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Raven wakes up to Beast Boy snoring.
She wakes with a jolt, hands starting to glow on default, but when he realizes where she is and who’s with her she lets the light die down, stops blearily chanting in her head.
She blinks several times as she wakes up fully, and is met with a green blur that turns into Beast Boy’s bedhead as she gets used to being awake. He’s snoring, albeit quietly, a pool of drool collecting on the pillow below his head.
Raven shouldn’t find it adorable, but she does, and she finds herself smiling despite the grossness. It’s not where she expected herself to be, years ago- but she definitely isn’t complaining.
When she was younger, she always expected she’d bring about the end of the world, so she always avoided imagining much of her future. She’d get a few years, and that would be it. Thankfully, she and her team stopped the apocalypse she had been fearing since she learned how to understand words, so now she’s left with however many years to imagine her future, however long that will be.
She never expected it to turn out like this: waking up as the big spoon to one of her teammates as he dreamed. And he is dreaming, Raven can tell- he does that thing dogs do, where they windmill their legs and make soft, worried noises. Raven’s never had a dog, but she’s seen TV, and apparently that’s what they’re like.
“Down, boy,” she tells him, rubbing his arm. Her voice is worn with disuse from sleeping so long.
Beast Boy quietens slowly, and tilts his head towards Raven. His chest rises and falls, and Raven hesitates before laying a hand on it, feeling his lungs expand and then contract.
This was not the plan, but then again, nothing has gone to plan.
-
The first time she notices it, the twinge in her chest that always seems to accompany Beast Boy, it’s right after Malchior escapes.
Raven is- well, she’s hiding, despite how much she’d deny it to anyone else. She’s just locked the book away, and is binding it with spells and signs that explain why you definitely shouldn’t let the person in this book out when there’s a knock on her door.
“Raven? It’s me.”
Raven keeps quiet as Beast Boy sighs, and then continues: “Look- I’m sorry.”
She takes a step towards the door, then stops. “For what? You’re not the one who-”
Beast Boy cuts her off in the middle of it. “No. I’m sorry that-” a pause, a swallow that’s audible even from the other side of the door. “-he broke your heart.”
Raven breathes shakily, but when she speaks, it’s steady. “I know it was all a lie. But he was the only person who ever made me feel like I wasn’t- creepy. And don’t try to tell me I’m not.”
“Okay.” The answer comes immediately, like he was waiting for it. “Fine. You’re way creepy. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay locked in your room. You think you’re alone, Raven- but you’re not.”
There’s a silence, like many other silences in Raven’s room, but this one she wants to break, to shatter, to crack with her own hands, so she opens the door and hugs him, expecting it when Beast Boy blushes like a firetruck and hesitates before his arms come up to hug her back.
“Uh,” he says, clearing his throat. He opens his mouth, but then he’s hit by Cyborg’s second round of Stank-Ball and they all get distracted for a while.
She doesn’t notice until later: how everything else melts away when she’s around him.
-
Raven grew up with monks who told her about how she’d end the world, and how futile it was to try to escape her destiny.
There were some that told her she could try, maybe, to stop it, but they were met with stern looks and told not to get Raven’s hopes up.
Raven did anyway, as the years passed, even before she joined the Teen Titans. She wandered the streets of New York and looked up at the sky and wondered how hard she would fight to keep it like it is.
Damn hard, she finds out. The Titans are, of course, hard fighters, and Raven is no exception. She fights, helps takes down bad guys and pretends like she can stay like this, stay a hero, and for a while she has herself convinced: she hangs out with her teammates and eats pizza and laughs with them when they get her off guard.
It doesn’t last long, not as long as she’d like, and eventually she’s dragged along into the prophecy she always knew was coming, letters lighting up along her body: red letters she grew up reading are inked in neon along her arms, her legs, up her stomach and ribs and spine.
She tries to cover them, to stall the last day of the world, but it doesn’t work.
