OKAY SO I FULLY DROPPED THE BALL IN UPDATING THIS, HUH?
Everyone who was waiting for this fic to continue: sorry for the delay, thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the story!
If you're following my life and as per the last Author's note, no I did not get that job I was interviewing for, but I did get a new project from an existing client that was huge for me (as in implied a lot of learning) and I was focused on that for a while. And though I'm practically never not writing, I've been juggling other projects (another TT fic and WAAAY TOO MANY original stories), PLUS this chapter and the next one have some important emotional moments I was stuck on for a while.
But hey! We're here now! On to the chapter!
January. Vanquishing a demon, at great personal cost p.1
Four out of the Five were camping in front of Kori's locker, waiting for her in the deserted hallway.
"I'm telling you, this kid ran off and is cooling off at a friend's house somewhere," Vic was saying.
"It looks like that, but we have to look into it anyway," said Dick. "The parents asked us to." They had never gotten a mission from parents before; the others thought this might be the only reason they had taken it.
"I bet his mom is the reason he ran off," said Gar. "She was a real piece of work."
"I don't think he was kidnapped either, but we still have to check," said Dick. He turned to Raven, who was unusually quiet. She was sitting on the ground, focused on a piece of paper; even though he only saw the back of her head, he somehow knew she was glaring at it. He nudged her shoe with his. "What's up with you?"
She grumbled. "Mr. Light gave me a D in the test."
"Maybe he doesn't like you 'cause you keep calling him Mr. Light," said Vic.
"He's not a real doctor," argued Raven. "I'm not gonna call him Dr. Light."
"Why'd you get a bad grade?" asked Dick.
Raven emitted a low growl that sounded like, "I wasn't able to study." Then she rose her head. "But I still didn't deserve this grade."
"Gimme that." Vic took the paper and looked it over. "Hm."
"What?" Raven snapped.
"You consistently added vectors wrong. And you got your units mixed up. It's so unlike you, Rae," he said as he turned the papers. "Do you want me to look over this with you? I could help you study."
"I can't today," she said. She was looking down and her tone made it clear that she wanted a conversation to end there. The only one to ignore the signs, as usual, was Gar.
"Why?" he asked. "What are you doing?"
But before Dick could get on edge about Raven being about to bite Gar's head off, the group turned at the sound of a classroom door. Expecting Kori, they instead saw Light himself leaving a room.
"He's still here?" asked Dick.
Raven was already standing. "I'm gonna go talk to him." She took her exam from Vic's hands and walked after the teacher with resolve.
"Should we… let her go like that?" asked Vic.
"You wanna stop her?" asked Dick.
They watched as Raven talked sternly to the teacher. Light, in his usual detached fashion, led her into an empty classroom.
Gar wondered at her. She had apparently been struggling in school, and that was a first for her.
A week ago, he'd entered school half asleep, as per the course, after having woken up two minutes before he was meant to be in the bus and then dozing off once he was on it. He'd been walking through the halls in a daze, and then there was Raven in front of him.
"Hey," she said. "Have you had breakfast?"
He blinked a couple times to make sure she was really there and not a dream. "Um, no… actually, I was in a rush to-"
"Here." Raven bottle into his hands.
Gar focused his eyes enough to discover it was a vegan yogurt. "Oh. Uh, thanks?" He took an experimental swig and looked at Raven. "What's up?" he asked her, in a tone that doubled as conversational and also asked why she was being weird.
"I had a dream that we failed the Math exam," she said.
"Oh. Oh!" he went, feeling himself waking up. "Wait, you and me both? That can't be right."
But later, Mr. Bill had handed out the exams, and sure enough, Gar had failed. He'd turned to Raven sitting behind him. She had her head on her palm, looking tired. When Gar held up his F-marked paper for her to see, she nodded sadly, as if to say Me too.
Next to Gar, Vic had been smiling down at his A+, oblivious to everything. Gar hadn't gotten anywhere when he'd tried to ask Raven why she'd failed.
