Tears Are For Lovers
III: When Things Get Awkward
- ( o ) -
Normally, when you read stories where something dark, arcane, and generally clandestine is going to happen, stories sprinkled with leanings of fatalism and most probably mysticism, there's prophetic dreams that the lead character immediately forgets after awaking from that premonition, sweat-drenched and breathing heavily.
Not here.
That night, Starfire slept like a baby. It probably had something to do with her mattress, a soft, downy thing imported from Tamaran, land of the warriors. They may specialize in grunting and bawling, but those warrior peoples knew how to make a bed comfortable. Seriously.
Beast Boy didn't stir, Cyborg lied silent on his metal slab of a bed, and Robin, though dreaming so predictably of crime fighting, had no ventures into the dark world of supernatural understanding.
Even Raven, half-demon child, did not dream. Her nightmares used to contain a raging Trigon and a crumbled, burning world; now she slept dreamlessly, passing from one darkness to another before waking.
Perhaps though, even with all of the clichés that attached itself to those dreaded dream sequences, the Titans should have one. They needed to have one to deal with the coming trouble and shocks. But fate (and the muse of this particular story) was disinclined to give them any suspicions about the coming events, so the five teenagers were left in the dark, peacefully awaiting a time where turmoil ruled and confusion sprung up like weeds in an untamed garden.
- ( o ) -
It didn't help that she was determined not to fall in love.
It didn't help that she denied herself the pleasures of simple human arousal, often contained by the chaining and locking away of the emotion Lust.
It didn't help that she had an inkling she liked someone else already.
Squeezed against Beast Boy thanks to the tentacles of a particularly persistent monster, Raven had no choice but to blush. Natural responses were, well, natural. And it particularly didn't help the situation when she snuck a glance at Beast Boy to see that his face, too, was aflame. Her slight body crushed against his under the weight of a gigantic, writhing mass of flailing feelers, a monster concocted by some ambitious mad scientist or another. Resisting the hold of the foe only brought her into further contact with him... and something at his pelvis that was changing from limp to... not limp at an alarming rate.
Beast Boy, from the dilation of his large green eyes, was just as aware of it as she was. A look of horror, followed by a split I-should-have-known expression, passed over Raven's face. She did not want to be stuck pressed against Beast Boy and finding out that he had the hots for her... especially not in this situation!
Cyborg launched a barrage of missiles at the center of the mass of black limbs, but the soft, glutinous enemy only absorbed them and spit them back out on the ground, useless. Starfire struggled with two of the black arms, a test of alien vs. creature strength. Robin, just as eager to finish the many-armed jelly-thing off, attacked from beneath.
Raven and Beast Boy hung in the air, awkwardly (and resolvedly) not looking at the other. A thought popped into Raven's head as the embarrassment accentuated with the tugging and insistent pressing against the inside of her thigh courtesy of BB's libido. She had psychic powers. She could just vanish out from that spot and pop in somewhere else. Duh, said the cruel little voice in her head. Stupid.
So, unable to endure any longer, Raven popped out and popped in, fanning herself with a corner of her cloak to alleviate the intense burn that had imposed itself upon her cheeks in the last five minutes.
The tentacles, now lacking a second body to enwrap, slightly loosened and Beast Boy fell to the earth, catching himself just in time and morphing into a cat that landed gracefully on its four paws. Though disaster had been evaded, the remnants of mortification hung on his face.
Cyborg finally blasted the beast through the hole where it spewed out the attacks it sucked in, obliterating half of the entirety of that ebony mass. Clumpy, almost translucent pieces fell to the earth in the aftermath, and none of the onlookers –or the titans— were spared.
Starfire fell into step along side Raven as they headed back to the T-car, parked far enough away that it had not suffered being pelted with the residue of black-jelly. "Is something, as they say, 'the matter,' Friend Raven?" she asked, looking inquisitively at the fading redness on Raven's face and the scowl the dark girl had determinedly secured in place of the flush. "You seem ill."
"I'm fine Starfire," said Raven, her voice a quiet rumble. She shook her cloak to dislodge any clinging clumps of beast. "Just make sure I don't get within ten feet of Beast Boy for the next year, and everyone else will be fine, too."
