vi. Chapter Five
Raven was often reluctant to leave the tower for a crime scene. Never before had she wanted to go as she did now, standing left behind in the kitchen with Beast Boy who was still in his mismatched pyjamas and bed-hair. She hadn't realized it would hurt so much. She was dead-tired of hurting.
For perhaps the first time in her life, Raven wanted – wanted, not needed – to meditate, to clear it all away. She was surprised also to find that a small part of her was curious to see whether meditation would be any different without her powers. She felt like she had not been curious about anything for a very long time.
"So… you did sleep okay, then?"
Raven started at the sound of Beast Boy's voice and turned to look at him. Immediately the sight of the bandages wrapped around his palms jumped out at her. He was not wearing his gloves, and she wondered why she had not noticed it before. For a moment, Raven stared with a kind of fascination at his hands, bulky and blunt-ended, fingernails cut to the quick. Even those were a light shade of green.
It occurred to her that she did not know what had happened to make him that way. She had the vague notion that he had not been born a green shape-shifter, but – and Raven shut the door there, not willing to enter any further into the realm of curiosity.
No more complications, she told herself. Please, let there be no more.
"Raven…?" said Beast Boy, cutting into her thoughts. She realized she was still staring at his hands, and snapped her eyes up to his face. "Did you sleep okay?"
"I…" Raven frowned. A fog seemed to have wrapped around her mind, and she shook it off. "You asked me that already. I told you I slept fine."
"I know, I just thought… because you… erm – nevermind," he muttered finally, giving up. His shoulders drooped with resignation.
Raven sighed.
"Um…" said Beast Boy, casting about for something. "…Do you want to do anything?"
She looked at him. It was always startling to her, that in spite of all she had done to him, how cold she had been, he still…. Her heart contracted. She could not understand it.
"Is it okay…" she said softly, staring fiercely at the floor, a bloom of self-hate burning her up. "… is it okay if I be by myself for a while…?"
Briefly, Beast Boy looked surprised at the question, then – she made herself glance at him – disappointed. "O-oh, yeah – I mean, I have things to do, too…"
"Okay," Raven nodded, and turned her back on him to walk to the door. She felt like such an idiot.
"I – well, I'll be here, if you need me…" said Beast Boy, with a trifle of awkwardness. Her hand was on the control pad, but for a moment she did not move, seeing only the dark of her own shadow cast on the door in front of her.
"… okay."
And then she was in the hall, walking with quick, clipped strides. She felt as if she were running away, but she could not have said why.
Once in her room, Raven sagged against the door, head leaned back, eyes shut. There was only stagnant silence, and a great weight seemed to lift off her and flutter away. Alone, she could do whatever she chose – cry, shout, rage, stop pretending, stop it all. But standing in the darkness, nothing came… Well. Wasn't that what she had wanted, after all?
Raven shoved off the door and, neglecting the ceiling lights, moved across the dim room to open the blinds. She pulled each one up, flooding the room with sun. From the tower, the city appeared lain out like a little toy, light flashing against the tall structures and beetle-sized cars running across the bridge and tiny boats swallowed by the blueness of the bay. She leaned her arms on the window sill. She thought about Robin and the others. She thought about Beast Boy.
They had never been able to accept that she was not like them. She was not meant to be cared for – in fact, the very nature of her powers seemed designed to stomp out emotional attachments.
Raven saw her reflection in the window pane. She reached out haltingly, and touched her fingers to the glass. I don't have my powers now, she reminded herself.
But even before she came to earth, even before the Titans, her mother had… her mother who should have known best not to… her mother had loved her. Raven turned that over in her mind (her mother had loved her…?) and as she did she saw clearly the image of her mother, holding her, taking her by the hand, teaching her – and then, also, turning away from her in cold silence, watching her with a flat wariness in those gemstone eyes, leaving her behind and not looking back. Sometimes, Raven preferred not to remember that her mother had played both the nurturer and the distant idol.
A hard expression came across her face. I did idolize her, she thought. That is why I try not to remember… Did she love me at all?
Raven shook her head, pushing the thought away.
…It doesn't matter.
She left the window, and sat on the end of the bed, her feet on the floor. The shopping bags remained in a heap nearby. If she'd had her powers, she would have moved them to the closet with a quirk of her finger. She decided, for now, to leave them where they were.
A restless feeling came over her. Raven looked around the room, not ready to settle her mind just yet. As if of its own accord, one foot began to beat against the floor. For some reason, she glanced at her bureau. She saw the glint of her meditation mirror, lying benignly atop the chest of drawers.
She hadn't thought about that mirror – or perhaps had not allowed herself to think of it – since the night of the museum robbery. Now she wondered what would happen, if she were to… would it even work without her powers? It occurred to her that she might not be able to activate it at all.
