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Raven stood in front of her bookshelf, pale fingertips hovering over the familiar well-worn spine of one of her favourite novels.
It was a fictional tale about a young sorceress coming to terms with the darkness that lined her magic with the help of those she meets along her journey. She had always envied the protagonist for the sheer level of control she had over her magic, even in times of peril. She envied her freedom and reign over powerful emotions that would have drowned Raven - and possibly a number of unwilling others - in them.
The parallel had never been lost on her. Not even when Raven had first cracked it open and read the first few paragraphs, not when she had closed it with a musing sigh and contemplated on the rather optimistic albeit fictitious outlook its author had held on darker magics. If only they knew the cost.
Regardless, it had been a simple comfort, something she plucked from the shelf without thinking to spin her away from this world for just a few hours and drop her into another where powers like hers were not something to dread but something to celebrate.
Now she could scarcely bear to look at it, let alone take it from her crowded bookshelf to read from. It felt just as suspect as every other book she’d tried to pick up over the last three days.
Three days since Malchior had revealed himself to be none other than the terrorsome dragon from the grimoire now locked deep within the confines of a chest hidden in the shadows of her room.
Part of her knew it was irrational to think that every book lining her shelves had something dark imbued into the ink. That each margin held a malicious shadow waiting to leap out at her the moment she would pry the dog-eared pages apart, concealing wicked betrayal in every drop of a rich voice that always beseeched more of her.
Changed her. Manipulated her.
Raven released a taut sigh and before she could second-guess herself, yanked the book from the shelf into her cloak. Frustration knotted somewhere in her throat. Reading was something she could always turn to when even meditation could not quell her. It was something she could do lingering on the outskirts of the other Titans, detached enough to maintain her peace while remaining near enough to feel included. It was grounding.
She hated this. Hated how a book that had once been warm in her memory now felt cold and heavy in her palms. Hated how Malchior had stolen something that had once been such an infallible source of solace for her and forced it to become a thing to question. She wouldn’t say she feared it, but the drop of her stomach whenever she got even close to cracking open another book said more than her denial ever could.
Raven sat on her bed, clenching the novel so tightly her fingers blanched impossibly paler. After several minutes of telling herself she’d flip open the cover in a few seconds, it turned into after she’d made her bed, then straightening a slightly askew candelabra on her dresser, and then dusting the top of her ceiling sconces. She recognized procrastination and knew she wouldn’t get anywhere with reading this afternoon.
So Raven meditated. She meditated day and night, unbinding the frazzled tethers of her mind from the damage Malchior’s tenure had wrought. She worked to fill the gaping wound he had left by herself, pulling the fibers of her soul together stitch by stitch. It was all she knew to fix it.
But that wasn’t entirely true. That stitching had begun the moment a certain green changeling had hovered outside her door when all had been said and done, radiating a regret so potent and a heartfeltness so compelling that all she could do was let her shattered world pitch straight into his arms for a moment, and begin to feel the pieces gluing back together.
Beast Boy told her she wasn’t alone. And Raven believed him.
So when she drifted into the common room later when meditation failed to provide the peace she so desperately desired from it, the book still untouched in her hands, she hooked on to that feeling of solidarity his presence that night had given her.
The warmth of an embrace cut woefully short but satisfyingly avenged by gutting Cyborg in the stomach with a stankball.
…Even if that solidarity now came in the form of petulant clamoring between the boy Titans over who should get the next turn with the controller. Why they didn’t just buy a third controller to settle these childish scuffles so all three could play, she had no clue. Boys .
“Dude! It’s not fair!” Beast Boy badgered, before quite literally turning into a badger and clambering over Cyborg in a vain attempt to snag the controller from the larger teen’s hands. After failing a few times he morphed back with a snarl. “Give it!”
“You know the rules, BB,” Cyborg tutted, grabbing his head and shoving the changeling back towards Robin. “Winner gets to play the next round.”
“But you’ve won the last eleven rounds!” whined Beast Boy, arms still flailing towards Cyborg’s controller. “I wanna chance to kick Robin’s butt, too! Gimme!”
“I’d like to see you try,” Robin huffed, protectively clutching his own controller to deflect any attempts at snatching it from him during his turn. Beast Boy slumped down between them, arms crossly pressed over his chest. He seemed to mentally shift gears before leaning over into Robin, gripping his leader’s shoulders and staring with implore into the whites of his mask. “Robin. You gotta win this one. It’s the only way we can stop him.”
