Raven didn't feel guilty.
That was the first thing she noticed, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her room with the lights dimmed and the curtains drawn. No sharp spike of shame. No warning bell in the back of her mind. Just a quiet, almost buoyant sense of anticipation that made her chest feel light.
Giddy, even.
The diary rested in her hands like something warm. Old leather, softened with age, the spine creased from use. It carried the faint scent of dust and time, not the sterile recycled air of Titans Tower. This was a relic. A piece of him from before. From a life that no longer existed in any official capacity, but still shaped everything he was.
Dick Grayson's past wasn't sealed away just because he'd outgrown it.
If anything, it mattered more.
Raven traced her thumb along the edge of the cover, savoring the moment before opening it. She had taken it from his old room at Wayne Manor days ago, quietly, carefully, like a borrowed book no one remembered lending out. The room itself had felt heavy with echoes, childhood carved into wood and walls that had watched him grow up too fast. The diary had been tucked away like something he'd decided not to bring with him when he left.
That alone felt significant.
She told herself she was doing him a favor by reading it here, in the safety of her own space. This wasn't voyeurism. This wasn't intrusion. This was stewardship. Emotional archaeology. You couldn't understand someone by only knowing the version of them they presented now.
Dick's business was her business.
That was what closeness meant. That was what caring required. You didn't get to claim concern and then politely avert your eyes when the truth lived somewhere inconvenient. Privacy was a courtesy, not a right, and it only applied when it didn't interfere with understanding.
Raven opened the diary.
His handwriting was younger here. Looser. Less controlled. The lines slanted slightly, the ink pressing deeper into the page in places where his emotions had gotten away from him. She smiled despite herself, the giddy warmth blooming again, sharper now, almost effervescent.
It felt intimate in a way nothing else ever had.
She read slowly, deliberately, as though rushing would bruise something fragile. The entries weren't daily. They were sporadic, written in bursts when something inside him had demanded release. Raven recognized that impulse immediately. She had lived her whole life containing herself until pressure found a crack.
On one of the first pages, the TEAM was mentioned. Not the teen titans, a team that he was with years ago.
Raven did some research, and found that the team he was talking about was a covert one. It consisted of Kid flash, Aqualad, superboy, Artemis and Miss martian. This was not public knowledge, and it was painstaking to dig through people's minds to find this out but it was worth it. Dick didn't deserve to keep things hidden from her.
It made Raven curious on why this team was so secretive, but that curiosity quickly burned out. They weren't relevant anymore, she knew this because of what he wrote in the diary. Dick wrote how Batman had tried to take control of him again, how he lived under his thumb. The team he was in was apparently led by Aqualad, Dick wrote at length the anger he felt. How undermined he was, and that after a year of being with the team he had left.
Good riddance in her opinion. She didn't need to know his previous teams side, she would only take his side anyway. Dick's place belonged with the teen titans anyway. With her.
He wrote about responsibility even then. About expectations. About feeling like he had to be older than he was. He wrote about school in clipped, dismissive lines, about training in more detail than necessary, about feeling like he existed between worlds without fully belonging to either.
Raven's chest tightened.
You were already carrying too much, she thought. And no one noticed.
She lingered over the passages where his voice softened, where he admitted fear without naming it outright. He didn't write "I'm lonely," but the absence of connection threaded through every page. He wrote about keeping people smiling. About not letting anyone see when things got heavy.
Raven felt a swell of something dangerously close to tenderness.
This is why, she told herself. This is why you need me.
Then she reached the entry that changed everything.
The handwriting shifted again, younger still, almost hopeful in its looseness. She recognized the tonal shift before she even read the name.
Zatanna.
The letters seemed to pulse on the page, innocent and damning all at once.
Raven's breath stuttered.
He wrote about her laugh first. About how it cut through tension like a spell of its own. About the way she made missions feel lighter, like the stakes weren't always crushing down on his chest. He wrote about how easy it was to talk to her, how she made him feel normal.
A crush, he called it. He tried to downplay it, framing it as something fleeting, something he knew he didn't have time for. The tone was almost embarrassed.
Raven's fingers curled slowly against the page.
