Chapter 7: Cleansing/Release

Keith went back to Titan Tower the next morning, a colossal hangover hammering at his temples. His facepainted blindfold was horribly messy, and the single zipper on his body suit, on the back of his neck, was partially undone. When he walked into Titan Tower, the other Titans were about to ask what happened, until Keith rose a hand. "Hangover. I need coffee before I break something." And he proceeded to not talk to anyone for the next 3 hours until his hangover was gone.

Once he was capable of functioning, business, again, went as usual.

~~~Timeskip to Constantine being ready to do the ritual~~~

Keith stood to the side of the training room, his weight shifted to his right hip and his arms crossed. "So how is this ritual gonna work, John?"

Constantine scratched the side of his head a little. "Well, I have to recite a sort of chant, and then I have to burn a few different incences, and then...oh. I forgot about this part." He sucked his breath through his teeth. "I need another person to provide an untainted or un-influenced soul. A true soul of a person. And it must be a soul older than the soul being cleansed."

The eyes of all the Titans turned to Keith. He shrugged. "Okay, fine. Any side-effects I should know about?" John's face went pensive, before he asked all the Titans except for Raven to leave.

John blew a heavy breath. "You have already seen Raven's soul. That's how we are here today. A noteworthy side-effect of this ritual is that both people involved will have seen and truly experienced the other person's soul." He paused. "Keith, if you go through with this, you likely won't be able to hide your past. At least, not from Raven." Keith stiffened severely here.

An aura of denial, frustration, and just overall tension radiated from Keith. He abruptly stood up and retreated to his broom closet room, wrapping himself in his hammock and locking the door behind him. He needed to think about his choices here. And do so extensively. He shut off both his hearing and his sight, murmuring an old Gaelic meditation rite to himself. He got out of his hammock and sat crosslegged on the floor, assuming a classic meditation posture.

He quickly found himself in his own mind, where he could destroy and scream all he wanted to eventually get it out of his system. He was in the midst of this when a being floated down from nowhere.

They looked almost like an elf, but their gender was completely undiscernable. Their voice, which they began using shortly after floating down, was smooth and velvet-y, but at a perfect midrange that implied no bend towards a specific pitch range. "Wielder of the Tri-Color Power Ring. Hear me." A pressure came over Keith's mind and he was forced to sit down in his own mindscape. "You wield the responsibility of the power of rage, and you are destined to hold the power of will and the power of hope in combination. You must embrace vulnerability, if you are to ever find your own hope."

Keith, the angry PTSD man that he is, growled. "Like hell I will. The last time I was vulnerable, my dad only broke me a few more times. Vulnerability is weakness for a Kelvin." The way he spoke about it, was almost sarcastic, but not quite. "Vulnerability is how an abusive fuck of a father can manipulate a broken and shattered child to allow themselves to be broken and shattered. Fuck that shit." The more he bled more of it into his words, the more memories began streaming into his brain.

"You're a freak! Your mother birthed a fucking mistake! Killing your mother was the only payment I would accept for your worthless arse!" The words rang heavily and loudly in his mind, like the tolling of a church bell. Brief sound bites of snaps and cracks, and laughter, and the cries and screams of a young Keith rang further through the cavern that was Keith's mind.

The being inside the Power Ring began speaking again. "Allow others to share this burden. Allow others to allow you to hope for the future. You can't hope to burden all of this by yourself for much longer." The voice, the screaming, the crying, the laughter, the cracks, the snaps, the sound of a knife stabbing into someone, the sound of burning and cutting, all of it slowly faded away, until it was just Keith and the being, accompanied by silence.

Keith sighed, opening his eyes to his broom closet. He stood up and left it, ignoring the other Titans and gunning for the training room. He locked it behind him. Raven and John were there, still waiting for him. Keith was the first to speak. "Raven...whatever you see, whatever you feel from my soul's anguish...keep it between us. Please. At least until I say so." Her face went serious, and she nodded, her short purple hair bobbing with the nod slightly.

John nodded before he set about preparations. "I need you both to lay your right hand, palm-first, flat on the other person's forehead. This ensures that the souls meet and interact."

Keith, his hands clammy from what he was about to do, rose a shaky hand to rest on Raven's forehead. She saw the shake of his hand and took a deep breath, preparing herself to see Keith's trauma laid bare for her eyes only. She calmly laid her hand on his forehead.

The instant she did, they both mentally checked out from their respective mortal coils. Keith saw the same that he did before, but the more time he spent in there, he was able to watch Trigon's tendril in her soul fade and dissolve.

On Raven's end, she felt as though she was watching a horror movie. She watched Keith's soul, as a young Keith's metahuman powers manifested and sent him blind and mute slowly over time. She watched Keith's father murder his mother in cold blood and burn her body to cinders in a firepit. She watched Keith's limbs be broken again and again, snapped and twisted and dislocated over and over again by his sick and twisted father. She watched the slow cycle of the nasty circular scar on Keith's neck be made. She saw the tallies made in Keith's back, two sides of the chart, one for his cries and one for his screams. She saw Keith teach himself how to fight on the rare occasions that he wasn't broken and misshapen. She watched Keith go beg a neighbor for help only for the neighbor to not understand his mute pleas and move on. She watched him discover his sight and his speech, though independent as they were. She watched as Keith's father was finally taken to prison to rot for all time. Raven then watched the late teenager rush himself through all the years of school he missed and live on the streets alone. She watched him flee his memories, bound for Gotham. She watched Blindside be born. She watched every battle Blindside had ever had. She saw everything, right up until he got his new skeleton.

It was then, that Keith and Raven were both slowly sucked back into their own beings. Keith's initial reaction was complete silence. Raven, usually so stoic and emotionless, felt Trigon's absence from her being and felt safe to do what she desperately felt she needed to: She hugged Keith. What were already weak walls, crumbled to rocks and pebbles and Keith cried into her shoulder, releasing 20 years of pain and sorrow into a blue cloak. Constantine tactfully cast a silence spell on the outside of the room and teleported away so as to not be intrusive.

Raven just held the weeping Irishman, his crying subsiding slowly into the shallow hiccups and the soggy cheeks that happen at the end of a big cry. His hands clutched her cloak for dear life, his chest heaving for breath and for the crying to stop.

He slowly extracted himself from her arms and wiped his eyes with his knuckles, giving no shits about his facepaint that was running down his face. "I really need tear-proof facepaint." He half-heartedly joked. She softly chuckled and shook her head, feeling clearer in her head than she ever had.

"Keith...thank you for helping me cleanse my soul. And...thank you for trusting me with your trauma. You won't regret it, I promise." He smiled, giving in to a need to comfort him and gave a small kiss to the top of his head.

He nodded slightly. "Thank you for accepting my trauma. And for being someone I can trust with it." His pale, pasty Irishman face went slightly pink at her comforting gesture.

The silence spell then ended, and the other Titans barreled into the room.