Summary: Raven has a problem—the team has figured out that she has a secret. When Beast Boy decides to investigate, will he find what's really making Raven's powers go haywire? One-shot. Slight one-sided Raven/Robin.
A/N: I've been working on this piece as a side project to everything else for almost a year now. At first it was just to play up some quality Raven/Beast Boy interaction, but it evolved into something that I'm really quite proud of.
This story has a slight one-sided Raven/Robin twist, so if you dislike this pairing... well, tough cookies. Though to appease all of you cannon shippers, I tried to keep the characters as IC as possible, which means you can still get some Robin/Starfire and Beast Boy/Raven couplings if you want to read between the lines.
Oh, and P.S.
There are slight references/spoilers to the episodes Spellbound and The End 1 & 2. Just a warning. Aren't I considerate?
Disclaimer: I do not own the Teen Titans because I have no money. Grand Valley State University has all my money.
Tell
Raven had a problem.
Not that she wasn't used to having problems—in fact, one might say that Raven seemed to deal with more troubling issues than anyone, let alone a teenage girl, should have to. Over the years, simply being who she was had accumulated her quite a repertoire of incidences where she had single-handedly taken care of an abundance of horrible predicaments; after all, being a superhero (and a portal to Hell, to boot) often came with its own sizable amount of troubles.
However, this particular crisis was far beyond her renowned expertise.
Her eyes turned back to her book, reading the first line on the page for what felt like the millionth time. Her mind was far too scattered to concentrate, and each time the words entered her head they scrambled in distraction and she had to force herself to reread the stupid excerpt all over again.
And it was all his fault.
Beast Boy was staring at her intently, large green eyes pinning her with a poor excuse for a serious glare—it lost its potency due to the grin clearly expressed within their depths and thus was easy to disregard. Raven had been dutifully ignoring him and his presence beside her on the living room couch for the past twenty minutes, reading a few chapters from The Bell Jar and waiting for the inevitability of his short attention span losing interest in her and prompting him to leave. Though as expressed before, the strains of irritation were beginning to get the best of her and her concentration was, for whatever reason, slipping in light of his persistence.
And here she thought being an only child would have allowed her a reprieve from such annoyances...
"Aaaarg!" Beast Boy groaned in frustration after the cold-shoulder treatment had gotten the best of him. "Tell me!"
She refused to look up. "There's nothing to tell."
"C'mon, Raven!"
"No."
"But--"
"'But' nothing. Go bother someone else."
A pause.
"Pleeeeeaase?" The changeling begged, drawing the out the word into an annoyingly pathetic plea.
She looked up from Sylvia Plath to shoot the boy with a withering glare before ducking back down to read the same line yet again. "No."
"Raaaaven," Beast Boy's plea turned into an aggravated whine. "Just tell me already! It's no big secret, anyways; things have been blowing up left and right for the past two weeks so you might as well just spit it out already!"
Raven bit back an irritated sigh and discreetly scooted farther away, trying to control the tic that had developed right above her eyebrow. "Don't you have something better to do?"
This interrogation had been going on for nearly half a day—Beast Boy had been following her around since after breakfast when she accidentally destroyed the boys' GameStation with a tendril of black energy that had slipped past her control. Ever since, he'd insisted on being a growing thorn in her side, constantly prodding about just what was causing these "accidents", claiming to be looking out for the good of the team and not just trying to settle his own insatiable curiosity.
It was true that Raven had been having a bit more difficulty controlling her powers as of late—first it was the odd light bulb that would mysteriously shatter, and then it was the telephone that somehow separated itself from the wall… Eventually it became bigger and more noticeable… Meditation seemed to work only temporarily despite its usual success in helping the empath rein her dangerous emotions, and after a brief period of privately freaking out it had become all too clear to Raven what the true problem was. However, it was highly unlikely that she'd ever swallow her pride to seek out help for such a thing; Raven was an expert at taking care of herself, and she was positive that almost no one in the universe knew her enough to be able to offer any assistance with this particular dilemma.
It was even more unlikely that she'd ever become so desperate that she'd resort to confiding such an embarrassing problem in Beast Boy of all people. There was better chance of Starfire finally learning how to properly prepare earthen foods.
"Leave me alone," she groused in monotone.
"Fine, then! I'll just have to guess," Beast Boy stroked his chin pensively, looking for the world like a five-year-old imitating Freud. "Let's see… what could it be….Are you sick?"
