Dedicated to all who have been so kind as to read, and especially to those who have both read and reviewed supportively for me as requested...
But especially, ESPECIALLY, for: sekai no yakusoku, The Writer you Fools, Gray Dove, alena-chan and Cherry Jade
Accidental
Chapter Five: not yet
The news spread fast.
And for once it had nothing to do with her nighttime gestures of heroism.
For once it had nothing to do with 'Arella' or 'Nightwing' or the like.
For once.
Oh no.
She should be so lucky...ha!
Raven ducked away from the unabashed stares of nearly every student at The Academy as she walked in the next morning. She wondered if someone had taken the generous liberty of not only being present during the unplanned lip-lock but perhaps recording it too, and broadcasting it school wide.
It was the only way she could fathom so many people knowing already.
Well, that wasn't entirely true.
Raven knew the fleetness of word of mouth well enough...it had just never applied to her life before so she'd easily set it aside as a passably acceptable part of human behavior.
Now she found herself seriously reconsidering.
"Hey Roth, you put a spell on the class rep?"
Seriously.
"I don't put spells on people," she paused as she eyed the speaker, her irises tinged with ice and fire all at once. And as the person looked about to respond to her claim, she finished shortly, "I curse them."
A withering glower added the perfect finishing touch to that rejoinder before she stalked coldly away.
It was a convincing way of silencing people Raven categorized as exceptionally stupid—luckily there were not many.
The rest of the way to her locker was relatively uneventful. An occasional wolf whistle followed by exclamations of disbelief and so on was heard, but only vaguely as she brushed them off like bits of laundry lint.
They were hardly as significant.
And on getting to it, Raven felt the icebreaker of the day was done, but a flash of red out of her peripheral vision made her groan as she realized her hope had come too soon.
"Raven," Kori greeted with a half-smile.
"Kori," Raven returned the greeting, minus the smile. A glance at the clock nearly rendered a more cynical twist of her lips as she realized it was hardly 7:25 in the morning and she was already beyond any kind of pleasantry.
"Is it true you and Richard Grayson have begun to date?" Kori asked and Raven was surprised in spite of herself. As far back as she could remember, she couldn't bring to mind a time when the beautiful peer was so...blunt.
"I don't know if you'd call it that exactly," Raven felt her resolve crumbling beneath her feet and it sounded largely in her ears like scratching sandpaper. She opened her locker and busily began sorting her things for the day, careful not to look at Kori.
"Truly, Raven, I merely wish to know the truth," Kori persisted. Raven sighed.
Since when do you sigh so much, hm? Some part of her mind snickered at her and a part of that part of her mind did a horribly accurate impression of a 'giggle'.
Raven slammed one of her books down, hard. Kori jumped.
"Yes," she said at last and Kori nodded.
"I see," she said. Raven was glad. She didn't think she could take having to expound any further on the subject. "And you have feelings for...for Richard?" Kori asked now, dashing Raven's hopes of a near-painless escape. She turned to face green eyes, doing her best not to inhale to obviously—a sure sign she was already fed up—and trying to remember it wasn't Kori's fault that Richard was a conniving lunatic with strange taste in women.
Briefly, Raven only now noticed she thought of herself as 'strange', but it was passing because a distraction happened along, as usual.
"Morning ladies," the man of the hour said with a smile Raven felt like damning him for. That's why they all like you, you moron! You flash that megawatt grin of yours that makes the Cheshire cat look sour and they all just melt, she thought, irritated with him all over again. A sideways glance at Kori confirmed her thoughts; the girl was all blushes.
"Good morning, Richard," Kori replied with a smile much brighter than the one she'd fifty percent offered to Raven moments earlier. He nodded at her genially but then turned his full attention onto the noticeably silent bookworm, her head now pointedly buried somewhere in the pile of stuff that was the contents of her disorganized locker.
"Uh, Raven?" He poked her in the side, affectionately, jokingly even. Raven jumped, hitting her head on some books piled on the side of the locker and some things went scattering. She exhaled roughly, put out by her own skittish reaction and Richard's tendency to incite said skittishness, as she gathered the fallen items. Richard, of course, stooped to help. "Morning," he said again and Kori, realizing his eyes were not about to leave the mysterious Raven Roth any time soon, left quietly enough for Richard to almost not notice and to barely wave as she did so.
"Why don't you go out with her?" Raven asked unhappily, her locker now even more out of sorts than before as she did her best to stuff what had fallen out back in, with little success. "Sure save me some grief," she muttered, not intending for him to hear.
"I won't just drop you after our first date or anything, Rae," Richard said, jumping to conclusions and Raven bit back a dry laugh. That hadn't been what she was thinking at all and she found herself at a crossroads as to whether that was because she actually believed they could work together or because she was very much a pragmatic sort of girl.
If only it were so simple, her thoughts resounded, half-mocking, half-amused.
"I know," she said and still would not look directly at him. Richard sighed. Was this how she intended to act in front of him? He thought she might be even colder now than before; before at least she had been cynically sociable...now she just seemed to be taking entirely evasive measures.
