Don't own teen titans, sadly.
For Nothing, For Everything...For the Birds
Prologue: Still
------------------------------------------------------------
He sat, watching her, still as night itself, and just as invisible.
Her.
He wondered when he began to crave the sight of her so...undeniably.
Obsession was a familiar consort of his, but this new point of focus perplexed him like a stranger with no name. He watched her as she turned and walked from one side of the roof to the other, swinging her legs over the side, leaning slightly on her hands as her hood slipped off.
And still he watched.
Her hair had gotten longer, a little past her shoulder, reminiscent of the day she had blown her dear father back to Hell where he so definitely belonged. The watcher held back a scoff of absolute disgust. Through that ordeal he himself had learned that lords of Hell had no finesse, a finesse that he had much skill and therefore much clout in. Stirred out of his musings as the object of his secret desire—not love, he didn't believe himself capable of such a thing any longer—shifted restlessly in the starlight.
Skin that by others might be considered a pallid grey appeared to him as a luminescent nameless shade.
Absently he got the urge to move that soft curtain of purple away from her face, out of her eyes so that he might gaze at them without her knowing. He suspected the muscles in his armored fingers of aching with that desire and shrugged it off. That in itself was too affectionate a want; he had long since convinced himself it was fine to desire, to lust. They were after all rather sinful things and sin was mostly what he had made his life about, granted sin with an elegant touch, but sin nonetheless. Fondness was a definite taboo though.
Obsession he could deal with, had dealt with, would deal with.
And while obsession was, he admitted, never healthy, this one was particularly troublesome in that it still would not go away.
Still.
Still, after many months of training, many days of channeling his hate in the general direction of the titans indiscriminately, many hours of harnessing his darkness, she called to him without even the slightest attempt to do so.
It burned him really, to be gripped so wholly, so unknowingly by a child. Was he turning to pedophilia? He hoped not and crushed the thought with the obvious. If memory served right, she was more than eighteen, if only a little.
No longer a child.
Not that it mattered.
Age difference aside, besotted with the enemy was never a good state to be in.
With that thought, a dual colored mask disappeared into the shadows from whence he so often came, his vision fraught with a beautiful, silent raven.
------------------------------------------------------------
The girl he had watched, now somewhere at that threshold of womanhood and adolescence, exhaled roughly into the wind, making waves break at the base of the T Tower's island in oddly shaped half-circles. Unaware of the eyes that had up until seconds earlier been on her, she let her own wander over the edges of the night, relaxing into her solitude and frowned. Even all these years later, emotions more under control, wisdom closer to the surface than rage and the team still rock-solid together, she found herself much suited to quality time with herself. Comfort didn't necessarily incite peace though.
Raven Roth wished a little that the time she spent with her fellow titans was less forced. She made efforts hoping those efforts would become unconscious, natural. But it was not to be, it seemed. She still made better friends with books and old scrolls, made better connections and felt safer in the confines of her barely lit room. On top of that, she longed for the few emotions she did feel to rescind from her heart.
"Can't sleep?" a calm voice asked behind her and those emotions reeled in surprise even if her outward demeanor hardly flickered.
"A dare I call it 'trendy' happening of late," she smirked with a dry sarcasm that was not at all unkind, but humorous.
"No rest for the wicked," the boy wonder quipped, settling beside her on the edge of the tower. His stare was unhidden even behind his eye mask as he scrutinized his dark friend. Robin had long since stopped berating himself for detailing her with such a quality, having learned the very fine line between what it was to be dark and what it was to be absolutely evil. In fact, he often felt himself more guilty of the latter than Raven herself, half-demon or not.
She had not agreed to be the apprentice of what Robin considered the very embodiment of said evil. She had not conjured some self-destructive thief in the night in order to quench his unhealthy thirst for justice and excessive obsession with that one particular villain of questionable origin. She had never given up.
He doubted, briefly, that she had ever considered such a thing. Raven, he thought with the smallest bit of envy, did not believe in surrender.
"We're not wicked," Raven said carefully, her articulation and inflection indicating all that she did not say.
"My choice of words is never as good as yours," he admitted, a hand running through his hair that was, due to the time of night or early morning, sans gel. The empath only now noticed this and quirked what appeared to be a small smile, not a smirk or a sneer or anything like that. This was one of those rare Raven smiles that was something you had to look for, something that Robin had only recently noticed himself looking for more and more when he spoke with her.
"Well, you have your technology and I have my books. We're all entitled to our areas of strength, boy blunder," Raven said.
"Are you insinuating I'm not well-read?" he arched an eyebrow at her, slightly insulted and more so amused.
"I'm not 'insinuating' anything. It's a fact," her deadpan assertion.
"I think I'm being insulted," he mused.
"Smart little bird," she mussed his hair without thinking, meaning it to be a playful gesture, like one she would partake in with beast boy or even Starfire, if with less enthusiasm. It didn't quite turn out that way as the dark-haired young man before her tilted his head to one side, as though considering something and, with another unconscious movement, brought his own hand to encircle her wrist.
