To my readers both loyal and new
Hello hello, and may I say, it's good to be back. College life is slowly grinding away at my soul, but on the bleak side, I've taken to my one and only addictive vice to mitigate the pain—MMPORGs. Wowcrack is the main reason this chapter is so long in coming, and you'll be gratified to know that I've sworn off of it until the second mid-term is over in an effort to save my grade. Weather or not that will translate into a new post sometime before the end of the month or not remains to be seen, but hell, I will try.
According to my exalted fiction writing professor, (she's a literary fiction buff, and I like sci-fi/fantasy, so we don't get along that well) as well as the entirety of my class, my one major flaw is a penchant for overwriting. I have to agree, especially since several of you have commented on that same fact, so I've been working an effort to tone down the redundant descriptions and overpowering language a little. It's slow going, seeing as how I have to work against a lifetime of self-training, but I think I've made a little progress, and input here would be much appreciated. But hey, I'll stop bending your eyes on this spooge and let you get on with the story. Never been a huge fan of drama myself, but I must admit, I'm rather proud of this. Just wait for part two… oh man… just wait.
Chapter 6: Heart to Heart to Heart: part 1
Titan's Tower Med-Bay
As the sound of Robin's body falling limp to the med-bay floor died in the air, Starfire finally came back to herself. As though the enormity of what she'd just done quickened her return from blind panic, her flailing stopped, her eyes focused, and she gazed in shock at the limp form crumpled in the corner of the room.
"Oh dear," She said, because she couldn't think of anything better in the face of what had just happened. As though to protest the fact that she'd just escaped panic, her heart refused to explode back into activity again, keeping its calm, plodding pace. Starfire was just too tired, and as the fear of what she'd done sizzled numbly along her spine, she clawed herself the rest of the way out of the hospital bed. "Robin?" she asked, her frazzled brain not immediately registering the fact that he probably wasn't in any condition to answer.
Eventually, Star got her bare feet over the edge of the bed, put her weight onto them, and promptly collapsed into a heap on the scorched and pitted tiles. It was warm against the bare flesh of her legs and arms where she lay crumpled, her muscles all gone flaccid after her impetuous attempt to move them, and she found that all she could do was stare helplessly over at Robin's limp body.
"What…?" she asked in dim surprise, expressing only the barest shadow of the fear she should be feeling right now.
"That would be… the lingering affect of my spell," Raven's voice answered her from someplace unseen, and if Starfire could have jumped in surprise, she'd probably be clinging to the ceiling by now. "The geas of austerity is a comprehensive hex… it'll be a little while before the power dissipates, you should feel normal after that."
"You… did this to me?" and Starfire's voice was without inflection, though somehow still conveyed an air of stung betrayal.
"Yes. You'd be thanking me if you were thinking straight." Raven's voice was also flat, and together, their twin droning was almost funny… or funny tragic, at least.
"You… You… I wish I could see you right now… so I could… could…" Starfire was utterly incapable of expressing the anger trying hopelessly to flare up at that moment. If pressed, she probably wouldn't even be able to say why she wanted to become angry, so jumbled were the snips of memory and dream coursing through her magic-addled brain.
"Yes…" Raven whispered, interpreting some command, the compelled response catching Starfire off guard. She was as yet consciously unaware of Raven's affliction, demonstrated somewhat more fully when she gave a tiny shriek as Raven's power hefted her gently into the air and floated her over onto the mystic's hospital bed. When she set down, she was certainly able to see Raven, though this probably hadn't been what she meant.
The bed was relatively tiny, a single at best, and unsuited to more than one occupant at a time. Thus, when Starfire's exhausted shell was set down next to Raven's, the result was… rather a tight fit. In the final distribution, Starfire's left arm was trapped under her body as she lay on her left side, her right arm falling across Raven's stomach as she lay on her back. The alien's nose was about two inches from her friend's right cheek, and the shock of their sudden proximity seemed to bring some sense back into Starfire.
