Chapter Text
The house is small, worn but well cared for; there’s dirt by the doors that’s been tracked in, the couch looks comfortably lumpy, and there are scuff marks and chips in places like the bannister and the kitchen counters. It looks lived in.
All of the bedrooms are occupied. Raven expected this. Foster homes have a fairly high turnover rate, so there was virtually no chance that any of the rooms might’ve held a trace of their former occupants. But the wall by the hall closet has a height chart spanning several feet vertically and horizontally, and right near the top, almost eye level with Raven herself, is a mark and the name Angela.
“I remember her,” the foster mother says. She is nearing eighty, and has warm eyes and steady, gnarled hands. “I remember them all, of course, but Angela Roth only stayed with us for a little over a year. She barely stood still long enough for us to take that,” She gestures at the mark, then sighs. “Always on the move, Angela was.
“I’ll always regret that we couldn’t help her more. I really thought she was starting to open up to us—until those people found her.”
Raven thinks about the cult that had targeted her mother, how they must have spoken so sweetly to her, complimented her and built up her self worth. They would’ve asked for little things at first, like her time or her money (a lock of her hair). Once they’d made their final request, it had been too late for anyone to help her.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Raven says to the old woman. The woman takes her hands but says nothing else, and Raven can’t think of any reason to linger. The sound of children playing outside drifts in through an open window and echoes faintly through the house, following her out the door.
Beast Boy stands on the sidewalk outside. He’d offered to come in with her, but hadn’t pushed it when she’d said no. As she joins him, a breeze picks up and makes her pull her coat closer around herself.
“We’re going to need warmer clothes,” Raven says. “Not all the snow has melted up in the mountains yet.”
Beast Boy nods and gestures at the house. “You, uh, wanna talk about it?”
Raven curls her hands up in her pockets. She doesn’t know what she could say, how to explain why she had wanted to come here. Somehow, with so many things beginning and ending, this had felt right.
“No,” she says quietly, and Beast Boy seems to understand. The wind blows again, and the two of them leave, and do not look back at the little house where Angela Roth used to live.
The monastery does indeed still have snow on the ground around it in early March. The mountain is steep, so Raven hovers most of the way while Beast Boy tires himself out halfway in his mountain goat form. They pass over one final hill before the monastery cuts across the horizon before them. There are lights gleaming in the windows, and after a minute the tall oak doors swing open and three small figures come sprinting out.
“Raven!” somebody squeals, and one by one, all three kids launch themselves at Raven until she falls over in a pile of children.
Unable to keep from smiling, Raven does her best to put her arms around them. “Okay, you guys, I missed you all, too, but you need to let me up.”
Melvin and Timmy stand up, but Teether remains resolutely clinging to Raven’s middle, so she holds him as she gets to her feet. “It’s great to see you again,” she says, taking them all in. They’ve each grown a few inches; Melvin is looking a bit ganglier, Timmy’s hair seems to stick up even more than before, and Teether has gotten chubbier because of his eating habits.
Timmy bounces up and down. “Look! Look, Raven, look, I lost my tooth.” He stretches his mouth wide open with his fingers to show her the gap in his top row of teeth.
Melvin nudges him over. “Yeah, well, I can ski without falling down now. Mostly.”
“I can—”
Raven cuts Timmy off before this can escalate. “You all remember Beast Boy, don’t you?” She tugs on his arm and he waves cheerily.
The kids peer up at him. Melvin scrunches her nose. “You’re the animal dude, right?”
“That’s right!” Beast Boy smiles at her.
She nods, and the giant teddy bear manifests behind her. “Bobby says he bets you can’t turn into a bear like him.”
Beast Boy puffs out his chest. “Oh, yeah? Check this out.” He morphs into a large green bear in the blink of an eye, and stands on his back legs so that he’s eye level with Bobby.
“Whoa,” Timmy says, staring up at the bear in amazement. The bear flops onto the ground and lies down on his stomach. Teether wiggles in Raven’s arms, and she lets him down so that he can join the other two in climbing all over the bear.
Once the three of them are situated on his back, Beast Boy stands up on all fours, and Melvin, Timmy, and Teether explode into another round of delighted laughter. He carries them the rest of the way to the monastery, Raven and Bobby walking along beside them. When they arrive, the doors are open and several monks are waiting at the entrance with their arms out for the kids to slide into. Beast Boy shifts back to human and shoots Raven a grin, motioning for her to go inside before him. She does, smothering the urge to turn back and stare at him.
