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Mid-morning in the Titans kitchen always saw some form of mayhem.
Whether it was Starfire trying to perfect a particularly explosive Tamaranean pastry recipe or Robin commandeering the kitchen island to get outside opinions on the connections he’d made from his files. But today it took the more conventional form of Cyborg flipping a stove top of sizzling bacon while pointedly ignoring Beast Boy’s complaints from the fridge.
“Dude, did you even get the almond milk I asked for?” the changeling whined, forlornly shaking the near-empty husk of what remained of his last carton.
Cyborg pursed his lips with disgust, tutting. “I have, and will always, only ever buy real food when I’m on grocery duty, B. To tack on whatever nut liquid-- because that stuff is not milk-- goes against everything I stand for.”
Once Beast Boy was done melodramatically sighing and moaning his woes for everyone to hear, he’d snatched the box of cereal he’d been intending to use that almond milk for and began eating it dry by the handful. A snicker of success pulled at Cyborg as he lowered the heat on the stove. He scooped the bacon up and tossed a couple eggs into the grease.
The pneumatic swoosh of the main door to the common room sliding open drew his attention from the sunny sides. Raven padded in, hood up, immediately turning pace to head for the electric kettle on the farther end of the kitchenette. “Turned it on for ya earlier,” Cyborg forewarned as her hand reached for the power latch, “but it’s prolly not hot enough for tea anymore.”
“Thanks anyway.” Raven restarted the kettle with a flick. Cyborg watched her angle herself sideways towards the rest of them, arms crossed beneath the bundled shoulders of her cloak. Her stature suggested she was in what he’d begun to consider her low interaction mode, but as her hands drew up to draw down her hood, she still wanted their company. She must have been tired to tumble out of her room so late in the morning -- and more specifically, after Beast Boy. Not that he could particularly blame the girl.
It hadn’t been two weeks since Trigon was banished. Two weeks since the Titans had been forced to watch helplessly from behind a black-and-white veneer as their friend disintegrated into an otherworldly portal to herald her father’s arrival on Earth.
Cyborg absentmindedly flicked a couple of the eggs over. The Titans were always buoyant when it came to recovering from particularly troubling conflicts, or at least Cyborg liked to believe so. Nothing could keep this team down. Not H.I.V.E, not Slade, not Brother Blood, and now they could add the demoniacal Trigon the Terrible to the list. But something haunted that last bullet, something that made his chest twinge and his arms weak. Cyborg was the kinda guy to hold a real grudge and man, did he have one against that cloven red giant for ever making them think Raven was… gone. Snap, just like that. Atoms torn apart before their very eyes in a blinding pool of white.
Despite every villain and naysayer, they’d never once been confronted with a grief so potent it took the fight out of Cyborg’s circuits. That shadow still lingered like an unwelcome ghost. It was disorienting to fall back into the routine of normalcy. The memory of that broken world lingered in his circuits like a glitch he couldn’t patch out. Even though Raven stood alive and well at the end of the kitchen, watching with a subtle smirk as Beast Boy tried and failed numerous times to throw Frosty Flakes into the air and catch them in his mouth.
Well. That felt as normal as you could get, all things considered. So he latched onto that pattern like a hardline connection. “I’m makin’ breakfast,” Cyborg offered as he shoveled the first finished set of sunny sides to a plate. “All the dressings. Eggs, bacon, and pancakes.” He gestured to the growing tower of cakes on the counter opposite him, where the last additions were bubbling away on the griddle top. “Want me to fix you a plate? I promise they’re no hockey pucks like the ones you whipped up.”
Raven, filling up her favourite blue mug, only gave him a sidelong glance through squinted eyes. Voice flat, she intoned, “well, sorry for trying to make you a nice breakfast on what I thought was our last day alive.”
Oops. Cyborg wisely opted to backpedal, his grin sheepish, an apology already on his tongue. He really didn’t wanna start today on the girl’s bad side-- but luckily for him, she only deflected it with a small smirk as she began steeping her tea. “It’s fine. You’re right -- they were terrible.”