I don’t like my birthday, she tells the team, and they try to fix it by making her a birthday banner, cake and party hats, the works- Beast Boy doesn’t understand, none of them do, but he’s the worst about it. This is the second time she notices it, how she gets around him, how everything else fades.
They’re all pretty bad about it- they surprise Raven in the lounge and get all surprised when she yells and ducks into the floor.
“Uh,” Cyborg says. “Raven?”
“It is merely us,” Starfire tries. “Your friends, with warm wishes on the day of your birth!”
She shoots a small smile to where Raven had disappeared into the floor, and Raven convinces herself not to materialize to glare back at her- Starfire is still learning all the human customs, birthdays being one of them, and it’s harder being mad at her when she acts like a kicked puppy about it.
“I told you a surprise party was a bad idea,” Robin says, and Raven hears it vaguely, distantly, from where she’s rising up out of the floor.
Beast Boy shrieks when he notices Raven materializing behind him, only realizing when she starts to ask, “How did you know it was my birthday?”
“Um,” Beast Boy says, from where he’s getting death glares from Raven and dubious looks from everyone else. “You know how you made a big deal last night about tomorrow? Well, we started wondering what tomorrow was, so we did some snooping- okay, I did some snooping. And I sort of found a restricted file in the off-limits area of the Titan’s computer, and it kind of had your birthday on it.”
Raven is so busy glaring at him she doesn’t notice Starfire until she pipes up, saying, “And we have been preparing your celebration ever since!”
Still learning earth customs, Raven reminds herself. Wouldn’t do any good to yell at her.
“We put up tons of decorations,” Beast Boy declares, gesturing to the gratuitous amounts of banners and confetti littered around the Tower. He even puts his hand over Raven’s shoulders as he says it, but then slowly retracts the arm when he sees how hard she’s glaring.
“I baked my famous eight layer cake with three kinds of frosting,” Cyborg says, and any other time Raven would at least smile, but nothing about this situation makes her want to do so.
Starfire bursts in next, thrusting something called a crown of meat at Raven and declaring it is, of course, a traditional Tamaraian ‘Throknar.’ Raven is starting to wonder what the hell Starfire’s probably been eating while none of the others have been noticing, since all Raven’s seen her eat so far is pizza and whatever anyone else makes her in the Tower.
“I hope this is okay,” Robin says, sounding less than certain about it, stepping forwards. “We just-”
Out of everyone, Raven thinks she might have explained it to Robin first, but right now she’s livid, still checking her arms for red sigils every few minutes, and she’s past being polite about this. “No. It’s not.”
Her team stares at her, Cyborg holding his stupid eight layered cake, Starfire with her crown of meat and Robin and Beast Boy hunching into their shoulders, and Raven backtracks.
“Look,” she starts. “I really appreciate what you’re all trying to do here. But I’m not interested.”
She means to leave it at that, make a clean exit and hide out in her room for a while, but Starfire scoots in front of her hopefully.
“But- there will be music, and the iced cream, and a strange game involving pins and the behind of a donkey!”
“We got a piñata shaped like Beast Boy,” Cyborg says, trying for coaxing. “You know you wanna smack it.”
Raven inhales through her nose. “I said no.”
“C’mon, Raven!” Beast Boy is the breaking point, like he usually is, making Raven’s insides spark, grate against each other, light up uncomfortably at the sound of his voice. “I know you hate fun but it’s your birthday, it’s special! You can’t just let this day end without-”
Raven loses control without meaning to, channelling it through her voice: “NO,” she says, almost roaring it, and the balloons all explode at once, the banner rips itself to shreds, the cake bloats and then sprays out to coat the carpet and walls and half of her teammates as Raven turns and walks out of the lounge, down the hall and into her room where she will try and concentrate on something that isn’t the day ending.
-
The thing is, Beast Boy seems to love what makes them freaks.
He all but fanboys over Robin when he meets him, does the same to Cyborg when he learns about how many parts of him aren’t entirely human, glees over Starfire and her alien-ness.
