Chapter Text
Jump City had learned how to sound normal again.
The ordinary noise felt stranger than the alarms.
Traffic moved below Titans Tower in its usual restless streams. Horns complained at red lights. A delivery truck backed into the alley beside a bakery with three short beeps that carried oddly well over the water. Somewhere downtown, a construction crew had resumed work on a half-finished office building that had spent the last few months wearing Brotherhood scorch marks like a bruise.
Jump City was not healed. Not entirely. Too many windows still had plywood over them. Too many streets had patches where the asphalt changed color. Too many people paused when something large moved too quickly through the sky.
But the city had started pretending it was ordinary.
Raven understood the usefulness of pretending.
She stood beside the Tower’s common-room windows with her cloak drawn around her shoulders and a mug of tea held between both hands. The mug had a chip near the handle. Cyborg had offered to replace it three times. Raven had refused each time because the chip had no effect on function, and because replacing a thing simply because it looked damaged seemed like an inefficient philosophy to encourage in a tower full of heroes.
The sun had slipped low enough to turn the bay into a sheet of dull orange metal. The light reached through the glass and warmed one side of her face. Raven shifted half an inch out of it.
Behind her, Beast Boy let out a sound of heroic distress.
“No. No, no, no, no. Time out. Absolute betrayal. Bro, I trusted you.”
Cyborg’s laugh rolled across the room. “You trusted me after leaving your queen wide open? Sounds like a you problem.”
“It was a strategic queen. She was bait.”
“She got eaten.”
“Because you fell for the bait wrong.”
Starfire floated upside down above the couch, her hair spilling toward the floor in a bright curtain. She had taken no active part in the chess game except to gasp every time one of the pieces was captured, which meant she had supplied most of its emotional stakes.
“Friend Beast Boy,” she said solemnly, “your small horse has also been defeated.”
Beast Boy leaned over the board. “That was my knight.”
“Yes. The horse who fights with the bravery of a knight.”
“It ran into my rook,” Cyborg said.
“Man, your rook was loitering.”
Robin stood at the kitchen counter with a tablet in one hand and a disassembled communicator spread across a cloth in front of him. He had finished his training review fifteen minutes ago and had moved on to recalibrating the team’s alert bandwidth. Nothing about Robin looked restful, but Raven had long ago accepted that his version of rest involved tools, a task, and the silent belief that no one had asked him to sprint across rooftops.
He glanced up at the chessboard. “Your queen was vulnerable for six moves.”
Beast Boy twisted around in his chair. “Thank you, Captain Encouragement.”
“I’m encouraging you to notice the board.”
“I noticed it. I noticed it was full of enemies.”
Starfire drifted lower, still upside down, and studied the fallen pieces. “Perhaps the queen desired a vacation from battle.”
Beast Boy pointed at her. “See? Star gets it. My pieces have rich inner lives.”
Cyborg folded his arms and leaned back with all the satisfaction of a man who had won before the game ended. “Your pieces are tired of your leadership.”
“My pieces love me.”
“Your pieces filed a complaint.”
Raven took a slow sip of tea.
The warmth touched her tongue, then her throat, then the tight space beneath her ribs that had not quite loosened all day. Chamomile, mint, and a little too much honey. Cyborg had made it while pretending not to make it for her, which meant he had left it near the kettle and announced to the room that somebody had better drink it before good tea went to waste.
Somebody had.
Raven looked at the board from the window. Beast Boy’s position was nearly unsalvageable. His king was boxed behind a ragged line of pieces that had clearly been moved with more enthusiasm than planning. Cyborg’s pieces advanced in clean mechanical pressure.
“Move the bishop,” Raven said.
Beast Boy froze.
Cyborg froze.
Robin’s screwdriver stopped turning.
Starfire gasped softly, as if Raven had just stepped into an ancient duel.
Beast Boy looked over his shoulder. “Are you... helping me?”
“No.” Raven drank again. “I’m shortening this.”
Cyborg narrowed one eye at the board. “Don’t listen to her. She’s trying to make you lose faster.”
“I was already doing that without help.” Beast Boy leaned over the pieces. “Which bishop?”
“The one that can still move.”
“That’s hurtful.”
“It’s also accurate.”
He moved the bishop. Cyborg looked down, then blinked.
Robin’s mouth twitched.
