I padded through the common room in the dead of night, barefoot on the chilly metal floors of the Titan's tower. Raven was seated on the couch, her leg folded beneath her, a book resting against her knee. She didn't glance up as I came in, but I could see her shoulders stiffen in her awareness of me. I pulled a soda from the refrigerator, cracked the tab, and rested back against the counter, noting how her fingers clenched on the book's cover as I took a languid swallow.
"You're not much of a sleeper yourself," I observed conversationally, as if I didn't know all of this already. There wasn't much the comics hadn't told me about her—she's Trigon's daughter, she's half demon, she has major emotional issues that lead to major power problems. Not exactly rocket science, there. Raven turned the page without taking her eyes off the book, but her mouth thinned. She was irritated. And irritation is attention.
I didn't say anything. I waited. I counted to sixteen. That's how long it took her to glance up, her dark, secretive eyes just sparkling a little in the kitchen's subdued light. I smiled, slow, like I'd won something. Because I had.
"You're staring," she said, tonelessly. I shrugged, drank some more. The soda was too sweet, cloying on my teeth. "You're interesting."
That got a snort out of her. A laugh, not an irritated sound. A start. She turned down a corner of her book (obviously horror), and gave me her full attention. "Interesting how? Like a science experiment?" She sounded sarcastic, but there was something behind that. A touch of loneliness. Curiosity. No one ever recognized how often those two emotions were linked.
I rotated the can of cold soda in my hands, the moisture on my hands creating tiny streaks. "No. More like… I understand." I turned my head to her, looking at the odd ways in which her shadow fell, too many limbs, twitching when she wasn't. Holy shit, no wonder why the Titans had so much trouble getting along with her. But I didn't freak out. I pretended I hadn't seen anything. "Half-demon, right? Trigon's daughter?"
The book she was reading slapped shut. Gravity seemed to tighten around us. "Who told you that?" She didn't tremble, but her shadow did—shifting to show more teeth than it should have had behind me. I gulped. I didn't realize this was going to be so difficult.
"I didn't have to be told anything," I said, tracing the cool metal of the can with my fingers. It was condensing moisture, leaving me with damp hands. "We've got dossiers on every supernatural creature in the world in the Batcave. That includes demonic lineages." That wasn't entirely a fabrication – Babs might have had a whole file entitled 'Do Not Open Ever, Bruce'. But I learned it from a book, not from a database. Of course, that was something I didn't need to tell Raven.
She froze, the tendrils of shadow disappearing back into her like wisps of smoke pulled back into a flue. The atmosphere eased a little. "Files," she said, heavy with disbelief. Yet her grasp on the novel relaxed a little. I raised an eyebrow as if it was no big deal, as if I hadn't just prodded at her sorest spot. "If you ever want to discuss the Apocalypse lineage thing… I'm here." I relaxed my smile a little. "Not averse to a bit of darkness."
Liar. I was scared. Of her magic—fine, maybe—but mostly of how her eyes kindled to violet when she exerted herself too much, as if her body was a dam half-gating something. Fear isn't of any use when you let it master you, though, and Raven didn't need my fear. She needed someone who would see the jagged bits of her and not shudder. So I didn't. Even though it was hard.
"You're afraid," she said abruptly, cocking her head to one side. She spoke more softly now, as if trying out the words in her mouth. "I can smell it."
I didn't say I wasn't. That would be lame – she'd know that. I just clicked my soda can against my knee, and saw her eyes follow the motion. "I am," I said casually, as if I were saying it's going to be a sunny day and not I'm scared shitless of you, "but that's my problem, not yours."
Her mouth opened—slightly—as if she wasn't expecting the truth. Her shadow twisted against the ground, curling into itself, as if it wasn't sure whether to pounce or to flee. "Most people lie," she said eventually. The words came out flat, but there was something brittle in there. "They say they're not, or that it's something else."
"Yeah, well," I said with a shrug as I threw the empty soda can into the recycling bin. "I'm not most people." Again we stood there in silence, this time the tension between us palpable enough to sink your teeth into. Then, more quietly: "And neither are you."
Raven's hands spasmed on her book cover. I saw her shadow flutter — unease, not rage. Interesting. "You don't know me," she whispered, but there was no venom behind it. Only tiredness. Tired of long nights in a tower by herself.
I pushed off the counter and glided over to sit beside her, careful to leave enough distance so she wouldn't run. "Nope," I said, "but I do know what it's like to be the whisper-worthy person." I could almost feel the streets of Gotham and the sensation of lifting wallets from the local residents. "Doesn't sting so much if you have someone to whisper right back."
She blew out through her nose. Almost a snort. Her shadow twitched out, creeping toward mine as if it were a curious animal. I stood my ground. It was now her choice. "Why?" she said at last. This time her voice wasn't flat. It was rough, like she'd dragged it against concrete. "Why go through the motions?"
I pressed my lips together, my mind racing. There wasn't a real answer, other than that she was someone I'd read about in a comic book, once upon a time. But the girl sitting next to me wasn't confined to pages anymore. Her breath was too loud, too ragged, like she was fighting to keep her voice from cutting. So I just shook my head, nudging my knee with hers. "Because being alone blows," I said. "And you don't have to be."
