Teamwork Different

Once upon a time, a girl named Maya arrived at Titans Tower, and she was having the hardest week she could remember.

Maya was twelve years old, with dark braids and a yellow jacket she was very attached to, and three days ago — without any warning, during a perfectly ordinary Thursday afternoon — she had discovered that she could move objects with her mind.

This sounds like a wonderful thing. And it was going to be. But right now it was not feeling wonderful, because the ability activated every time she felt nervous. And she felt nervous about nearly everything — the new city, the new people, the new everything — which meant that objects near her were in a state of near-constant unpredictable motion.

At breakfast that first morning, a book fell off the shelf. At lunch, a juice box in her hand made a sound like PSSSHHHH and lost its structural integrity entirely. At dinner, Maya felt a wave of I don't quite belong here yet — and a full glass of water rose from the table, drifted to the ceiling, and hovered there for four seconds while everyone watched, before Cyborg caught it with a very quick arm.

Everyone was very kind about it.

Robin said encouraging things in a calm voice. Starfire said it was "magnificently extraordinary" and hugged Maya three times in rapid succession, which was warm but also quite a lot of hugging for someone already overwhelmed. Cyborg said "okay, I have some instruments," brought them out, and Maya immediately became more nervous, which made the saltshaker levitate, and Cyborg put them away. Beast Boy turned into a puppy and ran laps around the table, which helped nobody except Beast Boy.

Raven watched all of this from the kitchen doorway. She had come for tea and had not yet gotten it.

After a moment, she said — quietly, just to Maya — "Come to the library."

In the library, Raven put the kettle on and made two cups of chamomile. She set one in front of Maya, sat down, and said nothing immediately. Maya sat with her hands in her lap, trying very hard not to be nervous — which made her more nervous — and the teaspoon next to her cup shivered, lifted a centimeter, and clattered back down.

"That happens to me," Raven said.

Maya looked at her with complete disbelief.

"Not with teaspoons anymore," Raven said. "But when I was your age, in Azarath — a dimension of quiet towers and deep silver water — I was reading, and I heard something outside the window. A very small, very ordinary bird."

Maya waited.

"I moved every book on the shelf nearest to me. Simultaneously. All forty of them."

Maya stared. Then she laughed — a small, real laugh, surprised out of her. Something that had been wound very tight came suddenly loose.

Raven drank her tea.

"The ability will keep growing," she said. "Powers do that whether you guide them or not. The question is not how to stop it — it is how to learn its language. A surge comes from something specific. Find that thought, name it, breathe through it. The power is yours."

She explained the practice the monks of Azarath had taught her: witnessing. Not pushing feelings away, not drowning in them — simply noticing. Here is a feeling. I see it. It does not have to run me. Standing beside your own experience instead of inside it.

It was the most important thing she knew.

They worked on it that afternoon. And the next. And the one after.

Maya got better. Not all at once — slowly, steadily, the way you get better at anything worth learning. The juice boxes stopped. The books stayed still. The glass of water stayed on the table.

Near the end of three weeks, Maya sat in the main room and held a small smooth stone completely still in the air for fifty-four seconds — steady and deliberate and entirely controlled — and then set it down with a small, clean click.

She looked at Raven.

Raven nodded, once.

Maya's smile filled the whole room.

At the door the morning she left, yellow jacket on, bag over her shoulder: "Thank you. For all of it. But especially the library part."

"The people who helped me were patient," Raven said simply. "I'm returning that."

She went back inside, to the library, to her tea and her book. The teaspoon was where she had left it.

Everything was as it should be.

And somewhere across dimensions — in the still water and the gentle sky and the morning circle of the monks of Azarath — the world breathed in, and breathed out, and was peaceful.

Sleep well.