Disclaimer: Boob!
I should be getting my internet back soon, so I'll no longer have to wait for a window of time where I can use dial-up to post updates.
For a preview of what Robin's band (Plastic Machine) sounds like, check my bio for the link!
This chapter is for James, my super-awesome friend who deserves a million glomps of doom for how much he's helped my writing! (:
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For a little while there, I seriously did consider for a short time the prospect of a relationship with Robin. I know you're thinking it: 'Come on, Raven, you had a thing for Robin, didn't you? Godammit, you giant whore!' and so I suppose I'd better just admit it and say that way back in the beginning I did have a bit of a crush on him…but it never escalated into anything more than a confusing little kiss or two behind the others' backs before we both came to the conclusion…well, to put it plainly, we pretty much stopped and asked 'What the fuck are we doing here?' and that was end of that. We've always been close, but never close in that way. Robin has (and always will) wanted Starfire since the day we all met. We had our little moments, but after we sat down and decided that we were just never going to be anything, Robin and I have grown quite comfortable in our friendship. And so that's the end of that discussion. I wanted him in the beginning, but it was just something that I wanted because I was young and stupid and I didn't really know what I wanted in the first place. After all, don't we always want what we can't have? I suppose I never really knew what I did want until around the time I had my dream about Garfield, but that's beside the point. The point here is, my romantic feelings for Robin are zip. Deal with it.
When we got into the living room, I'm not exactly sure what it was that I expected, but Robin's band certainly wasn't whatever it was (well…it wasn't Robin's band, since he was only filling in for their guitarist, but whatever). They were a strange bunch. Of course, there was Wally, still in his yellow and red spandex uniform that freaked the hell out of people on the street. And then there was, to most of our surprise, Argent, in her usual elegant gothic style of dress. I didn't know the others. There was a medium-height teenage boy who had a fascination with wiggling his eyebrows, sporting a shock of electric pink hair tinged purple at the tips, looking very much the part of 'rock star'. And then there was a relatively normal-looking girl with reddish brown hair and curved bangs who seemed to have nearly as much trouble not smiling as Starfire did. None of them seemed very threatening, which made me a little less harsh in judging them. But I still couldn't help but be a bit skeptical.
"Alright, let's get started!" the pink-haired boy said, looking like he wanted to bounce off of the walls right about then (and I wouldn't have put it past him). "Now that Robin's actually here."
So they called him by his superhero name as well. I felt a little less put out now, since the four of us knew Robin's real name, which he had surrendered to us along with the secrets his briefcase contained. He never put that kind of trust in anybody else. Nobody had ever seen inside that case. Ding Dong Daddy had stolen it assuming it contained some kind of secret weapon or something along those lines. He would have been quite surprised if he had seen what the case actually held. Surprised and disappointed. But for us…it was something we had always wanted, a glimpse at who Robin really was. And it was nice for once, not to be left in the dark about the boy behind the mask. I think it made us all feel a little better about things.
I think Robin rolled his eyes then, but it's pretty much impossible to tell. He always hid behind that infernal mask. "You're the one who never even shows for practice," he said, shaking his head. "At least I come."
You could tell just by that remark that Pink Hair was a bit of a slacker (I've heard the artistic types always are, but who am I to judge?). Robin has a knack with somehow getting people to almost immediately do something to reveal a lot about their personality right away, a talent which was pretty obvious here. I wasn't exactly sure if I liked him yet or not. He had that airy, carefree manner about him that reminded me of Wally, but a bit of a hyper, jumpy edge that reminded me of Garfield…the bad part of Garfield, anyway.
The Girl, on the other hand, wasn't quite so obvious. She was normal in appearance, and the only one in the room dressed in a way that could be considered relatively normal (Pink Hair was wearing a kilt over his old black jeans). She had a rather adventurous smile on her face and she had green eyes that reminded me a bit of Garfield's, though his were a bright, shocking green color and hers were a bit less intense. These closed-book kind of people always made me nervous. I was never quite sure what to expect of them. I was hit was a slight pang when I realized that something about her reminded me slightly of Terra. I wasn't sure what it was. Maybe the fact that she was just so…well….normal.
"Guys, you know Wally and Argent. And these are Eric and Josie," Robin said, and Pink Hair and The Girl waved (well…Josie waved, and Eric gave us a spastic kind of thumbs-up maneuver). "And these are my friends, Cyborg, Raven, Beast Boy, and Starfire," Robin said, introducing all of us in turn. He had his electric guitar in hand, rather than the acoustic one I was used to, and looked very rock star, despite his mask and tights. I managed what was probably a spooky-looking nod at the newly introduced pair, since I had my hood up again. I made an attempt to be friendly, but I guess my disarming smile wasn't as disarming as I thought it would be, given the fact that I could barely feel the corners of my mouth point upward.
"What's new, Raven?" Argent asked me in her nimble British accent, still in the process of setting up her keyboard on its stand. I shrugged, watching her slide the legs of the stand smoothly into place and situate the keyboard on top.
"Nothing much," I answered, debating on whether I should continue with the small talk. "Heard anything new about the Brotherhood of Evil?"
