Warning: This story hints heavily at a Star/Raven pairing. It's not kissy-kissy or full of gal-on-gal action. If you don't like that sort of thing, the solution is simple—read no more from this point. I'm not trying to bash other pairings with what I've written here; in fact, there's quite a possibility I like other pairings as much as I like this one. To find out, you might ask—I don't bite. I say again: this story hints heavily at a Star/Raven pairing. If you don't like that, read no more.

Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans. I just write about them, because I am a rabid fangirl and I can. So there. Nyeh!

Midnight Encounters

There it was again. That… that sound.

Starfire clenched her jaw and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to ignore it. It happened at least once a week, this exchange between the darkness and the Tamaranian teen: the agonized flicker of noise in the tower, only just loud enough to touch her ears, her heart, her soul, stirring the hairs on the back of her neck to wary attention. It was like the last sibilant murmur of a dying thing, she thought, and it scraped mercilessly against the inside of her skull: the rattling hiss of Cyborg's tool against the ice on his car's windshield on January mornings. It wounded her; it made her draw her legs up beneath her chin; it made her want to hug herself; it made her want to sing so she wouldn't hear it anymore, to pitch her voice higher and higher until it cracked and bled and broke on the ice, because at least it would be better, yes, she thought: it would be better than hearing that noise.

It was not a sound whose owner sought comfort. Starfire, ever the kind soul, had gone looking for it before; the first night it had touched her ears, she'd drifted through the tower with wide eyes and trembling hands, thinking that someone must be hurt, someone must be dying: oh, but no. She'd found Beast Boy asleep on the couch, his fingers buried in a bowl of cold popcorn and his head tipped back, the tips of his fangs glistening in the moonlight. His snores echoed in the main room, and the station he'd been watching had long since gone off the air. Starfire remembered turning off the television, just to be sure, but the sound persisted, cutting through the darkness in sorrowful, staggered intervals.

The others had been asleep in their beds, or so she assumed. She felt no need to enter Robin's room; she could sense him breathing and growling and thrashing beneath his sheets, muttering occasionally, chasing villains even in dreams. She had felt the hum of power from Cyborg's chambers that indicated his sleep cycle, but drifted to his door and opened it anyway, gazing within: he was recharging, dormant, his human eye closed and the mechanical orb glazed over. She heard him creak as he moved, his fingers twitching, and she left quickly, loath to disturb him or concern him unreasonably.

By the time she'd reached Raven's door, the sound was but a memory, a feeling like cold sweat between her shoulderblades. She'd rested a hand on the thick silver barricade, and remembered having pondered knocking, opening the door, going inside; after all, she thought, Raven likely only kept it locked sometimes. However, with the tower silent all around her and no valid reason to enter the only other female Titan's room, Starfire hadn't been able to see the sense in risking death. More than a little befuddled, she'd returned to her room and bed. No one else ever mentioned hearing the sound, not even when it roused her again three days later, and once more the following week, a pitiful keen in the corners and corridors of Titans Tower, faint and fleeting and tortured.

Starfire, however, hadn't gone without mentioning it to her friends. As a stranger to most of Earth's traditions and daily happenings, she'd grown used to asking questions and wasn't ashamed to voice her concerns. Her friends, though they laughed at her phrasing sometimes or feigned embarrassment at her bluntness, were always kind enough to answer her as clearly as possible.

"My dearest companions," she'd asked them the morning after hearing the sound the first time, resisting the urge to clap her hands in congratulations as Beast Boy flipped a pancake and managed not to get it stuck on the ceiling, "is it most normal for sounds of painful death to echo in the halls at night on Earth?" The word 'death' stuck in Starfire's mouth like the delightful candy of cotton, only not quite delightfully, but she'd managed.

The other Titans at the table had given her bewildered looks. Cyborg, however, had turned after a few seconds to prod Beast Boy in the side, and the green teen scowled at the larger boy as Cyborg chuckled, "She heard you snorin', BB. It's okay, Star; we all do that sometimes. Beast Boy just manages to sound particularly idiotic in the process."