Cyborg barked a laugh somewhere between amusement and relief. Then, abruptly, a light bulb buzzed to life over his head. He gripped the counters excitedly and leaned toward Raven, gesturing at her with his spatula. “That’s what we’re gonna do today. I’m gonna teach you how to make a proper all-American pancake.”
Raven’s hands stilled over her mug, and even half-hidden by her hair, Cyborg could see the reservation and impending refusal about to crawl out of her, so he beat her to it. “C’mon, Raven! For your health -- and ours -- you don’t wanna be responsible for anymore apocalyptic flapjacks, would you? Besides…” Cyborg tilted his head as his thoughtful expression morphed into a positively devious one. “You like waffles, don’t’cha? They’re just a hop, flip, ‘n a waffle iron away from makin’ those…”
That drew Raven’s eye. She slowly twisted her head until it was pinning Cyborg down. He held fast, all grinning self-satisfaction as he watched her mull over his argument-- but he knew the war was already won.
When Raven finally agreed, he could tell it was more out of resignation than genuine interest. She’d given him a world-weary fine but declared she’d be taking her tea, a plate, and her morning meditation before she set foot back in this kitchen. Which sounded all right with Cyborg, since it meant he had time to prepare the imminent war zone their kitchen would become by this afternoon.
And prepare for war he did . By the time Raven returned almost two hours later, sacks of flour were tossed like sandbags up against the edge of the counter and cooking utensils lined the island like an organized weapons arsenal. Cyborg’s favourite mixing bowl sat amidst it all, a focal point on the battlefield.
Raven, growing warier by the second as she approached the kitchen, eyed Cyborg’s lineup. “Is this all… really necessary?”
“Did’ja think I was just gonna let you get away with adding water to a box mix?”
Raven shrugged noncommittally, which he interpreted as a timid yes.
“That is completely antithetical to my values. The coward’s way out.” The cybernetic teen tutted, making a show of brandishing a plastic keyring of measuring cups. Cyborg’s smile grew wide. “I'm showing you how to make a real pancake. Now roll up those sleeves and get over here!”
After Cyborg hefted one of the bags of flour onto the counter, sending up a small cloud of white flour in the process, he’d prattled off measurements. “We’re bakin’ for a tower of bottomless pits so we’re gonna get a little generous with the measurements,” he huffed, knowing full well he was the deepest pit of them all. He benefited most from the quintupling of ingredients. “How ‘bout you start us off by dumping some flour into the mixing bowl?”
Raven, who stood silently beside Cyborg at the counter, drifted her gaze onto the bag dribbling flour onto the ceramic. With a weave of her wrist, the bag zipped upright as dark magic curled around it. Cyborg didn’t even have the time to cry out before it twirled upside-down and dumped the entire contents of the sack into the bowl. And all over the counter and floor. And then some. Like all over him, for instance.
Cyborg blinked. And then blinked again with a wince, realizing there was powder clumping in his eyelashes. He swiped it off with a finger, leaving a trail of skin and metal beneath the healthy layer of powder, and assessed the scene. The girl was really leaning into the warfront thing here. “I respect the ambition you’ve got goin’ on, but unless we’re cookin’ for Titans East, I think we’re about fifty cups too many.”
Raven shifted with a frown. “You said to dump it in.”
“...Touché. Alright, next step: sifting!”
After managing to tidy up the area just enough that every movement didn’t send idling flour flying, Cyborg showed Raven the other dry ingredients-- baking powder, sugar, salt-- and how to use the sifter to mix them cohesively together. “You don’t want any nasty lumps in there,” he explained as Raven began hesitantly tapping the sifter over the re-portioned mixing bowl-- growing stronger with every shake. “Just like that-- you can do it a little faster. C’mon, faster than that! Wait, hold on now, Raven, wai--!”
A proverbial mushroom cloud suddenly erupted from the bowl, sending a shock wave of dry ingredients across the kitchen and, again, all over Cyborg. He had a funny feeling this would be a recurring theme.
“...Well all right!” coughed Cyborg, a cloud of flour escaping his lungs looking comically like a warm breath on a cold winter’s day. “Think we’re good to head on to the wet ingredients.”
