First, Worst, Last

by Cyberwraith9

The night life of Jump City bustled around her, too close for comfort without ever quite daring to touch her. Cars rumbled past in the orderly and frustrated lines of traffic, the streets packed for a Friday night made perfect by a cool summer breeze. The sidewalks were twice as packed and just as hectic. And always present, the collective emotional din of humanity blared across the ether, making the simple city street feel alive in some unspoken, ineffable way.

Ineffable, that is, to everyone but Raven. She stood ramrod straight with her back to the brick facade of a tiny bakery as she silently willed the foot traffic to move around her. The city's psychic background noise washed over her mental barriers, which she had meditated into a veritable fortress for the night. Nothing short of an all-out assault on her mind could even touch her. This unfortunately left her alone with her thoughts, which were rapidly crumbling into panic.

For once she felt as though the odd looks the passersby gave her were earned. The familiar comforts of her vestments and cloaks were gone. She wore a black dress cut high on the leg, with thin shoulder straps and a neckline that plunged more than she wanted it to. A set of pumps held her ankles in a vice-like grip, but had the added benefit of making her feel as though she might topple over at any moment. Starfire had insisted on helping with her makeup, especially when discovering that Raven didn't own any. Their wildly different complexions and tastes had left Raven with only a clear lip gloss and a ghosting of eye shadow that complemented her twilight hair.

She forced herself not to check her watch again. It would make her look nervous, and she refused to look nervous, because that would mean she was nervous, and nervousness would be ridiculous because there was no reason for her to be nervous.

Everything is going to be fine. The words looped in her head until they became her new mantra. Everything is going to be fine.

The air split with a long, avian screech, making Raven and everyone else in earshot jump. A dark shape zipped out of the night sky, revealing itself as it spread its wings to land on the sidewalk. Raven recognized the green falcon before its feathers ballooned, becoming the more familiar elfin shape she had been expecting.

"Sorry I'm late," Beast Boy said, smiling as soon as he saw her. "Traffic above the turnpike was murder. Pelicans, am I right? Learn to fly already!"

Like her, Beast Boy had shucked his uniform in favor of something nicer. He wore dark slacks, polished shoes, and a purple button-up shirt with a necktie. The outfit glistened with newness as though it had been stitched fresh just hours ago.

As he ran his hand through shaggy green hair, his smile grew strained. Raven realized with a start that she was frowning. She hastily smoothed her features and said, "You look nice."

He smirked. "You look better." Then he backpedaled, stammering, "Better than me, I mean. Nicer! You look nicer, which is to say...good."

Raven stumbled for another compliment to wash away that awkwardness. By the time she gave up, the silence had gone on too long. "So," she said a little too forcefully, "you're here. We're here. What did you have in mind?"

Beast Boy shrugged, gesturing around them. "I figured we'd get swept up in the moment and go with the flow, Mama."

Her brow furrowed. "No," she said.

"No to the flow, or no to 'Mama?'" he asked.

"No," she said again. The lines of her pumps cut deeper into her ankles as she shifted from foot to foot. "You, um... You didn't make any reservations? No plans? Even a glimmer of a plan?"

He licked his thumb and drew it across his eyebrow, wiping away a nonexistent errant hair. "I find that plans get in the way of doing things, Gorgeous," he said, and lit her with his brightest, sexiest smile.

Raven stared at him blankly until the smile faded from his face. Then she continued to stare, just to make a point. "Let's think of something else," she said.

He started to say something, but then stopped. A flash of annoyance rang in her empathic senses before she watched him swallow it. "Uh, how about food?" he suggested.

Raven felt her own annoyance burgeoning and tamped it down before it could spread to her face again. "Food sounds good. Lead on," she said.

Bending at the waist, Beast Boy gestured before them with a sweep of his arm and a stuffy, exaggerated, "Milady?"

The gesture nearly broke the stolid line of Raven's mouth. But then she flinched back as he offered her his hand. "Oh...um..."

