RobStar Week 2025, Day 6 - Other Titan's POV
(The TT universe ships RobStar and I was delighted to explore that a little bit in this one.
People's emotions weren't hidden to her. She was an empath. It was "her thing". It was how she'd known Starfire wasn't mindlessly furious when they'd first met her, but terrified out of her mind.
It was also why the exuberant alien could be exhausting to be around, with how much and how intensely she projected her emotions outward.
So she knew something was going on between Starfire and Robin pretty quickly.
It wasn't just the unbearably loud happiness that Starfire felt whenever she was around Robin, no, it was that all of the alien princess's emotions were more blaring around their leader. She was always more worried, more sad, more angry, more frustrated, more everything when Robin was involved.
Eventually, within about a month or two after settling in to the Tower with everyone else (and boy was that an adjustment story of its own), she learned how to filter out Starfire's intense Tamaranian emotions like background white noise, got used to them.
Meanwhile, Robin had decent enough mental shields that he didn't really leak out much, so his awkward feelings for Starfire—and she knew he had them, because of course empath—didn't really bother her.
Well, up until she accidentally formed a mind bond with him.
If she'd thought her mental clarity was agitated by Starfire's outward feelings, Robin's were even more aggravating, because they slipped straight through Raven's mental shields through their bond to project inside her head and rattle around in there.
At first she had tried to ignore it but when it became clear that Robin had no idea he was projecting (or picking up things from her), she had to take him aside and have a very long conversation about mental boundaries and privacy and keeping things inside his head as much as he could.
That had been awkward. In several fashions.
Raven did not care to repeat the experience.
Despite Raven's many complaints about his observation skills (and general level of intelligence) Beast Boy was not stupid. He knew there was a thing going on between Robin and Starfire that they didn't want to acknowledge, but that was plainly obvious to anyone who had working eyes and ears.
You see, when you had basically the entire animal kingdom at your disposal inside your DNA, it came with certain sensory perks. Not just sharper and better vision and hearing, but smell for example, infrared signals, or that cool thing sharks had where they could sense the electric fields of their prey. Beast Boy couldn't always control when they partially activated, so he'd just kind of learned to be used to hearing, seeing, smelling, and sensing things that were technically invisible to the human sensory experience.
Turned out a lot of freaky things happened in a human body when it was attracted to another member of the species.
So yeah, he could smell the pheromones and hormones they gave off sometimes. Which was really gross and felt super personal and like he was some kind of creepy voyeur for being able to tell exactly when they were horny for each other.
...Having roommates as a superpowered shape-shifter sucked sometimes.
Cyborg didn't need any fancy superpowers or extrasensory perception to know exactly what was going on between Robin and Starfire. (Though admittedly his biometric sensors did help with picking up the clues—slightly dilated eyes, faster heartbeat, adrenal gland activation, things like that.)
He'd called it day one, within minutes of meeting them.
The moment Starfire had kissed him, Robin was a goner. Cyborg had been surprised he hadn't seen literal hearts floating up above the kid's head, because the dazed confusion Robin'd had sitting there on the ground staring after her after she'd pushed him said everything.
And the, "I have to find out if she's a threat," sounded fake as hell even without his cybernetic brain reading the distracted notes in his tone.
He'd seen enough fledgling high school crushes in his day to recognize the tell-tale signs.
So yeah. He'd known they liked each other forever.
Boy was it aggravating watching them dance around it though.
The blushing, the hidden whispers, the averted eyes, the cheerful banter that was flirting without knowing they were flirting, playing "I'm not looking at you", it was the whole package. Cyborg sometimes felt like he was on one of those teen drama shows just waiting in the wings for the leads to finally kiss.
If he still had hair, he'd want to rip it out.
"So I'll... see you later then, I guess," Robin coughed awkwardly, rubbing a hand behind his head.
"Indeed," Starfire said, seemingly unable to make eye contact with him.
She departed first, and he spent a very long time staring at the closed door after she left before heading out as well.
There was a lingering something in the air that all three of the others at the Titans' kitchen table felt as the two exited the room.
"So..." Beast Boy said, the first to pipe up and break the awkward silence. "They're a thing, right? Like, they got something going on there."
"Oh, they are down so bad," Cyborg agreed, taking a miserable sip of his coffee.
"Totally," Raven added in her flat monotone.
"Oh good!" Beast Boy said, shoulders deflating in relief. "I thought it was just me that had noticed."
Cyborg shook his head. "Nope," he said. "They're like the world's worst kept open secret."
"I can tell what love feels like by proxy just being around them," Raven moaned.
"When do you think they'll actually confess?" Beast Boy wondered.
"Ugh, who knows?" Raven grumbled, rubbing her temples. "Can't come soon enough if you ask me."
"I'd say five seasons and a movie, if we're going by television rules," Cyborg quipped, taking a large gulp of his coffee.
Beast Boy buried his face flat on the table with outstretched arms. "This is agony," he complained.
"Tell me about it," the other two muttered.
