Title: Nataraja
Author: Katarik
Fandom: Animated Teen Titans
Rating: PG
Pairing: Slade/Robin

Summary: There is more to dancing than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
Disclaimers: DC Comics owns the original characters.
Archive: Certainly, if you want it. Merely inform me first.
Note: Title from the name of the statues of Shiva dancing, the Shiva Nataraja. Shiva is the Hindu god of creative destruction and of dance; according to some legends, Shiva's dancing created the world.
Third theme: Dance.

*---*---*---*---*

Starfire has seen more things than people think she has, especially her friends. They forget that she is a princess of Tamaran, and that she had been a slave. She has seen strange courtship rituals and the gloriously terrible beauty in bloodshed. She sees Slade and Robin, though she does not wish to acknowledge it.

Robin is her friend. It hurts something in her -- Raven might call it her heart -- to see such a beauteous, kind friend as Robin caught in l'galla bonds.

Even slaves had never worn l'galla bonds. Only priests sworn to dance with their Gods bore l'galla bonds, to keep their dancing fierce and to keep them tied to their chosen servitude.

Sometimes the priests' dances had been fights, and people had died.

Robin's bonds are of that nature, she thinks, and she hopes very much that the l'galla will not pull him closer to his partner; Slade is one of the dancers who would kill.

-- Finis

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