The room was dead silent.
There he stood, like nothing had happened. His arm was effortlessly twisted behind his back, clasped with his brother hand. His pale eye was sharp and he peered at both of them calmly, anticipating anything but not going to force a response.
He had won the day.
Without thinking, Raven smiled. It was more of a smirk, but Beast Boy saw it, and immediately he clenched his fists.
Then his animalistic eyes switched to Slade, sizing him up. He had been hurt, but he didn't show it. He could be playing with the both of them, maybe he was never really in pain…
But it looked so real, it couldn't be…
Doubt crept into the emerald teen's mind, and he contemplated what his next action would be.
The lights flickered and the pebbles from the loose ceiling cracks cascaded to the ground with soft clunks and clicks. Echoes caressed the room with an eerie white noise while shadows undulated across the rough walls.
Somewhere a bat shrieked.
Too dazzled to do anything but stare, Raven enjoyed the silence. She was able to collect her thoughts and emotions, and for a few seconds everything was floating in the air. It was the eye of the storm, and things would not stay calm for much longer.
"Well?" Slade finally asked, breaking the deep quiet.
Beast Boy tensed.
"Well what?" he snapped back, fangs growing over his lips.
Slade chuckled evilly.
"Now, now," he drawled patronizingly. "No need to get defensive."
"Who's gettin' 'defensive'?"
The masked man simply stared at Beast Boy, his eye openly mocking.
Raven heard the ripping of cloth, a mane was sprouting from her friend's back, his nose was beginning to elongate, the holes under whiskers popping up on his face.
Slade did not move an inch, but Raven sensed his energy begin to rise up in his body.
Beast Boy flinched forward, and Slade drop-stepped.
"Stop it."
Raven sent out a force field, blocking the two from one another. They looked back at her, betrayal in both their eyes.
"No fighting while I'm around," she growled.
Slade lifted his hands in the air like he was being arrested while his opponent crossed his arms petulantly, his features sinking back into his usual, gangly self.
"What else are we going to do?" Beast Boy murmured under his breath, glaring at the ground.
The silence ensued once more.
However, after a minute of it, Slade sighed and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, stretched, and rolled his shoulders.
Raven watched, and noticed he didn't favor his injured arm. It hung just like the other, and its flexibility seemed to be its usual top-notch self. Her healing was more powerful than she thought. This was baffling. Instead of keeping an eye on Beast Boy's increasing glare, she was pounding her mind. How did he manage to heal so quickly?
She wondered if there was something in his blood that he hid, some secret that only he knew, that made him more powerful. She had never considered it, thought he was a normal human with extraordinary capabilities. This new information could have been the key to defeating him, the one thing Robin could never figure out.
"Well if we're going to just stand here, we might as well get one thing straight," Slade announced, snapping Raven's concentration.
"And what's that?" Beast Boy spat, ready for a challenge.
Slade gave him a hard look, and stifled his psychotic rage. If he wanted, he could have torn out the brat's throat within half a second. But, he knew that would only make things messier, Raven would obviously be unhappy, and he needed to remain relatively diplomatic now that she had regained her powers.
However, he couldn't resist rubbing it in.
"That I won."
Slade was baiting him.
Beast Boy fell for it immediately, and he lunged forward. But, before he could throttle Slade's (previously) wounded shoulder, Raven engulfed him in her darkness, and forced him across the room.
When the bubble broke, Beast Boy snarled aloud as he sank back onto the carpet.
"You. Did. Not. Win!"
Slade crossed his arms.
"Yes, I did."
This angered the boy once again, he made a move to get up, and, once again, Raven held him back. She gave Slade one of her withering stares, annoyance flashing through her mind.
"Why are you helping him?!" Beast Boy yelled, turning his rage on her.
"I'm not," she replied matter-of-factly, eyes still on the obviously pleased Slade.
This baffled him and he stuttered and sputtered like he was the only sane person there-which was entirely possible. Did she not understand what she was doing? Why was she sitting there when Slade was so close?
With him, it was like a magnet in the room, Beast Boy simply felt compelled by some unknown force to fight Slade. That's what the Titans, what every superhero did: fight villains. It boggled his mind that Raven was so nonchalant about the whole thing, when she had the best reason, the best cause to beat the shit out of him.
