Work Text:
Robin sat alone in the operations room, the main lights dimmed to a low, functional glow that left most of the space in shadow. He had been here for hours, unmoving except for the occasional shift of his hands across the keyboard, the soft clicks of each keystroke threading into the silence with deliberate precision.
On the screen, the document sat nearly complete. He had one for each of his new team members. Hers was the last, and it was kicking his butt. He'd been working on hers for several months. Every time he thought it was complete, he learned something new about her powers and how they worked. It was…mildly irritating. She wasn't even that tall. How many powers could fit in one body? What was she—a deity?
Protocol: Vanilla
The name itself was absurd and ridiculous, though that had been the point from the beginning. Vanilla was simple. Vanilla was clean. Vanilla was controlled. It didn't draw attention, didn't overwhelm, didn't leave room for interpretation, and that was exactly what this needed to be.
There were no excess words in the document, no wasted space or lingering thoughts. Every line served a purpose, each section breaking down into clear, calculated steps that moved with a kind of quiet inevitability from one phase to the next. Environmental conditions were listed first, stripped down to the essentials. Next came lighting variables, spatial constraints, proximity thresholds—each one chosen not for complexity, but for reliability. Nothing unpredictable, nothing that relied on chance. Everything had to be repeatable.
From there, it narrowed.
He listed pressure points, both literal and strategic, mapped with careful detail. Angles. Timing windows measured in seconds rather than guesses. Contingencies that accounted for deviation without ever allowing for collapse. It wasn't a plan built to fight so much as it was to deescalate. From what he'd seen so far, deescalating would be the best they could hope for…unless someone was able to successfully place a bullet between her eye sockets.
He had a list of chemicals and concoctions that could possibly work to slow her down if need be…maybe. Robin groaned. How B was able to build his own Doomsday Protocol after just a few interactions with the League, Robin did not know.
Robin's fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment longer than necessary as he read through the final section again, not because anything needed to be corrected, but because he knew exactly what it was he was looking at. There were no gaps left, no weak points he hadn't already reinforced, no lingering uncertainties waiting to be resolved. It was complete in a way that most plans never were, distilled down to its most essential form, stripped of anything that might complicate it.
Based on all the information he knew, this plan would work.
That was the problem, though. He knew for a fact, that he didn't have all of the information. He didn't know how powerful she was, she was the hardest to read—and they didn't exactly go out of their way to socialize with one another. "Not that she'd open up to me if we did," Robin muttered.
His gaze lingered on the screen, not moving, not shifting, as the reality of that settled in the space between thought and action. There had been a point, earlier in the night, where this had still felt hypothetical, still carried the distance of something that existed only because it had to, not because it ever would. Now that distance was gone, replaced by something quieter and far more concrete, something that sat in the finality of the document in front of him.
A last resort. A line that, once crossed, wouldn't be undone.
He exhaled slowly, the breath measured, controlled as he made his decision.
His hands moved again, quick and precise, navigating to the final command without pause. The cursor blinked once, twice, before he selected it, the motion almost automatic now, plan the decision already made long before this moment had arrived.
SAVE.
The soft confirmation sound was barely audible in the quiet room, but it carried anyway, sharp enough to mark the shift from something unfinished into something set, something that now existed beyond thought or intention. The file name remained exactly where it was, unchanged, stark against the rest of the interface. He was finally finished.
Protocol: Vanilla.
He leaned back slightly in his chair, shoulders still squared, posture still controlled. For a long moment, he just sat there, unmoving, eyes no longer fixed on anything in particular, as if the weight of what he had done hadn't quite caught up to him yet. It was weird, coming up with a plan to immobilize the people he was meant to entrust with his life and vice versa. He didn't know how Batman did it? Then again, the whole point of this endeavor was to step out of his mentor's shadow. With that thought in mind, Robin couldn't help but wonder, Why did I create the Vanilla Protocol?