Starfire, understanding only that Raven was angry with Beast Boy and wished not his presence, looked between them. "Has something happened while you were both trapped in the grip of our recent foe?"
"Look, Star," said Raven unhappily, "if you want the details, go ask idiot-boy over there. I don't want to talk about it."
Star complied, only to receive an equally grumpy rejection from the aforementioned idiot-boy.
Sitting at a window in a coffee shop situated conveniently between the scene of the battle and the Titans' vehicle, the man smirked. He lifted a cappuccino to his red-violet lips and watched Starfire try to arbitrate a peace between the two humiliated teammates. He could not hear them, of course, over the murmurings of the other occupants in the shop, but the look on each of their faces was good enough. His Goddess love bore resolve and goodwill, his sorceress love held anger and displeasure, the green one had 'my-life-is-officially-over' written all over his face, and both Metallic Man and Leader Boy were pretending not to understand what was going on. Such a delightful team.
They were amusing, he decided. They were fun to observe, as they were no better than animals and he was the scientist sent to observe them. Except, of course, he'll do more than observe. He will take what is rightfully his and leave the three pathetic males standing in the lonely dust of their adored tower.
- ( o ) -
The problem with coming from a different planet, decided Starfire as she sat through an uncomfortable supper, was that you were often on different levels of existence from others. On her home world, everything was open, and free, and true. Here on Earth, people hid things and told lies more often, and did not allow themselves the freedom to admit wrongness and repair all damage.
From the first day she spent on Earth, Starfire tried to foster goodness and rightness and all the values she had learned growing up on Tamaran. Robin, though he preferred what Cyborg called brooding to what Beast Boy called a night of excitement, terror, and popcorn, knew what she referred to.
Openness was the only way to gain trust in each other as a team and a people. It resolved all differences and allowed for goodness and togetherness to prevail. She had not always been open, true, but that was a habit learned after settling on Earth, where Raven had her parents and Robin had his villains and Cyborg his sense of unhumanity and Beast Boy his Terra.
Raven, surely, did not know openness. She was secretive where Starfire knew barely anything about secrets, dark where Starfire only saw goodness, and, as Cyborg said, more morbid than the grave. Raven had her pain, and she dealt with it in an entirely different way than Starfire, which perpetuated her suffering while Starfire fell in and out of happiness with such energy and exuberance that she had no time to impress and carve such torment on her soul.
This willingness to lie and hide was a fundamental difference in how humans and Tamaranians thought that confused and angered her, because they were no longer a happy, pleasant group but now spoke in two-word sentences and glared at each other over their daily nutrition.
Starfire, for the first time she could distinctly remember in a long time, matched Raven's scowl with one of her own.
- ( o ) -
Robin looked up from the mass of papers before him as the door slid open. A tall girl with a plethora of flaming hair entered, translucent white dress shimmering under a purple overcoat. They had not been able to get the dress off, and so Starfire, in order to assume a semblance of normalcy, wore a robe the hue of her former warrior's garb when they left the tower to fight. She had not bothered to take it off once they had returned.
"Have you locked yourself away, Robin?" she asked softly. But her voice was altered, no longer highlighted with gentle innocence. It wasn't enough of a change to alarm him to danger, but Robin was startled nonetheless. There was an edge there, something close to bitterness. "Once more in your work?"
"What else?" Robin's reply was droll, as if he, too, found his preoccupation with his occupation tiresome.
"Rest assured I have not come to dissuade you," said Starfire. "On the contrary, you have been investigating cursed garments, correct?"
Robin nodded, sitting back on his swiveling chair.
Starfire's voice dropped to a near whisper. "I may have some information... A book I've brought from Tamaran bears a description close to what you may be looking for, except this garment is not cursed. Instead, it is blessed. garb for a Goddess, they say..."
- ( o ) -
Curled up between a statue and a bookcase, Raven pulled her cloak tightly about herself and closed her eyes. Her mind was screaming with horror and pain, as barricades she had constructed with a fair amount of her own energy and soul burned and crashed, crumbling to dust at the voice of a stranger.