He attempted to put a gloved hand to her forehead to check her temperature but she swatted it away without even looking up.
"I don't get sick," she droned, giving up on the one unreadable line and tetchily flipping the page.
"Hmmm… is it nightmares? Insomnia?" he ventured, obviously having trouble thinking of possible answers.
"No."
"What about angst?"
"No."
"Indigestion?"
"No."
"… Herpes?"
If possible, Raven's irritable mood became even more irritable, and she had the death-glare to prove it. Beast Boy recoiled, scooting to the other end of the couch as quickly as possible lest the empath decide to chuck him out the bay windows or something else to that degree. With her powers on the fritz like they'd been, he considered himself lucky she didn't accidentally blow up the tower…
"Yeesh! Fine, it's not herpes…" he huffed in an immature pout, folding his arms across his skinny chest and slouching dejectedly. "Geeze, I don't know why you won't just tell us. I mean, the last time your powers went all scary was when you were crushing on a book… and unless you're, like, in love with an enchanted table or something we can probably help, just like last time."
"A table?" Raven intoned dryly, rolling her eyes in sarcasm to hide her slight offense at his insinuation. "I have better taste than that."
"Well, it's not like you've been crushing on an actual guy."
She opened her mouth to fire off some snide remark but for some reason all sounds had become stuck in her throat. A flush was creeping its way into her cheeks and she fought fruitlessly to suppress it before Beast Boy saw it. Unfortunately, he had taken notice of the silence left in the wake of her failed reply, his sharp eyes catching the coloring dusting her pale cheekbones and throwing off her complexion before she forced it down and regained her composure.
Inwardly, her heart was racing in embarrassment. He knew. One look at his face and she knew he knew. One look at her face and he knew she knew he knew.
"Of course not," Raven lied calmly, though hearing it after such a large pause made the truth even more mortifying.
A nearby lamp exploded.
Beast Boy, for all of his teasing and jokes and ready-to-fire comebacks, was struck speechless for what felt like the first time his entire life. She couldn't have… she wouldn't… An Ice Queen like Raven would never let something like that slip out unbidden… right?
Raven watched in horror as his already large eyes widened in shock at the reaffirmation of his suspicions, the bottom of her stomach dropping into oblivion as a cheeky, positively evil grin began spreading across the youngster's green face.
"Oh, I see." His smirk had become completely Cheshire. She could practically see the wheels and cogs in his head spinning up some dastardly scheme.
"Beast Boy…" she warned uneasily, closing her book with a resolute snap and trying hard not to look too terrified. Her violet eyes darted nervously back and forth between a spot on the carpet she suddenly found fascinating and the ever-growing smile on the shifter's face, as if unsure just which would be less discomforting.
He cackled lowly, whispering as if it was still a closely kept secret and not some horrible skeleton that decided to leap out of the cupboard to properly humiliate its owner.
"You have a crush…" Beast Boy hissed between poorly concealed giggles, "… on a boy!"
'Better that then a table,' Raven thought while hastily pulling up her hood to cover her red face.
She glowered at him from beneath the cowl of her cloak, but she was sure that even he'd be able to see how flustered she was, and thus the scowl lost its effect. Her initial reaction was telling her to lie, every instinct seeking some sort of futile self-preservation by recanting what'd just slipped out. However, every excuse and denial she could conjure of sounded pitiful and weak to her franticly scrambling brain.
"Shut up," she returned lamely, unable to think of anything else in her unsettled state.
Beast Boy, however, found her statement to be one of the best things he'd ever heard, for he burst into a fit of uncontrollable snickering.
Raven's face felt like it was on fire. Part of her reveled in it—perhaps if she blushed hard enough she'd spontaneously combust and save herself any more ridicule from a 13-year-old wannabe comedian. Inwardly she chanted a combination of her own personal mantra and something along the lines of 'don't kill Beast Boy, don't kill Beast Boy, don't kill Beast Boy…' It worked to some degree, but the grating noise of his laughter inserted between the singsong words "Raven's got a cruuush! Raven's got a cruuush!" in her peripheral senses made it just that much harder to let go of her pent up aggravation.
A few magazines left on the coffee table—possessed with an off-shoot of loose telekinesis—leaped into the air and promptly tore themselves to shreds.
