Disclaimer: Nooo!

Sorry this chapter took so long! I had final exams last week and so I was busier than normal. I don't think the next chapter will take as long. Gah, curse school (;

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It came apparent to me pretty soon that the fact was, it wasn't that I couldn't make a move. It was that I wouldn't. I had these raging, blistering feelings that actually bordered on a fiendish passion for him, I thought of him so much, I wanted him constantly and yearned secretly for just a brush of his arm…anything was enough….I just wanted to be close to him. And yet, along with all these feelings dragged that inevitable weight that I carried, dampening my chances of ever even coming close to something you could call a relationship with him. That weight was one thing and one thing only: my fear. For almost my entire life, fear has been with me constantly. Fear of the horrors I was to bring for Earth in the future, fear of losing people close to me…fear of a million things. And all that raging, churning fear was constantly boarded up inside my skull, affecting, for the most part, only me and my own actions. Fear was the one thing, no matter how mature I got, no matter how many years passed, I was never going to have a way around. And this fear of rejection from Beast Boy (or rather, just fear of the thought of telling him how I felt, though I tried to convince myself that I was only afraid of him rejecting me) held me back. Among other things. Was I even ready for a relationship? Did I even want a relationship? Or was it just the warm, intoxicating closeness of his body that I wanted? To be completely honest for a moment, I'm not exactly sure what it really was I wanted. All of these feelings were so confusing. All I knew was that I wanted him. What exactly it was that I wanted from him eluded me, but I knew that I wanted him…couldn't deny my desire's hot, almost palpable presence that seemed to hover in the air between us. It was a wonder that he didn't comment on it, because it was almost a physical thing, an entity, I could almost reach out a hand and wrap my fingers around the hot, squirming, pulsing little creature that was my desire, though I alone could see it.

But, though my feelings were strong and denying them was now pointless because I knew they were there, I continued to shield them, cloaking them in a mask of shadows like I often did my own face, hiding them safely locked away in some deep, internal vault, always carefully guarded against forced entry. Always hidden so expertly from the object of my affections. There were times when, if he had been a little more attuned to me, he would have been able to tell instantly and obviously that I had feelings for him. When our hands or arms brushed accidentally an almost pleasant, but still embarrassing, faint pink would spring to my cheeks, and instinctively my hood would raise to cover any of my expression's betrayal of my emotions. There were times when our eyes locked randomly when I could have sworn I saw him looking suspicious of my feelings. And I always turned away, turned away from him like I had for the past two years on a regular basis and pretended I could care less if he was near. If Robin was exasperated that I wasn't revealing anything to Garfield, he was keeping it carefully concealed. He knew it was none of his business, and so he stayed out of it. But there were times when an obvious event occurred between Garfield and I, and I would pretend nothing had happened as usual, when I could feel Robin's all-too-obvious impatient stare that said quite plainly 'What are you waiting for?' I wasn't exactly sure what I was waiting for, but I satisfied myself in deciding that whatever it was, it hadn't come yet. That maybe I wasn't meant to reveal my feelings to Garfield yet.

Meanwhile, as my ever-constant battle raged within, Robin held true to his desire to make a change. When Robin is restless with a routine, it is usually painfully obvious. Because he makes a conscious effort to do something to get himself back into the groove of enjoying his routine. But this time, switching training time to after lunch wasn't going to satisfy his craving to encounter something different. I had thought maybe this whole thing was just going to blow over and he would be back to normal in a few days, but he wasn't. This became clear four days after when he initially confided in me that he needed a change. He went out on a Saturday morning, mysteriously (but then again, when isn't any outing Robin goes on without us mysterious?) a returned with a car.

Now, when I say car, I definitely don't mean a red Ferrari. Because this car was far from it. It was a relatively old black car, though I know nothing about cars so I couldn't really judge either the age nor the model. The car was in fairly good condition, though, I knew that. The paint job appeared to be newer than the car, and was still a sleek, glossy ebony. Despite the fact that the car had no back seats, it wasn't all that bad. There were two bucket seats in the front, and then any that might have been behind had been ripped out long ago.

"Uh….nice, Robin," Garfield said, surveying the car after Robin brought it into the Tower's garage. "But….uh, you do realize it doesn't have backseats, right?"

Robin didn't look irritated at this, though I would have. He gave a chuckle under his breath. "No, I know. That's why I got it. We're going to use this car to ship what band equipment won't fit in the van we have," he explained.

Band equipment. I never thought I'd see the day when Robin of all people talked about band equipment. Band equipment. This whole thing was nonsensical.

I know I wasn't the only one who found the concept of Robin joining a band bizarre. I recalled a conversation with Cyborg earlier that week.

