You all know I don't own TT...DAMN.
Ah well.
Dedicated to all who review. Thank you so much. It means a lot to me.
But especially thank you to: Gray Dove, The Writer you Fools, Cherry Jade, alena-chan, and sekai no yakusoku
Accidental
Chapter Three: escape artist
"So, why weren't you there last night?" he asked, leaning against the neighboring locker in a casually superior way that made her have to think fast of several really good reasons not to slap him. "Hello?" He did so much as to wave his hand in front of her face like she was some crazed lunatic and she tried to calm herself to keep from carrying out her darkest desire...
...the very, very slow disembowelment of the stupid man standing next to her, a never-failing smirk exuding from every accent of his expression.
She couldn't hit him; a teacher might see. She couldn't kill him; she'd be expelled even if no one saw, because who else had been seen not getting along with the infallible class rep?
No one but her.
She couldn't do any of that, oh no, and she didn't. Like Gar said a while back, she knew the lines were drawn thickly at the Academy and she wasn't one to cross said lines.
But it was so tempting.
"Rae—————ven," he drawled lazily, dragging her name out needlessly.
Very tempting.
A metal slam resounded through the hall, eliciting a startled yelp from Richard Grayson—which would have been funny if Raven had the patience to pay humor any attention, which she didn't—and several turns of heads from various other students who were—the poor dears—no less startled than the class representative. A few of them even dropped their things—books, bags, binders, and so on.
"I don't think I'm even going to answer that question," Raven replied coolly and clicked the combination lock together with even more force than she'd just used to throw her locker door shut.
Irritated by what she perceived as Richard Grayson's arrogance in his expectance of her to actually be waiting at a goddamned telephone for him, Raven stalked off in no small hurry.
Maybe that was why she failed to notice that the lock fell back open.
Richard rolled his eyes—a trait of Raven's he'd picked up already, even if he didn't know it—and was about to call out to the ruffled girl when a thought occurred to him.
His smirk grew, if possible, and once she was completely out of sight, he turned back to her locker.
When he left, the lock was strategically secured...just as Raven Roth thought she had left it.
--------------------------------------------------------------
She'd been blind enough to think herself home free when the stupid charmer didn't follow her and it was Friday which meant the school followed a Day 2 schedule—they did block scheduling at the Academy—and that in turn meant she might be able to get away without seeing dear Richard again until after the weekend.
It was the beginning of lunch and Raven glued her eyes busily to the ground as she made a sightless path to wherever, working her mind around how best to avoid the class rep and his—she glowered at nothing in particular—friendly invitation out tonight. Phone calls she could keep on not being around for, messages from one person telling her to meet Richard at X place at X time she could conveniently pretend to have never gotten... and so on. It might work. She just had to be careful not to—
She ran into something and at first she thought it was a wall, hoped it was a wall.
"Fancy meeting you here," the theoretical wall said and she groaned.
"It's lunch. We're bound to run into each other eventually. It's statistical," she replied dolefully and pushed past him. Richard held back a laugh and followed.
"Mind if I join you? I thought we could talk about our—" But he never finished.
"Oh Richard, there you are!"
Yes! Raven briefly acknowledged the possibility of a God existing and turned to face the source of her temporary salvation: Kori Anders. She'd never been so happy to see the bright redhead in all the time she'd known of the pretty girl and now she took advantage of her presence by practically shoving Richard in her general direction.
"Kori," she greeted with a forced smile; the thing with Raven was if she was happy, she was happy, but she never really felt like smiling, so if she ever did it always tended to be forced—the variants on how forced were the separating features.
"Raven," green eyes smiled cheerfully at the shorter girl and Raven did her best to steer the conversation in the right direction.
"So you wanted to speak to Richard?" Raven asked pointedly.
"Yes, Richard, I wondered if perhaps you would like to have lunch with me?" Star asked and then added politely, "Unless you are already having lunch with friend Raven?" Her brow knit ever so slightly here, but it was so slight, no one noticed...except Raven, who understood what it meant.
"No, he's not," Raven answered for him shortly. "Have fun you two!" she tossed them one last forced smile before heading quickly in any direction that could be defined as 'away'.
She did not turn around and so she missed the look of confusion that made its way across Richard's face, the look of confusion mingled with what one might also assess to be frustration.
But one couldn't be sure and Raven didn't see, so it was like it never happened at all.
For her part, Raven had begun to make up excuses in her head about not seeing Richard after work tonight when she, undoubtedly, would be out jumping rooftops. Shortly she considered telling him as much but sacked the notion almost immediately.
