A/N: So, hi! Yes, I am posting something new! (You see how inspiration happens?)

Anyway...

This deserves a little explanation as to the timeline this shot takes place in. Those die-hard Teen Titans fans might be a bit confused and see elements of things that have happened in both the Comics and the Cartoons and things that you can't tell where I pulled it out of.

Frankly, I pulled everything out of my...imagination. I'd been told several different factors about Raven and Robin's lives after the Teen Titans, and some things about New Titans and stuff like that, and these random and maybe incorrectly conjoined facts just sort of congealed into this story you have here.

So, just assume that this is in the future where neither Raven nor Robin are living in Titan Tower as Titans any longer and there is a new young team of Titans in their place and that for some reason, both Raven and Robin have been called back to the Tower. (Whether any of the others was also called back you can imagine at your leisure).

Those of you that have been with me for awhile are familiar with the fact that I tend to do this kind of mixing and matching of true cannon with fanon and my own imaginings, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

What I mean to say then, is that any and all inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and allegedly blatant canonical errors are entirely my doing. I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Thanks: Especially to Toboe Lonewolf, Marie R. and Kysra for beta'ing this for me. Chi Yagami also answered my general distress call for betas, but since I'm going to have a really busy weekend and know not when I'll be able to get back to the computer in order to post this, I decided to go ahead and post before getting her input. After I get her input, I'll probably be amending this and reposting!

Dreams for Plans
(24: Remembrance)
by Em

"Can you tell me how it used to be? / Have we missed our chance? / Have we changed our hopes for fears / And our dreams for plans?"
- "Dreams for Plans," Shakira

The Tower was silent, the young ones long asleep, with only the hum of the machinery a distant comfort in the undercurrent of the city glittering in the distance.

She found him, as she knew she would, on the roof, facing the north, toward the city, as if waiting for something she had never figured out. She couldn't say when he realized she was there, but it didn't matter. She took the time to search his man's silhouette for a shadow of the boy she had known, and he let her.

It wasn't until her keen eyes found him (there, hidden or pushed aside or suppressed, underneath years of experiences) that she stepped forward, the vision clearing and coming into focus, sharpening, like an autofocus of a camera lens just before the flash. There he was – her Robin – in the tilt of his chin, the way he pressed his lips together as he thought, the way his hands fell at his sides in calm repose, while the tension sang through every muscle, every sinew, even at rest. He was there, the boy she had loved, but like a distant shape hidden in the broader shoulders, the defined muscles hiding the gangliness of youth.

He was there; but Robin, she realized, was only one shadow among many that made up Nightwing.

He waited until she stood alongside him to speak. "Did you find him?"

His voice wasn't so much a shock as it had been the first time she heard this older, deeper, rougher timbre, but the intimacy in the moment made the difference starker somehow, like an overdeveloped film – one image overlapping over the other, appearing ghostly and wrong.

"Pieces," she answered when she realized he wouldn't look at her, no matter how much she stared at him. And in typical Raven fashion, she offered no more. And for a long while, they were silent, listening to the waves on the shore, the distant sound of sirens, a plane flying far overhead.

Atypically, Raven broke that silence first.

"What's become of us?" she asked, her voice so low she might have thought he hadn't heard her over the crash of the waves.

He didn't look at her, but she could tell he'd heard her.

"It took us all coming back together to make me realize it," she started, "but something's wrong –" she shook her head and looked back toward the door that led into the Tower, the place she'd called home for so much of her life – of her youth. "This isn't how it was supposed to be, is it?" she asked. When he still didn't answer, she turned back to him. "Are you where you thought you would end up?" she stared at him, willing him to turn to her, to speak.

"Where did you think you'd end up?" he asked.

He was trying to dodge the question, it seemed to her, and the girl she'd been would never have let the boy he was get away with something like that. But, ever since the moment she looked up at the door and saw him in the room several hours before, their interaction had been strange and alien, so she let him. "I don't know," she answered truthfully. She sighed. "After my sixteenth birthday, everything was unplanned – I never knew what I wanted to be, except that I–" she trailed off.

"What?" he asked.

She stopped looking at his profile, couldn't bear it, and turned back to the glittering lights of the city. "I suppose I had dreams."

"And now you don't?" he asked.

"Do you?" she countered.

"I have plans," he answered.

"Not the same thing," she insisted. "I know where I'm going in my life, but I can't help but wonder if that's where I dreamt I would be going."