Yet, here she stood, blocking every way, making sure nothing happened.
"Traitor." Beast Boy roared, his eyes welling with tears.
"Just because I'm not fighting doesn't mean I'm a traitor," she said in her classic monotone, sending goosebumps of rage up Beast Boy's skin. "It just means I'm making a choice."
"And what's that?!" he shouted in her face. "Choosing him over us? Your family?"
"No…"
"Please, Raven… what else would you call this?"
"I don't…"
"I think it's rather obvious."
Slade spoke up.
He was enjoying the drama play out in front of them. It was touching, really, seeing two former friends battle. The stakes couldn't be higher, but the green punk was missing the point, and Slade hated when the answer was so obvious but no one else could see it.
He had already answered the boy's question, but he refused to listen.
Beast Boy turned his attention, his nostrils flared.
"You see, dog, Raven has been with me for many months," Slade told him, casually observing his knuckles. "And during her stay here, I have both emotionally and physically tortured her beyond belief."
Raven's eyes sunk down, memories crawling back into her head from the shadows.
"I have seen her greatest fears and regrets," he continued. "I've seen what makes her happy and sad. To be honest, I know her better than you ever did."
"That's a lie!" Beast Boy barked. "Raven, tell him it's a lie!"
"She couldn't tell you anything of consequence, because I've made it impossible to do so," Slade cut in, a smile creeping behind his mask. "If she thinks she hates me, then she feel unbelievably guilty for having our child, as well as enjoying any time we've spent together. If she admits to loving me, it makes it easier for her to bear it. And it's partially correct, anyway."
"So you've made her insane?"
Slade laughed.
"No, I just saw a weakness and exploited it," he explained as if teaching a very slow-witted student. "She was so desperate for acceptance. The Titans were able to provide something, but there would always be a dark side that you could never comprehend. That's why she hid in her room, and never spoke, or showed any real affection. Sure, she could say that she was trying to control her powers, and that's why she never interacted, but that was just another white lie so that she wouldn't hurt your precious feelings."
Beast Boy remained silent.
"But I have seen her true nature. And it's not the Raven you know. She's much more…oh, how do I put it…free," he said, his one eye rolling upward as flashes of her swallowed up his mind. "Down here, she was able to finally break the mold of a Titan that Robin is so desperate for her to fit."
Two Months Earlier
"Stop crying."
Slade had been sitting by her side as she writhed on the floor in agony.
"I….c-can't…" she blubbered out, her hands wrapped around herself, her face rolled into her chest along with her legs.
He sighed.
They had just been sitting quietly, not bothering to talk because they both knew they would get angry at one another. After the initial intimacy, after Slade got what he wanted, there wasn't much else to do but wait.
Every day for her was like torture.
The spawn of her most hated enemy was growing larger by the second in her womb. The horrible irony was almost too much for her.
This was why she was crying.
It was around mid-day, she guessed, and they were cramped together in his private workplace, because he wouldn't leave her alone, and she didn't want to spend another day looking at the blasted computer monitors.
It was creepy enough that she was down here; she didn't need to know why Slade felt the need to be a stalker.
The first time, he had dragged her lifeless body in that direction. She was too depressed to notice, and he wanted to show off, as always.
When they arrived there, she was astonished by how close he was able to get to them, to everyone.
Cameras were flicking every few seconds on a dozen different screens of hundreds of people, from delivery men to gangsters.
They had no idea, not a clue that some psycho was peeping in on their lives. It gave her chills to think about, the things Slade must have seen, must know about, from all sorts of people.
It was like he was trying to get closer to a world that would always reject him. She didn't think it was imperative to spy on grocery store clerks, but for some reason he did.
She watched his eye as he stared intently ahead. It moved up and down quickly, not missing a single beat of anything. She saw how much it engrossed him, it was almost a compulsion. It was then that she hated going down there. To see such a human side of him come out, even it was abnormal, was too much for her to digest.
"What are you thinking about?"
It didn't sound sincere, but he actually was intrigued by her sudden deadening.
Raven had stopped crying.
It was silent once again, and had been for the last ten minutes or so. Raven was wrapped in a ball on the carpeted floor, her eyes distant. He studied her drastic extreme from wildly weeping to hardly breathing.