He was just the type to take that kind of comment seriously, she imagined unhappily.
She spent the rest of her day thinking up excuses, each one more unlikely than the next, and eventually gave up because she found something especially vexing about a person who could get under her skin without even being within a walking proximity of her.
Well, more specifically, Raven found something especially vexing about the much-beloved class representative and his...well, his everything.
Him and his damn blue eyes behind those pseudo-intellectual silver frames. Him and his stupid, silken-looking black hair. Him and his eternally smug mouth.
Yep, him and his stupid, ridiculous, arrogant, incorrigible...everything.
...why am I thinking about this!
All this she thought with a murderous flare, and the scowl she wore for the remainder of the day was notably disparaging...even more so than usual.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The final bell rang and so far he hadn't been able to find her since lunch. That was when the friendly Kori Anders had sweetly, but somewhat forcibly led him away to have lunch with her—or more pointedly, Richard thought: not with Raven. He knew when a girl liked him; it'd been painfully obvious for years and eventually he learned to pretend to be blissfully ignorant of it. This was a lie and sometimes it didn't go so smoothly as he wanted but it was a nice alternative to the outright: I'm not interested, please leave me alone.
Richard didn't want to hurt anyone after all.
On the other hand he was beginning to have more and more interest in the resident recluse of the Academy and as that interest grew—even on this day alone—he suspected more and more that he ought to say something.
Ought to do something.
But whenever he tried to get a moment with her on the phone or between classes or in the morning at the lockers and so on, she managed to slip away.
At first he'd chalked it up to bad timing.
But no one was that lucky and soon he realized she'd been purposefully steering clear of him and that on those chance occasions when she did bump into him, she found a backdoor and slipped out of it with noticeable speed.
She's a ridiculously achieved escape artist, Richard thought dourly.
But why, he wondered. He knew they'd agreed to work together at least for the project and maybe she thought it wasn't imperative for them to start now, and in a way she was right.
He wanted to start early because the earlier they started, the more time he, Richard Grayson, would get to spend with one Raven Roth.
Except that she seemed Hell-bent on avoiding such extended get-togethers.
And it was through this simple series of events that Richard determined that he was not a very patient man, so he kept a watchful eye out for her, two if he could spare the other from someone talking to him or the teacher lecturing or the oncoming traffic rush between 4th and 6th period.
All to no avail, and his patience, if possible, thinned even further.
"Where are you?" he muttered as he walked the halls, a muted sense of where he was surrounding him, blocking out his usually keen peripheral vision.
Maybe that was why Garfield Logan snuck up on him so easily.
"Who is 'Yu'?" a familiar voice asked, amused. Richard jumped. "Whoa, calm down dude. It's just me." Green eyes laughed at him and Richard frowned.
"Not 'Yu', 'you', y-o-u, and I was talking about..." he trailed off. "A friend," he finished lamely and at this Garfield shot him an unabashed smirk.
"A certain anti-social, super-smart 'friend' maybe?" Gar inquired none too subtly and Richard's frown turned to a scowl.
"And what of it?" he asked, beginning to walk away. That too was fruitless; Logan only proceeded to follow.
"What's eating you?" he remarked, more interested than offended. Most people at the Academy said Garfield Logan was really quite beyond being offended at all. "Sorry I freaked you out, back there," he added and this won him some forgiveness as Richard slowed his pace so that the jokester could fall into stride beside him.
"No problem. I'm sorry, but my 'anti-social, super-smart'," ridiculously attractive, his mind threw in but he continued instead with, "friend as you put it, keeps running away from me." At this, Gar looked his most genuine: baffled.
"Running away...from you?" he asked and Richard was somewhat offended again but brushed it off in hopes of learning a little more about the dark bird from the class clown.
"Yes, from me," he answered shortly. Gar's laughter subsided after a time period that was much too long for Richard, but subside it did and when it did, the shorter man shook his head.
"Man, that's weird. Are you sure it's Raven? She doesn't 'run' from anything," he said and companion blue eyes clicked away with a thousand questions, but settled for one at a time.
"I'm sure and maybe 'running away' was the wrong phrase. It's more like avoiding me, and before you say anything, I know. She doesn't like people. I got that, but it's seriously more like she's singled me out as the sole carrier of the plague and is doing everything to avoid getting it," Richard clarified and Gar nodded thoughtfully.
