Ashes

"A fire can't burn forever. Eventually it consumes itself." –Brian Fitzgerald, My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

After his mother died, his father had her ashes scattered in their backyard. "This is what she wanted, Victor," he told him. "To be with her family even after she died. To be able to watch over her flowers while she watches over you, through your window, just like she used to."

Sometimes he thinks that might be why he left home. It's not that he's mad, and its not that he doesn't believe that's what she wanted. It's just that it creeped him out too much to know that it was what she wanted. To think about her watching him from the backyard every night, to have that constant reminder of how his life used to be, before the accident and before she died. To know that even though she was always there, she was never there, she never would be there, not really. Not even her body was really there. He wishes she had wanted to be buried, not cremated, so that at the very least she'd be whole. After a while, he just couldn't stay in that house anymore, couldn't be surrounded by the bits and pieces of her burnt up body and his burnt up life.

When he smells the fire burning in the living room, his first reaction is fear. What could be burning at three in the morning? Is a villain attacking?

It's not until he opens the door and sees her there that he realizes what's going on. The fireplace. Of course. It's harmless. Fire can be. He forgets that sometimes. He feels paranoid, stupid for expecting the worst, but for some reason the musky, earthy scent of burning cedar wood always smells more like burning flesh to him.

"Hey, Rae," he says, sitting down on the couch just a few feet away from her. She opens her eyes and looks up at him from where she's sitting, lotus-legged, suspended just above the gray carpet. Her face is half-shadowed, half glistening in the light of the flame.

"What are you doing out here?" he asks.

"Can't a girl sit by the fire while she meditates?" she replies. "It's not a crime." She shuts her eyes again, and he can tell she's not interested in talking, but he's not letting her off that easy.

"Never said it was," he tells her. "But it's three a.m. Why aren't you asleep?"

"Why aren't you?" she retorts. The fire crackles.

He tries to suppress a grin. He should have expected her to ask that. Should have known, the minute he sat down, that if he wanted her to talk about what was on her mind, he'd have to spill his. "I'll tell you if you tell me," he suggests.

"I don't need to know, then," she says, her eyes closed, hands resting palms-up on her knees. She breaks into her familiar mantra, the one he knows by heart. Azarath metrion… Azarath metrion…. Sometimes he thinks he hears those words in the middle of the night, but he's never quite figured out if what he's hearing is really her, kept up late by insomnia dreams, or if its just his head, beating out some kind of sick insomnia nightmare of its own. Azarath metrion… Azarath metrion… Azarath metrion zinthos.

"Alright," he says, "I'll go first then." She opens one eye, glares at him with it.

"You're not giving up, are you?" she asks.

"Nope," he replies. She sighs, a short huff of a breath.

"Fine," she says dryly. "What are you doing up at three, Cyborg?"

"Hungry," he jokes. "Wanted to see if Ming-Ming's Twenty-Four Hour Chinese is really twenty-four hours"

"You're a jerk," she tells him. Then she closes her eyes again, hums out her chant, azarath metrion zinthos azarath metrion zinthos... Clearly, he's not getting off easy either.

"And," he admits, "I couldn't stop thinking about Beast Boy. About what he said about Terra being back."

This catches her attention. Her eyes open sharply, and when she looks at him he thinks she might be trying to calculate the things inside his head. Then he remembers that even he can't actually do that.

"What about it?" she asks. Her voice is flat but he sees something in her eyes. Maybe it's the same churning feeling he has in his stomach right now, but probably it's just the reflection of the fire, of the little sparking embers doing suicide leaps off the top of the flames. They turn to cold black pebbles, ashes, as they crash-land on the stony fireplace floor.

"Just wondering if she really is back," he answers. "Wondering how it could have happened. Do you think something we tried might have worked after all?" She looks away, stares at the flames.

"No" she says. Her face seems to burn as the fire illuminates it but her voice is ice white. "I don't."

