The Measure of a Titan

by General Havoc

With Terra's betrayal still haunting them, the Titans rescue a young kineticist in need of a home from certain death. But after their loss, can they extend their trust to an outsider again, especially one being hunted by an unknown enemy? BBxRae, RobxStar

25. The Clockwork Butterfly

Disclaimer: I've actually forgotten if I own the Teen Titans or not. I think not.

Author's Note: Hello once more, and yet again I have to apologize for an unconscionable delay in my posting this chapter. Part of the problem is that this chapter (fair warning!) is enormous. And when I say a chapter is enormous, those of you who know this story will know that I very much mean it. The other part has to do with real life issues, jury duty, work difficulties, and illness all combining to make it very difficult to proceed on this story. I have finally vanquished them all however, and present this gargantuan chapter for your reading pleasure, in the hopes of course that you will find it an enjoyable read. I shall begin work tomorrow on Chapter 26, and hopefully better it with what reviews I receive for this chapter, as that is the way one improves. So if you want to see this story get better, please just leave me some idea of how. Thank you once again.

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Chapter 25: The Clockwork Butterfly

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
two roads converged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

- Robert Frost, Road Not Taken

O-O-O

A hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long, the primary cavern of the Los Palmas diamond mining complex was large enough to house a small warship, yet at present it was dark and nearly empty, save for the distant glow of the strung lights hanging above the cavern floor. Mine carts and laser drills lay scattered about the rock enclosure, some on their sides, some with smoking rents torn in them. Figures in black armor, energy rifles still in hand, lay crumpled alongside the mining equipment, soft moans, or the lack thereof, indicating which ones were still semi-conscious, and which ones were out cold.

The three dozen figures striding through the middle of the cavern did not pay the fallen soldiers the slightest attention, and what few sounds the troops made were masked by mechanical whirings, heavy footfalls, and, of course, witty banter.

... well... banter at least.

"See, what'd ah tell y'all?!" remarked the red-suited figure in the lead to an identical red-suited figure walking alongside him. "Nobody ever beats Billy Numerous!"

A chorus of enthusiastic replies from the dozens of exact replicas of the speaker only added to the surreality of the situation, but the four people walking along who weren't clones of the crimson-clad southerner took it all in stride, for while Billy was congratulating himself for having made such a mess of the security guards who had tried to stop them, Gizmo and Mammoth were engaged in what was apparently a much more important pass-time: Whining.

"Are we there yet?"

"Yeah, how much further we goin'?"

"Shut up, both of you," said Jinx, glancing left and right through the forest of Billys as she tried to pick out the appropriate path.

"We've been down here forever!" said Gizmo, "I need to recharge my batteries!"

"I told you to bring extra, didn't I? And what are you complaining about? You're not even walking!"

Gizmo crossed his arms and muttered something under his breath, as the two jets emerging from his backpack harness floated him over fallen guards and debris. Jinx chose to pretend she hadn't heard what he'd said as she consulted the map in her hands.

"Should be around... somewhere..."

A grin crossed her face a moment later as she spotted a small tunnel branching out from the main cavern and running deeper into the mine. Without a word, she walked quickly towards it, leaving the others to follow. The line of electric lights hung overhead led directly into the corridor, as did a rail cart line, marking it out as a location of some importance within the underground maze.

"Yo, Jinx?"

Jinx glanced back absentmindedly as See-More caught up to her, leaving Mammoth and Gizmo to bring up the rear along with Billy Numerous, once more re-united with all of his selves.

"What is it?" Jinx asked, inflecting her voice with fatigue to signal how little she wanted to hear any more complaints.

"Relax," said See-More, "I was just wonderin' what we're doin' down here. You said we were gonna take Billy for a test, but why here?"

"We're in a diamond mine, genius," said Jinx deadpan. "What do you think we're here for?"

"Yeah," replied See-More, still confused, "but I don't see any diamonds. Are we s'possed to be diggin' em out of the wall or somethin'?"

Jinx sighed and growled to herself. "When they dig the diamonds out of the ground, they store them in a secure place inside the mine before they ship them to the jewelcutters. We're gonna raid it."

See-More let a smile cross his face. "Sounds good. So where is it?"

"If this map is worth anything, then it should be right about... there."

Ahead, the tunnel divided into two different shafts, the lights splitting and proceeding in both directions. The rail tracks however led left only, and from the fork in the tunnel, Jinx could see that the leftmost branch came to an abrupt halt ten yards further down, where the way was blocked by a solid steel door. Jinx turned and waved up the other Hivers, and stood back to watch as See-More confirmed that there was a vault of some sort behind the barrier, Gizmo went to work trying to open it, and Mammoth and Billy watched for any further interference from whatever guards might still be poking around.

Gizmo reported that the door was "trivial" to hack, and would be open in a couple minutes, and Jinx allowed herself to think about the real purpose of this heist for a moment. She glanced back at Billy Numerous, who was, she was displeased to note, blabbering with Mammoth over the proper way to deep fry a whole turkey. No genius, that one, but he'd managed to hold his own pretty well with the guards on the way in, and he didn't seem too annoying. Of the six or seven replacements the Hive Five had tested out to replace Private Hive (who had up and left after the disaster with Mother May-Eye), Billy seemed to be the best prospect.

That said more about the others than it did about Billy himself, but Jinx supposed she was lucky not to have attracted another Superhero on deep cover...

"Ha! Got it!"

