Thank you so much for each review. I am really grateful and I apologize for the slowness or shortness of this chapter but with any luck the next one will pick up decently again but this has some decent interaction at least. Let me know if I should continue, haha. I probably will anyway, since leaving a story unfinished would be lazy I guess, or something, but I do know this story seems to—for some people—not be quite so exciting or fast-paced, but I had to toy with this idea! My fanatic side would not let me quit. I rather like Slade's character you see, and his past is intriguing, even though the show has yet to go into it in depth.

Sorry for the ramble. Review if you can/have time. It's always a nice surprise in my inbox full of otherwise school-related junks that keep me from my beloved titans.

-rei

For Nothing, For Everything...For the Birds

Chapter Six: for nothing

He cursed his weakness and blamed it on the old age that would never come to him, knowing that even now he was only 27, a youth for all the crime and death and blackness surrounding his past and present. The loss of his wife however long ago, the fact that he had caused her end was to be the stopper of all stoppers, the wrench in the gears of a normal person's ability to seek or even desire what he now was faced with wanting. Adie...the loss of her was to be the defining factor that kept him from that human side he never wanted to feel again, wanted to kill, and who, since he could not kill himself physically, had to die an inside death, a silent one without pleas. Slade was supposed to be Slade, not anyone else.

But then there was that one eye left, that unscarred part of his face, that yearning part of whatever pieces of soul remained, all tossing and turning.

And it wasn't that the young sorceress reminded him of his late wife, no, far from it. Raven was darker, a less nurturing character to be sure, though no less beautiful, no less...entrancing. Yet it was not solely physical, he had come to find in her time there. She had a quick tongue, that he knew, but he had not noticed, had not ever taken the time perhaps, to take in the mind behind it, the quiet and composed way she held herself when she was in a room with him, no fear. But in that same quiet way she moved...the villain started in his chair, in spite of himself. His eyes flickered in realization. She moved like a person uncertain, for all her confidence, an inhibited beauty, like someone used to being not only in the background, but faded...ignored. And it occurred to Slade and the man behind Slade's façade that she had probably never been told how beautiful she was...told that she was beautiful at all or that she was loved.

Not that he was an expert or anything. He himself had only been loved once, it seemed...and she was dead.

He shook the memory of Adie away brusquely, turning his mind back to the young lady in his hold now and her quiet mannerisms. Only someone who had never known the words of a lover would have such guarded eyes and measured and pre-calculated actions; this was even set apart from her usual need to tie down her emotions, with which he was all too familiar. It wasn't a knowledge or social awareness that could be gotten from a father—well, certainly not hers—, or even a mother—and she having died so early, probably not enough time to say anything anyway—, or even a friend—and here his mind flashed on the young leader of the titans. His lips curled distastefully. The mental link the rings provided him with Raven did not allow him much because the empath had grown up knowing and learning better ways than he on how to harness and hide her thoughts, but what he saw sometimes, when he saw it, could not be anything but true.

And he had seen...things.

There were images, in her more silent days, the days he knew she most missed her comrades, the days he began to remember what it was like to worry about another soul, to long to go to that other entity and give...dare he even think it? Comfort. It was of course, a comfort he never gave into approaching her with. What would she think after all? Would she even believe him? He doubted it sorely. But those images...of her friends they were usually, but more often than that he found them falling upon the masked face of the boy wonder...angry, sullen, lost...caring. From the mental link too, however, Slade knew that nothing was between the birds, but then again sometimes nothing was everything and for the birds...well, he was less skeptical of feelings being there than most things.

Worst of all his realizations though, he had somehow, after his slight admission of his fixation with her, noticed Raven's animosity to lessen considerably and this gave him a twisted sliver of hope. He was surprised he could put a name to it. It had been so long since it had even been a matter of any consideration for anything at all for him. Her mere tolerance of him seemed to yield to something more akin to curiosity and intrigue...and this was vexing too. She stood at times, in his study, running her fingers across the spines of one set of tomes or another, casting perplexed glances at him when she came across a particularly unexpected title. Here he would give explanation and of all those times, he recalled with an unnerving fondness, there was one time that the amethyst eyes seemed to smile at him...not through him or around him, but at him.

How was he supposed to take that, anyway? He buried his face in his hands, mask long since set aside in the darkness of his room. His sigh of frustration was heard by no one and that bothered him as well. Since when had he cared who heard or was there to hear anything he had to say, anything he thought? Since when?

His mind told him since when, but he did not want to listen. She was dead. So were the feelings. Why couldn't they stay buried?

