Work Text:
once, i tried to fold myself into a crack
that followed my spine down my back,
body curving like a crescent moon
waning & i found i was finally small
enough to swallow myself whole.
--— MADELEINE CHRISTIE, NATURE, VICTORIOUS
“I don’t understand."
Robin fiddles with the end of a birdarang, masked eyes downcast, shoulders slumped. In the past, before she worked up the nerve to accept Robin’s offer to take back her spot with the Titans, when Terra had allowed herself to imagine her reintroduction into the team, the sight of Robin small and pale and sullen never made it into the picture.
"A while after you…” He pauses, seemingly trying to work the words out of his mouth. Terra scowls. “—after you saved the city, I was in the basement and wiped away some dust from Slade’s mask. There was a chemical in it that makes me hallucinate Slade attacking me whenever I’m in the dark."
"And there’s nothing to stop the hallucinations?"
He sighs. The birdarang clinks against the table as he sets it down. “No. It’s permanent.”
Terra’s eyes flicker down to her hands. “I’m sorry.”
Robin jerks his head in a small nod. “Me too.”
The team’s dynamic shifted since she last saw them. She knows that in the almost two years since her death that they’d be different, but not like this. Every time the alarm goes off at night all the lights in the Tower flicker on and when she rushes to the ops room Robin is always already there, staring up at the screen with a scowl. The others wait for him to brief them on what’s happening and they all head out without him, leaving him bent over the keyboard with slumped shoulders.
Robin always hesitates before entering a room. The few times she sees him ask for help his scowls are deep, his shoulders tense. He never looks at their backs when they enter a room before him to turn the lights on; he glares down at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, anywhere but them, his arms crossed over his chest, tightly, as if holding himself together.
"—Shit!” Terra rubs her eye with a fist. Robin raises an eyebrow at her over his shoulder and shrugs, turning to look back at the screen. Blinking at the bright lights, she pads over to the kitchen and prepares a bowl of cereal for herself. She clutches the bowl and heads towards Robin, eyes darting from the screen to him as she slowly eats spoonfuls of cocoa puffs.
The maps and figures on screen make no sense to her sleep deprived brain, and she doesn’t bother to try to understand it, far more focused on her late night/early morning snack. Four in the morning isn’t unfamiliar to her and by the look of Robin’s sallow face and deep scowl he’s used to the hour too.
He sighs and turns to look at her as she shovels another spoonful of cereal into her mouth. “What is it, Terra?”
She swallows and shrugs, swirling her spoon in the bowl. “Couldn’t sleep. And I was hungry, but that isn’t a shocker, right?” She smiles before looking up at the large screen again. “What’re you doing?”
“Following up on clues for Slade’s whereabouts. I’ve found a couple over the past few months.” He types something and another figure appears on the screen. Ignoring the sudden loss of appetite, Terra scoops up some cereal then allows it and some milk to fall back into her bowl.
“That’s not healthy."
Robin snorts. “That’s obvious.” He pauses, hands hovering over the keyboard, and glances at her. “You never had any contact with him since—”
"No.” She shakes her head. “I thought he was dead ever since my memories came back.” Her eyes fall to her bowl and now soggy cereal, and she scowls. “Sometimes — I like pretending he still is.” The admission is too open and honest and she itches to steer away from it, to leave behind any trace of Slade, but how can she when he’s in her nightmares, when he haunts Robin, when his presence still weighs on the team?
Robin seems to deflate in front of her. “Yeah. I wish I could do that.”
There’s nights she pads out of her room and finds Robin, wide awake and hunched over the computer in the lit ops room. She says nothing, and he says nothing, and they sit in silence, far apart, the ghost of their shared trauma hovering between them.
There’s night she pads out of her room and finds Robin, half-asleep and twitchy on the sofa. She says nothing; she steps out of the ops room and returns minutes later with a blanket and wraps it around his shoulders, sits next to him with enough space between them to leave no illusion of pity, sits next to him until he falls asleep from exhaustion. She won’t pretend to understand; won’t pretend to know what it’s like to hallucinate the person that symbolizes her biggest traumas every time the lights flicker off, but she knows what it’s like to see him in sleep, knows what it’s like to feel his stare crawl over her limbs like a phantom pain. So she stays all night; only leaves once the sun rises and the night leaves Robin to another day.
The months drag on this way. Some days are better than most. Some nights seem endless. The team tries not to keep count of the times Robin accidentally finds himself in the dark, faced against an enemy only he can see. Terra pretends she doesn’t keep a mental tally.
But there’s baby steps. Adaptations.
Robin sits closer to her one night. She sits curled up on the couch, a blanket around her shoulders. When she looks at him, he says, “I’m scared to close my eyes. I keep thinking I’ll see him.”
