OKAY, YAY FOR THANK-YOUS FOR COOLNESS...um, translation, if you don't want to, you don't have to but yet again, I felt like thanking everyone I was aware who reviewed. Since I ask for them it is only fair I pay proper respect to those who encourage me so nicely! The chapter is of course, after the thank-yous so if you want to scroll past them and read it first and then go back or whatever, be my guest. Otherwise, on with the gratitude:
Final Fight: I don't think I'm capable of writing a decent allusion to rape, much less a rape scene, so we needn't worry about that. Something nearing those lines is possible, but never quite there, you know? It unsettles me too much. As for Robin, I apologize. I didn't realize I did that. I'll try to be a little more careful with his character; see, what I REALLY adore about him is his strength and I want that to come through, even if he does let himself experience emotions more he should still be Robin! Right? Thank you for the input and the review! Hope this one's okay. There's a little more feeling in this one. Less Slade, but what must be done, must be done sometimes...sigh. More Slade next time.
Gilraen Luinwe: Sweets, you're fantastic. Thank you so much for that super enthusiastic review. You definitely had something to do with me getting this chapter out by now. You're awesome.
Morbed-Kai: that's right. I am really glad you caught that. Neither Slade NOR Robin would just settle for killing her—taking Robin's somewhat psychotic side into account. Why kill? Cruelty has much more to do with what we do to each other when we're still breathing and conscious after all. Thank you for the compliment/encouragement!
Sage Raven: I am glad it caught your attention and do hope it can keep it! Thank you very much for taking the time to read through it thus far!
TheFonceSorcerous: Heh. Aw. Thank you. :gives cookie:
Gren44: Wow. Your review really boosted my motivation. You know, I adore all the encouragement people are sending me in the form of reviews. It's a really handy system has going here. I am glad I found it. It's never really been that anyone liked my writing at all. I'm glad I've found a place where some people DO like it. Thank you so much for your kindness.
Cherry Jade: Oh well, they DO talk… :sweat drop: er...I promise it'll get better eventually you know, after the drama and all that hullabaloo. Xx Anyways, THANK YOU CHERRY JADE! You are so super duper about reviewing all the time and telling me to keep going. I truly appreciate it. You roxors.
The Sacred Heart 2: Robin and Raven are just such a sensual couple in my opinion and often the stories are so much richer for it, mentally and physically. I am really glad you like them too. Hope the story keeps you interested and thank you for reviewing, as always!
fictiongurl: update tis here! Thanks for reviewing. Do let me know what you think of this chapter if it strikes you well.
Neko: THANKIE:smile:
chiclet2021: OH I AM SO GLAD YOU LIKE THE TRIANGLE. I was hitting my head over whether or not to pursue the idea but I had just watched a rerun of 'the end' trilogy and it just struck me as quite possible. I mean, to many it makes no sense but since when do villains make sense? Even super cool smart and wicked ones like Slade. They are classified as 'psychotic' for a reason, after al! Anyway, rambling...sorry. What I mean to say is: thank you! There is not much of the Slade in here, but next time, lots more development of that side, and indirectly therefore, explanation and depth! Still, hope this chapter's good too.
Dark Shadows: Like Slade said, he and Robin are not SO different. It's a thought kinda on how it could have more to do with than simply brains, functionality, and the sheer willpower to be more than human, when you're anything but. A thought on how it could have to do with the human side, emotions and such, obsession of course, which is greatly emphasized in different ways in the series itself anyway! Thank you for your review Dark Shadows. Here be the update.
RedRover3173: Very happy you think it's worth continuing! Thanks very much for the vote of confidence and as thanks: this update and more to come. I've Slade workings on the side here as I type these thank-yous.
greygin: oh abso-positiv-alutely! Robin and Raven mesh quite nicely. I wouldn't even go as far as to say they go better than any other pairing possible, but it just makes so much more sense to me on a realistic level and then of course there's my personal preference, them being my two favorite titans and all...hehe...anyway, thank you much.
Lady Sonora the Black-Rose: accepts cookie with big smile THANK YOU! does happy flounce in circles hands you an ice cream cone
WWJDxLGLP: thank you!
Tecna: Could not for the life of me remember if I thanked you or not because the review came through for chapter '1' which is the prologue but after the bulk of the others, so just in case, here is a thank you to you and I gratefully accept the choco!
Thank you all for your fantastic support/encouragement/reviews/however one might interpret kindness that keeps me writing onward!
Thank you. Thank you. A thousand times.
And now, the second chapter.
For Nothing, For Everything...For the Birds
Chapter Two: pretty little bird
Slade stood, uncaring of the world around him on the roof of one of the many buildings in Jump. His posture was one of confident ease but if one looked closer, past the initially lax stance of a defensive martial art stance, one would notice the alertness of his spine, the solid vigilance of his eyes. It was one of those ordinary days with scattered white puffs of clouds shaped like castles and dragons, the kind of day on which loved ones went for rowboat rides and small children caroused on park benches.
A perfect day made just a little more perfect by his ability to spoil it all.
