Summary: A new and minor foe with some not so minor toys causes the Titans, Raven particularly, endless trouble, for though a sorceress the dark Titan may be, love magick is a new and rather disturbing matter.
Rating: M (R) for lots of silliness, bad writing, and sexual stuff.
Author's Note: Um, yeah... don't kill me folks. Explanations and excuses at the bottom.
Disclaimer: I'm too poor to update regularly.
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Prelude: A Series of Unfortunate Events
"How do we undo this curse?" Raven asked in as cold and clipped a tone as she could manage. When the girl lounging on the opposite side of the table smirked cattily, Raven mustered her most scalding glare, her anger brewing like thunder.
"It's not a curse; it's a charm," the young woman replied, her voice light and teasing, as if she spoke with friends.
Raven, scowling blackly, and Robin standing solid and forbidding at her side, were feeling far from friendly towards the juvenile delinquent.
"How. Do we. Undo it." Raven spoke slowly, breaking off in fragments, her patience with the snarky female obviously waning as the interrogation table crawled with her dark energy and danced in place.
Unperturbed, the girl smiled brightly, batting impossibly long lashes and releasing a tinkling laugh, shaking her picturesque dark curls back from her shoulders. "You can't undo a charm like mine. You may not hold my particular powers in high regard, but I am certainly better than that." Sighing when Raven only frowned harder, the young felon pouted prettily. "Oh, very well then. It can't be undone, but it will wear off, once it's run its course. Well, so long as you don't exacerbate it."
Robin, speaking for the first time since entering the room, leveled his cool, unwavering gaze on the simpering girl and asked tonelessly, "And how might one… exacerbate your 'charm'?"
Giving the masked hero a blinding smile, the girl in prison orange perked up and pointed her wide blue eyes in his direction, the better to seduce him with. "Well, by acting on it of course."
Frowning, Raven attempted to redirect the girl's attention towards her. "You mean…?"
Deflating visibly when Robin continued to remain stone faced and unaffected, the girl slouched back in her chair and looked sullenly at Raven. "Yes, of course I mean that. So long as you don't do that, the charm should wear off by tomorrow morning."
Raven's shoulders slumped in great relief. She could handle this. If all it took was not doing that, she should have no problem—
"Oh, and one other thing."
Tension corded Raven's shoulders all over again, and she narrowed a wary glare on the troublemaking witch. "What?"
Smiling with smug satisfaction, the comely brunette raised a hand to signal the guards outside the interrogation room. "The charm's potency will increase the closer it draws to expiration. Just wanted you to be prepared."
Raven stared, wide-eyed and slack jawed at the girl's back as she was led from the room by her female escort. It would get worse? No. Oh, no.
Robin, dropping the grim façade as soon as they were alone, turned to the shell-shocked Raven with a sympathetic smile and a hand meant to comfort on her shoulder. "C'mon, Raven, you know what they say. It's always darkest just before dawn."
Left eyelid twitching, the sorceress shot her companion an acid look and immediately shifted to a levitating lotus position, murmuring her mantra with heated intensity.
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This all started because of her. She called herself Venus—as in the Roman goddess of love. And given the riot she'd started in the middle of the mall, you might have almost thought she was.
The scene we came upon was nothing less than startling. Men of various ages fighting and yelling and posturing for her attention, all while she posed sexily on the elevated heart-shaped throne of the Valentine's Day display, smirking like the cat who ate the canary. She was loving every minute of it.
Robin immediately rushed into the fray to attempt some damage control, and Starfire and I would have joined him if not for what happened next. Beastboy and Cyborg took one look at Venus, turned to each other, and began proclaiming their respectively greater love for her. It was like watching them argue meat vs. tofu, but way weirder.
Star tried reasoning with them for a few minutes, but when they continued to ignore her, she tossed them apart—literally tossed them. Beastboy didn't get up out of the fountain when he landed.
I, meanwhile, was trying to figure out how this pretty, young airheaded hedgewitch was wreaking all this havoc. It was obvious to me that there was some kind of enchantment working behind this mess, but I doubted if she had half the ability. If it were Jinx, I might suspect she'd pulled off some complicated spell, but this girl was a complete amateur. She had to be using some magickal tool to pull off anything on this scale.
Experimentally, I heaved a nearby trash receptacle towards her. So distracted was she by the melodrama playing out at her feet that she only just looked up in time to leap from the throne and out of the way with a very girly shriek.
