Midnight Oil (open)

Participants: Rose Wilson / Open
Open/Closed: Open
Location(s): Titans' Tower
Time of Day: Midnight
Weather: Overcast, raining
Summary: Working late is one of the hazards of being a superhero.

She sat slouched on a leather swivel chair, legs draped haphazardly over one arm. The room's only light came from a large computer screen – so broad that it filled her vision. In its upper right corner, it displayed a digital picture of Lilian Worth; the only image that remained constant. The rest of the screen was taken up with a topographical map of North America, and ever-changing rows of faces. Each new face was displayed for little more than a second before vanishing, the machine analysing facial similarities between 'Sweet Lili' and every female citizen in databases it had access to. That just so happened to be 'all of them'.

There were, it seemed, some benefits to being a Teen Titan.

It had been a painstaking process, scouring the globe for any sign of her mother, with no confirmation that she was even alive – all she had to go off was a gut feeling. Rose hadn't seen her in years, Lilian presumed dead at the hands of the first Ravager, a misnomer she now bore. She'd never thought to question it, never thought her father might have been mistaken, until the past quite literally came back to bite her.

Under the Black Lanterns' light, family corpses long laid to rest had risen to drag those still living down into the dirt to join them. What remained of her brothers, uncle and step mother – even her father's former butler – had set upon Rose and Wade Wilson. But Lilian Worth was not among them, and Rose didn't believe it a coincidence. If her mother was dead, she would have been there, playing on the guilt of her surviving family just like the other reanimated.

However, her search had turned up nothing – even utilising the vast resources available to her. Every night that she'd been able, she had sat in the Titans' tower war room, staring at the computer within, doing her best impression of Tim Drake in the bat cave. She'd analysed imaging from satellites around the globe, looked through databases across every continent, and run weekly searches targeting the area Rose had last seen her mother all those years ago.

If Lilian Worth was alive and well, she most certainly didn't want to be found.

Stifling a yawn, Rose raised a hand to rub her eye, then let it drop into her lap, shaking her head a little as, one by one, the rows of female faces blinked off the display. They were replaced with the words 'NO MATCH' – capitalised and written in red, highlighting another night of failure. With a small, frustrated sigh, she leant forward, reaching out to the keyboard infront of her to cancel the search program.

As she did so, she caught sight of herself, her face reflected in the computer's screen. She stared at her mirror image for a long moment, unflinching. There was once a time she might have turned away, not wanting to see the patch over her left eye, disgusted by what it represented – an homage to a father she idolised and hated in equal measure, and the mental toil he caused in her. Now, though, she could at least stomach the sight of herself. The patch had come to represent everything she wasn't, and while she wasn't always sure what she was, she was certain of at least one thing: Rose Wilson was not her father, no matter how much she looked like him.

She held her own gaze for a few seconds more, before reaching over and hitting the 'ESC' key, plunging the room into total darkness. “I need a coffee...” she muttered under her breath, swivelling her chair away from the computer and raising gracefully to her feet.

For all her power and abilities, it was an alert penned onto a virtual calendar months before that brought Raven to the west coast that night. Over the past several months, the direction of her attention had been adjusted for the first time in a long, long while. She was still a proud and dependable member of the Teen Titans... Just... On reserve status.

Blüdhaven was where Raven lived, formally, now, and it was another group altogether that drew most of her time when under her hood. But that didn't make her any less beholden and dedicated to the Titans. Hence the reminder. Very few members knew - partly because Raven liked it that way - but hidden beneath all the hi-tech defenses of Titans Tower were different shields with similar intent.

Raven was personally responsible to the enchanted wards and seals that made the Tower extremely hard to suffer magical assault or foolery directly. Otherwise Jinx would've teleported the Fearsome Five directly into the common area for a surprise attack every other weekend. These, just like the technology being used, demanded regular maintenance, renewing and improving.

So, when Rose Wilson left the room she'd been holed up in for hours, it was to find Raven floating cross-legged in the middle of a shimmering matrix of mystic diagrams in a crossroads of corridors. Lavender energy sparked and whispered through the air, reflected in eyes the same color. "The pot's still warm," she said without turning, and held up a steaming cup of coffee in one gloved hand to show her meaning.