By the time she'd settled herself, the changeling was only beginning to calm down. His giggles trailed off, though they were still audible in his voice, ready to bubble up at any moment. "So, Raven," he started in a mockingly professional way, "who's the lucky guy? Anyone I know?"
"I do not have a crush--"
"Is he a stud?" he asked with a barely contained chortle. "I bet he's a total babe, right Raven?"
"He's not—"
"Teehee! My name's Raven and I love you, mystery man!" Beast Boy prattled in a screechy falsetto, an obviously awful parody of Raven's gravelly voice. "I want to marry you and have, like, ten thousand of your babies!"
"BEAST BOY!"
"Aw, c'mon, I won't tell anyone! Promise!"
"There's nothing to tell!" Raven snapped, on the verge of losing her temper. A telekinetic gust of wind flared around her to blew her hood to her shoulders and set her short violet hair twisting angrily, exposing the irate expression etched in her delicate features. Behind her, a picture frame cracked on the wall, the spidery edges of glass fragments distorting the photo of the Titan's smiling (or in Raven's case, surly) faces.
"Don't kid yourself, Beast Boy. I don't do crushes; I can't," her face relaxed from its glare, replaced by something far more dead and unreadable, masking whatever she was really feeling with a zombie-like exterior. "So drop it."
The laughter in the shape shifter's eyes dimmed a little at her stern tone—usually Raven would tolerate moderate teasing, however (he admitted reluctantly) he was digging at what was probably a touchy subject.
Beast Boy sighed dramatically. He'd never understand girls… or more specifically, moody goth girls. Or even more specifically, just this one extremely dangerous and moody goth girl…
Cyborg and Starfire had always said the reason he and Raven constantly butted heads was because she needed to be approached sensitively and sensibly, and it was no big secret that Beast Boy was a blunt hooligan missing perhaps a little more than just common sense and about as tactful as a wrecking ball.
It was beginning to dawn on the shifter that openly harassing the empath would never get him what he wanted out of her. Maybe a more subtle approach would garner better results...
"So seriously," he said in what could easily be mistaken by those unused to his faux-seriousness as a solemn tone, twiddling his thumbs a bit in his lap, "Do we know this guy? Or is this another cursed-object-with-a-monster-inside romance thing?"
As soon as the words were out of his mouth he wanted to kick himself—he'd have to work on the subtlety-thing later, and hopefully Raven wouldn't "accidentally" blow him up in the meantime.
The pale girl's frown deepened, her low voice gaining an ominous edge as she ground out, "Beast Boy." Her glare could have killed relatively small animals. "Thin ice."
The shifter winced at the sound of the guttural growl, fear twisting his stomach into a giant knot. In a matter of seconds he'd managed to push Raven far past the realm of irritated into something dangerously close to in-the-mood-to-murder.
"Okay, okay! I'm sorry! Calm down, already…" he held up his hands in a form of surrender. "I didn't mean anything by it, honest."
Raven took in a deep breath and counted to ten very slowly before exhaling in a long, silent sigh, her anger dissipating like a vapor as she sought to calm herself. The tension unwound itself from her shoulders, the blush faded from her cheeks, though the heat seemed to remain long after the color had gone.
Without meaning to, Beast Boy had hit a sensitive, exposed nerve with his probing comments. It wasn't like she enjoyed the emotional torture of these "crushes"— she'd never had any sort of luck with romance, and further more probably didn't have a romantic bone in her entire body. The pointlessness of a relationship, she knew, was painfully obvious; a demon such as herself would never be able to truly accept or give love without putting her friends in danger. It was stupid to even consider such a fleeting happiness. The cost was far too high to gamble with.
Yet, despite all of her common sense and maturity and rationality, those stupid bubbly feelings remained, buried deep but there all the same, wreaking havoc with her mental control and setting her emotional plane in a state of disarray.
Beast Boy sighed, watching her brow furrow ever so slightly as it often did when she was thinking hard about something troubling. Now that he knew to look for it, he could see that sad little light flicker secretively in her carefully-guarded violet eyes, and—though he'd never admit it—it made him feel slightly chastised.
For some odd reason, he felt the need to see her smile—nothing drastic, a tiny upturning at the corners of her mouth would've been enough. But then again, Raven rarely ever smiled so Beast Boy wasn't sure why she would smile or why he even wanted her to. He figured somewhat tiredly that it was probably just to make himself feel better.