He’s obviously creeped out by Raven at the start, but then again, so is everyone. He comes to be curious about it as the weeks go by, asking questions Raven’s never had to answer and whooping when she figures out new ways to blow things up.
He seems to genuinely enjoy it himself, turning into animals, parading around in different skins. Raven doesn’t learn until later that he sometimes wishes for a normal life, at his worst moments- but they all do, when Raven stops to think about it. They all want parents, and school, and normality, even though there are times when- for Raven, at least- they’re soaring a hundred miles above the earth with power crackling at their fingertips and laughing louder than they’d ever let anyone hear down below, even when there are moments where they wouldn’t give this life up for anything.
She asks him about it once, when they’re on a carousel and he keeps getting quiet, which is odd for him: “Hey, if you could, would you be normal?”
Beast Boy turns to her, frowns so that fang is pointing out below his bottom lip. God help her, she’s come to grow fond of that stupid fang since she’s grown to know him.
“What would I do if I was normal,” he says, and then, as if to accompany that, he turns into a raven, starts squawking around the enclosed space, landing on Raven’s shoulder. He does that a lot when he wants to be funny, turns into a raven and bumps her with his beak like look, I’m you!
She tweaks his head, strokes a finger down his wings. “I bet you’d be amazing even if you were normal, Beast Boy,” she says, and then regrets it when he goes silent, hopping back onto the seat and turning back into the green guy she’s gotten used to.
He stares at her, blinking with his big animal eyes, though she doesn’t know what animal they remind her of yet. “Yeah,” he says, questioning, dubious, and she shrugs.
“Yeah, of course.”
His mouth ticks upwards and then his gaze drops to the floor where he’s started scuffing his feet. “You’re making fun of me,” he accuses.
“I’m not,” Raven says. She starts to reach out, but then stops herself. “Beast Boy, I’m- come on, I think that about all my teammates.”
He looks at her again when she says that, not smiling but looking hopeful now, his mouth starting to tug upwards slightly.
Raven feels awkward, tremendously so, wishes she had gotten on the ride with someone else and doesn’t understand why her stomach feels like this, like she’s going to vomit. She’s been up in spaceships, she’s flown planes, she’s soared above the earth’s atmosphere, she should be able to handle a carousel.
“Thanks, Raven,” Beast Boy says. He grins at her and Raven feels like she’s been gutpunched.
She’s still reeling from it when it’s their turn to get off the ride, Beast Boy climbing out and Raven nearly staggering, straightening up when Robin notices and frowns.
“You okay,” he asks, and Raven shrugs.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I just- I’m going to talk to Starfire.”
Robin raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything as Raven walks over and tugs Starfire away from where she had been admiring the cotton candy machine with childlike wonder.
“It vanishes on your tongue,” Starfire says gleefully, and then she wilts when she sees Raven’s face. “Raven, is everything well?”
“I,” Raven says. She swallows. “What do you- what does it mean when you feel like you’re getting punched when someone smiles at you?”
Starfire gasps. “This sounds like a very cruel person! Did you punch them back?”
“No, I mean-” Raven sighs, puts a hand to her forehead. “It just felt like I was getting punched.”
Starfire looks unsure. “A spell, perhaps?”
“I don’t know why I thought you would be helpful,” Raven says flatly, and is turning away when Starfire gasps and grabs her arm, turns her back around.
Starfire’s eyes are locked on the carousel, which is rising with Robin in it. She watches it rise as she says, “I think I understand what you are asking, my friend.”
Raven tries to stop herself from blushing, but it’s a futile effort. “What am I asking?”
Starfire beams at her. “I think you like someone, Raven.”
The villain of the week chooses that moment to attack.
Raven’s never been so happy to see Cardiac wreaking havoc on innocent civilians before.
-
Beast Boy is the youngest of the Teen Titans, and it shows until it doesn’t.
Raven doesn’t realize until Beast Boy comes back from a month-long off-planet mission, skin a darker green than it was when he left, which he proudly declares as a tan. He grins at all of them, Cyborg gathers them all in a group hug and pretends he’s not crying over getting Beast Boy back, and then drags the kid to play video games while dripping pizza cheese all over their laps as they attempt to eat it while playing.