He looked up to see her reaction, and then recoiled as if his hand were an explosive. His voice threaded with panic as he said, "Oh! Sorry, sorry! Duh. Of course you don't want to—"

"No!" she cried, making him flinch in kind. She could feel the walls of her mighty empathic fortress beginning to crack. Taking a deep breath, she held out her hand and forced herself to say, "I would very much like to...hold hands..."

Beast Boy took her hand with all the enthusiasm and certainty of a cornered squirrel. Raven could not guess which of them had the clammier, sweatier palm, but she cringed all the same at the swampy skin pressed together. As they started to walk, Raven felt grateful for the odd looks from the people around them, because it meant she and Beast Boy looked as uncomfortable together as she felt.

Her feet wobbled atop the borrowed pumps, forcing her to yank at Beast Boy's hand to keep her balance. It took more effort than she cared to admit to keep herself from banishing the shoes to another dimension. After the third block, she could feel Beast Boy fidgeting through the clammy grasp, and she realized that the silence had gone on too long again. "So...your clothes are new," she said.

"Huh? Oh, yeah!" He looked down, tugging at the necktie with his free hand. "I had to beg and plead with Robin to let me get a set of clothes that can shift with me. He wouldn't let me get it until I told him I needed it for our date."

"To be fair," Raven said, "don't your clothes cost an unbelievable amount of money?"

"No, see, it's believable now. I believe it because Robin spent half an hour telling me how expensive each and every unstable molecule costs. Though, in his defense, I think I'm wearing the equivalent of a downtown high-rise condo." Beast Boy slicked back his hair and adopted a phony Gotham Growl. "You need to treat those clothes like a responsibility, Gar. We need to practice budget-conscious crime fighting."

A snort rattled Raven's nose. "It couldn't be any worse than Koriand'r." Her voice rose two octaves as she parroted back, "Raven, you cannot forego cosmetics for this momentous occasion. Let me drag you into my room and slather your face in colorful minerals."

"Holy cosmetics, that sounds swell," Beast Boy growled. "Just make sure we still have enough in the books to fuel our supersonic jet."

"Well, if the jet is ever stuck at home, Koriand'r can offer it a makeover," Raven said.

Beast Boy laughed. "Oh! And you should have heard Vic. He was all... He was, um..."

Raven bit her lip, letting him trail off as the same thought struck her. "We're not going to spend the whole night making fun of our friends, are we?" she asked.

"What? Psh! No," he said, laughing off the question. "It's not like we're so desperate for anything else to talk about that we'd spend our whole date making easy jokes about the people we live with. We can talk about other stuff, like...um...oh! How was your day?"

Everything in Beast Boy's body and soul screamed his wish to yank his words back and swallow them. The question hung in the air, a toxic silence that clung to them no matter how fast they walked. Raven held her breath and tried to think of something to say, anything else. Her vision started to go black at the edges before she caved in and answered, "Good. We were training for most of it. You were there too."

"Yes. Yes, I was," Beast Boy said. "I thought you did a great job floating and teleporting. Really, just...top notch."

"Yes," she said, and then, "I mean, thank you. I also liked the way you...turned into animals."

Her cheeks blazed with humiliation. She wasn't practiced in conversation, but having had several conversations in her life, she knew empirically that talking to another person wasn't supposed to be this difficult.

"Thanks. I try to animals really hard," he mumbled. Beads of sweat gathered nervously on his brow. He wiped them into his hair, trying and failing to slick it back behind his pointed ears. After two more false starts, he chuckled, and managed to say, "I'm not used to seeing your arms."

She frowned. "I'm sorry?"

He lifted her hand as if to show her the bare arm extending from her dress strap. "Your arms. You always wear your bodysuit thing with the sleeves, and the cloak. Which is cool, but you just have really nice arms. Toned, I mean. All that training." Squeezing his eyes shut, he visibly strained to stop himself. Then he said, "Can we pretend I just told you that you look nice in that dress instead of whatever the hell just came out of me?"

The cracks in her psychic walls became fissures in the onslaught of his nervousness. "Please let's," she deadpanned.

They walked on, a small ocean of uneasiness gathering between their mashed palms. Silence had been a sanctuary to Raven her whole life, but now it felt as though the silence was assaulting her, ruining something that had seemed so simple mere hours before.

