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For Nothing, For Everything...For the Birds
Chapter five: no answers
The four titans shared looks.
Nothing.
Not a damn thing.
They had searched for hours and drawn unnecessary attentions from the press until Robin, pulling a magnificent Raven impression, scared them all away with a few harsh words and an uncharacteristically ferocious glare. Beast Boy kicked a larger piece of rubble with the toe of his shoe, a somber look on his face and Starfire floated warily, as though suspicious of being watched. Cyborg scanned the area yet again with his mechanically enhanced and substitute eye to get the same blank, normal readings he had been getting since they got there and Robin paced, gripped with a touch of madness that was beginning to scare the other three.
It reminded them of...
Well, never mind what it reminded them of.
They all felt the same as they watched the lines of discontent and pent up frustration become more and more set on their leader's face, all the while searching the places they had already looked a thousand times...just to avoid his misdirected wrath.
The sun began to set.
"Robin," Cyborg started, ready to risk a bit of his leader's rage for the betterment of the rest of the team, as always, but Robin held a hand to silence him.
"I know. Let's go back," Robin relented and the others—though surprised—had the insight not to let out their relief in a collective sigh, letting well enough alone. Just as Robin swung a leg over the R-Cycle, he halted. Starfire shot in inquiring glance at him.
Tk. Tk. Tk.
Tk. Tk. Tk...
"TITANS, GET DOWN!" And everything burst into flame with a crashing noise—presumably part of a building, but one could never be too sure about a bomb. Having heeded Robin's warning, none were too badly scathed and the four formed a circle, backs to each other in defensive mode. The fire was everywhere and they could hear civilian screams and catch sight of figures running in every direction that could be described as 'away' from the explosion.
"What the Hell..." Robin muttered and Beast Boy and Cyborg's faces mimicked the question while Starfire settled for intense worry for anyone around that might have been hurt. There was another noise then, one of metal gears and wires and hinging...and the titans were met with Slade bots once more, to be precise: what seemed like a sizable army of them walking through the fire's core.
"Hell is right," Beast Boy spat and immediately took the form of a T-Rex, swiping nearly the entire first line of bots into an uneven heap of steel and alloy. With a shared yell the others split into action.
They fought and fought hard as bot by bot seemed to keep on coming until one gigantic boom later, stars littering the sky, the last one fell in a smoking pile of disconnected parts.
"So..." Cyborg trailed off, question hanging between all of them.
What was that?
No momentous reappearance by Slade, no lesser but troublesome crony like Cinderblock or Plasmus, nothing...The four titans turned to leave.
A creaking was heard five feet away.
They each jumped about a foot each except for Starfire who, already floating, did much the opposite, falling in a startled heap onto the ground. Caution as their guide, they approached the source of the sound...
"A bot?" Beast Boy's tone was quizzical.
It looked rather entirely destroyed...but wait.
A flicker of light fizzled through, and something shot out of its remaining center:
"Titans," greeted the expressionless man.
"Give her back!" Robin shook the metal box like a man possessed. Cyborg grabbed it from him quickly.
"Yo, Robin man! Cool it. You're going to break it," the metal man warned.
"Smart friend you have there Robin, but why the anger? Oh wait, I know," Slade disappeared from the screen for a moment and there flickered an image that both lifted Robin and broke him.
It lifted him to be able to see her again.
It broke him to see her as she was.
Raven lay on the floor of somewhere so indistinct it seemed unnatural, her body unusually fragile looking and misleadingly motionless. Her petite frame looked uncomfortable in the twisted position she lay in, as though she had been thrown like a rag doll against a wall, let fall, and left to die.
But she could not be dead. Not one of her teammates would even consider it.
Some of her silken hair fell limply across her closed eyes and the four teens strained to see some sign of breath from her pale lips, a rise of her chest however slight, any indication of life.
Nothing.
They told themselves the screen was too small to allow them such examination and that surely that was why they could not detect any of those things. They were painfully logical about it.
They had to be.
Slade reappeared then to find Robin's face emotionless and tense.