Raven cracked the egg on the counter as shown, and used both hands to drop its contents into the bowl. Cyborg’s brows lifted with surprise. This would be easier than he thought! He was here under the notion that-- oh . Well.
Right after the yolk fell the egg shells, crumbing apart into the bowl under Raven’s fingers as she drew her arms back under her flour-stained cloak, glancing expectantly up at Cyborg for the next instructions.
Cyborg blinked. I stand corrected.
“How ‘bout for the next few eggs the shells make it into the bin?” came his weary chuckle, poking a thumb at the waste basket he’d dragged over for her to use.
The addition of milk and butter was just as successful. Somehow, someway, despite the entire bag of flour being used, it was runny. The batter was runny. How it got to that point, he had no logical explanation. The dry-to-wet ratio was completely off in favor of the dry and this outcome was literally a chemical impossibility.
Well. If Raven was good at anything, it was doing the impossible. The whole Trigon thing had made him sure of that.
Mixing was where it got tricky. Raven initially tried using her magic to use the whisk first, and when he’d encouraged her to lose the magic and give it a little more oomph, he quickly ate words when she began mixing more ferociously by hand and several magic-lined utensils began floating up from the countertop. She didn’t even seem to take notice of them.
“Hey, Raven!” Cyborg shouted above the clamour of silverware. “I don’t think--”
Cyborg’s sensors picked it up on the system before he heard it-- the swish of the doors gliding open as Beast Boy re-entered the commons room, shaking a new carton of almond milk dramatically over his head. “See? Perfectly normal milk, fresh from the almond, at the store. Dude, it was like right there near the front!”
“Yo, B, duck! ”
Beast Boy stopped in his tracks. He looked perplexed. “Huh? No, I flew there as an eagle. Hey, why's all the silverwa-”
A very undignified and even more unmanly shriek escaped from Beast Boy as a two-pronged fork suddenly whizzed past. He immediately morphed into a green mallard, avoiding being skewered, but his almond milk was not so lucky. The fork flew true and pierced the side of the carton, taking it all the way to the wall with it, where it stuck. Milk began leaking down the wall onto the floor.
Raven, to her credit, looked mortified, having dropped the mixing bowl with a clang to the counter the second the fork went rogue. “Sorry,” she muttered. And she looked the part, hunched in her flour-smudged cloak, behind the counter that was quickly becoming some kind of biohazard. “...It got away from me there.”
Beast Boy reverted back to clear his sheepishly throat, turning to stare at the almond milk carton crucified on the wall. “Aww, man!” he whimpered, hanging his head and trudging forlornly back out the doors. “I’ll be right back, guys. I have to go, uh, to the store for something.”
Cyborg managed to hold down the fort between the murder of the almond milk (which he vehemently concurred was the morally correct thing to do, when she’d asked) and getting the first ladle of runny batter on the griddle top.
“You gotta wait ‘til there’s these little bubbles on the surface,” he pointed out to her as he grilled a prototype pancake. “You give it a quick flip and-!” In a quick, confident flick of the spatula, his pancake performed a perfect arc in the air, spinning a few times in the air like an gold medalist, before landing perfectly on the griddle. “Voila! Now you give it a go.”
Raven grimaced slightly and ladled batter for her own pancake onto the grill top. Cyborg immediately felt his face pull with alarm as the batter tried running away from her spatula. When it was time to flip he advised her as much, but only watched in dismay as she overestimated-- and the pancake flew towards the ceiling. And stuck there.
After a few seconds of stunned silence had passed, the pancake unpeeled from the ceiling and dropped with a smack back onto the griddle, wet-side down. The cooked side was charred black.
He had no idea how she’d burned it. It had been on the burner for the exact same amount of time as his. Something in his brain must have short-circuited computing because his nose had that smoky smell that meant something internal was frying. Or maybe it was just the pancake.
“...Five second rule?”
Cyborg looked at Raven. “How you feelin’ about a round two?”
Raven hung her head with a groan.
The second round went a touch smoother. No flour bags were abused and exploded, there wasn’t a mushroom cloud of dry ingredients to choke through, the milk didn’t turn it into chemically questionable soup and the egg shells made it into the bin instead of the bowl. Well, at least ninety-seven percent of them.
