Just a quick thing I wrote this morning.

. . .

In Which They Miss the Meeting

. . .

"Have you ever been down the tunnel?"

Raven almost choked on her oatmeal when he blurted it out. The morning had been unnaturally quiet until that moment. She'd wandered into the common room to make her tea and grab a bite of breakfast and he had been so pensive that he hadn't even said hello. Not even when she sat across from him, scraping her chair on the tile to try and rouse him from his thoughts. But he had just sat there, staring out the window with a torn expression until finally blurting that out.

Raven set her spoon down. What tunnel? The tunnel that connected the island to the city at the bottom of the bay?

"Without the car, I mean." A blush washed over him but quickly faded. "Obviously you've been down it in the car. I meant walking. Have you ever walked in the tunnel?"

"No," she replied at length. "I can't say that I have."

He bit his lip and drummed his fingers for a moment before rising from his chair. He leaned on both hands over the table, his eyes wide and eager. "Do you want to?"

"Uh… why?" Her curiosity was honest but she realized she'd hurt his feelings as soon as she said it. She opened her mouth, trying to figure out how to soften the question but he got there first.

"You don't have to. I just thought you'd like it. Early morning is the best time to goㅡlike, before 7 o'clock," he added, glancing at the clock in the kitchen. "And I almost never wake up this early so I was thinking I might go down there before everyone else gets up. But I realized maybe you'd never been down there cause you probably didn't know about it and thought we couldㅡ"

"Beast Boy." She stood up, moving her bowl to the sink with her powers. "I have no idea what you're talking about." Before he could reply to that she picked up her full mug of tea and motioned toward the door. "Why don't you just show me?"

The elevator down to the tunnel was as swift as the temperature change. The air down here was cool and damp and perpetual, like that of the innermost chamber of a cave. Their steps echoed away for miles into the tunnel, ricocheting in a spiral around the half-cylindrical glass wall that surrounded them on all sides. The car was there in the spot it usually occupied whenever Cyborg didn't have it in his shop, geared up and ready to go. It felt strange passing it by.

It was dark.

The only lights were the pinpoint emergency lights that lined the middle of the road, vanishing in the distance where the tunnel curved out of sight. Raven had pretty good eyesight but even she was nearly blind. She stayed close behind him, wondering why on earth they were down here and why they hadn't brought a flashlight. All she could see was his thin outline in neon blue. It was pretty creepy. Maybe that's why he thought she'd like it.

"Hold up here," Beast Boy said about fifty yards later, when they'd reached a sort of electrical station. It was hard to tell with that faint blue light. He climbed the ladder onto a raised dias and promptly began fiddling with levers and switches, open and closing metal grids that revealed vast networks of wires and gears. "I always forget which one," he laughed, and Raven was about to raise the concern of Cyborg killing them both for messing up his delicate system, when Beast Boy whooped in triumph. "There it is." He glanced over his shoulder, still laughing. "Cy put a sticky note on it for me and told me never to wake him up before seven again."

There was a loud series of clicks and an electric hum that seemed to come from every direction. Then, suddenly, there was light.

A million lights, actually. Beyond the safety of the glass wall, an endless lineup of florescent lights woke up one by one on the seabed, scattering fish in every direction and reflecting off the glass walls, illuminating the tunnel and the sea. Raven went to the glass, pressing her hand against it, and watched the line of lights as they turned on, continuing on in the distance past the point where the tunnel veered right, climbing an underwater hill and disappearing off the edge, reappearing once more in the distance, faint and faraway.

When she looked up at the dias he was sitting on the edge, grinning like a maniac.

"I didn't know about the lights," she admitted. He'd been right about that.

"They were for construction." He jumped back down to her level, pointing at the nearest of the lights outside. "Cy hasn't used them since, but he let slip about them once and I made him show me."

She had to agree that it was a sight worth seeing; as impressive as the view off the tower roof. "Doesn't it scare away the animal life?" she wondered. It didn't seem like something he would enjoy.

"At first." He shrugged. "They come back after a few minutes. Fish are curious." He gestured onward magnanimously, toward the rest of the tunnel, his face oddly nervous. "After you, then."

He was right again. The fish did come back, and it took less than five minutes. Soon the seafloor was alive, stirring with hundreds of creatures that flitted in and around the coral and seaweed. The lights seemed to draw them in more than they scared them away, and at one point a tiger shark emerged from under a ledge to inspect Raven at the window.

"I think he likes you," Beast Boy joked, peering over her shoulder.

"Probably wants to eat me," she surmised, running one finger along the glass as she walked.

Beast Boy only scoffed. "No way. He probably barks about as loud as you do." He was already walking away when he added, "And bites as hard."

Raven spent the next mile and a half wondering if that was a compliment.

"How far did you want to go?" They were sitting on the cold cement, resting against the glass wall, Raven fiddling with her empty ceramic mug as they sat there. Raven was studying a school of fish that was circling a mound of mid-bloom coral, and scarcely heard his question. "Cause we're more than halfway to the end," he went on, "where it comes out on the beach. We could probably turn back now and still make it to the morning meetup on time."

After a moment of contemplation and mug-twirling and no answer, Beast Boy addended the proposal. "Or we could continue to the end and then you could open a portal back to the tower," he suggested. "I don't think we'd be late." He sounded so hopeful that she knew he really wanted her to pick the latter.

She set her mug down. Even that small clink echoed slightly in the tunnel. "Or," she suggested evenly, "we could go on to the end and get some coffee at the beach. The tunnel comes out pretty close to the West End Brew." For some reason she couldn't look at him, and focused on the spiraling school of fish. "You like coffee, right?"

His smile was obvious in his voice, even though she wasn't looking. "Coffee is my lifesource. You know that. I thought you only drank tea, though."

"Sometimes coffee is more appropriate," she answered cryptically, and for once accepted his hand as he offered to help her to her feet.

"You know we'll miss the meeting if we go for coffee. Robin will kill us."

"He'll live." Raven kept her eyes on the thriving morning ocean as they walked on, completely forgetting about her mug as it disappeared behind them. "Besides, I'm having fun."

"Me too," he sighed, and something brushed her hand. She glanced his way and he swiftly threw his hands behind his head, interlacing his fingers and nearly tripping over his own feet. "Me too!" he repeated, a bit too enthusiastically.

Raven spent the last mile wondering if he'd just tried to hold her hand.

. . .

Optional ending in which Cyborg drives down the tunnel later and gets a flat when he runs over her mug. Haha.

I went to an aquarium last week. Can you tell?