Just what was she so afraid of? He wondered.
"What are you so afraid of?" he asked and was pleased to get more of a reaction this time.
"I don't do fear, pretty boy," Raven said, a defensive menace lacing her tone. Richard's smile widened just the slightest bit.
"Then why won't you look at me?" he challenged, not missing a beat.
She looked.
He looked back.
And for a moment, he and she—Richard Grayson and Raven Roth—really looked at each other, stripped temporarily of guards and bravado, of biting repartee and secretive laughter.
And it was an accident of course, just an accident, but in that moment Richard thought he saw the whole Raven—fear, loss, pain, hope, dreams and all—and Raven found herself thinking much the same thing about the handsome class rep.
And then it was over.
"Happy?" she intoned in a way that said she definitely was not, breaking the spell.
"Very," he replied cheekily and she groaned. He made as if to wave to someone over her shoulder and Raven turned her face slightly to get a glimpse of to whom Richard was dividing his attentions. She found no one and at first was confused.
Then she felt the soft, warm pressure of his lips against her cheek and she understood. A chaste kiss that maybe should have been their first, but Raven was secretly glad it was their second—it had a sweetness to it, an almost innocent nature.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd thought something was innocent and found she could not fault Richard for his actions. All the same, Raven was Raven, and Raven wasn't the type to simper and so on.
Instead...
"That was sneaky," she said but all the cheerlessness had gone from her voice and Richard suspected her eyes of dancing a little more than usual. "You're a thief too. I didn't give you permission to take that."
"I am a Jack of all trades though, miss. I must keep all my abilities up to speed," Richard smirked and Raven arched a brow thoughtfully.
"Oh you're a Jack of something alright..." she countered and let the rest of the statement hang between them.
"You can't back out now. You already told me yes," Richard reminded her and Raven rolled her eyes.
"You're a dope," she said and closed the lock on her locker with extra care this time—Richard had returned her books that past Friday afternoon when she gave him a positive answer. At which point Raven had also made up a dozen feasibly, if somewhat sketchy reasons for not being able to see him at all that weekend including that Friday night and so she'd gone the rest of Friday and the weekend, Richard-less.
At one point in the early hours of a Sunday morning, standing atop a part of a cathedral in the city, cape billowing about her, she'd chanced on a thought of how blue his eyes were—not for the first time—and then she'd realized she actually missed him. But now, standing less than a couple feet away from Richard, she had a hard time dealing with that truth, but deal with it she did, in more or less words.
"What do you mean, 'dope'?" he asked, feigning hurt.
"You're a dope," was all she said again but graced him with a very small, very honest smile.
"Can I see you tonight?" he asked, his stride easily overtaking hers to a point of her taking three steps to every one of his until he noticed and subtly adjusted his pace to accommodate her.
Sure she was fast; metropolitan vigilantes had to be. If there was a list of requirements for heroes—and there wasn't, but Raven felt it was pretty generally understood—then swiftness would probably be somewhere in the top ten.
But in the day hours she was just Raven Roth and Raven Roth was a student who didn't like physical exertion of any kind—walking or crew, it didn't matter. It wasn't her thing. So she took smaller, more separated steps...like the sheltered literati she was made out to be here.
"I have—"
"—homework, I know," he finished blandly.
She nodded pointedly. Richard crossed his arms.
"So?" she prompted.
"So I guess your grades will have to suffer. I want to take you somewhere," he said, stubborn as her and twice as vexing with it—that damned smile never left his face.
"I could say no," Raven said wryly.
"But I won't take no for an answer," Richard said, lightly mocking her emphasis on the negation, and she closed her eyes.
"Why are you so absurdly impossible?" she asked.
"Only the impossible ones can do impossible things," Richard said simply and it occurred to Raven that he was insinuating that she was just as impossible as he was.
She sighed. Maybe he had something there.
"...fine." What are you saying? Her mind whirled. You have no time for this! And what if he finds out? You idiot...idiot, idiot, IDIOT! She did her best to tune out from herself and into pleasant blue eyes behind silver frames.
"After school. I took work off," he said and Raven's self-reprimanding ceased wholly as she felt her feelings soften a bit.
He'd taken off work...for her.
"How did you know I'd agree?" she asked.
"I didn't plan on letting you go to class unless you did," he grinned and as if on cue, the bell rang for first hour.
They shared an almost conspiratorial glance before Raven turned away.
"Come on boy blunder, we'll be late," she called over her shoulder as she walked speedily in the direction of their class. Eyes alight, Richard followed. Things we're going as he'd planned, even Raven's agreement to accompany him after school.
Of course, you know what they say about the best laid plans.
And so did Richard.
He just didn't take it into account when making his. And it should be noted that if Richard Grayson had known that Raven Roth was one and the same as his savior from a bygone night who called herself 'Arella', he might've reworked said plans...not reconsidered, just reworked. A superhero being your girlfriend was a factor of reasonable significance, after all.
But he didn't know.
Not yet, anyway.
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