Pressing the impatience out of her voice, she asked, "How far is it to the restaurant?"

"Huh?"

"The place where we're getting food?" Sarcasm steeped her tone in spite of herself.

His expression twisted with confusion. "I have no idea where we're going. Weren't you taking us there?"

Flecks of sweat dribbled down her palm as she slid her hand from his. Sarcasm flared into irritation, lending its edge to her voice as she snapped, "You said we should get food."

"Right!" he said. "I thought you had somewhere you wanted to go and you were leading the way. Why would I know? You're the mind reader!"

Her anger jetted through the gaps in her fortress. She saw the shadows around her begin to twitch. Other people must have noticed as well, because she and Beast Boy suddenly had a much wider berth on the sidewalk. "I assumed that when you asked me on a date that you actually had a 'date' in mind. A plan?"

She thought she saw his canines elongating as he clutched at his temples and snapped, "What have I ever done to make you think I ever have a plan for anything?"

"I let Koriand'r pluck and scrap and paint me for over an hour getting ready for tonight. I thought maybe you would do something besides wheedle a new outfit out of Robin," she shot back. "Clearly I gave you a wild overabundance of credit." The shadows were alive now, twisting and curling around her feet.

Beast Boy seemed to loom over her, even taller than before. A glance down confirmed that it was no illusion. Bare green flesh peeked out between his socks and the cuffs of his pants where it hadn't before. "I guess I thought that, when you said 'yes,' maybe you'd want to finally have a good time for once in your life instead of being a control freak!"

The last two words left his mouth in jets of steam as the air around them snapped with unnatural cold. Raven jerked at the temperature drop, realizing just how upset she was, and crushed her brows into a frown as she began pushing her will back into her mental walls to rebuild them. "Garfield, this—!" she started to snap.

As her walls became whole again, Raven was shocked at the sheer force of the ire she felt. She hadn't told Beast Boy to choose a venue, or plan anything. When he had asked her out, she hadn't asked about the plan then, or made any of her own suggestions. Now her anger was seeping into their surroundings, broken free from her practiced calm over the tiniest aggravations. Why?

The reason dawned on her, draining the tension out of her face. She felt her expression sag as she realized she was letting herself grow irritated with Beast Boy because it was easy. It was familiar territory, safe and comfortable. It let her avoid thinking about how overwhelmed she felt just by the thought of being on a date.

"...this isn't working, is it?" she murmured.

She was talking as much to herself as she was to Beast Boy. Still the words struck him like a slap, snapping him back to his regular gangly proportions. "What? No way, we just... We..." He trailed off, the thought withering on his lips. After a long pause, he said, "I guess it isn't."

Raven watched him rub at his eyes, his shoulders deflating. Whatever anger she had bottled back melted into a cold slush that churned in her stomach. A thousand different things to say whirled in her mind, each worse than the last. Finally she mumbled, "I'm sorry."

Eyes pinched shut, Beast Boy shook his head. "Don't be sorry. Nobody should be sorry. This just sucks."

"It absolutely sucks," Raven agreed in a leaden tone.

Beast Boy threw back his head in a long groan, turning away from Raven. "This sucks! After all the crap we've survived, like the Brotherhood, and the Tyrants—"

"—Trigon," Raven added, "the Church of Blood—"

"—Slade! And Slade again!" he growled, knitting his fingers into his hair. "And maybe Slade a third time. I sorta lost count."

Raven nodded. "I thought we might have finally gotten one quiet moment where we could try. We finally had a chance to see if this would work." Closing her eyes, she added, "I guess now we know."

She thought she would feel guilty, like she would let him down, or just relieved to be past the uncertainty. But instead, she just felt thick with disappointment.

Beast Boy sighed, his palm sliding down his face. "God, first dates just suck. Suck, suck, suck. Suuuuuuuuuuck."

"They really do," she said. She was trying to think of the least awful way she could just teleport back to her room and pretend like the night had never happened. She would have given anything to go back in time and beg herself not to go out that night. In point of fact, she thought she might know the book with the spell that could let her do exactly that.

But then a new thought occurred to her.

"First dates suck," she drawled.