"Raven… what has happened to us? Why…"
"Shhh," Raven hissed her friend to silence out of pure exhaustion, not even the drug's grip on her brain able to wring a properly immediate response out of her. "Just… just try and touch my forehead. It'll be… faster…"
Starfire's eyes went wide at the agony written across Raven's face so openly, its usual expression hiding any hint of such emotions. Taking the cue from her friend's obvious analogue to the pain she herself was feeling, Starfire didn't question, she didn't even hesitate. Gathering what little strength she could, she managed to drag her free right hand slowly up Raven's body, utterly unable to actually lift it. Eventually, she reached the other woman's face, pressing her fingers against a space just below her soft midnight locks.
Immediately there was a reaction, both women jerking with the press of power from Raven, bodies stiffening and shaking as energy jumped between them. There was a flash of black behind Starfire's eyes, the play of obsidian lightning along her fingers, and a long moment of tension, then nothing. Both women went limp, more utterly limp than ever before, bringing a still that lasted quite a long time.
Under the circumstances, that is, after considering the dire knowledge that had just been passed on to the Tamaranian, one might only have wished the still could have lasted longer, and given them some small respite. No such luck.
"Oh… my… no…" Starfire whispered in a breathless mumble, as the tears started to flow freely down her cheeks. The night in its entirety had been illuminated to her by Raven's dark power, no miserable detail left out, no heartbreaking fact absent. As though that weren't enough, the spell Raven had cast in their dreams chose that moment to begin fading, so that the true horror of what was happening had no buffer to break upon before striking her in the heart. "No… why? Why? Raven why?" the slow tears developed into harsh sobs, a wracking burst of misery punctuating the staccato breaths of weeping every so often as Starfire devolved beyond further words.
"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I… I wish… Star… this was never… I'm so sorry," Raven could find no voice to properly face Starfire's inconsolable hurt, so staggeringly terrible was this pain. She'd prepared for this eventuality several times, she'd planned what she'd say, how she'd apologize, beg for forgiveness, promise to work without rest for some kind of solution, but it all fled her mind now. In the face of Starfire's weeping, no mere words could possibly hold enough apology, no explanation could ever be enough to mitigate the hell pouring out of her eyes and wringing her body.
"I do not understand Raven," Star was barely coherent through her tears, "how can this be happening?"
"I wish I knew," Raven answered, her voice gone hollower than it had ever been as she heard Star begin to ask the very same question she'd dwelt upon for endless miserable hours of her recent life. "I've had plenty of time to wonder about it, too much time, and I still don't understand… can't explain… how this… all this time…"
Her voice trailed off into silence, and the mask of pain contorting her face gave the absolute lie to her emotionless tone. Her breathing quickened, and she bit her lip, betraying more than Starfire had seen from her in a long time, and somehow, this was the catalyst that snapped the alien's agonized mental paralysis. Like some kind of twisted flight from her own misery, Starfire latched onto Raven's pain with a depth of warm compassion borne from the fires of this terrible revelation.
"Oh my…" Starfire whispered through choking, slow tears as she realized the full implications of what she'd finally learned, "Raven… how could you?"
Raven's heart froze in that instant, her powers too degraded for her to feel the compassion radiating from Starfire, even considering their proximity, and instead she took the words she'd always feared to hear in the only way she'd ever expected them to be meant. Like a block of ice under of sledgehammer, Raven's aching heart detonated into a billion pieces, her body, rigid as always, sprang stiff as a steel rod, she gasped once, then her whole form followed her crumbling heart.
"I… I wish I knew how I could… how I could possibly make this better…" her corpse voice spoke, "if you want me to leave… I'll go. I never meant…"
Starfire's piercing gasp, wet with her tears, cut Raven's broken submission short, "No, Never!" and quite to Raven's wide-eyed shock, Starfire gathered her dwindling strength and wrapped both arms around her, pulling them forcefully chest to chest, pressing her tearing eyes into Raven's leotard shoulder as she choked down another sob. "I could not imagine being a Titan without you with us!" and the redhead's voice was a startling mix of iron and silk, an envenerating draught of feeling that, along with the powerful embrace, drove the drowning ice water mercilessly from Raven's soul.
"My words were to be: how could you… how could possibly endure this pain?" Starfire went on, her slow tears still punctuated by gags and sniffs as her initial, knee-jerk explosion of misery faded in the face of Raven's exhaustively drawn-out nightmare. "How could you face this, face it so long, all by yourself, never saying a thing? I feel it now, I feel it mauling at my heart… and yet you… you withstood this… how? And… why?"