Raven rolled her eyes and padded further into the room, making for the furthest unoccupied edge of the couch, levitating onto it and placing the book silently on her lap. She did not move to open it. Maybe in a few minutes when the boys’ volume got annoying.
Cyborg and Robin had begun their twelfth match, trading empty barbs and insults, and Raven with no reading to ground her, found herself absentmindedly watching the screen.
Until she felt his presence saddle beside her, glowing with a curiosity she was all too familiar with. A curiosity that while well-intentioned -- especially as of late, she’d come to realize -- still felt smothering at times.
“Hey Raven! What’cha readin’?”
Raven glanced briefly at Beast Boy. He sat tucked into a crouch, arms wrapped around his knees and chin tucked over them as he regarded her with a fanged smile.
Since Malchior, he’d been… a little softer around the edges. Concern whisked from him like a warm breeze, undercut with an underlying draft of remorse she didn’t like sensing on his psyche. She’d forgiven him for the creepy comment when she hugged him outside her bedroom door, but she supposed Beast Boy was the very type to linger on insecurities. If his whole larger-than-life disposition wasn’t enough of an indication.
Still. It was sweet. Not that she’d ever tell him that. She learned her lesson the first time with the funny thing.
“..I’m not really,” Raven said when she realized she’d been quiet for maybe a couple heartbeats too long, gripping the spine of the novel in her palm before sliding it off her lap to the couch.
Beast Boy huffed thoughtfully. “Never thought I’d see the day you didn’t have your nose stuffed in a book!”
To his credit, Beast Boy immediately registered that that might have been the wrong thing to say, watching whatever openness that had lightened Raven’s features seal right back up as her gaze darkened and her head bowed.
“At least it’s not that book,” she muttered, immediately feeling his horrified gaze burning into the side of her face.
Beast Boy startled. “I didn’t think-- I didn’t mean, like, that one,” the changeling fumbled, stumbling over himself as he tried to backpedal. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to…”
“I know.” Raven’s response was curt and quiet and a little sharper than she’d intended for it to be. She shrank down a bit, concerned he'd jump ship and scramble back across the couch. So much for solidarity.
An awkward silence stretched between them, covered up by the ruckus Cyborg was making as he bested Robin on the second lap of the circuit, the tinny sound of pixelated explosions booming from the speakers.
Beast Boy rocked back slightly, knees still hugged to his chest, and Raven could feel him watching her again. That subtle thrum of worry still threaded itself under his usual brightness, making the crooked smile on his face waver. “..You haven’t been reading much lately, is all.”
That got her attention. Raven glanced up from her lap, brow arched in a silent question as Beast Boy fiddled with his thumbs. “I mean-- I’ve seen you trying to read, since… y’know.” Gloved hands rubbed sheepishly up and down his arms as he avoided her scrutiny. “You always bring a book but you never open it.”
She blinked, not having realized he was so perceptive about that. Then again, he had admitted to being a spying little fly on the wall in her room last week with Malchior (which she still felt oddly about), but this, again, felt well-intentioned. Of all the Titans, he’d been the one to keep tabs on her throughout the entire ordeal.
Maybe if she’d just listened to Beast Boy’s concerns for even a second during it, she wouldn’t have fallen so deep under Malchior’s spell. Her heart twinged guiltily for all she’d done under his influence, and for all her friends’ consolation on how she’d done nothing wrong, Raven knew she was responsible for all she did under him too.
Raven hadn’t really planned on saying anything, expecting the silence between them to stretch until he would maybe grow bored of it and return back to the others like he normally would. It felt like the moment before you turned a page, except you were hesitant to keep going for fear of what the next page had to offer.
Yet she turned it still.
“I’m sorry for morphing you.”
Beast Boy blinked, obviously taken aback by the apology. “Huh?”
“When I morphed you last week. Into a rat.”
Beast Boy’s expression remained confused for just a moment until it grew shadowed with the memory of it. “Oh,” he exhaled, jaw working like he was trying to find the words to continue. To laugh it off, wave a gloved hand and blather about how was just another page in their book of tiffs. But his actual response was a lot more earnest.
“...It’s okay,” he finally puffed, blowing air from his cheeks and scratching the back of his neck uneasily. “I guess I kinda deserved it.”
“No, you didn’t.”
The changeling glanced up at her, surprised. “But I spied on you. In your bedroom.”
“You were worried,” countered Raven, voice barely above a murmur. “And I was reckless. I used Malchior’s magic to violate your autonomy. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Beast Boy absorbed that in silence, and she swore she could feel the emotional scale within him wobble erratically between guilt and gratitude. So she decided to help tip it further in the latter’s favor.