Beast Boy noticed Cyborg’s blink and Robin’s almost-smile. He straightened. “Wait. Was that good?”
“It was inconvenient,” Cyborg said.
Beast Boy placed both hands on the table. “Everybody stay calm. I have discovered chess.”
“You have discovered being told what to do,” Raven said.
“Still counts.”
Starfire clapped. “Wonderful! The horse queen has been avenged.”
“There is no horse queen,” Robin said.
Beast Boy lifted one finger. “There is now.”
Laughter settled over the chessboard again, and Raven let the sound pass around her without stopping it. She did not smile where anyone could see. She allowed one corner of her mouth to soften against the rim of the mug, which was more than enough.
The evening had been good.
No alarms. No emergency frequencies. No strange energy blooming beneath the harbor. Robin had used the word “light patrol” and meant it. Cyborg had cooked something that contained vegetables because Starfire had asked what made human comfort food “comforting” if it did not also prevent nutritional collapse. Beast Boy had complained, eaten three portions, and claimed moral victory because the vegetables had been disguised by noodles.
The Tower smelled faintly of soy sauce, machine oil, tea, and the ocean.
Home had always been a dangerous word. It asked too much of a place. It gave walls moral weight. It made absence sharper.
Raven had learned to use the word carefully.
Still, familiar sounds breathed around her: Cyborg’s chair creaking under his weight, Robin’s small tools clicking against metal, Starfire humming a tune from Tamaran under her breath, Beast Boy whispering threats at a chess piece as if intimidation might improve strategy.
The Tower held all of it.
Raven held the Tower.
Not with magic. Not exactly.
Her powers could move stone, shadow, steel, and a hundred other things most people did not notice until those things moved against them. But rooms had their own currents. Living beings changed the air. Joy brightened. Fear spiked. Anger heated. Grief sank low and heavy, especially when no one named it.
Raven had never needed to reach for those things. They arrived.
After a mission, she could feel the team’s adrenaline hanging in the common room long after the bruises were iced and the reports were written. After an argument, she could feel the residue clinging to corners. After a nightmare, she could tell who had walked the hall before dawn by the shape of the silence they left behind.
She did not invade. She did not pry. She had rules for herself, old ones and newer ones, all built from discipline and fear and a sincere desire not to turn care into trespass.
But empathy did not always ask permission before it gave her weather.
Tonight, the weather was mild.
Cyborg’s satisfaction glowed sturdy and warm. Starfire’s delight sparked and fluttered without edges. Robin’s focus sat tight and bright near the counter, braided with the usual low vigilance he carried even when the Tower was safe. Beast Boy’s mood shifted quickest, green-gold bursts of humor around deeper colors he had once hidden badly and now carried more quietly.
Raven watched the water and let herself catalog those things without touching them.
A manageable exercise.
Almost restful.
“Raven?”
She turned.
Beast Boy had left the chessboard. Cyborg was studying the pieces with the injured dignity of someone who had just discovered his opponent might have a chance. Starfire had righted herself in the air and was offering encouragement to both sides at once.
Beast Boy stood halfway between the couch and the windows, hands in the pockets of his hoodie. He had grown quieter in the past few months. Not silent. Never silent. But quieter in the spaces between jokes. Terra had changed that in him.
No, Raven corrected herself. Terra had revealed that.
“What?” she asked.
He nodded toward the mug. “Tea okay?”
Raven looked down at it. “It’s tea.”
“That bad, huh?”
“It’s fine.”
“Fine from you means either fine or secretly cursed.”
“If it were cursed, you would know.”
“See, that sounds exactly like what a cursed person says right before the tea turns into a bat.”
Raven raised an eyebrow. “Why would I curse tea into a bat?”
“I don’t know. Wizard reasons.”
“Sorceress.”
“Right. Different bat policy.”
The corner of her mouth betrayed her again. Beast Boy noticed. He always noticed when she almost smiled. He had the decency not to celebrate loudly, which was one of the ways Raven knew he had matured.
He moved closer to the glass and looked out over the bay beside her. Not too close. He had learned distance the way some people learned languages: awkwardly at first, then with growing fluency.
“City’s loud tonight,” he said.
“It’s a city.”
“Yeah, but it’s the normal kind of loud.”
Raven glanced at him.
