Chapter Text
“God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.”
—A.J. Heschel
Remember when you were fifteen and you were convinced you were evil and irredeemable and completely insane but it turns out you were just fifteen.
—tumblr user Cowboyvamp
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“You’re going to come inside, you’re going to take a shower, and you’re going to eat something,” Raven’s voice was firm, but it still came to Gar as if his head was swathed in cloth.
His eyelids fluttered as he broke his gaze away from Terra’s memorial. He had stared at it so long, it stopped making visual sense to him. He knew the curve of her lips accommodating that cute overbite, he knew that the bust was strikingly accurate to the bouncy bobbed silhouette of her hair, the way it flipped inward at the ends, he knew the way that her eyes dominated her face, and yet, in the same way when you stare at a Rothko painting too long you start to see more and more red in the purple, those features that he had known so well for so long melted into a haze of confusion.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, blankly, turning to look at Raven. Raven wasn’t exactly an improvement on the “Making sense of the person you’re looking at” front. She was a few feet away from him, standing slightly above him on the incline leading from their memorial garden back up to the tower. Her hood was down, the red gem at her hairline was gleaming dully, bright as the blood from a fresh shaving nick. It was late in the day, not quite sunset. Rita called it the Golden Hour back in his Doom Patrol days.
“That’s why you’re showering, first,” said Raven, folding her arms.
“Rae…” there was so much exhaustion in his voice.
“Please,” said Raven, and her voice got a bit taut, “I’m—I’m worried. We’re all worried. But I’m worried, which should worry you.”
“I’m… figuring it out,” said Gar.
“Sometimes you can’t figure it out on your own,” said Raven, quietly.
“But—” Gar started and looked at her, searching her expression. “I don’t get it!” He blurted out furiously, “Why is it easier for everyone else to move on!? I—I’ve been dumped before! I’ve made an idiot of myself, before! But everyone’s just—and I’m—!” He gestured helplessly and then he re-read the tautness in Raven’s expression. “You’re not just out here to tell me I stink and I need to eat, huh?” His shoulders sank.
He could see something physically burgeoning up in Raven like a tide, but she seemed to inhale and meet it, quelling it in the process. Those violet eyes of hers flicked off as she exhaled through her nostrils.
“Raven….” Gar’s voice was steady, “Is… there something you need to tell me about… about the day she died?”
Raven pressed her lips thin, still not meeting his eyes. “You’re not the person I should tell,” she said softly.
“Bullshit,” said Gar.
“Gar, you know why I would say that—you know there—there are times for these things, and I’m not good at figuring out what—”
“I’m not a fucking child! Or maybe we wouldn’t be here right now if everyone wasn’t treating me like a fucking child!” Gar exclaimed.
Raven paled, visibly drawing in to herself, then glanced off before exhaling.
“Do you remember that hostage situation I botched?” she asked, softly.
“What?” said Gar.
“Locus,” said Raven, looking back at him, “The geneticist terrorists—there were still a handful of cells turning up here and there, and the Titans and Young Justice were handling them because they weren’t a big enough threat to bother the League with—at least as far as we thought.”
“Raven, I’m pretty sure I would remember if you botched a hostage situation—” Gar started but Raven cut him off.
“I should have absorbed his panic, absorbed everything—dulled and discombobulated him to the point where the team could move in, but I didn’t. I thought Dick and Donna were winning him over, and I didn’t want to suck away his senses, for three seconds I thought ideology and words were enough, and two people are dead because of that mistake.”
Gar remembered now. “Santa Marta. The Biotech campus. Rae, that was two hostages out of 148.”
“Two people who would be alive today if I knew what I was doing!” Raven snapped, “So when Terra was—!” Even now she caught herself, even now, she hesitated. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Raven…” Gar said softly.
“She was going to kill you,” Raven said softly, “And—and maybe killing you would snap her out of it, make her realize that she wasn’t where she wanted to be.” her shoulders pressed inward and her voice took on a hot, thick quality, “But then you would be fucking dead, Gar! I wasn’t willing to spend your life on a slim chance at her redemption! So—so I told the team what they needed to hear to stop her.”