Terra stares at him. There’s a long pause and then –
“I see him every time I try to sleep.”
He looks at her. She wishes neither of them understood.
“What are you doing?” Terra eyes his fingers resting on the light switch.
Robin stares at his hand. The gym is empty sans them. The others are somewhere in the Tower, maybe. Terra saw Raven and Cyborg in the ops room earlier before she headed down here. She isn’t sure where Starfire and Beast Boy are.
The training mat is laid out on the floor. A weight rests on the floor. Judging by the sweat stains on his blue shirt, Robin had been working out. Now, though, he stands by the light switch, his eyebrows drawn together.
Terra’s heart thuds in her chest.
“I—” His hand stays where it is. His mouth is turned down in a confused frown. “I thought, maybe—”
“Maybe you’d give yourself a heart attack?”
This time he looks at her. She’s not sure if it’s because of the panic in her voice. She’s not sure if it’s because he realizes what he’s doing. All she’s sure of is that she doesn’t want to run across the room and turn on the lights, seconds ticking by, wondering how quickly the hallucinations will make Robin hurt himself this time.
His hand lowers.
Terra takes a step forward. Robin stares at her.
“Do you want to leave with me?” she asks. She keeps her gaze on him. She keeps walking towards him, slow. She keeps her hands at her side.
He continues staring at her.
“Robin?”
“I want to stop feeling afraid.”
The lights turn off.
For a moment there’s nothing but silence. Terra hears Robin’s harsh breathing. She hears her own shocked exhale. Nothing happens. It’s only when her eyes adjust that she catches sight of Robin, hunched over by the wall, hands around his middle.
He’s crying.
Terra crosses the short distance and turns on the light. Her hands shake.
Part of her thinks she should get Raven or Starfire. They know him better. They could pull him out of this. But she stays rooted to the spot, staring down at his slouched form, at his trembling shoulders. His sobs are quiet, like hers.
“Robin?”
He shakes his head.
Her hand hesitates near his shoulder.
“Robin, can I touch you?”
He shakes his head. Her hand falls to her side.
She crouches next to him, hands on her knees. Her fingers dig into her skin. It’s the only way to stop the shaking.
“He’s not here. He’s not.” She wants to say, ‘It’s okay’, but thinks better of it. It’s not okay. She still cries at night. Her chest is still scarred. Her breath hitches every time she hears his name.
Robin isn’t any better off.
“He’s alive,” he whispers. A tear rolls out from beneath his mask. He rubs at it and turns his face away from hers. “He’s not here but he’s out there. Somewhere.”
“I know,” she says. She keeps her gaze on him, his pale face. “I’m scared too.”
He doesn’t say anything for a solid moment. Terra isn’t sure how to break the silence.
“Don’t tell the others,” he says, finally, looking up at her.
She should but—
“I won’t.”
No one finds out.
Slade’s symbol blares on the screen. Everyone stares up at it and then looks back at Robin. He stands, fists clenched by his sides, scowling.
“You are not going,” Starfire says. Her hand rests on his shoulder. He doesn’t look at her. “It is night time, Robin. You cannot go. You know he will use this against you.”
“She’s right.” Cyborg backs away from the giant screen. When he looks at Robin, he frowns.
Terra sits down, away from them all. Raven and Beast Boy are talking now, and there’s some discussion happening, she knows. She can’t stop looking at the symbol on the screen. She can’t stop remembering the insignia on her chest. She can’t stop feeling Slade’s hand sliding underneath the armor of her suit, severing the connection between metal and skin.
She presses the heel of her palm to her chest.
The scar burns underneath her shirt. There’s a faint pressure on her chest. It’s numb, like her left arm. The feeling isn’t a new one.
“Terra?”
She looks at the team a moment too late.
Raven comes to kneel by her. She doesn’t touch her. She stares at Terra. Terra stares back.
“She can’t go either,” Raven says, looking at the team over her shoulder. “She’s — not well.”
“We’ll have to go without them, then,” Cyborg declares. The alarm blares again. On the on-screen map, Slade’s symbol flickers from the warehouse district to the bay. “Now.”
Just as the others rush towards the door, Raven hangs back. Robin doesn’t look up; he lifts his hand and she takes it for a second. It’s something they’ve done before. Terra watches as Raven squeezes his hand. The tense line of his shoulders relaxes marginally.
Raven steps away from Robin. She flies towards the door, only stopping to look back and meet Terra’s eyes.
“Raven, we gotta go now!” Cyborg yells from outside the room.
Raven nods at Terra and leaves. The door hisses shut, leaving Terra and Robin in the ops room.
When Terra looks at Robin, he turns away from her.
She digs the heel of her palm to her chest. The scar continues burning.
When she rejoined the Titans after months of pretending at Murakumi High School, Cyborg offered a medical examination. Just to check over her vitals, make sure she wasn’t sick.