They stay at the monastery longer than they planned. March turns to April very quickly; the days are full of playing with the kids and helping them hone their powers. Raven never thought she’d be good with kids, but these ones she gets. They’re bursting with potential, with powers that they so desperately want to use to do good, and they all crave her and Beast Boy’s approval, and Raven—well, she can work with that.
May is creeping up on them when Raven approaches Beast Boy and reminds him that they should be leaving soon. He agrees half-heartedly, which is odd, since their next destination has been chosen with him in mind. Beast Boy’s spent as much time with the kids as Raven has in the past weeks, and can usually be found with at least one of them hanging off of his arm. A year ago, Raven might’ve made some derisive remark about maturity levels, but now she sort of gets it.
A few nights before they leave, Raven senses something outside her window, and for a moment she feels a deep and familiar rush of adrenaline. It dissipates when a small blonde head bobs up into sight above the sill, and Raven opens the window to let Melvin climb in.
“Your room isn’t that far away,” Raven says once Melvin has both feet planted on the carpet.
Melvin points out the window. “I wanted to practice.”
Practice? Raven doesn’t understand until she looks out the window and sees the ladder Melvin used to climb up—and watches it disappear into thin air. “You’re getting good at those,” she says.
Melvin ducks her head, her cheeks pink. “You’re a really good teacher.”
Raven really isn’t, but their powers are similar enough in nature that her own methods of controlling her mental abilities are helpful to Melvin, too. Melvin isn’t even nine yet, and she’s far surpassed Raven’s control at that age. “Well, you’re a really good student,” she says.
“I could get even better!” Melvin bounces on the balls of her feet. “You could teach me a lot more, and me and Timmy and Teether would all get so good at our powers.”
Raven reaches out and takes the girl’s hand. “Come here.” She leads her to sit on the bed, and gets to work at redoing Melvin’s sloppy pigtails. “Melvin, listen, Beast Boy and I have to leave soon. It’s not because of you guys—we love spending time with you, but there are things we need to do.”
Shoulders drooping, Melvin says, “Bobby’s gonna miss you.”
“And I’m going to miss Bobby.” Raven finishes one braid. “But Bobby is a big boy, and he knows deep down that I’m not leaving because I don’t want to spend time with him. And he knows that I’m not leaving for good. I’ll be back someday.”
Melvin turns around, eyes shining. “Promise?”
“Pinky promise.”
They hook their pinkies together, and Melvin nods. “I’ll tell Bobby.”
“I think Bobby will be okay. Do you think so?”
Melvin is quiet as Raven completes the other braid. “Yeah,” she says softly.
“Well, maybe it would make Bobby feel better if the three of us have a sleepover tonight,” Raven suggests.
Melvin turns and throws her arms around Raven’s neck. That night, as Melvin sleeps in Raven’s bed with her, her knees digging into Raven’s spine, and Bobby slumped next to the bed, Raven realizes Melvin didn’t ask if Beast Boy would ever come back.
The Doom Patrol’s base is considerably better hidden than the Titans’ own tower. Granted, the two teams had wildly different functions and modus operandi, but the covertness of the Doom Patrol’s base is very impressive. Even more impressive is the fact that Beast Boy was able to find it and break in when he was a child.
The team is expecting them this time, and when the doors open for Beast Boy and Raven, all four adults are there to greet them. Rita rushes forward to hug Beast Boy, which is to be expected, and then does the same thing to Raven, which is decidedly not. Raven awkwardly hugs her back; it’s not as bone crushing as Starfire’s embraces, which Raven oddly misses. Negative Man and Robot Man approach to clap Beast Boy on the shoulder and shake Raven’s hand.
Mento keeps about a foot of distance. “Welcome back, Beast Boy.”
Beast Boy holds his gaze. “Yeah, good to be back,” he says evenly.
There’s a hint of a smile on Mento’s face, and his eyes seem to soften just a bit. “And you, Raven, nice of you to visit,” he addresses her.
“Yeah,” Raven says. “Well, thanks for having me.”
“Oh, any of Beast Boy’s teammates are welcome here any time,” Rita insists.
“We’re all pretty impressed he managed to get himself some real friends,” says Negative Man, reaching out to ruffle Beast Boy’s hair.
Beast Boy swats his hand away and turns into a bird to flap obnoxiously at Negative Man’s head, and Robot Man catches him until Beast Boy shifts into a snake and slithers up Robot Man’s arm, and Rita scolds them all, and Raven can feel herself shrinking back from their easy familiarity. It had taken her months to get used to the Titans enough to join them for movie nights, and that was when they had all been new and awkward around each other. This is a fully formed family; what had she been thinking?
