A/N this chapter is dedicated to JuliaTheOtakuFangirl because they commented on the last chapter something that helped fill one of my plot holes.
Raven
"Oh hello friend, er, teammate Raven!" I scowl at the fact that she is still upset, and she tries to cover it up. "How is your day faring?" I look up at Starfire's face, which is red. She looks like she's holding her breath or something.
"You got anything you want to tell me?" I inquire, with one of my magic shields at the ready, just in case.
"Oh no, it is nothing!" she starts sweating.
"You can tell me."
"But I cannot, for no one is meant to know, she told me not to!"
"Who, Terra?"
"Yes friend Terra! ShesnuckintothetowerandshewasveryclearlyattemptingtonotbeseenbutIhappenedtoglanceupandsawher (she pauses for a breath) andsheshookherheadnoandmadethebequietgestureandIdidnotspeakofituntilnowsonowImaynotbetrusted!" It all comes out so fast, and I barely had time to raise my shield; the words came out faster than the wind, along with a little rain in the form of spit.
I wipe my face in disgust, then make her sit on the couch, since she had slowly floated closer to the ceiling with every word that escaped her lips. I survey the room quickly, then back into a portal to Robin's room, where I see him throwing bird-a-rangs up and catching them. I climb forward out of my portal, back to a dejected Starfire on the couch.
"Starfire, it's okay. I knew Terra was here. She's in my room. Don't talk to anyone else about it besides Beast Boy," I command.
She nods. "But why have you allowed friend Terra into your living quarters?"
"Because Cyborg stole her room for storing his machine stuff."
"Perhaps when friends Robin, Beast Boy, and Cyborg are absent, I may ask friend Terra to do the fixing of my hair." She indicates the short crop. "It is not exactly fanciful."
I laugh lightly, making the popcorn seeds at the bottom of a dirty bucket pop. "That it is not. Thank you for keeping it secret from Robin and Cyborg, I'm glad I can trust you. I'm heading back now, do you want to come with to talk to Terra?" She nods happily.
"I do wish to apologize for being upset before, I believe we all did the overreacting. I will most likely act overly when Robin or Cyborg are near, as they would be unhappy to see otherwise." I nod my understanding.
Glancing down the hall, I see Metal Man clunking his way towards my room. Uh oh.
I grip Starfire's arm and dash down the hall, then stop suddenly to avoid careening into him. Before he can see us, I tug Starfire back into a portal to hide.
Beast Boy *while Raven and Starfire talk*
I'm jolted from my catnap (oh man, I gotta save that one!) when I hear a clunking down the hall, which signals to me a red flag, meaning Cyborg's on his way. Faster than changeling-ly possible, I shift back to human, leap out of the bunk, and grab a pile of the spare cloaks Terra isn't sitting on. Most of them go over her, and all the extras I can find pile next to her, so that it won't look completely conspicuous. A loud thud, thud, announces the fact that Cyborg has arrived.
I whirl around just in time to see the door fall down, and a Cyborg with a raised fist. "What are you doing in here?" he asks snootily.
"I could ask you the same thing," I respond.
"What's the lump on the top bunk? What's the top bunk?"
"Nothing. Raven just told me to watch her room in case jerks like you or Robin, and maybe Star, came barging in here."
"So where is she then?"
"None of your business. Get lost."
"Oh man, helping the betrayer out? Robin's gonna have to hear about this." I glare at him, and he returns the expression. We stay locked like that for a while, until he finally breaks away, muttering about how he needs to fix his car. "And I don't believe what you say about the lump. I bet you're hiding Raven in here or something, and you're bugging her." With that, he stalks off down the hall. I swallow the bile in my throat at what my best friend's turned into, then shift back into a cat and hop back up with Terra, after shoving aside the cloaks. Before I fall asleep, I share a glance with Raven and Starfire who just walked in, and see a mutual understanding between all of us not to mention this to Terra when she wakes up.
