HERO
...
The day after it happened, Robin barricaded himself in his office.
Darkness seeped from the walls into the centre of the room, disrupted by a sphere of yellow light that spewed from his reading lamp. He shuffled again through the stacks of papers on his desk, striving for structure in the mass of disorder.
Two solid knocks rattled his focus.
"It's open," he called out to the steel door. A hand on the other side flattened to the scanner, and a girl cloaked in blue stepped inside.
"We have to talk," she said as the panel shut behind her.
She didn't miss the delayed lift of his head, only parting from his work when he heard someone speak.
"Raven." She saw the fortified expression he carried ease up. "Uh." His shielded eyes ducked back to his desk. "Can it wait?" he said, picking up another sheet. "I need to sort through these—"
"No." Her tone shackled him down. "It can't."
When he marked her a second time, he could identify her stare. Rigid coals, unmoving in the shadows.
The Titan leader lined his posture in his seat, setting down the paper and gesturing to the chair in front of him. Raven stepped forward and sat herself down, unflinching against that harsh, spitting light.
"I was going to check in on you." Robin widened his elbows on the table, folding his hands in front of him. "See how you're doing, after..."
She watched his face in minute detail.
"That's thoughtful," she returned. He thought something was off in the way she said it, but extended a brotherly smile all the same.
She spoke again with her words cast in iron.
"Have you extended that courtesy to Beast Boy?"
Robin's smile chipped. He blinked behind his mask.
"What?"
The girl's posture was unnervingly still. He witnessed the slight aligning of her brows.
"They told me, Robin."
His collar got a little tighter.
"What happened," she pressed on, "while I was out?"
Her voice was like a boulder pushing down on his chest. The walls of his office felt closer now, its darkness no longer soothing, but bleak and stifling.
When he was at last able to break from her stare, he gathered the documents nearest to him and straightened them out. The two clicks they made against his desk were a centring sound.
"My judgement was off," he admitted.
"You think?"
The bridge of his mask angled down, his grip firm at the papers' sides. Raven didn't relent.
"You threatened him," she glowered - and the block he swallowed plunged itself into his gut.
"I thought he'd hurt you." He opened up a ringbinder and clipped some files inside. "We all did."
"When has Beast Boy ever hurt me?"
"That doesn't matter." Robin looked up at her now, setting the folder aside. The bane in her face made it so much more difficult to hold his ground. "He wasn't himself."
"Exactly," she said.
The impact of that word shuddered through him. Gloved fingers twined together on the table, and Raven staved off her venom, going visibly grave.
"... Is that what we do with people who aren't in control now?" The question slid out as a murmur, and she winced. "Abandon them?"
Raven considered Plasmus. The man inside the mutant. They housed him in a specialised facility that would keep him comatose, and in the meantime were working tirelessly to conceive a cure that might spare his blighted state.
Raven considered Adonis. Tomorrow, Cyborg would visit the penitentiary and share his findings. He would then return to the tower and formulate a new agent to cooperate with the felon's DNA and grant the same results as Beast Boy. Adonis would go on to serve his time for his crimes as a human, and be registered to a therapist to find the root of his depravity.
Raven considered the second soul that slept beside hers.
Its fury. Its teeth.
Would the person she trusted most in the world abandon her too?...
"Raven." Her leader leaned forward with a frown, mask pulled up in the middle. "No. That's—"
"So just Beast Boy then."
"No!" Robin clawed through the guilt swelling inside him. "I was—" His hands reached out. "I was trying to protect you. The team."
She nearly had to laugh, but let a sneer slip instead.
So who protects the team from you?
"Is that it, Robin?" His dubiety appeared, sketched across his forehead in irregular lines. "Or are you just so desperate to enact justice, you'll overlook the facts?"
The last time he felt this small, it had been another dark figure in a cowl chiding him. Bruce's words rang out now.
You're not ready to lead your own team.
At the time, his protégé had stood firmly against that belief. But now...
"... Did they tell you what came next?" Robin spoke into the bloating silence.
Raven did not answer.
"I was wrong. He didn't attack you." His chin tilted down. "But he attacked us on your behalf." The lamplight revealed the brief flicker in her gaze. He put his hand to his head. "Which... Why, by the way?"
Raven had not broken her eyes from him since she'd entered the room. Now, they quietly landed to his desk.
"I'm not sure."
Robin narrowed in. "I thought you two had talked?"
"He doesn't know either," she said, full of truth.
Robin's office fell to a hush.
"It's immaterial now," he announced, spreading his papers back out, severely eager to leave it all in the past. "Cyborg has the antidote. We'll get a gauge for how often it needs to be administered." He sat up, surveying some reports as though they may shield him from her. "He'll be okay."
The sibyl did not leave, even as several moments dragged, muddying the air.
"Robin."
He reluctantly peered at her through his mask.
"This can't happen again," Raven said. 'This' did not just mean shutting out Gar. It meant the recklessness. The lack of trust. "If it does," she drove home, "you might not have any team left to turn on."
That ruptured him. His shoulders inched up and head bowed to his desk.
"I know," he sighed, slumping in his chair, giving in at last. Remorse weighed heavily on the young leader. Sour. Jarring. "It won't," he told her, finality in his voice. "I'm sorry, Raven—"
"Not me," she cut through. "Him."
His heart pattered and he nodded.
"Okay." Robin inhaled through his nose, setting his shoulders back in line. "Okay. I'll... talk to him."
His teammate appeared to soften then. "Not now," she said. "He needs some space. He's... adjusting."
Of course. Not twenty-four hours had gone by since Beast Boy's biology was laid bare to him. Since he'd been brutally attacked, his body cracked apart. Since he'd been subject to testing and trials in the Med Bay.
They were still monitoring his response to the antidote, and the changeling was exhausted.
"Right," Robin concurred. "I'll give it time."
Raven watched him not two seconds more, before standing to leave. She silently paced away from the chair, only to stop at the outline of the door.
"He looks up to you, you know," she said, glancing back into the room. "You're his hero too."
It seized all his awareness, his papers forgotten.
He felt imprisoned inside of this horrible yellow bulb, so sharp that its radiance blurred the sight in his eyes.
Justice.
What is justice?...
Maybe Robin could admit, to himself at least, that when he looked at Beast Boy, he sometimes saw something he didn't like. A former sidekick, too famished for the approval of his leader.
"Remember that."
By the time he realised his vision had strayed, she was gone, and the office was just Robin again, caught within his shadows and his light.
Author's Note:
this isn't like, explicitly bbrae. but since it's a scene tied to my bbrae fic, i decided to put it in my bbrae series as opposed to my platonic one. thought the shippers might appreciate it more, idk?