(Four years later)
The laptop gave up with a soft, defeated crackle, the screen flashing once before dissolving into a thin ribbon of smoke that curled upward in lazy, uneven spirals. The room smelled faintly of burnt circuitry, sharp and metallic. Cyborg stared at it for a moment, unmoving, one brow lifting slowly as he shifted his gaze from the dying machine to Raven, who stood a few feet away with her arms loosely folded, her expression composed in that way that usually meant something had already gone wrong. "I may have… lost my temper," she said, her voice even, almost thoughtful, as though she were reporting on someone else's mistake rather than her own.
Cyborg barked out a laugh, the sound cutting easily through the quiet. "Man, I swear, you and technology have beef on a personal level," he said, stepping forward to nudge the laptop closed with the side of his hand, as if that might somehow make it less broken. "Like, what did this one even do to you?"
Raven didn't answer right away, her gaze drifting briefly to the faint smoke still rising from the seams of the device before she looked away again. "It stopped responding," she said, which was technically true, even if it left out everything that had happened in the seconds before.
"Uh-huh," Cyborg replied, unconvinced but not pushing it, already turning toward the far side of the room where an older workstation sat tucked beneath a bank of monitors. He crouched slightly, pulling open a lower compartment with a practiced motion, and after a second of rummaging, he came back up with another laptop in hand, the casing worn at the edges but still intact. "Good thing we keep backups of everything," he added, flipping it once in his grip before setting it down on the desk in front of her.
Raven watched him, a flicker of disgusted annoyance passed through her eyes. "I still don't understand why this is necessary," she said, quieter now, though not uncertain. "Hacking, encryption, bypassing security systems—it won't matter in the long run. None of this does."
"You can't rely on your magic," Cyborg said.
"That's not what I mean," Raven mumbled.
Cyborg paused, one hand resting on the back of the chair as he looked at her, really looked at her this time, as if weighing the words rather than brushing past them. For a second, the humor slipped, replaced by something steadier, something grounded. "C'mon, Rae," he said, his tone shifting just enough to carry the edge of something more serious, "don't tell me you've already thrown in the towel?"
Raven's gaze narrowed slightly, not in anger, but in quiet resistance. "I'm not giving up," she replied. "I'm simply stating the obvious."
"And that," Cyborg said, tapping the lid of the laptop lightly before pushing it open, the screen flickering to life with a soft glow, "is exactly what quitter talk sounds like."
She didn't respond, but the faint tightening at the corner of her mouth said enough.
He stepped aside, gesturing toward the chair. "Sit," he said, not unkindly, just firm. "Try again. Slow this time. No blowing up the hardware."
Raven moved without protest, lowering herself into the seat with a kind of deliberate calm that didn't quite match the faint tension in her shoulders. The laptop hummed softly as it booted up, older software loading in layers that felt almost archaic compared to what the Tower ran now. Cyborg leaned over her shoulder for a second, pulling up a basic terminal interface, something stripped down and simple, before stepping back again. "I'll check on you in thirty," he said, already turning toward the door. "If this one starts smoking, I'm charging you for it."
"It won't," Raven replied, her voice quiet but certain.
He paused at the threshold, glancing back at her with a half-smile. "That's what you said about the last one. Have fun now!" Then he was gone, the door sliding shut behind him with a soft hiss that left the room steeped once more in that late-night stillness, broken only by the low hum of systems and the faint tap of keys as Raven began again.
For a while, it was exactly what he had asked for—slow, controlled, precise. She moved through the interface carefully this time, tracing commands instead of forcing them, letting the logic unfold step by step rather than bending it to her will. The frustration was still there, just beneath the surface, but it didn't spike, didn't flare. It settled instead, contained in the steady rhythm of her breathing and the measured movement of her hands.
It worked. Not perfectly, but…it was good enough.
Minutes passed without her noticing, the world narrowing down to lines of text and the quiet focus of problem-solving, until something shifted—a directory she hadn't opened before, nested deeper than the rest, tucked beneath layers that hadn't been part of the exercise Cyborg had given her. It wasn't unusual for systems like this to hold old files, fragments of past work left behind in corners no one bothered to clear out, but something about this one caught her attention.