The giddiness evaporated, replaced by heat. Not a flare, not an explosion, but a slow, suffocating burn that crept up her spine and lodged itself behind her sternum. Her shadows stirred in response, darkening the corners of the room without her conscious permission.
Of course, she thought, the word sharp and bitter. Of course it was her.
Zatanna. Effortless. Charismatic. Someone who never had to ration herself, never had to fear the consequences of wanting. Someone who could walk into a room and take up space without apology.
Raven pressed her lips together, jaw tightening as she read on.
He admired her confidence. Her openness. He wondered, briefly, what it would be like if things were different.
Different.
The word scraped.
Raven snapped the diary shut, the sound louder than she intended in the quiet of her room. Her pulse hammered in her ears. Anger surged fully now, hot and visceral, flooding her chest until it felt hard to breathe.
It wasn't jealousy.
She told herself that immediately, clinging to the thought like an anchor. Jealousy was petty. Jealousy implied rivalry, competition, scarcity.
This was something else.
This was the anger of recognition. The fury of realizing that Dick, like so many others, had once mistaken brightness for understanding. That he had reached for someone who made things feel easier instead of someone who could sit with the difficulty and not flinch.
He had been young.
That mattered. Raven forced herself to slow her breathing, to let the emotion crest and recede without breaking containment. This diary was old. Years old. Whatever he'd felt then had burned out quickly, replaced by heavier things.
Still.
The image lingered in her mind unbidden. Zatanna's hand on his sleeve. Her mouth close to his cheek. Her laughter spilling into space Raven had never been allowed to occupy.
Raven rose and began to pace, the hem of her cloak whispering against the floor. Her thoughts spiraled, tightening, sharpening.
It wasn't fair.
Not because Dick had been allowed to feel that way, but because Zatanna would never have understood what she'd been given. She would have taken the lightness and left the weight behind. She would have kissed him and laughed and moved on, leaving him exactly as she found him.
Raven stopped, pressing her hand to her chest.
You didn't know him then, she reminded herself. Not the way I do.
That was the truth that mattered.
She returned to the diary, opening it again with deliberate calm. She read past the Zatanna entries, noting how quickly they faded. How the tone shifted back to responsibility, to pressure, to exhaustion. The crush dissolved. The burden remained.
Raven exhaled slowly, the anger cooling into something more refined.
This wasn't a threat.
It was information.
Dick Grayson had a pattern. When the world grew heavy, he reached for light. When he didn't know how to ask for rest, he accepted distraction. He mistook relief for connection because no one had ever taught him the difference.
Raven closed the diary gently and set it aside.
She felt steady now. Centered.
The past didn't frighten her. It clarified things. It proved what she had already suspected. Dick didn't need someone dazzling. He needed someone who could sit in the quiet with him and not ask him to be anything else.
Someone like her.
She leaned back against the wall, letting the conclusion settle comfortably in her chest.
This was what closeness looked like. This was what caring demanded. You didn't turn away from truth just because it made you uncomfortable.
And if understanding him this deeply meant crossing lines other people insisted on drawing, then so be it.
Lines were for people who didn't trust themselves.
Raven trusted herself completely.
Once Raven understood the pattern, everything else followed naturally.
Dick Grayson was exhausted.
Not in the obvious ways. Not in the ways people rallied around. He wasn't injured. He wasn't failing. He wasn't spiraling. He was still showing up, still leading, still smiling when he was supposed to.
That was the problem.
Raven felt the strain coiled tight beneath his composure, a constant low-level pressure she had grown accustomed to tracking. Leadership weighed on him more heavily than he ever allowed anyone to see. He absorbed tension like a sponge, took responsibility for every mistake whether it was his or not, smoothed over fractures before they could splinter.
He didn't complain.
So no one intervened.
Raven watched it happen again during a routine debrief. Beast Boy joked too loudly, trying to deflect from a mistake that had nearly cost them a civilian. Cyborg grew defensive. Starfire tried to soothe everyone at once, her concern spilling outward in all directions.
Dick mediated, as always. Calm. Measured. Reasonable.
Raven felt the emotional recoil ripple through him when the room finally emptied. The way his shoulders stiffened. The way his thoughts folded inward, tight and sharp.