Gar was shaken from his recollection by Kori returning to the group. "Miss Mae confirmed that Sawyer left the class early on Friday."
"More fuel the theory he was planning on running away," said Vic.
"We're still checking with his friends," Dick dictated. "When Raven comes back-"
A loud crash cut him off. All turned to the classroom Raven was in, because it had sounded like desks and chairs toppling over. Before the four could move, the door to that classroom opened and out came Light, his face frozen in a look of horror. He didn't seem to notice the kids as he power-walked past them and right out of the school. He didn't seem to care when the Secretary called after him to clock out.
When the four rushed into the classroom, Raven was kneeling on the floor, collecting what seemed to be the contents of her bag. Even with back to them, they could tell she was shaking as she rose.
Dick approached her first. "Raven? What happened?"
Still not facing them, she just muttered something about Light falling over.
"Dude, he looked like he'd seen a ghost!" said Gar, rattled. "I know he almost failed you, but what did you say to h-"
Raven turned to him with a snarl, and Gar yelped and retreated, bumping into the desk behind him. He thought, Okay, I see what might have happened.
He was on her way, so she pushed him as she stalked out the classroom. She seemed to Gar unearthly strong when she did it—but maybe he'd been standing weird.
As Kori and Vic stared after Raven worriedly, Dick looked around the room. He took note of two fallen desks and three fallen chairs towards the back of the room, in line to where Raven had been kneeling; but he couldn't figure out what could plausibly have happened.
He couldn't picture Raven pushing teachers to the ground, which was what the evidence told him; but if Light had just fallen over, Raven wouldn't be shaking. And if he'd done something to her, why would he have ran out scared?
He took one last mental picture of the scene and then told the others, "Let's just go."
Raven wasn't in the hallway or outside the school when they left the classroom; it seemed she had left without them. The others went on to Vic's as planned, and when Raven never showed up there, Dick called her, wisely stepping out to Vic's driveway to make the call.
"Yes?" Raven answered.
"Hey, you coming to Vic's? For the mission?" Dick spoke in a gentle voice. Her tone just now had struck him as particularly unreadable and neutral, even for her.
"No."
"Look, if this is about earlier-"
"I need to be home right now. Okay?"
"Raven…" But he didn't know what to say to her. If you ever need to talk, I'm here? That sounded performative, because he knew she wouldn't take him up on it. Raven didn't talk to him—he didn't know if she talked to anyone. Most of the time Dick could only hope she talked to Kori about things. He ended up going with, "Take care. I'll see you at school."
And he kicked himself for coming up short in helping her when she said, "Okay," and hung up.
"Raven's not coming," Dick said to his friends when he went back to Vic's room.
"Told ya," Vic told Gar. "You offended her."
"How's this my fault?" demanded Gar.
Dick ignored them. "New distribution, me and Kori are gonna cover his hangouts and friends' houses on west. Gar and Vic take those on the east."
After an afternoon of combing through the western portion of town, Dick and Kori stood at the house of their biggest suspect, the missing guy's best friend. He wouldn't let them inside the house, wouldn't even move from covering the threshold. Dick and Kori didn't need to look at each other to communicate: they both thought Sawyer was most likely there.
"Look, if he's with you," Dick told the boy, "just tell him we won't tell his parents where he is. We're not the police, we're not gonna make him go back home. For us, it's enough to know he's okay."
"Well, I told you he's not here," said Sawyer's best friend. "But if he was, what's it to you? Who even are you that I'd have to tell you?" And when Dick didn't attempt to answer, he closed the door without another word.
"We cannot blame them for not trusting us," Kori opined, as they walked away.
It still left a bad taste on Dick's mouth. He thought people knew them by now, and knew to trust them. "Let's close this one and go home."
He called Vic to put him and Gar and up to speed.
Gar perched himself on Vic's shoulder to hear the call, and then cheered when he hung up. "Cool, I have time to get home and try the new Mega Monkeys game!"
Vic held him by the collar. "Not so fast. We are going to Raven's now."
"What? Why?"
"Because you need to apologize for being callous."
