Raven told herself it wasn't stalking.
That word implied something frantic. Desperate. Careless. It suggested obsession without intention, hunger without discipline. Raven had discipline. She had control. She had spent her entire life mastering the art of restraint.
What she was doing was observation.
Understanding required proximity. Context. You couldn't truly know someone from the version they offered the world, especially not someone like Dick Grayson, who wore charm the way others wore armor. He gave people what they expected to see. What they wanted.
Raven wanted what he didn't offer.
She sat cross-legged on the floor of her room, lights dimmed, curtains drawn. The air hummed faintly as shadows pooled naturally at the edges of the space, responding to her presence like old friends. She breathed slowly, evenly, letting her heart rate settle before she reached outward.
Her soul-self unfurled without sound.
It slipped through walls like smoke, weightless and unseen, tethered to her consciousness by something ancient and patient. Raven guided it with practiced precision, not rushing, not straining. She wasn't searching blindly.
She knew exactly where Dick would be.
The gym lights were still on. He always trained late, long after the others had retreated to their rooms. Movement helped him think. Gave him somewhere to put the restlessness he never talked about. Raven hovered unseen in the rafters, watching him move through familiar drills with muscle memory and focus.
He took his time. No music. No distractions. Just repetition.
She noticed things she hadn't before. The way his shoulders tightened when he missed a strike. The way he exhaled sharply afterward, like frustration lived somewhere just beneath the surface. This wasn't the Dick Grayson who laughed easily in the common room. This was the one he didn't show anyone.
You don't have to perform around me, she thought, not for the first time.
She followed him when he left.
Not closely. Not obviously. Her soul-self drifted at a careful distance, enough to observe without intruding. Dick stopped by the kitchen, poured himself water, leaned against the counter longer than necessary. His expression was tired in a way that felt personal.
He checked his communicator. Paused. Put it down without sending whatever message he'd considered.
Raven cataloged it all.
She began to map him the way she mapped ley lines and emotional currents. His habits. His routes. The times he sought people versus the times he avoided them. The places he went when he wanted to think. The places he went when he wanted to feel less alone.
Starfire's room glowed warmly when he passed it.
He hesitated there.
Just for a moment.
Raven felt something dark curl pleasantly in her chest.
You don't go in, she noted. You just pause.
She learned what he ate when no one was around. Learned that he preferred silence in the mornings and company late at night. Learned that he lingered in doorways, that he reread old files, that he touched the same scar on his wrist when he was overwhelmed.
She learned his tells.
This wasn't invasion, she told herself. She wasn't interfering. She wasn't changing anything. She was simply removing uncertainty. If she understood him completely, she could anticipate his needs. Be where he needed her to be before he realized it himself.
That was care.
That was devotion.
Her soul-self slipped back into her body hours later, seamless and quiet. Raven opened her eyes to darkness, pulse steady, mind sharper than it had been in days.
She felt closer to him now. More aligned. Like she had filled in missing pieces of a puzzle no one else had bothered to finish.
Dick Grayson wasn't unknowable.
He was just careful.
And Raven had always been good at slipping past walls.
She rose from the floor and went to her desk, opening a blank page in one of her journals. She didn't write his name. She didn't need to.
She began listing things she'd learned.
Preferences. Patterns. Silences.
Ways in.
She told herself this knowledge would help her protect him. Support him. Be what he needed when the weight of the world inevitably pressed too hard.
She didn't think about what would happen if he ever tried to pull away.
She didn't need to.
Because now, she understood him better than anyone else ever could.
And understanding, Raven believed, was the purest form of love.
It turns out that her beloved was hiding quite a few secrets from her and the rest of the team. She had broken into his old home, the Wayne manor. Raven really didn't want to invade her man's privacy, but his business was her business at the end of the day. It wasn't hard to teleport in the manor, there was no magical protection preventing her from doing that whatsoever. She carefully walked past Tim drake's and Jason's rooms respectively and arrived at his bedroom.
Raven made sure to keep her awareness high, getting caught here just wouldn't be ideal at all. But even if she did get caught, her beloved would stick by her. And if he didn't... well he is only human after all, he can't stop her from forcing him to be with her.
Dick Grayson's room at Wayne Manor was quieter than the rest of the house, not because it was untouched, but because it had learned restraint.
The walls were a muted gray, chosen deliberately, practical and unadorned. Nothing flashy. Nothing indulgent. The furniture was solid and old, dark wood that had been refinished more than once, bearing faint scars that hadn't quite been sanded away. A heavy desk sat beneath the window, its surface clean except for a single lamp and a stack of neatly aligned notebooks. Everything had a place. Everything suggested discipline. Control.
At first glance, it looked like a room meant for an adult who didn't linger.
But the longer one stayed, the harder it was to miss the evidence of a childhood that had never quite been erased.