On impulse, Raven stood up, took the mirror from the bureau, and sat again on the bed, cross-legged. She laid the ornate hand-mirror on the sheets in front of her. Dimly, she knew it was a bad idea, but she leaned over and peered in anyway, reaching for that familiar spot in her mind that would open the channels.
A half-surprised exhalation escaped her when it worked. She had a flash of premonition that read darkly of chaos, and then a great rushing seemed to rise about her. She was pulled in.
Blurs of color sped past her. It was like being in a tidal wave, and she was flying through it somehow, touching nothing. Thoughts like,
Where am I going?
What will happen to me?
seemed to drop behind, joining the blur, almost as soon they bubbled up, until she felt empty of them entirely. In the past, peering into her own mind like this had always intensified her emotions – now a crippling apathy seeming to wind around her. She closed her eyes then…
…and when she opened them she was standing knee-deep in a thick fog. The fog was drifting between the colors that had been tied to her emotions, red in some places, pink in others, yellow, green, orange. She could not see the ground. She could not see any of the surrounding area – for a moment she thought she glimpsed a pink range of mountains, but it might have only been a swirl of mist.
Had her powers always separated her emotions, then? Was this what the mind of a normal person would look like…? What if… what… The thought slid greasily away from her, almost seeming to make a trail through the fog, which closed up behind it.
Again, she thought she saw a bit of landscape, an orange stretch of forest, but it appeared as gently erratic as the mist, and was gone a moment later.
There was nothing else to do but take a step forward, and then another. Even as she walked she seemed not to move at all. She felt the mist swallow her footsteps.
Somehow, she was not surprised when a group of black birds swooped down in front of her. She had almost known it was coming. The birds had red eyes.
They gathered into one mass, and then when she looked at them she was seeing herself, but at a moment in the past. With horror she realized that it was the moment when she ran, it was the moment when she leapt out the window, powerless. Her cape was billowing hugely in the wind from the bay, but the mouse-brown hair looked incongruous with the rest of the uniform. She fell, she seemed to fall a thousand times, down into the bay, down onto the rocks below, onto the concrete city, down, she fell and splattered like a bug.
It could have happened. But it didn't.
"Don't show me this," she hissed, boiling with shame. The black birds dispersed, cackling to each other, perhaps cackling at her. In her throat she made a noise of disgust.
"Why did you come here?"
She whirled around at the sound of the voice, and found herself startlingly close to a figure in her own image, floating like a ghost, seeming to be formed of serenely yellow diaphanous mist.
"I came… seeking answers," she said, hardly knowing why.
The figure became an evil red and swooped close to her, close enough that she felt as if she were breathing it in. "Tell yourself the truth," it murmured, in a sand-paper voice.
"I couldn't stand to be left behind again," she blurted. The fog seemed to become thicker, pressing in on her with warmth. She wanted to close her eyes. She did. All around her a typhoon of rustling feathers, and she saw a long-ago image of her child-self on Azarath, in the room that the monks gave her.
The child-self fumbled through a low-level meditative chant, looking again and again towards the single window in the austere little room, wanting in some way to fly out like a bird. Cracks appeared in the plaster, the chair flew violently out from underneath the desk and across the room. The child-self attempted the chant again.
"That was the day Arella left us," said the figure softly in her ear, now colored a pale gray. "Don't you remember?"
She turned away. "I don't want to remember that."
"But it happened."
"I don't care."
"That choice is always yours," said the figure, withdrawing from her. "Run away, if that's what you want."
She stared with hard eyes at the figure, riding a swell of indignation.
"I'm not running away. I know my own mind," she said, as strongly and clearly as she could. The fog seemed to cool and dissipate around her.
"I know you do," the figure replied with an indulgent smile, blushing into rosy pink, "it is your heart you are estranged from."
"What…?"
Then she could see the scene of that morning in the kitchen, herself with her back to Beast Boy, walking away. Over and over, she walked away. What, exactly, was she walking away from?
Brushing against her, in a voice like a whisper, "You don't have to be alone, if you don't want to. That was the choice you made…You promised yourself not to fall in love, to love nobody at all."
She pushed away the memory, barely listening. "Don't show me this."
The image vanished. Nothing, now, but mist and color. There was a whole world here, once.
"Tell me what happened here," she said, diverting herself from that previous subject. "What's beyond the fog?"
"Darkness," sighed the figure, almost longingly.
She shuddered.
"Show me."
The figure hesitated, made a sweeping gesture with its arm, and they stood suddenly before a great, solid blackness. They had not moved, but it felt as if they had crossed a great distance. She looked up at the darkness. Somehow, it was familiar to her. She reached out and pressed her hand to it. It was solid and warm and quivering like the side of some sleeping giant.