Being human was not attractive to him, he knew. It proved too weakening, too much a defective way of living...but it seemed more and more lately that he would have no choice. He could not take her because he actually cared. Yes, he cared. At first he had told himself it was his standards, his desire to not be crude, but still maintain a contemptuous light. At first.

But he knew it to be completely different sooner than he would ever admit.

He knew it was because of the way she rested her chin on her hand thoughtfully over her cup of tea in the morning as she waited for it to cool a little and she thumbed through one of the thousands of books in his archives. He knew it was because of how she had come to taking to his company of her own will lately more than of his subtle manipulations to get her near him, just to watch her while she tried to get under his skin, more of a game now really than an actual ploy to get away, he could sense. He knew it was because when he had held her chin with his fingers and looked at her, told her as close as he could yet come to what he thought of her, he had wanted to bring himself closer still.

But how could he even know what he felt anymore? How could he begin to? He had long since staved off any remote semblance to what he suspected to lurk in his mind and psyche...it had been so long. Still, without needing to ponder, he knew he had if at all, only felt this once...yet he could not put words to it for her, even so near to her as he had been.

Instead he had stalked off, irritated with her and with himself.

But that was the way it had to be, right? He scowled into nothing in particular. There was another thing. Slade did not question himself, ever. He left the questioning up to his foes and his prey. But lately he had been doing nothing but that singular act and while it threatened to make him lose what was left of his mind, it also drove him to seeing things more clearly than perhaps he would have deigned to otherwise. What could he do?

"Slade?" it was a soft tone, the gentlest she'd used yet and it still managed to scare about ten years of life out of him—not that he showed it, not that anyone would've been able to tell the empath's sudden appearance through the wall nearly caused him a heart attack...not that anyone but her would've noticed. But she did. And the slight upward quirk of her lips told him so. He tried not to be as disgruntled as he felt.

"What?" There, that was, if anything, impersonal at best.

"Will I ever be set free?" And the small smile was gone, and here was her meaning behind the softness, here was her sadness at its quietest, and fullest, and most hurtful. He was vaguely aware of the minute flick of her right hand that made the ring on her finger glimmer its silver sheen, even in the dark. Absently, he twisted his own.

"You ask me that every day," he stated numbly.

"And every day you evade me," she countered smoothly.

"You know," and his laugh was quiet, but not hollow as he fell into his next words like a stumbling blind man, "I find a certain degree of pathetic pallor in myself these days, an unusual fraction of human quality that I'd thought myself far beyond reach of years ago." Here he paused and Raven shifted, showing her first sign of discomfort in all the time she'd spent there.

"And...why is that?" She didn't know why she asked. It wasn't like she really wanted the answer, wasn't like she wanted to listen to his voice and hear what he had to say, wasn't like she dared to hope for what even the boy who almost kissed her on a rooftop eons ago had never told her. It wasn't like that.

Not exactly.

"Because, Raven," and she shivered at the sound of her name on his lips, "I am a fool." Even he couldn't say it, it seemed and Raven scowled darkly, more to herself than at him. She didn't want him to say it anyway. He was a criminal, Robin's arch nemesis, the titans' worst adversary and...a well read man of well-chosen words, if few, subtle and keen, intellectual and dark, not without that ample amount of attractiveness that made it seem unfair to the rest of men his age—scar abating. Whether she shook her head to clear it or deny it, she wasn't certain.

Neither was Slade.

And as they were there they sized each other up for the thousandth time, him sitting, legs akimbo with elbows resting on them as if making some under the table deal that had nothing to do with legalities, she standing before him, cloak hanging loosely about her, as though ready to wrap her up and fly her away from everything, even herself. They met each other's gazes and they met each other's minds and tentatively—neither was certain which allowed access first—it was like a mental click as doors were gently edged open...memories first, concerns, thoughts...fears.

But both were a paranoid sort, so it was only a glimpse of what was really there. But it was enough and then they were back to staring at each other like nothing else existed to stare at, so why not?

Why not?

There was a thin tension, the same feeling a person could get from tiptoeing across a room with a sleeping body in it, afraid to wake them, but almost wanting to, because the person on the couch was the one you'd had a fight with earlier and couldn't wait another instant to talk to, to get things out in the open...There was a cloudy darkness in the room that had nothing to do with the fact that there were no lights on and no light at all except the white shadow creeping underneath the closed door...There was only a dark girl and a dark man in a dark room.

And it was nothing and it was everything.

Slade laughed at the strangeness, mentally of course and felt Raven's own cerebral tug as if she was asking 'what?' with a quizzical look, though her face remained impassive on the surface. He laughed at the similarity to his earlier thoughts only this time, there was the definite and all too present and noticeable absence of one of the birds in the equation and he wasn't certain he minded in the least, wasn't certain he minded that it was only him and her.

