Discoveries
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A/N: Not really sure where this came from. My Muse never gives me answers, just more plot-bunnies. This time it was coated with a citrus-flavored glaze.
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Quiet invested the small house, the peaceful, uninhabited quiet that descends when those who give a residence life are absent. She knew he had no pets. That had been one of his uncle's rules that got strictly enforced, a rule which he had casually mentioned once without thinking about it. She suppressed a giggle over that thought. Engaging his mouth while his brain was still out of gear was a habit of his, one that alternately irked and delighted her. He could be a total pain in the ass, and then turn around in the very next minute and do or say something that would send such a warm flush racing over her skin that it made it hard to breathe.
Shaking the cobwebs loose, she entered and carefully closed the back door behind her, the special mesh of her black gloves making no noise and leaving no trace. The same mesh covered the rest of her body, preventing the possibility of her leaving some telltale behind. (The odd, stray pink hair, maybe? No, that would not do.) Picking the lock (Hah! Lock. Right. Her tutors at the H.I.V.E. Academy would have sneered at it in disdain.) had taken all of seven seconds. She knew he'd only been in the house for four days, and the previous owners hadn't bothered with an alarm system. He hadn't gotten around to getting one installed, either. Not that she thought he ever would, since he'd left his apartment just as vulnerable, and he'd lived there for over two years. Normally, a hero as inattentive and scatterbrained as that wouldn't last too long. She figured he must've been gifted with all the luck she was missing.
Just in case, she extracted a small and highly classified device from a hidden pocket, and used it to scan the house. The only remotely active electronic things it picked up were the stereo system, three clocks, and a microwave oven.
Ducky.
She made a quick-but-careful circuit of the house: laundry/pantry/mudroom; eat-in kitchen; some little nook-type thing that might've been intended as a very small dining room, but which was instead piled high with boxes; living room, with a tiny half-bath off one side and the front door opposite; a short hall; and two small bedrooms, one of which contained his bed and dresser and access to a microscopic bath, the other playing the role of catch-all room. All told, the house might've covered seventy-five square meters, eighty tops. His apartment had been bigger than that!
That second bedroom was a real mess; she had to pick her way through it carefully to avoid bumping anything. But each bedroom had a small closet, and it was in that second one that she discovered the attic access hatch. She was up in the low space inside a few seconds.
Forty-two minutes later, she exited the house, blending back into the gathering dusk, and leaving no trace of her excursion.
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Wally got home around midnight. His uniform was torn in several places, and bloodied in more than that. He had it stripped off in a fifth of a second, and it only took so long because he was so tired and discouraged. The Brotherhood of Evil had eluded them once again, leaving a string of ever-more-deadly traps in their wake, and it had been sheer luck on two occasions that he survived at all. Dumping the ruined uniform in the trash can in his bedroom, he walked dejectedly into his shower.
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The abandoned storefront that Jinx had appropriated for her 'temporary residence' (she refused to think of it as a lair) was in a bad part of town. Not that she minded. It kept unwanted traffic to a minimum, and besides, everything of any value had already been looted from the place before she found it, so nobody was interested in it anymore. She only had to evict a couple of drunks, install steel doors front and back (carefully sheathed with weathered plywood to conceal their nature) and activate her security system to feel right at home. (There was that one thug, a month or so ago, who had followed her and tried to get the drop on her as she was going inside. Eighteen hours later he woke up in the middle of nowhere three hundred klicks away, naked and completely shaved all over, his face dyed blue.) Other than that, life had been uneventful since her last move.
Scattered remains of a Chinese takeout dinner lay on the floor beside her. She was lounging on an old couch she'd found recently, reading the owner's manual for the plasma flat-screen she'd picked up that morning, when the motion sensors she'd installed in Kid Flash's house alerted her to his presence there. Instantly she skipped over and flipped on the monitor. The lenses she used in the spy-cams lent a slight fish-eye effect to the images she was able to view, but they were certainly clear enough. Immediately spotting him striding away into his bath, a small squeal slipped out as she ogled his extremely-well-defined musculature. Yeah, the spandex didn't leave a lot to the imagination, but there was really nothing like seeing him 'in the flesh', as it were, and she could stare at that lean backside for hours.
Okay, Jinx, now we get some payback for all the stalking he used to do.
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After she let him go, but while she was still with the H.I.V.E., she would find those red roses all over the place. Never more than one per day, and never in their headquarters itself, but always in her path. Then, a week and a half after she helped the Titans take down the Brotherhood (the first time), she packed up a few of her significant belongings and slipped away in the night.
Those were some lean weeks. She'd been a very confused young lady, unsatisfied with her handling of life up to then, but unsure of what else to do. Her training in the H.I.V.E. had given her a specific skill set, and she didn't see it as being conducive to life as a hero. But his words had created something. A filter existed now between her and the world that hadn't been there before he'd said, "You can do better."
It hadn't taken her long to understand just how deeply true that statement was. The problem came in how to act upon it.