Or, ‘kid’ is an overstatement- Beast Boy has grown in the years Raven has known him, filling out and getting taller in front of her eyes. She’s sure the first time she saw him he barely came up to her neck, and that when he left for the mission he came up to her forehead, but now he actually has to look down to meet her eyes.
They both realize this at the same time, Beast Boy grinning harder than ever and Raven glaring like she dares him to mention it.
He does, of course, because Beast Boy has always been pretty blind about these things. “Hey, you’re shorter!”
“No, you’re taller,” Raven says, trying to keep her tone as steady as possible. “Your voice is also deeper, if we’re pointing out things that are obvious.”
“It is?” Beast Boy says it like she told him he can shoot pizza from his fingers at will. He grabs Robin by the shoulder as he’s passing. “Robin! Is my voice deeper or is Raven messing with me?”
Robin considers. “Say something else.”
“Mangos, kittens, tissues, pineapples-”
“Your voice is a little deeper,” Robin allows, and Beast Boy lets out a whoop in which his voice cracks. His hands fly to his mouth, but Raven and Robin are already stifling laughter.
Beast Boy starts to flush, pointing at them. “Neither of you heard that!”
“Oh, we heard something.” Raven shakes with how hard she’s trying not to laugh, which in turn sets Robin off.
Robin manages, “We should tell Cyborg,” and is going over to the couch when Beast Boy tackles him, yelling, “Nooooo!”
Raven watches them tumble together, watches Beast Boy’s shirt ride up over the abs he definitely didn’t have the last time she saw him shirtless when they were all training together. Now it’s her turn to flush, the blush itching on her cheeks as she goes to sit on the far end of the couch where Cyborg is just starting to notice the tussle behind him.
-
Starfire corners her about a week after this, hovering upside-down in midair, brushing her hair as it hangs below her head, scraping the ground. “Hello, Raven!”
“Uh,” Raven says. She pulls her hood up over her head, starts making a beeline for the door. “I have to meditate.”
Starfire soars in front of her, upright now, hair falling in front of her face before she sweeps it back with one hand. “I wish to speak with you.”
“Uh-huh,” Raven says, trying to shove past her and getting nowhere as Starfire floats in front of her on each attempt. “Can’t this wait, Star?”
“It was waited,” Starfire says. “I have waited several times as you wished, but now I am putting my foot down!”
She even floats to the ground to do it, stomping her foot.
“Right,” Raven says, avoiding her eyes. “I just, uh. I really have to, I gotta meditate-”
“You can meditate anytime,” Starfire says impatiently. “What you can also do anytime is tell me about the person who makes you feel punched but in a good way, but I would very much like it if you told me about them now!”
Raven considers flying out the window, but figures Starfire would chase her. She thins her lips, sighs. “It’s not a big deal, Star.”
“Tell me about him anyway,” Starfire suggests. Her eyes brighten. “Or her. Is this why you are distressed about it? I have been told that on Earth, same-gender couplings are sometimes looked down upon. Are you experiencing a crisis of sexuality, Raven?”
“No,” Raven nearly shouts. She lowers her voice. “No, Star, I’m not- I mean, I’m, I’m bi, but that isn’t what this is about. I like-” she squeezes her eyes shut. “There’s a boy. I like a boy.”
“Is this a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” Raven sighs. She rubs her hands through her hair, which makes her hood fall off. She tugs it back up again. “It’s- someone you know.”
“Oh,” Starfire says, and starts to hover again. She pauses. “Is it Beast Boy?”
Raven jerks at the name, then hunches into her shoulders. “Is it that easy to tell?”
“Not for the boys, I assume,” Starfire says. “But they are very bad at this kind of thing. I am fairly sure none of them have noticed your affections.”
Raven nods. Blushing furiously now, she grits out, “Does he. Does he like me back, do you know?”
