First Impressions/Foreign Tongue
Summary:
The team's origin story, but make it gay.
(Or: AU where Starfire didn't let Robin anywhere near her handcuffs, but thought the chick raising shields was trustworthy enough.)
The shield that sprung up between the three earthlings and the alien surprised everyone involved - none more than the spellcaster.
Ignoring her trepidation, Raven stepped out of the shadows. "Maybe," she suggested, "fighting isn't the answer."
She felt the boys' attention shift to her the moment she spoke, felt their wariness and hostility. Neither of those feelings had been caused by Raven, but it was Raven's experience that those kinds of emotions, once elicited, would overflow to whatever else caught the troubled mind's attention.
She prepared to bolt.
But outwardly, she was calm and her gaze was level as she stared down the three earthlings and lowered her shield; the choice was theirs to make.
At last, the guy in the cape gave the others orders to stand down.
"What, d'ya think you're the boss or something?" the big guy challenged.
"Just give me a chance," He said gruffly.
Overflowing hostility, Raven thought.
Whatever their opinions, the other two stayed back as the guy in the cape took the lead.
He walked toward where the alien girl knelt, half collapsed, on the pavement. Raven noticed he made a point of approaching her slowly, from the front, with his hands open. It didn't matter.
She shot to her feet, that strange green energy pulsing around her closed fists.
"Trække sig tilbage!" She shouted in an incomprehensible alien tongue. "Trække sig tilbage og lad mig være i fred!"
"Easy," the earthling said in a soothing voice. His hand drifted towards his toolbelt. "My name is Robin, and I don't want to-whoa!"
The alien came at him swinging and hit a solid black barrier.
For the first time, Raven became aware of how she'd positioned herself: directly in between the two feuding parties.
She certainly had Sunshine's full attention now.
"Trække sig tilbage," the alien shouted again, but this time Raven heard the exhaustion in her voice. "Lad mig være i fred."
The alien girl's emotions were strange; Raven couldn't read them the same way she could read people back home, or even the way she could read the three earthling strangers. Her emotions were... huge. Overwhelmingly so. And they didn't intertwine the way most peoples' did, like a cloth that looked gray from a distance but had all sorts of multicolored threads woven through it; instead the emotions were carefully separated, but whirling around so fast in the girl's head it was hard for Raven to process. It was easier to read the way her arms drooped under the weight of the thick metal cuffs that bound her.
Raven raised a glowing hand.
The alien summoned her green fire and aimed to shoot, but she was too slow; she wouldn't have had time to strike back if Raven had ever wanted to harm her.
As it was, the heavy cuffs turned black. They disassembled in midair and fell to earth, like a space shuttle shedding its rockets
The girl stared at her unbound wrists. The whirlwind of her emotions ground to a halt. Then suddenly the girl was face to face with her and she slammed her mouth into Raven's own. Raven eyes widened.
And then she was on the ground.
The alien girl stood imperiously over her in full battle armor, her flowing hair haloed by the full moon. "Si non vis perire, me solum relinquatis!" she declared, before she pushed off into the night sky and vanished.
.
.
.
"... Was that Latin?" Guy-in-the-cape asked, still staring in the direction the alien girl had gone.
"'If you wish not to perish, you will leave me alone'," Raven mumbled from her spot on the pavement, too shocked even to process the words she was translating.
Somewhere far down the street, a vehicle flipped like a pancake into the air and set off multiple car alarms when it crunched back down to earth.
Raven touched a hand to her mouth.
The big guy helped her up.
"I think she likes you."
A/N: "an incomprehensible alien tongue" fjdfsa unskyld dansker jeg elsker jer!
On a more serious note: there are some people on this site who feel very threatened by the presence of queer love in fic; people who have harassed me and my author friends in the past and who will no doubt do so again. I have no intention of letting them stop me from posting, but all the same, a kind word—even a literal, single kind word lol—in the review box would be extra appreciated.
Love, peace, and elbow grease,
-Juniper