Thank you so much for all the reviews! They've seriously been making my day(s) since I'm sick again...blah. Anyways this chapter is short and I'm sorry but more soon I hope and the next chapter of 'Hush' should be out soon-ish too…with any luck. Ah.
Dedicated to alena-chan, Cherry Jade, The Writer you Fools, and my dear castle in the air …my dear castle in the air
Glass
Chapter Seven: Need
He brooded and it was as though winter had frozen over the manor anew. That was preposterous if only because winter never ceased long enough to come again and therefore be new, but the chill was unmistakable and after the keeper took Raven to her room he disappeared from the castle. For days his absence slowly became more and more prominent to Roy, X, and Hotspot and they knew well where Robin had gone and knew just as well that none of them could follow.
There was the difference between master of the castle and its facilitators. He had a certain degree of freedom they did not and at times like these exercised that freedom by seeking haven in the glass garden they all knew existed but had never seen.
He'd mentioned it once, or he must have for none could remember a time he did not know of its presence in the center of the bridging woodland. But for some reason none could remember either when he might have told them it was there or that that was where he went. Still, they knew.
So he must have told them...once.
His breath hung like morning fog and he could almost see it crystallize right before him, tiny sparkling fragments slowly forming thorns that began to grow on a curved stem and then lead to an unfurling slew of heart-shaped petals.
"You had no choice," he muttered and his anger caused a hairline fracture in the new flora, silver-white in the winter moonlight.
It'd been very fine of him to show Raven his gratitude, to let his difficult nature fall away however shortly but the fineness dimmed to him now as she lay in something of a healing coma, back in the castle. It had been very fine indeed, but now his actions and her mistaken actions culminated in a wilting mix of confounding messes and Robin ran an agitated hand through his black locks.
He could never tell her the truth.
She would never help him then.
No one would help the man who kept telling him or her that it was the wood when really it was he himself who had trapped her there after all.
But had he had a choice?
A howl whipped through the trees, causing his cape to billow around him magnificently, a dark and flickering shadow. He grimaced. The wood had a bad habit of reading him too well sometimes and its responses were not welcomed now, his heart growing hard in him at the thought of what might have happened if he had simply turned a blind eye to Raven's trespassing that night a while back.
Then she never would have come, never would have challenged his manner, never would have read the invocation. And he, Robin, would be no closer to ridding his castle and keep of the curse than he had been five hundred years before—even further perhaps, for how many maidens exactly did one expect to have run into the enchanted wood within a century of each other? The wood and castle's lands alike riddled themselves with small Magics, Mischiefs, and the like but like all things enchanted the magnitude of the one all-encompassing binding wrapped itself vice-like around him and his.
And they would still all lay relatively dormant if not for…her.
If he hadn't done what he told himself again he had to have done, even as he began to pace as he had for the past three days, in maddeningly short spans with contradictorily long strides, back and forth, back and forth, and never getting anywhere. So far she'd shown no signs of waking, not that anyone at the castle ever saw him return. He went back, undetected, only to watch the sleeping form of Raven for a time each night to make sure her situation became no graver than it was. He couldn't risk it.
After lying to her though, everything had become a risk and the line he felt himself walking was confusing even to himself. She called out the genuineness in him but he could not give of it wholly which was troublesome and she was smart which meant when she woke—and if she woke came to mind but he pushed it aside hastily, disheartened—she would be a force to contend with if he were to keep the truth from her still. Not that he had much choice, he told himself darkly and the crunch of the crusty snow beneath his boots was loud in his ears as he tried to keep thinking.
"She is too beautiful," he said to himself hopelessly, not at all confining his meaning to the realm of the physical, though that was obvious too. "Too smart...too...much..." I cannot hope for anything to come of this but I have already set it into motion, he thought in curbed upset.
She is, he mused with some sadness.
And yet I need her, he admitted to himself, to the wood, to the night. And she is my only hope, he acknowledged consequently. For even a vagrantly foolish man will realize when his last chance has arrived, whether it is in the form of a cavalry or in this case, the form of a literati with a fabulous scowl of displeasure almost always on her features.