Beast Boy kept his eyes on the water. His reflection in the window looked older than his voice usually sounded. The green of his skin was muted by sunset, his expression caught somewhere between ease and thoughtfulness.
“After everything,” he said, “normal’s kind of weird.”
Raven held the mug tighter. “Normal is usually weird. People only notice after the abnormal tries to destroy them.”
“Pretty sure that’s going on a motivational poster somewhere.”
“It would be a terrible poster.”
“Depends on the font.”
She let silence answer. He accepted it.
The construction noise downtown stopped. For a moment, the whole city seemed to inhale.
Beast Boy tapped one thumb against the seam of his pocket. “I went past her school yesterday.”
Raven did not ask who.
The name stood between them without needing to be summoned.
“I wasn’t trying to,” he said. “Patrol route just went that way. There was a game or something. Big banner. Lots of yelling.”
Raven watched his reflection instead of his face. “Did you see her?”
“No.”
His answer came easily enough to be true. The feeling beneath it did not.
“I didn’t look that hard,” he added.
The sentence told one truth. His grief carried another.
Raven waited.
Beast Boy breathed out through his nose. “I used to think seeing her again would fix something. Like if she remembered enough, or if I said the right thing, or if I made her laugh, then it would all... line up.”
His voice held steady. He had learned how to speak around the bruise without pressing on it.
“And now?” Raven asked.
“Now I think maybe she already told me the answer.”
The sunset made the window too bright to show his eyes clearly.
“She wanted to be who she was,” he said. “Not who I remembered. Not who I needed. Just... her.” He gave a small laugh, but it held no performance. “Kinda rude of her to be right.”
Raven looked down at her tea.
The warmth had faded.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Beast Boy shrugged once. The motion did not dismiss anything. It only made room for it. “Yeah. Me too.”
At the table, Cyborg had been studying the board with dangerous patience.
Then he shouted, “Aha!”
Starfire shouted, “Oh no! The vacation queen!”
Robin said, “That is still not a piece.”
Beast Boy’s mouth tilted. The sound from the room reached him, and he let it.
“I’m okay,” he said.
Raven did not contradict him.
Okay was a flexible word. It could mean whole. It could mean standing. It could mean the wound had become part of the map and no longer needed both hands to cover. Beast Boy had earned his version of okay. Raven could feel the grief still there, but it no longer thrashed.
“I had to let her go,” he said quietly.
Raven heard no bitterness in it.
Only cost.
She nodded once. “That is harder than holding on.”
He looked at her then.
For half a second, his attention sharpened with uncomfortable precision, as if her answer had told him something she had not meant to reveal.
Raven turned back toward the room. “Your king is in danger.”
“My king lives in danger. It keeps him humble.”
“Your king is about to be humbled into extinction.”
Beast Boy hurried back to the table. “Nobody touch anything! Especially you, metal man.”
Cyborg grinned. “Too late.”
The chess game collapsed five moves later in a storm of accusations, laughter, and Starfire’s formal farewell to the fallen horse queen.
Raven finished the cold tea because waste was illogical and because moving to the sink required walking through too much cheer.
The cheer did not hurt.
Raven almost wished it did.
Unpleasant things were easy to guard against. Fear had edges. Anger had heat. Pain had gravity. Joy was more difficult. Joy entered through cracks, expanded, and loosened doors.
Raven had spent years building doors that held.
After Trigon, everyone had looked at her as if the doors had become unnecessary.
They had meant well.
The world had not ended. Her father was gone. The prophecy had failed to own her. Her friends had brought her back into herself.
Relief had filled the Tower so brightly it had nearly hurt.
Raven had accepted the celebration because refusing would have made everyone worry. She had meditated. She had resumed missions. She had rebuilt her routines. She had answered when called, fought when needed, rested when appropriate, eaten what Cyborg put in front of her, and corrected Beast Boy’s grammar when his jokes became structurally offensive.
Recovery had looked exactly like responsibility.
Therefore, she had concluded she was recovering.
The conclusion remained logical.
Mostly.
“Raven?” Robin’s voice cut gently across the room.
She looked over.
He had put down the communicator. His mask made his expression difficult for strangers, but Raven had never needed eyes to read him. Robin’s concern was a precise instrument, quiet until it was not.
