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+--- Thread: Dr. Drakken's fanfic memory bank: Better the devil you date… (/showthread.php?tid=8524)
Dr. Drakken's fanfic memory bank: Better the devil you date… - Ross Van Loan - 01-12-2016
On the verge of entering the tower’s common room, Beast Boy paused: something wasn’t right. His eyes surveyed the room and its inhabitants. Nearly everything and everybody looked and acted as they had countless times before : Starfire was in the kitchen fueling her alien dietary requirements with mustard and mold ; Cyborg battled Robin in the algorithmic arena of Carpocalypse Racers, and Raven was reading one of her dusty, musty, fusty old tomes of Things Best Not Known By the Minds of Teens. Only she wasn’t really reading: she was watching. The book was a hunter’s blind, and Garfield was the quarry. He found the implications unsettling.
Raven was the single most focused person, besides Robin, that he knew. When she read, she did so with a single mindedness that would have made a black hole feel inadequate and scattered. Now, however, as Beast Boy stood on the threshold of the chamber, his eyes beheld a different type of Raven, a distracted Raven.
Raven’s eyes had skittered over him from over the top of the tome and then back in an alarmingly unsubtle attempt to be subtle. Raven was never subtle nor sneaky. There should have been some wry greeting or lingering look, but not today. Today, she hid behind her book. Once was bad enough, but she kept sneaking implacable looks when her terribly inaccurate social senses informed her that it was safe to peek.
‘Okay, the hell princess’ isn’t any spookier than usual, Gar. Hello! Hell Princess!’ He thought, stepping into the room with all of the cool and collected that he could muster.
Robin and Cyborg weren’t so absorbed in their game to not notice the odd emotional wireless signal. Cyborg nudged Robin, whispered, “What’s up with Gar?”
Robin took his eyes off of the digital battlefield to consider his team mate. His opponent smirked as he took advantage; vaulted the enemy car into the oblivion of off track space. Robin directed his second best Batman glare at the cyborg before giving his attention to Beast Boy.
He was acting odd : Gar walked into the room with the exaggerated composure of a bad, nervous actor. Something was making him uncomfortable in a place where he should be nothing but relaxed. Robin widened his search; identified the cause: Raven.
He leant over to Cyborg: “Raven’s spying him; it’s freaking him out.”
Bent over his controller, Cyborg muttered, “It’s about time.”
Robin gave him a sidelong glance as his automotive avatar sideswiped his opponent’s T-Car into a time consuming end-over-end fireball crash.
“That he freaked?”
“Dude! Gar’s a nonstop freak-out.”
Robin nodded sagaciously as his red and black suspiciously Batmobile-ish car howled across the finish line to fireworks, victory music and gratuitously-pneumatic-bouncy space-bikini fans.He did a little touchdown dance; spiked the controller on the sectional couch: shouted,
“Score!”
No one but Cyborg paid any attention to Robin’s display: it was standard T-Tower proceedings; what followed was a different matter.
Cyborg, not being able to help himself, quipped: “That’s what Raven’s trying to do!” Immediately, he wished he had not blurted, his hands flying up as if to cram the already escaped words back into his big mouth.
Raven bolted upright, the book and several other items in the room copying her shocked reaction with the assist of a sharp burst of uncontrolled ebon energies: the book, pages splayed, took startled flight; the television uncertain which way to escape split down the middle and tried for two directions at once; all of Robin’s belted smoke bombs gave up their swirling ghosts in an abrupt fog bank; Cyborg’s detachable drone hand fired out of the smoke to crash through the den’s picture window; smoke shrouded Gar made a noise that could only be described as a surprised squawk that abruptly reduced to an equally surprised squeak; and somewhere deep within the kitchen, Starfire yelped to staccato green flashes of light and the metallic sounds of expiring pots and pans.
Raven, regaining emotional control, spoke her three word signature intonation and gestured a twirling hand gesture: the smoke wheeled into a roiling point that vanished with an audible ‘pop!’ to reveal the stunned den debris.
Everything and everyone was a mess. Robin, his utility belt singed, was sprawled across the top of the couch. Cyborg, sitting on the couch, stared at his stump dumbly before shouting, “Give me back my hand!” and stumbling to the shattered window to peer with extended optics for his astray appendage. A food covered Starfire flew, literally, out of the kitchen only to stop, jaw dropped, at the scene of devastation before her.
“Are we under attack?”
Raven turned to her and meant to say something witty in her gothic fashion, but she caught sight of what had befallen Garfield ; she scooped him up and fled.
Starfire, looking very worried, grabbed her significant other by both shoulders.
“What is going on?”
Robin looked up into the eyes of his alien princess girlfriend—Yes, Robin you’re in Outlanders—and smiled crookedly: “Raven’s finally into Gar.” He raised his head, took in the mess that was once a den; declared: “Really into him!”
Having once really being into Raven, Star knew exactly, immediately and intimately what had transpired.
She moved her hands to cradle his face as she brought her mouth down to his for a happy kiss.
“Their dating is going to be even more gloriously messy than a G’lorg Snarr on the Apex of Hoop’La!”
Robin, having some idea of the true nutty hullabaloo of Tamarainian culture, could only imagine that that meant messy teen love times ten thousand. He wiped the strawberry jam from his lips planted, albeit accidentally, by his boo’s buss as he thought out loud, because he was still a bit befuddled : “Have we G’lorged?”
Star laughed, delightedly ; whispered in his ear.
He did his best Keanu: “Whoa!”
***************Garfield regained consciousness within a room that he had only been within one other time: a scary, illuminating, and oddly endearing encounter with the hidden facets of Raven. Three things registered upon his consciousness in rapid succession: he was small, he was something with a forked tongue that he didn’t recognize, and he was in Raven’s lap! She was looking down at him with an expression that was half avid, half bemused. He squeaked, the tongue lancing out past piranha teeth, and he felt what seemed to the be the unfurling of leathery wings: what in the heck was he, anyways?
She held up the book that she had been ‘reading’ in the den: the cover had an intertwined pair of ridiculously pointy winged lizards.
“You’re a winged horny dragon.” She coloured immediately as she had meant to say, “Thorny! I meant thorny dragon. Moloch Horridus!” She finished, somewhat lamely and far too scientifically for the extra wide eyed spiky lizard on her lap. What she found embarrassing he found endearing and comforting. The enigmatic and sarcastic Raven could be as fantastically awkward as Garfield. With this realization came the key bit of awareness that had eluded him for so long. Their gawkiness was mutually endearing.
To prove it, he managed to lisp a high pitched, “Wow, you’re as much a spaz as I am!”
She rapped him gently upon the head.
“Ow!” He was currently very spiky.