"Robbie joining a band…what's up with that?" he had asked, shaking his head a bit and putting the video game controller down on the sofa, showing that he was too baffled at the moment to continue clawing his way up the high score list at the moment. I had closed my book, marking my place with a few fingers, and shrugged my shoulders slightly.

"I'm sure he has a logical reason for doing it," I had said composedly, in a very it's-not-a-big-deal kind of a way, trying more to assure myself of this than Cyborg.

"Logical reason? The boy's gone and lost his mind! He's already got a team to manage, and as if that's not enough of a challenge for him." Cyborg had shaken his head in flabbergasted loss for words for just a moment. "He knows how hard it is to focus right now, after everything that happened…" he gave a vague shudder. "And this is definitely not going to help things."

"He's our friend, Cyborg. And he has his needs. Who are we to question them?" I had pointed out, hoping this would convince him to stop reminding me of the things that had happened during the battle against the Brotherhood…things I wasn't exactly ready to face even in memories. I was afraid he was going to bring them up directly, because I couldn't handle them right then. But thankfully, the subject dropped down, down into conversation hell, not to return from the dead for the moment.

"So you don't think there's anything weird about Robin joining a band?" Cyborg gave me a probing look. "Just admit it, you think it's nuts, too. Come on Rae, I know you well enough to know you think Robin's gone a little off the deep end with this one. He's always been a little out there but…how can he possibly think he can juggle the team and something else on top of it?"

Now, it might be sounding to you at this point that Cyborg was a bit neurotic and prone to overreacting. This actually isn't true. Cyborg is actually one of the more laid-back Titans. It takes quite a lot to set him off. He normally goes with everything as it happens and waits until he has a very good understanding of a situation to make an attempt to judge it. He is one to assess things before jumping straight in. And so he doesn't much overreact, since when he does react, it's when he knows exactly what's going on. But, as we were all still on-edge, since we were still settling back into our normal lives, the slightest thing could jar any one of us into a sudden pang of realization that things were still crazy with us, no matter how back to normal everything seemed. The thought of this eminent chaos sent Cyborg into panic occasionally. It was going to take longer than this for our lives to settle back into complete normality, for every last out-of-place fragment of our little reality to piece itself back into the puzzle of our everyday lives, and we all somewhere deep inside knew it. And though it wasn't a delicate process and nothing was really much capable of disrupting it, he was pretty jumpy about the whole thing, with that constant worry of 'oh god what if this screws up everything and life doesn't end up the way it used to be'. I think he yearned as much as I did for everything to feel exactly as it did the day before we left, and his terror at the thought of that not happening accounted for his occasionally strange and erratic behavior those days. We were all a little spastic, I suppose.

Robin stepped a bit away from the car as though he intended to leave the room, and then stopped. "I'm sorry, but I just can't seem to get it. What's so strange to you four about me joining a band?" he asked, standing patiently and awaiting our answers to this difficult question with utmost lack of complaint. "Any particular reason why you all seem so against it?"

The four of us were speechless for a moment, all of our minds grinding away in attempt to really pick out the true reasons for our mutual contempt for Robin's decision to flop everything around with his sudden choice of hobby. I could tell Starfire was uncomfortable with the whole idea by the way she was finding an inability to keep still. When she is upset or confused, she tends to move around a lot. Pacing is her usual action of choice, but right now she was merely crossing and uncrossing her arms and drumming her fingers restlessly against thin air as though her steady, constant motion would somehow bring all other movement in the world to a screeching halt if she tried hard enough. I knew Cyborg's thoughts on the situation already of course, and he too looked uncomfortable. Garfield had so far showed no distaste for the concept for Robin joining this band so far, but there was something in his eyes that mirrored the feelings I had on the whole matter. He, like me, rarely showed whatever happened to be running through his mind at the moment on the outside. Most of his feelings were hidden, like mine, though my mask, my means of hiding, was a sarcastic and emotionless guise, while his was a mask of what was sometimes only false cheerfulness.

We all just stood there, all waiting for someone else to finally voice the words that all of us were thinking. It seemed as though no one was ever going to speak, and I was almost about to swallow my pride and confess my fear that this whole situation would change things, but I didn't. I couldn't stand the thought of being the first unmasked.

It was Starfire who finally spoke. "Robin, I cannot stand it! As much as I wish to allow you to make whatever decisions you see fit, I do not wish to lose you!" she erupted finally, a geyser of raw emotion finally pouring forth, set free from her troubled mind. Robin looked extremely bewildered, but she failed to noticed and continued. "You will grow closer to these new….bandmates…and everything will change! You will longer be…our Robin."

"Easy, Star, I'm not going to-"

"You will no longer have the time and energy to keep running the team effectively…and things will fall apart!" she continued, but Robin held up a hand, and she silenced herself.