When the stethoscope pressed over the fabric against her scar, she burst into tears. Cyborg froze and stared at her for a moment before pulling her into a hug, whispering into her hair that he’s sorry, he’s sorry, he just wanted to check her heart beat.
Once she calmed down, he offered one of the earbuds to her.
“So you can hear your heartbeat too.”
She accepted it and they listened to her hummingbird heart together.
She closed her eyes and cried again, silent. Cyborg rested a hand on her cheek and she leaned into his touch.
The next morning, the Titans come into the ops room battered and bruised.
Robin is asleep against Terra’s shoulder. She’s awake, staring at them over her shoulder, eyes red and swollen.
Raven meets her eyes.
No one wants to wake up Robin.
“Robin?” Terra turns to look at him and pats his cheek. The mask doesn’t let her see when his eyes open, but she knows he’s awake the moment his mouth turns down into a deep frown. He pulls away from her, masked gaze meeting hers for a moment, and looks back at the team.
His expression hardens.
They all sit on the couch except for Raven. She sits in the lotus position, hovering above the floor. There’s bruise marks on her neck.
“He stole some technology from Wayne Enterprises,” Cyborg says. His finger is a torch. He’s fixing his forearm. His normal eye is swelling up. “I haven’t been able to hack into the server yet to figure out what he stole but—“
“We believe we have found something else,” Starfire says, staring at Robin.
“It’s, um,” Beast Boy glances at Cyborg. Cyborg nods. “We think it could help. With the hallucinations.”
“We just have to contact someone who works at Wayne Enterprises in order to use it.” Raven rests her hands on her knees. When Robin looks at her, her face remains the same.
Terra doesn’t know what to say, so she says nothing. She reaches for Robin’s shoulder and he doesn’t shrug off her touch.
She takes it as a good sign.
“I can do that,” he says. He clears his throat and looks away from all of them.
The ops room is well lit, as always, when Terra steps in late at night. The others are asleep, she’s sure, but Robin is here, in his usual spot in front of the screen.
Surveillance videos and street cameras fill up the giant screen, filled with nothing but pedestrians and workers and warehouses. Terra comes to stand next to Robin, mirroring his crossed arms, his stiff spine.
“What do you think you’ll do if you come face-to-face with him?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says.
She turns to look at him. His face is pale.
“I play it out in my head, sometimes,” she starts, tucking her hair behind her ears, “and it’s never the same. A lot of the time I like to imagine myself killing him. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. Sometimes I just think I’ll scream at him for hours.”
“I don’t think I could kill him.” Robin shakes his head. He meets her gaze, frowning. “I don’t think I could kill anyone. Not even him.”
“I think that too, sometimes.” She looks back at the screens. Her eyebrows draw together. “But I know he’ll kill me if he gets the chance. I don’t think he’d kill any of you. But I know him.”
Robin’s hand bumps against her own. He leaves it there, his gloved hand against hers. She links their fingers together and he squeezes her palm.
“I won’t let him.”
The envelope comes in two weeks later. Cyborg opens it and pulls out a syringe, the formula already set.
No one wants to look at Robin.
Terra’s hand bumps against his. He links their fingers together after a moment and she squeezes his palm before letting go. He steps towards Cyborg.
“Do we do this here or in the med bay?”
“Unless you wanna get an infection, we should do it there. Sterilize the needle and all that,” Cyborg says.
Robin nods and the two of them leave the ops room. Terra wrings her hands together.
“I want to stop feeling afraid,” he tells her, finger on the light switch.
On the edge of his bed, Terra sits with her fingers gripping the blanket. The room is bright, but the curtains are closed. The bulbs above them buzz, faintly.
He looks at her. She looks at him.
The lights turn off.
Her eyes adjust to the dark and Robin is standing next to the light switch, mouth in a straight line. He looks around the room, slowly, and when nothing happens, he stares at her.
“Do you see him?” she whispers.
He shakes his head.
Terra smiles. He wordlessly crosses the floor and sits beside her on the mattress. He reaches for her closest hand, easing her fingers from the tight grip on the blanket. His thumb soothes over the pale knuckles and then his intertwines their fingers, his ungloved palm against her own calloused one. And then he kisses her.
He pulls away after a moment, his breath hot on her lips. They’re close enough to feel their chests rising and falling, but, Terra thinks, their breathing is deeper. Not faster. She places a hand on his chest, fingers splayed.
When she kisses him, it’s soft and steady; kissing him is holding hands in a free fall.
Terra sits back, her eyes closed, swallowing. A long moment passes before she opens her eyes, and when she does, she meets Robin’s masked gaze.
Her hand leaves his chest and comes to rest at the edge of his mask.
“Can I?”
He nods.