"Still want her back?" his question insinuated what none of them would believe to be true. Without waiting for an answer that probably would not come, the screen fizzled and then snapped to black.
Beast Boy leapt at it, trying to shake the bot to see if the connection had just been interfered with and stepped back when he realized it was entirely intentional, eyes downcast. Cyborg's fists tightened—if possible—and he said nothing, ever the rock of quiet in the kinds of situations that involved Raven, who he regarded as not quite a little sister, but definitely family; it was a testament to his composure that he did not break something, which he could have easily done.
Robin stared as though he was dead himself.
Oddly or not oddly enough, Starfire's reaction was the most volatile. The distressed Tameranian cried out in fury and her eyes glowed their wide, bright green as she blasted the already dead bot to smithereens, outraged. Whether anyone took notice of it or not, she and the empath were closer than a person might think, closer than the press cared to detail about because they would far rather cling to the stereotype of bubbly and shadowy not mixing.
After having switched bodies, they had begun their first real links of friendship and that having been so long ago, the girls were, while not an orthodox pair, a definite duo of what one could call good friends. And so it was that Starfire, after releasing her initial anger on the bot, whimpered softly and her eyes welled. After allowing herself a couple moments of tearing sadness, the Tameranian steeled her will back together as best she could and turned to look at the boy wonder.
He continued to stand there, eyeing the bot as though he expected it to come back to life, put itself back together and attack—or worse, like he expected it to transform into Slade himself.
Starfire laid a hand on Robin's shoulder softly, fully aware of the overly agitated state her leader was in and the softness was not all for Raven's safety in that moment. It was for his too. She had seen her leader, their leader, obsessive and with or without hallucinogenic dust, he could become borderline insane sometimes. And she worried.
They all did.
"Robin," she paused, voice breaking, "What are we to do?"
He wished he had an answer but could only continue to stare vacantly, emptily...hopelessly.
Rae, where are you? He called out to her with his mind and had not the heart to tell his fellow titans that he did not receive so much as an affirmation that he and the empath were still bonded at all.
There was nothing, and more nothing.
He knew what that probably meant, but refused to believe it.
"Robin?" Starfire dropped her customary precedent of 'friend' out of solemnity.
"Return to the tower. I'll follow shortly," he ordered with uneasy quiet. When none moved to obey, he snapped, anger knit across his features, "Now! I said I'll catch up." Cyborg and Beast Boy wore similarly displeased and worried expressions while Starfire's was one of concern and hurt, but Robin said nothing beyond that as they each disappeared out of his sight.
He sighed.
There were angry pulsations beating in his head that might have been his heart and might have been his raw emotions ripping themselves apart and then messily stitching themselves back together again. There were regrets about fierce words and a pointless fight. There were doubts.
There was the thought of losing Raven, forever.
Even as he kicked the stand up and took off at unrecorded speed on his R-Cycle, Robin knew he had been lying earlier; he would not follow his team. Not for the first time, he would deviate from a leader's role and allow himself to either focus wholly on one thing or lose all focus to the point of not being able to concentrate at all.
He was going after her, bond or no bond, he felt she must be alive because surely without her, he too would no longer be able to draw breath as he did beneath his helmet, frustrated and anxious.
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His gut instinct served him effectively, even if he had no way of knowing it did.
Raven stirred in the empty room her friends had just seen her in a half hour ago, through the bot's screen. She groaned, rubbing her head as she slowly propped herself up on her elbows. She felt like she'd been hit with a truck or dropped off a cliff—or something equally brutal. Placing her hand down on the cold metal of the floor, she herd a distinct ting, the sound of metal on metal and she looked down.
A ring was on her hand, her ring finger actually. She bit her tongue to keep back a cry of dismay and instead, tried to remove it.
It would not budge, much less come off. A growl rose in the back of her throat and she stormed to the door, ready to loose all her vexation on it and hope to Azar that she could kick it down in an unusual bout of what Starfire might call righteous fury. As it was, she didn't have to.
The door slid open automatically.
