(Raven)

A wave of nausea flooded her system as her head pounded in pain from a migraine. They came frequently and for as long as she could remember – or did they? How long could she remember anyway? She ignored the questions in favor of getting out of her bed and pulling the blinds closed; the harsh, unrelenting sunlight that cascaded in was like daggers in her eyes. Migraines were funny like that. They dulled her senses – denying anything that may normally have offered comfort yet at the same time made them hypersensitive to anything that wasn't just perfect. Which, as it turned out, was a lot when you had a migraine.

She slowly turned, taking care not to set off another wave of nausea, and propped herself up on the window sill, observing the room. It was both familiar yet not – she felt as if she had been here before, but something told her that it wasn't hers. Nothing was particularly wrong with it. It was a small room, with a twin-sized bed, a desk next to a door on the opposite side of the room from where she was standing, and a small table with a mirror set up to her left.

Everything should be fine. Everything seemed fine - but a nagging feeling wouldn't go away. Like her mind was filled with a haze, leaving her groggy and…defective. It's nothing. Get ahold of yourself, – name? I…don't know my name. Her heart raced and panic began to set in as she frantically tried to recall some piece of identity, only to come up with nothing no matter how hard she tried.

She needed to calm down, but not just because the stress had pushed her physical discomfort to the brink. She was getting more and more emotional. And somehow that felt wrong, bad in some way she couldn't describe. It was like some sort of emotional limiter had kicked in, and her heart started slowing again.

She felt her mouth opening, vocal chords producing a sound almost against her will, "Azara-"

"Rachel?" inquired a voice.

Familiar… So that's my name?

Snapped out of whatever weird trance she'd gone into, Rachel found her sitting on the floor, legs crossed and arms held out palms-up, her thumbs pressed to her index fingers.

"Are you alright?" asked the voice again, as its owner stepped into view. It was a woman in about her mid-twenties, mousy brown hair tied back in a ponytail. A look of worry was behind thin-rimmed spectacles and her eyebrows knit in concern. She was familiar, much like the room they were in, maybe this was this woman's house.

"I feel a little ill," she replied flatly. "You asked for Rachel. I'm guessing that's me?"

The look of concern shifted into one of pity. "Rachel Roth. What about me? Do you remember my name? Anything at all?"

Rachel thought about it, staring into the woman's face only to receive a report of pain that flashed through her head. She winced. "Sorry. I don't remember anything."

The woman shook her head. "No need to apologize, Rachel. My name's Kylie Miller. We were good friends before your…accident."

"Is that why I can't remember anything?"

Kylie nodded. "It happened a few months ago. You went missing for a few days and turned up in a ditch just a few miles out of the city. Um. You never really talked about having any family or anything, so I offered to take you in until you regained your memory."

She felt herself starting to panic again. "And this was months ago?"

"Some days are better than others. Yesterday was really good – you almost remembered everything. A few little details were fuzzy – like you didn't remember some stuff about your childhood, but you remembered more recent years. Like late high school, college, working with me in the coffee shop after classes," she said all this, faint smiling growing on her face as if she were remembering fond memories. "That's why I didn't take it slowly when I first came in. This happens sometimes though; usually after a lot of progress, you'll have a bad day. The doctor tried to explain it, but to be honest, I don't really understand it all that well, being an English major and all. Science never made sense to me."

"Okay, so it'll it get better? Tomorrow will probably get better, right?" she asked, as steadily as she could manage. It was good to have someone there to talk to these things about, and Kylie did seem like a friend – something about college and the coffee shop had seemed right. But at the same time, it still felt wrong to let her fear show – like she had an innate fear of fear itself.

Kylie gave her a soft, reassuring smile. "I'm sure of it. It'll probably even get better today. Come on, you said you weren't feeling well. Migraine, right?"

Rachel nodded and took the hand Kylie had offered her, forcing herself up off of the floor. Her caretaker walked her to the kitchen, where she insisted that Rachel sit on a barstool by the counter while she got her some pills for the migraine and steeped some tea to chase them down and sip on after.

The tea was Earl Grey and the twinge of citrus tickled her tongue as the hot drink warmed her body, send a tingling wave all the wave down to her toes. Kylie watched her pensively from across the kitchen, sipping on a cup of her own.

"You feel up to eating? I could make some waffles."

Something snapped inside her head and her vision warped and blurred. Inside her head…echoes, voices and laughter both her own and from others, the taste of sweet taste of blueberry waffles coming to the forefront.

