Raventhedarkgoddess: I live! Or at least I'm able to update again. Please try not to be too hard on this chapter- I have some serious writer's block here!
Chapter Twelve: Shattered Dream
Raven's breath was shallow, her chest hardly moving up and down, breaths entering and leaving her chests in quick, gasping breaths that hardly did her justice in their randomness. His fingers rested against the vein in the side of her neck, which was beating out of time. "Cyborg, can anything be done?"
Cyborg sighed and moved Robin aside, forcing Robin's arms away from their posistion around her waist in order to lean over her, dodging a few shards of a window where he knelt in order to check the same things Robin had checked.
"Her pulse is low and her breath is shallow, but it looks like she just completely tired herself out." He picked her up and, with a little help from their nearby teammates, got their couch uprighted. Gently, slowly, he lay Raven down on the couch and sighed. "I think she just up too much of a fight."
"What are you saying?" Robin asked, rather dumbfounded as he sat down next to Raven, near her on the floor, stroking her hair almost subconciously in a gesture that Cyborg caught with his eyes but ignored.
"I'm saying she felt like she had to protect you, man."
But why would she...? "Raven..."
"She was just doing what she had to do. Don't blame yourself." Cyborg mistook the love in the word for an empty form of grief and set his hand on his shoulder.
"I know, but she..."
"Friend Robin, you must not mourn for friend Raven just yet," Starfire said lightly.
"You guys just don't get it, do you?" He asked. "You just don't understand what I'm feeling at all, do you?" You don't understand how badly it hurts to know I didn't let her know until... I never really let her know how I feel about her.
"Then why don't you tell us?" Beast Boy asked him, picking up some of the shards from around the couch, glass shards that didn't cut his hands nearly as deep as Robin's words were cutting them all, his angry outburst for no reason.
"I loved her, dammit! She sacrificed herself for me and I wasn't there, I failed to protect her..." And then he caught sight of his face in the shattered glass.
And Slade's promise came back to haunt him. "The girl may or not live, but I will defeat you."
"I'm not going to let you," he hissed from between his teeth. "I'm not going to let you be taken away." Even as he spoke to Raven, however, his eyes strayed to the floor.
And there he saw the shards of another dream in the shattered glass Beast Boy had failed to clean up. The Past comes back to bite me again...
Raven, it will NOT end this way.
Raventhedarkgoddess: I'm sorry this is so short, please R+R! I'll get back to this again soon, like, in one or two weeks. Expect a wrap-up in the next two chapters!