When she moved, the gauzy outer robes she was wearing separated and I glimpsed something wrapped round her midsection, the mall lights dazzling off the ornate metalwork. It took me only a moment to recognize it, and when I did, I knew we were in potentially very deep trouble here.
Shouting urgently for Robin, I located him quickly where he was trying to keep a Starbucks worker and a middle-aged man in a powersuit from butting heads. I pulled him away from them; if we didn't do something fast, we'd have much, much worse on our hands. A city of lovelorn men and scorned women was no welcome prospect for any superhero.
I explained the situation quickly, and was grateful he didn't question me skeptically. Instead, like he does best, he went into action. Phasing, I brought us both to the top of the garbage-littered platform, alighting beside the toppled throne.
She caught me by surprise as soon as Robin stepped away from me, leaping upon me from where she'd hidden herself behind a tier of pink, red and white balloons. We tumbled to the platform landing, her straddling my waist as she strained against my grasp on her wrists, scrabbling to reach my face with her fingernails.
"Coldest fires, burning low; deepest passion shall you know. Beset by harbingers of bliss; gift of Aphrodite's kiss!" She sang the rhyme with conviction, and I saw the glee in her eyes as I felt the invisible bonds of the spell taking hold of me.
At the time, I didn't know what she'd done. I had no prior experience with love magick.
The next thing I knew, she'd pressed her lips harshly against my cheek. Making a noise of outrage, I grabbed her shoulders and threw her forcefully off of me, feeling an immense satisfaction when she crashed into the balloon tier.
Robin was upon her in an instant, snapping her thin wrists into a pair of cuffs as she moaned pitifully about her head.
Forcing her to her feet, Robin reached for his communicator to alert the authorities that the culprit had been apprehended, but I stopped him with a raised hand. Climbing to my feet, I stood in front of them, eyeing the sullen witchling distastefully. "Wait, Robin; we have to get the Girdle off of her, or else we'll just have a repeat performance in the city lockup."
Nodding and voicing his affirmative, Robin gruffly tried to pry the ancient relic from Venus's waist, but to no avail.
Regaining some of her cheer and confidence, Venus lifted her chin into the air and gave her hair a toss. "That will never work, silly boy. Only those men with the blood of the immortals have the strength to remove the Girdle, by the gods of Olympus's own decree."
"I do not think these gods of Olympus accounted for the strength of a Tamaranean woman." Starfire settled to the ground at my side, her face set in pique and determination. Bracing herself a foot from Venus, she gripped the top of the Girdle with both hands and pulled, the muscles in her arms straining, eyes glowing that eerie emerald. In a moment, the Girdle opened and came away from Venus's slender waist, sending Starfire staggering back a few steps with her own momentum.
Venus stared at the redheaded alien in abject horror, then from her to me. When her baby blues landed on me, they hardened like ice chips, spite and anger making an ugly mask of her delicate features. "You! You will feel the wrath of Venus." Her mouth twisted in a waspish sneer, and she brought her cuffed hands to her face, pressing her fingertips to her pursed lips and blowing on them. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
Remembering the spell she'd sung, I eyed her warily, raising a blacklit hand in case she tried anything.
Robin, doing us all a favor, pinched a muscle on her shoulder and she collapsed, limp and unconscious, into his arms.
With the Girdle no longer in Venus's possession, its affects waned quickly and the fights were ended shortly, and Venus hauled away soon thereafter by the authorities.
Thinking Venus's particularly annoying brand of trouble passed, we collected the bemused Cyborg and Beastboy and went home.
And learned very quickly how hellish her fury was.
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AN Pt2: Urm, yeaaah. I'll make my excuses for lack of updating on Awkward Entanglements by saying I've been doing little besides sleeping and working. The only reason I put this one up and risked all your anger was because Em insisted I do a Valentine's piece when she read this. This was actually going to be posted on V Day, but ff(.)net decided to hate me for a week, and this is the first chance I've really had to upload it since. So happy belated V Day.
Thanks to everybody. :) You guys friggin rock.
Special thanks go out to, of course, Em-chan, my brainclone and god-mama. To Jurodan, the Betaman, though he didn't have anything to do with this piece of crap; he just rocks. And also, a new one, to Dust Traveller, awesome writer and extremely cool guy who convinced me I don't suck at writing romance after all. If you haven't read his What Evil Lurks or Stone Heart... for shame.
Tootles! ;p Mwah.