Chapter 5

"What loses its head in the morning and gets it back at night." Starfire read out the note as the rest of the team listened attentively. Beast boy's foot tapped away at the floor repeatedly as his nerves grew and he could feel the nausea building in his stomach. The sound of Cyborg's frantically scattered breaths echoed around the room and drew annoyed glares from an equally worried Raven. 

"How could this happen?" Raven began, "You were right there with her! How did you not hear a thing?" She looked towards Damian waiting for his answer.

His eyebrows furrowed, "I'm not the one that decided that the bathroom would be 2 storeys above the damn living room!" He growled sending a fist into the wall where the faint dent of past punches could just be made out. 

"You should've been paying more attention to her!" Raven yelled back.

Damian turned around and took a step towards her before screaming, "What? Did you expect me to take her to the bathroom with me!"

Raven's eyes narrowed and she swung her arms up, "I don't know! Maybe!"

Damian took another step towards her, his teeth grinding, "I'm not the one that started this whole stupid mess with a shitty love spell!"

Raven snarled, "Don't you dare bring my spell into this! It was your brother that chose to broadcast to the whole fucking world that you had a wife! My spell has nothing to do with it!"

"Of course it does!" Damian screamed, "Your spell makes her damn weak! If she wasn't-" he made quotation marks with his finger, "in love, or whatever the hell you want to call it, she would've been more careful! Love is weakness!"

At this point, Raven was seething. "Love is NOT weakness!" she prodded a finger on his chest, "You're just filled with so much darkness you're blind to how much she actually likes you! Her love for you has made her stronger but you just fail to see it! Don't you notice that in every battle where you're in trouble she somehow seems to beat the shit out of the attackers!" she paused taking a quick breath before continuing, "Y'know I actually feel sorry for her. She shouldn't have to love such a stupidly oblivious guy like you who has been through so much bullshit that he fails to let in any light! Her best bet at love is with that blonde cat back in Paris!"

Raven flinched as he backed her into a corner and slammed his fist into another wall. "You don't know anything!" he grumbled, his eyes so dark they looked as if they would swallow her whole and his jaw clenched so damn tight she was surprised his teeth hadn't even chipped. "You don't know anything!" he repeated, his voice softer but still clouded with aggravation. "That bloody cat isn't good enough for her! H-He isn't g-good enough." he sounded as though he were trying to convince himself let alone everyone else.

Starfire's eyes widened. "You're jealous." She stated matter-of-factly. "You're jealous," she repeated, "of how much they get along. How much time they get to spend together."

He moved away from the wall releasing Raven from her tight prison and proceeded to instead slump down along it; the same wall she'd slumped down when he'd teased her. The same one he'd left her a stuttering, blushing mess. Beast boy took a sharp breath in when he noticed the water dripping down Damian's eyes. Cyborg's eyebrows furrowed and his frown deepened. 

A sniffle could be heard in the silence creeping up on them. Another one followed after and then a sob. Raven's eyes led her down to the sight of Damian sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the wall and his hand resting above his eyes as he looked up, the tears streaming down his face and along his neck then disappearing down the collar of his shirt.

The last time they'd seen him cry was a few years ago when he'd gone undercover with his father to infiltrate and take down a secret meeting between Gotham's villains and Russia's criminals. They'd agreed to join forces to take down the CIA. They'd succeeded in arresting Gotham's villains and sending Russia's back to their country  - where their punishment was suspiciously kept a secret -  but barely and his father had come back with serious injuries and on the brink of death. Ra's al Ghul had refused to let him use the Lazarus Pits due to their feud over Talia. Damian had been crying day and night worried over his father's safety before him and his brothers had joined forced to steal some of the water from the pits.

Now here he was, his bottom lip quivering and heavy streams of salted water making their journey down his face. The silence in the room followed by the sound of his sobs was excruciating. He was the one to break it. "I-I-I-I just. I can't take it. I can't keep losing people close to me."

Starfire nodded slowly staring solemnly at her friend. "You don't want her to get hurt. That's why you've never told her how you feel." Beast boy's eyes widened as he looked at Damian and then Starfire and then back to Damian. "You love her. You're in love with her."

All eyes landed on Damian as the others tried to process this new information. He sighed before taking a moment to calm down and wiping away the remnants of his meltdown with his sleeve. He didn't give a damn about manners or personal hygiene. Right now his main focus was Marinette. He sniffed before standing up and straightening his shirt. He looked up to meet the eyes of his partners before saying, "Right, let's get to finding Marinette and beating the shit out of a green and purple man in a  shitty bowler hat."

He strode over to the discarded card on the table and picked it up repeating the words in his head. The gang followed after him but shared concerned looks as they proceeded to pretend the previous event hadn't just happened and Damian hadn't just admitted his feelings for Marinette.

Beast boy sat down with a grumpy huff and threw the cushion that had gotten in his way across to the other side of the room where it proceeded to ambush a painting and send it tumbling down and crashing on the floor. Damian sent him an annoyed glare. Raven watched as the cushion slumped down along the painting covering the blue of the ocean painted in waves that crashed as birds flew overhead. Her eyes then widened as she made a realisation.

"A pillow!" she whispered. "A pillow!" she repeated louder. All eyes went to her begging her to explain. "A pillow loses the head of a person in the morning when they wake up and gets it back at night when they're going back to bed!"

Damian's eyes widened but then narrowed before he groaned. "We have over 20 pillows in this damn Tower, how the hell are we meant to open and close all of them?"

A glint in Starfire's eyes caught his attention. "We just won't close them."

His eyes narrowed. "Are you suggesting we rip every single pillow open until we find the right one?"

Her smirk answered his question. Cyborg grinned, "I'm down for that."

Raven grumbled under her breath. She'd payed double for the dark royal purple silk pillows filled with 100% sheep wool in her room only to now have to have them ripped open. She sighed. She could get new pillows. There was only one Marinette Dupain-Cheng. 

To outsiders, the sight of the Teen Titans going around their Tower and frantically ripping open pillows and unstuffing them would seem incredibly bizarre; hilarious even. The pitch of Raven's whine as she watched her favourite pillows be destroyed in front of her eyes would make an untrained ear bleed. It was when they came to Beast boy's room that they found him standing awkwardly in front of the door.

"Move." Damian's cold voice almost (almost) shook him to the bone.

Beast boy slowly shuffled to the side allowing them passage into his Beast cave where they found a body pillow tucked under the bed. 

"This is an invasion of privacy." he muttered embarrassed.

Raven looked from him to the pillow and then back. She was actually impressed at how the creator of the body pillow had captured every intricate detail of her beautiful hair and made her eyes darker than it'd needed to be adding that extra mysterious look that she loved. Her legs were a bit longer than they actually were in real life and her cape hung just that little bit longer.

When her head was ripped open, she flinched. It was pretty unnerving watching your own head get ripped open. The card they'd been looking for those 15 pillows ago flew out and onto the floor. Cyborg picked it up and read the next riddle.

You scream, I scream. We all scream...

-The Riddler

"Ice cream."