Masked

Rejection

"Not everyone likes to play the big villain, kid. I'm a thief. I'm not threatening your precious city. Just looking out for number one."

Chapter 7

"Beastboy?" 

Raven coughed at the stuffy gas circulating upon itself in the enclosed room. A ping sounded from her communicator and the empath frowned. Beastboy's last transmitted location had alerted 6 hours ago, with not so much as a beep or a signal since. 

"Take the teen into a psychopath's ward, will you, Mento?" Raven grumbled to herself. Even by her standards, this warehouse was eerie. The halls twisted and turned into nothing like a funhouse at a carnival, almost like it was designed to drive its occupants mad. The undercurrent of various chemicals built up over the years of disrepair didn't help either.

"No annoying green boyfriend here." Raven exhaled the last remnants of her stress. The battle had probably wrapped up long ago, with Rita patching his bruises up as only a protective mom would. He was probably hamming it up in the Patrol's hospital room right now, ignoring the need for rest and beating every level of Mega Monkeys 4...

"Rae-Rae?" A barely audible croak appeared underneath a pile of rubble, and jilted Raven's aching heart with it. 

"Beastboy? BEASTBOY!" Raven pawed at the stone with such ferocity that her slender nails chipped and bled. Underneath the endless concrete lay a plethora of jester's veils, stained with the red of bodily fluids. It took all of her willpower not to scream when she glimpsed Beastboy's dull eyes, barely visible under the choking grip of the mask. It grinned so much when he couldn't, almost as if to taunt him during the endless nightmares of abuse.

In a delusion, Raven cried her last plea for Beastboy's safety. "Where's Mento? Why would he leave you like this?" She ripped the covering off of the changeling's surface, wincing at his shriveled form beneath the scars that had ravaged his beauty.

Raven realized the situation in a long, painful jolt. "Mento was never here, was he?" She cupped Beastboy's face in her hands, already feeling warmth fading from his battered body. "Come on, come on, come on.." Raven wept in helplessness, the aura of her healing powers somehow being blocked from reviving him.

Beastboy pushed back his unbearable agony, and slipped into consciousness long enough to give Raven his trademark smile. "Did you know because I only said dude once?"

Raven's salty tears crashed onto him, with the cool water enveloping his wounds. "Don't talk, you idiot." She held him with the affection of a thousand declarations left unsaid, knowing very well this might be the last sarcastic comment they would share.

"We gotta get you out of here." Raven surveyed the hostile territory, hands never leaving the changeling's build for more than a second. Were her uncontrolled emotions hallucinating the crazed laughter that echoed in her head? Or could it be real?

She doubted her ears no longer when Beastboy tensed against her, his flickered heartbeat beginning to race with adrenaline. "Go.."  Beastboy's limp arms tried to shove Raven from the embrace, both a warning for her and a death sentence for him. "Get the others..."

Even without her telekinesis, every fiber of Raven's perceptive intuition told her Beastboy needed an anchor to clutch to, something to keep him threaded to the land of the living. "I'm not leaving you." His pulse was unregulated, and Beastboy's survival chances waned with every missed breath. Not good.

The laughter crescendoed to the light, and so did the identity of who had driven Beastboy to the brink of hell. "One little birdie flying away, a pull of a trigger, and they're not ok!" The Joker bowled over in hysteria, with no sense of rhyme or reason to his manic verse. Raven instinctively blanketed beastboy in her cloak, lifting her arms in a shielding stance. "You...you're supposed to be with.." The empath stuttered in confusion.