"It was not this snoring you speak of, I do not think," Starfire argued, but her protest had been lost to the swirling cacophony of sudden noise: Beast Boy howling in complaint and despair as his pancake, having been flipped again the moment of the unfortunate, offending prod, landed not in the pan, but on the floor; Cyborg, roaring with laughter at Beast Boy's misfortune. Robin, who had been reaching for Starfire's hand out of concern, snatched his fingers back and yelled at the other two boys to shut it, please. Raven, ever the quiet sort, had merely rolled her eyes, picked up her bowl of Cheerios, the book she'd been reading whilst eating said Cheerios, and trotted out toward the couch, seeking solace from the idiocy of other mortals. Even if those mortals happened to be her friends as well.

Starfire had simply thought it best not to ask again.

She regretted it now, and dragged her sheets over her head, letting herself be surrounded and swallowed by the soft, sweet darkness of her covers. She curled her toes and wished fervently that the sound wouldn't come again: that it would please, please just let her sleep; that it would go away, fade into oblivion and let her dream her dreams of bright things and victory and sunrises, etching golden wings of welcome onto the horizons of future mornings. She wished so hard and so furiously that she tired herself out with it, and was just beginning to relax once more, the tension melting from the arched line of her spine, when the sound brushed her ears again, the phantom touch of a cold, unwelcome lover.

It was a little louder this time and, Starfire thought with drowsy concern as she sat up, fisting her hands in the sheets, more plaintive. And it was lasting longer than usual—it had tended to fade, the past two times she'd listened to it, within four or five minutes. This time it had gone on longer than ten, and there was something subtlety different about the pitch of the sound besides. Starfire rubbed the tanned shell of her ear and tipped her head slightly, sucking a long breath: and then she held it, listening. Waiting.

The blood pounded in her temples, slow and intent, and white fireworks of desperation began to explode behind her eyes after two and a half minutes of throbbing, breath-holding silence. Biting her lips from the inside, Starfire persisted as long as she was able, and opened her mouth to inhale at last when the sound came again: a long, low croon, almost weepish in nature, that ended in something like a sob. Green light soaked the room as Starfire bristled, nostrils flaring and eyes aglow; she flung the sheets away and flew toward the door, fully intent now. She wasn't sure if she was looking for danger or going to the aid of some hapless creature within the walls of Titans Tower, but she knew one thing for certain: something, someone, somewhere was crying. Piteously. In anguish. She could very nearly smell the salt.

She went to Robin's room first, driven by instinct and caring, but he remained asleep even as she hovered over him, her face anxious. She hurried next to Beast Boy's lair: it could only be called that, so scattered with clothes, half-gnawed rubber toys, and defunct gaming controllers. Curled in a fetal position in a nest of what might have been, at some point, sheets, the changeling twitched a pointed ear at Starfire and drooled, stretching out a leg in the process. Starfire, unable to help the curiosity that was so much a part of her, noticed that he was wearing shorts of the boxers peppered with little green fire hydrants before she sped away again.

Cyborg's room, humming just the same as it had been so many days before, offered Starfire empty relief—the half-human Titan himself wasn't crying, but the source of the noise wasn't present in his chambers either. Feeling tears of frustration beading in the corners of her eyes, the Tamaranian girl drifted back through the silent halls to hover in front of Raven's door, splaying her hands on the cold, silver surface. Her fingers trembled in a mix of indecision and nerves; adrenaline coursed through her veins with every firm drumbeat of her heart, and Starfire could see her reflection in the door, her face contorted with anxiety and distress. The green glow of possible energy bolts in her eyes had begun to fade, three out of four friends having been found safely asleep. And the fourth… well, the fourth was known to be able to take care of herself, and to snarl at anyone who attempted to show her kindness.

Starfire didn't think Raven would be very appreciative of the Tamaranian barging into her room in the middle of the night. There was nothing more unnerving or soul-shattering to Starfire than to be on the receiving end of one of Raven's glares: they were worse than Robin's frowns, than Cyborg's groans of, "Aww man, Star!" or, even, than Beast Boy's puppyishly liquid gazes of confused puzzlement and hurt. Raven's glares were cold, biting, bitter: damning, condemning, but never resentful. Disappointed. They soaked the happiness and sunlight right out of Starfire, leaving her feeling bleak and empty and somehow depleted, thoroughly unsatisfied with her existence. It often took her several hours to recover from a glare from Raven, and when she did recover, it was usually her first priority to seek out the blue-cloaked girl to apologize to her. Sometimes, Raven apologized back, or looked surprised to even be encountering Starfire over such a matter; sometimes gave the girl a distracted wave and continued reading, or meditating, or doing Raven-ish things, and Starfire left her with the knowledge that things were all right again.