It was the name. Protocol: Vanilla
She scoffed. "What is this…porn or something?"
Raven stilled, her fingers hovering just above the keyboard, the command half-formed in her mind before she even realized she was considering it. The word itself felt almost out of place here, too soft for the structure surrounding it, too simple for something buried this deliberately. She told herself it didn't matter, and that she didn't care. But she was curious. Without another thought, she opened it.
The file unfolded in clean lines, structured with a precision that felt immediately familiar, even after all this time. There was no clutter, no wasted space, no excess explanation—just a sequence of steps, organized and deliberate, moving from one point to the next with a kind of quiet inevitability.
It took her less than a second to understand what she was looking at. Her breath didn't catch, didn't falter. It simply slowed. This…was a plan. A very good plan…to neutralize her. Everything was so specific in a way that left no room for misinterpretation. Environmental variables outlined in careful detail, each one chosen with intent. Spatial limitations designed to narrow movement, to contain rather than confront. Timing windows measured down to seconds, built around patterns she knew intimately. It was all her—her habits, her reactions, the way her powers moved when they weren't fully restrained.
Raven read on, her eyes moving steadily across the screen, absorbing each line without pause.
Pressure points mapped with an accuracy that spoke of observation, of study, of time spent understanding not just what she could do, but how she did it. There were contingencies layered beneath contingencies, each one accounting for variation without ever losing the thread of the objective.
Neutralize. Deescalate. The word weren't written anywhere in the document, but nothing in these plans was fatal.
Vanilla.
Her fingers lowered slowly to the edge of the laptop, not touching the keys this time, just resting there as if grounding herself in something physical might change what she was seeing. It didn't. She kept reading.
There were timestamps embedded in the file, fragments of its creation scattered across months, years, revisions layered over revisions in a way that made it clear this hadn't been written in a single night or a moment of fear. It had been built, piece by piece, refined, adjusted, perfected. For years. It also hadn't been touched in over a year.
Raven frowned. Why'd he stop?
Raven closed the file with a single, precise movement, the screen returning to the neutral interface it had held before. Her hands remained where they were, her gaze fixed somewhere just past the screen, unfocused but not empty. There was no immediate reaction, no surge of anger or sharp spike of hurt, nothing that broke the stillness that settled over her like a second skin.
She felt…nothing. She didn't even feel betrayal. He's more perceptive than I thought. Her heart raced a little at the thought of Robin watching her so closely. I wonder what else he's noticed?
The Tower was settling into evening, the light outside dimmed just enough to blur the skyline into something softer, while inside, everything carried on with its usual quiet precision. The training floor still echoed faintly in Robin's muscles as he made his way down the corridor, the residual rhythm of movement lingering in his body, controlled and steady, the kind of exhaustion he preferred because it meant everything had gone exactly the way it was supposed to. As much as he loved training with his team, he loved his solo sessions even more. No variables. No unpredictability. Just repetition, refinement, control.
By the time he reached the kitchen, that focus had already started to unwind, easing into something looser, more automatic. The door slid open with a soft hiss, and he stepped inside, reaching up absently to pull off his gloves as he crossed the threshold.
Raven was already there. She sat at the counter, one elbow resting against the smooth surface, her posture composed in that familiar way that made her look almost untouched by the passage of time around her. There was a laptop open in front of her, its screen casting a low glow across her face, though she wasn't actively typing, her hands resting still on either side of it. The room itself was quiet, the hum of appliances low and constant, the faint scent of something sweet—vanilla and lilac—specifically her scent.
Robin slowed slightly, not stopping, just adjusting as he took her in, the stillness of her presence registering somewhere just beneath the surface of his awareness. "Didn't expect you to still be up," he said, his voice casual, easy, as he moved toward the counter, dropping his gloves beside the sink. "Figured Cyborg would've either converted you to the cult of technology by now or sworn off teaching you entirely."
There was a beat of silence…which wasn't unusual. He simply walked over to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water.
"You named it 'Vanilla?'"