You shouldn't have to carry this alone, she thought.
And if no one else was going to lighten the load, then Raven would.
The false cause didn't need to be dramatic. It couldn't be. Drama attracted attention. Drama invited questions. What she needed was something subtle, something that felt inevitable rather than engineered.
She chose exhaustion.
Exhaustion was believable. It was invisible until it wasn't. And most importantly, it was something Dick would try to handle himself until it forced his hand.
Raven began by doing nothing.
She stopped preemptively stepping in during missions. Stopped smoothing emotional currents before they spiked. She still contributed, still fought, still protected the team. She simply allowed the emotional aftermath to linger longer than usual.
The difference was almost imperceptible.
Dick noticed anyway.
"You okay?" he asked her one evening as they crossed paths in the hallway outside the common room.
"Yes," she replied honestly.
He frowned slightly. "The team feels… tense."
Raven tilted her head. "They always do after close calls."
"That's not what I mean," he said, slower now.
She met his gaze, letting just a fraction of her restraint loosen. Not enough to alarm him. Enough to be felt.
"You can't keep absorbing everything," she said quietly. "It's unsustainable."
His breath caught, just barely.
"I'm fine," he replied automatically.
Raven didn't argue. She didn't push. She simply nodded.
"That's what you always say."
She walked away before he could respond, leaving the words behind like a splinter.
She timed the next step carefully.
Late night. The observatory. Familiar territory. Neutral ground.
She didn't summon him. She didn't follow him. She made herself available in the place he already associated with quiet, with relief.
When he arrived, it felt almost like relief passed over him.
"You always beat me up here," he said lightly, leaning against the railing beside her.
Raven kept her eyes on the stars. "You're predictable."
He laughed softly. "Guess that's fair."
They stood in silence for a while. Raven let the emotional current settle naturally, letting him feel the absence of demand. No questions. No expectations. Just space.
"You ever feel like everything's starting to blur together?" he asked suddenly. "Like you're running on instinct more than intention?"
"Yes," Raven said. "That's burnout."
He huffed a humorless laugh. "You say that like it's a diagnosis."
"It is."
He didn't argue.
She felt the shift then. The subtle realignment. The moment where he stopped performing and started listening.
"That's not something you can just ignore," she continued calmly. "It compounds."
"So what," he said, glancing at her, "I'm supposed to step back?"
"I think you're supposed to let someone else hold things for a while."
He looked away. "I don't know how to do that."
Raven softened her voice. "You don't have to know how. You just have to stop pretending you don't need it."
That was the key. Not offering herself outright. Not positioning herself as the solution. Simply naming the absence.
She could feel him recalibrating, thoughts shifting as he fit her words into the framework of his own experience.
"I hate letting people down," he admitted quietly.
"I know," Raven said.
And she did. She knew because she had read it in his handwriting years ago. Because she felt it in his emotional field every time something went wrong. Because she understood that guilt was his default setting.
She didn't tell him she could help.
She didn't need to.
The next few days unfolded exactly as she expected.
Dick pushed harder. Took on more. Slept less. Tried to outrun the truth she'd planted instead of addressing it. Raven watched carefully, intervening only when necessary. A quiet comment here. A look held a second too long there.
"You don't have to fix everything," she told him after a late-night strategy session ran long.
"I'm not fixing," he replied. "I'm managing."
"That's worse."
He smiled faintly. Tired. "You always say things like that."
"Because they're true."
He didn't disagree.
When the moment finally came, it felt almost gentle.
A mission went sideways. Not disastrously. Just enough. A miscommunication. A delayed response. Nothing catastrophic, but enough to shake Dick's confidence.
The team regrouped quickly. No injuries. No lasting damage.
But Raven felt the crack widen.
She found him later in the training room, sitting on the edge of the mat, elbows braced on his knees, staring at nothing.
She didn't announce herself.
"Everyone's fine," he said before she spoke.
"I know," Raven replied.
He exhaled slowly. "I should've caught that."
"You can't catch everything."
"I'm supposed to."
"No," she said firmly. "You're supposed to be human."
That made him look at her.
Really look at her.
For a moment, Raven let the mask slip just enough to be seen. Not vulnerability. Certainty.
