Chapter Text
The pallid wash of Terra’s face was cast in stark relief against the blackening sky, her mouth pulled into a tiny “o” of surprise, her finger still hovering by the buzzer, mid-air. Raven watched her gloved hand drop haltingly back to her side.
The flood lights mounted above the Tower’s entrance automatically switched on, insubordinate to the dark. Their wan yellow light seemed to spotlight Terra, like a performer on-stage. Raven could guess at the power of such performances.
She stood with her arms crossed over the chest of her sweater, one thin eyebrow arched expectantly. It was plain that Terra was surprised—if not entirely dismayed—that she should be her greeter, this dark-eyed demon, the telekinetic powerhouse of Titan’s West. It wasn’t hard to guess who she’d been hoping for—although Raven supposed any of the other titans would have been a more welcome sight to Terra than herself.
As Terra fumbled through an awkward opener, Raven studied her sweat-beaded face. The years had changed her—no longer was Terra in the role of skinny child, sunburnt and lonely. She was taller now, with muscle in place of skin and bones. Her face seemed harder, fuller, but beneath the shade of her baseball cap the skin was still smooth and freckled, albeit the white pucker of a scar across her left cheek. That same blonde hair still peeked out from under the brim of her baseball cap and behind her shoulders, but Raven noticed that she’d cut it—flaxen wisps broken loose from her ponytail curled aimlessly at the cusp of her collarbones—and guessed that the hack job was self-inflicted. She was dressed civilian-style, white keds and blue jeans, a soft t-shirt, a Jags cap. Indiscernible from the masses, which Raven supposed was exactly what Terra had been aiming for.
A part of Raven enjoyed watching Terra squirm, the geomancer’s body language restless and awkward, her words jumbled, how are you, um, so, hi. But when Terra segwayed into “you might be wondering why I’m here . . .” Raven lifted a hand to stop her.
“I know why you’re here.”
This also seemed to shock Terra. She blinked slowly, once, twice. Those eyes—deep and wide and blue—had also not changed. In fact, they seemed startlingly frozen in time. It was all Raven could do to stare back into them.
“You. . .do?” The blonde asked, skeptically.
Raven grimaced. “Yes,” She repeated, matter-of-fact. A more honest answer would have been sort of, but it wasn’t exactly as if honesty was owed here.
When Robin had mentioned the night before that a member of Titan’s East would be paying the Tower a visit—to correct a T-Comm issue, is all, he’d said—Raven had scarcely looked up from her book. The rest of the team had expressed similar levels of disinterest in the news. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time an honorary was dispatched to the Tower. The T-Comms had proven invaluable in their fight against the Brotherhood, and continued to connect the team to super-powered allies across the globe—but the network was new, the system fallible. In the years since the Brotherhood’s fall, they’d all done their fair share of fine-tuning the comms.
But she’d woken the next morning queasy and dissociative—a feeling that had only worsened as the day dragged on. She’d sipped herbal tea from a chipped blue mug while the rest of her team busied themselves with their morning meal, willing the warm water to settle her stomach as Starfire and Robin brushed up against each other in the kitchen, flipping pancakes and bacon like it was foreplay.
Then had come the pulsing in her temples—a slow, steady mantra of pain. She’d slipped from the common room not long afterward, leaving the sizzling of bacon behind. But even in the darkness of her own room, with the curtains drawn fast and the candles burning low, her headache had only grown worse.
Migraine, she told Robin when he stopped by her room later. But the truth of it was much worse. He’d retreated quickly, quietly, with hardly so much as a follow-up question. She supposed it was then that she’d first known.
The pulsing in her head had only grown more insistent, an incessant need to be felt. Once in a while, its steady rhythm became erratically punctuated by bursts of panic—flashes of fear that left her hands shaking, her shoulders twitching. When Robin called the team to order in the common room after lunch, it was all Raven could do to slide silently onto the couch, cloak drawn and eyes closed.
"Migraine," Robin had repeated, before Beast Boy could berate her with questions.
“Alright, team,” Robin started, his voice politely lowered. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing much trouble today. I’ve logged a few civilian reports of suspicious activity by the docks—namely missing boat engines and electronics. But no villain sightings, at least. Cyborg, do you think you’d be able to go down there today, maybe talk to some people, gather evidence?”
“Sus out the vibe, you mean.” Beast Boy chimed in, helpfully.
“Sure.” Robin nodded. “Beast Boy, you can go with him.”
“Alright!”