"I'm not little," his words were not meant to be a whisper. He blamed it on the sea breeze, not relinquishing his hold on her and Raven forgot to breathe as she realized their closeness. Now, in the past there would have been shattered windows, probably a totaled T.V. set and a general power outage, among other things.
And he hadn't even made a real move yet.
Luckily this was not the past and Raven's well-practiced emotions settled for what resembled a very strange game of ring-around-the-rosy in her head as her leader and friend absently rubbed her wrist with his fingers in gentle circles, a lover's caress, even if he didn't know it.
"You're going to bring me that sleep I couldn't attain if you don't stop that," she tried joking since pulling away would have been way too revealing. To her combined relief and dismay, he was not the least bit put off.
"Funny, I'm more awake than I was before," he inched closer to her, breath a warm wave of shared air on her lips. That was it, she had no other option, she reasoned and gently, oh so gently, moved away, just out of his reach, her wrist slipping from his tender hold. "Raven?" he asked so much with just her name.
The moon glowed like a large pearl in an ocean of black and blue as she pushed herself to her feet and took a few precautionary steps farther away from his hurt expression, away from his confusion.
"It's not wise," she chose her words with the greatest care, as usual. She need not say more than the hardly palpable truth.
"I don't care," he wielded his like a weapon and a shield all in one.
"I do," she replied and turned and descended into the tower without another of her well-thought out words of expert detachment.
Robin sighed. He'd known pretty much that she would retreat into her shell, not that he blamed her. Since the defeat—however temporary—of her father, Raven had made clear attempts to renew her emotions, to reshape herself to each one, wanting to experience what she was now allowed. But so many years of not being able to seemed to have harshly handicapped the dark-eyed girl and she still found very minimal joy in their group outings or even innings.
The fight with her father had brought him a gift that showed him beyond doubt the truth of his feelings. He had literally been more than willing to not only go to Hell but to go there with his most hated nemesis, all for her. And he didn't think it noble or above others that he had done it. He knew of course that he would have done it for any of them.
But afterward...
After she, Raven, all by herself, had stood against Trigon the terrible, after she had blown him back to the nothing place he deserved, after the sun came out again, she had said something in her quiet, measured voice:
"Somebody believed."
And how could he not? How could he not believe in the most hopeful person he had ever known?
But her words came across like a glimmer of something no one had dared to believe was in her ability to experience, much less share: love. Pure and without the shadow of anything—not her father, not her own self-convoluted thoughts, not his own doubts that were there as he was very human—her words said 'love' without even trying. And she wasn't trying. She was just feeling, finally, after all that time, she had been feeling and nothing had been exploding in to a million little pieces.
Robin had an inkling she didn't even realize that the smile she gave him was a brilliant one, a lover's smile; in fact he knew she didn't and it made his chest tighten with the knowledge that maybe the only time she would say something with such loving care to him was when she was unaware.
That was just one moment.
And that was the world to him suddenly, the tenderness in her inflection, the light of her smile, the comfortable way she fit against him as she latched uncharacteristically onto him in a soft approach rather unlike the usual kindly but air-depriving tackle of Starfire or the right-out attack of Kitten.
Raven had hugged him. Raven didn't hug people; it was practically a rule! But there she was with her slender arms wrapped around him and after the initial barrage of shock he had been certain the other titans were experiencing passed, he'd simply stroked her hair and smiled with his reply.
If anyone had had any reservations about her, her more than incredible hand in the revival of the world had thoroughly erased it.
There could be no question about it.
She cared for the titans beyond any misgivings, beyond what any of them could compare with really. She hadn't been kidding when she said that they raised her. To her, the titans were and would always be her only family, the people that she loved. Raven did love them. Robin knew that too.
And he loved her. They all did of course, but Robin...he sighed.
Love meant so many things: loss, hope, pain, euphoria...and to him, love was quite simply Raven. He'd admitted it to himself some time ago but not to her, never to her. It would make her feel cornered, no matter how he went about it. He'd learned as much from their recent conversations or shared silences. And still...Robin's brow furrowed as he glared at nothing, intending the glare fully for himself.
Still he'd almost—or had already, quite possibly—stepped over the line...
Still he'd nearly taken what he had wanted for so long, nearly thrown caution to the non-existent winds and shown her how much he cared, how much he longed for her...
Still he'd let himself forget that important thing.
Raven's space was her safety net.
And he had invaded it.
He cursed himself and his hormones—not in quite that order—and returned to the tower himself, pondering how to soothe the ruffled feathers of his companion bird while unbeknownst to him, several uncharted miles away, an old enemy of theirs mulled mirthlessly over his own begrudged feelings for the dark empath.
------------------------------------------------------------
I don't know if this is something worth continuing but let me know if you've got a sec.
Thankies!
:waves and disappears to find chocolate:
-Rei