Rose Wilson

Of all the sights Rose might have expected to see upon making her way through the Titans’ Tower in the dead of night, Rachel Roth - floating cross legged at the heart of interconnecting corridors and surrounded by glowing eldritch symbols - wasn’t one of them. As the metallic door to the war room hissed closed behind her, Ravager made her way toward to the closest rec area – a small kitchenette used for preparing snacks and drinks when using the Tower’s extensive monitoring systems. Before she reached it, though, she found herself coming to an abrupt halt, confronted with Raven’s unanticipated presence. Rose tilted her head, arms folded across her chest, and raised a pale brow, taking in the figure levitating amongst mauve sigils. She said nothing, at least, not at first, observing the scene with a careful eye.

Without turning, or indeed showing any indication she’d physically noted Rose’s presence, Raven held out her hand. In her gloved fingers was clasped a steaming cup of coffee.
"The pot's still warm.”
“You read my mind,” murmured Rose, spurred back into motion by the promise of caffeine. “Sorry…my feelings, right?” She shot the concentrating mystic a knowing smirk as she passed her, stepping into the chamber to one side of the main thoroughfare in order to pour herself a drink. She emerged a few seconds later, and in her right hand was a ‘Boy Wonder’ mug baring a dark, thick coffee with the consistency of treacle.

Leaning against the rec room’s door frame, almost lounging, she returned her attention to Raven. Again, she made no immediate move to engage Roth in conversation, seemingly happy to observe her practices and sip at her drink. It was a good few minutes before she finally spoke.
“So how’s Bludhaven? Cold, wet and depressing as always?”
Raven and Rose had never been close or particularly friendly, but Ravager liked to know her current and former teammates whereabouts. There were times she had an almost ‘Bat-like’ desire to be informed, though it stemmed from her father’s tutelage: Batman craved information so, in the worst case scenario, there’d be no threat he couldn’t defend the earth against. Deathstroke just craved information so he knew how best to kill anything and everything he encountered.

Raven

Raven still didn't look Rose's way, but the air she had wasn't one of unwavering concentration, really. She was looking through the milling symbols in the space around her with the same kind of half-lidded haze of a person scrolling mindlessly through social media. The free hand, not holding her coffee cup, waved faintly. Occasionally a pulse of brighter lavender light would leave those fingertips and etch a fainter strand of one of the sigils more deeply.

"I could do either," Raven commented absently to Rose. She was an empath foremost, but Raven had her fair share of telepathic aptitude on the side - gained through a combination of her blood and sorcery. "But, in this case, neither." And that was that for a while. Rose disappeared to get coffee and Raven was only mildly surprised when she returned - it was more likely that Ravager would've kept to her own company.

Then again, Rose had a penchant for doing the less predictable thing at any point in time.

Minutes passed by, or Raven assumed. She was absorbed in her work, for all it looked as though she wasn't. One cluster of glowing lines pivoted on an unseen axis in front of her. The empath assessed it from multiple angles, then reached into it with a pinching motion. Drawing the touching index finger and thumb back, its contours blazed brighter, then the whole thing fell to the floor and seeped into it.

Rose broke the silence with a question, and Raven considered it for a handful of breaths before answering. "You could say that. Suits my aesthetic a lot more than San Francisco," and despite there not being the vaguest sign she was bantering, she was. "Speaking of, how've the Titans been lately?" It was no secret Raven wasn't around as much as she used to be. Neither was it a secret, based on Rose's question alone, where she was instead. She trusted Ravager to give her a blunt, if not colorfully-worded briefing.

Rose Wilson

Rose raised a brow and smirked, picking up the veiled jest in Raven’s Bludhaven response. If she was surprised Ravager knew of her living arrangements, she most certainly didn’t show it, her expression unchanged as she continued to form whatever spell she laboured over. “No idea what you mean. Aren’t you all sun and sandals?” She wasn’t – looking at Raven’s pasty complexion, Rose wouldn’t have been surprised if she hadn’t seen daylight in months. “I’d kill to see you at the beach. I bet your tan really puts Starfire’s to shame.”

'Speaking of, how've the Titans been lately?'