"Not again," she pleaded with some unknown power, digging herself into the wall.
Fire seared her thoughts, her powers failing to gain control over what was now anarchy in her mind. Any less control over her powers, Raven feared, would mean the unleashing of every single one of her emotions and the destruction of her home.
He did not know, she decided, halfway between consciousness and anguish, what she was enduring. His words were soft, almost too gentle for comfort, the words of one lover to another in the hazy afterglow of lovemaking. But she could not listen to them; she was too busy being torn apart at the seams.
Finally, after a buildup of tension and passion, the separate entities in her mind gave a collective cry:
"Stop!"
And suddenly, the man stopped speaking.
The calm after a storm, the shaky peace between battles, the sudden quiet after an abrupt end of noise—it scared and disconcerted her, and for a moment, all Raven could do was pull at the polyester of her cloak and hang in the tatters of her mind.
The barriers had been too tightly worked with the actual material of her mind, with the actual thoughts she went through, for her to come through unscratched after a tremendous skirmish like this had been. Sure, it seemed as if the other were untouched, perhaps even shocked into silence, but for Raven, this was one of the most sobering experiences she'd ever had.
"Stop," she said again, this time out loud. It was more of a statement to herself, to assure herself she was still there, still rational.
There was a quiet murmur at the back of her head, something foreign and male, but not loud enough to disturb her hard-earned peace. Then—a sound akin to the fluttering of wings and he left.
She somehow knew he was gone, disappeared from her presence. And she was left with her own ruined controls.
Tendrils of power escaped from her as Raven shakily got to her feet and approached her bed. She began to pull together the scraps of her thought, threading needles of black power with logic and sewing together memories, repairing tapestries of spells stored in her subconscious, dangling the elaborate embroidery of her childhood complex before her.
Raven wondered for a moment whether to repair it or not; if not, her life would be so much more carefree, and she would probably be a lot happier than she was now. But if she did so, she would not be Raven any longer, and so the thread returned to its incessant weave, finishing off loose edges and retouching designs.
Slowly, surely, Raven rebuilt her psyche.
- ( o ) -
He swore at himself, pounding his fists into the weak, wooden walls of his rented room. The plaster crumbled under his knuckles and rivulets of blood began trickling from tears on his skin. How could he be so stupid? The witch of his past and the witch of his present had different levels of power—the past and karma of this witch had ensured a sense of paranoia and installed a web of protection around her, a web he had bypassed easily and without knowledge, much weaker than he was used to.
He had proved blind to her suffering, understanding her squirms and demands were cries of torment only when she had found a scrap of her old power and screamed at him to cease his urging. He realized that any sweet words would only hurt her more, and after an almost-silent apology, withdrew. Only when he opened his third eye did he see the ravaged wasteland of her consciousness. Guilt pulled on his strings, nicking his calm.
He let forth another string of expletives.
She would have more difficulty trusting him now. Any psychic communication would lead only to a heightened sense of persecution. Which meant if he wanted to speak to her and convince her of his good intentions, he would have to meet her face to face.
- ( o ) -
Disclaimer: When have you ever known me to claim TT was my own? Use common sense! No copyright infringement is intended, this is purely for fun.
A/N: Sorry for such a long wait between updates. I was engrossed in another story I was writing, and I had an AP World exam and a math test, plus my back-to-school book essay. By the way, if you read this, do drop a review. Please. I really want to know how this affects you. BTW, this chapter is dedicated to ChocolateCurlz because she's such a totally awesome person. Go check her out, if you haven't already (which most people have). Thanks for reviews go to: numbah-1-RAVEN (no I'm not abandoning this fic), My Silver Wound (thank you!), A lilmatchgirl, DarkVyse88, OptimusChrist (watch me stick to this fic like glue), ShinigamiPhoenix, ChocolateCurlz (a hit? oh, I don't know...), Sakushii, DITZY (ah, merci, it's great to know I'm loved), J (I did not), Ryusensei, and Haley too-lazy-to-sign-in Carr.