Raven froze. But it wasn't the same kind of electric, pent-up freeze as before. This one was quieter. Like a snowfall. Her shadow splayed out around our feet, dark and jumpy, but it wasn't creeping up the walls. It just… lingered. "You're twelve," she said at last, as if reminding herself.
"Yeah," I said, cracking open another can of soda. I offered it to her. I smiled when she raised an eyebrow. "That means I have, like, no ulterior motives. Swear to whatever demon god you want." The soda was cold in my hand. Condensation dripped to my wrist.
She took it. The tips of her fingers touched mine—just touched—and for a moment, the edges of her silhouette flashed purple. A friendly flash. "You're so weird," she said, but she didn't mean it meanly. Just factually. That made my heart squish because true. I was. A twelve-year-old with a dead man's memories, and I was living in a tower full of heroes like I was one of them. But I didn't have to tell Raven that. At least, not yet. Maybe never.
I observed as she took a drink, the motion of her swallowing as the sweetness went down. She made a face—likely too much sugar—but didn't stop drinking it. Baby steps. "So," I asked, my hands clasped behind my head, "going to share the nightmare inducing material you're reading, or am I going to have to guess?"
Raven's mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Almost. "Grimoire of Azar," she said, rapping the cover with a black-painted fingernail. "Light bedtime reading." Her tone dripped with sarcasm, but the tension had begun to ease from her shoulders. Still edgy. Still ready to run. But at least she wasn't poised on the brink.
I smiled and bent down to examine the pages. The writing was spiky, as if they'd been written with a talon rather than a pen. "Oh sick, are you conjuring a hellhound to devour my homework?" I pressed my knee against hers. Teasing.
Raven didn't step back. She just smiled, the edges of her shadow moving with the motion. It was enough of a response. The tension in my chest dissipated. She wasn't just allowing me to coexist with her; she was permitting me. And it mattered. In a world where the most powerful demonic creature was a master of feelings — literally — I would know if she'd found me out. She hadn't. Yet. Maybe never.
###
I'd joined the Titans a long time ago compared to when the real Jason Todd joined, before Starfire was going to get married off on Tamaran and leave Dick all broken up, before Cyborg started slowly self-destructing as he agonized over whether Sarah Simms could actually love a half-machine, when Gar was still chewing his cheek to bits to avoid telling Mento he was a fucking sociopath. Even Donna was messed up, her perfectionism a thin veneer over her not having the slightest idea who she was outside of the "good Amazon."
The point is, I knew what was going to happen, just as I know the lines and creases on my hands — and that means I knew the Church of Blood was going to kidnap Raven. I'd read the comics. I knew they needed her to bring back Brother Blood, I knew Dick was going to go apeshit trying to rescue her, and I knew it would all be tied up with a bow by issue #31. No one would be permanently hurt. No one would actually be in danger. It would just be another really long day (or days) for the Titans.
Only now Raven had claimed me as hers. Not in a weird way - well, not that weird - but like the way big sisters could be, you know? Too much, too overprotective, when they'd decided you weren't going to die on their watch. We'd had the whole soda and truths thing three weeks ago, and I had a shadow. A literal shadow, because Raven's demon shadow would try to merge with my own whenever she thought I wasn't paying attention, like some sort of twisted comfort object.
I flipped over in my bed — another nightmare that had left me drenched with sweat — to see Raven sitting cross-legged at the end of my bed. Her violet eyes gleamed in the darkness as she read yet another morbid novel. "You were screaming," she told me calmly, as if she hadn't just apparated into my bedroom at three in the morning. Her shadow appeared to twist and writhe on the ceiling above us, like wisps of cigarette smoke under a glass paperweight.
I swallowed hard, the evaporating sweat on my skin making the sheets cling to my back. Raven's eyes never left mine. They were fixed and unblinking, as if she could probe the contents of my nightmares with her eyes alone. I could have told her it was just Gotham demons haunting me again. But I knew the lie would be ash in my mouth. "You saw it?" I asked instead, my voice hoarse from screaming.
She loomed over me, the darkness swaying above us like the first exploratory vibrations of a spider's web. "Not completely," she said, which meant she had picked up on the fringes — the sense of loss of my previous life, the gaining of Jason Todd, and the slow building horror of being discovered as an abomination.
Raven raised an eyebrow, gazing at me as if I were a problem she couldn't solve. "You were scared. But not of me." It was a whispered remark, full of curiosity. Like it had never occurred to her before. It was a compliment on a grand scale for someone like her. Finally, she thought. Someone different.
I wiped my hands on my pants, slicking off the moisture. Having Raven nearby had shaken loose worries and concerns I'd long repressed, but so what. She was still a half-demon, one who craved souls, who could, with a quick gesture, separate limbs from their owners. How would she react if I told he er she was making my world a frightening place? Would she let her darkness overcome itself to destroy me?
I didn't know. The not knowing burned my stomach with jitters. I thought I could do this, that I knew enough about Raven from comic books and Wiki pages. But this Raven wasn't words on a page, wasn't just an idea in my head. She was warm breathing person in the night with fingertips drumming on a grimoire, perhaps keeping a countdown. The rabbit hole was deeper than I realized, and I was too far in to climb back out.