“…you lied,” said Gar.
“No!” The word flew out of Raven as a flinch, and Gar stepped back as the air around her darkened and rippled with telekinetic distress.“No! If there was a way to save her without losing any of you, I would have—!” Tears were now running freely down Raven’s cheeks, she pressed the heel of her palm to one of her tear streaks, “I would have….” She drew in a steadying breath, that telekinetic field around her settling, wiping both her cheeks. “I.. I didn’t lie. I told the team what intent was there. What… she would immediately act on. I knew that wasn’t all. I knew how scared she was, I knew how lonely she was, but if one second of hesitation meant a rock flying through your skull or Dick’s? Or Vic getting crushed—all metal bits and—?” Her eyes met Gar’s and he flinched a little at the bloodshot purple staring right into his soul.
“It was the worst choice I’ve ever had to make,” she went on, staring at him, “But it also wasn’t a choice at all. She—she loved you, Gar, but she also hated you. She hated how much you needed everyone to love you. She hated all of us because we chose to defend a world that had hurt her, so much. And—and I knew what she would act on, first.”
Gar had broken his eyes away from her at last, and his face was stony. Raven pulled her hood up and turned away from him slightly, practically disappearing into her own cloak. “But also… I was still mad,” her voice was very small, deep in the shadows of that hood, “I know I was still so mad at her for everything she did to us. So… I don’t… I don’t trust the choice I made.” And her voice got even smaller, then, “And…and what does it mean for me? That there was darkness I couldn’t pull her out of? Wasn’t willing to…”
“Is it bad that I wish she faked the whole thing?” Gar’s brow crinkled, “I want to hate her, too… I—” he squeezed his eyes shut, “God, am I such an asshole for that?!”
“Gar—” A hand managed to find its way out of the dark abyss of Raven’s cloak, she touched his arm.
“‘I wish the whole world would rearrange itself so my feelings aren’t hurt’—god, no wonder the whole team treats me like a kid—”
“Gar,” Raven’s body abruptly pressed against his in an embrace, arms clinging around his torso, holding his own arms to his sides. It kind of happened all at once, like abruptly being swallowed up by water. The contact stilled him. For a girl who was half-demon, it felt… holy, almost.
“Rae?” the nickname fell out of him, stupidly.
She was quiet for a few seconds, not releasing her arms from him, but she also seemed stunned by her own act of physical affection. She always considered and did everything so carefully, that the act of trying to pull him out of his own spiral on reflex left her unsure of what to do next. He felt her breath hitch before she spoke again.
“I’m so scared that I’m… fundamentally something that shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Something that never should have existed,” her voice was quiet, “With the royal family of Markovia… and Tara’s own history of them… I always felt that… was an experience we shared.” A soft huff fell out of Raven’s nostrils, warm against the side of Gar’s neck, “But the more I found in common between Tara and myself… the more she would pull away. I didn’t take it too personally, didn’t look deeply enough into it. I was… creepy. I was a threat when it came to you. Of course she wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”
I was a threat when it came to you, Gar’s pointed ears burned and he glanced off. He never thought of Raven and Tara as competing for his affections, and for that matter, Raven probably didn’t, either. But Raven was protective. And he had a crush on her well before he even met Tara, but Raven had closed herself off and—
Raven seemed to regain enough awareness of both of their states of minds to pull back slightly, but he caught her by the forearms.
“Look—” he started, not actually knowing what he was going to say.
His eyes fixed on her mouth for a few seconds. That mouth and her sharp, delicate jawline were the only things visible from beneath the shadow of her hood, until those big eyes of hers caught the light again as they flicked up to meet his gaze. There was a stupid, hungry part of him that wanted to flick that hood off, grab her face, and start sticking his tongue down her throat—a horrible muddy mess of the desperation to stop feeling everything he was feeling right now, and the fact that he liked her, he loved her, but he also loved Tara, and Tara was gone, and there was now just an agonizing, all-sucking void in him where she used to be and the real kicker was, he never really knew her, did he? He saw only what he wanted to see, and now they all had to maintain a narrative as romantic as his own stupidity. Through this massive gap of silence after that word, seagulls called, waves crashed around their tower’s island, and Raven stood there, perfectly patiently.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breaking his eyes down from hers.
