Perchance
By Lady Pyrefly
Author's Note: This story came to me last night when I couldn't sleep. The irony, I assure you, does not escape me. XP
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To sleep, perchance to dream.
William Shakespeare
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Robin dreams of failing, of falling. In his dreams he slips down a rift in the time/space continuum and free falls downward, ever downward, into the black Nexus below. Scenes from his past, present, and future play out as Robin whizzes by. He panics, and flails his arms and legs wildly, trying to find something solid to cling to. The Boy Wonder's arms graze something soft and warm. Robin reaches out to it and pulls it close to his chest. A pair of sparkling emerald eyes stare upwards into his own, and a pair of soft, feminine hands remove his eyemask. She screams like breaking glass, horrified. Panting hard, Robin wakes up and grips his bedclothes with white knuckles. Slowly, however, his beating heart slows and eyes droop. When he awakens the next morning, Robin will remember nothing.
Starfire dreams in flashes, quick bursts of sensory perceptions. Earth things she doesn't properly understand yet. The inside of a lock, the taste of metal, mold on an orange. The color of an accountant's soul, the hair of a small girl who grows up hopeless. Tide winds along the beach, a scream like breaking glass, blood flowing from an open wound. Pain. Poison. Death.
Raven dreams of the future, the day Trigon will die. A flash of white, a net of dark, and her father sinks downward to the hell he tried so desperately to create. Cutting her hair and slitting her wrists with the same sharp metal pair of scissors, Raven enjoys the taste of nothing in her mouth, the scent of death around her. This isn't the first time she's had this dream.
Beast Boy dreams of Raven. Of holding her, tenderly in his arms. He's green and she's purple, the combination grows hazy in his dreamland, until there is no color at all, just shades of gray as he presses his lips to hers. She smiles, a real smile that reaches her deep violet eyes, and kisses him back. A pair of scissors dangles menacingly from Raven's long fingertip. He knows what she means to do, but Beast Boy can't let her. He rips the blades from her hands and throws them across the room. They shatter into a million little shards, and Raven is grateful. He saved her. He loves her. Beast Boy murmurs softly in his sleep and rolls over; only in his dreams can such love exist.
Cyborg's dreams are half unintelligible, an arcane mix of ones and zeros oozing like poison from the computer part of his mind. But the human half dreams of emotions, of running, whole and healthy through a green green park. Fragments of childhood memories flood into his dreams, tossing a football with an older father figure across the way. The football changes without warning and without mercy into the malicious ones and zeros of the binary code, which attack him and force him into submission.
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It is dreams like these that make the Titan's weaken and fearful. But only, of course, in dreams like these.