"Callous? I wasn't being callous! I don't even know what that means!"
They argued all the way.
On any given day, Gar was down for going to Raven's, even on a day like today where he she was being frankly scary and he didn't know what her deal was, but today it was about the principle of it: he didn't want to go because Vic made him.
Because if he had to be honest, a part of him –a deep, hidden part of him with unspoken and indefensible feelings- had considerable trouble with how Vic was being today, namely how he was being about Raven. Earlier, when they were discussing Raven's math test, Vic had also annoyed him. Gar couldn't pinpoint why immediately, but then he saw it: it was the way Vic had called her 'Rae' offhandedly. It had rubbed Gar the wrong way, and again, he couldn't defend the feeling, but he still felt it.
He was the one who started calling her that, with fear in his heart and a great amount of bravery, back when she wasn't close to any of them. Now he couldn't help feeling like the others had all co-opted it.
Of course he'd heard her tone back there; of course he'd known she didn't want to discuss her test. He'd asked anyway because that was who he was—he was the one who always prodded more, at his own personal risk. None of the others would dare co-opt that.
But he couldn't process all of that with himself, let alone explain it to Vic, so he just fought with him all the way to Raven's house.
"Hey, she did whatever to Dr. Light, then she yelled at me, and now I have to apologize?" Gar demanded when they were on her street.
"You ever notice how you're the only one she snaps at?" Vic returned. "You're always pushing, aaalways egging, and you make her lose her patience." They were now at Raven's door; Vic texted Raven to tell her that. "See, your problem is you don't know when to shut up. You need to learn when your input is needed and when it isn't. Which, I gotta be honest, it usually isn't-" the words died in his lips when looked up and Gar was nowhere to be found. Looking down, Gar's shoes were in front of him, over the grass under Raven's window. With dreadful certainty, Vic looked up: sure enough, Gar was grinning and waving down from Raven's windowsill. As soon as he made sure Vic saw him, he swung his legs and disappeared inside.
Vic glowered at the closed door. "Mega Monkey," he grumbled to no one.
"I should have known."
Gar was still grinning at Vic's face and froze at Raven's voice. He turned to see her glowering at him from her bed, where she sat cross-legged.
"You do realize you hold me hostage, right?" she told him, getting up. "If I want natural lighting to enter my room, I have to live with the threat of you dropping by whenever you feel like it."
"Jeeze, lighten up!" Gar returned. "I'm your friend! This is a visit!"
"What do you want?"
Vic would have wanted him to say I'm here to apologize. He shrugged and picked at a little bottle filled with some sort of powder on her bookshelf. "I'm just hanging out."
She lunged at him, took the bottle out of his hands and stared him down. She still towered over him, which killed him. "Gar, I'm not in the mood for a visit today. I want you to leave."
Her face seemed to twist in anger. Just when he thought she'd really scream at him, she turned her back on him instead, and left her little bottle elsewhere in her shelf.
Only then did he notice she was wearing a tank top. Her bare shoulders were an odd sight: Raven was always covered up. She usually wore layers upon layers; long flowing shirts, skirts over tights and boots, longs sleeves pulled over her wrists. Even during Dick's training she wore at least a long-sleeved shirt, plus her regular gold necklace. She had no jewelry on right now. It somehow made Gar feel even more like he was intruding.
Outside the house, Vic waited. He waited for so long that he began fearing Gar had said the wrong thing and he and Raven were fighting up there. Then more time went by, and he began to feat she was burying him.
It was yet another while until Raven finally opened the door. "Hey. Sorry I took so long," she said, not really sounding sorry.
Vic wasn't going to say anything if she hadn't. "It's cool."
She led him through the rooms and hallways and stairs rather quickly, and only then Vic understood why she'd taken a long time to open the door. She hadn't wanted to leave Gar alone in her room. He'd just made her leave her bedroom unprotected.
Gar, meanwhile, was very much fulfilling Raven's fears by having a field day left alone in her room. She'd told him not to snoop around, and he was ignoring that completely.