"Look," he said earnestly, hands clasped in his lap as he twiddled his thumbs in the perfect image of an admonished child, "I didn't mean to make you mad—I was just joking..."
He paused to chew his lip with a pointed canine, "Most girls like the teasing; then again, you're not most girls…" He floundered, "Wait, I didn't mean it like that. I meant that your sense of humor isn't exactly… no, wait, that's not what I wanted to say either—what I meant was…"
Raven cut him off with a deadpan stare that prompted him to finish his original thought lest she set him on fire and blame it on spontaneous combustion.
"Never mind. Anyways," he ended with a dramatic sigh, "I'm sorry."
Though being an annoyance seemed to come second nature to the green changeling (and despite just how easily he managed to thoroughly ruffle her feathers with his younger-brother antics, so to speak), it was moments like these that Beast Boy actually became sort of tolerable, when he was no longer trying to be the king of Ass Clowns and took a moment to be frank with her, and Raven appreciated his sincere apology.
Of course, she'd rather have her arm chewed off by some Tameranian carnivore before she'd ever admit it.
The empath closed her eyes. "Do me a favor," she said softly, her flat words losing their bite, "and just keep your big mouth shut for once?"
Beast Boy, for what felt like the first time in an eternity, was sobered by her uncharacteristically gentle tone. It was one of the rare times that Raven actually showed enough of her true colors for him to be truly caught off guard at how delicate they were.
Raven, no matter how faintly, was actually revealing that little bit of herself that she kept so far away from everyone.
And it made him feel like a heel for teasing her.
The empath watched Beast Boy out of the corner of her eye, taking note of his almost-studious look and fighting the urge to frown. She didn't like the sympathy in his expression.
"Okay, Raven," he offered her a small, apologetic smile. "I promise not to tell anyone about the crush."
"Who's got a crush?"
Raven's heart stopped.
Across the room, a potted plant possessed by a strand of dark energy uprooted itself and fell to pieces.
Beast Boy knew for a fact that there was little on this earth that could scare Raven—change and spontaneity, the endangerment of her friends, her father, and Wicked Scary 3. It seemed a small list in comparison of his own seemingly-endless inventory of petty fears. Raven had faced demons, monsters, mutants, the fires of Hell, and even her own death without so much as a flinch; in a respectable way, he admired her courage like a youngster would admire their parents, seeing them in an indestructible light that was unchallenged by mortal dilemmas.
And yet, he couldn't be sure, but just as Cyborg's booming voice came from behind the couch he could've sworn he saw a look of pure terror cross her pale features. However, in a flash it was gone, quickly covered by a look of carefully-composed stoicism, if it was ever there at all.
"No one," Raven supplied, perhaps a little too quickly, re-erecting her walls faster than Beast Boy could follow.
"What's that about a crush?" came a new voice from the doorway as their leader made his way into the kitchen. She could feel Robin's presence in the back of her mind, and it sent her brain spinning. There was a slight, distant chinking noise as some of the silverware clattered violently in the dishwasher, manipulated by some rogue telekinesis.
The muscles in Raven's forearms were beginning to ache as she anxiously clenched her fists around the thick fabric her cloak, and she was quite certain that if she continued to fight the blush creeping up her neck any longer she might have an aneurism. At least things couldn't get any worse…
A child-like giggle caused Raven's stomach to lurch as Starfire entered the conversation, slipping in behind Robin. "Marvelous! Do indulge with the sharing of the secrets—please, who is being squashed and who is the squasher?"
'I stand corrected…' Raven bit back a groan of discontentment—Starfire would never give the insistence for girl-talk a rest now.
"Uhh, the word is 'crush', Star. Not squash. It's a crush," Beast Boy corrected nervously, feeling antsy.
"Ah, so there is a crush!" Cyborg smirked triumphantly.
Beast Boy could feel Raven's withering gaze burning twin holes through his skull.
"Nuh-uh!" the changeling insisted on the brink of panic, trying to recover and failing miserably. "There's totally not a… it's not even a… it's…"
He looked to the empath for any sort of support, but her sideways glare expressed only how pathetic she thought he was, clearly stating that he was on his own.
Robin chuckled, opening the refrigerator and giving its contents a cursory glare.