It was unlocked. She could not help but arch a brow at the empty space before her in the corridor. Cautiously—for who let their enemy wander all of the sudden with access to anywhere without an alternative motive?—she stepped through the hall.
Apparently, Slade let his enemy wander all of the sudden with access to anywhere—the alternative motive had yet to be discerned, as certain as Raven was that it existed.
Her footsteps echoed with a loudness she was not accustomed to making, but she knew it was no use to try and levitate.
That damn ring. She tried again to slip it off, but could not and sighed.
That damn Slade.
What is his problem anyway?
"I don't have a problem, dear Raven," his voice sauntered in behind her and she flinched. Wait...she hadn't just said that aloud, which meant that... "I share a mental link with you." He finished her thoughts for her and she was either brave or careless enough to spin on her heel and poke him angrily in the middle of his chest, scowling.
"Get. Out. Of. My. Head!" She punctuated each word with deepening levels of her glare, as well as pauses powerfully injected with displeasure.
"I think not," he dismissed her order and pushed past her. She followed, livid.
"Where did you get this?" she demanded, fear from before losing all its grounds as she let Rage and Bravery combine to make something of a Christmas-esque spectacle in her mindscape of Nevermore.
To her further indignation, he ignored her and kept walking until he got to one of the last three uniform doors and punched in a code to allow himself access.
"Answer me!" She trailed into the room after him. The other effect of the ring was to smother her emotional outbursts and their effects on the outer world. Nothing was exploding, not the computers, not the doors and ever so unfortunately in her opinion, not Slade, so she could only surmise it was a truthful clause concerning the artifact.
He began typing something and pressing in random numbers and schematics began rolling across the eight or nine screens around them and Raven was unsettled by how much he reminded her of Robin.
No, don't think about that. She slapped herself mentally.
"Yes, Robin and I are rather…alike," Slade drawled from his seat without turning around and Raven frowned deeply. This was a most hated set-up indeed.
"Only in your least despicable qualities," she conceded roughly and took seat at the front computer screen. "What is all this?" She waved a hand at the still scrolling information. Slade did his best not to be caught off guard by her sudden aloofness, not because she was cold—that he expected—but because she had the distinct air of someone completely indifferent for his or her well-being.
Well, if anyone could manage to be indifferent about such a thing, it would be her, Slade admitted to himself and gave her an answer. "Lists," was his terse reply. She scowled again.
"If you have no intentions of using me then why am I still here?" she asked after probing his mind a little bit, subtly, but not subtly enough.
"Who said I had no intentions?" he queried smoothly and then proceeded to shoot up several very solid mental walls, ejecting Raven from his mind entirely. She recoiled violently, a sharp pain festering behind her temples. "Don't go places you can't come back from, Raven. I should think you would know that better than anyone."
"Likewise," she rasped, voice and throat suddenly hoarse as if from yelling. The rejection of her energies from Slade's mind had been not only powerful, but notably aggressive. She found it hard to breathe and let her hood fall, hoping for better circulation of the air around her.
Bastard.
"Watch your tongue," he teased.
"Technically it's my mind," Raven said, her breathing still shallow from the physical blow she had taken due to being so hostilely thrown out of another's mind when she wasn't prepared for it.
Slade sighed. He was not familiar with shielding his mind from others. His mask tended to do that for him and since he was not used to such things, he had been more forceful than he meant to be in pushing her out of his head.
An empath was a little more trouble than he had first supposed, albeit a very sensuous and equally tempestuous one...still trouble, and he forced himself to focus on that part of her instead of her other comparatively more...desirable qualities.
"Just breathe and calm yourself, child," Slade intoned, as if bored by her, even though he was anything but. Raven bristled.
"I am not a child."
"To me, you are." And that was, if nothing else, the mother of all the lies he had fabricated so far.
A child would not entrance him as she did with her every flicker of those violet eyes; a child would not call up in him some awkwardly human urge with the arch of her back as she stretched to relieve herself of various kinks and tensions.
A child would not make him feel as she made him feel.