Starfire went very still, and Raven, if possible, was even more motionless. Neither woman so much as passed a whisper of breath as that question squeezed between them and began to fester and writhe, the drug compulsion gripping Raven's mind forcing her to break out in a sweat as she unconsciously resisted giving the one and only answer. It was the single correct answer, and it was the whole and complete truth, and if Starfire didn't believe it, if she couldn't accept the truth, that was it. The urge to cook up a lie that might be more believable was intense, but the drugs proved to be her master yet again, and Raven let out her breath in a sigh as her resistance crumbled, and she committed her future to the craps shoot that was total honesty.
"I couldn't hurt you, Starfire," Raven's voice was heavy with her own pain and miserable resignation, but her release was nothing compared to the spasm from Starfire. The moment the words touched her ears, a wash of combined relief and anguish wrung her body, the experience transmitting back to Raven as Starfire gripped her with an inhuman strength and fresh tears poured into the dark woman's shoulder.
Starfire had expected that answer, had known in her heart that there could be no other, but this certainty had not stopped her of-late paranoid mind from devising all manner of nightmarish reasons for Raven to keep her secret. The terror that Raven had been doing it to deceive her while she lay her designs for Robin, or that she'd endured her own personal heartbreak only for the sanctity of the team, silently resenting Starfire all along, had both burned treacherously within the young alien. With their death came a relief so pointed that it even overcame her misery, however briefly, and escaped in the form of a crushing embrace, even as Raven continued to justify herself, not realizing how unnecessary it was.
"These feelings… they surprised me… I mean… I never meant to feel them…" Raven picked her words carefully, "and when I realized at last what had happened… I think you can imagine what a shock it was… you know, as the implications occurred to me." Starfire snorted involuntarily through her tears as she interpreted the morbid joke with none of her usual misunderstanding. Raven waited a hard moment, then went on in a much more pained tone, "Oh Starfire I… I couldn't tell you… I couldn't do that to you, to Robin I… I just couldn't! I knew… I knew already then how you felt about him… how you probably felt about each other… and I knew that I had no place in any of that! I tried to stop it… tried to put those feelings away… because I knew I could never express them… not without… without this… and I didn't want this. Please believe that I'd never want this nightmare… not for you and Robin. If that meant I had to bare it alone… I was… willing to accept it."
"Mmmmm…" Starfire moaned a long, aching sigh into Raven's shoulder, then finally managed to lift her head and turn puffy eyes to meet the other woman's slowly tearing set. Lying side by side, face to face, their shared pain was a tangible thing, a tender, pulsing boil of emotion that had come into existence despite whatever valiantly torturous efforts Raven had made to prevent it. Shaking her head slowly side to side, Starfire projected her weak denial to the room.
"I… I… I lack the words…" Starfire admitted, her bleak mask frozen in aching shame, "What you did… what you attempted… was the effort of a true friend… and it is I who should apologize for ever, ever, considering you a betrayer." Raven's own face softened perceptibly as this, her heart fluttering with life again, if only faintly. "But I… I cannot believe that this is happening… that any of this could be true… or that you had to accept what you have borne. I wish… I wish…" she choked on new tears, her pain blossoming anew at what she was trying to get out, "I only wish I could say that you… that your sacrifice… your suffering… were not necessary. I wish I could say that I would have wanted to know right away, to know immediately that this problem had come to be! But to my shame…" she trailed off, crying freely again, and not at any pain Raven had caused her, but rather, because she recognized a failure in herself that was almost as shocking and frightening. "To my great shame!" she shouted to overpower her own tears, "I truly wish I had never learned of this! I wish this pain had not come to me, that I was not condemned to suffer from what you tried to contain! Raven… Raven why is this happening… how can this be happening… what in this world could make me wish such a terrible thing…?"
"Oh Star… Star… don't cry like that… please don't…" Raven's words were a scarcely usual whisper of utter compassion as she watched her dear friend torture herself over the kind of selfish feelings no mortal being could possibly have not felt in her situation. "I… I never wanted you to know about this…" and she managed to take the initiative and clutch Starfire back to her shoulder, sopping up the tears with the dry side of her leotard now, "I did everything I could… tried everything I could to keep this locked away… and I failed. I guess no one could have predicted that something like this would happen… but that doesn't excuse my failure. No one can blame you for anything that's taken place here… and you shouldn't feel guilty… not over something as natural as hating this situation."