"Then do you think it was something she did?" he asks. "Do you think she was conscious under all the rock, and she somehow figured out how to use her powers and…"

"Do you want to know what I think?" she snaps, suddenly glowering at him with fire-red eyes. "I think that when the volcano went off, she didn't stop it. She contained it. I think that entire room filled with lava, and the only place it couldn't fill was the place where she was standing. Then, once that lava finished burning everything in its path, her powers cleared it out, and filled in the spaces it left. "

"Meaning…"

"Meaning," she finishes, "that she was dead before the rock even touched her body."

He sets his elbows on his knees and rests his chin against his hands. "Like Pompeii…" he muses, and he wonders if she's right. And he thinks he might have known this for a long time, but he's just never been as brave as she's being right now. Brave enough to say it out loud.

"She's never coming back," he says, and he wonders how he's brave enough to do so.

"No," she replies. "No, she's not."

And this is their burden. Maybe Robin and Starfire carry it too, but he thinks that it couldn't possibly be as heavy for them. They haven't felt the rock in their hands and wondered if it's really her bones, her skin, her heart. And anyway, they have each other to lift it. He is unspeakably jealous of Robin for that, because Robin hasn't had to sit and watch Star's heart get set on fire and know that there is nothing he will ever be able to do to put that fire out

"Do you think he'll ever be able to accept that she's gone?" she asks, suddenly. The fire flickers off her eyes, making them sparkle like the splintered glass of a shattered window, broken and inappropriately beautiful.

"No," he tells her. "I don't."

When she shuts her eye again, whispers those same three words, the ones he hears in what he thinks must be his dreams, he knows that she's just trying not to cry. And he stares into the flames, wondering how long it will be before they're gone, waiting for them to burn themselves down into nothing but a pile of black dust on the floor. And he wonders how this became his life. Watching over the ashes and wishing he could put them back together and knowing that he can't. Because once something burns out, that's it. You can't light it back up again.

Author's Notes

This take place just after Things Change, I guess. This idea just wouldn't leave me alone. I've actually had that Pompeii thing in my head for over a year, and I just had to find a way to use it. And this is what happened. I ended up writing the first draft while I sitting in a coffee shop. I just had this idea and I had to do something with it. The science of that theory is probably really off, but I tried.

I like Cyborg. He's such a good guy. I think he has a lot of perspective on life that the other Titans aren't quite old enough to have. Which makes him a natural advice giver and shoulder to lean on for them. But it's also isolating for him. He's trying to be the adult. He's protective of their emotions. Robin and Starfire don't need him for that, they have each other. But Beast Boy and Raven are both so emotionally messed up in such different ways, and the Terra thing makes that worse. This story is mostly just about how I think Cyborg feels about the whole Terra thing. I think Cyborg is trying to protect both of them, at once, even when their well-beings conflict with one another's and even when they conflict with his own. At the end of the day, there's so little he can do. I think he knows that and I think it really upsets him.

When I was in, like, fifth or sixth grade, I was nuts about Cyborg and Raven as a couple. I sort of forgot about it for a while but recently I realized how much I really do like it. I don't think I could ever write a real romance for them, though. They're too stuck. I know the producers have said Beast Boy and Raven don't have feelings for each other, but, um, the producers are so wrong. I don't support BBxRae at all. I don't even really like it that much. But when I'm watching the show, it's so obvious to me that she has feelings for him. I just don't think he reciprocates, or is even really aware of, those feelings. So I wonder if Cyborg and Raven and BB and Terra are just sort of stuck in this never-ending chain of emotions that no one quite knows to how break out of.

Um, by the way, I don't necessarily agree with Cyborg and Raven's theory that Terra is dead. I do think the Things Change girl is Terra. But, uh, they don't know that.

Also, I'm pretty sure the main room doesn't actually have a fireplace. Or at least, there's never been one shown on screen. But I guess there could be one hidden in the wall somewhere, right?