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The ceremony was a gloomy event.
Which was to be expected, of course; it was a funeral. Yet, somehow, she got the feeling he wouldn’t have liked it. For all of the stern, no-nonsense airs he put on while he was working, while he was their leader, he was still the goofball who made better cracks than Beast Boy, who happily explained Earth customs to Starfire, who playfully competed against Cyborg… who didn’t have to work to make even her smile.
Soon, Raven thought, staring at that open casket. Soon, he’d pop up and have a good laugh over tricking them all so easily; soon, he would arrive and apologize to his team for not telling them he faked it all in order to go undercover and take down one of their enemies.
The minutes ticked by as more and more people stood up to talk about him, yet with each kind word, his body remained still.
Even as the crowd dispersed, even as her friends tugged her along, making them the last to leave, she looked to him over her shoulder.
Raven had realized what had happened long before the police wound up on their doorstep.
Feeling sudden, intense pain, and then the dreamy sensation of some part of her—deep, deep down inside—falling away kind of couldn’t be ignored; even if, for the better part of a day, she pretended to herself that it was nothing.
She had known better… but she hadn’t wanted the truth to be real.
Their bond hadn’t been useful for much else beyond that, however. What sensations she had felt through him did nothing to point them in the direction of the person responsible for such a horrific tragedy; nor did the minute amount of evidence Cyborg collected at the scene. The trails Beast Boy picked up all wound up in dead ends, and the interrogation of every known criminal by an enraged Starfire yielded nothing.
After weeks of turning up nothing, It had only taken two months before they fell apart completely.
Starfire cried, nearly as hard as she had at his funeral, while she packed her bags.
Beast Boy did the same in the middle of the night, when he thought no one would find out, forgetting about the empath that resided down the hall.
Cyborg suggested that this would just be temporary—that they just needed a break—and opted to stay at the Tower.
She said it was because they had outgrown each other, though not even she believed that lie, and left before the break of dawn.
Her reality was tearing at the seams, and Raven simply couldn’t find it in herself to care. What did it matter, when the only two lifelines she had to hold onto were gone?
Insanity was a cold comfort, but it was better than being completely alone.
It was better than falling into outright evil. To be sure, he would’ve pitied her, maybe even been mad at her for choosing this in the wake of his passing… but he wouldn’t have been disappointed in her.
He still would’ve thought she was stronger than that, though… but he hadn’t been infallible. He had been wrong, sometimes; especially when it had involved her.
For the one whom Robin once claimed to be the most hopeful Titan, she no longer had any idea what to hope for.
Her emotions left her, first.
It didn’t come as much of a surprise. Not since before what happened to him had been confirmed had she felt anything, anyways; she had shed no tears over him, had held no grief in her heart for the tragedy. It was kind of nice, in a way. There were no longer abrupt explosions when she felt something particularly strongly, and she was no longer a danger to be around.
Of course, her powers went next.
Those didn’t matter much, either, though. How could they, when she had quit being a superhero altogether, when the idea of the Titans being a team was irrevocably shattered?
The bleak humor of the situation occurred to her some years into her masochistic seclusion. Starfire had been right about what she had seen far in the future, after all. She wondered idly when that point in time—where Starfire came to see her, years younger and flung forward from their past—would be reached.
Eventually, the anticipation of such an instance fell away with the rest of her memory, to collect dust and cobwebs in the far recesses of her mind.
Without her best friend to anchor her to reality, the world had fallen away beneath her feet.