Terra
A soft purring alerts me to the presence of another creature near me. I slowly open my eyes to avoid disturbing it, and see an adorable little green kitty. Adorable+green+animal=Beast Boy. I give a small smile, then pull up my other hand, resting it on his neck. His little kitten mouth curves up the smallest bit as I run my hand over his back and scratch behind his ears. As I scratch all down his back and gently pull across his tail, Raven's door whooshes up from where it was lying broken on the ground. I glance up from looking at Beast Boy's little stripes, and see Raven levitating it back in place, and Starfire watching from the side to make sure it was even. Briefly, I wonder what happened, and whether Starfire told Raven she saw me, but then realize the latter is a stupid question. Of course she did.
"Hey," Raven says softly, walking over. "What'd you do with Beast Boy?" I lift up my hand and wiggle my fingers, now covered in green fur. Raven rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "I told him to keep watch!"
"Oh friend Terra you have returned! It is most joyous to know I shall have another friend within the tower again! Friends Robin and Cyborg seem much less of friends when they are having one of the 'bad moods'. Now may we have the girl time? Raven promised one to me as we came here!" My brain barely has time to keep up with my ears and Starfire's voice, and I'm still processing it all while Starfire and Raven are talking. I give up on understanding (or trying to), and hop down to the floor, careful not to wake Beast Boy.
"Uhh, Star?" I ask, flabbergasted at what I hadn't noticed before. "What's with your hair?"
"Oh, you had not noticed upon entering? A minor Control Freak mishap," she responds. Raven dips her chin a little. I wonder how 'minor' the 'mishap' was.
"Hey Rae," I say, looking at Raven. She's not scowling at my use of her unofficial nickname. Weird. "How much you wanna bet I can fix Star's hair and make it awesome?" She grins readily, and Starfire floats higher in excitement. Raven pulls up some random hair tools from the window with her magic, and floats some over to me. We both look at Star with evil grins, and her eyes shatter (A/N in the show where the pupils explode then fall to the bottom of their eyes in a pile of scraps).
*****some hair tossing and snipping sounds later*****
"Sooo? What do we think?" I ask excitedly, swirling Starfire around in her chair to face herself in the mirror on Raven's wardrobe (not the one to her mind). Raven and I peer into it behind her, anxious to see Starfire's expression when she saw what her hair looked like now.
"Joy! It is most pleasing! On Tamaran, such an image would indicate a funeral. Tell me, who is requiring a funeral?" she responds. Raven and I stare at each other, mouths agape.
"No one, Starfire. It's just a hairstyle we accidentally invented," Raven soothes, squirting water on Starfire's hair to make it stay down.
"Oh. Then this 'hairdo' is very wondrous!" She exlaims, tugging on the little tendrils hanging down. We cropped it in front, then made it get progressively longer until we hit the top of her ear, where it was down just past her shoulder. From there, we shortened it again, until it was the same length in back as Raven's was in the same spot. Altogether, it looks like an upside-down tepee. "But what about you, friend Terra? Friend Raven's hair is too short to do much with, but yours is very much long enough to work on!" We both look at her with sad faces. "Not that your hairstyles are unpleasing! I just assumed it would have been more joyous to do a hair-styling session again!" she quickly covers.
"Starfire's right. I know having all that hair can't be good when you're controlling earth. Or trying to, anyway. I'm gonna have to help you with that. But still, it's bound to get all knotted and dirt-covered," Raven agrees. Sure enough, when she lifts a strand of my hair, there's dirt woven in throughout it. Groaning, she pushes Starfire out of the chair and me into it. They jabber over my protesting about what to turn my hair into; it's long enough to do almost anything, since it'd been so long since they last saw it.
*****more hair tossing and snipping sounds later*****
"Okay, you'd better like this, because you aren't getting anything different," Raven orders. Starfire claps and swivels me around in the chair to face the mirror. What I see, I never would have picked for myself. They barely shortened it at all. I look up at her accusingly. "What, I just wanted to make you let us work with it!" Raven protests with her hands up defensively. I delicately touch the tips with my hand. All they did was make a diagonal line of bangs from the top right to the bottom left, and pull all the rest of my hair in front of my shoulders. From there, they sprayed in red highlights in random streaks.
