If you've been reading the whole story, this chapter is probably really different from the rest, in respect to the fact that its been over a year since I wrote the last chapter and not only have my overall writing styles changed, but I as a person have, too. Like, dude, there was a point in my life where I would refuse to be anything other than a princess for Halloween and now the color pink physically hurts my eyes. And yellow. And really bright green. And pretty much my entire mindset has changed and although I have no fucking clue what label I am, the closest thing I would be is emo/punk/goth. Yeah, idk, either, you're not alone. But—oh, WAIT. I forgot, you don't care what societal label I am, now do you. I remember now, I was writing a story. Back to that, then.

Chapter 11: And I held that small girl in my arms and I watched as her breathing slowed, and her chest stopped moving up and down, up and down, and her blood kept spilling from her mouth and onto my hands but I didn't care as I hugged her tightly to my chest.

The blood.

Spilling.

Like a fountain, the blood.

Red rain.

Rain.

Lluvia.

Blood.

The blood.

Her blood.

Her last blood.

Pale skin.

Jutting bones.

Cold skin.

So, so cold.

And red.

With her blood.

Cold and red and raining.

And,

Death.

Dude, I claim the right to take away the fact that x's and o's equal hugs and kisses. I now deem them skulls and crossbones. XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

It was all over, she was dead. I barely knew her; I never would. She was a stranger, she was a nobody, she was small and insignificant and weak and fragile and if you were to hold a gun to her head you would be able to see the fear in her eyes. She was young, she was innocent, she was honest, she was empty, she was full, she was nothing and no one and unimportant and life would go on whether or not she was there going on with everyone else.

And yet she was everywhere, she plagued me, haunted my dreams and inundated my conscience with guilt and grief and despair and just go. Look up all the synonyms for sorrow on dictionary dot fucking com because honestly that would be a lot easier than naming every terrible feeling that wracked my petite frame. my entire mindset shuddered with empty sobs, dry eyes and dry cheeks and no salty taste in my mouth where the tears all collect, but a heart heavy with rainy tears, rainy blood; bloody rain. Lluvia. Oh, oh, red rain; rainy, rainy red.

And I wish Edgar Allen Poe was here to string my thoughts into something beautifully corrupt and broken and so filthy with sorrow that it couldn't be anything but powerful and woe is me because I can't find the words, cant find a payphone to call Robin, can't find the willpower to use my telepathy and he's so far, far away that I feel as though I've lost him, too.

And God, this fucking hurts because that's what death does to a person—rips your heart out, wrings it until all the dying blood and the new blood mix together and its all just a brownish-red slush and then feeds the dried up carcass to hungry dogs. And all you can do is watch the teeth of the hounds tear away at something that used to be yours and oh god, oh god, oh my fucking—veins are severed, stuck between molars and I don't think I could ever joke about spinach being stuck in someone's teeth ever again, because this little girl just turned my heart into a freaking spinach omelet and that is not now, nor will it ever be flattering.

A little girl that was a stranger, a nobody, a small, insignificant, weak, fragile, young, innocent, honest, empty, unimportant person that would fucking cry if you held death to her head, loaded, cocked, trigger ready, safe-guard down the freaking drain. Rain. Lluvia. She was everywhere and nothing I do does really anything to help.

Not that I've really tried to do much yet. But I'm Raven. I'm a Teen fucking Titan—the emotionless one, the apathetic one that couldn't give a shit whether or not you were the saddest heap of limbs in the world, the one bleeding her heart out to dogs for some girl she didn't even know.

The culmination of something so big and so wrong and yet so inevitable tore away at me but you can only lose so much blood before you pass out. I wanted to cry, wanted my mask to crack and crumple and curl away under moistened salt because I had failed and I had let someone die. In my arms. I let someone down—how can anyone trust me anymore? I can't even trust myself to hold back the tears because the public eye is everywhere and yet it seems so insignificant next to the way that some girl named after weather could make my knees buckle and my head spin.

I feel like I'm going to wake up tomorrow with a hangover, without even at least having the fun of being drunk.

And I'm clearly sober, despite the fact that I'm fucking high on the depressants my body has released within myself and—can you OD on your own body's natural defense system? God I hope so, because this was a new kind of pain I had never experience before.

I felt so…strange.

Like I had just witnessed a new part of life that as much as you wish you could just ignore it, you just can't.

Because it's physically impossible for human beings to grasp the concept of utopianism.

And, god, I'm not even human, but I feel so weak and vulnerable and so utterly incapable of holding back the emotions that I usually numb down so easily. And if that's not the telltale mark of a human then you can start calling me Starfire and let me run around in obscenely short skirts. No, really, I'm serious. Because when you're in shit this deep, you can't not be serious because for Christ's—someone just died. Someone I could've saved, someone that deserved to be saved—someone that was maybe more human than everybody else just died and after the Cremation Service is done with her she'll be physically gone, too.

I'm so confused. I feel so utterly broken and just plain empty without all its connotations and implications and underlying subtexts and I'm just so empty. It feels like where my, let's say liver, should be, there's this gap and apparently as of now I'm liver-less and I feel like I'm about to die because of it. But I don't even deserve that much.

Because I. Let. Someone. Die.

And there was so much more I could do.