Argent shook her head, sending locks of spiked black and red hair flipping around. "They're still frozen where they belong," she assured me, plugging a cord that ran out of the back of the keyboard into the wall outlet. "Don't worry about it."
"I'm not worried," I told her. "I just-" I shrugged. "I just wonder sometimes."
Argent nodded. "I don't think there's any way they're going to get out of this one."
"Alright, let's get moving!" Eric shouted as though we were in an extremely noisy room. "We didn't come here to stand around!" Wally grumbled a bit about not having his guitar tuned or something along those lines but strode over to the others, anyway, taking his place in front of the mic (so he was the vocalist, apparently).
I made a point to find a seat beside Jinx on the sofa and inquire about things while the band was doing some last-minute tuning. She seemed to have lost some of her awkwardness over the last twenty-four hours, which was a good sign. She also seemed a bit surprised that I was talking to her, which I don't blame her for. I don't exactly win any awards for world's most social person, and I certainly had never really talked to her when she had been a villain. But I understood what it was like to feel out of place and awkward, and so I was in a pretty good position to help. So I did the best I could.
Garfield was on my other side, much to my own secret pleasure. He elbowed me and gave a small grin. "How much do ya wanna bet Wally was late because he was boinking Jinx before practice?" he asked in a light whisper. The mere brush of his arm against me, and also the fact that he had mentioned sex to me, no matter in what context, sent an electric chill up my spine. I gave a small chuckle to humor him and he have me a large smile, which made me instinctively return it.
The band (which was apparently christened Plastic Machine) was actually pretty interesting. They had a way of having all their separate sounds flow together to make one constant, harmonious, almighty wall of sound. Every separate part of the music supported each other, each doing something individual to keep the song going, which reminded me a bit of the Titans. Wally's voice was also that confident, addictive kind of a voice, going soft or loud or harsh or sweet, depending on what was going on in the song. And I really did enjoy watching Robin (or anyone, for that matter, though Robin was especially good at it) playing the guitar, the way their hands danced over the strings and plucked life out of the depths of the instrument.
The current song was something strange, a warm-up kind of tune. It sounded as though about half of the lyrics were in Japanese, either that or Wally was just babbling to get his voice warmed up. After the song was over, Eric announced the temporary list of songs that would be played at the gig and the order they would be performed in, reminding the band that the list would certainly change, and then they came to the decision to run through the entire set. And so they began. They started at the beginning , and I had to admit it was extremely captivating. They didn't slam straight into it with an air of arrogance as some bands did. They began with a quiet, detached kind of entrance to the first song, and then they slammed through the whole thing with confidence and just the right amount of emotion and desperation. I've never really been much of a music critic, but I still had to admit that they impressed me.
After running through the entire set, the practice was more or less over. Instruments were put back into cases, equipment was loaded back into cars and vans, and the whole room was choked with the suffocating feeling of 'packing up'. I swallowed a small bubble of panic that the concept filled me with and watched the scene, ready to jump up at a moment's notice if someone needed help. Anything to take my mind off things.
Josie, who had finished loading her equipment into whatever car she was storing it in, strolled over and took a seat on the sofa. A strange wary feeling came over me when I saw that she had found a seat on Garfield's other side. I immediately shook it off and felt ridiculous. There was absolutely no reason to react that way. I didn't care when Starfire sat beside him, after all, and she was a girl, too. My just something about the way her red-brown hair swept gracefully around her shoulders and the way her smile lit up her face made me stay on-guard, no matter how natural I tried to act.
"Hi," she said cheerfully to Garfield, giving him a smile. "You're Beast Boy, right?"
"Yeah," Garfield said with a nod and a grin. "So, how do ya know Wally and them? You have any superpowers or anything like that?"
Josie laughed. "Naw, I'm just one of those boring normal chicks," she said with a wink. " I'm not one of you glamorous superhumans. Eric is my cousin's best friend, so I know him that way, and I met Wally and Argent through him." her green eyes glittered good-naturedly, and try as I might I couldn't find anything threatening in her that might have spelled out our doom.
"Oh," Garfield said with a nod, looking way more interested than he needed to. God, why was he smiling like that? "So, you from Jump City?"
Josie shook her head. "Nope, moved here last summer. Born and cultivated in Gotham."
Garfield giggled a little more than he needed to. "Cool. A Gotham chick. Do you know Robin from before? I think he was cultivated there too."
Josie laughed again. Something about the way she laughed tied a deep, tense knot somewhere in the depths of me. It was a familiar kind of laugh. I already knew who she reminded me of. I had known from the moment I had seen her who she reminded me of. And now I saw that he saw it too. I had been a fool to think that he wouldn't see it. I had been lying to myself, hoping that he would be too blind after all this time to recognize it. But, of course he did.
Garfield was laughing too, and I saw something in his eyes that I had seen far too many times before. I had seen it when he was around a certain blonde way back in the old times. And there that look was again, plain as day. His eyes didn't lie. His eyes always spoke to me without meaning to, without him even realizing it. And they were speaking to me now. But I had already known the truth in what they were telling me before that look had even come over him yet.
They were telling me that I was officially fucked.
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More soon dearies (;