Pizza Night

Tonight's story is a gentle one. There are no villains, no battles, no close calls. There is just a Friday evening, four pizzas, and five people learning something important about home.

The city had been busy for three straight weeks. Missions almost every night — small ones and large ones, quick ones and complicated ones — and by the time Friday arrived, all five Titans were tired in that particular way that lives behind your eyes and makes everything feel slightly heavier than usual.

Beast Boy announced pizza night before the sun had even finished setting. "Chico's," he said, in a voice that allowed for no discussion. Nobody discussed it.

Four large pizzas arrived from Chico's in Jump City — four was Cyborg's minimum acceptable order, a fact he had established on their second week together and never walked back from. They arranged themselves in the common room in the way they always did, which was the best evidence that this was truly home: everyone had a usual spot, not from an assigned seating plan, but simply from the accumulated habit of being themselves in a shared space.

Cyborg sat on the left side of the big couch, close enough to the kitchen to make regular supply runs without effort. Starfire settled in the armchair by the window, sitting upright the way she always did, and held her pizza at what she had privately calculated was the optimal angle for both eating and enjoying the view. Raven took the floor — she liked the floor, the steadiness of it, the low center of gravity — and propped her book on her knee with one slice of pizza on a plate beside her. Beast Boy arranged himself across the right end of the couch in the precise configuration of a person who had turned into a very large cat at some point in the last hour and never fully recovered.

Robin ate standing up. He always ate standing up. The others had tried several gentle approaches to this over the past months and had concluded it was simply who he was.

Beast Boy had chosen a film about a dog who solved mysteries, which was, everyone agreed, an excellent choice. Starfire found it extraordinary. She had forty-seven questions, all of them sincere, beginning with "Why does the dog distrust the mailman specifically?" and progressing through "Is the bone a metaphor?" and "What is the dog's real name before he became a detective?" Beast Boy answered all forty-seven questions with great enthusiasm and, Cyborg pointed out, only intermittent accuracy. "His version is more interesting, though," Raven said from the floor, without looking up. Beast Boy made a noise of triumph that lasted approximately four seconds. Starfire applauded.

The film finished. Nobody reached for the remote. The room settled into a quiet that was full rather than empty — everyone present, everyone resting, the city humming softly below the tower windows.

After a while, Starfire began to tell them about the Blorthog. It was a festival on Tamaran, she explained, held in the spring, when Tamaraneans honored their closest companions. Not family by birth, necessarily, but chosen companions — the people you had decided to keep close. You brought them small gifts that meant something specific. You told them, in words, what they meant to you. It was considered one of the most serious occasions of the Tamaranean year, treated with more care than many holidays.

"I miss it," she said simply.

"We should do it," said Beast Boy immediately.

"Right now?" said Robin, who had sat down at some point during the film without seeming to notice.

"The Blorthog is in spring," Starfire said. "But I think perhaps the spirit of the thing matters more than the timing."

There was a small, easy quiet. Beast Boy looked at the pizza box in front of him. "Thanks for getting the pizza," Cyborg said to him. It came out more genuine than either of them expected. Beast Boy blinked. "Thanks for fixing my communicator," he said. "Like, fourteen times." Cyborg nodded, once. "It's not hard," he said. "I just like doing it."

Raven set her book face-down on the floor. She looked at the room — at all of them, in their usual spots, in the warm yellow light of the common room, with the city spread out behind them through the tower windows. She had not had a usual spot anywhere in many years.

"Thanks for staying," she said. She did not address it to any one of them. She meant all four, equally, completely.

Outside the windows of Titans Tower, Jump City glittered in the warm dark like a second sky turned upside down. Inside, five people who had chosen each other sat in the comfortable quiet of a home they had made.

Goodnight, little one. Home is not a place you find. It's a place you build with people who stay.