She started traveling, finally moving halfway across the country, to Houston. Working as a solo burglar was productive, especially given that Wally had lost her somewhere on the road. That, or he had simply given up with the roses. She certainly never noticed any stray breezes where there shouldn't have been any (which irked her … not that she'd admit it). With no one looking over her shoulder, she could be picky about her targets and take her time. The upshot was that over a four-month period she executed three heists that netted her close to eight hundred thousand dollars. Two of them weren't even discovered while she still lived in Houston, and the one that was had completely scotched the poor wretches who investigated it.
Once she had the money converted into a portable form, all nice and legal (minus the 15% cut for laundering) she moved to Tampa and took a brief sabbatical to explore her options. Because, while her stint in Houston had been lucrative, it left her with the nagging feeling that it wasn't really what Kid Flash had meant by "better". Renting a small bungalow within a ten-minute walk of the beach, she honed her skills at becoming one of the Gray People. Judiciously chosen hair dye made her a brunette, contact lenses turned her eyes hazel, and a can of spray-on tan disguised the grayish cast to her skin. With the right set of clothes, she became essentially invisible in any random group of ten or more people.
It wore thin after two months. "Better" obviously didn't describe this situation, either.
She chartered a boat to Grand Cayman Island, flew British Airways to Heathrow, and then on to Brussels, where she looked up one of the contacts she'd learned about while with the H.I.V.E. Two weeks later her name (listed as Jaime Smythe) was added to the roster of a mercenary band that executed Black Ops for a group of European nations.
At first it was satisfying. She got to use her skills while working with a well-oiled group whose expertise made her positively ashamed that she had ever directed such a clutch of losers as the H.I.V.E. Five. Their first three missions were infiltration/retrieval jobs, at which she excelled, and each one came off without a hitch. But that fourth mission …
Yeah. That was the reason she left. She'd been forced to kill two guards, and while taking human life was something that she had thought, objectively, wouldn't be that big a deal, as it turned out …
That was her last stint as a mercenary. Apparently being a paid soldier didn't fall into the "better" category, either.
All of which had brought her back to Keystone City. Maybe if she got some direction from the horse's mouth, so to speak, she could make some decisions about her life from an informed viewpoint. But first, she wanted to know as much about Kid Flash as he seemed to know about her.
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Some six or seven minutes passed before he came back out. While he could travel at incomprehensible speeds at will, water didn't have that ability, so getting clean had to happen the old-fashioned way. Jinx hadn't budged. She was anticipating …
Oh, yeah. He came out still toweling himself off. She flicked the monitor viewpoint around to get a more frontal view, then (while he tossed the towel back into the bath) she adjusted the scale and …
No way.
No. Fucking. Way!
He stood there for a few seconds, seemingly lost in thought, and giving her a perfect view of his, ah, equipment. Her eyes got huge.
Okay. Let's see. She fiddled with a few settings and a glowing grid came to life on the screen. He's about 185 tall, so that's … um … seven and a half grids, call it. And that thing hangs … hm … nearly a grid …
She sat back, somewhat stunned.
No freakin' way.
But there it was. Apparently spandex left a lot more to the imagination than she'd previously guessed.
Damn. That means I owe Argent a ten-spot.
Eyes glued to the screen, she watched as he moved around the room, rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out a laptop. Then he reached behind the dresser and extracted a reasonably large flat screen TV (how had she missed that?), hung it on the wall across from his bed, and ran a cord from it to his laptop. Climbing onto the bed and getting comfortable, he tapped on the keyboard for a bit, and the flat screen came to life …
… with a picture of Jinx!
She was in the middle of a flying kick, sailing across a room with marble floors, and she recognized it instantly as the lobby of AGN International Finance Corp. She and the H.I.V.E. Five had robbed it last year.
How the hell did he get that photo?
But then she noticed what Wally was doing, and forgot all about the TV.
It got even longer as it hardened up, and his regular strokes were helping it along quite nicely. Jinx blinked and focused on it, more than slightly amazed at the dimensions it was achieving.
She was not inexperienced. Her childhood had been one long, protracted, highly-detailed nightmare, but she'd managed to enter puberty with her "virtue" intact. By then her control over the hex force was sufficient to dissuade any would-be rapists, and when she realized that she could direct such affairs to her liking, she took a more … active role in the exploration of her interest in the opposite sex. And, yeah, it was fun. Could be fun, under the right circumstances. Could be a right pain in the ass – literally – under less-than-ideal circumstances. But she knew her way around a guy.
Then it hit her: Wally was jerking off … to pictures of her!
So he does think about me that way!
There was a different photo up, this one of her in running shorts and a midriff-baring sleeveless sweatshirt, lounging supine on a concrete park bench with her head hanging off the end. It was spring, and the blossoms of a cherry tree hung not far above her.
She had to admit that she looked damn good that way. The day in question had been an official H.I.V.E. Five holiday, sort of a victory declaration after they'd pulled a successful heist and (for once) kicked the Titans' collective keisters.
Well, okay, Raven and Beast Boy hadn't been on hand, and they'd gotten a little lucky with the placement of …
Never mind. They got the loot and got away, and that's all that's really important, right?
The photo changed again.
How many pictures does he have of me, anyhow?