Her soothing words surprised even her, though actually, she was probably the last person who'd have expected such maternal compassion from herself. As she finished speaking them, the room fell to silence besides the slow weeping of Starfire on her shoulder and the slow crackling of exposed electrical wires in the devastated room around them. Raven had no mind for either as she felt the slow drain of misery siphoning away between them. No one could sustain the concentrated emotional force they'd been suffering, not for any length of time, and as she wept, Starfire's immediate agony burned down to a dull smolder of pain… the same minor ache that tormented Raven whenever she failed to put the problem from her mind.
As she'd said, the pain of their situation was not new to Raven, and now that she was more or less certain Starfire was going to pull through without hating her forever, the much more immediate terror and agony that loosing her friendship would have meant drained fully out of her as well. Thus, Raven's eyes dried out quite quickly, and she was able to concentrate on slowly rubbing Starfire's back as the alien struggled to cope herself. For some unknowable length of time, Raven let Starfire weep her agony onto her shoulder, wishing futily that she had some words of hope or support that wouldn't sound as blatantly false as they'd quite obviously be.
Then, something did occur to Raven's bone-tired mind, and she decided that if she could grant Starfire none of the comfort she so longingly wished to give, she could at least provide the woman with what she owed her… an explanation. Gathering a memory of all the times Starfire had longingly begged 'why?' and 'how?' Raven found that she could speak, the drug reacting better than she'd hoped to the trickery.
"It was last Christmas," Raven started, and Starfire jerked to attentiveness without raising her eyes from the other woman's shoulder, "I guess that's when I first realized what was happening… or at least when I was positive we were definitely in trouble. For all I really know, it could have been building for a long time before that… I've never exactly been the most honest with myself about my feelings, after all… but last Christmas was definitely the catalyst… the trigger that made it impossible to deny."
"Last Christmas…" Starfire whispered into Raven's shoulder, "Robin gave you a book." It was clear from the way she said it that Starfire remembered nothing more significant than that from a day that would probably live forever in her friend's memory.
"Heh," Raven chuckled humorlessly, "It was a little more complicated than that. I had never celebrated Christmas before… not the Christian version, nor even the secularized one that people all over earth tend to practice… so it was just as new to me as it was to you, I suppose."
Both of them fell silent as they recalled Starfire's glee at learning of the American tradition of friendship, family, and generosity that was celebrated so widely in the dead of every winter. Both of them also thought back to Raven's more than mild disdain for the whole concept, despite the (not that she'd have admitted it) huge amount of attachment she'd formed to all of her friends in the long months they'd been living and working together. Beast Boy, of course, demanded that they all exchange gifts. Robin, as was rare for BB's suggestions, readily agreed, and that had been that.
"I suppose I've never been the most forthcoming…" Raven understated badly, "but you all managed to surprise me with what you decided to give me."
"You were certainly the most difficult to do the 'Christmas shopping' for," Starfire almost muttered, and her tone was showing heartening recovery from the husk it had become.
"Yes, well, that's not the point," Raven frowned, then sighed, "The point is that, of everyone, Robin… Robin did something special."
"All were impressed by his gifts most of all… he acts very 'tough,' but that Christmas, a different side of him came to the surface." Raven was suddenly quite shocked by the quiet insight Starfire was showing, as though the pain had burnt away her bubbly façade and revealed the mind beneath.
"Uhh… yes, exactly. You recall that he got me a book… but what I managed, barely, to keep quiet… was that it was an incredibly special book, a magical book, actually. I don't know how he found out… I'll probably never know how he found out… but that book… I'd wanted that book since I was six years old. Every birthday until I left Azar, I begged my mother to get it for me… I begged her… but there was never really any chance of me ever getting it. But Robin… I didn't even ask him… I still haven't gotten him to tell me how he found out about it, but I wouldn't leave him alone until he told me how he got his hands on it…
Christmas Morning: Residential Floor Corridor
"Raven, wait up!" Robin called down the hall at a dark retreating silhouette. She froze at the sound, as though caught with her hand in the cookie jar, then slowly half-turned to present the young man with her profile, her cowl thrown back, her arms crossed, and her frame set at a surly angle. She was frowning. "Where are you going? It's our turn to open your presents… you can't just leave now."