"You're exhausted," she continued. "And pretending otherwise is going to cost you."
He swallowed. "I don't know what to do."
Raven felt something settle into place.
This was the opening.
"You don't have to do anything right now," she said. "Just… don't be alone with it. I'm here Richard."
Raven was the only one privileged with his name, and that was for a reason. She was special enough to him that she could call him that to his face.
The relief that washed through him was immediate. Palpable. He nodded once, like he'd been given permission to stop treading water.
"Okay," he said quietly.
Raven stayed with him until he stood. Until his breathing evened out. Until the emotional pressure eased enough that he could move again.
She told herself this wasn't manipulation.
She hadn't caused the exhaustion. She hadn't invented the doubt. She had simply made space for it to surface.
And if that space happened to bring them closer, if Dick began to associate relief with her presence, if he started seeking her out instinctively when the weight became too much…
That wasn't her doing.
That was inevitability.
Understanding always created intimacy.
And intimacy, Raven knew, always changed things.
Raven told herself she hadn't done anything to deserve this.
That was important. Deserving implied effort, intention, manipulation. It suggested that she had reached out and pulled something toward herself. She hadn't. She had simply been present. Available. Quiet.
If Dick Grayson kept finding his way back to her, that wasn't orchestration.
That was gravity.
The change revealed itself slowly, the way all meaningful shifts did. Not in declarations. Not in confessions. In pattern.
He started seeking her out without realizing he was doing it.
Not constantly. Not obviously. Just enough to register. A pause outside the doorway of a room she occupied. A glance across the common area that lingered before he redirected himself. Small recalibrations that meant nothing individually and everything collectively.
Raven noticed every one.
She pretended she didn't.
After the mission, after the debrief, after the moment in the training room where he'd admitted exhaustion without calling it that, Dick's emotional field carried a different texture. Less coiled. Less frantic. Still heavy, but no longer compressed to the point of fracture.
Relief, Raven recognized, was addictive.
She knew the feeling intimately.
It was the absence of vigilance. The quiet after restraint loosened. The subtle recalibration of a nervous system that had learned it was allowed to rest, if only briefly.
Dick began associating that sensation with her.
He didn't articulate it. He didn't need to.
One evening, Raven found him in the observatory again, already leaning against the railing when she arrived. He looked up when he sensed her presence, the faintest flicker of something like relief crossing his expression before he smoothed it away.
"You're up late," he said.
"So are you," she replied.
He smiled faintly. "Guess that's fair."
They stood side by side, the stars reflected faintly in the glass above them. Raven kept a careful distance, hands folded inside her sleeves, posture composed. It took effort not to step closer. Want hummed quietly beneath her ribs, insistent but contained.
Control mattered.
"I've been thinking about what you said," he continued after a moment.
Raven tilted her head. "About burnout?"
"About not being alone with it," he corrected.
She felt a quiet satisfaction bloom in her chest. He hadn't dismissed it. He hadn't forgotten. He had carried it with him, turned it over, examined it.
"I don't think I'm very good at that," he admitted. "Letting people in when things get… heavy."
"You're good at carrying," Raven said. "That's different."
He huffed a soft laugh. "You make it sound like a flaw."
"It is," she replied gently. "Just not a moral one."
He considered that, gaze fixed on the stars. "You always say things like that."
"Because they're true."
He glanced at her then, something thoughtful settling behind his eyes. "You don't push."
Raven felt the words land like a quiet benediction.
"I don't need to," she said.
That was the key. She didn't demand. She didn't ask. She didn't reach for him. She allowed him to come to her, to sit in the quiet she offered without fear of obligation.
It was restraint dressed up as virtue.
And it worked.
Over the next few days, the pattern solidified.
Dick began stopping by her side during downtime, unannounced and unremarked upon. Sitting with her in silence while others talked around them. Asking questions that weren't strategic or practical, but reflective.
"Do you ever get tired of holding yourself back?" he asked once, voice low.
"Yes," Raven said without hesitation.
"How do you deal with it?"
She considered him carefully before answering. "I remind myself why I do it."
He nodded slowly. "That makes sense."
She wondered what reason he thought she had given him.