Rita is ushering them along to eat now, and the group starts to follow along except for Raven, whose feet seem to be stuck to the floor. Beast Boy glances back at her, worry and understanding flickering across his face in turn. He holds out a hand. “Wanna come get some dinner? There’s tea.”
If she says no, if she turns and leaves right now, Beast Boy won’t hold it against her. So she takes his hand.
Raven and Beast Boy are not just guests in the Doom Patrol’s home; they’re also superheroes, and they’re expected to pull their own weight when it comes to superhero duties. Their first mission as a group is nominally a success, but it still ends in a loud argument between Beast Boy and Mento over Beast Boy’s disobedience and Mento’s pigheadedness.
Beast Boy storms off, and Raven finds him back at the base, on the roof of one of the observatory towers. She isn’t sure if he wants her to join him, but there’s an open space next to him, and he’s in his human form, so the odds are pretty good.
“I used to come up here a lot,” he says when she settles in. He’s so close the skin of their arms is almost touching. “Mento’s always been like this. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him. I never used to yell back, though.”
She doesn’t know what to say; Raven has dealt with father issues, sure, but really only one specific flavor of father issues. She has no experience for when the father and kid actually care about each other. So she just leans closer to him, lets their arms press together and feels the heat of him next to her.
It seems to help, and over the next few weeks they fall into a strange rhythm: meals in the dining room or kitchen, missions during the day, and stargazing at night. It’s all so goddamn easy, it really is, but for some reason Raven’s hands still shake every time Beast Boy asks if she wants to get dinner together, and her stomach still twists into knots whenever they’re on the observatory roof and he puts his arm around her.
Maybe it’s because it’s easy—it reminds her too much of last time. It’s not exactly the same; being with him had felt like sinking, like something heady and clawing. He was everything about herself that she’d ever hidden away, every dark corner of her room that she didn’t let the light touch. Beast Boy is nothing like him; he’s the air and the earth, everything she never thought she would deserve.
So of course it’s not the same, not really—but still. That fear under her skin doesn’t go away, and by mid-June she finally caves, and calls Cyborg, and asks for a favor.
“Rachel Roth,” Beast Boy reads off the name on the file that Cyborg sent her.
Raven fidgets awkwardly. “Yeah, Raven isn’t a really common name for a nineteen year old, and I’ll be trying to blend in during all my classes, so…”
“I get it,” Beast Boy says. He hands the folder back to her without meeting her eyes. “Have fun at college.”
He doesn’t even sound mad, is the worst part, just resigned. Raven feels sick. “Beast Boy, I’m sorry,” she pleads.
“Don’t be sorry.” He looks up at her, finally. “Really. You were never obligated to come here, or stay, or—any of it, if you don’t want to.”
“But I do!” Raven says desperately, feeling the vice coil around her powers slipping. “I want to—I want all of it, but I can’t, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She presses her hands to her eyes in an effort to keep from mentally lashing out. “You deserve better than to wait for something that might never happen.”
Raven hears him move, but she’s still not prepared for his fingers to wrap lightly around her wrists. She lets him pull her hands away from her face so that they can look at each other.
“There is nothing wrong with you.” The conviction in Beast Boy’s voice makes her breath catch. “And you are worth waiting for.”
Raven eventually loses track of how long she stays in his embrace. Long enough to memorize his heartbeat, surely.
The apartment she gets is small but functional. It’s only a few blocks away from Cyborg and Bumblebee’s place, and they help her move in her limited possessions. Afterwards, they go out to dinner, and although they don’t act it at all, Raven can’t help but feel like the third wheel.
Still, she’s immensely grateful to them, especially when Cyborg offers to help her get all of her books and prepare for her classes. September is approaching fast, so she doesn’t have much time to reflect on everything that happened before she got to Newark. As a result, the first time she ends up telling anyone the full story is in early August, about two weeks before classes start. And it isn’t Starfire or Robin, but Bumblebee whom she tells.
This turns out to be very fortuitous, because Bumblebee listens to Raven’s fumbling descriptions of how broken she felt, and just takes a sip of her coffee before saying, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been there, girl.”
Raven blinks. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not always gonna feel it every time,” Bumblebee says casually. “I don’t feel it at all.”
“You—you don’t? But Cyborg…”
Bumblebee smiles. “Yeah, I’m in love with Victor. The emotional stuff can be separate from the physical stuff.”