First, he went through her bookshelves. He was focusing on anything that was in English –there seemed to be at least three or four different languages in her collection-, because he was completely convinced she had to own some normal people fiction. He was dying to catch her owning a romance novel he could tease her with.
He gave up after too many meditation guides and poetry anthologies, and then thought to check out the book on her bed. It was called the Book of Azar.
He thought, Oh, Azar has a book published. Cool.
He opened it; it opened naturally on an envelope that seemed to be working as bookmark. He checked that out too. Who's Trigon Scathe? he wondered, and then the door swung open.
In came a livid Raven and a worried Vic behind her. Gar panicked, lost hold of the book, and it toppled to the ground. He picked it up quickly, and by that time Raven was on his face.
"The one thing I told you not to do," she began.
"Uh, guys," tried Vic.
"Uh, I was looking for some light reading?" said Gar sheepishly.
"You were being a nuisance, as always," Raven returned.
Vic cleared his throat. "Guys," he repeated.
Raven finally looked at him. He pointed at the ground.
When Gar dropped the book, the letter had fallen out, and its contents had spilled. Now a copious amount of money peeked out.
Raven breathed deeply, looked at no one, and kneeled down to collect it. Vic and Gar exchanged a glance.
Struck by her solemnity, Gar tried to chuckle. "D'you have a secret job or something?"
Raven seemed to be thinking something over. She looked up at them, and decided to give an explanation. "…It's from my father," she said.
"You have a father?" Gar reacted.
Vic looked ready to chew him out. "Seriously, man?"
Raven uncharacteristically paid him no mind. She put the letter back on the book and the book carefully on her shelf.
"He likes to send something every once in a while to remind us that he exists." She looked at both her friends with a strange hesitance. Gar thought her eyes looked strangely lighter, almost lilac. "Every time he contacts us, my mom has us move cities."
It took them a second to react.
"Wait, what?" Gar said after a moment. He looked at Raven with wide eyes. "Are you saying she might make you move? She can't do that, can she?"
"She's been talking about it all week," Raven said simply. She sat on her bed. "It's just what she does when he finds us."
"Finds you? What…?" Gar looked at Vic helplessly.
Vic avoided his eyes. Gar was surprised, but Vic had figured something along these lines a while ago. Raven had said Azarath was a shelter, where people went to be under Azar's protection. She'd never said what she and her mother needed protecting from. She'd also never talked about her father. He'd put two and two together.
Since Vic wasn't answering him, Gar turned to Raven. "You can't move away. C-can't we talk to your mom?"
"Gar," Vic said in a warning tone.
"What?" Gar returned indignantly. "She can't make her! It's not fair!"
"Gar, Raven might not feel safe here either."
That made Gar relent. The boys looked at her. Raven was gazing at Vic curiously, realizing she hadn't ever considered how she felt about it. Running from Trigon had always been an instinct that steered her whole life; she usually just let Arella sweep her away from place to place.
"Rae?" Gar asked softly.
"I'm as safe with Azar as I could ever be," said Raven, truthfully. "He's never won against Azarath."
Gar exhaled with some relief, making Raven think he was willing to hang on to any silver of hope. She watched her friends. Gar was panicking, shifting on the spot. Vic was still, somber, staring at the ground. Raven didn't know what she expected would happen when she told her friends about this, but she was surprised and moved to see them so affected. She felt herself blushing.
"And your mom would have you leave the shelter?" asked Vic.
Raven pulled her legs under her body. "No, we'll move to another Azarath base. They're all over the world."
"Whoa, okay, wait." Gar said, waving his hands wildly. "Why are you talking like this is a done deal? It's not, is it? We can still do something about it, right?"
"Gar," warned Vic.
"No!" Gar snapped. He knew he should be reeling himself back like Vic wanted, but he couldn't help it. It made him all the more desperate to see Raven look so resigned, so still. Like there was nothing to be done. He wasn't used to seeing so little fight in her—so he had to make up for the difference. He kneeled down to her level. "Do you wanna move away?" he asked her.