The aging tears had melted onto her face and left trails of red splotches. The swollen eyes and wobbling lip gave the indication that anything could still set her off.
His question made her cringe slightly, but it just surprised her that he was interested. Tired from it all, she decided to tell him the truth—he would find out anyway.
However, she refused go face-to-face, to push herself off the ground, liking the feel of the rug on her cheek.
"I was just thinking about the cameras," she mumbled.
This caught him off guard, which was a rare feat accomplished. He thought she hated them.
"What about them?" he asked casually, placing his palm on her shoulder.
It was unexpected and she shifted awkwardly, but didn't shrug him off. It wasn't like she wasn't used to his hilariously cold fingers by now. The glove that covered his hand wasn't enough.
Sighing, she bit the inside of her cheek, pondering how to phrase the answer.
Instead, she thought of something else. It was off topic, and she knew that he probably would cut her off in the middle, but she felt compelled to tell him. Sighing, she buckled up for whatever mockery he had in mind. Lightheaded and positively drained, her judgement may have been askew, but the dark circles under her eyes, the ever-swelling belly, reminded her that maybe she should stop caring so much.
"Before I joined the Titans," she began, and for once he listened. "I remember watching all the other kids do normal things, like go to movies or talk on the phone or anything else. It always bothered me that I might never have that, because my destiny told me that I would die before I got the chance."
She paused, and waited for him to say something about how pathetic she was or how she was so immature and young for actually desiring teenage normalcy, it even sounded cliche to her.
Yet, he just lightly traced her shoulder, following the tattooed S. So, she continued.
"...Or, it was because I was jealous of them. What they had, what I didn't. I was gifted with powers no one would ever have, but I was alone. Even on my home planet I was an outcast.
"But, whenever I'd feel freakish, I would just watch other people's lives. It was like I could pretend to be one of them, pretend to live in their shoes while they went through their normal day. What I wouldn't give to be like them..."
Slade said nothing. Raven gulped, knowing that she could never turn time back to reclaim the letters that spilled and were spilling from her foolish mouth.
"Sometimes I would just show up at a random place, hide in the shadows, and I would just see how they, anyone, interacted with one another."
Bile boiled in her belly, and she wanted to take the words back instantly. He would laugh at her, she had no doubt. Instead of having to see the gloating expression flash through his eyes, she looked away, too embarrassed to do or say anything else.
But he didn't laugh.
Slade was heavily mulling over her answer. It had struck a chord with him, and he knew that the similarities between the two were more than coincidence.
If he had the guile, the power, he was positive that if he had the chance to peer into her thoughts, feel her senses, know what she knew, they would be identical to his.
Thus, her answer was enlightening but also extremely unsettling.
Was it loneliness that drove him? He had never considered it. He assumed that he was made to do this, made to be an aberration, because his life had dictated that he should. Who was he to fight destiny?
She felt the same way, yet she had managed to delay her inevitability, draw a new path. Was it possible for him to do the same? Did he want to?
No, he didn't. That he was sure of.
Of course, solitude could have been the catalyst for his exploitations, but he enjoyed his work now. It had nothing to do with his deepest, buried emotions, anymore. Did it?
His inner turmoil rumbled inside him, and it had been a long time since he had felt something so horribly pure growl its way back to existence.
For once, the mastermind felt confused. Another question burned his tongue, compulsion. He had to ask it, even if his sinful side commanded that he just shrug it off, it could not be avoided.
"What did you see?" Slade asked, his voice just above a whisper.
Her answer would scar him forever, that he knew. For some idealistic, whimsical reason, he was riding everything on what she thought. After all, they were cut from the same cloth, and he was beginning to wonder if she was just another part of him.
Raven paused, peered up at him and saw his eye was wide and distant, as if he was trying to see what she saw, observe the screens just behind the walls. She saw the cogs churn inside, and wondered, coincidently, what he was thinking.
Her fingers dug into her palm, but she took a few deep inhales and exhales. This was a conversation, an answer she never thought she would disclose. Yet, something about the sincerity in his voice suggested that she dig deep to relay what she truly felt and not what she wanted to say.
"I saw pain."