"I'm sorry, but I'm really not in the mood for any of this right now," and there was a telling tick in her left cheek, tipping her perceptive leader off right away.
"Well hell," and Robin's rather concerned expression transformed into a smile, "If you're afraid we're not going to like them, of course you're free to take off, but after Starfire's gifts, I don't know what you have to be nervous about." His huge smile challenged her noncommittal frown relentlessly, until the barest suggestion of a grin touched her lips as well.
"That's not very nice… you know she's still getting used to things here on Earth." They were both joking, of course, as only a true jerk would have gotten on Starfire's case about what she'd chosen to give as gifts. Robin, for instance, had managed to smile quite genuinely at his gift, once he got over the fact that he only had two arms and his hand-knit sweater had three. Cyborg had accepted his novelty fruitcake with all the grace anyone with cybertronic strength could muster considering that it's 2 by 11 foot form weighed so much that it sent his arm motors into a fit of whirring and hissing protest the moment she unloaded it on him. Beast Boy… well, Beast Boy had looked like he was about to make a wisecrack about the wicked battleaxe that was bigger than he was, but a sufficiently dirty look from Raven and Robin at the same time (Cy was too busy eyeing his fruitcake with an odd mixture of dread and avarice) cut him off and limited him to a false smile as he tried in vain to budge its intense mass. Raven, meanwhile, managed to make out like a bandit, receiving a gorgeously carved ebony hairbrush with nothing more than a prerequisite promise that she'd let Starfire comb her hair for her next time they hung out. Indeed, after that showing, one wouldn't have thought Raven had a thing to worry about… but that didn't stop her, oh no.
"Listen I… I just really don't want to be there. I'll be fine in my room for the day… you guys just enjoy yourselves." Her tone left no room for persuasion, and Robin, by this time, knew better than to try. He simply shook his head slowly, giving her a 'you're going to regret missing this,' look that might have actually stung her a little if she'd been less determined to escape.
"Okay, okay… but before you go, here, this is for you." He held out a small rectangular package wrapped in the same brown paper that had covered all his gifts so far, and immediately Raven eyed it with a caution borne of experience.
"Another one… oh rapture…" but her deadpan words didn't stop her from reaching out and taking the proffered gift. She gave it a leery stare, and Robin burst into a soft chuckle at the sight.
"Oh man… don't worry Raven, I have a feeling you'll be pleasantly surprised by this one." Not that it would be that hard, was the unspoken addition to that prediction.
Besides the comb, which was wonderful, Raven had received the same scratch-built mp3 player that Cyborg had cooked up for each of them. It was wafer-thin and had 30 times the storage space of the average iPod… and it would probably be a bookmark considering all the use Raven had for it. But at least it had been a crafted project… Beast Boy had given her a plushy blue kitten and a gift certificate to Barns & Noble… showing all the thoughtfulness of 'girls like stuffed animals,' 'Raven likes blue,' and 'Raven reads a lot.' She still felt more than a little shocked that he'd remembered her favorite color, and while she was underwhelmed, she figured it'd do to lay off the little punk a little for the time being. At least until he found some new way to infuriate or annoy her with his thoughtless antics.
"Well, aren't you going to open it?" Robin prompted her. He had the most self-satisfied grin imaginable, and Raven felt her hackles rise slightly in dread anticipation of what could have gotten the normally dour detective so please with himself. By the size and shape, it was probably a book, and while she figured that was probably a good start, she couldn't imagine it was all that impressive… at least not by her own exalted standards.
Sick of his smile, she tore open a corner and ripped the paper swiftly down the spine, revealing the title. Her eyes glazed over it once, then shifted up to present an unimpressed half-smirk to the guy who'd chased her down to give it to her. Something occurred to her, and her eyes trailed slowly down to look at the title a second time. Then she read it a third time, then a fourth, her breath quickening as she suddenly began to blink quite rapidly. Her eyes flashed up to take in Robin's ever-widening smile, and she inhaled sharply as though to speak, only to huff it out as words completely failed her.