“What?” Raven blinked.
“You’re grieving too, and the team needs me, and I’m just—” words failed him, he squeezed his eyes shut, and he… more or less just clonked his forehead against hers, the cloth of her hood only mildly dulling the impact. If it hurt, Raven didn’t show it. He felt her cool fingers at the base of his skull and back of his neck. He now became a lot more acutely aware of the greasiness of his own hair, the need for a haircut.
“Do you want me to take it?” Raven asked quietly.
“What?” Gar’s eyes were still closed.
“I can… I can take this from you. I can make this hurt less,” her voice was soft. He knew what she meant—her ability to absorb others’ emotions, to swallow the panic of a crowd, the power that maybe would have saved those two hostages’ lives back at that Biotech campus if she hadn’t made that split second decision to trust Dick and Donna. How much of Tara’s rage and panic and heartbreak had Raven drunk in before that rock knocked her out? Was she still sitting with it? Was it all she had left of Tara, now?
His eyes opened and he pulled back slightly. His eyes met hers and he studied her a moment, the utter sincerity in her eyes, the hunger, not for his approval, but the sheer need to heal her part in this rift. Something twanged in him like a plucked string, the slow understanding that Raven hadn’t just told him about her own experience that day because it was something he needed to know, more than that, it was something she needed to tell. But of course she was careful, of course she wouldn’t want to hurt him, and that path of avoidance was its own kind of hurt. You’re not the one I should tell. There are times for these things, and I’m not good at figuring out… And then he felt the animal in himself, the quiet dignity, the ability to sit with discomfort in a team that constantly felt the need to fix everything now. In that moment he felt himself no longer lost and drowning in his grief, not because it was being swallowed, but because it was being shared.
“Thanks,” he said, “But I think… I should probably sit with this. Like you do. You gotta grow up, sometime, right?”
“Gar, I don’t want you to feel like—” Raven started but he put a hand on her shoulder.
“And I am going to take a shower, like you said,” he added.
She scoffed a little. “And eat something?”
“Only if you eat something, Miss Herbal Tea Mc-Meal-skipper.”
“I don’t skip, I just—“ Raven caught herself and gave him a hard side-eye, “Forget…” she added a bit more affectionately.
“Guess that means I’m making you my famous air fryer tofu satay.”
“I hate that air fryer,” her eyes crinkled and a spare tear made its way out, which she quickly wiped away.
“It’s literally the best addition to our kitchen,” said Gar.
Another scoff huffed out of her as she realized he was baiting her. She pulled away from him slightly, his hand slipping from her shoulder, but it was like that physical contact had hooked him, and he steadily trailed after her.
“…Terra thought the air fryer was stupid, too,” he rubbed the back of his neck, glancing back at her memorial as they walked.
“She thought a lot of things in the tower were stupid,” Raven mouth hitched to one side in an almost-smile, and her eyelids lowered slightly, “I always liked how she could call things stupid but never seem like a downer.”
“She was an asshole, though,” Gar smiled ruefully. He said it with affection. Back when Tara was alive he could count on more than one hand the number of times, he had spoken up on Tara’s behalf when her words finally got under another teammate’s skin enough for them to lose their cool. He was always saying she was ‘rough around the edges’ or ‘she’s been through a lot,’ but there was something freeing in the admission that, yeah, even as their friend, Terra could be an asshole.
Raven, ever the empath, picked up on his meaning. “We liked that she was an asshole,” she said. He was looking at the back of her hooded head, but he could hear the faint smile in her voice, but her previous wording snagged him.
“…you’re not a downer, you know,” Gar added, as Raven walked.
“I am a downer,” Raven replied, “But that’s what people need, sometimes.”
“No, but you don’t bring people down, you’re just… there when people are down,” Gar corrected, before catching himself, “..and…um… thanks, for that.”
“Thank you, Gar,” she said in return.
They both made their way to the tower as the sun finally touched on the horizon.