"Look, I don't mean to be rude, but I think all of you are overreacting. A lot. It's not a big deal. Just something I'm going to do with my spare time. I'll still have the same amount of time for you guys that I always do." And I wondered if he was handling this so gently because he knew that secretly, for all of us, he was our one source of stability, that sense of something so perfectly strong and unbreakable that forced us to keep going on despite how uncomfortable all of these changes were. He was our one grounding force, the one person that for all of us stood for some warm, safe source of steadiness. "And I'm not going to become attached to anyone in this band. I'm only doing this as a favor for Wally. He called and asked me if I could take the place of their lead guitarist in a charity concert because he's away for the month."

"Wally as in Kid Flash?" Garfield asked, and Robin nodded.

We had been aided by Kid Flash in our final battle against the Brotherhood. He was a little high-strung at times but overall a pretty good asset to the new branch of Honorary Titans, and if not for him, we might not have gotten Wildebeest and Hot Spot out alive. Also, his vibrant sense of loyalty had been nothing if not encouraging, and he had played a large part in assembling a second attack on the Brotherhood's base while we were inside already fighting, which gave us a huge advantage. There were also buzzing rumors that he was now living with a former member of the Hive Five; Jinx.

"But seriously, you can all stop worrying. Nothing is going to fall apart. It's all fine. I'm telling you, this is not a big deal," Robin said in that wonderfully reassuring voice of his that could force you to believe in the impossible if he said it was true. "Trust me. Nothing is going to change."

If only he had known how very wrong he was.

XXX

After that first day that we all found out about it, the whole band notion pretty much disappeared for a while. It was mostly forgotten, piled underneath the other facets of our lives. Because, as Robin had told us, it truly was only something he would do in his spare time. He went to infrequent rehearsals to get familiar with the way things worked when the band played together, and did most of his practice at night in his room with his acoustic, and that soft music lulled me to comforted sleep on many occasions when nothing else could. It became a constant, comforting sound that I grew accustomed to within a few days at it became a part of my nightly routine. It was nice not to fall asleep to that stark blanket of smothering, all-consuming silence.

Meanwhile, our lives were getting back into an old, tighter pace. Robin, steadfast as he always was, pushed us headlong into intense training sessions on a regular basis, trying to get our heads 'back in the game'. We did normal sessions as usual, but there were also sessions where we would work on our teamwork that really pushed us to our limits at times. We would often do exercises to work on our trust in each other, and Robin frequently paired me with Garfield, which I knew he did on purpose. It wasn't as awkward as it could have been, though, since we had direct orders from Robin to work together and because this was strictly business. I remember many occasions when we trained together, how hard it was to stay focused on our exercises when I was thinking so much of him. It was hard to focus on anything beyond those startlingly green eyes when they were giving all their attention to me and me only. This was especially damaging when we were practicing hand-to-hand combat. Robin said that in case any of us were ever for some reason without our powers, we would still need to know how to defend ourselves, and so he pushed the hands-on training to the max. But sometimes I was so captivated by those stunning emerald orbs that I would barely notice he was moving to catch me in a headlock until it was too late.

I did enjoy these partner training sessions immensely, though. I was frequently close to Garfield, which was of course exactly what I had been wanting for so long. I would catch him in a hold, and I would be able to briefly take in his scent, unique and wild in quality, like summer air at twilight, not overpowered by that strong stink of cologne that some guys chose to wear. It took much willpower to keep from holding him longer than necessary. Touching was eminent in these sessions, and I relished in the opportunity to allow our hands, arms, even faces to brush as we trained on and on and his summer twilight smell was enhanced by the faint musky scent of sweat. I became far too bold and I knew it, but in the heat of the moment it was far too hard to care, and I would find myself catching him in a restraining hold and pulling his body rather unnecessarily against mine, to which he made no complaint. This was probably because he didn't see just how superfluous it was, but it was nice all the same that I never had so explain my actions. It was a pure rush just to practice hand-to-hand combat with Robin, Cyborg, or Starfire because of the thrill of a perfect block, of a well-thrown punch, of a perfect hold. But with Garfield of course it was a different kind of rush, one that had nothing to do with anything even remotely professional. It was a rush that came from pure animal pleasure at touching him, at just being close to him, brushing against him as we both slowly dampened ourselves in sweat throughout the course of the training session. I was desperately hooked on him, but I didn't care.

On the outside I was the same old Raven, but on the inside I wasn't myself at all. The 'normal' me was not a horrendously immature hormonal teenager overpowered by lust. But this strange new side of me was. It was as though some peculiar new animal side of me took over when I was around him, as though the old, sensible me was left somewhere far beneath it, buried in layers and layers of unfamiliar new emotions that clutched every inch of my body in tangles of physical and emotional yearning whenever the slightest contact between us took place. Trivial things didn't matter anymore, all that existed was the two of us. Just the one room (whichever one we happened to be in) where we were and nothing else, nothing but that little place we stood existed in the entire world. The slightest contact could send me somewhere far, far away from reality into a place in my mind where the only thing I could focus on was the sensation of the touch until it was over.