"Where did you dream you'd be going?" he asked logically.

She turned to him again and held her tongue just in time. "Can you tell me?" she asked softly. "You always used to know me so well…"

"I remember," he started slowly and finally, finally, looked at her. "I remember how you used to love to read on this roof on crisp Fall days," he said. "I'd catch you sometimes when you'd put the book down and raise your face up to the sun and close your eyes, as if you were soaking it in."

"I never knew," she admitted.

"I wouldn't disturb you," he explained.

"I remember the first time I finally understood the look on your face as you stared out at the city at night from the roof," she spoke. He waited, so she explained. "You looked proud – you were proud of the city."

"It was my city," he said.

"Are you proud of Bludhaven?" she asked.

He laughed, but the sound was bitter and mocking, and nothing like the joyful free sound she was used to coming from him. "Bludhaven isn't a place to be proud of," he answered finally. "And it isn't my city," he added as an afterthought.

"Then, what is it?" she asked.

He seemed to think about it. "My penance."

She wanted to ask him what he thought he was making penance for; she wanted to tell him that no matter what it was he thought he needed to make penance for, it couldn't be as bad as she could feel he thought it was, but she didn't.

"I remember the day Victor finished building this place," she mused, turning her back on the city and looking, instead, around her at the roof. Not much had changed since their time here.

"I remember it, too," he confessed. "I remember you laughed at one of Beast Boy's jokes."

She whirled on him, the expression on her face clearly shocked even if it was only in the widening of her eyes and the slight downward turn of her lips. "I did not," she argued.

He smiled and it seemed to surprise him. "You did," he assured her.

"You must have imagined it," she countered.

"We all saw it and commented on it," he remarked.

"Obviously a mass hallucination," she deadpanned.

The light of the smile left his face, even as she watched. "I remember the day you died."

She sighed and turned away. "Must you?" she asked.

She felt it when he turned his gaze away from her. "I'm sorry."

His words surprised her the way she thought nothing ever could anymore. "For what?" she asked.

"I couldn't keep the Robin you knew alive," he spread his hands in front of him and lowered his gaze to the black leather of his gloves.

Raven stopped herself just before reaching out for him. "Change is part of life, Richard," she said instead.

He nodded and turned away again. For awhile, they were quiet.

"I had dreams, too," he said, his voice low.

"Had?" she asked softly.

"I don't dream anymore."

"What did you dream?" she asked, looking at him.

"I had a lot of them when I was young and idealistic and stupid," he confessed.

"Idealistic, yes," she allowed. "Young, obviously," she continued. "But I'd never call you stupid."

He turned his gaze upwards, tracking the flight of an errant bird in the sky. He didn't answer her. "What were your dreams, Raven?" he asked, instead.

"After my sixteenth birthday, I had a whole slew of them," she admitted. "Probably because before then, I didn't dare."

"So?" he prodded. "One?"

She was quiet for awhile. Finally, she sighed. "I used to dream of having a little two-storied house in a suburb somewhere," she admitted. "It would be painted white, with blue curtains and flower boxes in the front windows, a big yard for a dog or two, those great big fluffy ones that like to run and play, and I'd have an herb garden and–" she cut herself off and closed her mouth with an audible click.

"Married with a devoted husband and 2.5 kids running about painting happy homes in bright colored crayons to display proudly on the fridge door," he finished.

It was her turn to laugh then, and even she could hear how little mirth was in it. "See?" she said, swallowing past the surprise in her throat. "You always could read me." He always could...except where it counted.

"And now?" he asked instead.

"It was an impossible dream from inception, Richard," she said blandly. "I knew that even then."

He wanted to argue with her, but he knew she'd see right through it. "I never thought to wonder whether any other Titan ever dreamed about being normal."

She scoffed lightly and kept her sight fixedly on the skyline. "You thought you were the only one that wondered what life would've been like if..." she trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

"If my parents hadn't died," he finished for her.

She nodded crisply. "If my mother hadn't been raped, if a drunken kid hadn't run a red light and smashed into the Stone family vehicle, if a young kid hadn't been bitten by a green monkey and his parents hadn't had to make a hasty decision to save him..." she trailed off again and sighed. "If...if...if..."

"I probably would've never had the white picket fence and yard and all that, you know," he said into the descending silence. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Raven turn to look at him, so he turned to face her. "If my parents hadn't died, I would've grown up in the circus," he mused. "I suppose, even if they hadn't been killed, I still never would've been what one would call normal."