Raven could hear the grin in his voice, see that toothy smile even with her eyes firmly shut. She felt the couch shift beside her a little, heard the cool smack of skin on steel as Cyborg cuffed the back of Beast Boy’s head with a metal palm. Robin must have shifted his eyes to Starfire then, because she heard the alien’s lilting voice beside her. “Yes?”
“Star,” Robin murmured, as if half in thought. Raven could hear him tapping at the holographic pad he always brought to team briefings, scanning the screen for notes. “You have a press release at four–”
“–On the Jump City Bank robbery, I know,” she finished for him, warmly. “I wrote my speech notes last night.” Raven could sense the alien’s blush, a warm hum of feeling that washed over her—it was a welcome (if momentary) interlude from the throbbing in her temples.
Starfire had become quite the media sweetheart in recent years, and eloquent to boot—her constant commercial partnerships with makeup companies and clothing lines had not only invited a steady stream of cash the Titans could use to upgrade their armory and uniforms, but had also forced Star to master the art of public speaking. Gone were the days of her stunted speech and fumbling metaphors; she’d taken naturally to the spotlight, all big smiles and red freckles and I’m just so excited to be here’s, and even the garish Valley Girl accent she’d adopted seemed only to make the public love her more.
“Great job again on handling those robbers on your own,” Robin added, genuinely, and another warm flush washed over Raven’s aura. Softer acclaims came from the rest of her team, Yeah, Star, and Way to go, for real. Raven groped blindly to her left for the alien’s hand and patted it—the best she could offer, right then, by way of support.
There was a long pause that followed, in which Raven sensed through the fog of her brain that Robin was looking at her. Then, in a movement that made her wince, he clapped his hands together and said, “Okay, team! I guess that’s it. Good luck today. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
There was a shifting of seats, a rustling of fabric as her teammates rose to their feet. Raven sighed, pressing her index and middle fingers to either side of her forehead. She could already hear Beast Boy launching into his well-mastered speech on why every mission should begin at Pizza City, along with Cyborg’s groaning rebuttal.
“Oh—don’t forget.” Robin tapped his holopad, two quick taps, halting Beast Boy’s filibuster. “One of the members from Titan’s East is coming to the Tower to deal with those comm issues I mentioned. Probably by this evening.”
“Who?” Raven asked, opening one purple eye, just a crack. From between her eyelashes, she watched Robin stiffen. The movement was barely perceptible, just a tightening of his shoulders, really, but enough for the empath to notice.
“Hm?”
Stalling. “Who are they sending? Do you know?”
“Not sure.” From between her eyelashes, she could see Robin shrug. The rest of the team was already filing out; Raven could sense Starfire lingering by the door, waiting, too, for an answer.
“Definitely not Speedy,” Beast Boy called over his shoulder, laughing, as he and Cyborg slipped from the room. Raven opened both her eyes to look at him. Robin shrugged again, noncommittal, setting the holopad down on the coffee table. She watched him incline his head toward Star before stepping from her line of vision. A wave of panic washed over her, and she closed her eyes once more.
She found Robin in his room some minutes later, where she knew he’d be, pouring over a desk of cluttered files and yellowed papers. Raven knocked on the door frame, three quick raps of her knuckles, before settling against its cool metal edge. Robin spared a glance over his shoulder before returning to his spreadsheets. It was all the invitation she needed.
“Why aren’t you telling them?”
“Telling who what?” Robin countered, not looking up.
“Come on, Robin. We both know who they’re sending.”
“That’s not true,” Robin argued softly. He seemed to hunch even further over his papers. “Speedy didn’t say exactly–”
“I feel her, Robin. We both know.” A long silence followed, punctuated only by the soft rustle of papers as Robin leafed through his notes.
“Don’t you think you should tell them?” Raven prompted, after a moment. “Don’t you think you should at least tell him?”
“I don’t know.” Robin sighed, finally turning from his desk. He leaned back against its edge, and ran a hand down his face. “I don’t know,” He repeated, shrugging. “What I do know is that Terra is the one thing capable of breaking Beast Boy’s concentration—the only thing, really—and I need him to stay focused on the team. We never know when something could happen—”
“It’s been quiet for weeks,” Raven interrupted, ignoring the glimmer of truth beneath his words.
“I”m just saying,” Robin lifted his hands in surrender. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I—I even thought I was going to tell him today, tell the team at the briefing, but—”
“We deserved to know.” Raven cut him off again, annoyed. “How will Starfire react? Or Cyborg? Beast Boy isn’t the only person on this team that Terra hurt.”