Casting one last unreadable glance at the fractured rose to his right, Robin swept out of the glass in three fell steps, suddenly at the foot of the castle even though logically it should have taken him hours to even get out of the wood.
Enchanted was the way of things here though so 'should have' held little conceivable ground here as things were.
He moved through the castle as only its keeper might, fluidly, unnoticeably, almost as if he were a part of the manor itself, until he reached Raven's door and here he made his presence known by opening the door, if very quietly so.
She lay there as he had left her not a night before and his devotion to all things beautiful resonated painfully in his eyes. Somehow Raven had managed to assimilate a heavenly glow that cocooned her body in whitish wisps of what could have been moonbeams, making her skin illuminated and her chiseled features more delicate in the most renaissance of fashions. The black of her lashes laid flat on her equally moon-pale flesh and it occurred to Robin that in her dormant state the almost perpetual scowl she'd worn so far was absent and in its place was something unreadable but in that, not unhappy. And he marveled at the peace there.
"When will you wake?" he asked with no hidden amount of wistfulness but Raven did not stir from her present state and so he took seat on the bed beside her, thoughtful. And as he had done each night so far, he now let his hand boldly frame her right cheek, his cold against her cold, his skin against hers, all coming together in one subtle act of everything in either one of them that was tender and vulnerable.
"You can't disappear like that...master," X said from the door, the crack it was open allowing just half of his face to show through.
"I am keeper here as you know," Robin replied.
"I know this master, but still...you owe us more," X insisted, edgy. "What if she had fallen deeper?" he asked and some of his hidden motive made itself known.
"I'd have returned. I can feel her," Robin told X and after a considering moment, X left, door still partially open. "I can feel you," Robin said to Raven and ran his index finger on a tracing line against her jaw, smooth and lovely, regal and stubborn. That she had no idea what she had done, saying those words and bringing on the black winds, did not concern Robin so much. He knew she couldn't possibly have grasped the reality of it all before this...this escapade. And now? His eyes traveled her. X had done a decent job of bandaging her and some spark of something like jealousy roiled unhappily in Robin's chest but it died down as he surveyed the cleanness of Raven's skin.
There had been scars there, he was certain, specifically shaped markings.
But now they were gone and Robin puzzled over it with the look of a man not at all used to puzzlement. It was the look one got when one was faced with an unavoidable burden or an unexpectedly sour taste in the mouth. His confusion of the scars mingled with that of his befuddlement over her ability to heal him and now, it seemed, heal herself, though much more slowly. It must be magic, he mused with gentleness born of awe and he retracted his hand from her face to rest in his lap. He stayed a while longer before exiting the room soundlessly and retreating to the library for the first time since the mishap with the parchment.
It was there that Raven found him much later.
When she'd woken it was something of an inane feat to keep her eyes open as the world initially heaved like the sea beneath her when she tried to stand, but she'd grabbed hold of one of the bedposts to steady herself and forced some measure of composure down on herself. She'd woken to the thought: I must find him, and she would not be deterred, least of all by herself, she insisted with all stubbornness and had very gingerly made her way down the hall, hand bracing the wall for steadiness. In walking she noticed something very odd about her vision though she couldn't put a name to it. She thought, for some reason, she could see more sharply, smell more accurately and her sensory of tactile feeling was readily apparent with her bare feet pressed on the lush carpet of the hall. Everything was heightened and she brought a cautious hand up to her forehead again.
The gem was there, as if it were a part of her.
Well, she supposed somewhat balefully that it was now.
Her tapered fingers traced its edges, the hardness contrasting strikingly with the comparative tenderness of her skin, even paler with all her hair framing her face now, short as it had become in the throes of the incantation. She let her hand move from her forehead to run through her hair tentatively and it was not a very long run any more for her longest hair was up front, making a dynamic sweep down from the shorter strands in the back. So many changes, her heart ached a little and she doggedly had steeled herself to keep walking until two familiar doors appeared—as if by magic—on her left.
"So there you are," she said to the door and it opened for her obligingly, but she was not surprised. If anything, Raven found herself offering a slight nod and smile at the gold knob on the door before entering the library.