Raven’s cup of tea warms up her hands. “So you never want to—?” she asks hesitantly.
“Nope.” Bumblebee pops the ‘p’. “Vic gets it. And it sounds like Beast Boy was getting it, too.”
“He was.” Raven stares down into her drink. “He was so understanding, he wasn’t pushy at all.”
“Well, don’t go giving him any cookies for the bare minimum of not being a jerk,” Bumblebee says, her voice teasing but her eyes serious.
“I wasn’t, I just… I do like him, but.” Raven looks up at Bumblebee. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t, not for a long time.” Bumblebee—Karen reaches out and squeezes her hand. “You’re not broken. It’s okay to take your time. The right person will wait while you do.”
Raven doesn’t end up crying in a coffee shop, but it’s a near thing.
When Cyborg had had her pick her class schedule, Raven had been lost. There were a lot of interesting courses, but halfway through the semester she still has no idea what she wants in terms of a degree. There isn’t really a clear career path when your life experiences include stopping the apocalypse, and putting “proficient in dark magic” on a resume is bound to close more doors than it’ll open.
So she takes all of the beginner freshman classes and tries to do what Karen suggested and focus on enjoying college. The whole atmosphere on campus isn’t one she’s used to; Raven had been worried she’d get looks for her unusual appearance, but it seems purple hair is actually on its way to becoming the norm at universities.
Raven leaves her cloaks and leotards behind in favor of more normal clothes, but she still wears a lot of her own distinctive charms from Azarath, which is how a girl from her Sociology class ends up striking up a conversation with her in the line for the food court.
“It’s a bindi, right?” the girl asks.
“Uh.” Raven reaches up and touches her forehead. “Kind of. It’s the Ajna chakra.”
The girl—Raven’s pretty sure her name is Lisa—nods. “That’s what I thought. My roommate’s from India; she wears one, too.”
Raven drags up an old memory from when she was around twelve. “I… think I am… South Asian, I mean, at least a little bit. On my mother’s side.” Arella had told her, once, about how she’d stolen her birth records and looked up her ancestry; at the time, Raven hadn’t really understood the differences in human races, and had been far more concerned with her patrilineal heritage.
She keeps thinking about this for the rest of the day, about just how thoroughly the system had failed her mother. Angela had been abandoned, erased, and forgotten, and by the time someone had cared about her, it had been too late. Angela’s situation was nothing like Melvin, Timmy, and Teether’s is now, but Raven can’t stop herself from thinking of them, too. It’s Melvin’s words in particular that come back to her: You’re a good teacher. Hardly, but it does give her an idea.
A few days later, she walks out of her advisor’s office, having declared for a Bachelor’s in Social Work.
In early November, a proper set of winter clothes is rapidly becoming a necessity, so Kory and Raven take a day to go shopping. Kory doesn’t really need a giant coat or boots or a scarf the way Raven does, but she likes shopping and clothes in general, so she goes along.
“And,” Kory adds, “I find I do not like the snow. The only experiences I have of it are tied with tragedy.”
Out of respect for Red Star, Raven says nothing, but Kory continues.
“Although Jump City did look rather beautiful covered in snow, despite the circumstances.”
Raven frowns. “It didn’t snow in Jump City.”
“In the bad future I fell into, it did,” Kory says. “I thought it odd, but it was quickly overshadowed.”
“It was probably some kind of nuclear thing,” Raven says absently. She never had to see that future with her own eyes, for which she’s immensely grateful, but it haunts her regardless.
When Raven had first heard of her own personal fate in Starfire’s future, she’d considered it one of the better scenarios. Not ideal, of course; she didn’t want to become a hollow, broken wreck, but… her friends had been alive. Splintered and hurt, but living and breathing. It had been the first time she’d ever really given thought to the possibility that this world might not be completely doomed. And if the sacrifice for that were her sanity, she’d pay that price gladly.
But now it occurs to her that she might not have had to give her life for her friends, but that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t. None of them are really in any danger of that future anymore: Victor is actively working towards advancing his prosthetics, Dick and Kory are living happily together, and Raven isn’t alone—but Beast Boy is.
He’d made a big deal about the bald thing when Starfire had told them about it, but Raven remembers what he had said one night on the roof of the Doom Patrol’s base: “I’m lucky the Doom Patrol took me in. Otherwise, I probably would’ve ended up in dissected in a lab or stuck in a cage.” She hadn’t made the connection then, but now she does.