"I thought you might like it. Anyway, you enjoy that, I'm going back to the others. It's almost time to watch the claymation Christmas movie marathons… never been a Christmas when I haven't. Merry Christmas Raven." He began to walk away, still smiling most insufferably, when a swift hand caught him by the shoulder and twirled him around again. Bewildered, he looked back at Raven's shock-widened eyes, seeing them… shine and glitter with moisture?
"How? And… just… how?" it wasn't the kind of tone one argued with, and Robin had only to notice the uncommon physicality of the encounter to know he'd touched a great deal deeper than he'd expected to.
"It'd ruin things to just admit how I came up with it," he said as he slid his eyes to the hand on his shoulder to get them away from the start of tears still holding back in her eyes. "Let's just say… a little birdie told me." She obviously wasn't satisfied by that, but now Robin was asserting himself right back, and she'd get nothing more there. "As for just how I got my hands on it… it's a long story. The trail lead through Batman, then to the Justice League and a certain arch-mage named Dr. Fate. It just so happens he had a copy, and I managed to negotiate it into my possession. Fair enough?"
"NO!" the word was snapped more than shouted, but it was still much more forceful than he'd been expecting, and he flinched away from the harshness. "Robin, this isn't the kind of thing you can just buy from someone with plain old money. How in the word did you get Dr. Fate to give it to you?"
"Oh… that…" and Robin looked properly embarrassed now, bringing a thrill of fear to Raven. One thing that could be used to pay for magic books was bits of one's soul… and while she didn't think it was likely…. "We talked about it and he explained all that mumbo-jumbo about magical value transfer. We agreed in the end that a little old-fashioned drudgery would do the trick. He was kind enough to teleport me to his tower and back… but it was still quite a few late nights. But really wasn't too much to do to get my hands on the perfect gift for a good friend, so don't worry about it."
"Robin…" and Raven was shaking her head, unable to calculate right off hand just how much sweat and toil would be necessary to buy a book this rare. It boggled her mind that anyone would do that… much less do it for her… and suddenly she found herself looking at Robin with new eyes. Eyes that were somehow clearer… as though she'd been looking at him through a veil the entire time she'd known him, and was really looking at him for the first time.
"I said don't worry about it. Have a nice day Raven." And he smiled at her rather wanly, then turned and walked back toward the common room.
Raven watched him walk away, then glanced at her book, then back at him again. She stared wide-eyed as something began to grow within her, her pulse quickening in an ever-expanding runaway explosion of motion, picking up and up until it was pounding powerfully through every inch of her body. Her cheeks began to color, flushing a damning crimson that no eye could have mistaken. In a sweep of motion, Raven pulled her hood up and whisked down the hall in a swirl of cloak, nearly ran to the first corner in the tower corridor, then ducked behind it and pressed herself against the wall.
Clutching the book to her chest, she let her legs give way as they so desperately wanted to, and she slid down the wall to the floor, her knees folding up in front of her to help her hold the book tight. A smile that hadn't graced her face since the deep innocence of her youth sprang freely into life as the tears that had been threatening so long came to life on her cheeks. A black stain began to spread along the wall behind her, and where it touched the paint peeled off in spirals and zigzags, revealing the bare white beneath the metal grey. She pulled her book up again, tearing the rest of the wrapping off in a blaze of black power, then snapping it open and paging through it, as though to make sure she really had what she thought she had. After a moment, she smashed it shut again and squeezed it back to her chest, letting her eyes wander to the ceiling. It was a long moment of wonder before she realized exactly what she had to do.
In a swirl of black power, she was instantly back at one of the common room's two hallway entrances, and she stepped blithely in to find Robin and thank him with all the proper levels of overweening gratitude and justifiable amazement. That this would give her another chance to test the sensation that the very thought of him was suddenly bringing her was merely coincident to her need to thank him as he deserved… of course. No sooner had she stepped into the common room, however, than did she stop, jarred back to reality by the sight that greeted her. Her heart went cold in one drenching deluge of recognition, driving out every warm floaty sensation that had so completely circumvented her natural caution.