He’d scrubbed the griddle top clean for round two, prepped the grease, and watched Raven methodically begin ladling scoops of the batter onto the warm grill.
A silence, comfortable and patient, had rolled over them, accompanied only by the sound of batter sizzling on the griddle and the occasional scrape of a spatula.
It still hit him sometimes, that oddness, out of nowhere. How wild it was that she was standing here, flipping pancakes, like the past month hadn’t happened. Like she hadn’t been dissolved and reassembled and taken down her multidimensional demon lord of a father the size of a Jump City block. Just two weeks ago, Cyborg had stared into a sky full of fire, wondering if that was it. For her, for the Titans, for everyone on earth. Even he’d had a hard time finding the spirit to keep on fighting for a new dawn when the sun burned out somewhere in the corrupted atmosphere.
“You want to say something.”
Cyborg started, looking at the girl with surprise. She met his gaze evenly, a single brow quirked. She had that particular gleam to her eye that made him feel like she could see straight through his circuits to his heart. Right. Empath and all . His chest rumbled with a chuckle. “You know all my tells, huh?”
Raven shrugged. “You’ve never exactly been the type for subtlety.”
Cyborg laughed at that, resisting the urge to clap her warmly on the shoulder. “You know it!” he crowed. “I was just thinkin’ about how glad I am that you’re all good, Raven.”
Raven’s lack of response was invitation enough to keep speaking, so he did. “We were all pretty shaken up that day, y’know.” He knew he didn’t need to specify which day. “Thought we’d lost you down there. And we had no way of knowing if you’d be coming back or if you were…”
“Gone.” Raven solemnly finished the sentence where Cyborg failed to, opting to let the morbid notion drift off back from whence it came. Even if it was only a memory now, that terrifying uncertainty still held a power over him. Maybe it was that monochromatic demon version of him dredging up angst from his old human life coupled with the loss of Raven that really hit home for Cyborg.
He glanced at her now, her expression faraway, spatula poised over the pancake for a beat as the sound of bubbling batter filled the air. “I was gone, in a way,” she divulged in a taut voice. “Trigon removed my memories. Memories of my magic, my past… of all of you.” Raven spared Cyborg a small, solemn glance, as though guilty for forgetting him. “But the more Robin talked about the Titans when he found me, the more I remembered.”
Cyborg let out a great gust of air, blowing out his cheeks, a crooked grin on his lips. “Man… I remember seeing you tiptoe out from behind Robin, all tiny ‘n white. I didn’t believe my own scanners for a second. Then when we were down and you just-- woosh!” He made a vague gesture with one hand, like he was emulating wielding her powers, “took down Trigon like it was the easiest thing in the world!”
“It wasn’t.”
Cyborg winced slightly at the tension in her tone. But he knew it wasn't for him. So he gave her a faint smile. “I know.”
Cyborg let the quiet hang there for a second, brooding on what she’d said. He watched her eye the pancake he was sure would be ready to flip any second now, but he could tell even she was pondering something far deeper and darker than the likes of some bubbling batter.
He’s never been too good with the subtle stuff, as she stated earlier. He was big and loud and larger than life and that’s just how Cyborg liked it! …But for once, he didn’t feel the need to fill this silence right away.
Raven’s here. She’s safe. Not a white-cloaked ghost of a friend he thought he’d lost forever.
He remembered how every part of him had weighed heavily that night as they watched Raven disintegrate into the portal, felt her signature disappear from his radar as the world was swept with fire-filled air. Watched her return like a white phoenix from the world’s ashes with outstretched hands, commanding a hallowed power strong enough to banish Trigon, Destroyer of Worlds to the furthest reaches of perdition.…
Hard to believe that was only three short weeks ago, because now those same pale hands wielded a flimsy spatula to experimentally probe at the edge of her pancake.
Cyborg thought about what she’d recited, over and over and over until he’d gotten sick of it, about how Trigon was infallible. Unstoppable. How her part in the prophecy would come to fruition and she’d become this gem for Trigon to use to enter their world. Even up until the very end, she’d maintained that fatalistic outlook. But some of her last actions with the Titans told another story.