For whatever reason, he dared not name. He could not name it...ironically, he could only feel it.

Something in his companion's eyes told him maybe that was enough.

And this time Slade did not even blink at his mental lapse in calling her 'companion' instead of something much less personal. She turned to go and he stood, suddenly, the first movement that lacked fluidity she had ever seen him make. Her footfalls halted and she glanced over her shoulder, tentatively.

"What?" she asked simply. He took a step to her.

"Nothing," he said after what could have been a millennium, but as he passed her he took a moment to stand strangely close to her, close enough to take in the odd and scintillating scent of her—clear vanilla and old books probably, if he could discern properly—, and he repeated himself with a softness she had never suspected him capable of. "Nothing," and he pressed something familiar and cold and metal into the palm of her hand, curling her fingers with that same unpredictably gentle touch before walking out of the room, door shutting with a clang behind his shadowed form.

Even in the dark Raven could match the ring up with the one on her finger.

She slipped her own off and eyed both circles of silver, confused and...something else, and then she realized he'd answered her of course, today.

She could finally go home. Her mind immediately flashed on her volatile argument with Robin that had transpired before she was taken and her heart ached at the thought of leaving what had started as a prison and now seemed like the only safe place for her to be at all. And for the first time Raven realized she had a dumbfounding question.

Did she really want to go home anymore?

An explosion rocketed her out of her thoughts. Lights flashed red and glaring. Her eyes darted around, perplexed and caught off guard. What was going on? A look at the screen in the room behind her made her breath catch unkindly in her throat. It was a timer...probably for a self-destruct mechanism. Gathering her cloak around her she fell into her soul-self, but she did not flee.

No.

She flew in search of him. Surely, she reasoned, he had a way out. Surely he would be fine. But she couldn't leave without knowing...and she wished to have their mental link back again, but instead was unexpectedly met full-force with the bond that she had thought lost to her forever: Robin. Her mind reeled from shock and she was in her normal form, building still making angry sounds about impending destruction around her as she leaned against the wall for support. His mind was so cold...so distant...he felt crazed...

Shaking herself, she willed her resolve to strengthen and sent a silent thought towards the quiet man who loved chess and books as much as she did, a silent thought that said she hoped she was alright, even if he couldn't hear her thought. Then she dashed through and down the halls, coming to a door she hadn't explored before and threw it open to reveal a flight of stairs. Throwing any caution she might have had under normal circumstances aside, she bounded up them, not trusting her teleportation abilities, not trusting herself.

Another explosion came, and this one sent Raven sprawling on the stair case as she hit her head against the wall. Her legs threatened to not work right and she scowled as she levitated the rest of the way up. Now she could hear voices...familiar ones. She paused next to the door...

"Liar!" It was Robin, and Raven's hand unconsciously pressed firmly against her chest as she winced; his intensity made her heart pained, heavy. There was the sound of a flurry of motion, fighting she could only presume, a clash of metal, staffs probably...

"Exhilarating as this is Robin, as I said before. Raven," and he paused at her name in a way that only she could understand. For his voice was as emotionless and subtly mocking as ever it was when he did battle, but she heard more because now, whether she liked it or not, she knew more. She was not certain this was a good thing but was pulled out of her thoughts at his next words, "...is not here. She...escaped." It was a lie, of course. But he could not tell Robin that, no. Slade was a villain and even if he had told him, Robin would never believe...no. And in his current state...Raven flinched as she heard an angered cry from her leader and a grunt from her previous captor.

"I will take her back! She is mine!" Robin recoiled from one of Slade's stronger attacks, but held his ground, feet shifting in a half-defensive posture, brow knit in frustration and too many endless hours of anxiousness, of not knowing.

"One would never know," Slade said coolly and Raven was about to open the door when the door came bursting in on itself by way of a detonator of some kind—whether it was Slade's or Robin's she did not know. Another groan after someone hitting the concrete of the building's roof and she could hear Slade's voice, choked but echoing in that fascinating way his mask allowed. "You've never even told her you love her, never spoken to her in a way that would make her your own. You have never told her, Robin," and his voice was a definite sneer of disgust now, "You have never told her she is beautiful."

Her heart might have stopped there. She couldn't be sure. Robin, for his part, felt some more of his restrain slip.

"How do you know?" Robin pressed the metal length of the staff harder against his foe's neck, threatening to break him. He was tired...no, exhausted, and half-insane with the days of obsessively searching for Raven, of not seeing her, not being able to feel their bond, not understanding...knowing he might never see her again, and all this he blamed alone on Slade...until now as the villain continued to speak.

