1151/Old Clothes, Old Feelings.

Old Clothes, Old Feelings.
Date of Scene:	14 April 2020
Location:	Donna's old room, Titans Tower.
Synopsis:	Donna and Raven determine that 1 does not equal 3, and this may be the cause of some tension - but apparently not enough to avoid the need for a fade to black.
Cast of Characters:	Donna Troy, Rachel Roth

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Donna Troy has posed:
    The door is already slightly open. It hadn't been a day earlier - presumably Donna had been inside her old room in the tower at some point during the night, when Raven was asleep. She pushes the door open wider and steps in, holding it for Raven. She's still being rather solicitous.

    There are still plenty of signs of Donna's presence from three years ago haunting the room. She'd only packed a single bag when she left. The blinds are open and the glass wall has let a lot of sun in - on the opposite wall, several framed movie posters are beginning to look distinctly sun-bleached. A shelf above the bed has a few books on it, and there are a few more in a stack on her desk. A map showing Turkey, Greece and the Aegean curls down at one corner, where a tack has come loose. Otherwise the room is rather tidy.

    It always had been.

    Lying on the bed is evidence of that previous visit during the night. A small bag, a very torn jacket, an expensive looking camera and Donna's lasso - looking now rather mundane without that brilliant glow - sit there in a pile. On top of the pile are a few torn shreds of pink fabric.

    "I must have a few things in here," Donna says. "I packed in quite a hurry. There's probably something I can wear." She looks back at Raven with a glance of concern, making sure she's walking okay and isn't about to fall over. Hopefully she'll stop worrying soon.

Rachel Roth has posed:
    Honestly, the concern is unwarranted. It's not as if Raven overtaxed her empathic healing by taking in enough near-mortal wounds to drop the Titans several times over. How Raven is still standing is rather strange. But, she really only has two modes. Out, and Fine.

    She's trying to appear as casual as she can be. She didn't follow Donna into the room fully- instead, she remains at the doorway, leaning on the frame. Her hands are in her pockets, the curvature of leg visibly curled on the other the stretched fabric of her yoga pants merging the two into one difficult to distinguish silhouette only recognizable as both legs by the fact that despite how gifted she is in the thigh department, she's not -that- gifted.

    I mean, she's -close- though.

    "There are a few things left in the closet. Maybe not a full -outfit.- I realized you packed in a hurry. Made sure there wasn't anything you'd need me to send you. Didn't quite think that I was one of the only people that -could,- but... I knew you left in a hurry."

    The last portion is- there's a bit of hurt there. Troia can feel it, even if it's not entirely audible.

    Raven doesn't let it linger too long before she gets Heavy.

    "Before we go. And -we- are going, sticking together isn't limited to when we -know- we're going to fight." she exhales, deeply. Raven isn't good at -talking- about her feelings. "We have to figure out... This. Us. Whether we're going to go back to it, or whether we... Don't feel it can work." There's a pause.

    "I don't think we can let it wait. I've... Avoided trying to -read- whether you'd come to terms with it. But you have to understand, if the Titans are coming back, the least dangerous thing in front of us is this."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna - Troia - opens the closet door, and almost immediately closes it again. She turns back to Raven and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Yeah. A few things. A few very /musty/ things. I have the choice of travelling in rags, or smelling like a goat. " Or possibly asking Raven to borrow something of hers, but that might lead to areas of questioning which - when it comes down to it - Raven had just brought up.

    Troia sighs slightly, and nods her head. "I know. I have been thinking the same. I'm not sure I have the answers in straight in my head yet, but we need to talk. Come in and sit down. I won't bite."

    "Unless you ask nicely."

    That's how it had all started really, those little flirty comments.

    Troia takes a deep breath and opens the closet door again. She sorts through what's inside rather hurredly, and fetches out a pair of leather pants. Being less absorbant than fabric, they have perhaps suffered the least from being locked away for three years. She holds them up to herself, then slides the closet door closed again and takes the pants into the bathroom. After a moment the sound of the shower can be heard - too soon for her to be in it, she must be using it to rinse off the pants, hoping that might help.

    "It's strange to say this when it has been three years, but it feels like this has happened very fast." Donna's voice echoes with the resonant sound of bathroom tiles as she speaks loudly to be heard over the sound of the shower. "I mean we never quite got around to having that... you know... the 'are we a thing' conversation. Before I got back to Metropolis I didn't have any idea what to expect. You might hate me. You might have forgotten me. Then in the space of half an hour it seems like we suddenly bypassed the 'are we a thing' conversation and the 'shall we tell the others' conversation and went straight to everyone /knowing/ that we're a couple. "

    The shower stops, and Troia comes out of the bathroom without the pants. She takes a seat on the edge of the bed, and picks up the scrap of pink fabric, folding it over and over in her hands. "It feels kind of overwhelming, Raerae. It... all the scenarios I was going through in my mind on the plane over, all the things I planned to say." She shakes her head. "Voided. My emotions are still catching up with me."