And yet, I feel like I just fulfilled another part of my life, completed another mandatory task needed to conclude my life. I feel blessed to have met this girl and I feel honored and I almost feel like I don't deserve it, but I know now that I had met someone truly beyond their years. Lluvia. There's something almost royal or majestic about the way her name rolls off my tongue and out into the confines of my mind and even Nevermore can't handle that much and it's just a word so intense that it needs to roll off my tongue into a place much broader than just my mind, some place in all its grandeur that—

"Lluvia."

"Yes, dear? Did you say something?" asked an elderly nurse. Her white, almost translucent hair did nothing to compliment the chalky pallid rubber of her forehead—and yet even she seemed more important than I did, I had to hold some kind of awe and respect for her: someone so withered by age and troubles and burdened by worries and fears and swollen with inflated joy handling everyday the sick, sad patients of the hospital. Her white hair and white skin and white outfit with the matching white shoes and hair blended in with the white walls and the white tiled linoleum floor and the white ceilings and white fluorescent lights that I wasn't completely unfathomable in my wondering if she, too, was dead. Or on the verge of death. Either way she came back to this place everyday to try and inspire hope in others despite the possibility of nagging tensions within her own mind—forced to fake a smile with enough mastery to pass it off as a genuine smile and make others, in turn, smile back.

"No. Yes—I'm sorry to bother you, but would you show me to the nearest payphone?"

She gave me an understanding smile as she realized that I had held Lluvia as she had bled into my arms.

Which was kinda obvious by the drying brown stains and the way they caught and reflected white lights oh so well. She pointed out the closest PAYPHONE sign, indicating towards the white piece of plaster jutting out of the wall, wearing a black telephone symbol on it. Dark black contrasting bright white—standing out, tall and proud for all to see and—yeah, now I'm getting just a bit too emotional and I have to take several deep breaths before I start making profound metaphorical connections between life and death and everything within a 20 foot radius of me.

It took me a moment to remember why I was standing in front of a payphone—something that under normal circumstances I would never have needed. Maybe I was a bit inebriated, after all.

I dialed the familiar digits of Robin's cellular phone, which I had come to love due to its eternal services and the fact that it was practically glued to Robin's hip.

I waited for it to ring, and when the "The number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. If you wish to leave a message, wait for the beep."

Beep.

Came, I just sighed deeply to clear my mind which was already becoming cloudy again with the thoughts I couldn't fight off.

"Hey, Robin. Uhm..hi. I-I'm at the hospital. I'm at Jump City Hospital, visiting Lluvia. We…talked. She's really nice and very unique and, she's something completely different, and oh god, uhm."

Sigh.

"Sh-she died, Robin. She's..She…in my arms, Robin—she died in my arms, and I-I held her as she died in my arms and I'm just so. Yeah. You probably get it, I guess. Just, I figure my minute or so to rant is almost up, so just…just wait up for me to get home; don't try to contact me, I just need time to think and..stuff. Just wait up for me, okay? I, uh, I-I. I love you, Robin. I'll see you at home. Bye."

I placed the phone back in its cradle, its long coil jangling around before settling back into quiet placidity. The soles of my boots seemed to clank loudly in the quiet halls until I neared the busier and louder entrance hall.

Everyone here is wearing one of two colors: black or white, and I feel very conspicuous, in my dark blue cloak. I feel as though everyone is watching me; my every move, every step, every blink, breath, the way my fingers clutched pathetically at the him of my cloak, pulling it closer to my body, hiding the bloodstains as though I had murdered her. And it felt like I had, too. I pulled my hood up over my head, taking a deep breath and closing my eyes briefly, taking a moment to pull myself the fuck together. I exhaled sharply, feeling my own breath against my chin and when I opened my eyes again everything was so much clearer, so much steadier and it felt like the violent tremors that had previously possessed my spine were, at least for now, gone; at least for now, Nevermore had shut up; at least for now, I could find the strength to make it back home before the I remembered the fact that I was scared shitless.

Oh god, so, so scared.

Never before had I been so scared before. I didn't even know why I was scared, I just knew that I was and that I was in desperate need of meditation, my tea, Robin—anything to keep my mind from wandering back to the life that had ended. And for once in my life I couldn't get all the thoughts to just go away like they had done countless times before, and for once in my life I had never been so eager to put them all away, put them all aside, shove them back somewhere far, far behind my eyes. All I wanted to do was go crawl into a hole in the middle of nowhere with tea, my mirror, and Robin and maybe never come back out, because my little foxhole in the ground was so much warmer and cozier than the bombshell-littered world waiting outside.

And yet I couldn't be more anxious to get out of that hospital, out those glass doors and maybe wash off this filth that is suddenly everywhere and all over my hands and crisping all over the front of my uniform.

I stepped out into the dimming light, finding solace in the sun's slow descent. I was fine just watching life move on without me, without the Teen Titans, able to function on its own without the help of five teenagers.

What an achievement, right?

I couldn't help but love this city, though, in all its industrialized, polluted air. Even with its oozing monsters and scheming villains, people managed to go about their lives as normally as possible, managed to raise a family, make friends, and go out on Friday nights with a couple of high-on-life college roommates.

My mind just a little bit clearer, and the world just a bit humbler, I could now slowly make my way back to Titans Tower.

Make my way back home.

And frankly, I would keep the blood that flows in my veins pumping that much harder for the blood that no longer flowed in Lluvia's.

And I was okay with that.

Fuck! No matter how hard I try, I can never write very much. Oh well. Idc enough to do anything about it. This is NOT the last chapter, but either the next one or the one after that will be. Um…I'm not creative enough to think of a better AN than that, so w/e.