Robin frowned slightly, the words not quite landing at first, his mind still half-turned toward the rhythm of training, the ease of the moment before. He turned back to Raven. "Named what—" He stopped, looking at the open laptop in front of her. It wasn't a gradual realization. It didn't unfold piece by piece or leave room for confusion. It hit all at once, sharp and immediate, snapping into place with a clarity that made everything else fall away just as quickly. For a second, he didn't move. He was too busy gauging her reaction.
"How?" he asked, the word quieter now, more controlled.
Raven's gaze didn't waver as it met his without hesitation. "I destroyed another laptop," she said, as if she were recounting something minor, something inconsequential. "I guess Cyborg decided to use one of your old ones." There was no accusation in her tone, no sharpness, no trace of anger. It was just a statement of simple fact. "I found it," she added, after a moment, as if the explanation needed nothing more.
Robin exhaled slowly, the breath measured, contained, though the tension that followed it settled quickly into the line of his shoulders. He glanced away for a second, just long enough to gather himself, to push past the initial reaction before it had the chance to take shape. "It's not—" he started, then paused, adjusting the words before continuing. "It's not what you think."
Raven didn't respond immediately, her expression unchanged, her attention still fixed on him in a way that felt too steady.
"It's not about hurting you…or anyone," he stopped. "Was that the only one?"
"Yes," Raven replied.
Robin mentally exhaled before he went on, his voice firm now, grounded in something more deliberate. "It was a contingency. A last resort. It was there to protect everyone if something went wrong."
Raven listened intently. Then, after a moment, she inclined her head slightly, as if acknowledging the logic of it without fully engaging with it. "It's very thorough," she said, her tone still calm, almost clinical. "You accounted for most variables. Environmental limitations, timing windows, pressure points. I was shocked to see how much attention you paid to my powers. It would work."
Robin's jaw tightened as he analyzed her reaction.
"There are a few areas that should be improved," she continued, her gaze drifting briefly toward the laptop before returning to him. "For example, this section—"
"Stop." The word cut through the space between them, sharper than anything he had said so far, immediate and unyielding.
Raven didn't flinch. She didn't raise her voice, didn't shift her posture, didn't give any outward sign that the interruption had affected her at all. "No," she said simply.
Robin stared at her for a second, something in his expression tightening, the control he carried so easily in every other situation beginning to strain under the weight of what she was doing. Then, without another word, he moved around the counter and sat right next to her, the distance between them narrowing in a way that felt anything but comfortable.
Raven watched him settle, her gaze steady, unbroken. "For weeks," she said, her voice still quiet, still measured, "everyone has known who I am—what I really am."
Robin didn't respond, but the shift in his posture said enough.
"And since then," she continued, "no one has wanted to talk about it. Not really. Not in a way that matters."
"That's not—"
"It is," she said, not louder, just certain, her words slipping in cleanly over his before he could finish. "We avoid it. We move around it. We pretend it isn't something we need to prepare for. Suddenly, I'm IT training with Cyborg, air-sparring with Starfire, nature walks with Beast Boy—" her voice broke off as her hand lifted slightly, gesturing toward the laptop in front of her. "This is preparation," she said. "This is what we should be doing. That other stuff is a waste of time."
Robin leaned forward slightly, his expression tightening further. "We are prepared," he said, his voice controlled, though the edge beneath it was starting to show. "We've been over this—"
"You've been avoiding it," Raven corrected, her tone unchanged. "All of you."
The tension snapped, not outward, not explosive, but sharp enough to shift the air between them. "The reason no one brings it up," Robin said, his voice rising just enough to break through the careful restraint he'd been holding onto, "is because every time we do, you act like it's already over."
Raven's gaze didn't waver. "I'm preparing for the inevitable."
"You're giving up."
The words landed harder than anything else he'd said. For some reason, they hurt more coming from Robin than they did Cyborg. "No one understands what he's capable of," she said, her voice still quiet, but carrying something heavier now, something that pressed against the edges of her control. "No one here has seen it."
"Starfire has," Robin shot back immediately. "She made that pretty clear a few weeks ago. The explanations and visuals she provided were very illuminating."