    She looks up from the pink fabric to Rae. "I loved you. Back then. Stupid as this sounds, that's why I had to leave. It made me realise how empty my feelings for Marv really were. You were just this little fling I was having, this little game we were playing while I waited until I had graduated, as I promised. Except I loved you, not him. I didn't know how to deal with it."

    "It should be so much simpler now. I still love you Rae. But is it /right/? I don't know. "

Rachel Roth has posed:
    It had been a battle- a joke here. A comment there. Raven was still in the closet, pretending that she was just never interested in anyone when the opportunities arose. It made sense, really, the wardrobe change from that -witchy- attire. It was so easy to think that Raven just didn't care to have people -looking- at her.

    Troia is so far the only one to really learn the truth.

    The war quickly turned into this... Double meaning. That the times they -weren't- flirting were more akin to jokes than the times that they were.

    Raven is left inspecting her nails when Donna walks off into the bathroom. She isn't entirely sure what to say to the comment- or, even, if she should say anything. The bed hasn't been used in three years, nor has Raven. Gearing up for a renewed 'battle' now might be especially dangerous to the idea of -talking- rather than letting it get swallowed up by the tension in an entirely physical way. She's not sure how much self-control either of them would really have after three years apart, triply so since all of it was left to boil over into this great display of life-saving affection.

    It's why she's silent all the way until Troia returns to the room, but Raven is still standing in the doorway. The two of them have to look at each other- place real physical distance to represent the metaphysical schism. Sitting on the bed would be disingenuous.

    "Yes." she responds, succinctly. "Everyone is now acutely aware that three years ago, we allowed ourselves to enter into -something.- I counted the days. I figured you'd leave, spend some time thinking about it. It was clear to me that we could be more, that we -were- more, when we..." She gestures to the bed.

    "Plans never work. Not with things like this. We- people like us, we live too fast." It's probably hard hearing such emotional advice in that monotonous drawl. Either that, or it's charming, in its own way. "All of that was going to crumble to dust when you actually got here. Do you really think you could have withstood all of that bubbling up if I had been conscious and waiting?" There's a pause, "That I'd -been- waiting? Even if it had been only a year." She looks down, for a moment.

    "I knew. The entire time, really. I figured it would probably happen slower. Maybe you'd get physical with Marv and figure it out. I didn't -plan- for it to go the way it did, but again it's... When it's just below the surface, it won't stay there for long."

    The hand she'd been inspecting a moment ago, left at her side while she was talking, comes up to pull her hood down and massage at her face for a moment. "What's... Not to know? Troia I... If we still feel this way. Mutually. What isn't -right- about it? We're not kids anymore. We weren't then. We're allowed to be happy. Allowed to do this. It -is- simpler now. We are almost thirty. If we aren't ready to do -this,- -now,- when will we ever?"

Donna Troy has posed:
    The wince that crosses Troia's face when Raven says the line about figuring it out with Marv is visible across the room. That was the problem, in Troia's eyes, that everyone had figured it out apart from her. Everyone told her it was a mistake, that he was too old for her. The word 'creepy' had been employed once or twice. At the time she thought they were just being narrow minded. He was barely more than ten years older than her, it just wasn't a big deal. People get so hung up on these things.

    Except that they were all right and she was wrong. Rae was even anticipating her discovering this, like Troia had been some naive teenager and the others so much wiser than her. The reality was that - with the exception of Raven, from whom such feelings cannot hide - the others probably were reacting just to the age gap rather than recognizing that Donna's infatuation was inherently too shallow to last. The feeling of shame hasn't gone away.

    Perhaps the hardest part is the realization that Rae was ahead of her. That particular bit of mutual self-discovery - the teasing, the increasing closeness, the eventual physical expression of it all - should have been Troia's territory, not Rae's. There was, in her upbringing, no hint of stigma to such things. Nothing to be shy about, nothing to question oneself about. She should have been the strong one, the guiding one, yet here is Raven saying she's the one who knew.

    Troia carefully puts down the pink cloth and walks to where Raven stands in the doorway, and rests one arm easily over each shoulder. It's an embrace of sorts - arms length, but intimate. Less dangerous than the bed though, perhaps.

    "I said it wrong. I was never as good with words than you Rae. Yes, you are right... /it/ is right. But it's also fast. For three years, I didn't know how serious you were about me. Didn't know if you had forgotten about me even. I thought about you, often. But I didn't dwell on it. So it was a thing, then it wasn't a thing, and now suddenly... is it a thing again? I... I can't see any reason why it shouldn't be. But it also feels like it was three years ago me who made this decision, not today me. "

    She tilts her head sideways, looking into Raven's eyes, and her hands meet behind Raven's neck, their faces just a little closer. Although slightly taller, Troia doesn't have Diana's stature and the pair are pretty much of a height. The two sisters don't look all /that/ similar, really.