Rachel shook her head to clear her mind. Kylie had come across the kitchen up to the counter.

"Everything alright, Rach?"

"Yeah, thought I remembered something for a second. I think waffles would be nice."

Her friend beamed back at her. "I thought they might."

While Kylie busied herself preparing waffles, Rachel thought back to the voices and laughter. Trying to remember them exactly the way she did when she had the flash, she picked out one, hoping to be able to stick a name or a face to the sounds. Maybe if she could remember those people, she would have some kind of recollection of her life.

One was a cheerful and bright laugh and belonged to a girl; it made her feel warm, if somewhat smotheringly so. The rest belonged to guys. One laugh was high pitched, glee almost matching the brightness of the girl's – the more she focused on it, the more conflicting her feelings were about the person in question. On one hand, she was fairly certain she'd wanted to strangle whomever it may have been, but on the other, the was a quiet, subdued amusement that came along with it. Like a little brother? Kylie said I didn't really talk about family…

The last two weren't sounds of laughter but those of speech. She couldn't quite make out what was said, but the voices carried as much emotion as did the laughs of the previous two. The first voice was loud and deep and with it came a sense of solidness and reliability of a true friend. The second one was sharper, though not harshly so, and had a smug tone. It was…different. On the surface, it was just as close to her as the others but there was a different type of connection that she felt to this one that she couldn't understand.

She must have spent a long time trying to figure it out because when she finally snapped to, Kylie was sliding a plate of waffles over to her.

"Seemed kind of deep in thought there for second. Remember anything important?" the girl asked through a mouthful of waffles.

"Kind of. I know you said I never really talked about family, but did I ever mention a brother?"

"Mmm. Not that I can remember."

"I see. I think I remember eating waffles with friends. I don't know where we were or what they look like though."

"Oh. Well, we can go through some pictures I have of some of our friends after we finish eating. Maybe that'll help you remember."

"Thanks, Kylie. If you're busy I don't want to take all of your –"

She shook her head adamantly. "You aren't interrupting anything. I'm only taking classes part time right now anyway, and it's an off day for me at the shop. Besides, you're my friend; I'm not just going to leave you to fend for yourself like that."

Over breakfast, Kylie caught Rachel up on her life since they had met. About two years ago, she had started attending a university, which was where the two had met. As was policy, those in their first year had to have a dorm on campus, and they had been roommates from the start. Apparently they hadn't been friends at the beginning but as the semester moved on and through gradual exposure due to sharing major-related classes, they became good friends.

She said that they most of their time was split between their coffee shop both during work and rest hours and crashing at friends' houses, hiding away from general society.

After they were finished eating, Kylie showed her some pictures she had on her laptop. After going through what seemed like countless photos of them and their friends, Rachel felt a little more comfortable as terms of identity went, and she even faintly remembered a few of the times in the photographs, vaguely recalling each person in her circle of college friends.

Still, they had gone through countless photos, but none of them connected with the flash of memory she'd had earlier. And even of the memories the photos did trigger, none of them made her feel as strongly as she did about the laughter and voices. Something about that made her feel sad. Maybe they were friends she'd left behind in her hometown?

They were to the last batch of the photos when something caught Rachel's eye. They were pictures of a circus, something Kylie said Brian (a third year theater major) had dragged them to, but when she saw the photos, a sadness that was not her own tore through her heart. The longer she looked, the more severe it was, and when they got to a picture of the acrobats, it was like time froze.

A scene played in her mind but like the sadness, it was not from herself – it was like she was looking through the eyes of another person, feeling things the way the felt, seeing things the way they saw them. And in that moment, she wasn't herself – she was somebody different. She saw a pair of acrobats soaring through the air, only something was wrong, something happened that shouldn't have, and she didn't know quite what. She watched on at the man and woman plunged to the ground and felt icy-cold dread, horror, shock, and a thousand other emotions that she wasn't supposed to be feeling. Time froze again and the image literally shattered, revealing some kind of dark figure behind it that evoking an all new wave of conflicting, alien emotion before her vision blurred into pitch darkness.

Eyes fluttering awake, Rachel realized that she was slumped on the floor, head lying next to what she guessed was her own vomit. She was drained, exhausted to the point where her body wouldn't obey her commands to move, and her head was spinning. Faintly in the background she thought she could hear Kylie's voice talking in a hushed, level tone, so faint she could barely make what she was saying.

