A Slippery Slope, A Green Horizon.

Birthday

Beast Boy woke to the sound of whimpering.

In his groggy, half asleep state, he stumbled from bed and tried to find the source of the noise. It took several seconds for him to realise that his room was in fact, silent.

It was coming from down the hall, from Raven's room.

Sighing, the shapeshifter sat back down on his mattress, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing the ache from hands that had just remembered the strain he placed them under the day before. They had stopped the H.I.V.E Five from hijacking an armoured car laden with jewels, in the heat of battle Gizmo had called to Raven and his words chilled them all.

"Have a great birthday tomorrow, demon."

Beast Boy, according to what Cyborg had told him about it later, lost control and reverted to his human form. He had snarled and dashed Gizmo to the concrete with his gloved fists, knocking the criminal into unconsciousness with a flurry of blows and pivoting to slam a gorilla's worth of knuckles into Mammoth's jaw as he came to intervene.

The green teen had looked for Raven after the other H.I.V.E members had been captured, but she was nowhere to be found.

Now, staring at the wall and unwillingly intruding on her private moment with the darkness that she so rarely allowed to overcome her, Beast Boy hated himself for that slip in control. He should have known that it would solve nothing, he should have gone to her in support, but instead the beastly nature he was so aptly named for was allowed free reign and he had simply brought more pain into the world, rather than helping his friend deal with hers.

His bedside clock read 12:03am, and the birthday girl was in pain, crying while the monster she shared a floor with listened. He could never find sleep again tonight, as much as he wished to give her the privacy she deserved. The same keen senses that led him to the pleas of a lost child now kept him prisoner in the waking world while the girl down the hall fell to pieces.

Raven, curled up in her room, let go a single agony filled gasp.

Beast Boy's door was barely closed by the time he reached her own, a gentle salvo of taps announcing him.

"Rae, can I come in?" He breathed.

"Go. Away." The sorceress replied, her voice was even, deadpan in execution. If she had been speaking to any other Titan it would have sounded perfectly fine, but the pointed ears of her floor-mate found the broken intake of breath, the patter of tear drops on sheets.

"Raven, I can't stop you from feeling like this, but I can help you through it." Beast Boy insisted. "I know you must think I'm an idiot, and after yesterday I can understand why, but even an idiot knows you don't shut people out when you're in pain Rae."

Silence met him in response, such profound quiet that Beast Boy thought she had cast a spell.

"If you don't want to be seen like this, that's fine, but I'm not leaving." He said, sliding down the wall beside her door. "I'll sit out here and talk about the migration habits of blue whales all night if I have to, just so you know I'm here. It might even put you to sleep, though the kind of dreams people have when listening to facts about whales probably get weird. Let's see... There's a pod that goes passed Africa during late autu-"

Raven's door slid open, the girl herself stepping out wrapped in her cloak to look down at him, dressed in the boxers and loose white shirt he had worn to bed. "I don't think you're an idiot."

"What?" Beast Boy frowned.

"You said I think you're an idiot." She said uneasily shifting her weight and looking away. "I don't. You were angry that Gizmo brought up what I did and acted on instinct, protecting a friend. That doesn't make you an idiot."