That damn girl, he mused darkly, not realizing his mental phrasing was conspicuously similar to her earlier one. Raven had gotten control over her intake of oxygen again, her throat still sore, and huffed to herself in front of the computer screens, pushing random buttons out of a mixture of boredom and piqued desire for vengeance, however petty she might have to resort to being.
"Stop that," Slade snapped at her, but she didn't listen.
"Stop what?" she asked, obviously trying to get a rise out of him.
"I don't even have to let you in here, much less let you out of that room down the hall you've been keeping to yourself in, so be careful of your attitude," Slade warned, but it was only half-supported. The truth was his obsession was eased with her proximity somehow, eased by his interaction with her, even if it was all antagonistic to some degree.
Some part of himself smothered the thought that he might truly take some form of joy in her company and as quickly as it came, it was gone and he was back to being singularly annoyed with her.
"Just because you're playing nice right now doesn't mean I have to," Raven said, fed up now. She tried again to get the ring off, failing of course.
"The rings are rather nice," Slade goaded her and she did her best to not be what could only be described as 'needlessly aggravated' by him.
"You know that's not what I meant," she said.
"I actually do," Slade returned, inferring to his ability to tap into her mind and Raven flinched.
"I hate you," Raven said and turned away from him again, drawing her knees to her chest as she became decidedly fascinated with the lists on the many flat screens around her, doing her best to catch anything useful.
"Well, the feeling is not far from mutual," Slade muttered his lesser lie and went about his business, now unconcerned with the captive titan due to her suppressed powers and he did his best to be unconcerned with her person as well.
To his chagrin, he found himself to mostly fail at accomplishing the last.
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Days passed without the general concept of time being applied.
Raven accepted Slade's invitation to stay in the one other room available to her—though there were so many she wondered at their contents as well—and spent her nights there, not quite sleeping, but drifting. She had resigned herself to being stuck there until she figured out how to either disenchant the rings or at least get them removed.
For a short time she had considered cutting off her finger but Slade had sensed this thought—that damn mental link—and made certain nothing that could allow her this action was in her reach.
He made her feel like a child and she hated him all the more for it as day by day she crept through the rooms, knowing that he probably knew she did and let her do so because he knew she would find nothing helpful to her. Slade was too paranoid a man to not know everything that went on in his own abode, after all.
Moments not spent lurking in corners she was certain he could see her in anyway and not spent seething in her room, trying to get a new grasp on things, were spent doing her best to annoy her captor.
Her reasoning was becoming more and more juvenile as Slade had first insinuated but she was getting both desperate and terribly impatient: she figured if she couldn't get herself out that the next feasible way was to get him to let her out himself...if only because he couldn't stand another second of her ruining his machines or talking his ear off in her monotone fashion about absolutely nothing, as opposed to the intelligent conversation she was quite capable of having with him.
Except of course that she did not deign to.
"I do wish you would cease that," Slade said, clearly annoyed. Raven scowled deeply.
"And so I've plenty of reason to keep at it," she retorted saucily with a flip of her hair, growing out now since she had nothing with which to cut it. Her hair grew fast after all and it had been a while since she was first brought here.
It had been nearly three weeks. In that time Raven had made eighteen admirable attempts at escape, none of which—as must be evident—were successful. They did, however, make it a necessity for Slade to spend several despised hours locking down his entire hidden lair, securing it from her because even though the rings subdued her teleportation, it soon became clear—through a series of somewhat rocky incidents—that she could still move things with her mind and short-circuit anything technical within a thirty-foot radius.
"Would you like scissors?" Slade asked suddenly and Raven turned slowly to stare in question.
"Excuse me?"
"Would you like scissors? In my company you may not be so driven to resort to such primitive means of escape as cutting off your finger and your hair has gotten much longer," he paused here to mentally stroll into her mind to indicate where this seemingly abrupt conversation had come from and her displeasure increased tenfold. "I thought you might like to cut it to its usual length."