She watched Starfire, too. Watched the way she laughed, the way she reached for Dick openly, the way her affection remained unchanged. Raven didn't interfere. Didn't compete. Didn't withdraw.
She simply occupied a different space.
Starfire was warmth. Raven was quiet.
Starfire took up space. Raven made space.
And Dick, increasingly, sought the latter when the former overwhelmed him.
Raven told herself this wasn't displacement. That nothing was being taken away. Starfire was still loved. The team was still whole.
Raven was simply becoming… necessary.
Richard was exhausted, no doubt about it. He wanted to relax, but not physically. Richard always made sure he was ready and in fighting condition, he'd always get between six and eight hours of sleep. He was mentally exhausted as much as it hurt his pride to say, and all he could think about was Raven. She relaxed him in a way that was almost...unnatural.
Richard made his way through the corridors, avoiding any of the other titans, he didn't want them getting the wrong idea. He was just a friend seeking some comfort from another friend. Although he could see why that could be twisted, and that was one thing that couldn't happen. Inter-personal relationships between teammates always led to destruction. Richard had seen it first hand after all. Bitterness coursed through him, but he shut it away. He was good at that.
Richard raised his arm, and gently almost hesitantly, knocked softly on Ravens door. On the first knock, her monotone voice bid him to enter. Richard froze. That wasn't supposed to happen, he never entered her room. No one ever did. They all knew what she was like, how her room was almost sacred to her. Richard felt strangely special to her, Richard hesitated only a fraction of a second longer before pushing the door open.
Raven's room greeted him with quiet rather than darkness. The lights were low but deliberate, softened to a dim violet glow that seemed to breathe rather than illuminate. Shadows rested where they belonged, not creeping or restless, but folded neatly into corners like patient sentinels. The air was warmer here than the corridor, not stifling, just enough to feel intentional, as if the room had been calibrated to soothe rather than impress.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
It wasn't perfume. It wasn't sharp or sweet or cloying. It was something herbal and faintly earthy, like crushed leaves warmed by sunlight and stone after rain. Tea, he realized distantly. Something steeped recently enough that the scent still lingered, curling into his lungs with each breath. It grounded him immediately, the way certain memories did. The way quiet did.
Raven stood near the window, her back to him at first, cloak draped loosely rather than wrapped tight. Even that felt unusual. She turned when the door slid shut behind him, expression neutral as ever, but her eyes softened a degree when they met his.
"You look tired," she said.
Not are you tired. Not concern sharpened into a question. Just a statement. An observation. It slid past his defenses before he realized they'd been up.
"I'm fine," he replied automatically, then winced internally at how rehearsed it sounded.
Raven didn't contradict him. She never did when he said that. Instead, she gestured vaguely toward the room. "You can sit. Or not. Whatever helps."
The bed sat against the far wall, neatly made but not rigidly so. The blankets looked heavy and soft, dark fabric that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Nearby, shelves held books stacked in uneven but intentional piles, spines worn, some titles unfamiliar even to him. Crystals rested among them, not decorative so much as… functional. Like tools that had earned their place.
The room tasted faintly like chamomile when he swallowed, the air carrying the suggestion of warmth on his tongue. His shoulders eased before he told them to.
He remained standing. "I didn't mean to intrude."
"You're not," Raven said calmly. "You knocked."
That was true. Somehow, it mattered that she pointed it out.
He took a few steps in, careful, like he might disturb something delicate if he moved too quickly. The carpet muted his footsteps entirely. The silence here wasn't empty. It was full, padded, like sound itself had been wrapped in cloth.
"I don't usually…" He trailed off, gesturing vaguely. Come here. Need this. Think about you this much.
Raven watched him without pressure, without expectation. That was the most dangerous part. "You don't usually let yourself rest unless there's a reason," she finished for him.
His jaw tightened. "I rest."
"You recover," she corrected gently. "That's not the same thing."
He let out a slow breath, surprised by how much it felt like surrender. "You make it sound indulgent."
"I think you've earned indulgence," she said, as if it were an objective fact.
She crossed the room, movements unhurried, and picked up a mug from the desk. Steam curled faintly from it. "Tea?"
He shook his head. "I don't want to fall asleep."
