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It’s not weird. That’s what he’d say, if he was stupid enough to say something. But: it’s not. It’s not weird, or creepy, and he’s not trying to—to start anything. It just happened. Just happened after twenty solid hours of phobic hallucination, after a broken ankle and a black eye and four cracked ribs and a gash across his cheekbone that doggedly refused to clot. He shook off the sensors and IV drip, Raven nodded at him, Cyborg nodded at him, Beast Boy nodded at him, and Starfire—Starfire nodded at him, and smiled wearily, and turned to leave, and he grabbed her wrist.
“Star—wait.”
She turned, and he nearly threw up because—because—Slade ran right by you, how could you let him get away? Dark crescents, the color of strong tea, had emerged beneath her eyes. Most of her fingernails were jagged, because she’d ripped up the goddamn floor for him. You are hurting me you are hurting me you are hurting me.
“Robin?”
He’d stumbled back against the bed, ankle trembling beneath him. “It’s nothing.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it go. “I’m fine.”
He knew she knew what one of his Fake And Leaderly Smiles looked like, and that this was certainly one of them, but it was so late and he was tired, he was just so goddamn tired. They shuffled from the infirmary to the elevator to the bedroom floor, and as they approached her room he raised a weary hand and said, “okay, well, see you—“
“No.” She fixed him with one of those Tamaraneans are a warrior race, you know stares. Her voice was flat, but not hard. “No.”
He blinked. “No?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No. You will sleep with me tonight.”
“Uh—uh—Star, I don’t—“
“I am familiar with the idiom, and it is not what I am implying.” She took his hand. Her voice left no room in the hallway for argument. “You will sleep with me tonight.”
And—he was so tired. He was so tired, so exhausted in every possible way, and everything hurt, and he was scared. He was scared. He was scared and he was sick with shame and she’d ripped up the floor to save him.
“Okay,” he said.
She made him change into pajamas: an old t-shirt and drawstring pants from his room, a three-year-old Christmas gift from Alfred. They had some kind of ridiculous thread count. The shirt was tight across his shoulders now, and the pants fell a scant few inches below his knees. He concentrated on this as Starfire shucked off her boots and collar, as she turned down the blankets, as she pulled him onto the mattress.
“Here,” she said, “you will take this side, and I the other. We shall have more than enough room, I think.”
“Yeah.” He watched the plastic stars puttied to her ceiling dim. “I—I think so.”
She curled towards him, a long, warm parenthesis of body heat. He realized that she intended to sleep that way, and that he could, conceivably, spend the entire night watching hair tangle itself into bedhead, her shoulders jump with dreams of falling, of flying, of his arm tight around her bicep, clenching, hurting—
“Robin.” She shook him gently. Her hands were warm and callused from the heavy bag she favored. “Breathe.”
He did, slowly. He was too tired to do anything but look into her eyes, and so he closed them. He thought of her sleeping, of all the small, secret noises he was going to overhear, of the indent the bottom of her collar had dug into the swell of her breasts—and he was crying, silently, horribly, shamefully, and he was pretty sure he was going to throw up.
“Robin, Robin—”
“No,” he said, low and sharp, “I can’t, I don’t—” He sat up, threw off the covers, got shakily to his feet. “I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
He stumbled. She wrestled him, as gently as she could, back onto the bed, and braced him upright, her hands hard on his shoulders. “Cannot what? Robin? Cannot what?”
“I can’t be here—with you.”
“Are you sick? Is it the drug? Is it—”
“No.” How could you let him get away how could you let him get away. “I don’t—I don’t want—”
“Sleep?” Her eyes were searching, desperate. “Comfort?”
you are hurting me you are hurting me you are hurting me
He buried his face in his hands.
That had been necessary. That had been an extraordinary circumstance. He’d cried, for god’s sake.
The second night happened a week later. They’d been watching a movie in the living room. It ended, and. Well. It was late, and everyone was still sort of on edge, and she was dozing against his shoulder, and it was so easy to just fall back against the couch cushion and let it happen.
He woke at dawn, his mending joints full of complaints, Starfire’s hair stuck to the edges of his mask. She was not a delicate sleeper—her arms were thrown wide open, as if to embrace the rising sun, and her legs were—“immodest,” as Alfred described Bruce’s sloppier dates. He stared very hard out the window as he eased her limbs off him and retreated to his room. To sleep. And then, when sleep did not come, to at least rest a little, with his eyes closed. And then, when rest eluded him, to at least get some filing done.