“Light patrol in twenty,” he said. “You still taking east side?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
Robin kept the question gentle. Cyborg’s laughter lowered by a degree. Starfire’s attention flicked toward Raven and away again, polite enough to pretend it had not. Beast Boy kept his eyes on the chessboard, one hand resting beside his fallen king.
Four friends noticing should have been harmless.
Raven’s chest tightened anyway.
“I said yes,” she replied.
Robin accepted the answer with a nod. “East side has been quiet. Keep it that way.”
“An inspiring strategy.”
“That’s why I’m team leader.”
Motion returned to the room.
Raven set her mug in the sink and let the ceramic click once against the metal basin. The sound was sharper than she expected. Her shoulders tried to rise toward her ears. She stopped them before anyone saw.
Twenty minutes was more than enough time to meditate.
Not a full cycle. Not even close. But enough to smooth the top layer before flight.
She moved toward the hall.
Beast Boy’s voice followed her. “Hey, Rae.”
She stopped because ignoring him would have drawn more attention than answering. “What?”
He tossed one of the captured pawns into the air and caught it. “After patrol, rematch. You coach me, I destroy Cy, history remembers us.”
“History would ask for a better witness.”
“That means yes.”
“It means you have invented your own language again.”
“Still counts.”
Raven left before her mouth could soften a third time.
The hallway outside the common room was dimmer and cooler. The Tower’s walls absorbed sound well, but not completely. Laughter followed her in muffled waves. The farther she walked, the more the waves thinned.
By the time she reached her room, only the hum of the building remained.
Raven’s door opened at the touch of her power. Her room waited exactly as she had left it: bed made, books aligned, meditation candles unlit, curtains drawn enough to keep the sunset from crowding the walls. Her mirror hung silent. The air smelled faintly of old paper and sandalwood.
She stepped inside and let the door close.
The quiet reached her too quickly.
For a moment, Raven stood just past the threshold with her hands at her sides and did not move.
Then she exhaled.
The breath came out uneven.
She frowned at it.
Raven could name no reason for that.
Her body had been inconvenient lately. Sleep had been lighter than usual. Meditation had required more effort. Her appetite had become abstract. None of these details constituted a crisis. Bodies changed in response to stress, and the last year had provided an excessive amount of stress.
She was handling it.
Raven crossed to the center of the room, lowered herself into a seated position, and folded her legs beneath her cloak. The familiar posture helped. The floor was steady. Her hands found their places. Her spine straightened.
Inhale.
Hold.
Release.
Azarath Metrion Zinthos.
The mantra settled into the room, soundless and old.
Inhale.
Hold.
Release.
Azarath Metrion Zinthos.
Her thoughts arranged themselves in disciplined lines. The common room receded. The city dimmed. Her awareness narrowed to breath, pulse, the cool fabric against her wrists, the faint vibration of the Tower’s systems running through the floor.
Then Beast Boy’s grief moved through memory like a hand brushing a bruise.
I had to let her go.
Raven opened her eyes.
The candles were still unlit.
She had not meant to think of Terra. She had not meant to think of anyone. Meditation was not avoidance. It was order. She knew the difference.
She closed her eyes again.
Inhale.
Hold.
Release.
Azarath Metrion Zinthos.
Robin’s concern entered next, sharp and controlled.
You sure?
Care, not accusation. Concern folded into operational confirmation.
Her hands tightened against her knees.
Inhale.
Hold.
Release.
Starfire’s warmth brushed against the edges of thought. Cyborg’s steady presence. The city’s noise. The old echo of her father’s voice, not words now, never words if she could help it, only the remembered weight of being watched from inside her own blood.
Raven’s eyes opened again.
The room had not changed.
Her breathing had.
She looked at the clock.
Six minutes had disappeared somewhere between the hallway, the door, and the first failed breath.
Fourteen minutes until patrol.
Enough time.
She lit the candles with a thought.
Black energy curled outward, obedient and precise. The wicks caught, one after another, small flames standing straight in the still air. Raven watched them until her pulse slowed.
The difficulty was not danger, and that distinction mattered.
Danger had signs. Corruption had signs. Magical contamination had signs. Possession had signs. Raven had spent her life studying signs because the cost of missing them had once been the world.
This was fatigue.
Fatigue could be managed.
She closed her eyes.
This time, the mantra held.
Mostly.
Patrol was quiet.