"She triggered again," said the voice. "You'll need to come by ahead of schedule, or I'll have to sedate her and bring her to myself. We can't have regaining her identity at this point in the game."

Rachel's eyes widened as she redoubled her efforts to move. She felt a strange energy course through her body and saw pulses of black emanating off of her and wrapping the barstool that she'd been sitting on before she felt a pin-prick in her neck that sent her into unconsciousness.

(Nightwing)

Any other time, Nightwing would've been uncharacteristically amused – as was always the case when he managed to get one over on Red X. Even if he never did manage to actually catch the guy, he could at least beat him at his own game. Except right now more was on the line than petty rivalry with the thief – Raven was out there, and every day that went by meant another that she might not be anymore. He knew better than to be rash, but he'd been on this thing for too long already, and for all he knew, they had had her for even longer than that. Maybe it's time to kick thing's up a notch. I can't keep moving this slowly.

He had told Jinx to meet him at the rooftop of their usual parking garage about ten to fifteen minutes ago. After he'd tripped the X's alarm and pilfered through what he could in the time that he'd had, he taken the Xenothium back to his apartment. He didn't exactly have a set-up to handle Xenothium itself per se, but he had some secure storage boxes that would do until he found a better place for it. The files he'd go through later, sure, but they were a low priority and were mostly just to rattle X to maybe give himself and Jinx some breathing room for a little while.

He found the girl lying back on the ledge in the sun as if she didn't have a care in the world.

"Here," he called out, pulling out a laptop and sitting on the ledge next to her.

The pinkette swung around into an upright position with a slack grin plastered on her face. "So mission success?"

He gave her a noncommittal grunt, holding out to see whether or not the driver would dump the car and too worried about that to berate Jinx for her recklessness in the alley.

"So dark and edgy today," teased the girl, leaning over to get a better of screen as it displyed the movements of the tracker on map. "Wow, out of the city already. Road trip?"

"Unless it's a dumpsite."

"Then why aren't we on the road now? Even if he dumps the car, he'll have to get back to his base of operations somehow."

He'd thought about that before but mulled it over again upon Jinx's suggestion. He came to the same conclusion he'd had before. "Even if the guy does dump it, it'll leave behind some kind of clue. But if he's not going to and we spook him, he definitely won't lead us to wherever he's working out of."

She nodded along quietly. And then yawned rather obnoxiously, stretching as her arms and legs shot out in all directions. Her eyes narrowed as she turned to face him again. "You didn't you sleep at all, did you?"

"I caught thirty to forty five minutes," he replied, eyes never moving from the screen. He felt a punch to the shoulder that derailed his train of thought.

"I got three to four hours! How are you more awake than I am," complained the pink-haired girl.

Truthfully, having been up for a little over two days, Nightwing was exhausted. But there were things to be done, and after years of training and pushing his body past its limits, exhaustion had become something to be shrugged off, not succumbed to. So, reflecting this fact, and perhaps not wanting to give Jinx the satisfaction of knowing he was almost definitely more tired than she was, he shrugged and went back to watching the laptop.

She yawned again. "So. You ever going to tell me why we're going after these guys? Or what they're doing?"

"I'm not sure what they're doing exactly. That's why I wanted you to see if you could get the flash drive back. Should've just had you make two copies."

"Okay, so why did you start looking into them if you don't know what they're doing?"

"I traced several missing persons reports and illegal shipments back to them."

"Ah," said the girl thoughfully. "Who'd they target?"

He sighed, thinking about whether or not he really wanted to let her in on everything. There's not really any reason not to. She's helped out, and other than being a little too liberal with her power usage, she's not as bad as a lot of other heroes are saying. Maybe I should just give her a chance.

"Look you don't ha-"

"Raven. And several others, a lot with ties to other heroes."

There was a brief pause before she spoke again. "How long?"

"I'm not sure. That's why I can't stop, won't slow down until this is done."

"We'll find her," she said, using soft tone that he would've said didn't suit her until just then. "But it's not going to mean anything if you fall apart along the way. I doubt they're just going to hand her over. Or the others, for that matter."

"Yeah," he responded, "I know."

"That means you're going to need to sleep at some point. I'm not doing this job on my own if you go brain dead, Nightwing."

"I'll sleep. After we check out the places where this guy finally stops."

"And if she isn't there? Or if it's well-guarded when we get there?"

The concern was odd. Then again, she had been a leader once too. Old habits, huh?