"Wow! This looks so great! Where did you get the red-" I'm suddenly cut off by a loud explosion below. We all run to the window, and see that my emotions made me tear out a chunk of the island our tower sits on.
"RAVEN! WHAT DID YOU DO!" I hear Cyborg and Robin yell. Crap. I stare at Raven and Starfire, then grab the latter's wrist and dive under Raven's bed. Raven quickly removes the top bunk and drops it out the window. All that hard work gone to waste.
The door vibrates, then rattles to the floor. I duck further against the wall, but stay within seeing range of the door, where Robin is standing with Cyborg, who has his fist raised in the knocking position.
"You broke my door twice in one day. What." Raven doesn't even phrase it as a question. Just a statement. Her arms are crossed, and she pulled her hood back up.
"What was the big explosion?" Robin seethes. His mouth is curved far enough down that it could fall off of his face, and Cyborg replaces his raised hand to his opposite arm, then pulls the other over to cross his arms. Odd, he looks a lot less mad than Robin.
"I was meditating," Raven replies, emotionless. "I broke concentration, fell off my bed to the floor, got surprised, lost control. Minor explosion." I notice her using as few words as possible. Maybe her reasoning is that she doesn't want to 'waste' them on the guy who called her a traitor. She doesn't flinch as Robin tries to poke his head into the room. Instead, she uses a magic hand to push him back out, then raises the door back to its position. Before we can crawl out from under the lower bed, I see a small green blob fall down from the ceiling in front of us.
A. . . cat? Oh right. I forgot Beast Boy was up there the entire time. That dude sure can sleep. I grab his tail, pull him to the side, and climb out, dragging Star with me.
"Hey! What was that for! You almost threw me out the window!" Beast Boy yells, shifting back into a human and rubbing his back. "Why did you-" I clamp a hand over his mouth. "Why does everyone keep doing that today?" he mumbles.
"Be-cause, Robin and Cyborg were just here to yell at Raven, who's over there glaring in the corner, and they aren't supposed to know anybody's here except Raven," I explain quietly.
"She's right," Raven conversation-jumps, "And you should head back to your room. I'm sure they're gonna go tell you that you were supposed to come yell at me too."
"Fine. I'll go. Hey Star and Terra, nice hair," he concedes, stepping next to an open portal Raven made. Hopefully, it leads to his room. If not, I'm not sure I'd want to know where it goes. She summons another for Starfire, since she'll be next on the guy's list, and Star quickly exits after thanking us for her 'most glorious hair recreation!' "Just to be clear, this does go to my room, right?" Beast Boy checks, obviously doubting the path the portal takes. Raven nods curtly, and he leaves after a quick glance back at both Raven and I.
Raven's gaze doesn't break from where Beast Boy and the portal just were. She's staring intently at it, as if she expects someone small and green to step back in here. After a few minutes of that and her not responding to my talking, I go up and wave my hand in front of her face. She blinks twice, then looks at me. "What?"
"You were standing there for like five minutes, watching were Beast Boy went."
"Oh."
"I saw the way you were looking at him. You like him, don't you?"
"What? No! No way! I do NOT like Beast Boy! Ew!" She throws her hands up, and I look past her shoulder to see the top bunk float up to the window.
"You've got a friend there." Raven quickly pulls it back in and sets it atop her bed, then looks at me.
"I. Do. Not. Like. Beast. Boy."
"Ah, right right," I concede. "You don't like him."
"Thank you!" she sighs, dropping onto the edge of her bed.
"You LOVE him!"
"WHAT?!?" She yells, bolting up (and causing her wardrobe mirror to explode).
"Raven! Shove a sock in it!" Robin's voice drifts up. Grrrrr.
"Beast Boy and Raven, fly in Jump City. K-I-S-S-I-N-G! First comes Slade, then comes Trigon, then comes Control Freak with the wedding song!" I sing loudly, but quiet enough to avoid Robin and Cyborg.
"Terra," Raven pleads.
"Fine, fine, I'll leave it alone. For now."