The shopping trip concludes within a few hours, and once she bids Kory goodbye and gets home, Raven takes out her laptop and writes an email to Beast Boy. She tells him all about her apartment and her classes, about the future she’s planning. Once it’s finished, she leaves the draft on her computer for a while, wanders around the kitchen and procrastinates on sending it. But eventually she does—and then she has to turn her phone off to keep herself from checking it all night long.
Beast Boy’s email is waiting for her the next morning. It’s just as long as hers, full of details about his missions with the Doom Patrol and all the animals he’s been taking care of. There are quite a few spelling errors that make her roll her eyes fondly, but it’s not really his fault that he never got a formal education, between the illness and being orphaned and superhero training. The letter ends with I miss you, too, which makes Raven’s stomach flip. She didn’t say it in hers, but somehow he knew anyway.
She writes back, and then he does, and then she, and on and on for months, until winter has passed and it’s the middle of spring. At first, their letters stay somewhat light, mostly daily to weekly updates. But eventually Raven starts talking about the therapist she’s been seeing, and Beast Boy reveals how he’d gone to his parents’ graves. It’s halting and difficult, but it’s there.
(Every once in a while, when Raven goes to the grocery store, she passes by the tofu and debates buying some, to have around just in case, but every time she thinks, Not yet.)
It’s summer when she tells him about the house she’s been looking at; three bedrooms, but that’s not a deal breaker, Timmy and Teether could share, and so could—well, she leaves it at that. She’s not there yet, she’d like to finish her degree and get a job first, but it’s in the works.
It’s autumn, and Dick proposes to Kory, like they all knew he would. Raven writes to Beast Boy to tell him, and he sends his congratulations to the couple, but confides in Raven privately that he isn’t sure they want him back for the wedding.
It’s been a long time, he says, I haven’t seen them in over a year. I was never that close to Robin anyway.
Raven wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, and indeed she scolds him for this line of thinking in her reply, but she concludes with, You don’t have to come back for them, though they’d love it if you did. Cyborg misses you, and so do I. You don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to be.
It doesn’t actually escape her notice that this is the same advice he had once given her. She sends the email, and then she puts it out of her mind; if he wants to come back, this is his opening.
Raven doesn’t hear anything for several weeks. Winter break starts, and Melvin, Timmy, and Teether come for a visit. There’s not a lot of room in her apartment, but they buy sleeping bags and turn the small living room and couch into a fort.
One day, when it’s cold but not windy, Raven takes the kids for a walk in the park, and Kory comes along so that they can discuss the wedding. She’s very enthusiastic about bridesmaid dresses, and Raven tries to talk her out of frills while the children play in the distance.
“Raven!” Timmy yells, running up to her. “Teether took my lolly!”
“Nuh-uh,” Teether says. “The skirl took it.”
“A what?” asks Kory.
Melvin joins them, rolling her eyes. “He says he saw a squirrel take Timmy’s lollipop.”
Raven bends down to Teether’s level. “Teether, it’s winter. All the squirrels are hibernating—that means they’re sleeping. It’s too cold for them to be out. Now, did you take Timmy’s lollipop?”
Teether shakes his head. “The skirl took it.”
Raven sighs, and Melvin says, “There are no squirrels out here, dummy.”
“Yuh-huh!” Teether argues, pointing to a tree a few feet away. “Over there!”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Timmy’s voice is getting dangerously loud.
“There was too a squirrel! It took your lolly, and it was green, and it was over there!”
Raven’s head snaps up. “What—green?”
“You didn’t say it was green.” Melvin’s eyes are wide.
Kory puts her hand on Raven’s shoulder. “Look,” she whispers.
Underneath the tree Teether pointed at is a figure that wasn’t there before. Raven stands up, almost unaware of having done so, and approaches the tree and the man.
He’s smiling, of course he is, she should’ve known he’d be smiling. He’s grown a bit; not enough to be considered tall in his own right, but she has to look up to meet his eyes. Most of the gangly teenager has faded away, and his shoulders are a bit broader. But the biggest difference is in how he carries himself: Near the end of their team, Beast Boy had gained a bit more confidence, but he was still awkward, as if he didn’t quite know how to be confident in himself. Now he stands at ease, proud and content.
Still, his eyes are hesitant when he looks at her. Is this okay? He steps forward and holds out his arms, leaving an inch of distance for her to make the final move.
Raven, hardly daring to breathe, moves unthinkingly to close the gap.
Later, Garfield stands at her bedroom window and stares out across the city. Raven puts her arms around his waist, presses her forehead to his back, and they watch as the snow quietly begins to fall.