This was a stunning high-definition view of her tossing a hex blast at something behind her. Her costume was ripped in a few places – a few strategic places – and the way she was moving combined with the position of her arms seemed to … enhance certain aspects of her anatomy. That, or she'd been photoshopped. She wouldn't put it past him at this point.
Her gaze drifted back to Wally, and stayed there for a bit. He was using both hands now (there was certainly plenty of space) and had sped up some. Head thrown back, he was moving his lips in the same pattern over and over …
Lip-reading was something she'd picked up in the H.I.V.E. She squinted, trying to decipher …
Jinx … Honey … Yes … Like that …
Movement caught her eye, and she flicked back to the screen, where a video clip played. Her mouth dropped open. That was after she'd dyed her hair! She was walking along the beach in the early morning, wearing that zebra-striped bikini and …
… and she realized that she had her fingertips against a very sensitive place, and that the sensitive place was getting quite damp.
She thought about it for only a second before a wicked grin crept onto her face, and she increased the pressure, eliciting a very low, almost unnoticeable moan.
He had followed her after all. But he left her alone. Did he know about Houston? If so, why didn't he …
Ah, fuck it. Who cares? She was much too titillated with her current activity to worry about something that obviously hadn't interfered with her life.
Maybe that was it? Maybe he was just … letting her find herself? The thought skittered across her mind like a cricket, losing itself in the dense hedge of lust that was quickly taking over the landscape. She watched avidly as he manipulated himself, becalmed by the way the head of his manhood seemed to pulse.
She increased her own rhythm, the illicit nature of what she was doing exciting her as she hadn't been in a long, long time. It hadn't really occurred to her before that she might be something of a voyeur. Never crossed her mind, really. But … damn! She closed her own eyes, leaned her head back against the chair, pushed the flimsy material of her undergarment aside, and plunged two fingers inside.
Not ten seconds later, her world exploded in one of the most intense orgasms she'd ever had, drenching the seat of her chair, and leaving her a shivering, quivering mass.
"You like that, huh?"
Jerking upright with a shriek, she whirled, nearly falling off the chair in her haste to regain her feet.
There he was! Right there, in her … um … temporary residence! And …
… and …
… and he was still naked!
This was throwing her seriously off her kilter. He just stood there, grinning, arms crossed over that (Delicious! Rippling!) chest, with that – that – that fireplace poker sticking out in front of him.
"How the hell did you … where did … what kind of … when …"
"You dropped by my place earlier today. I just thought I'd return the favor."
Her blank, incredulous look made him hoot with laughter. "All my doors and windows have these microscopic proximity switches. They don't send any signals or trip any alarms, but they record who comes through and when. You were in my house for forty-five minutes."
"But I scanned …"
"It's alien tech, courtesy of my uncle's connection to the Watchtower. Doesn't use electricity."
". . . . . . . . . . Shit."
He laughed even harder at that.
"How'd you know where I was?"
"Followed you."
"… Followed me? But …"
"I got back before you left. I could tell the back door had been opened, so I just waited outside until you left. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be you!"
"… But …"
"You seem to be using that word a lot."
"What was with the torn uniform? Was that a hoax?"
"Oh, no. No hoax. After you got back here, I got a message from the League that they'd located the Brotherhood. Turned out to be a decoy – a heavily booby-trapped decoy – and …"
"How'd you know I was watching?"
Silently, he pointed up at one corner of the room. She followed his direction and eventually caught a very slight glint behind some cobwebs, and her mouth fell open again.
"You did know I was watching you!"
"Yep."
"You son of a bitch! You played me!"
"No, I played with myself. You just …"
"Son of a bitch."
"Heh. I've got a utility on my laptop than lets me watch what's coming in from that spy-cam in a small box in a corner of the screen."
She turned back to face him and crossed her own arms, her expression unreadable. "You missed your calling. You're a damn good spy."
"You're a special case."
Her eyes dropped back to his still-engorged manhood. "I gotta admit … I wasn't expecting that."
"So I gathered."
Slowly ambling in his direction, she stopped just beside him and let one arm drop, let one finger rest lightly at the base and then even more lightly drag the tip of a nail down to the end. That brought forth a couple of noises that made her grin. "You like that, huh?"
"… Touche." His voice was a bit ragged.
"So tell me, Mister West …"
"… What?"
"How long have you had this fetish of yours?"
"My only fetish has pink hair and a wicked sense of humor."
"Don't forget that she can also blow your skin off your body if she feels like it."
"That fact is never far from my mind." He sidled over and slipped an arm around her waist. "It's … exciting."
"Well, something is obviously exciting."
His other arm found its way around her, which made their position a tiny bit awkward, given what was pressing against her belly. She giggled and wrapped one hand around it. He gurgled something in response.
Coaxing her features into lines of Severe-Schoolmistress-With-A-Side-Of-Determination, she said, "You realize this won't fit, don't you?"
He just blinked at her.
"Not at first, anyhow. We'll have to work up to it slowly."
"Is that right?"
"Yes, it is."
"Then don't you think we ought to get started?"
"I do." She nodded in placid agreement. "Yes, that I truly do."
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A/N: Thank you for your patronage! Review if you feel so inclined.
Happy Reading!