I thought I was losing my mind.

XXX

Without the constant threat of the Brotherhood hanging over our heads, our crime-fighting lives were becoming increasingly dull. Most of the villains we'd been fighting since we founded the team, as well as the new ones we had encountered with the Brotherhood, were either put behind bars or dead from the culmination of the war. Slade, who had had absolutely nothing to do with the Brotherhood fiasco, seemed to have disappeared completely. The last we'd seen of him was when he had aided us in the fight against Trigon, and he had seemingly vanished into thin air now. And so we really didn't have anyone to fight or any crime to solve. We pretty much trained constantly, staying in peak condition for absolutely nothing. We were getting so bored with everything that we did (which was…well….nothing) that we actually willingly took the training sessions that we had once dreaded and found ways to get out of. It got to a point where I wasn't even in the training sessions just to be close to Garfield, where I just did it for something to do. Meditation and reading weren't exactly providing five-star entertainment anymore, and the five of us had taken to watching movies constantly and sitting around talking about nothing. Conversation topics were scarce now that we'd been talking to each other as much as we could since we'd been separated and now we wanted to make the most of time we spent together.

It was nice and irritating all at the same time how we spent so much time together. I had been surprised that it was Robin who initiated the first evening of just sitting in the living room with pizza and a mix CD comprised of different types of music, at least one song that each of us would like, and talking about life, the past, the future…whatever. Just being together, talking, all of us…just five friends. I'd never really had those close, special times with friends before, and so these were strange to me. But after some time of this, no matter how nice it was, I think we all got pretty tired of it. A person can only take so much togetherness before it gets old. And so, life was getting pretty boring. I think it had been about a week since we had even left the Tower, and I could have sworn Cyborg and Garfield's asses were starting to graft with the sofa fibers. I was reading a book (as always). It was one without a title that I knew, one that held far too many unpleasant memories. A large, white leather book that now held no voice, only pages of a story that I could barely concentrate on sometimes being so livid with the memories it brought up.

Sure, his betrayal had hurt at the time, but it had been time, and I was past it. Now it was nothing but pure, unbridled rage when I thought of him. Rage is never a good thing for me to willingly expose my mind to, but despite this there are times when I have to read the book…I must look back and reflect on the past and how it impacted me. If I don't, I'll end up like Terra.

Oh God, Terra. Now that's a subject I don't really care to get into. I have pretty much been successful in not mentioning her so far, but before I progress in my tale, I suppose I'll go back to Terra. Of course, she was our friend for some time, then betrayed us, broke Garfield's heart, and ended up going 'savior' and rescuing Jump City from certain destruction. Despite how I had loathed her for some time, after she saved us and died in the process, I had given up my grudge, drained all the poison out of me that was hatred, and forgiven her. I had even tried to return her to life. And things were fine, I no longer had any negative feelings toward her memory. But then, she'd had to go and return, which had pretty much ruined my neutral opinion of her. It wasn't her return that made me start disliking her again…it was her actions. Garfield saw her when we were fighting a nameless villain the very day of our return to Jump City (we call him 'Chameleon'…we never did discover what the public call him). He had talked to her, and she had pretended she didn't even know who he was,…told him that he had the wrong girl, even refused to respond to the name 'Terra'. She was 'just a normal high school teenager', and completely ignored and denied her past. When she finally did admit that the past had happened, she had firmly told Garfield that she didn't belong in our world. Subtly and passive-aggressively rejected him. And so he had walked away from her that day and never looked back, and now he didn't talk about it. And so I don't talk about it. But I do have a grudge against her for hurting him that way, denying the past that way, denying the very essence of who she was and still is that way. And I never want to be like that. I frequently look at the past and tell myself 'it's real, it all happened', just to be sure I never become Terra.

And because of that, even though it bothered me, I still look back on Malchior every once in a while. On that particular day, it was more irritating to think of him than anything. The summer heat was wearing us all thin, and the tension of being so blatantly bored was wearing. And then we all heard it…angel voices singing in sweet tones, singing promises of heaven. Namely, we heard the squawking of the alarm.

I fairly threw my book down and the video game controllers flew form Cy and Gar's hands, and Starfire dropped the spoon she had been stirring Pudding of Boredom with, and we were suddenly at attention, staring raptly at Robin, who was now hovering near the door, and then he said those beautiful words that we hadn't heard in far too long.

"Titans, go!"

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More soon!