Robin had been right about the east side. The warehouses along the water sat locked and dark. A few late workers crossed parking lots with shoulders hunched against the wind. Two teenagers tried to climb a fence behind an old shipping office, saw Raven descend without a word, and immediately discovered urgent business elsewhere.
The city did not need every foolish choice turned into a lesson.
She drifted above the rooftops with her cloak spread around her. The air was colder up here. It pressed against her face and cleared the last of the Tower warmth from her skin.
For the first half hour, the work helped.
Patrol had structure. Move. Observe. Listen. Report. Repeat. Raven liked work that required attention without conversation.
At 8:42, Robin checked in from midtown.
“All clear.”
Cyborg followed from the bridge. “Clear here too, unless you want me to arrest a guy for crimes against parallel parking.”
Starfire’s voice brightened through the channel. “The park is peaceful. I have assisted a lost dog and received many grateful licks.”
Beast Boy came last. “South side clear. One raccoon owes me money.”
Robin paused. “Why?”
“Personal reasons.”
Raven touched two fingers to her communicator. “East side clear.”
Her voice sounded normal.
Good.
She landed on the roof of a low building overlooking the docks and let her cloak settle. The bay moved black below, cut by strips of reflected city light. Farther out, Titans Tower rose from the island, windows glowing.
From this distance, the Tower looked smaller than it was.
Almost fragile.
Raven knew better. The foundation was reinforced. The systems were redundant. Cyborg had upgraded the security grid twice after the Brotherhood and once more because he had a dream that someone hacked the refrigerator.
Still, the Tower stood alone in the water with all its lights turned toward the city.
A watchtower.
A home.
Both demanded vigilance.
Raven’s communicator crackled softly.
No voice followed.
Static only.
The sound slipped under her skin.
For one impossible second, the rooftop vanished. Her vision filled with red sky, broken stone, heat without flame, the terrible pressure of a destiny everyone had named before she had been old enough to reject it.
Then the dock lights returned.
Raven’s hand was clenched around the communicator.
The plastic casing creaked.
She loosened her grip at once.
Nothing had happened.
A flicker of memory was not an event. A stress response was not a prophecy. Her mind had produced an image, and she had dismissed it. That was control.
Her breath came too shallow.
She drew it in slowly.
Azarath Metrion Zinthos.
The words steadied the edges.
Her communicator crackled again.
This time Beast Boy’s voice came through. “Raven? You there?”
She pressed the button. “Yes.”
“Cool. I thought your signal dropped.”
“It didn’t.”
A pause.
“Right,” he said. “Good.”
Wind blurred his end of the channel. He was moving quickly, probably as a bird. Beast Boy had become better at leaving pauses alone, but not perfect.
“You still clear?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Same. Super clear. Aggressively clear. Criminals are really letting me down tonight.”
“File a complaint.”
“I did. The raccoon took it.”
Despite herself, Raven’s shoulders eased by a fraction.
Glass broke in the alley below.
Raven turned.
Three figures scattered beneath her, one clutching a bag, another halfway through the smashed window of an electronics shop. No supervillain. No magic. No threat larger than a clumsy burglary.
Her feet left the roof.
Her cloak caught the air and carried her down in silence. The thief with the bag saw her first and made a strangled sound. The one in the window tried to reverse direction and got stuck. The third raised both hands before Raven landed.
“Don’t,” she said.
They didn’t.
The police arrived eleven minutes later. Robin checked in once during the handoff. Raven answered. Her voice remained normal. Her report remained concise. No one had reason to ask anything else.
By the time she returned to the Tower, late-night quiet had settled across the common room.
Cyborg had left a covered plate under one of his overbuilt thermal lids on the counter. Starfire had arranged a blanket over the back of the couch in a way that suggested she had either folded it or wrestled it into submission. Robin sat at the main console, reviewing the final patrol notes. Beast Boy was on the couch with one leg hooked over the armrest, flipping through a comic without appearing to read it.
He looked up when Raven entered.
“East side survive you?” he asked.
“Barely.”
Robin turned from the console. “Everything good with the shop?”
“Three arrests. Minor property damage. No injuries.”
“Good work.”
Raven gave a small nod and moved toward the hall.
“Food,” Cyborg called from somewhere under the console.
She stopped.
A panel near Robin’s chair slid open, and Cyborg emerged on a mechanic’s creeper with a flashlight between his teeth. He removed it and pointed toward the kitchen. “Plate. Counter. Yours.”