Surprisingly, she smiled. "At least your costume would've fit in there."

His lips quirked and he shook his head. "Never gonna let that one drop, are you?" he asked on a sigh.

"No," she answered simply.

He exhaled and looked back at the city, but he really thought that was all right by him. "I don't think I ever had dreams," he admitted after a while. "Not like that, anyway." He glanced at Raven and saw her intention to argue with him, so he spoke up. "I think what I had more were fantasies, you know?" he explained. "I never really thought I'd get them, not even in a far off possibility." He shrugged.

"Like what?" she prodded. He looked at her, so she clarified. "Your fantasies."

"Oh, I suppose not so different from yours, really," he said. "Except I wanted to live in the country somewhere with a few acres of land around and beautiful hills in the distance that I could see from my window and where my kids could play in a nearby pond and have a tire swing from the old oak tree in the back yard and where I could sit on a porch swing and sip lemonade on cool nights."

"You'd raise sheep, I suppose," Raven said after awhile.

Robin turned to her and was surprised into laughter. "Did I make fun of yours?" he questioned.

Raven turned to him, all seriousness. "I was not making fun," she insisted. "I simply wanted to get a complete picture and if you're on a farm..." she trailed off.

He shook his head. "I did say it wasn't a dream so much as a fantasy, didn't I?" he reminded her. "So, it isn't exactly complete or accurate," he shrugged. "Sue me."

"In that case, I suppose your wife looked like June Cleaver, always had dinner on the table at 6 and brought you your slippers and pipe every night so you could read the paper by the fire."

He shook his head. "I never did like the June Cleaver type."

"Maybe if she'd been a red-head."

Robin looked at her and raised a brow, but she was unapologetic.

"Are you going to deny that one?" Raven pressed.

"Well, I'd find it hard to figure that any of the goth types you fell for fit in with your blue curtains and white picket fence," he mused.

"Who ever said I fell for them?" she asked vaguely.

He raised his other brow. "You were certainly happy enough to date them."

She raised her right shoulder in an elegant imitation of a shrug. "That was the type that wasn't too scared to ask me out, I suppose." She slid him a glance and quirked her own brow. "And don't think I haven't realized how you switched this over to me," she looked away again.

"Just humoring me, I suppose."

"Hm," she confirmed.

He was looking around the roof of the Tower himself by then and felt an almost dizzying wave of nostalgia – his vision blurring for a moment and echoes of their laughter and games and arguments seeping from the stones.

"We had some good times," he said, before he realized he was going to speak.

"More than that," she admitted. "You saved me," she said into the silence that followed. "And not just because you went after me after my father appeared, and not in any of the other obvious ways all of you were always there to support me when I needed it," she thought about it a moment. "Living every day with you..." she turned to him and her eyes uncannily found his, even despite the mask. "With all of you," she amended after a moment. "I'd never had that kind of normalcy..." she nodded, and shifted, just slightly, the white of her cape coming forward to cover her body. "Every day I lived with all of you – it gave me the strength to..." she trailed off and sighed, shaking her head, as if having trouble finding the words. "...live."

Before he could think of what to say, she started to walk away.

He reached out and took her hand, no less shocked at his action than she obviously was when she turned back to look at him.

"In each of my fantasies," he said, his voice quiet and sincere, "the person sitting on that porch with me, watching the sunset and watching our kids play..." he watched her searching his face, felt it as her breath caught. "...it was you."

She didn't move out of his grasp the way he had half-expected her to. Instead, she turned around to face him fully and slowly lifted a hand to his cheek, her thumb gently caressing the stubble on his chin. "I would've moved to the country," she said softly, nodding before letting her hand slide off his cheek.

She took a step back from him and he released his hold on her wrist, letting it slide slowly from his grasp, hesitating as their fingers touched. Her lips twisted into a sad smile before she turned and walked to the door that led back into the Tower. In the threshold, however, she paused and looked at him over her shoulder.

"I would've insisted on the big fluffy dog, though," she said, "and no sheep."

Despite himself, he found himself smirking as she stepped into the Tower and the door slid closed behind her. "Kids need pets," he mused, turning back to the skyline, realizing that fantasies...dreams...were easier to resurrect than he had previously thought.

x-x

A/N: So...what did you guys think? I could really use some feedback for this one...were you too confused about the placing of the story? Does it matter to you why they're there or what's happened? Was it too sad? You know...the usual stuff! XD