Starfire found herself most unwilling to receive a Raven glare so late in the evening. Worrying her lower lip between her teeth until it stung, she sighed and pulled her hands back from the door, clenching them momentarily in the pink fabric of her nightshirt. Her bare legs were beginning to prickle: she felt uncomfortable, floating in midair before the other female Titan's door, bathed in darkness and cold to boot. Her toes were freezing. Resolving that she would simply go back to bed and bring up the issue of the sound again in the morning, pancake incident or no pancake incident, Starfire released her nightgown, letting it flutter down around her knees, and turned away from Raven's room.

She had time to float two feet in the opposite direction before the sound slid sodden fingertips around the tip of her ear and pulled—but it wasn't just a sound any longer, oh no. It was a cry, a sob, a wail muffled by walls and agony and an unwilling soul, and Starfire spun around in midair, her brilliant green eyes fixed upon Raven's door. It was coming from within, the heartrending noise, and the Tamaranian's resolve had never been stronger. Speeding forward, she ran her fingers over the touchpad next to the door, cursing softly in her guttural native language when the thing refused to budge. Summoning the smallest emerald energy bolt into her fingers that she was able, Starfire thrust her palm against the touchpad and prayed for a simple short circuit, hoping that she would not, in her excitement, allow her still-expanding powers to relieve Raven of her room's main wall.

Thankfully, the touchpad melted beneath Starfire's hand and the door, defeated, schlupped upward with only the faintest of hisses. Starfire peered into the darkness beyond, extinguishing the glow of her fingers immediately—she hoped she'd be able to see moderately well once her eyes adjusted, because she wasn't keen on blinding Raven the instant she stepped inside. Rubbing again the hem of her nightgown between warm thumb and forefinger, the girl eased into the dark chasm, jerking upright in the air when the door gave a dissatisfied rumble and schlupped closed behind her. She heard the locking mechanism slide into place, and felt something like a pang of fear when she realized that she was very likely trapped in a room with her fellow Titan.

Starfire wasn't afraid of Raven—respectful as much as possible, of course, and wary sometimes, but never did she look upon the gray-skinned adolescent as an entity to be feared. Raven, however cynical, quiet, and faintly morbid, was Starfire's friend, but Starfire felt that she could think of much better situations to occupy than those involving Raven, herself, and four constricting walls. Not that she couldn't blast her way out, of course: Starfire just didn't believe that Raven would forgive her easily for dismantling her room.

Squinting, the concerned redhead looked slowly around Raven's room. She'd been inside once or twice before, but she'd never stayed long enough to really examine things: partially because she'd been concerned with other matters, and partially because Raven had never seemed interested in letting her have an involved look around. She noted with stunted interest the statues and sculptures of tentacled things, of demonic creatures with multiple jagged eyes that crouched or clawed or skulked or leapt, forever frozen in time in positions none too friendly. The walls were bare, for the most part; a bookcase absolutely crammed with novels, tomes, volumes decorated one, but Starfire could spot no posters. There wasn't a window in the room either, and no moonlight as such; the Tamaranian winced as she drifted forward and snagged a naked toe on the edge of something sharp. Looking down, she recognized the dim, rectangular outline of a covered mirror, and frowned at it disapprovingly. Why have a mirror if only to cover it? And, furthermore, why have a mirror and leave it so far out from the wall, where unsuspecting hovering visitors might run into it?

Starfire, after leveling the mirror with her stern gaze, turned her gaze to the far corner of the room. As a being who functioned on stimuli and emotions from others, Starfire had learned to grasp for even the smallest of external reactions when in Raven's presence—the hooding of violet eyes, the twitch of a sardonic smile, the flicker of fingers, the ever so slight tremor in the calm, collected voice. Now, however, she had no need to grasp at all. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stir again as she stepped closer to the long, dark object that was Raven's bed: she could hear the other girl panting faintly, twisting in the sheets with slow, deliberate movements; she could smell the salt of her tears, quiet and pungent and bitter; she could see the slick shine of moisture on Raven's lips as they parted, as the girl tipped her head back with all the languid misery of the dying and moaned.