The thought made him concede. "Alright. I still want to check this place out today, but we won't make any moves on it unless they're packing up and leaving or if any of the people they've taken are in immediate danger."

After that, she nodded but didn't press any further. It was odd having someone look out for him again. The partnership thing was new altogether – it was different than working on a team. And his time with Batman hardly counted. He resolved to trust her more.

About twenty minutes later the tracker finally stopped moving. After waiting to make sure it wasn't just a temporary stop, he roused Jinx, who had lied back down and dozed off.

"Road trip?" inquired the girl.

"Looks like it."

"This mean I get to steal another ride?" she asked, mischievous grin on her face.

He shook his head sternly. "No, you can ride on the back of mine."

He noticed the subsequent rolling of her eyes, but he couldn't be sure of whether it was because of his lack of humor or genuinely because he didn't support grand theft auto. In light of that uncertainty, he declined to comment, as he wasn't really sure he wanted to know the answer.

His mind quickly shifted to the task on hand as the pair neared his cycle and mounted it. On the way, Rav-

His thoughts were interrupted as a torrent of pain descended down upon his head, and he dropped to the ground writhing in agony. There was a mental image that flashed before he blacked out – the death of his parents.

(Jinx)

Jinx looked down in a mixture of shock, confusion, and panic at the Nightwing, who was currently writhing around on the floor of the parking garage whilst clutching his head in pain.

She spared a quick look around to make sure it wasn't some sort of direct attack by anyone nearby. Not seeing anyone or anything that had caused this, she turned her attention back to him.

"Talk to me. Tell me what's happening," she said, desperately wondering what was going on with him. It was useless though, as his eyes glazed over momentarily before closing.

Shit, shit, shit. Getting a handle on her nerves, she checked for a pulse and felt relief flood through when there was one. So what was up with that? And now what am I supposed to do?

She thought briefly about lying him over the back of the cycle and maybe driving back to her apartment before ruling that out as a bad idea. Fortunately, he seemed to wake up as quickly he had…glitched.

"Jinx?" he asked weakly, immobile from the floor. He still seemed to be in pain or was at least severely drained.

"I'm here," she reassured him. "Are you still hurting?"

"Not like I was. Too raw to tell right now, really. Need to get somewhere."

"Yeah. Think you can stand?" she asked. The answer was almost assuredly "no," as she was fairly certain she had to lift him off the floor herself and then act as a living crutch to get him over to his cycle.

She helped him on, and he put his hands on the handlebars of the cycle and started it and then pushed a button, turning it the thing into what appeared to be a more normal-looking motorcycle.

"Your brain must actually be fried if you think that you can get anywhere driving that thing right now. More so if you think I'd actually let you try."

He shook his head weakly. "Palm sensors. Only turns on with my gloves."

It was her turn to shake her head. "You would have those."

She climbed on in front of him and felt as he slumped behind her, looping his arms around her to hang on.

"So where do you want to go? I can take you to my place. Or if you want to go to your place, you can give me directions."

The was a pause as he seemed to think it over.

"Yours," he croaked.

"Okay then" she said. Going to have to trust me eventually. Then again, given the fact that she didn't wear a mask, perhaps that was the issue right now. Now's not the time to dwell on that.

"Wait," came his voice, as relayed an address.

A little while later, they arrived at a storage unit. He hobbled over to the thing by himself, motioning for her to stay put. After opening it, he disappeared inside and closed the thing back, only to reemerge a few minutes later in street clothes and a sunglasses. Once out, he motioned for her to park the thing in the unit and thereafter locked it back up.

"I can walk to my apartment from here," he said. His voice was clearer now but still very weak.

"No," she said firmly. "I'm not leaving you alone after that."

"And. And what will you do if it happens again?" he challenged.

"More than you'll be able to."

He seemed to give up on the argument. "Come on. And pull your hood up. I don't want the other tenets to see your face."

"That's no way to speak to a lady," she joked. But she complied, pulling the hood up to attempt to conceal her identity. As for her eyes, well, if they ran into anyone, she'd just have to do a lot of staring at the ground.

A few minutes later, they arrived to the apartment building, and Nightwing sans costume guided her up to his apartment. Once inside, he quickly collapsed onto the couch where he fell into a deep sleep.

Great, she thought. And now what I am supposed to do?

(Red X)

Meanwhile, somewhere else in Blühaven, Red X sans suit stared a his belongings all packed into cardboard boxes.

Great. Now where the hell am I going to go?