Starfire And Raven

Are you all settled in? Good. This story is a quieter one. It's about two very different friends, and what they find in each other.

Koriand'r and Rachel Roth were not obvious friends. Starfire was warmth and brightness and questions and enormous enthusiastic hugs. Raven was stillness and care and words used only when they were necessary. Starfire found every ordinary thing on Earth fascinating — traffic lights, birthday cake, the sound a kettle makes. Raven found most things satisfactory and said so without decoration.

They had been living in Titans Tower for two months when Robin sent the two of them alone across Jump City on a Tuesday evening.

Stolen artifacts had been tracked to a warehouse in the old theater district — pieces from Tamaran, taken from a diplomatic collection. Robin sent the others elsewhere and Starfire and Raven crossed the rooftops together in the last of the evening light.

Starfire was quiet the whole way. Raven felt it without asking — a warm, tightly held flutter of worry coming off Starfire like heat off pavement. She did not comment. She paid attention.

The warehouse had twelve guards, and Raven had already understood what this actually was before they arrived. A trap set for Starfire — specifically and deliberately. The person who had set it was Blackfire, Starfire's older sister Komand'r. Blackfire had not come to Jump City because she wanted the artifacts. She had come because she wanted Starfire to come looking for them.

Starfire hit the warehouse doors like a golden sun and the fight filled the space immediately. She was fast and powerful and brave, her starbolts blazing, her Tamaranean strength scattering the twelve guards. Starfire was magnificent.

Then from the back of the warehouse, a voice: "Little sister."

Blackfire stepped from the shadows. Her smile was precise and carried no warmth. She had Starfire's height and coloring and was nothing like her in any way that mattered.

Starfire stopped.

It was one beat, one half-breath — a hesitation so small that only someone paying very close attention would catch it. But it was real, and it cost her, and three of Blackfire's remaining guards moved to flank her in that moment.

Raven had been moving since they entered the building. She hadn't fought any one soldier directly. She had worked at the edges — lifting a crate into the path of someone circling Starfire's left side, pushing a group of guards backward with a controlled pulse of dark energy, keeping the space around Starfire clear so Starfire could fight without being overwhelmed from behind. Now, in the moment of Starfire's hesitation, Raven stepped forward and let her power go wide. Dark energy expanded outward like a wave — quiet, absolute, certain — and Blackfire and the three flanking guards hit the far wall with a solid thud and did not immediately get up.

Blackfire looked at Raven with those cold eyes for a fraction of a second. Then she turned and slipped through a door in the wall that seemed to appear from nowhere, and she was gone.

She always found a way to leave. That was Blackfire.

The artifacts were recovered. Every guard was down. The mission was complete. Starfire stood in the middle of the now-quiet warehouse with her hands still glowing faintly and her breath coming more quickly than usual, which had nothing to do with the fight.

"I always hesitate when I see her," she said. Her voice was very quiet.

"I know," said Raven.

"That is a problem, is it not?"

Raven considered the question seriously, the way she considered all things. "Not always," she said. "Sometimes hesitating when you see someone means you still hope they'll make a different choice than the one they usually make. That isn't a flaw in you."

Starfire looked at her for a long moment. "You sensed that," she said. "The hoping."

"I sense everything," Raven said. "I don't always mention it. But I noticed." A pause. "I notice a lot of things about you."

They flew home over Jump City in the dark, side by side, the city lights spread below them like a second sky. They didn't talk. Starfire didn't fill the silence with questions. Raven didn't retreat inside her thoughts.

They were just there together — two very different people who had found, without either of them planning for it, that they understood each other more than most.

Sleep softly, little one. The friends who know what you carry without being told — those are the ones you keep close forever.