Starfire felt her soul blaze with a mix of pity, protectiveness, and anxious concern. Raven was lying in a cocoon of warped sheets, settled more in the middle of the bed than near the top; her pillow rested, not at all dented by the recent presence of a skull, at least a foot above the girl's dark, scattered locks. She was covered from the collar down; her bare shoulders, however, startled Starfire, who had never seen Raven without her cloak and accompanying black leotard. Another cursory examination of the room revealed that very garment to be hanging on a hook just above the end of the bed. The Tamaranian watched for a moment, unable to help it, as Raven kneaded her fingers restlessly in her sheets. The normally stoic face was alive with emotion—the smooth slate brow was creased in what seemed to be distressing indecision, and Starfire eased forward at last when Raven's lips twitched, her eyes shuddering beneath their lids.

She took a seat between Raven's head and the unoccupied pillow, reaching out after the slightest pause to gingerly rest her fingers upon the dark head. Raven rebelled faintly against the touch, turning away from Starfire's palm once, twice, three times, relenting at last with another exhalation that sounded, the Tamaranian thought, suspiciously like a sob. Her locks slid, straight and silken, beneath Starfire's fingertips, and the redhead stifled a gasp as her entire hand began to tingle, her nerves protesting in screaming unison beneath her skin.

Touching Raven was like touching ice.

Black ice on the road, stealing the traction from the wheels of Cyborg's car for a heartstopping second, an invisible fiend; glazed ice on the sidewalk in front of Titans Tower, menacing to even the surest boot; thin ice on the pond in the middle of the nearby city, thin ice that gave way and broke, cracked, shattered, splintered beneath skates and Starfire was falling, falling through the surface into a wet, dark, unending chasm, sinking like a stone despite all attempts to fly out, fly free, fly true, away from the suffocating, mind-numbing dark of the soul Raven's soul she is so cold oh my friend my dearest friend you are frigid you are afraid you are dying you are so cold—

Starfire jerked away despite herself, her own cheeks wet with tears now. The darkness smelled like salt all around, a combined frost and fire, and the Tamaranian lowered her head after a moment to look at Raven through blurring vision. "Oh," she whispered before she remembered that Raven was asleep, Raven would be mad—no, furious if she woke up to find Starfire in her room, on her bed, sobbing over her like a little girl. Clapping her hands over her mouth, the Titan choked back her startled sorrow and pondered her options.

She could leave. There was a chance Raven would never know she'd come at all—and then she remembered the door's touchpad, damaged by her own hand, and wondered how she would explain that to the girl come morning, provided she managed to get out without making a racket. Shaking her head, Starfire clenched her fingers around her jaw and ruled out that option. She had a certain grace about her, she knew, but it came and went as fleetingly as summer showers on the Tamaranian meadows—there was no way she'd manage to get back to the door without rousing Raven.

And the other option, of course: she could stay.

Gritting her teeth, Starfire decided that there was really only one option, thank you very much, and it was indeed to stay. She could not, would not leave her friend like this; she refused to let Raven, however much the girl might be angry with her later for it, drown in the destitute murk of her own dreams. Nightmares. Whatever they were.

Turning slightly, Starfire extended a hand to the other Titan and carefully, carefully brushed the tendrils of violet hair away from her icy face. Raven winced and gave a weak stir, brow quivering, and Starfire, biting her lip for a moment, at last decided that words couldn't hurt.

"My friend," she began, and stopped immediately, startled at the hoarse grate of her words. She swallowed and licked her lips, cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and tried again. "My friend," she half-whispered, half-murmured, "please do not be afraid. Do not shy from my hand. It is I, Starfire, and I… I am here to proceed with the giving of comfort."

Starfire watched Raven's face carefully, keeping contact between them to a minimum lest her system rebel again and draw her down into the depths of suffocating darkness—she could be no help to Raven there, no, not in the world bereft of sunlight and air and life. Not in the world beneath the ice.

Having gone still under the outer influence of touch and voice, Raven rested in a moment of stillness and silence. Her tears, though sluggish before, eased to a halt, held at the corners of her eyes; her wrinkled brow smoothed over; and her lips parted the tiniest bit to allow the passage of soft, ragged breaths, in and out and almost helpless, Starfire thought. She slid her hand from the straying strands of Raven's hair to the girl's cheek, running her thumb in concern along the pale gray swell to smooth away the moisture, the salt, the sadness, worrying that Raven must have been fighting without them at some recent point, since the skin seemed bruised and puffy beneath her eyes.

Starfire could not recall a time when her teammate had looked so frail and vulnerable as she did now.