The titans, they would come running...as usual.
He would taunt them...as usual.
They would give it all they had...as usual.
And, he would get what he was after with any luck...as usual. Or rather, who he was after.
Her.
The pretty little bird with demon wings.
Yes, her.
Slade suspected himself of letting slip something like a smile as he waited for the distraction to make its appearance, but it wasn't a smile. Smiles, by definition, were to have some shadow of underlying kindness. He had no such thing. Most accurately, it had no exact name; too cold and devious for a smile, too controlled for a smirk...as usual Slade stood on a level all his own.
And that was how he liked it.
-----------------------------------------------------
Starfire flew around, her brow furrowed in anxiety while Beast Boy pummeled mercilessly away at the heads of some unnamed creatures on his game station. Cyborg muttered to himself as he thumbed through technology magazines and Robin paced in front of the living room window. They were all worried about a certain amethyst eyed friend of theirs.
Raven hadn't come out of her room for days.
Every day one of the titans—except Robin who hadn't gone near her door at all—asked her if she needed anything, if she was okay, if she required help of some kind and every day she simply said "No thank you."
Well, lately it'd been more of an agitated "No."
There hadn't been any trouble in Jump that had to be attended to so she had not even come out for that. Robin watched vacantly as a timid Starfire made her way to the empath's door.
"Friend Raven?" her voice was more than a little apprehensive, as though the Tameranian girl expected the door to blow off its hinges at any given time.
"What?"
Starfire cringed.
"It is I, Starfire," the redhead said and hurried on to add, "I wondered if you would be interested in—"
"No...thanks Star," this last part was included as if Raven felt thoroughly guilty for the look of depressed resignation on Starfire's face, that she felt but could not see.
"As you wish, friend Raven," Starfire surrendered with such a look of forlornness that Robin reached out a comforting hand as she reentered the living area and squeezed the alien girl's shoulder as if to reassure her that things would be okay. She gave him a small smile and joined Beast Boy on the sofa.
"No luck?" Cyborg asked, knowing the answer.
"Friend Raven is most, um, gloomy," Starfire finally decided on 'gloomy' since any other words she could think of had strictly to do with strange animals on her home planet with even stranger dietary practice and odd habits of destroying small meteors, among other things.
"Dude, she's been in there for practically four days!" Beast Boy exclaimed, waving his controller around wildly, nearly hitting Starfire on the head with it by accident. He offered a sheepish apology and Starfire assured him that it was not at all a problem while Cyborg scolded the shape shifter about being more careful, but the boy wonder heard none of it. Robin had stopped pacing as though he'd only just registered what Beast Boy had said in reference to the reclusive empath.
"Five days," he corrected the green changeling carelessly and then, as if a thought had just struck him, he moved to the kitchen without another word. Cyborg and Beast Boy shrugged at each other while Starfire became somewhat engrossed with the colorful game on the screen, leaving their leader to his own devices.
A short while later a tea kettle steamed like a locomotive as Robin poured its near boiling contents into a mug and calculatedly placed a tea bag in it. He eyed the sugar with some reservation and then thinking better of it, put the mug on a tray along with the entire sugar bowl, and a spoon. Ignoring the questioning looks his fellow titans cast his way, he quite nearly marched to the door he hadn't approached since five days ago and, realizing his hands were full, kicked at the door.
Nothing.
He kicked again, putting a little more force behind it. About to simply opt for kicking it down altogether, Robin stopped, foot in midair when the door zipped open with an irate clang. It invariably tore at his cape when it closed behind him impatiently, invoking a curse out of the boy wonder who greatly hoped this was worth it, already knowing it was.
"Raven," he approached the silent girl whose back was adamantly facing him, like a soldier at Buckingham Palace, resiliently unmovable. "I brought tea," he explained with a meekness not his own. What was it she did to him that made him so certain and uncertain of things all at once? He'd dearly like to know one day. When she made not even a sliver of a movement to indicate she'd heard him, he set the tray down softly at the foot of her bed with an exasperated sigh that voiced everything he had no words for.
"You overestimate my sweet tooth." Robin halted abruptly, stopping just two feet short of the door. He didn't turn but listened as the soft pad of feet settling on the ground reached his ears, and then there was the clatter of a mug being picked up and the sugar bowl's lid being lifted with a ceramic scraping noise. Then there was the faint ting of the spoon as it moved back and forth, pushing the tea bag and working at dissolving the sugar more effectively.
Ting, ting...
Another ceramic scrape told him she'd replaced the lid of the sugar bowl and a delicate sipping sound prompted his next question.
"How is it?" Her typical moment of consideration passed between them as she faced his back, face still sullen with quiet and regret but warming slightly at how much he cared.
"It's fine," she said.
"Good," he said.
Right, they said in their minds.
Raven shifted the mug from one hand to another in an abnormal show of her lack of ease. She had moved her eyes thoughtlessly as Robin faced her again. Vaguely she suspected her eyes of scolding her in the less than accurate reflection in the still steaming tea.