Drawn forward, she placed her other hand to it, leaned in as close as she could. She felt a pulse that seemed to match her heartbeat. A desire to possess that pulse overcame her. She raised her eyes to the blackness, but it was solid and seemed to stretch on indefinitely into the mist with no way over or around it.
Yet, when she looked to the left, there seemed to be something – not an opening, she knew instinctively, but a darkness that was separate from the warm and pulsing thing in front of her. The other darkness was smaller, denser, and it was… dead. A heavy, hanging thing, like a tumor.
"What is that?" she asked, turning to look at the figure.
"I do not know."
The answer chilled her. She did not want to stay here any longer. A ringing sound seemed to vibrate the base of her skull.
Raven…
She looked up, but the figure appeared not to have spoken.
Raven…
"Take me away from here," she tried to say. The words did not come. Suddenly it all disappeared, the fog and the darkness and the figure, into a pale nothingness. She felt as if a great hand were grabbing her, and hoisting her away.
Raven opened her eyes.
For a moment, she did not know where she was. She brought a hand up to shield her eyes, shrinking from the sunlight. In the brightness, a dark shape…
"Raven!"
It spread its wings, and was gone, the dark shape of a bird in the brightness.
There was an abrupt pounding on the door, and Beast Boy's voice on the other side. She remembered suddenly that she was in her room. The meditation mirror sat on the bed in front of her.
"Raven, I'm opening the door, if you're not gonna answer!"
She shoved the mirror guiltily beneath her pillows and out of sight before the door slid open and revealed Beast Boy silhouetted in the frame. He had changed into his uniform, on his face an expression of immense concern, which melted and reformed into puzzlement at the sight of her, sitting perfectly fine on the bed.
"When you didn't answer, I thought…" He rubbed a hand up and down his forearm self-consciously. "Why didn't you answer?"
For a long moment, Raven did not know what to say. She stared at Beast Boy in the way she had stared at his hands earlier that morning, only this time at his whole body. His face, which had become leaner with age, his shaggy hair and expressive eyes, the lithe build, like a swimmer, all wiry muscle and narrow waist. He really was a bit taller than her now, Raven realized with a kind of pang.
"Raven…? Hello?"
"I was distracted," she answered, shaking herself to cover-up the fact that she'd been staring. "I didn't answer because I was thinking about something. I'm fine."
"Oh," said Beast Boy, still with a look of puzzlement. "Um…"
"What are you doing here?" asked Raven, to move the attention away from her as she scooted to sit on the edge of the bed, with her feet on the floor. It worked. Beast Boy seemed to recall his original purpose.
"The others are back, and, well, you should come see…"
"They're back already?" she said, surprised. It felt almost as if no time had passed at all, and that they were back now… She felt foolish for having allowed herself to hurt so badly at their leaving. That was why she had looked into the mirror in the first place.
"Run away if that's what you want."
She just didn't want to hurt anymore. She didn't think there was anything wrong with that.
Beast Boy gave her an odd look. "…Uh…It's been three hours, Rae. What were you doing in here?"
"Reading," she answered steadily. For some reason, she did not want him to know about her look inside the mirror.
"… and you say I'm weird." Beast Boy shook his head, smiling, but Raven pressed her hand into the bedding and frowned at her knees.
"Beast Boy…" she began. There was no clear path to follow here. She felt as if she were treading on something soft and tender. Beast Boy was watching her with his head cocked just slightly to one side. "… I… I wanted to say I'm sorry. And… thank you."
"For what?" asked Beast Boy. She did not know what he thought of her then. She knew she was acting strangely.
"Nothing," said Raven immediately, then made herself continue, "I mean – everything. I don't know."
She let out a sigh, allowed her shoulders to slump, the charged-ness of the moment draining out of her. She put her hands on her knees and stared at them. She was wearing loose gray slacks. When she looked at them, all she could think of was being out in the city yesterday with Beast Boy. How bizarrely normal that had been. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt like an ordinary person…
All of a sudden the memory came to her. Her mother, in one of the jovial moods that seemed to filter in and out of her, pass through and unpredictably return, a fish in the reeds, in one of those moods her mother had taken her out to the park, held her hand, bought her a cherry ice and her lips were red, red roses for an hour after. But that had been very shortly before… left behind in the cloisters… and her mother must have known even then what she was about to do to her only daughter…
The weight of Beast Boy's hand on her shoulder, the sense of his closeness, called Raven back to reality. Her eyes refocused on her white hands gripping the knees of her gray slacks. She did not have to look up to know that Beast Boy was standing before her, arm outstretched to touch her, hand resting just so on her shoulder, warm and breathing through the rough glove-skin, breathing gently into her.