Which got done. And Starfire was up and about a few hours later, her hair wet from the shower, darkened to a theater-curtain sort of red. She smiled toothily at him and he smiled tiredly at her and neither said anything.
Which wasn’t weird. Right? It’s not weird.
And then—and then she started pulling him into her room, those nights they stayed up talking about basketball and slime mold and W.E.B. Du Bois. His words would start to melt at the edges, falling into a circusy slurry of syllables he’d spent years smothering: “I’unno” and “ing” softened into “’in” and once, after twenty-seven hours of wakefulness, a single shameful instance of “I reckon.” She giggled, very softly, at that one.
“Come,” she said, pulling lightly at his wrist.
And he knew. He knew what she meant, and he went, and they kicked off their shoes and they climbed into her bed and when she threw an arm over him he didn’t shake it off.
It didn’t happen every night. That meant it wasn’t weird.
And he didn’t touch her. She touched him sometimes, in ways that were—that were slippery. Her fingers grazing the hollow behind his ear. Her chin nestled briefly against his shoulder. Her hipbone knocking against his lower back. But that was Starfire. She was a big friendly cat of a girl. She touched everyone like that. Mostly.
But: he didn’t touch her. He didn’t. He just—he sometimes focused so hard on not focusing on the feeling of her breasts pressed against his back that it backfired. Just a little. And sometimes—most of the time—every time she flung an arm around him, he let it stay there. And he let her hair go where it would, which was everywhere, and frequently all over him. Hours later, he’d be punching out Johnny Rancid or rebooting the computer or making himself a sandwich and he’d find a long, smooth strand of red hooked into his collar, or clinging to his ankle, and he would pray that no one had seen.
Because it wasn’t weird. But it would have been kind of hard to explain.
He looked forward to it, some nights. He could admit that to himself. Sometimes—when the work was hard and long and refused to lie flat, kinking up into a telephone coil of whodunit and why—some part of him would sigh and think, okay, well, all I want to do now is lose myself in that big purple pansy of a bed.
Or sometimes, she would try out her crazier Tamaranean acupressure techniques on him, and, well. They really helped. And she’d do it before bed, because he’d be a bit of a jellyfish afterwards and sleep was really the only thing he could do. And those techniques—some of them, some of the ones she used rather a lot—involved her getting pretty close, her hands on his hips, her thighs pressing against his own, her lips murmuring assurances into his ear that, were the syllables rearranged, could make him feel things he’d rather not admit to.
Sometimes he looked forward to that.
But it was such a busy summer. Every goddamn lunatic strapping pasta strainers to their heads and setting out to rob Italian markets. A guy with a thing for marsupial puns. Water stains creeping across the gym ceiling. And Raven, Raven acting weird ever since her birthday, Raven smiling too-wide smiles.
It was easier to let it happen, to let one thing, just one thing in his life happen without resistance. This one, secret thing—not secret for bad reasons, secret because—because it was almost too good. Because it just made him feel—quiet. That was it. Quiet, in the room itself and in his head and it was such a rare thing, that quietness inside and out, how could he put up a fight?
The water stains crept and the possum guy cracked his skull trying to break into the enclosure at the zoo and Raven spent a lot of time in her room and Starfire would knock on his door, softly, her big green eyes like spring leaves, not even saying anything, just inclining her head towards her bedroom. And he’d nod, straighten up his desk, turn out the light, and follow her to her room. They’d reached a point of not needing to say anything, and he could tell she knew better than to trouble the silence.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he’d wake, and realize, somehow, that she was awake too. He couldn’t tell if her wakefulness woke him, or vice versa, or if they were just particularly prone to coincidences.
He’d roll over. She didn’t care much for covers, and so there would be long lean lines exposed in the moonlight for his eyes to roam, then snap sharply away from. They’d watch each other, like nocturnal animals, until one of them smiled.
“I was dreaming,” she whispered, one night.
“Yeah?”
“About Tamaran.”
“Uh huh?”
When I was very small…” She paused, swallowed. “When I was very small, I had a pet. A perlinne.”
“A perling?”
A single hiccup of laughter. “A perlinne. Somewhat similar to your pangolins, but golden in color, and domesticated. Historically, the royal family used them to test their meals for poison. But I did not. Her name was Klaty’li.”
“Klatelee.”
“Hush. She was very sweet, and very fond of my discarded shoes.”
Her eyes misted over. He waited, and waited, but her lips did not part. “What happened to her?”
