The room was already shrouded in shadows, but now it pulsed with something darker—alive, volatile, breathing with her rage.

Raven stood in the eye of it.

Her cloak hung half-on, half-off her shoulders like a discarded thought. The shelves of spellbooks she once guarded with obsession were overturned, their pages fluttering like wings trapped mid-fall. Her mirror—her mirror—lay cracked, a jagged black vein across its surface, whispering echoes of the storm she refused to become.

She pressed her back to the cold wall, breathing through clenched teeth. Her hands trembled at her sides, still wreathed in flickers of dark energy that didn’t know where to go. She hadn't meant to lose it. Not again. Not now.

"Azarath... Metrion..." she whispered the words like lifelines, "...Zinthos—"

The door hissed open.

Her head snapped toward the sound. A shape in the threshold. No knock. No voice.

Her powers surged first—instinct before thought. A sharp burst of violet-black erupted from her palm like a spear and slammed the figure into the opposite wall with a brutal, echoing thud.

Raven’s heart froze.

The darkness vanished like smoke in wind.

"...No," she breathed, wide-eyed, stepping forward as if her body couldn’t believe what her eyes saw. Curled against the wall, arms limp, was her—the one person she let touch the cracks in her soul without pulling away. Her girlfriend. The one who made tea and silence feel like warmth.

She dropped to her knees.

Her powers recoiled like they'd been burned. Her hands hovered—useless, shaking—over bruised skin she hadn't meant to touch.

"You—why did you..." Her voice cracked. She wasn’t talking to her girlfriend. She was talking to herself. To the monster in her blood. The curse in her name.

Tears welled fast, silent, rolling down her cheeks without permission. "I didn’t know it was you," she whispered, like confession might undo what she did. "You didn’t say anything. I didn’t know—"

The girl stirred. A wince. A breath.

Rachel reached out, hesitating. Her fingers brushed her girlfriend’s arm like a prayer she didn’t believe she had the right to say.

"I told myself I’d never hurt you," Raven whispered. “But I can’t even trust myself to be what you need. I’m always this. Broken. Dangerous. And still…”

Her voice shook. She couldn’t stop it now.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

She cupped her girlfriend’s hand in both of hers, her thumb trembling against skin still warm.

Then, soft as rain: "Please tell me you’re still here."