"You've woken," he said and she made an abrupt turn down an aisle of books she assumed he'd taken to reorganizing now. She found him shortly though. With her newly exaggerated senses, she also seemed to be almost unduly aware of Robin's presence, wherever he was, as if he drew her to him. His cape lay on the ground, a corner of it stuck unhappily beneath a pile of tomes and his hair was ruffled like someone had just ran their hands through it with little or no discretion. But his eyes were clear and it was there that Raven allowed her gaze to linger, locking her irises boldly with his.
"You are alright?" she asked.
"I am now unharmed," he said, gratitude there and she nodded.
"Me neither, though your castle is stranger to me now," she said and he quirked a brow.
"How is it you mean?" he probed, gesturing for her to sit wherever and so she did, interlacing her fingers a little nervously as she tended to do when things stopped making any sense at all.
"All my sensations, they're more than they usually are and that aside, there's this." She touched a hand to the gem in her forehead. Robin stepped nearer to the sitting girl and knelt.
"May I?" he inquired softly and she gave a quiet 'yes' or something along those lines as he ran his own index finger over the hard jewel, eyes as open with wonder as Raven imagined hers had been.
"Do you know what it is?" she asked with little hope that he did.
"A chakra I think, for your Magic," he said after a very long unmeasured silence and his words settled over her like a heavy blanket that one was too sick to remove.
"My 'Magic'?" she asked weakly now and Robin withdrew his hand with a sigh.
"It seems you have something of a sorcerer's power in you, though maybe you did not know it. I imagine it comes from your mother's side," he intoned as one teaching a student.
"My mother did not practice magic...well, father never mentioned it," Raven amended her claim and realized only now how very little she did know of her family's background. Supposedly they'd always been regarded—according to Terra, and even Star who wasn't wont to talk unkindly about anyone usually—as the oddities of the city and never quite 'up there' with the rest of the upper class.
Raven had never inquired further simply because it sounded dull and the way she'd seen it, the past was the past.
But now she sorely wished she'd asked something and out of an unusual distress, she buried her face in her hands, as though to hide away from it all. It was a bit much to happen all so very, very fast and her head was spinning—even with her eyes closed. She was well aware of the rustling of Robin's clothes, his tunic against the broadcloth of his breeches and the clack of his boots as he stood from where he'd so recently kneeled, and she heard more than saw him begin to move erratically.
Dully she was aware he was unsettled by her reaction.
"It may or may not help you to know you have offered my...you have offered me hope, Raven," he said and now she did look up at him, eyes a little glassy...but not cold.
"Hope? How can a girl who has none for herself offer it to anyone else?" she asked, heart painfully tight in her chest.
"I think you have it, despite what you may think," Robin dismissed her claim and now she grew angry.
"You dare to think you know more than I about what I do and do not know of myself?" she flared.
A frown creased his brow. He'd upset her already. When before he would have been annoyed there was far too much clear to him now to allow himself that frivolous frustration with her aptness to be argumentative, so he inhaled and did his best to explain.
"No, but I know what I have seen and it tells me that you are the maiden the prophecy speaks of, the incantation you read could be stirred by her alone. Raven, you may yet break this curse of eternal winter," Robin tried not to be too grand about it but it meant so much to him he lost himself in the rationalization and as Raven's eyes widened she could only vaguely nod an 'oh.' "I do apologize though. Even I know that this is a lot happening very quickly, too quickly perhaps," he said now and she nodded definitely in agreement here.
"I think so," she said brusquely, flattening the imaginary wrinkles in her skirts.
"But it is true, or what I believe to be true and as master of the castle and keeper, you may do well to trust me on my conjecture," Robin said, trying hard not to launch into a very elaborate speech about what she absolutely had to believe...about how she was not only his first hope in a long time, but his only hope. He tried and being Robin, he succeeded, but Raven sensed something of what went on in him underneath the surface anyway.
"You look at me as a man who has seen his last glass of water," she spoke softly and the echoes in the gigantic library were kinder now, no howling wind at their backs.
"I am grateful to you," Robin said evasively but no less sincerely.