"I know," Slade whispered dangerously, very aware of how little more pressure Robin needed to apply to snap his life in half. The masked vigilante had him pinned in a way that disabled movement, else Slade might have easily escaped.

"You know nothing!" Robin's voice was impassive and it struck a terrible fear in Raven's mind as their bond proceeded to not disappear, but almost twist in a mutated, disfiguring way. She cried out and fazed through the wall.

"Robin, stop!" She nearly dropped to her knees; his mind was so lost, Hellish, there were traces of the same delusional aspects as he had had when he imagined Slade to be where he was not...but this was all him, all Robin, and it was much worse for it. Here was darkness in him, here was pain and tragic stubbornness, and blindness...here was some of the man he hid behind his covered eyes and it was very cold and very dangerous feeling. She stepped closer to him. "Please, Robin...stop. Don't kill him...this isn't you, Robin, let me in," she laid her hand on his shoulder and felt as he slowly began to allow her into his mind fully again and she was relieved to feel traces of the usual hopeful warmth she had long ago come to associate with him.

"Raven," he breathed her name like he didn't believe she was really there, but his grip loosened and that was all Slade needed. Launching himself up, Slade knocked Robin off of him and sprinted to the edge of the building. Snapping out of his daze of relief, Robin seemed to forget Raven in that instant, taking after Slade at a dead run. She shot after him.

"Robin, stop! Just...let him go," Raven tried to make it sound like it was just because it was too much work, like it was just because she wanted to go home...she tried to believe it herself too as she did the only thing she could think of: stopped him herself in a black encasement of her glowing heritage.

But she wasn't fooling anyone, least of all herself. She felt cold again as Robin's voice ripped through her.

"You...you're protecting him?" his voice was outrage and incredulity. His face was pain and betrayal.

"Can we just go home, Robin, please?" She never asked, never pleaded, but all she wanted now was to go home, to lock herself in her room until she could forget the comfort of being a captive. It reminded her too much of being captive to a strange dragon in a strange book from a strange time...and she would not be broken again. She could not stand it. But Robin shook with anger and she felt herself wilt at the grieved emotions flowing through their bond.

"I can't believe you!" He accused her of many things with that single phrase. It was again nothing and everything. It was just the two birds as Slade had disappeared into the night once again.

"Robin listen to me. He did not hurt me. He was...kind," she tried to reason with her best friend, with her leader...with a young man she might have loved...might still love.

"It's Slade!" Again, a simple sentence said so much, and with it, he pushed her away, so spent on fury and confusion, so lost.

"I know," she said quietly. "And he let me go."

"Like Hell he did. He told me you escaped," Robin bit out harshly. She tried not to recoil and focus on her own anger, building now. Why couldn't he just feel their bond? Why couldn't he trust her? It was not like she had anything to gain in lying.

"You believe him over me!" She fired her own hurt accusation, eyes flashing in the unforgiving moonlight.

"What difference does it make?" And she dropped the barrier holding him back as he uttered those horribly final words. She crossed her arms over herself and turned away from him, angry, upset...aching. And for the first time so far, Robin's face relaxed into one of regret, one of sudden realization of everything.

"There is perhaps, no difference at all Richard," she whispered and began to levitate away but she felt his hand grab her wrist and pull her back. "Let me go," she still whispered, not trusting her voice not to break. How dare he? She would not be weak in the face of his words. No.

"Raven, I'm sorry I...I did not mean that. You know I didn't, I...I can tell from our connection you were being honest...I was just...I'm sorry...Raven, stop trying to get away from me. I only just found you again," his last sentence dropped and she could hear his sadness and feel his heartache as if it were her own. But his words...she struggled. "Raven!" he only said her name, but it was so much. Tentatively she allowed her face to turn and glance down at him, and he, sensing a slight lessening in her attention, pulled her bodily down toward him and wrapped his arms around her. Raven tensed. He held her closer, tighter. And she might have been about to relax into him finally, after several long minutes...but a familiar voice came barreling through at that point.

"Robin! Raven!" It was the other titans, standing on the roof of the building across from the one where the two birds stood. Raven pulled away at the sight of them but Robin did not release his hold on her wrist. He would not chance it.

Neither of them could tell if they heard the explosion or felt it first but in a split second Raven felt herself falling, concrete going to pieces beneath her feet and she could feel Robin's hand gripping onto her for the life of both of them...and then there was a searing pain in her head and she after that?

She felt nothing.

Nothing at all.

Well? More? Eh...well, probably like I said anyway. Heh. Sorry, I'm in a really weird mood today...ah well. Til next time!

-Rei