There in the common room, Starfire was quite completely draped around Robin as she helped him into his three-armed sweater, still thanking him in no modest or restrained way for the gorgeously master-crafted ten-inch snow-globe of the Tamaran Royal Palace he'd given her. Just like that, Raven's quick advance turned into an equally speedy retreat, and as Starfire caught the movement and glanced her way, it transformed into a flush of power that vanished her from the common room and deposited her in her own private space.
Staggering to the nearest wall, she collapsed into it, pounding a fist against it in absent frustration as she tried to figure out just exactly what had taken place here. Her body had been running on emotional auto-pilot for a full minute now, and she needed time for her mind to catch up. When she did finally get a grip on what had happened… when she finally shed the last layers of denial and self-deception… when she at last accepted that an impossible injustice had sprung upon her and her dearest allies from beyond the veil of comfortable friendship… it would no longer be quite such a merry Christmas.
Present: Titan's Tower Med-Bay
"And so I decided… well… I decided that the only thing I could do was keep quiet." Raven brought her story to a close slowly, the gravity of the subject weighing down on her hoarse voice. "After all, I was pretty clearly the only one who had a problem with the situation as it was, and if I never said anything… if I just left things as they were… that would have been it. No one would ever have known the difference."
The broken down room dropped into another one of its deep silences, Raven's dully explanatory drone flattening out into nothing. For some time, there was only the sound of sniffling, unsteady breaths. It was Starfire who broke that silence.
"Except… you knew," she filled in the glaringly absent conclusion in the barest whisper, and Raven grimaced in a mixture of fresh pain and bright-faced embarrassment. "I… I cannot pretend to understand what you put yourself through… but I… I think I want to… that I need to thank you. You… suffered much… for me… but all in vain I fear…" her voice was choked with the start of tears yet again, and Raven returned to a slow rubbing motion on her friend's back as she tried to massage some of the pain out of her.
"Please… please… I don't deserve your gratitude," Raven had to make this point clear, "I probably don't even deserve your friendship anymore. And," she had to override Starfire's protests against this last point, "I just wish… I just wish I knew what we were going to do…"
"An excellent question."
Both girls jerked in surprise as this third, cold, even voice intruded on their incredibly intimate conversation. As one, their minds fled from the subject of their shared pain, even as their eyes simultaneously flashed down to the foot of the bed, there to see a shadow-draped figure that neither had had the presence of mind to notice before he'd spoken. Caught short, Starfire released Raven and turned to face that inky silhouette, while the paralyzed woman could only lay in silent, burning embarrassment as the object of their mutual desire reentered the scene.
He was crouching, tip-toes to the foot of the bed's frame, perfectly balanced on the inch-wide bar as steely, calculating eyes took in the two women. Neither had any clue how long he'd been conscious and listening, but both feared the absolute worst, and for a long time, neither could gather the courage to even look him in the eye, much less say anything. Neither of them cared to realize that'd he'd known more than either of them had just revealed for more than a day now, and had been dealing with it in his own tumultuous manner. Instead, all three of them allowed the uncomfortable silence to stretch out, each woman fairly writhing with desire to flee Robin's presence, yet neither having any means to manage it.
"I'd guess we have a lot to talk about… don't we?" Robin asked rather rhetorically, breaking that numb quiet as his unflinching gaze bore into each girl. Despite herself, Raven felt the blessed release of a new, true question unclench the drug's grip from her brain, and in a wash of relief, could not hold her tongue in check.
"That would be the understatement of the century."
Future—H2H2H part 2: So the ladies have come to and understanding… of a sort… though how things are going to pan out friendship-wise are still anyone's guess. Robin is coming on like the offended party, which, in a very real way, he is. Starfire just realized her best friend has it as bad for her heartthrob as she does, and what's worse, she's been suffering in silence over those feelings for ages in an effort to protect her friend. Divided feelings? You bet! Raven more or less got over the misery of the situation a while ago, but now she's got to deal with the fact that her every effort has come to naught, and she may yet loose not only her best friend, but also a guy she's utterly hard-up over. What's an author to do with such a volitale situation? Why, have a god damn party, what else? So, tune in next time (hopefully quite soon) for the dramatic fallout!