"So do you read much or is this all for another show of grandeur?" Raven asked after a time, deciding to take unashamed shelter in the smaller things for now, the earthly things. Robin clicked his tongue.
"I read," he said shortly, defensively, and she laughed for some reason, maybe out of a need to release some of the tension building in her, maybe for some other reason.
"None of that again my Robin, you and X cannot speak with me at length in two-syllabic sentences any more than a wall, fixed look of expressionless nature or no," she warned with a slight glimmer to her amethyst irises that made Robin smile slightly too.
"X is not unkind to you?" he inquired as if he expected her to say he was.
"No, just..." she trailed off, uncertain.
"X," Robin offered with half pretend helpfulness.
"Yes, that's about it," she agreed.
"Well, I do like to read, and one has much time to spend...reading and so on when one has all the time in the world," he said with some note of brokenness in his tone that made Raven want to reach a hand out and pull him to her, but she refrained.
"You are not very young are you, though you look to be not much older than I," she admitted her contradictory thoughts and he shrugged.
"It is hard to tell here, young or old, for time does not really exist except maybe for the indication of winter which is a falsehood anyway because it is always winter," he said and Raven frowned, right hand running absently over some nearby books.
"But, if you did measure the same," she suggested.
"About five centuries," he deadpanned and she choked on nothing.
"Five centuries!" she exclaimed, disbelieving and in no small measure, appalled.
"Now I have a question," he interjected and she brought herself back full-circle, the picture of someone unruffled rather than someone stunned beyond life, her previous look to be sure.
"Yes?" she prompted. He knelt beside her again.
"Why do you call me 'your' Robin?"
The pile of books she'd been idly running her hands over toppled with her surprise at his question and the rustling of the pages and the hard-hitting of the covers on the marble beneath them resounded in almost musical tones all around them.
And it wasn't his question that had thrown her off, no. That would have been at least a little bit expected, perhaps.
No, rather, it was the answer that had occurred to her so quickly she dared to believe it had preceded the end of his question. It was that immediately Raven found her thoughts to have simply answered: because you are mine.
But she would not say it and instead offered him a non-committal shrug.
"Tell me someday then," Robin replied, trying to scrutinize her as best he could with little success.
"Someday," she agreed and added with new kindness, "Thank you too." At this Robin shifted to turn to face her more directly, his smooth hands resting on the ground behind him, leaning on his arms.
"For what?" he asked, honestly perplexed—again.
"...you tried to protect me," she murmured, gaze now busily glued to the marble swirls of the floor.
"I am sorry I could not," he said, regret and self-loathing evident in his voice.
"It was not your fault. Had I not read the paper..."
"I told you it was Magic, not Mischief. You couldn't have known otherwise," Robin made quick work of making Raven's attempted self-blame null and void with tacit explanation. "I..." but he could not finish.
Now was not the time for the whole truth, as much as Raven's deep, beautiful eyes requested it of him.
Now was not the time to tell he'd not only known it was Mischief, but known what would happen.
Not now...not yet...
He could not face her loathing of him in this moment...not yet...
Robin needed her to trust him, to even perhaps like him. He needed her...they all needed her...
And the prophecy would not be denied...
His mind, soul, and heart warred in the span of thirty deafening seconds before Raven shifted uncomfortably on the floor.
"You..." she tried to get him to finish his sentence.
"I…wish I could have protected you," he said at last and while it wasn't what the truth that went hand-in-hand with his previous clause, it was a truth nonetheless and it seemed to assuage her for now.
"You have done me much honor and kindness," Raven admitted, resting her chin in her hands as she eyed him thoughtfully, curiously.
"I do what I may," Robin said without pause and she answered him with a soft glint in her eyes that said: yes, I know.
"How is it to be immortal?" she asked suddenly.
Robin considered, eyes darkening from cobalt to midnight, flecks of silver edging their ways in from the sides.
"Lonely," he said at last and she didn't ask him anything else that day.
Yes I know, short AND not a lot happened. I'm sorry. Please stay with me though if you can! I'd really appreciate it!
Review please!
-Rei