Starfire beams at her. “I think so, yes! He gets most flustered when you are around, and talks of you often when you are not. I think you would be good together.”
“Well, thanks,” Raven says. She pulls her hood further over her head, hoping to hide how hard she’s blushing. “Uh. What should I do about it?”
“Do about it?”
“You know.” Raven ducks further into her robes. “My crush.”
“Oh!” Starfire practically lights up with delight. “I have seen many movies on the subject! You could-”
“Please, no movie suggestions,” Raven interrupts. “Believe me, Star, those never turn out well.”
Starfire starts floating around listlessly like she does when she’s thinking. “What would you suggest?”
“Uh. I’m not exactly an expert on this, Star.”
“Well,” Starfire starts. “What is the outcome you want?”
Raven opens her mouth, then closes it. She chews the inside of her cheek, then says, “I want- a relationship. With him.”
“That sounds simple enough.”
Raven snorts. “Right, simple like the three years it took for you and Robin to get together?”
“That’s- that’s different,” Starfire says, and now she’s blushing, albeit pleased as she does it. She shakes her hair back, then frowns. “I do hope Cyborg does not feel left out once you and Beast Boy become a couple.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we don’t know if we’re- we don’t know yet.”
Starfire cocks her head. “Why would he not wish to be in a relationship with you?”
“I don’t know.” God, Raven’s cheeks are burning. “He might not like me back.”
“Why would he not like you back?”
“I don’t KNOW,” Raven yells, and then grits her teeth, reins in her voice. “I just- I’ve helped save the world, and other worlds, dozens of times now. I should be able to handle a crush.”
Starfire continues to keep her head cocked at her, and then she says, “We should all make sure Cyborg feels included and loved once you and Beast Boy become a couple.”
Raven sighs, but she’s smiling now. “Yeah. Yeah, we should do that, Star. Good thinking.”
-
She kisses him for the first time during a training session.
At first nothing’s different, they’re all shouting and joking and Raven is in shorts and a t-shirt like everyone else, trying to get a punch past Beast Boy, who cajoles her every time she doesn’t manage it. Powers are off-limits for this, since Robin is adamant about them all learning to handle themselves if a time comes along when they’re sapped of their powers, and Raven is getting frustrated with simple hand-to-hand.
She isn’t thinking about Beast Boy any more than usual, which doesn’t say much with how much she’s been thinking about him recently. She’s throwing punches, and Beast Boy keeps dodging and blocking, and then she gets in a lucky shot and kicks his feet out from under him.
Beast Boy yelps, grabs her wrist, and Raven finds herself getting dragged on top of him, her knees landing on either side of his waist, her arms bracketing his head.
“Nice one,” Beast Boy pants. “But next time I’m totally-”
She kisses him and Beast Boy says a few more words into her mouth in confusion before kissing back.
He’s sweaty, and not the good kind, the gross kind, and they slip together when Raven presses closer, pushing her fingers through his clumped hair. Beast Boy puts her hands on the part of her back that’s bare, the bit under the cut-off part of her tank top, and his hands are bigger than she remembers them being.
They break apart when Cyborg says, “UM,” loud enough to get Raven’s attention, and they stare at each other, both blushing hard, before Raven climbs off of Beast Boy.
Starfire is clapping quietly, Robin is smiling even if the smile is a little confused, and Cyborg snorts in their direction when he sees them looking.
“I think SOMEONE owes me ten bucks,” he says, and then he and Robin start a good-natured argument over the dates of the bet that Raven is going to have to get details on later.
“So,” Beast Boy says, and his cheeks are dark green with the flush. “Uh. You wanna tell me something, Raven?”
“Maybe,” she says, and stands, offering him a hand to help him up.
He takes it, and she pulls him to his feet.
-
Later, after they’ve kissed and talked and fallen asleep in their clothes, Raven watches him snore and smiles into the pillow. She puts a hand on his chest and feels his chest move in time with his breathing.
None of this went to plan, but she isn’t complaining one bit.