Taking a sip of her coffee, Rose took a moment to think upon the Titans and the team’s most recent developments. “Fine, I guess.” It was a simple, blunt reply, but she was feeling unusually talkative, and thus elaborated. “People came back from the dead, a bunch of rookies joined, we’re under new leadership, everyone’s started walking around in costumes to show how they’ve changed, matured or regressed or…whatever. The whole transition from one team to another could have been messy but…it wasn’t.” Rolling her eyes, she quickly added, “Unfortunately.”

Drama should have been assured, and yet, Rose was left utterly deprived. Everything had gone so smoothly she’d had not even the slightest chance to feed off or instigate grief. “Gotta hand it to Wonder Cass, she’s not awful when it comes to getting a bunch of hormonal teenagers to work together.” That was the highest praise Cassandra Sandsmark would ever receive from a Wilson.

“What about you? Just back for the weekend to graffiti the tower in purple magic or are you fed up of running Batboy errands?”

Raven

There had been many incarnations of the Teen Titans since their inception. Each one was distinct and unique, for reasons good, bad or in between. To an extent, the Titans were always what their members needed them to be in a therapeutic kind of way. Above all, though, they were always a family. They were very proud of that, too, and very aware that it's what made the Teen Titans different from the Justice League.

Hearing Rose's explanation of the current state of the present roster made Raven's lips curl in slight amusement. Not that Ravager could see it, since her cloaked back was to the platinum blonde. "Matured." That was an interesting way to describe it. Not a poor kind of interesting, either. Raven wondered, then, if they should have had an Amazon leading things from the start, given the emotional health that Cassandra had already ingrained in her team.

Speaking of - Raven didn't miss the praise that Rose gave Wonder Girl. She also didn't fail to note the reluctance but determination in Rose's emotional state, no matter how smooth and nonchalant it was verbally delivered. That kernel of a compliment, from Ravager, meant far, far more than it looked like on the surface. And then the conversation was back on her.

"Not that it matters," Raven said distractedly, shifting her coffee cup to her other hand, "but that Batboy runs his own errands. And, actually, some of mine." The image of Jason in a convenience store checking their shared grocery list and asking her questions via text made her heart glow more than she'd ever expected something so small to. "I'm glad you're on the team again, Rose," she said, more sincerely. "I think you're good for it, and it's good for you. Speaking as a fellow... Difficult person."

Rose Wilson

Rose let out a mock gasp at Raven’s revelation, imitating a sense of shock and surprise that she didn’t feel in the slightest. “I’ve been trying to get a Batboy to run my errands for years. What’s your secret?” She tilted her head. “Really…I’ve tried everything, even brooding.” In truth, the Ravager maintained a fairly positive relationship with members of the Bat-family: she had been mentored by Dick Grayson, worked alongside Tim Drake, admired Cassandra Cain and was near-enough idolized by Damian Wayne. Despite her father’s best efforts, the vigilantes of Gotham could count her as their ally, even if they’d had their stand-offish moments.

She waved a hand at the empath’s following statements, rolling her eye at the compliment directed her way. “Difficult, me?” Rose paused. “That’s an understatement.” Ravager knew she had never been easy to like, and she was slow to warm to others. Her brash personality – from bluntly speaking her mind to stubbornly refusing to back down from an argument – often caused her to come across as rude, and half the time, she intended to be. However, she’d grown a great deal since joining the Titans, and more frequently than ever, her painfully brutal advice was given with others’ well-being in mind, even if it was masked with layers of sarcasm.

Rose Wilson cared about her new family far more than she liked to let on, and she would do near anything to disguise that fact.

The thought of family, however brief, returned her mind to its former work: her hunt for her mother. Though she’d given up for the night, she was awake enough to consider going back and re-running a search or two. Not that anything would have changed – it was just better than lying in bed, struggling to sleep, obsessing over the fruitless tasks she could have been undertaking.

Slurping what remained of her coffee loudly, she shifted from where she lounged against the doorframe, about to disappear back into the kitchenette to pour herself another drink. “It’s been nice catching up. We should do it again sometime in the next decade.” Turning her back, she glanced back at where Raven floated, surrounded by her mystic sigils. “Enjoy your tantric meditation thing.”

Raven