“I…” she cleared her throat. “That is the heart of the matter. Perlinnes live for approximately thirty of your earth years. Should nothing have interrupted her natural lifespan, she should still be alive. But…”Her voice frayed. “I do not know.”
She did not cry. But her shoulders shuddered a little, and—
Holding her, as opposed to being held by her, felt nice.
Hours spent researching occult bullshit-that-maybe-wasn’t-complete-bullshit, poring over Raven’s gem-studded, leather-bound library of Grimme Portents and Magickal Maladies, knitting together circuitry that wouldn’t see the market for at least another decade. Raven floating, silently, in the midst of it, seemingly afraid to open her mouth, lest something sinuous and sinister wrestle its way out.
They woke tangled together, sweaty, clothes twisted uncomfortably, caught in the flinchless glare of the sun through her windows. There was something unnervingly adolescent about it, to him—something like a snapshot from the life so many back in Gotham thought he was leading. Dick Grayson, off at Swiss boarding school, tempting all sorts of green-eyed lovelies into his bed.
No. No, he was overworked and underfed and falling asleep in the girl’s bed, the girl who was taller than he was and snored a little and had bad dreams about dead pets. He’d wake up and sit up and look at her, her skirt kicked off, her bangs bent into silly little whorls by the pillow, and he’d see himself in the mirror—shirt riding up, his hair fallen and moppish, his mask twisted. And just that once, he reached up and ripped it off, and blinked at himself.
They might have been seniors at Jump High. After a Halloween party. Rumpled, inaccurate versions of the couple everyone said they look SO much like, omg. She might have been a photography club president headed to Gotham U to study microbiology, he on the soccer team, following her to Gotham, maybe—maybe not even sure about what he wanted to do with his life. Maybe this boy, this blue-eyed boy with the hair that needed a trim, this boy trying so hard not to stare at the brilliant, bedheaded girl beside him, could indulge that sort of uncertainty. Maybe they weren’t sure what they were to each other. Maybe the future was murky. Maybe the only thing they had, at that moment, were a few snatched hours together, dreaming in tandem, the smallest, accidental touches in the belly of the night as intimate as anything ever could be.
“Robin?”
She was propped up on her elbows, and—and she’d seen. Everything inside him lurched, and his mouth fell open, but—
“No,” she murmured muzzily. “No time for—for that. Not now, Robin. “
He stared. She raised her eyebrows, almost sardonically.
At once, they burst out laughing.
The night after—which maybe he would always think of as the night after—after Raven had left her long locks curled all over the bathroom floor and they’d all eaten breakfast at midnight and the apocalypse had been, in general, roundly and thoroughly curbstomped, he knocked at her door.
It slid open. She smiled, but weariness was tugging at her in every way it could. She seemed dimmed, as though a bulb within her had blown. He hadn’t asked what had gone on while he was underground (in literal hell, that wasn’t going to stop feeling weird any time soon) and maybe he never would. Maybe they’d never need to revisit, in any sort of detail, the day the world ended.
“Ready for bed?” he asked.
She smiled.
They both changed into pajamas. He suspected she usually did not bother, given those early (and guiltily recalled) days, when she had to be reminded to wear clothes at all. Hers were green, with little elephants marching across the chest.
“New,” she said, with a faint smile. “I was hoping I would be afforded the opportunity to show you.”
But I did not think I would, given the arrival of armageddon, she did not say. He nodded.
“I like them.” He nodded. “Very cozy.”
She swayed, then collapsed—fully, dramatically—into bed. “I wish to sleep.”
“I can see that.”
“I wish to sleep with you,” she amended, cracking one eye open.
Silence. He coughed. “But you are ‘familiar with the idiom?’”
The eye closed. She smiled.
And it wasn’t weird. What could be weird, in the everlasting after they were about to embark upon? He was tired, he was tired, she was gorgeous, and—I love her, he thought, the words sneaking up on him, clarion in the fatigue-muddied murk of his mind. I love her.
What could he do? He thought it, and he thought it again, and he got into bed and she threw her arm over him. His ankle twinged a little, as it did sometimes. He could see the little indent her collar left across the top of her breasts. He watched it rise and fall for what felt like a long time.
“I love you,” he whispered, a handful of decibels above silence. “I do. I love you.”
She looked asleep. She sounded asleep. He let the words drift, half-knowing that they were absurd, that he was nearly hallucinating with tiredness, that she was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
Seconds later, minutes later, hours later, a stuttered moment before his eyes fluttered shut and sleep stole through him, he thought he saw her smile.