A/N: Just to be clear, I'm making up the details on Raven's past, particularly concerning her relationship with her mother, since the show doesn't really give us any – that's part of the fun of it, I suppose ;) If it's wrong in comic canon, well, that's okay with me. Enjoy, everyone.

I don't own Teen Titans.


i. Prologue


Raven didn't sleep often. She didn't like the idea of giving up her mind to the night.

Even as a child, she had lain awake for long hours in the dark, in her single bed, in her lonely, undecorated room, eyes straining for hidden predators where there was nothing but air and un-light. Yes, that had been foolish. The only predator she had ever needed to be afraid of was herself.

Because if dreams were the workings of the subconscious mind, well… Her subconscious was not meant to be free, and she had no desire to see what its workings would look like. No, no, no…

As she grew, she found that meditation could give her a portion of the energy that her body took from sleep. But she was not a machine and she could not do entirely without, wish as she might (and she did wish, fervently and often, until she understood that it was useless and discarded it).

So she learned to tie down her night terrors as firmly as she tied down her heart. She meditated on blanketing her mind each time she surrendered to unconsciousness, and now if she slept, then her dreams slept too, dormant, somewhere deep enough that she could pretend they weren't there at all.

No, Raven didn't sleep often, and now she was tired of being awake, tired on the inside. Her tired was bone-deep and permanent. She had crawled into bed anyway, knowing that feeling would still be there in the morning, wanting to escape further than the meditative trance, further to where nothing would follow, searching for an opiate that did not exist.

She had already barred her mind from dreams tonight, and still she was awake. Frustrated, Raven rolled over in the bed and opened her eyes.

Her room was gray and hazy in the dark, not as empty as her room on Azarath, but still just as lonely.

And… so what? She liked her privacy.

But privacy and isolation were two different things. And it wasn't in her to separate them. Even though Trigon was defeated – had been defeated for more than a year now – it just wasn't in her. She thought of the party afterwards, so full of hope. Everyone was smiling. Even her.

But perversely, what should have been easier had only become more difficult. The inch of freedom that Trigon's death had granted her just seemed to underscore how limited she still was. She knew she had friends who cared about her. And she knew that the root of her limitations, her powers, had given her those friends and made her a Titan.

But didn't they also make her incapable of returning the friendship that they had given her? Didn't her powers cripple her, even as they made her stronger? Didn't they hold her back, hurt her, lower her, make her less, un-whole and incomplete and incapable and inhuman…?

Everyone had a weakness, yes, she knew, and she was her own, so that made her a weakness, a weak little weakness that could tear down the city with a smile and rebuild it with a sigh, that's what she was. That's all, all.

Raven slammed the door shut on that line of thought.

Just one more thing she disliked about sleep. The way the mind must wander on its own before it can become blank and rest. And wasn't that wandering what she was trying to avoid by sleeping in the first place?

That was when the alarm went off. Red lights sliced into the darkness.

Half-grateful and half-irritated, Raven got up to meet with the rest of the Titans and save the city. Again.


He was a villain they had never seen before. He wore thief's black and an amateur mask made out of a stocking hat, but the high-tech hover board that held him like a feather implied that he was not your average robber. Even so, he did not make a very threatening sight, with his slim, almost awkward build.

A bad guy robbing the city museum in the middle of the night. Well, at least she had been dragged out of bed for something original.

Raven wondered why the police had not taken care of this. She watched the thief's board zip around the pair of bolts that Starfire had sent his way and then remembered that, oh, yes, he was too fast for them.

But he was also, apparently, an idiot.

"Fools!" cried the thief. An enormous red gem glinted in his hand. It was reputably the biggest ruby in existence, and it had been on display in the Jump City Museum. Until tonight. "You don't even know what this is, do you?"

Raven rolled her eyes.

"We know enough!" Robin retorted, always willing to exchange barbs with the enemy. Raven, by comparison, had always been an advocate of silent efficiency. "Now, hand it over!"

But the thief just zipped aside of Robin's projectiles and the simultaneous blast from Cyborg's cannon. Beast Boy was the one who got the closest when he became an octopus and latched onto the board itself with his tentacles.

The thief looked down at him, and by some unseen command the board began to glow red-hot around the edges. Beast Boy was forced to let go or become fried calamari. With a yelp he dropped, smoking, to the ground.

Okay. Enough.

"It's been here, unknown, all this time," said the thief, with a manic edge to his voice. Raven wasn't really listening, just watching the glint of the stolen ruby, reminded briefly and abstractly of the glinting of the sun off the towers on Azarath. Stupidly, the thief held up the thing with one hand. "But now, I'm going to use it –"

When he looked up triumphantly at his prize it was to see that it had gone all black. His eyes, the only visible part of his face, went wide with shock.

Underneath her hood, Raven smirked.

Quickly she sent out a thread of her power to connect with the gem and bring it back to her. She opened herself to it, feeling the edges and planes of the ruby with her mind, reaching for it in order to reel it in.

She didn't expect anything to reach back, because nothing ever had before.

She felt the flash of premonition only in the instant before she was met with an invading tendril of… something that was distinctly not her. Something that was other, like Trigon had been other.