“He stole my trust. Twisted it. You’ve only ever done everything to earn it. I just… don’t want to lose yours because of that mistake. Using that kind of power over you just because I could.”
Beast Boy’s stare was indecipherable. Raven leaned back slightly under it. So often she wished for him to just be quiet, but now that he was, she felt its weight like an anchor in her chest. For how loudly he wore his heart on his sleeve, it was in these rarer moments she altogether failed to read him. It was one of Beast Boy’s (admittedly very few) mysteries.
She’d been thinking about how she’d morphed him from the moment Malchior had betrayed her. A notch on the fraying thread of her mind, only growing more taut in her inaction the last three days. She didn’t want him to think of her as someone dangerous. As someone like Malchior.
“You couldn’t.”
Raven looked up. He was still looking at her with that same earnest, but it was warmer now. Softer. “You couldn’t lose my trust. I mean, it was surprising -- and a little scary! -- but… I figured it was him getting all up in your head anyway.”
“I was still in control of my own actions. I consciously decided to do it.”
Beast Boy shrugged, sheepish. “What I’m trying to say is-- it really is okay. Really. And thanks. I, uh, appreciate it. Besides, I already forgave you for it when he…” The boy trailed off, biting down on the inside of his lip. He didn’t need to finish the sentence for Raven to understand.
Her shoulders, which had been held stiff since she woke that morning, eased as that particular notch on her guilty conscience finally unraveled.
Another remained further down the thread, still, but that was to be addressed another more fateful day. She only hoped his trust would extend to her when she turned sixteen and brought brimstone and fire in her wake, too. If it even happened.
Raven’s hand twitched on her lap, her elbow angling back towards the forgotten book beside her. For the first time in a while, she thought she felt the courage needed to flip it open and indulge in her creature comforts without the burden of a guilty conscience pinning her down.
Beast Boy took notice of the minute gesture, face brightening with an idea. “Oh! If you want you can borrow some of my comics! Warm back up into it, and all. I’ve got plenty-- I just gotta dig ‘em out!” He squinted thoughtfully. “I think I left some under last week’s sock pile...”
Raven winced. “...I think I’ll pass. But.. thanks.”
“Offer’s always there if you change your mind!” Beast Boy grinned, finally shifting his gaze from her back onto the TV screen, where Cyborg was infuriatingly still in the lead over Robin and nearing the final lap’s finish line. “C’mon, Robin! Put the pedal to the metal and take that tin man down!”
“What do you think I’m doing?!” Robin hissed back, brow creased behind his mask as his hands trembled with effort over his controller. Cyborg looked entirely too blithe, whistling a tune that reeked of overconfidence. A smug tune she was sure would continue into the next round, much to Beast Boy’s inevitable dismay.
Well. Time for a course correction.
With a barely perceptible smirk followed by a rogue flick of her finger, she grasped the joystick on Cyborg’s controller and jerked it to the left, which sent his vehicle careening into the wall of the course in a screeching cloud of smoke. Robin’s racer streamed over the finish line in the nick of time.
“ What--!” hollered Cyborg, staring at the controller in his hands in horror. “I didn’t do that!”
“I dunno, but it kinda looks like you did just lose, ” Robin simpered, throwing his arms cockily behind his head, wholly unaware of Raven’s interference in the game. “Which means you gotta give it up to Beast Boy. You know the rules.”
His reverie with Raven all but forgotten, Beast Boy gasped with delight, shifted into a badger again to scramble across Robin and onto Cyborg, snatching the controller out of his hands in his teeth. “A-ha!” he hooped as he shifted back, dropping onto the couch and making a show of coddling the device close to his face. “Helloooo, beautiful! Scooch over, Cy, and let the real gamers show you how it’s done!”
Cyborg grumbled bitterly, heaving himself up from the couch and tromping over to the kitchen to munch his woes away. “Wanted a snack, anyway… stupid good-for-nothin’ modded controller… gettin’ a refund…”
The competitive clamor eventually became a comfortable background noise as Raven slowly drew the novel back over her legs. She brushed her thumb pensively over the worn indentation of its front, over the spine that had been cracked open one too many times to stay crisp and square, and with a tiny, tiny glance up at Beast Boy through her lashes, flipped open the cover.
Slowly, the sorceress’ eyes begin to trail down the familiar first paragraph of the story. Maybe on this read, she wouldn’t be so envious of the protagonist’s control over her magic.
Beast Boy, watching (not so discreetly) through the corners of his eyes as he raced and consequently fell far behind a jeering Robin, grinned broadly when he saw Raven finally turn the page.