"Maybe you ask too many questions," he said and Richard barely kept from doing a double-take. This character seemed far more likely the type to ask a dozen needless questions than he would. Gar read as much in his expression and explained, "I know Rae through Vic, you know, Victor Stone. We've known each other for a while and let's say I know how much asking I can get away with before she rips my front teeth out." This was all said very matter-of-fact and Richard had to take a second to store it all away as was his habit.
So they know each other pretty well, those three. Richard made a mental note of this without missing a beat: "Too many questions? She has something to hide?" Richard joked and tilted his head to one side at the oddly apprehensive look that came over his peer.
The heavy, worried expression seemed out of place.
"I don't think so," Gar said after a terribly awkward silence and Richard couldn't help but probe.
"You don't sound like you believe that anymore than I do," he challenged and Gar sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Look Rich, I don't know. She's got...secrets though and not one of us knows enough about her to know whether or not they're the kind of secrets that are best kept. So let's just say Vic and I worry about her. Don't tell her either. She'll kill me." He managed to inject a fair amount of a jocular tone in the last sentence and Richard nodded inattentively, willing to settle for that for now.
He had at least, a little more of an answer.
"Well, thanks," Richard said and parted ways with Gar. It was the end of the day which meant he had work, but first he wanted to stop by his locker. He took his time, unlocking the combination and picking out the folders and files he needed, glancing over his shoulder from time to time, keeping his eye out for a certain someone.
A smirk crept across his handsome features.
It was probably about now that she would be opening her locker to find...
There was a resounding crash as his books went scattering from his arms where he'd carefully begun to pile them and his locker door swung angrily with the smack it had received from a petite frame with heliotrope hair.
"YOU!" she raged and Richard Grayson jumped back for the second time that day, facing two fiery eyes of liquid amethyst.
"Hey there Raven," he smiled innocently.
"Where is it?" she asked...well, it was more of a demand.
"Where is what?" he looked away. She slammed her hands against his locker door, sending the lock sprawling across the hall.
"My books, the ones I need for Day 1, where are they?" Raven Roth barely contained her voice and even still drew half the attentions in the school's crowded corridor.
"Why would you need those? Today's a Day 2," he continued to not meet her gaze as he answered her and this irked Raven just so that she didn't even think as she grasped his chin between her thumb and index finger. Doing this, she made him face her. It didn't help that he was a good deal taller than her, but she wasn't a secret vigilante for nothing and her strength surprised Richard, even as he also partially let himself be turned.
It wasn't an undesirable position in his humble opinion and he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling the smile that would surely make her withdraw her hand.
"You know we start on a Day 1! I need those books to do my work. Where are they?" she glared her patented death-glare but Richard was unfazed except maybe by how interestingly the light seemed to reflect in her swirling irises. Those he was maybe entirely fazed by and he thought, not for the first time that day: I am so done with you avoiding me.
"What makes you think I have them?" he goaded and she drew him down closer, unaware of how strange her actions looked to the bystanders, of which there was an increasingly growing number whispering and gasping around them.
But neither seemed to notice, so wrapped up in each other, if for entirely different reasons.
"I know," she replied, voice dropping from displeased to livid as she lost the last grips on her own patience, done with being fooled with.
And now Richard smiled.
"Want them back?" he asked cheerfully.
"You will return my things," she replied, ignoring his question, driven on by his infuriatingly unbothered tone.
"I want something in exchange," he said all too harmlessly.
And Raven didn't trust him for a second but she had little choice...other than murder. It occurred to her that that was the second time that day she'd envisioned a rather colorful death for her taller peer and that it was no more doable this second time than the first.
Internally, she sighed with blind surrender
Outwardly, her eyes narrowed with heated resignation.
"Well then, what is it you want then, Dick?" she asked, her voice now so sugar-sweet that very briefly 'Dick' rethought his plan of action...but it was briefly and so it passed as he made good on his request.
"Payment of course," he said and closed the gap between them that Raven had, until that moment, failed to notice was very small indeed.
And all because of her.
Had she actually wanted this?
You were thinking about his eyes...his mouth...his hair...you were thinking about him...her mind teased her mercilessly as she felt him cradle her head with one of his hands, pulling her even more into the kiss.
I'm an idiot, she thought. And then more exasperatedly: an idiot like him!
But she didn't pull away and while later she might find that to be a mistake, at that moment, for once Raven Roth found herself confronted with something she could not have possibly planned an escape for.
And so, she didn't.
Thank you for all the reviews. I appreciate you taking the time to tell me what you all think.
That said, keep telling me your thoughts please, if you don't mind.
-Rei