"Yeah. That's what I just said," he grumbled, still not looking at her.

"But think about it," Raven insisted. "The whole point of a first date is for two veritable strangers to try to impress one another while they present the best possible versions of themselves."

Beast Boy frowned thoughtfully, finally looking over to meet her gaze. "Hey, yeah. It's all, like, lies and stuff. 'I can bench press a Volkswagen,' or ' My parents own a yacht factory.' That kind of junk."

The corners of Raven's mouth quirked at the mental image. "Trying to pretend you're something someone you aren't until you think you can show the other person who you really are."

"Yes! Exactly!" Beast Boy exclaimed. "And the whole time, both people are just waiting for the last few minutes of the date! The whole thing is just building up to the goodnight, just to see if they're going to kiss."

"Letting mercurial hormones dictate a critical life decision," she scoffed. "It's ludicrous."

"It's completely dumb! Especially for us!" he said.

She nodded. "For us especially," she agreed.

"You and I have known each other for years already."

Dark memories flitted behind Raven's eyes. "We've seen each other at our worsts," she said.

He smiled. "And our bests, too. Bestests. We've seen the best of each other." Waving away the thought, he insisted, "I don't want to get nervous around you. I'm already crazy-bonkers-nuts about you, Rachel."

A feathery lilt rose in Raven's chest. She broke his gaze, mumbling, "You're important to me too. Annoyingly, incomprehensibly important."

Beast Boy laughed again. He leaned against the wall of the nail salon they had stopped beside, his back to the glazed window. "See, this is the part I wanted to get to. The part where we talk about how much we like each other. All that 'being together' stuff is just getting in the way."

A maelstrom churned inside Raven's fortress, and she said, "Then let's just end it."

His voice caught in his throat as he looked away again. "Yeah, I got that part already."

"Not like that," Raven said. "Let's just end the date. Skip to the end. That's the whole point, like you said. Isn't it?"

"Didn't you say that was stupid? Letting Mercury-something something decide our somethings?"

The storm inside of her pounded her walls. She felt like one large exposed nerve that would start screaming at any moment. "Maybe," she admitted. "But we would at least know. Wouldn't we?"

He stared at her, and then said, "I feel like this is a trick question somehow. But on the other hand, I'm not going to look a gift kiss from a hot girl in the mouth. Or, I guess I kinda am, but—"

Squeezing her eyes shut, Raven snapped, "Can we please not make me regret this until after it's over?"

"Gotcha." Beast Boy squared off with her, his feet shuffling as though he were bracing himself against a roaring gale. "For the record, though, this is the weirdest way anyone has ever gotten to first base with me."

Nervousness and embarrassment pooled in Raven's chest. She tried settling her hands on his hips, and then up on his shoulders, and felt like she was trying to do pull-ups on him. The fact that he had grown so tall in a few short years, so much taller than her, irritated her in an entirely new way. "As long as we're giving each other notes, you should know that you're sucking every possible iota of romance out of this moment."

He rolled his eyes as his hands fumbled at her hips. "Says the girl who brings the word 'iota' on a date."

Her blush and her frown deepened in concert. "Would you just do it?" she groused.

"Fine."

"Fine!"

"Fine!" he snapped, and bent to kiss her.

A loud click resounded in Raven's head as her teeth struck Beast Boy's, knocking with the force of their lips mashing together. It felt at once awkward and wet and uncomfortably hot. Her first impulse was to push away and open a portal to the furthest point she could imagine, somewhere where she could spend the rest of her days avoiding him and the awful mistake they had made, and the unbearable embarrassment that would haunt the Tower as a result.

But as her hands slid to his chest to push, she felt his heart pounding through the thin shirt and taut muscle. His lips loosened, and the hard kiss softened into something entirely different.

Of all the beings she had ever encountered, Beast Boy's emotions were the strongest and loudest. He didn't just wear his heart on his sleeve. He threw his whole heart into everything he did and every thought he had. It made him the most genuine, most honest, most unbearable individual she knew. But the blaring emotions she had endured from him in the past were a whisper compared to what she felt coming.