“I ate dinner.”
“You ate air and one noodle.”
“That is inaccurate.”
“Two noodles.”
Robin did not look up from the screen. “It was closer to one.”
Raven stared at him.
He kept typing.
Beast Boy lifted his comic. “I’m staying out of this because I value my bones.”
“No, you’re not,” Cyborg said. “You counted too.”
“Only because I was impressed. One noodle is, like, monk-level restraint.”
“I’m not hungry,” Raven said.
Cyborg’s expression softened in the way he usually tried to hide behind volume. “Then save it. But don’t let it sit out all night.”
Raven could have argued. She could say she was capable of deciding when to eat. She could say she did not need monitoring. She could say the team’s attention was unnecessary.
Each answer would have been true. None felt worth the space it would take.
“I’ll put it away,” she said.
Cyborg accepted that as victory, because he was generous when he won.
Raven crossed to the kitchen. Beneath the thermal lid, the plate held rice, vegetables, and tofu in a sauce Cyborg had learned not to call “Raven-safe” where she could hear him. Steam no longer rose from it, but the food had not gone cold.
She set the lid aside and lifted the plate.
Her hand trembled.
Only once.
A small tremor ran through her fingers. Barely visible. Easy to blame on fatigue, cold, or the awkward angle of picking up a plate with one hand.
The black edge of her power flickered around the ceramic before she meant to summon it.
The plate lifted half an inch.
Then dipped.
Raven caught it with both hands before it struck the counter.
Ceramic touched stone too hard.
The common room went quiet.
Raven stood with the plate held against the counter and felt every eye turn toward her.
The silence lasted less than two seconds.
Beast Boy broke it with theatrical horror. “Please tell me the tofu survived.”
Cyborg snorted.
Robin looked back at the screen too quickly for it to be natural.
Starfire, newly returned from the hallway, lowered the hand she had lifted toward Raven and clasped it with the other instead.
Raven did not turn around.
“It’s fine,” she said.
Her answer struck harder than she intended.
Beast Boy’s comic rustled behind her. “Good. Because if dinner goes down, Cy’s gonna make us hold a funeral, and I am not emotionally ready to say goodbye to rice.”
Cyborg played along. “That rice had dreams.”
“College. Family. Maybe a nice condo.”
Starfire’s voice entered softly. “Then Raven should honor the rice by eating it later.”
A small sound escaped Cyborg, more breath than laugh.
Raven looked down at the plate.
Her fingers had steadied.
The brief flare of power was gone.
No danger. No damage. No reason for concern.
She transferred the food into a container, placed it in the refrigerator, and closed the door with careful precision.
“I’m going to meditate,” she said.
No one objected.
Their restraint almost made it worse.
Raven left the common room with her cloak drawn close.
The hallway stretched ahead, dim and familiar. Her room waited at the end. Quiet. Controlled. Empty enough to be safe.
Behind her, the common room remained gentle on purpose.
No whispering. No urgent conference. No dramatic footsteps following her.
Only the low murmur of her friends resuming an ordinary night so she would not have to carry their fear on top of her own.
Raven reached her door and stopped with her palm hovering inches from the panel.
For reasons she refused to examine, the kindness of that restraint pressed harder than the silence had.
She entered her room.
The door closed.
In the common room, Beast Boy stared at the hallway for a long moment after Raven disappeared.
Cyborg slid out from under the console again. The humor had faded from his face, leaving the older-brother worry he usually kept hidden until someone was bleeding or refusing a scan.
Starfire hugged the folded blanket against her chest. Robin’s hands rested still above the keyboard.
No one spoke first.
The Tower hummed around them.
Finally, Beast Boy set the comic down.
“She’s been doing that,” he said.
Robin turned his chair slightly. “Doing what?”
Beast Boy looked toward the hallway again.
“Acting like almost dropping the world doesn’t count if she catches it before anyone sees.”
No one laughed.
Outside, the city kept sounding normal.
Inside Titans Tower, one small shift had become loud enough for the people who loved Raven to hear.
And in her room, Raven sat down to meditate with both hands folded tight in her lap, telling herself that nothing had happened because nothing had broken.
The candles lit one by one.
The first flame stood straight.
The second flickered.
The third took two tries.