"Don't like long hair?" Raven said, wry and amused in spite of herself. If there was a more unlikely topic to be discussing than hair-cutting with Slade, she was hard-pressed to think of it.
"Actually, I do," he said shortly. And it was true. It was becoming more and more difficult to live with her in such close proximities to himself. Where first her nearness had eased his fixation with her, it now drilled it further into him like something strange and wonderful. It was like a taste of something that made one so thirsty it made no sense to keep on tasting, but one could not help it, even under the chance of dying from thirst from so much of the one thing they truly craved. Her longer hair gave her an added look of supple femininity that Slade suspected she duly did not care for but regardless, softened the edges of her, took away some of the hardness that was used to build her stoic nature so solidly. As for Raven herself, her amusement died a swift death with the unexpected candor and the oddly sensual timbre in her only company's voice.
"Where are your scissors?"
Curse the bastard, he threw them at her as carelessly as he might have thrown a dinner roll. She stopped them midair with her mind and snatched them, hacking mercilessly away at the longish sections—most of them falling below her shoulders.
Snip. Snip. Snip...
"Why do you keep me here?" she asked. She asked everyday. "You do me no outright harm and do not use me as others might to get the titans and you do not even make action to go after them. Why?" She threw the scissors back at him and huffed almost imperceptibly as he caught them without even looking. Such was Slade.
"I do not go after the titans if it does not suit my interests, does not benefit me in some very measurable way. I do not use you to get to them because I am not ready to do so...yet," he paused here and eyed her levelly. To her favor, Raven waited, knowing he had more to say—or expecting it, either one. "And I do not hurt you because I do not believe in damaged goods." Raven flinched.
"What does that mean?" she all but growled, and swifter than she could account for, Slade had moved around the area where he usually sat and stood in front of her fuming form, tilting her chin up at him with his fingers.
She found his hold to be oddly gentle.
"I do wish I could see beyond your mind, dear Raven, beyond even your lovely face for nowhere can I find the absolute reason behind what others would be so lofty as to call, my increasingly vexing 'obsession' with you," and with that he dropped her chin from his hands and stalked out of the room, ruffled beyond a doubt and as confusing as ever. Raven traced her chin and jaw with her right hand thoughtfully.
Obsession?
She knew a thing or two about it and as his words sunk in, she felt her stomach do strange things that had nothing to do with the fact that she hadn't eaten anything since the morning before.
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"Robin man, where are you?" Cyborg's voice echoed off his communicator.
"Looking for her," he said shortly. He did not need to specify who he referred to. The knowing glint in Cyborg's eyes told him the half cybernetic man understood, even if he did not agree.
"Man, come back. You need to rest," Cyborg was the big brother with a relentless edge.
"No, I need Raven," Robin said shortly and shut the communicator with a resounding click.
He hadn't gone back to the tower since that night nearly three weeks ago, had hardly rested scarce when he could not keep his eyes open by the rims of his nails or some other equally sharpening method. No. The widely-proclaimed boy wonder had scoped the city inch by inch of fathomable inch and found not a trace at which point he could only conclude that Slade might not be in the city at all. But then again, no. Slade would not leave without one of them having seen on patrol or likewise.
So where?
He ran his hand through his hair absently. Its ends were uneven at best and disheveled at worst—or worse. If he ever took his mask off—and everyone knows he didn't—one could have seen the circles under his eyes, half circles really, shadows. The shadows most disturbing of all though were the ones in his eyes, not under them. They seemed hollowed and blind, cold and relentless in a way not entirely safe to be as a human.
"Where are you?" he asked the empty space around him and was not at all surprised that he got no answer. It seemed a running theme lately: no answers.
Things could have gotten worse, much as Robin was loathe to admit, but it only began to rain and so, used to such unaccommodating weather, the masked vigilante continued his dogged search, numb and heavy with it.
Sorry for the wait! I'm working on Winner Takes All's next chapter though as well as beta-reading castle in the air's next chapters of Waste Not, Want Not and Accidental, so please stay with me if you can! As always, reviews are appreciated but not mandated.
-rei