Robin studied her for a long moment, his face stolid. Raven could detect only the slightest twitch of his lip, a subtle narrowing of his eyes. She kept her expression an even mask, unreadable, expectant.
“It’s different for them.” He finally sighed, unfolding his hands gently before him. “Starfire will act happy to see her, regardless of how she feels. And Cyborg do his duty to the team. Everyone’s made their peace, more or less.”
“You know what you’re asking, right?”
“I’m not asking you to trust her.” Robin shook his head slowly.
“How is this not asking us to trust her?” Raven paused, a sickening rush of deja vu washing over her. For all the years that had passed, the sting of Terra’s betrayal at times still brought her right back to that street, broken into boulders around a blonde girl in a silver suit—back to that room, mud clogging her throat, her lungs—
“Raven—”
Robin’s voice sounded distant, watery. Azarath, metrion, zinthos. Azarath, metrion, zinthos. The mantra thrummed through her mind, a lifeline back to reality. She did her best to follow it between the splinters of panic that worked to blind her, unmistakably not her own.
“She’s close,” Raven managed, finally, through gritted teeth. She forced her gaze on Robin’s. “You should tell him.”
She swept from the room, half-expecting her team leader to call her back, or follow her out into the labyrinthian halls of the Tower. But he didn’t. There was only silence. Silence—and that pounding in her temples, a quivering at the edges of her mind…
Standing before Terra now, that wash of emotions was almost too much to bear. Raven was desperate to be rid of them, to peel them from her aura like extra layers of skin, despite the sinking feeling in her stomach that told her the worst was yet to come.
“Most of the team is still out.” She sighed, bringing her index and middle finger to her temple. “It’s just me and Robin, for now. Come on, I’ll take you to him.”
Terra looked more than a little relieved by this information. She followed wordlessly as Raven led her inside, through a series of half-lit hallways to the main elevator. The ride up was silent, each of them pressed against an opposite wall, not quite looking at each other. Terra seemed to hesitate on the edge of questions, or maybe answers—but Raven didn’t ask for them, and she didn’t offer any information of her own, either.
The emotion was thick in the elevator, like sludge trapped in a box, so heavy that Raven could scarcely breathe around it. She sensed Terra’s fear, plainly, and the spice of adrenaline; but other things loomed behind them, the distant shapes of feelings she could not discern. It made her uneasy. Raven was thankful when the doors slid open, admitting them into the common room, dispelling the fog.
Robin was sprawled out on the enormous couch, an elbow cushioning his cheek as Curtis and Viper flashed across the TV screen. He rolled to his feet, feigning nonchalance, as a freight train exploded on the screen behind him.
“Terra,” He said, and nothing more. Terra froze halfway into the common room, and the empath reeled with sudden, wild panic. Raven forced a breath out through her nose, steadying the emotion, even as Terra whipped her pale face around to look at her once more.
Raven shot Robin a dark glance. Was that really all he was going to say?
Then, Robin clapped his hands together, causing both girls to jump. “Welcome—uh, well, welcome back.” Robin said, almost cheerfully. Terra’s answering smile could only be described, by Raven, as a grimace.
“It’s been awhile—and, well, we’ve done a lot with the Tower since…” Robin trailed off again. The look of mortification on Terra’s face would have been amusing, if it hadn’t been accompanied by an overwhelming rush of shame and humiliation. As it was, the whole interaction was becoming entirely unbearable for the empath. Raven made a step for the door, her gaze dark as she locked eyes with Robin.
“So—a tour is probably in order.” Robin said, smiling at last. “If you’re up for it, I’ll show you around. Then we can talk T-Comm.”
The look on Terra’s face told Raven there wasn’t much she felt less up for—but the geomancer nodded all the same, fixing her smile into something more genuine as she agreed.
“Great.” Robin gestured toward Raven with his chin, the slightest of motions. A dismissal. Relief washed through her—her own emotion, for once. Wordlessly, the empath slipped through the doors and out of the common room.
She managed to conjure a portal to her room with a lazy wave of her hand before exhaustion slammed into her like a brick wall.
Immediately, Raven sank onto her bed. The mattress seemed to swallow her whole. Through the slit between her curtains, Raven caught a glimpse of the sprawling night and the Jump City skyline beyond. Lights shimmered in her violet eyes, her vision blurred. Too tired to think, she shut them once more.