“You kept telling us he was unstoppable,” Cyborg mused aloud, idly wiping batter from the ladle with a rag. “Your dad. What made you change your mind?”
Raven blinked, lifting her head to regard him. A tiny stitch in her brow revealed she was pondering how to react to the question-- or maybe trying to figure out the answer herself. So Cyborg elaborated. “For how convinced you were that the world was doomed to end, Raven, you still protected us so that we could do something to save it. I didn’t understand why you’d done it.”
He leaned back, hands crossing pensively in front of him, gaze distant. “I was staring out at that world, all fire and stone and obsidian and thinking, ‘well, how can we possibly fix this? Why’d she keep us around to wander around Trigon’s fiery playground for the rest of our lives?’”
Raven looked like she was about to deflate, hitching her shoulders tensely beneath her cloak, but he quickly steered her away before the weight of his words settled in wrong. “Then we realized-- we had your magic! ‘Cause someone wasn’t as convinced as she made herself out to be about the end of the world.”
Raven hunched smaller, drawing a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she stared at the stovetop instead of at him. Cyborg swore he could see her cheeks colour slightly. Like she was embarrassed she’d done more than simply lie down and die as was prophesied. This girl!
Cyborg knew that the entire catastrophe probably weighed on the empath more than she would ever admit. But he felt no need to pull it out of her. Not today. He valued keeping his wiring in check, and he valued and respected Raven’s privacy. He couldn’t say he wasn’t curious about what was going on in her head, but when she was ready, she’d tell him.
“I knew you’d try,” Raven said suddenly, voice quieter than the sizzle of batter. “All of you. Even when you shouldn’t have.”
Cyborg tilted his head with a quirked lip. “That’s what we do, Rae.”
Her mouth twitched -- maybe a small, maybe a grimace at the nickname. He’d let himself believe it was the former since they had a nice moment going here. “I didn’t think I’d be around to see if it worked. The protection ward and powers were a parting gift.”
Cyborg’s smile faltered. He remembered the moment his scanners returned to function, waking up under Trigon’s sky in the ruins of Jump City. He leaned down on his elbows over the counter. “We didn’t exactly leap outta the rubble ready to charge, y’know. Woke up to a whole lotta fire, whole lotta bad news… and not a whole lotta hope.” He glanced at her, curious. “Then I saw this raven, up in the sky. Next thing I knew, my feet were movin’, even if I didn’t know what it was for yet. Led all of us together.”
Raven glanced up, the drop of her cheek relaying her surprise. Guess she didn’t know about that part. Cyborg’s head tilted in quiet curiosity. “That was you, wasn’t it?”
Raven’s brow furrowed, thoughtful. “I don’t think so. At least not on purpose.”
Cyborg shrugged in reply. “Whatever it was… it was enough to get us movin’. Enough to remind us the fight wasn’t over before it started. Sometimes that’s all it takes: one little thing that tips the scale. So what tipped yours?”
Raven’s gaze drifted down, not onto the griddle, but to the hand wielding the spatula. Her voice was quieter this time. “Well…” she mumbled, and he saw her gently graze the skin on the palm of her right hand. “Guess I got a little lucky.”
Cyborg’s features softened. “Yeah. I think we all had a whole lot of it that day. Rob told us we had to have hope, too. And man, was it hard to find it again beneath all the brimstone, but I’m glad I did.”
Raven smiled softly. “Funny. He told me something similar.”
Cyborg grinned cheekily. “Guy really knows how to do the whole leaderly inspirational speech thing, huh?”
Raven’s eyes rolled with exasperation, but it was fond. “Ugh, tell me about it.”
The two shared their amusement in matching smiles. They both loved and respected the guy, but sheesh, could he write a book on championing cheesy team morale.
They let the quiet linger for a beat -- warm, steady, and a far cry from the fire and brimstone of a few weeks past.
“I guess what I’m leadin’ up to,” Cyborg concluded, tossing the mixing bowl into the sink, “is that when everything looks impossible, I guess the only thing left to do is try anyway. And your track record shows you’ve got quite the habit of making the impossible possible, little lady. Like that ‘cake you got there.”