Not allowed to ponder long, Starfire jerked in startlement as Raven gave a quiet, nonsensical murmur and tipped her head upward into the strange touch, into the gentle warmth. Her brow furrowed again, and her lips quivered; Starfire opened her mouth to speak, but fell silent when the girl lying on the bed before her thrashed once, violently, in the sheets, digging an elbow into the mattress to turn herself onto her stomach. Eyes sliding open, the violet-blue depths glazed with pain, fatigue, hope, the gray-skinned girl dragged herself to Starfire with a whimper. The black spines and spires of glacial energy so common to Raven's outline in battle flickered now about the redheaded Titan's thighs and hips, snaking tendrils of frost along the surface of pink nightgown, tanned legs, clenched abdomen.

"Please, my friend!" Starfire hissed, twisting her fingers in Raven's sheets and squeezing her eyes closed. As gently as possible, she settled her free hand on the curve of the other girl's skull between nape of neck and ear, letting her palm slide over the slick locks once more. Her insides were crystallizing, she knew it—turning to stone, congealing into rock, into slate, into twisted shapes like the rest of the statues in the room, but she could not pull away, she must not pull away, Raven was her friend her friend in trouble sad cold freezing frigid lost trapped beneath the ice dreaming of the sunset dreaming of darkness dreaming of death oh Raven so cold—

Starfire felt cloth bunch at her hip, felt a sudden weight of damp coldness along the rise of her thigh. The sensation of frost spreading throughout her body, fading fast, remained unpleasant but bearable, and she drew in a relieved, shuddering breath before she opened her eyes and tipped her head down, fully expecting to be on the receiving end of the worst Raven glare yet.

Raven's head was in her lap, one arm further extended to curl and clench at her friend's pink-clothed hip. The other limb was wrapped loosely around the Tamaranian, small fingers splayed in the small of Starfire's back. Cheek resting on available thigh, Raven exhaled and pressed the back of her skull to Starfire's abdomen and hand, seeking warmth, comfort, solace. Seeking the light above the surface of the ice.

Starfire squeaked as the blood in her toes raced through her body's webwork of veins, every platelet struggling to reach her face first. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her cheeks were glowing with all the ferocity of a traffic light on red, and, even more embarrassingly, that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Listening to the hum of her pulse in her eyes and swallowing against the sudden lump in her throat, the redheaded Titan tipped her head and began to comb her fingers through Raven's hair, making soft shushing noises when she found the breath in her body to do so.

Raven quivered against her for several minutes, the tense lines of her body slowly ebbing into the shallow, relaxed curves of one dreamlessly sleeping. Starfire watched, her eyes anxious, as the furrow in the pale girl's brow began to smooth itself into oblivion. The tears were gone now, a faint memory, a wisp of salt on the gray cheeks that Starfire wiped away with two gentle swipes of a broad, warm thumb. It was with a rising gladness that the Tamaranian girl cradled her friend's head in her lap, the dark skull pressed flush to the insipid fabric of her nightgown. Every breath Raven gave the room was warmer, brighter, the essence of life having hidden in the shadows; each exhale was more stable than the last, and Starfire exulted to feel her friend growing strong again in her arms.

As the minutes ticked by, molding into hours, and Raven's fingers loosened in the cloth at Starfire's hip, the Tamaranian felt drowsiness tugging treacherously at her eyelids. Though she wasn't particularly comfortable, she was warm; the darkness pressed her soothingly now, tempered by heat and fatigue, tempting for the lack of Raven's piteous cries. Starfire yawned, gave her friend's skull a last affectionate caress and dropped her chin onto her chest, gazing down along the curve of the opposing pale face through the closing gap between her eyelashes. She felt distantly as though she were dreaming, yes, because she found in her lap the impossible, the stunning, the beautiful: the sigma of friendship, written in the ice by the first questing golden rays of the sunrise, and before she could sit up, before she could lean in to more closely study the phenomenon, the darkness swirled in to claim her, and Starfire succumbed to the tender grasp of sleep.

In the darkness, Raven was smiling.

Notes: I'm not certain as to whether or not I'm going to continue this or leave it as is. I feel that I have the capacity to continue, but it depends entirely on whatever mood I happen to be in tomorrow, the next day, and so on. What do you think I should do? Do you have any advice? Critiques? Comments? Fluffy hats? I'll be happy to steal the—I mean, listen to you.

Thanks for reading!

—Bainaku