raven and robin

Sarah flopped down on the couch and started scrolling on her phone. She knew she should be doing her homework, or some after workout stretches but she was in a bad mood tonight and wasn’t about to do anything productive. All the girls in her volleyball team had spent practice gossiping about their boyfriends or the boys that they were into while Sarah just had to smile and listen. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t interested in those types of things, but she could do without the snide remarks they made about her being the only one without a boyfriend or even having a crush yet. She’d watched porn and masturbated, but with the way the other girls talked about guys and sex, she couldn’t understand the hype. Whatever itch it scratched for them just didn’t exist the same way for her.

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

Valia abstained from joining Noah at the arena, still feeling under the weather from her spell gone wrong. Shannon stayed with her while Noah set out. He still had a job to do. He arrived at the arena to find Cyrilo and her entourage joining in with the crowd.“So, you decided to finally come out and see the fights?” Noah asked.