Raven's expression shifted, not dramatically, but enough to register.
"Starfire's explanation was incomplete," she said. "It was what she could translate into something you would understand."
Robin's hands tightened slightly against the edge of the counter. "It was enough."
"No," Raven replied, her gaze locking onto his with a clarity that left no space for argument, "it was not."
The silence that followed stretched, thick and heavy, filled with everything neither of them had said yet. Both held the other's gaze, neither willing to back down. Then Raven spoke again, her voice steady, final. "You need to be ready to kill me."
Robin gave a chuckle of disdain at the words she had just spoken. "If you really think that's going to happen," he said, his voice controlled but edged with something sharper now, "then you haven't been paying attention."
Raven's eyes flicked away from him for the first time since he had walked into the room, and the small movement carried more irritation than anything she had shown up to this point. She exhaled slowly, the sound quiet but unmistakably weighted, as if she were already tired of explaining something she didn't think needed explanation. "I'm serious."
"So am I," Robin countered, leaning forward slightly, the insistence in his tone firming into something unyielding.
"You created this protocol before you knew who I was, when we just met—and now that you know what I was born for—you want to do nothing with it?"
"Yes."
"What's changed?"
Robin didn't answer that question. Instead, he said, "No one here is giving up on you. Not me. Not anyone on this team. I don't understand why you don't get that."
"Because I know what he does," Raven said, her voice no longer as steady as it had been. "I know what my father does to people who care about me."
Robin didn't interrupt. He merely held her gaze through his masked eyes.
"He doesn't just come for me," she went on. "He comes for them. For anyone who cares for me. He punishes them, without mercy…because he can. Do you really think a can-do attitude is going to stop him?"
"So what do you want to do, Raven?" Robin asked. "Want me to kill you? Do you really want to die?"
"Yes."
"You're lying," Robin accused.
"How do you know that?"
"Because you came to Earth, stayed when the Justice League refused to help you, helped Starfire escape her captors, and you've been saving people for the last five years. Call me crazy, but that doesn't exactly scream, 'I'm ready to die.' It sounds like someone who is ready to fight."
"If you don't incapacitate me," Raven said, "you won't survive him."
"You really think we're doomed?"
Raven paused. "I've seen too much to think otherwise."
"What was your original plan, when you came to Earth?"
"To perish while holding onto the last piece of my mother. I never counted on the Justice League helping me." She looked down. "I didn't count on running into you guys. I never thought I'd stay for this long. Every night I went to bed thinking, 'this is the night I leave.' Before I knew it, a year had gone by—then two. And now here we are. I thought—" she shook her head. "I don't know what I was thinking," she looked away from Robin.
Robin slowly reached for her hand that was resting on the counter and clasped it in his. Raven nearly jumped at the touch, surprised to feel his bare skin on hers. "You're terrified, Raven," Robin spoke softly. " I get that. But please, don't stop fighting. Don't give up. We won't stop—I won't stop fighting for you. So don't stop fighting for yourself."
Raven didn't know what to say. She just sat there and stared at him as he gingerly caressed her hand.
The silence stretched. It lingered long enough to soften the edges of the moment. Raven could feel Robin's intense stare from behind his mask. She really wanted to look away, but there was something there—between them. She couldn't break away.
Finally, Robin exhaled, the tension in his shoulders shifting as he leaned back slightly, his eyes dropping to the counter between them for a second before lifting again to the laptop. "I didn't even know that file was still there," he said, his voice quieter now, the sharpness from before dulled into something more thoughtful, more uncertain. "I could have sworn I deleted all of them."
Raven didn't respond right away. She really wanted to continue their discussion, come up with a plan to destroy her before Trigon reached Earth; but she got the sense that Robin wanted to move on. So she asked, "Why did you name it Vanilla?"
Surprise and embarrassment rolled off of Robin. Clearly, her question had caught him off guard. "What?"
"The protocol," she clarified, her tone returning to something calmer, though not entirely neutral. "Why 'Vanilla?'"
Raven didn't need her powers to sense that Robin was uncomfortable with the question, the shifting in his posture was all that she needed to see.