Raven's lips curved, just barely. "You won't. Not unless you want to."
She set the mug aside again and gestured, this time more clearly, toward the bed. "You don't have to sit on the edge like you're waiting to bolt. You can lie down. Just for a minute."
He blinked. "I— Raven, I don't think—"
"You won't be trapped," she said softly, preempting the thought before he finished forming it. "You can leave whenever you want. I won't stop you."
She said it with such certainty that it disarmed him. No plea. No insistence. Just permission, offered and already withdrawn, as if the choice had always been his.
Richard glanced at the bed again. The weight in his head throbbed dully, not pain exactly, just pressure. Endless, cumulative. He realized with a start that he'd been thinking about this moment all evening. About this room. About her voice.
"This stays between us," he said quietly. "I don't want… complications."
Raven inclined her head. "Of course. This is just quiet."
Just quiet. The words slid into him like a balm.
He exhaled and sat, then paused, tension coiling again, before slowly lowering himself onto the bed. He lay back carefully, boots still on the floor, arms folded loosely over his chest like he might need to spring up at any moment.
The mattress dipped beneath his weight and held. The blankets were warm, faintly scented with the same herbs as the air. He stared up at the ceiling, breath evening out despite himself.
Raven didn't sit beside him. She didn't crowd him. She took the chair near the bed instead, close enough that he could feel her presence without being touched.
"That's better," she murmured, not looking at him.
Richard closed his eyes.
For the first time all day, his thoughts slowed. And underneath the relief, unnoticed but real, something else settled in quietly.
Richard felt himself drifting, the edge of sleep tugging insistently at him, when a small, warm hand brushed his cheek.
He stirred, instinctively, but not enough to pull away. The touch was careful, almost reverent, fingers lingering just long enough to ask permission without words. The mask came free easily, lifted away with practiced gentleness, as though she'd memorized the shape of his face long ago. Cool air kissed skin that rarely felt it, and he exhaled softly, tension loosening in places he hadn't realized were still tight.
Her hand returned, slower this time.
Raven's fingers traced the line of his jaw, then moved upward, thumbs pressing lightly at his temples. The pressure was steady, rhythmic, deliberate. Not indulgent. Not demanding. Just enough to quiet the noise behind his eyes. The kind of touch meant to soothe, not claim.
He didn't want to open his eyes. The moment felt fragile, like it might shatter under scrutiny.
"Thank you, Raven. I—"
"Rachel."
The word cut through the haze.
Richard's eyes opened, unfocused at first, then finding her face above him. She hadn't stopped touching him. Her thumbs continued their slow circles, as if anchoring him there, as if the world might tilt if she didn't. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, warmth blooming across pale skin, and she was very deliberately not looking at him.
In the low light of the room, she did look different. Softer, somehow. Less contained. There was a quiet radiance to her, not bright, not overwhelming, just… present. Like a candle burning steadily in a dark room.
"I don't know what you mean," he said gently. "Raven?"
Her mouth pressed into a thin line, then relaxed. "That's the name everyone uses," she said, voice low. "It's… easier. But it isn't the one that feels like mine. Not here."
Her thumbs slowed, then stilled for just a moment, resting against his skin as if she were grounding herself as much as him.
"My name is Rachel," she repeated, quieter now.
Something in her tone made his chest ache. Not sadness exactly. Vulnerability, carefully offered.
"Rachel," he echoed, testing it, letting the syllables settle.
Her shoulders eased almost imperceptibly. She resumed the massage, just a touch firmer now, as if rewarded by the sound of it on his tongue.
"Thank you," she said softly, still not meeting his eyes.
"For what?"
"For being… gentle," she replied. "For not asking why."
He watched her then, really watched her. The way she held herself like she was braced for impact even in moments of calm. The way her touch was precise, restrained, as if she were always measuring the cost of closeness.
"You don't have to explain yourself to me," he said. "I trust you."
Her gaze flicked to his for half a second, something raw and startled passing through it, before she looked away again. But her hand never left his face.
The room felt impossibly quiet. Safe. The kind of quiet that invited truths to surface without forcing them.
Richard let his eyes close again, trusting that she would still be there when he opened them.