"Raven!" somebody called her name, and she couldn't have said who it was to save her life.

So… it wasn't just a ruby after all, she thought, and then lost track of the outside world. Her vision swam, as if she were drowning, sinking down into black.

She did not want it, but it was like in the meditation rooms on Azarath, where the water trickled into the ponds and none of the rocks on the bottom stayed dry, only she was the rocks and the other was seeping inevitably all the way through her to the ends, rooting through her, searching, and she felt drawn out every which way and scattered, reaching out to be whole again but finding nothing to grasp her, until she was like a star grasping uselessly for its brothers in the emptiness of space.

'You think you're alone, Raven. But you're not.'

That was the first that bubbled up from the emptiness.

Her mind, her memories, melted down and strung out and regurgitated, and she was caught in the deluge, sinking, sinking, and she sensed, like the faraway bright spot of the sun through the deep water, that the other was there and yet apart from it all.

She was a child on Azarath, kept away from the others, like a little secret. She snuck away to peek at the other children as they walked, singing, in a line to school and recognized that she was the leader of a solitary life, one which she had not asked for, and could not understand.

She looked down into the round pond in the meditation room. The water was clear enough that she could see the pebbles on the bottom in dusky browns, reds, and blues. The black and gray ones looked dull and lonely among the rest. She kicked at the surface of the pool until the image was obstructed.

Her mother, watching her with sad eyes, holding and caring for her, but always at a distance, even when she was close enough to touch. She touched her mother's hand with a trembling finger. It was cold.

'…Mama?' she whispered, but there was no reply.

In the dark, the glitter of a malevolent gaze.

She came to the city (why did she come to the city?) and joined the Titans, finally a part of the group and yet not a part. She cared for them from a distance, and they allowed her to.

Wasn't that always the way?

Malchior, teaching and understanding her, (loving her?), betraying her.

The Titans…

'You think you're alone, but you're not.'

There was a kind of ripping-away that left her feeling wounded and bereft of something unknown, and it was followed by darkness as she had never known it before, as intensely lonely as if the world had shut itself off around her.

But she recognized that it was over, the other had retreated, and the event was becoming a blur, almost a non-memory in her mind, an empty space where the memory should have been.

On the outside she had only made a choking noise and collapsed to the ground.

"Raven? Are you alright?"

Opening her eyes was like waking from a dream within a long sleep. Robin was kneeling next to her, she noticed first, with Starfire hovering over his shoulder. He was probably the one who had spoken. Beast Boy sat on the other side of her, and Cyborg stood in the background.

"I'm fine," she said, instinctively. She didn't hurt, anyway, but as she struggled to sit up she noticed that her body felt heavier than it ever had before, while on the inside she felt unaccountably… buoyant. "What about the thief?"

"The guy got away," Cyborg was the one to answer. The others shifted uncomfortably. "And he took the ruby with him."

"How?" she asked, surprised and irritated all at once. They had been bested by a skinny guy on a hover board. Things just kept getting better.

"He used a smoke screen," Robin told her, clenching a fist in obvious anger. "He ran the first chance he got."

"And… nobody went after him," she interpreted flatly.

"We did not want to leave you in hazardous condition," said Starfire earnestly, the same way she said all things. "You appeared to be in great pain…"

Raven decided she did not like the way they were all looking at her, a nervous, on-the-fence sort of a look. The way you would look at something rabid.

"I'm fine," she said again, no longer certain whether she was speaking to them or to herself. The nervous look only got worse. "You should have gone after him. I can take care of myself."

Silence. Raven was beginning to get annoyed with this.

"Um, dude…" said Beast Boy, "…can you?"

She narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Raven, you… you look different," Robin told her, always the brave one. But he winced as if he was expecting her to bite his arm off as he said it.

"Yes," Starfire agreed. "The change in your appearance is most alarming. Do you not feel altered in some way?"

"No," Raven replied darkly. But that wasn't true, she remembered, thinking of the lightness and heaviness she felt. It seemed to be fading away. That, or she was just getting used to it. "…Different, how?" she asked, morbidly curious.

No one said anything for a moment, and Raven realized why this treatment bothered her so much. Because if they acted as if she were something breakable, she could believe that maybe she was.

"Your hair," said Beast Boy, finally. "And your eyes, and your…"

He gestured to his forehead, the spot where…

"My chakra?" Her hand fluttered up to the space where it should have been, and found nothing. And now that she looked at her hand she saw that the skin there was less pallid and more alive than it should have been.

"It's not just that," added Cyborg. "Your signature on my scanner has changed too."

She raised an eyebrow. "And that means…?"

"That's what we'd like to know," said Robin. "What happened to you, Raven?"

Wasn't it obvious by now that she didn't know either? Sick of being scrutinized, she went to pull her hood up with her powers, and in that moment realized the significance of those earlier conflicting feelings. They had all but faded by now, but she knew with distant clarity that the heaviness had been gravity weighing down on her, the lightness had been the freedom of her emotions from bondage.

"I… lost my powers," she noted tonelessly, as if it were somebody else it had happened to and not her.


A/N: The rest of the chapters will be longer – this is only the prologue, after all. Reviews would be really nice :)