"I'm sorry I've worried all of you," Raven finally choked out as though being forced by unseen beings to apologize. She ran to cover it up with an unnecessarily unfeeling, "Not that it takes much." Her lips busied themselves with the tea, ignoring the scalding effect it was having on her tongue.
"You should be sorry," Robin, for some reason, was starting to get angry. "Star's completely depressed; Beast Boy and Cyborg are bickering more than usual; and I, I haven't slept since the last time I came in here!" His voice had escalated to a startling timbre that made Raven acutely uncomfortable
Wordlessly, she set the mug down carefully on the tray.
"I haven't slept either," she conceded finally.
Her all too even tone suffocated him, made his blood boil something nasty. It was calm, collected—everything he wasn't at the moment and that set him off like a match to gun powder.
"Look Raven, if what you have to do is pretend it never happened, that you don't know, then do it, but now I need to focus on the fact that your unusually detached behavior is throwing the whole team for a loop. I won't order you to come out and be a social butterfly but if you could at least make the effort to do your usual daily appearance for tea and a few well aimed barbs at Beast Boy, it'd be appreciated," his voice bit through her with an untamed heat as he was back to being every inch the leader of the titans, solid and unmoving, and she didn't fail to notice the hardness in it but as often is the case, anger followed her intense pang of hurt.
How dare he! He comes in here playing nice with MY herbal tea and then just loses it? How dare he! Her mind repeated itself, outraged. Part of her was letting Rage a little too close to the surface while, in an erratic manner, another tried to decide how much of this she had actually incited, but her most present self was running away with her mouth before she could stop it.
"Well, thank you for the option of free-will oh great leader," her eyes flared in challenge with wounded pride and Robin bristled, obviously equally annoyed and frustrated.
"No need to call me great, Raven." His smirk was comparable to a grimace of stone and the empath forced down the shudder that wanted to rip through her nervously. They had not had a disagreement, a bickering like this before. It was colder than anything else, more distant and as if she was talking to a stranger and her confusion only spurred her blind anger onward as he added, "But as always, you are most welcome."
It was definitely more of a sneer now and Robin felt some of his inner workings screaming at him with great big question marks. For this was not part of his original plan at all. He had intended only on checking on her, bringing her some tea, to coax her out...
But he was upset—even angry—before he even began to make that tea and he realized the mistake of it all now. He should've just kept away, but now it was too late to reverse it all...
"Look, just come out for an hour now. The others are too distracted with your unusual behavior," the boy wonder all but demanded, his voice square with his best imitation of Raven's emotionless mask. That hurt her and it angered her and she could not decide which it did more.
"I'm not doing anything I don't want to and don't you dare think you can order me to! This isn't just my fault. You know I can't express my feelings the same way! You of all people, you know Robin...you know. And you still..."she sputtered into an edgy quiet before seeming to regain her fire, "You're the leader of the titans, not my personal dictator!" she nearly yelled, but contained it just barely. Yelling, she thought, was better than crying at least.
"I came in here to try and fix everything," he gestured wildly, both fed up and at his wit's end. "Raven I didn't mean to order your subservience, I just...I don't know," he lost his steam, a loud sigh blistering the thick air.
"Get out."
"Raven..."
"GET OUT!" black energy flared around in every direction thinkable, and some not thinkable at all, but still he did not leave.
"Raven calm down! You're going to blow up the whole tower!" Robin exclaimed worriedly, approaching her with measured but constant strides.
"You're impossible! I said leave!" she cried out and went to do something she normally would never do: slap him. He caught her wrist.
She seethed.
He glared.
She glared.
They both held the silence as the black energy melted into nothing.
And then:
"I wouldn't be impossible if you'd stop being heinous about the whole issue and just try and act normal!" The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them and while Raven seemed to keep her powers under check, her eyes flashed with hurt and more anger.
"Well, Richard," his name was ice on her lips, "I am not 'normal' but being 'heinous' seems to be very normal, since a certain masked member of this team is being so right now. So, I think I shall continue to act as heinously as I like, if it's all the same to you."
"It might as well be," Robin muttered and dropped her wrist like a stone, a deep cold sweeping through his body as he stormed out of her room. His voice seeped back into her room once more, "Just get yourself together, Raven and I'll do what I have to. The team needs you." And he was gone.
If he'd turned around, he would have seen Raven's own mask drop to reveal what could only be sadness, tinged with sordid regret.
But he didn't so much as begin to glance back.
So he never saw.
Instead, he locked himself in his researching room, the metallic clang of his door reverberating unkindly through the whole tower. Beast Boy shrunk against the couch and Cyborg shook his head while Starfire, worried, rose from the couch to inquire about their leader's well being.
Star hadn't even reached for the access key pad yet when red lights flashed and the alert was given. Stepping to one side, the green eyed girl watched as Robin emerged and stormed to the exit, no order, no anything. A quick exchange of looks and the titans followed without a word.
More development next time. Hope this one was to a general liking! And as always, thank you so much for reading. Reviewing is secondary, as much as I adore it. When you read it, it's plenty. Reviews just let me know you did of course...heh.
sheepish smile
-rei