"No," she said honestly.
"Then we have to fight it!"
"Can we think about this logically?" Vic asked, mostly looking at Gar. "Raven. What's the money for? Why did he send it? What does he want from you?"
She shook her head. "I don't know," she started. How could she get this across? She'd been trying to devise her father's actions all her life, and it had always been useless. She could think of reasons for why he did what he did until her head hurt, and she was usually wrong. Trigon's mind operated in a different wavelength. She didn't understand her father. She never had.
"He didn't write a note or anything?" Vic asked.
"He's been texting me, but there's not much to go there either," Raven said.
"But what does he say? Is he asking to meet up?" Vic insisted.
Raven took a deep breath. "He doesn't… talk like that. It's hard to explain, but he doesn't communicate like a normal person." Her hands curled and uncurled, like she was struggling to get a point across. "It's like he talks in riddles. The texts were links to news reports about tsunamis and earthquakes and fires, going back centuries." Her friends looked askance, and she sighed. "I have no idea what he's trying to say either. He always had this thing with… history and big disasters. And prophecies." She trailed off there, like she had no idea how to continue.
Vic sat next to her, mulling this over. "Does he believe in big prophecies and stuff?"
"He believed all sorts of things," said Raven, uncrossing her legs. "I haven't seen him since I was five. But I remember he used to say he was telepathic. That he could control other people's actions, and move stuff with his mind, and turn back time…"
Gar felt a chill go down his spine. "Could he?" he asked quietly. At some point in the past he'd simply accepted Raven was magic. While looking like everyone else, and seeming to live by the same rules as everyone else, she simply occupied a magical world, right beneath everyone's noses. The girl made potions and dream-predicted things; she saw through people, knew things she should have no way of knowing, and had a penchant for being in exactly the right place at the right time. No one talked about it, but Gar was pretty sure they all agreed she was a witch. And now she said this about her dad—could that be where her abilities came from? Were they about to find out the truth of her powers?
But then Raven fixed him with a chilly look. "Why, do you believe him?"
And Gar got pulled hard back to reality, and was forced to reshelf everything he thought he was about to find out about Raven. "Um, I mean, I don't know."
"Here's hoping he's a run of the mill lunatic," she said, and dropped her eyes. "Part of me thinks he's just poking at me. To remind me he's there. That he could ruin my whole life in a second if he wanted to."
"But, I thought you said you felt safe in Azarath," said Gar, sitting at the other side of her.
"What I said is that I feel as safe in Azarath as I do anywhere. But I really don't think we're safe anywhere." Raven's voice was resignation itself. "My mom likes to think that as long as we don't hear from him, it means he doesn't know where we are. I don't agree. I think he always knows exactly where we are. There's no point in running."
There was a stretch of silence.
Vic had just figured out what it was she'd said that sounded off to him. "Raven. You've had your phone for a few months. But you say you haven't seen your dad since you were little. …So how did he get your number?"
Raven's face didn't change. She pointed a finger at Vic semi-sardonically. "Exactly."
The boys exchanged a look.
Vic stood. "Raven, you have to do what you think is best."
Raven saw the deep sadness in his eyes. Their reactions continued to move her.
She looked at Gar next, silently asking what he thought. Gar was holding his elbows and looking away, and biting his lower lip as if to physically keep from talking. When he felt her gaze, he looked at her and solemnly nodded in Vic's endorsement, like he didn't trust himself to keep holding back if he spoke.
When she saw her friends out, Gar kept staring at her with big eyes, and moved slowly, like he didn't want to leave her house. As the boys walked away, he gave her the impression of a wet dog walking in the rain.
Afterwards, Raven went back to her room. She knew Arella would be in one of the group talks Azarath offered, but that was one of the things the shelter promoted that had never clicked to Raven. She had always preferred to meditate alone.
Once she felt done with her meditation, Raven picked out her father's letter again. She looked it over, much as she had been doing before her friends arrived, but now the action felt different.
