the new titans #86

brought on from headcanon of @momo-whore about raven having chronic pain, since textually raven does state she still has the pain she absorbed when she heals people.

also crowdsourced some of these headcanons with people in the raven discord

Raven’s pain increases a lot when she joins the titans and starts using her healing powers more often. She didn’t notice it as much on Azarath.

the titans take forever to notice raven has chronic pain because she is very good at hiding it and extremely emotionally repressed and doesn’t want to burden other people with her problems (from her POV), so on bad pain days she locks herself in her room and tells people she’s meditating

Don’t know if this is comics but taking from the cartoon: raven’s room is a sacred, do not enter space, because she doesn’t want anyone to see her at first in what she considers a vulnerable and needy state, but even when she gets more comfortable and accepting of herself she does need a place without anyone else to avoid being overwhelmed, since being in pain makes it harder to deal with overwhelming sensory stimuli (and raven is obviously autistic, too Link)

She knits and crochets (Ok this is also from someone else’s headcanon) but on bad pain days she prefers crocheting because you can stop in the middle of a row on crochet but you can’t stop in the middle of a row when knitting, so if she was knitting she wouldn’t be able to stop when she starts hurting too bad.

Vic shows her some stretches to help with her pain. He also is one of the first people who she opens up to about her pain, because Vic also has chronic pain from his amputations and she can sense it.*

Vic is also the person to convince Raven that it’s not shameful to be disabled (she has the internalized ableism of “yeah its OK for OTHER PEOPLE but it’s insulting/taking away resources from people who really need it if **I** am”). Raven eventually uses some mobility aids on bad pain days, but not until we get the white raven outfit and she’s at the stage where she seems to be allowing herself to admit she can experience emotion.

The Titans are already shown to feel bad when Raven has to heal them, because they know it hurts her (temporarily), but I think they knew she suffered after affects they would be even more reluctant to have her heal them.

She gets a purple cane with flowers on it. When the cane falls down enough that the pain chips, Joey repaints it.

Dick helps Raven go shopping for braces for bad pain days and tells her about when he was recovering from various injuries and used the braces to help. Raven is like “Why are you like this why didn’t you just wait and recover.” dick: “look who’s talking” (thinking of many instances she healed the team when it hurts her)

Raven loves drinking tea and the heat helps a lot especially when her hands are really hurting. If she has a project she wants to knit she’ll set up right near the water boiler

When the titans figure out about Raven’s chronic pain they want to take her off the chore wheel (they also want to take vic off the chore wheel but he is like “U guys do know my pain works differently right”) but she’s still too reluctant to accept help so dick like tries to observe her for a week and see which chores she seems least affected by and has her do those. He has to keep making up excuses for why he’s hanging around and watching her so closely and as an empath she can tell he’s lying but she doesn’t call him on it. He can help take care of her as long as he doesn’t admit he’s doing it so she can pretend its not happening :P

Raven’s comfort food is fruit parfaits and on her worst pain days her friends prepare them for her so she can take her mind off it.

Kory will can heat her hands up slightly with her starbolts and give raven heated massages. We’ll say Raven is probably only comfortable with this level of intimacy after Raven and Kory’s skinny dipping adventure (when Kory was trying to help Raven work through her feelings about Dick).