The doorframe was the most obvious betrayal. Along the inside edge, carved shallow and uneven, were faint horizontal lines, some barely visible now, others darker with age. Beside them, initials scratched in small, uncertain letters. D.G. A few dates, crooked and cramped. Someone had tried to sand them down once, long ago, but had stopped halfway through. The marks remained, stubborn and imperfect. Proof that a boy had once stood there, back straight, heels pressed flat to the floor, measuring himself against the promise of growing up.
The bed was neatly made, military-tight, but the headboard bore a small nick near the corner, like something had once been thrown too hard in a moment of careless energy. The bookshelf held tactical manuals and old case files now, but tucked between them were relics that didn't quite belong. A dog-eared copy of a children's adventure novel. A faded circus program, folded and unfolded so many times the creases had gone soft.
On the far wall, framed simply, hung a photograph that did not match the room's severity.
A younger Dick stood in the center, no more than thirteen or fourteen, his smile wide and unguarded in a way he no longer allowed himself. His arm was slung around a red-haired girl his own age, both of them dressed in school uniforms, ties loosened, collars crooked. They leaned into each other like gravity was optional, like the world had never asked anything hard of them yet. The joy in the picture was effortless. Unquestioned.
The frame had been dusted recently.
But Raven knew her beloved wouldn't leave the truly important things out in the open, he was tricky like that. Always hiding. Raven started chanting quietly, her powers so ludicrous that anything and everything was possible. So it didn't take long for her to find that the drawer in his desk had a false bottom, but trying to pry open that false bottom would cause the whole desk to explode. The bottom had a rubber coating that worked as an insulator which prevented the completion of the circuit that Dick had set up, once you remove that false bottom...Boom.
Thankfully, Raven had observed and already saw what she needed to do in order to get the contents. She just used her powers to teleport the contents of the drawer out into the open.
"Tricky, tricky Dicky." Raven whispered.
There were only two things hidden in that drawer. A diary and a photo. Raven picked up the photo first and her powers were nearly unleashed. Raven had never felt this much rage before. But then again her man had a way of bringing out things she never thought she was capable of.
The edges were soft and yellowed, corners blunted from having been handled too often, then forgotten, then found again. A faint brown stain bled up one side, like someone had once set it down too close to a glass left sweating in summer. The gloss had dulled unevenly, leaving tiny spiderweb cracks that caught the light when the photo was tilted just right. Time had not been kind to it, but it had been honest.
The team stood together in the frame, younger and sharper somehow, all angles and barely contained energy. They were close in the way teenagers were when they didn't yet understand distance, shoulders bumping, arms overlapping without thought. There was laughter frozen there, mid-motion, the kind that had no awareness of consequence.
At the center stood Dick Grayson.
He was unmistakably younger. Leaner. His posture was straight, almost rigid, chin lifted with a seriousness that felt disproportionate to his age. The costume he wore only reinforced it.
The old uniform was darker, heavier. Deep blacks and muted tones that swallowed light instead of reflecting it. The lines were sharp, aggressive, built more for intimidation than expression. There was no flourish to it, no playfulness. It looked like armor, not identity. Something meant to be worn, not inhabited.
Strangely, it made him look older than he had any right to be.
The whore was caught in motion beside him, frozen mid-laugh as she pressed a kiss to his cheek. Her hand was fisted lightly in the fabric of his sleeve, pulling him just enough off-balance to break his careful composure. The moment was playful, impulsive, unmistakably affectionate. Dick's expression in response was telling. His eyes were wide with surprise, his mouth caught halfway between a protest and a laugh he hadn't decided to allow himself yet.
It was the only crack in his seriousness.
Around them, the rest of the team blurred slightly, some faces softened by motion, others caught in exaggerated grins. They looked like kids playing at being heroes. Dick looked like a hero pretending to be a kid.
"You make me feel homicidal, Dick." Raven whispered, as she stroked her finger over Robins face. The slut that kissed Dick on the cheek was dressed indecently, a skin tight suit that looked like it was gonna burst holding in her fat tits. And stockings that barely contained her thighs. Raven debated how hard it would be to teleport to her and suffocate her in her sleep.
Raven stopped herself and thought logically. She couldn't kill every girl in the damn world, she just had to make Dick acknowledge that she was the one. Although just because she couldn't kill every obstacle doesn't mean that she couldn't do so once in a while. Raven took a deep breath and relaxed herself. She was a hero. She didn't kill.
Raven left the diary alone for now. She had more important things to do. Raven opened Dick's closet and saw her prize there in the basket. She gently picked up the white boxers. She brought it up to her nose and took a big whiff, it only smelled like detergent and nothing else. Raven put the boxers down in the basket disappointedly, she'd just have to break in his current room at the teen titans tower, no big deal.
Raven heard a soft footstep outside the room, someone was sneaking around. She quickly dissolved in the shadows and went back home. Raven couldn't wait to read his diary.