He gestured to the griddle top where Raven had just absentmindedly flipped her pancake without needing his timing or direction -- and it was perfect. A crisp golden-brown on both sides, steaming with heat and cooked to the touch. Even Raven blinked with astonishment as she realized it, eyes lighting up beneath her arched brow.
With a small smile that turned up the corner of her mouth, she levitated the pancake onto the top of their tower. From the more appealing top layers to the burnt and blackened at the tower’s base, they were all a show of her progress over the last two hours.
Cyborg grinned and snatched the tower’s platter up off the table, spinning it on a finger before presenting it to Raven in a grand flourish. “And look at that! Saving the world one week, saving breakfast the next. Think we’re ready for the taste test?”
Raven crossed her arms over her chest with satisfaction, but not before wiping a dollop of pancake mix from her cheek with the inside of her wrist cuff. Now Cyborg was no empath but he’d say she looked pretty pleased with herself-- that tick in her jaw was gone and her eyes gleamed.
He realized for the first time that her cloak, normally a deep midnight-blue, had become so coated in powder that she looked harrowingly similar to the white-cloaked ghost.
And had it been three weeks ago, the sight of this might have made his heart weigh heavy.
But now? He just felt proud. Proud she’d held onto hope, proud she’d defeated Trigon, proud she’d made the perfect pancake. “ Well?”
Raven smiled. “I’ll get the plates.”
The Titans gathered around the kitchen island, staring in equal parts awe and suspicion at the platter of pancakes piled high presented in the centre of the table like some kind of artifact. But despite the forks clutched in their hands, no one dared make the first move for the tower.
“Uhh, wow,” Robin began, eyeing the high-rise platter. “Thanks for making pancakes.. again.”
Beast Boy was leaning forward on the table, nose twitching as he assessed the possibility of death by pancake from scent alone. But he sat back, looking pleasantly mollified after a few seconds. “They smell normal,” he disclosed, snatching one from the top to experimentally poke at it on his plate.
Starfire, ever eager to indulge in her friend’s cooking, only clasped her hands together with obvious exuberance. “They appear most glorious! I shall partake first!” She speared the top three pancakes on a fork and made quick work of tearing into them.
Cyborg spotted Raven leaning incrementally forward, enough to inform him that she was focused on Starfire’s reaction. It was a moot point, he thought, since Star would’ve loved even if it was still as apocalyptic as Raven’s last attempt at pancakes. Still, he relished in Star’s absolute delight when the alien girl gasped. “Oh, friends, it is most wonderful! But tell me, do you have any more of the variant that reminded me of the incinerated glorka roaches? And may you please pass me the mustard?”
Robin took that query as a sign it was safe to proceed (with some understandable caution). He forked his own pancakes onto a plate and took a polite bite, and his surprise couldn’t have been more obvious despite the mask on his face. Beast Boy, seeing Robin take a bite and not immediately drop dead, took a chomp out of his own. “Oh dude, these actually taste good! ”
…And then began to wither under Raven’s pointed stare. “I mean-! Wowthanks,Raven! For making these!” Beast Boy laughed nervously, making an effort to shovel as much into his mouth as he could to deflect the empath’s glare. “Th’re awe’ome!”
“ Yes , they are,” tutted Cyborg as he plated his own share. “Mm-mm! Smells like someone else is finally gonna be on Sunday pancake duty!”
Now it was Cyborg’s turn to wither beneath the empath’s ire as it pivoted onto him. He gave a weak chuckle. “Uhh, how ‘bout every other weekend?”
The stare remained.
“...Once a month?”
It lingered still.
“...Once a month and I help?”
Raven’s hard stare broke, her face slackening with gratitude. “That, I think I can do. Thanks.” They smiled at one another, pleased with more than just the turnout of the pancakes.
Beast Boy, cheeks stuffed to the brim like a chipmunk, abruptly stopped short and looked at the pancake fluff on his fork, then up between Raven and Cyborg.
“Wai’, ‘ese are ‘egan, righ’?”