"It's okay," he told her. She believed him.
Raven did not know what would have happened then, if Robin had not walked in.
"Raven, are you alright…?" he asked, appearing in the open doorway and stepping through. Immediately, Beast Boy withdrew his hand and whipped around to face Robin. Raven stood up on reflex. She felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under her. With a certain amount of wonder, she realized that she had not wanted Beast Boy to pull away. She had not wanted that at all. Why…?
"Raven?"
Raven gathered her thoughts. "I'm fine, Robin," she said, a little crisply. "How did… how did it go?"
It did not escape her when Robin and Beast Boy shared a significant look.
"What is it?" she asked, with a swell of foreboding.
"When we got there," Robin began hesitantly, which wasn't like him, "there was nobody around, and we realized where we were – we were at the old city library… you know the one…."
A chill passed through her.
"That place is still standing?" she asked, swallowing thickly.
"Well… it was when we got there. It was always slated for demolition, but the city didn't want to touch it for a while after… um. The demolition got held up, anyway –"
"Maybe you should just show her," Beast Boy interrupted.
Robin paused, then nodded shortly. "You're right. It'll be better if you come see…" He gestured toward the open doorway.
Raven allowed herself to be lead down the hall to the living room. Robin kept glancing back at her, as if afraid she would disappear. A knot formed in her stomach that made it difficult to breathe. Beast Boy trailed behind her. Raven could feel his eyes on the back of her neck, but did not turn to look at him.
When they reached the living room, Starfire and Cyborg were standing over something that was spread out on the kitchen table. They both looked up as Robin, Raven, and Beast Boy entered the room.
"Raven –" Starfire began, but faltered and did not continue. Raven looked at Starfire and Cyborg, and then was struck suddenly by the raggedness of their clothing, and the smudges of charcoal on their skin. Cyborg's armor looked scuffed up, and Starfire's long, luxurious hair was tangled and wind-blasted. There was a tear in the front of her skirt. Raven's eyes darted to where Robin was standing and she saw that he, too, was looking worse for wear.
She hadn't noticed earlier. It had never occurred to her that they might be injured. It had never occurred to her because she had been too wrapped up in her own problems to think about them. Raven fought off a stab of guilt.
"Are you guys alright?" she asked, trying to make up for it.
"We are unharmed," Starfire answered.
"Yeah, it was only the one building that blew up in our faces," said Cyborg, waving a hand with nonchalance. "No biggie."
Raven's eyes widened. "The library blew up?"
"Almost as soon as we got close," said Robin, coming up to stand by the kitchen table and stare down at the thing that was resting on top of it. "And when the dust died down, we found this in the rubble. It was… glowing. We think this must be connected somehow to the explosion…"
Raven had stopped listening. She had come close enough to the table to see the thing on top of it, a large piece of stone that looked like it had come from the outer façade of the old library. A symbol was carved into the surface, by magic not by hand – she could tell from the smooth cleanness of the lines – a symbol which was very clearly a deviation of the Mark of Scath. And in fact, as she stared at it with a slowly creeping horror, she could see in her mind's eye the symbol burning a fiery red and then ripping the old library to pieces.
Raven shivered. She felt herself break out in a cold sweat, and had to lean against the table in order to stand through the wave of dizziness that washed queasily over her.
"Raven? What is it?"
She shook her head.
The old library had been the shell of an evil place, the nexus of Trigon's arrival on earth. Raven was glad to see it go, the memories there scattering wide, sizzled to dust in the blast, but the symbolism in the gesture was glaringly obvious – destroying the darkness. And the Mark of Scath with the exaggerated slash through it that was a connotation for death in the written language of Azar…
Raven knew the symbol that was engraved in the stone. The harder she stared at it, the more she was sure it was something from her home world. It fit into her mind like a puzzle piece, but when she tried to think of it she was met with a disturbing blankness. There were no memories attached to this symbol.
Only – something hit her – a cool pressing of lips to her forehead, her mother saying, I'll protect you, little bird. Do not fear.
But… protect her from what?
Raven could not remember.
"Raven… are you alright? Do you recognize the mark?"
"No," she said after a tense silence, "not at all."
A/N: Hello, Plot Twist.
Was the old library eventually destroyed during the Trigon arc? I can't remember, but if so... just pretend it never happened :P
As always, your reviews were lovely, everyone. Thanks so much! I hope you're all still enjoying the story enough to review again :D
And incidentally, am I the only one who doesn't hate the pagebreaks? I always seem to be reading anti-pagebreak sentiments in a lot of authors' notes, but personally I'm just fine with them. Very curious.