The wave of raw passions shattered Raven's fortress. She felt her mind vanish behind a tidal wave of his emotions, burying her in feelings that were not her own. She felt a physical, primal desire. She felt a nervousness that cowed her own, a fear of being rejected, of being inadequate. She felt excitement that made her heart race, and panic that this thrill could not last, and the sliver of courage to hope it might.

The empathic tsunami swallowed her into a concept she had a word for, but had never felt so strongly. It was a word she had read in countless stories, and heard in countless songs. It was something she thought she had known exactly once in her life, a word she had discarded forever when it had turned out to be a lie. At first Raven thought she would drown in that word, torn apart by the current of its myriad parts. But as she calmed, and stilled, she found her self again. She floated in the emotions, permeated but whole, inundated but distinct. Raven felt herself inside of him, inside of his word, and she was shocked to find that all of those same feelings—that same word—was already inside of her.

A burning sensation in her chest reminded her of her own physical presence. Her thoughts surfaced to find that she was still kissing Beast Boy. Her arms had slid around his neck, her eyes closed and head tilted, the tip of her tongue dancing with his where their lips met. Her own heart thundered in time with his as, together, they forgot to breathe.

When they finally parted, Raven gasped. The old walls in her mind snapped back into place on reflex, turning the dwindling tsunami into a trickle. Her eyes opened to find Beast Boy smiling breathlessly at her. The feline pupils of his eyes were wide with anticipation. "So," he huffed, "good date?"

The awkwardness of the night was gone. Looking back on it, Raven wanted to laugh at the way they had acted. They had never needed such pageantry. She struggled now to think if it had been either of their ideas, or if they had just assumed the other would want something so ridiculous. "It was a lousy date. But the ending almost saved it," she said.

"You must have liked something, considering..." He cleared his throat and glanced downward.

Raven followed his gaze and found her constrictor pumps sitting vacant on the sidewalk, their buckles loosed and straps wide open. Her feet were almost a foot off the ground, where she hovered with arms still wrapped around Beast Boy's neck.

"So," he said, trying to sound casual as he rested his hands at her hips, "it's still pretty early. Are you free for a second date?"

Her expression soured. She tightened her arms around him, bringing her forehead to touch lightly with his. "No more dates. Let's just spend time together. And let's agree to keep trying when it gets difficult."

He beamed. "Sounds awesome," he said.

"This could still be a disaster," she warned him, her voice and face flattening.

His grin remained fixed. "You're not scared of that. You're scared of what happens if it works."

She stared back at him and said, "I'm terrified."

Nodding, he said, "Then we have one more thing in common." And he kissed her on the lips before she could retort.

When they parted again, she felt herself smirking. A sliver of her frazzled concentration pushed into the air, forming a black portal that led back to her closet in the Tower. She chucked the pumps through the portal, then reached into it and rummaged out a pair of dirty sneakers, using her soul-self to slip them on and lace them up before she settled her weight back onto the sidewalk.

"I know a little underground coffee shop that has a good menu. The vegetarian quiche is actually pretty good."

Beast Boy worked the tie free from his collar, loosing the first two buttons on his shirt. He wadded up the tie and tossed it through her portal. "Sounds like a great excuse to learn what a 'quiche' is," he said. Hesitating a moment, he added, "Did you want to do anything after that? Maybe make a plan?"

Raven thought about it, and then said, "Let's find out." The portal vanished with a wave of her hand.

Beast Boy smiled and offered her his elbow, which she took only after giving him a playfully annoyed look in kind. They set out together down the empty sidewalk, ignoring the furtive looks of the people crossing the street to avoid them.

Raven smiled, knowing full well how ridiculous they must appear together, and she didn't care in the slightest. They only things that mattered were the warmth of Beast Boy's arm, and the gentle buzz of his emotions against hers, and the world of possibilities that lay before them. There were some deep pitfalls and dark shadows on that path, but they didn't scare Raven quite as much as they had before.

She caught Beast Boy glancing sidelong at her. "You know, I could get used to that. The smiling, I mean," he said.

Raven felt the unfamiliar pull at her lips and did nothing to fix it. "If you're not careful," she warned him, "you just might."

END