She'd never opened up so much about her father before. Up until this point, she realized, everyone in her life had either already known all about him, or were to be kept in the dark about all of it. She'd never had to explain him herself.
It had been hard to start; every word had felt like she was inventing language anew just to talk about him. But then it got easier—the words had tumbled one after the other, and she could feel Trigon's presence in her mind diminishing as she did.
He wasn't a mountainous secret of hers and Arella and Azarath anymore; he was a sad reality she had shared with two of her best friends. And even if that limited him, even if the portrait she'd painted of him today wasn't true—it helped. It was comforting. It felt like she could actually take some of his power away.
Floods and fires and earthquakes. The news articles he'd sent were all of disasters, but there was another link if you looked close enough: the focus of every stories was how human nature had made things worse. One was about groups stealing relief for flood victims, another of a company profiting off the fires by shutting the running water and overpricing bottled water; there were refugees turned away at borders, people shunned by a community in the midst of disaster. Was it a prophecy? A warning? Was he telling her he'd nudged some of it? Was he setting something in motion? Did he just want to scare her and ruin her day? For her to sit there wondering what he meant?
She'd even come to think he knew about her Club –it was hard to think there was something about her life he wouldn't know-, and this was him telling her I am more powerful than you. No matter what you do to counter me, no matter what puny little good you put into the world, I can put a thousand times more evil in it.
And then a part of her wondered whether it was all meaningless. Whether he just poked at her every once in a while because he knew Arella would freak out and move them away. Whether his real plan wasn't to ruin her life every few years, and for Raven to grow up detached, with no ties to places or people.
Maybe that was why her friends' reactions to her leaving their lives had struck her as so extraordinary, so much like something out of a movie. In the back of her mind she'd always been sure, she realized now, that there would be a point where her group of friends disbanded. She'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for other reason other than because things in her life had always ended before. But her friends' friendship had been relentless, and now, when the worst had happened again, when she'd come to the point where things usually ended, they weren't letting go easily. She didn't want to let go either.
Could it be she was in the right place for the first time in her life? Could it be she finally had something worth staying for, something worth standing up for?
Once, as a child, when Raven and Arella still lived with Trigon, Raven had stood up to him. Just once.
He'd been yelling. He liked to stand there and yell, and after that he'd knock them around for good measure. Raven didn't remember what he'd been yelling about. But she remembered climbing on a chair and yelling back in his face as loud as she could; and then she threw her fist across his face as hard as she could manage. She remembered the silence after, and being disappointed when she saw all her strength didn't even translate to a mark on his face.
Then he'd laughed. Raven had the sensation that she'd done something very right and very wrong at the same time. Because she could feel her mother's horror behind her back, and her father had never looked prouder. Raven had felt glad he was proud, and she'd hated that she was glad.
After they got to Azarath, they had told her what she'd done wasn't the correct response, and it must never happen again, and she must contain herself. But, even as a child, Raven remembered secretly thinking it had been the correct response then. Trigon had laughed, he'd been proud, and he'd laid off them for a few days; she'd gratified him, and she had become a horrible thing in order to do it, but she'd gotten a good thing, which was a degree of peace. Right and wrong was a balance.
Years later, Raven had come to think that might have been the event that convinced Arella to finally leave. The fear of her daughter turning out like Trigon might have been what tipped the scale for her. In reality, she had no idea—but it was possible. So how bad of a thing had it been to stand up to him, in the end, if it had gotten them away?
She hadn't let loose like that in years—not until today, when she lost it with Mr. Light. If her mother knew about that incident, she'd think the worst was happening. Her daughter was going to turn out like Trigon. Raven knew she'd been out of line with her teacher; her scariness had been overkill with him. But all of her strength didn't have to be bad. Not if she could use it to make a stand against her father. How else did you fight evil, but paying in kind?
Yep, this is my version on Trigon, squarely in the middle of my magic realism world: something halfway between his canon demon self and an everyday narcissistic dad.
Next chapter (which is already written, edited, and in the drafts :D) ends the arc of this Month! For better or for worse!
~The Lighthouse