"Easy, BB, don't hurt yourself," he joked while popping the tab on a can of soda, tactfully giving the shifter a leg-up out of the hole he'd dug for himself. Credit where credit was due—Boy Wonder was not one to leave a teammate in a sticky situation.
Starfire hovered next to Robin, her pretty face lit up with a 100-watt smile. "Does this mean that one of our friends is about to enter the Earthling courtship rituals of your culture?" she asked him.
Her warm smile was contagious, and Robin found himself returning it instinctively. "Maybe. Depends on who's got it and who it's on."
"Glorious!" The Tameranian princess clasped her hands together and floated down into the living room, perching next to Beast Boy on the arm of the couch. "Tell me, which one of my friends has this 'crush' so that I may properly prepare the Pudding of Marital Bliss!"
Beast Boy paled to a sickly pea-color. Raven retreated deeper into the folds of her cloak and stared hard at a spot on the carpet. The dishwasher jolted more violently.
Cyborg took in their discomfort with swelling glee. "Yeah, tell us… which one of you is it? Beast Boy?" He advanced on the shifter with a snicker, leaning a heavy prosthetic arm on the boy's skinny shoulder. "Don't tell me you finally got the courage to ask Raven out!"
The look on Starfire's face was so overjoyed that it twisted Raven's stomach. "Does this mean that I must prepare the Pudding of Marital Bliss for Beast Boy and Raven?"
If it was possible, Raven felt sicker.
The silverware rattled more violently in the dishwasher, the distinct sound of something ceramic shattering into a thousand tiny pieces only slightly muffled by the dishwasher door.
"DUDE!" Beast Boy looked mortified. "That's… no way! It's not like that! I-I can't believe you guys would even think that!"
The metal man favored the shifter a skeptical look.
Raven sucked in a hissing breath, trying hard to keep herself calm. Unaffected. Apathetic. "Honestly, do you really think he'd still be in this dimension if he'd sprung something like that on me?"
Beast Boy blanched.
This seemed to pacify Cyborg's suspicion as the rest of the team hummed a garbled agreement.
"But then," Starfire began pensively, "if the "crusher" is not Beast Boy, then…"
Raven winced as Cyborg's grinning face drew nearer, almost tauntingly as he finished Starfire's meandering thought. "… who's the lovebird?"
He leaned in close, his crafty smile overwhelming her vision and sending her heart plummeting to her stomach. "Is it you, Raven?"
With strength she didn't even know she had, Raven managed to completely smother her jitters, delicately opening her book with a regal air and favoring the metal man with a sour look.
"Oh, please." Her monotone was flawless.
"Aw, come on, girl—it's not that ridiculous. It's happened before," Cyborg pointed out almost smugly, holding up a metal finger for emphasis. "In fact, your powers were having technical difficulties then as well, if I'm not mistaken."
Raven made a haughty noise at the back of her throat to cover up the squeak of indignation that seemed to come out of nowhere at the reference to her last romantic endeavor. "Coincidence." She flipped the page.
"But Friend Raven," Starfire interjected, "are not your powers effected by emotion? Surely such a powerful emotion would elicit equally powerful responses from them, for instance…"
"… when you blew up the GameStation this morning," Robin finished from the kitchen. He smirked; Raven swallowed a blush.
Cyborg, seeing her discomfort, offered her an amiable pat on the shoulder, unintentionally ruffling her cloak a bit. "C'm on, Rae. You can tell us."
From behind her book, the empath gave an unladylike snort. "There's nothing to tell."
"Oh, please indulge us with the secret of your 'squash'!" Starfire bubbled, springing from her seat to hover over Raven, her hold on Earthling slang slipping in her eagerness.
Robin played with the tab on his soda can, elbows on the counter, masked eyes moving discreetly from Starfire's svelte form to the sulking empath. He offered Raven a friendly smile. "You know, we might not be experts in romance, but we are your friends—if this crush is giving your powers an unwanted outlet, maybe there might be some way we could help."
"There is no crush," Raven countered harshly, slender fingers tightening on the cover of her book as she reached the end of her fraying patience. "Romance is pointless."
It wasn't a total lie.
Starfire's face fell. "That is quite a regrettable perspective, Friend Raven. Truly you are, as they say, 'just kidding'?" She emphasized the words "just kidding", brilliant green eyes brimming with an unspoken concern.
The empath averted her gaze and said nothing.