    "Do you remember - no, I'm sure you wont. There was a day in that December. There was just the two of us in the tower, the others were... I'm not sure. We went and sat on the roof and looked out on the lights. It was so nice because I had... MY Rae. The one I only saw when the others weren't there, when you weren't so ready to hide your smile. It was cold, so we sat close. And you rested your head on my shoulder and I..."

    Troia takes a deep breath and sighs. "I think I want to... fall in love with you again. So that I'm feeling not three year ago emotions, but today emotions. Does that make sense?"

    Troia leans forwards a little, resting her forehead against Ravens, as she had done in the nightmare mindscape the previous day, when she couldn't hold back her tears. "If we do this now, I want it to be because we feel it now, not because we felt it then. If we do nothing, maybe we lose this moment, this chance to have what we missed. But if we jump straight back as if those three years never happened, I'm worried we find out that we are mistaking love for nostalgia."

Rachel Roth has posed:
    "I get to cheat." she begins, reamining silent for the whole of Troia's half of the conversation. She only speaks when the other woman's forehead is resting against her own.

    "I mean, in a lot of ways. For example, it wasn't three years for me. I lost track of time in an emotional nightmare following the death of two friends, but I was waiting for a year. I'm still waiting. I didn't -feel- those two years pass, not in the way that you would. I remember it all. Every comment. Every joke. I remember saying just the things I thought would be okay. I remember implying a little more than I thought would be okay- putting a little more of what I wanted into the jokes than they could fit. I remember hoping that maybe you'd figure it out. Catch the meaning. Call me on it."

    There's another moment of silence, then.

    "But the truth of it is that in regards to this, I know it's not nostalgia. I know it's not some ghost of a thing, an incorporeal Was that I'm not ready to admit Isn't anymore. Because I wasn't just -kidding- on the roof. I knew she was coming and I couldn't figure out if you would be comfortable but I wanted to tell her. I wanted you to say that I was more than the one you told her about. I -know- how I feel because I can't -not.-"

    She exhales, calmly.

    "If you need me to show you how it feels, I'll do that. But don't pretend that something as stupid as time apart can do anything to this. I haven't even -thought- about anyone else. Even if it was only a year."

Donna Troy has posed:
    "The way you were on the roof was... it was... "she stifles a giggle. "Unfair. I'm laughing because it was funny, but also I mean it. You get to be unfair - a little bit. Because I owe you. But don't push it okay, Rae? This isn't easy for me either. "

    Troia pulls her head back so she can focus properly on Raven. Mostly she looks into Raven's eyes, but from time to time, with almost self-conscious speed, her eyes sometimes flicker towards Raven's lips. "I got them. The jokes... probably all of them. On Themyscira, the humor is -- well, full of double meanings. And I learned a lot thinking about what the guards had said to each other just before they said, 'Shh! Queen Hippolyta is coming!'

    Troia gives a wide grin at the thought, and lets it soften naturally into a smile. Her eyes linger on Raven's for a few moments, then she blinks a couple of times and presses forehead to forehead again. "Maybe that is it. It is one year for you, three years for me. So I feel you are going a little too fast and you think I am going a little too slow. Just... let this go at its own pace, Raerae. Please? You can't just show me how it feels and expect me to catch up on those two years. I need to feel it for myself, my own feelings.

    Troia pauses a moment, then her voice drops a little, gets a little huskier, and the smokiness of her accent a little stronger. "Besides," she whispers breathily into Raven's ear. "If you want to show me how something feels..."

    She doesn't finish the sentence, but pulls back a little, arms still around Raven's neck, but arm's length again, and she grins.

Rachel Roth has posed:
    The smile Raven cracks is one that even she can't resist. Idly, and in self-defense, her hand slips behind her as she moves out of the doorway, hitting the pad and closing the door back up behind her. None may see.

    "It was pretty hilarious. But I am going to continue being unfair, because now I know what the jokes do. Like little buttons I can push. You left me alone for three years. You can squirm."

    Her eyes are on Donna's, for the whole of it, even watching the gaze travel down. "Yeah, I suppose we're in two different time periods. Have to catch up to me." she states, taking a moment to let her eyes swiftly wander, especially as Troia's face lingers near her ear.

    When Raven speaks up again, it's through her teeth. "Honestly, your memory's terrible. I'd be -reminding- you."

    Her gaze lingers on Donna, then, and then her hand goes back to the pad behind them. The door locks. Even if this is a game of chicken, Raven isn't going to lose.