"It's…" he started, then stopped, clearly reconsidering, his hand lifting slightly before dropping back to the counter. "It's a stupid reason. It made logical sense to me at the time, but looking back—it's just stupid."
Raven only raised a brow.
Robin glanced away, then back again, the movement quick, almost reluctant. "Fine," he relented. "Vanilla's supposed to mean calm." His hand lifted, then dropped, like he didn't quite know what to do with it. "Baseline. Neutral. When you lose control, everything spikes—emotion, power, all of it. The protocol was designed to bring that down. To make you…" He hesitated, then finished anyway. "Vanilla."
Raven pulled a face, though it lacked any real bite.
"I told you it was stupid," Robin muttered, quieter now.
A beat passed.
"Were you eating ice cream when you came up with it?" she asked, her tone dry, but softer than before.
He huffed out a breath. "No. I just—Look, it's not the only reason."
Raven simply looked at him expectantly.
Robin exhaled slowly, already feeling the shift, the way the moment was slipping somewhere he hadn't intended. "When we first met," he said, voice lower now, "I noticed you smelled like… lilac. And vanilla."
Raven blinked.
"And calling it 'Lilac' would've been…" He let out a short, humorless breath. "Too obvious."
Silence followed, lingering differently than before, stretching just long enough to make him aware of how close they were sitting, of how still she'd gone.
Robin narrowed his eyes slightly. "You're laughing at me."
"Not outwardly," she said, though something in her expression betrayed her.
"I was fourteen," he added quickly, like that might fix it. "Give me a break. Saying I named something after a girl with pretty eyes didn't exactly feel like a strong move at the time."
Raven stilled. "You thought I had pretty eyes?" she asked, quieter now, the words slower, more deliberate.
Robin didn't hesitate. "Of course." There was no edge to it this time. His masked gaze held hers—steady, direct, unguarded in a way it hadn't been all night. "I still do."
The words settled between them, softer than anything that had come before, but still heavier.
Raven felt the air tighten just slightly around them. Her pulse kicked, sudden and sharp, and for a second she forgot what she had been about to say. Her eyes flicked away, then back again, like she couldn't decide which was worse—looking at him or not. "I'm glad your naming skills have improved," she said, a little too quickly, the words thinner than she intended.
Robin didn't move. He merely watched her.
"I'm going to bed," Raven said finally, standing from her chair.
Before she could walk away, Robin called out, "Raven."
Raven stopped. When she turned, she was surprised to see Robin standing in front of her with barely any space between them. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Once again, he reached for her hand, fingers brushing hers first—bare skin, warm and real. The contact sent a jolt up her arm before she could stop it. She almost pulled away.
Almost.
Instead, her hand stayed where it was, caught in his, her fingers tightening just slightly in response.
"You're scared," Robin stated softly.
Raven didn't answer. She couldn't.
"But don't stop," Robin continued, his voice lower now, steadier, though something beneath it felt closer to her than it had before. "Don't decide it's over before it starts. We're not done fighting. I'm not done fighting for you." His thumb shifted slightly against her hand, a small, absent motion that felt anything but accidental. "So don't give up on yourself."
Raven stared at him, her thoughts pulling in too many directions at once. His words, his voice, the way he was still holding her like he had no intention of letting go—suddenly the room felt hot.
Robin exhaled, the tension in his shoulders easing just slightly as his gaze dipped, then lifted again toward the laptop. He pushed a few buttons. The file was deleted.
"Why did you do that?" Raven asked breathlessly.
"I don't need it," he answered without hesitation. "I trust you."
Raven felt her hand tighten reflexively before she realized what she was doing. Slowly, she pulled it back, the loss of contact immediate, noticeable in a way that lingered longer than it should have. "I hope you're right," she said.
Robin's mouth curved slightly. "See?" he said. "You said 'hope.'"
Raven shook her head, though it lacked conviction now. "It's a turn of phrase. It means nothing."
"Maybe. Maybe not," he shrugged, staring at her. Neither of them moved. Then, quieter he added, "We'll see."