"You don't really believe that, do you, Raven?" Beast Boy frowned and Raven found herself clenching her fingers tighter around the folds in her cloak.
"Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters," Robin countered, not about to let her back out without explaining herself. He leaned against the counter, pinning her with a too-steady-to-be-entirely-casual stare. "Do you really believe that love is pointless?"
For some reason the air suddenly became too slippery for Raven's lungs. Her heartbeat doubled in pace to make up for it, hammering the inside of her ribcage as if it were trying to escape. Her stomach, on the other hand, had ice condensing along its walls.
She was pinioned by the confused gazes of her teammates, their questioning eyes prompting her to answer and making the silence engulfing the room feel one hundred times heavier. Cyborg waited with a frown, arms folded across his chest and his brow furrowed. His cybernetic eye had an accusatory glare to it, almost commanding in its stare, while his human eye regarded her with only a sad sympathy. Beast Boy looked like he wanted someone to throttle him and put him out of his misery—he left Raven with an apologetic shrug, guilt welling in his candid green eyes for accidentally getting her cornered by her own team. Starfire looked as if she might cry; her big, pretty eyes were glistening with what might have been tears while her bottom lip trembled ever so slightly.
Robin was looking at her with that stupidly concerned expression. Her mind buckled.
"I do." The lie felt heavy.
The dishwasher noisily fell to pieces all over the kitchen floor. 'Liar,' the calamity seemed to sneer.
"Aw, man!" Cyborg groaned as water began spewing from the remnants of the dishwasher's exposed organs. "Look at this mess—this is going to take hours to reassemble!"
Beast Boy winced at the sight of the damage. "Geeze, Raven, is no piece of electronic equipment or kitchen appliance safe from your wrath?"
Much to his surprise, Raven remained silent. Usually a slightly-goading remark like that would have earned him a verbal smack at the very least.
"Hey, Raven," he turned to face her, "you conscious or what?"
But she wasn't listening. Her eyes were focused discreetly over the top of her book, watching ever so quietly.
She studied him blankly, watched his lips as he sipped his soda, noted the way his domino mask formed to his face, the way his body arched to observe the dishwasher wreckage on the floor, stared at his hand on the Tameranian's shoulder.
Beast Boy saw.
He saw her hands shake ever so slightly as she turned the page, trembling fingers fumbling with the smooth paper.
He saw.
He saw it in her eyes; a brief look of purity, of adoration, of pain and hopelessness touched her features so gently, so subtly… but it was there all the same and there was no doubting it.
He saw.
And with an insight he rarely came by, he knew. He just knew.
"Raven…" Beast Boy breathed in realization.
The sound seemed to pull her from her reverie, and her eyes snapped down to be hidden amongst the words of her book, as if they'd never been anywhere else. She was safe there, behind the thick, bound cover of her novel, behind her familiar barriers and defenses. She was her old self, empty and barely a step above heartless.
"Sorry," she muttered, though the offered apology was half-hearted at best.
Raven's apathy did nothing to soothe Cyborg's boiling frustration. He heaved an aggravated sigh, stooping to gather the broken parts of the dishwasher.
"Look, why don't you just can the attitude and talk to the guy?" A flathead screwdriver extended itself from the tip of his finger and he went to work piecing together the wreckage. "Anything's better than taking out your drama on every piece of equipment in the tower."
"I don't have drama," Raven retorted, a bit indignant at the implication. "There's no drama and there's no guy and there's nothing to talk about, so can we just drop it already?"
The half-android rolled his human eye. "Obviously there's still something to talk about if you keep making a war zone of our kitchen. And what 18-year-old girl doesn't have drama?"
Before Raven could grit out a tetchy argument Robin held up a hand in a peaceable gesture. "Raven, all we're trying to say is that we're concerned. You've been really out of it lately. It's no surprised that we're worried about you."
"Yes, friend, truly!" Starfire chimed in. "If there is anything that could possibly help to cure your discontentment, please tell us. We would like to aid you in any way we can."
Raven sighed through her nose, closing her book and rising from the couch in a ghostly-fluid motion. "I appreciate the offer, but there's nothing you can do." Her hood rose from her shoulders to cover her eyes and the dead expression within them. "If you want to help, then please, just leave me alone until this inconvenience passes. I don't need help, I need… space. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to meditate."
She glided towards the door.
The lights flickered as Robin called after her. "Raven--"
But whatever he was about to say was quickly lost as the empath cut him off. "Save your heroics for someone who actually needs them." The lights returned to normal and then she was gone.
Cyborg made a small, mutinous noise of discontentment as Raven vanished into the darkness of the hallway. "Hmph, whoever this guy is better have an angel's patience if Raven ever gets the nerve to make a move. I'd rather tangle with Plasmus when he has a cold than handle that girl's mood swings."
Robin arched an eyebrow in disapproval. "Come on, Cy, that's not entirely fair. You know as well as I do that Raven is… complex. After so long keeping herself bottled up, maybe this whole crush thing is just too much for her. A breakdown wouldn't be unmerited for someone as complicated as Raven."
"Do not say such things about Friend Raven," Starfire scolded, "She is not broken like you suggest. She is merely sensitive about her squash."
"Yeah, she's sensitive, alright. Sensitive like a toothache, you mean," Cyborg returned, reattaching the hinges on the dishwasher door. "I swear, that girl's about as cuddly as a porcupine—especially when she's twitterpated—and if she doesn't quit the whole Ice Queen charade she's never going to have a chance with this mystery fella."
Images of Robin holding Starfire's hand danced across Beast Boy's mind and caused an involuntary stab of sympathy to ache in his heart.
'… she's never going to have a chance…'
Poor Raven. She already knew how hopeless it was; she didn't have a chance no matter what she did.
The injustice began to make Beast Boy angry. If anyone deserved just a smidgen of happiness, it was Raven. Raven, who had been through every sort of trauma and toil that could possibly be offered. Raven, who had never once complained about her burdens. Raven, who had born her despondency in silence and accepted her loneliness in a way no person should ever have to. Raven, who hid behind her cloak and books and dark décor and never asked a thing from the world that couldn't accept her. Raven had more than earned the right to be loved. It was so unfair to believe that she never would be, and the thought burned like a coal in Beast Boy's veins.
"I think Raven just needs her friends' support. She needs to know that we're there for her and are willing to help."
"I agree. Friend Raven merely needs our help."
"Heh, what she needs is a swift kick in the--"
"Shut up, all of you!" Beast Boy exploded, glaring hard at each of his friends in turn. "Listen to yourselves, talking like you know what Raven's going through. None of you have any idea."
The rest of the team blinked in surprise, stunned into silence. Beast Boy took the moment to recollect himself before continuing, his anger abating in the wake of his outburst.
"I'm sorry, but Raven's the only one who knows what's best for Raven. If she believes we can't help, she'll balk at any offer of support and be twice as stubborn the next time. That's just how Raven is." The changeling's young voice was strangely somber, his words careful. "Raven is the kind of person that likes to handle her problems by herself, who knows why—maybe it's just to prove to herself that she can. I think she sees this whole crush business as a problem, and wants to deal with it the only way she knows how—alone. We should, you know, respect what she wants and stuff and stop bothering her about it. It's probably only making things worse."
Three pairs of eyes looked to Beast Boy in shock. For his part, Beast Boy looked resolute in his statement, refusing to cower beneath the weight of his teammates' stares.
"Beast Boy…" Starfire spoke in awe, unsure in how to proceed in light of the shifter's incredibly uncharacteristic perception.
Cyborg fumbled with a fallen screw. "Geeze, BB… I never thought I'd see the day you'd be campaigning for Raven's privacy."
"Well," Beast Boy fidgeted sheepishly, a bit embarrassed by his burst of insight, "I know if I had a crush I didn't want, I'd want everyone to back off about it, too."
"Do you really think that's all there is to it?" Robin questioned in a voice that was firm but not unkind. "I understand that Raven wants to deal with this on her own, but if she's struggling as much as she seems to be then maybe she needs some helpful interference, even if she doesn't think she does. If you know something else, if Raven told you anything that we could help with, you should tell us."
Beast Boy shook his head almost sagely, looking at Robin and seeing that tragic, bittersweet glimmer in Raven's watchful eyes.
With a wry smile, the shifter reclined comfortably on the couch and propped his feet up on the coffee table, giving the remote an expert flip before turning on the television and favoring the team with a languid shrug that clearly stated he was done with the conversation.
"Save the heroics, Boy Wonder." Beast Boy said. "There's nothing to tell."
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