As usual, all she needed to do was give Gizmo a computer to hack, and all complaints vanished. She adopted a feral grin as Gizmo pushed the door open and flew into the vault. Jinx and the others followed him in, finding themselves inside a metal cube twenty feet to a side, the walls covered in locked metal boxes, like the safety deposit boxes in a bank. On the opposite wall was a special box, three times larger than the others, fitted with a combination lock, clearly holding something important, and she walked straight over to it as the others began to burn, cut, tear, or pry their way into the various smaller boxes to get at the valuables inside. With a wave of her hand, she smashed the lock on the front of the larger box, and opened the door.

Jackpot.

Inside the metal box sat a single diamond the size of a small peach. Oblong and flat, like an enormous beetle, it positively glowed a pale blue in the fluorescent light of the vault. Carefully, she plucked it out of the small safe, and held it up to the light, letting it sparkle as she turned it slowly this way and that. The others all stopped what they were doing as they saw the enormous gemstone, and whistled, chuckled or simply gazed on appreciatively.

"Whoa!"

"Look at that!"

"Hot damn..."

"That's gotta be worth a lot!"

The last comment engendered a smirk from Jinx. "We're not fencing this one," she said, clearly uninterested in hearing objections. "This one's mine."

Puzzled looks were exchanged. "What?" asked Gizmo. "Why? That thing's gotta be worth millions!"

"Yeah," asked See-More, more confused than upset. "What do you want with that?"

"None of your business, okay?" she snapped, clasping the diamond in her fist. "Finish up here and let's get going."

Her orders did not quite carry the note of command she might have hoped for, as all four of the others rolled their eyes (or eye), and chuckled. See-More even nudged Mammoth with his elbow. "I guess diamonds really are a girl's - "

Jinx whirled around, shooting See-More a look of pure venom. "Finish that sentence and watch what happens. I dare you."

See-More took one look at his team leader and elected to refrain from further comment, and Jinx did not stick around to hear the rest, stepping out of the bank vault to wait for the others to finish with their rounds of theft. In no time at all, all five of them (more if you counted Billy's doubles) were walking back the way they had come, all but Jinx loaded down with diamonds of all shapes and colors, bragging to one another about the amazing stuff they were to buy with their shares. Jinx alone remained silent and unburdened, the brilliant gemstone held safely in her pocket as she let Mammoth and Gizmo take the lead, and tried to trace the shortest route back to the surface on her map.

"Yo, Jinx?" asked See-More. "How're we gettin' outta here?"

"In handcuffs."

Jinx had only a bare second to register that someone else had answered before she walked straight into Mammoth, who had come to an abrupt halt in front of her. Bouncing off of him, she stopped as well as she saw the one thing she had hoped most of all not to see tonight.

Or rather the six things.

All six of the Teen Titans were standing in the middle of the enormous cavern the Hivers had been traversing only five minutes before. Robin stood out in front, his staff held like a flagpole, his perpetual smirk of smug superiority written on his face. To his left and right were arrayed the other Titans in a line. Raven, cloaked in shadow like a living nightmare, floating several inches above the ground with dark energy sheathing her hands. Starfire, her eyes and fists blazing a radioactive green, poised on the balls of her feet to launch either into the air or directly into one of the Hivers. Cyborg, looming larger even than Mammoth, arms crossed, feet planted wide, scowling at them as if the Hive were less than dirt beneath his metal feet, a gross inconvenience to his time. Beast Boy, crouched down like a coiled spring, a wicked grin on his face, standing far enough from his teammates that Jinx knew he was already planning on assuming some gargantuan form and ripping into them. Last of all, nearest to Robin, a boy she didn't recognize in person but knew to be Devastator, the newest Titan, decked out in red and orange and holding at his side a baton made of flaming steel like a branding iron hot off the coals, whose gaze was darting from one Hiver to the next too quickly for her to read.

Robin, as always, commanded all the attention, stepping forward with just the slightest swagger and flipping his staff around into a ready position. "Give it up, Jinx," he said in the tough-guy voice he had to have learned from Batman. "You're outmatched this time."

They were, Jinx knew, but Mammoth took a step forward himself and clenched his fists. "You guys can't stop us!" he thundered back at the Boy Wonder. "Go crawl back to your tower before we break your legs!"

"Yeah," chimed in See-More, sliding his visor's adjustment knob over to a combat setting. "This stuff's ours now. You want it, you're gonna have to come and take it from us!"

Despite her best attempts, Jinx couldn't help but smile a bit. No matter that the last five times they had faced the Titans had all turned into disasters, her friends were all ready for round six at the drop of a hat.

Cyborg scoffed at the other Hivers, par for the course for him as his human and robotic eyes both fell on Billy. "Doin' some recruiting?" he asked.

Jinx stepped past Mammoth and See-More as Gizmo and Billy stepped out to form a line on either side of her. "If you can," she said, giving Devastator her most disparaging look, and grinning as she saw him flinch, "so can we."

"Always one step behind," said Robin, and the smug satisfaction written on his face as he said it gave Jinx the urge to cave his it in. "We've got you six on five. Give up the goods and come quietly."

She didn't even have to glance over at Billy, for he took his own cue, stepping forward with a grin. "Now you listen here, stop-light. Nobody outnumbers Billy Numerous..."

Three seconds later, a small army of clones stood all about the cavern, encircling both Titans and Hivers, the former blinking in disbelief, the latter cackling to themselves as they faced down their nemeses. This had not been what Jinx had had in mind when she had decided to take Billy on a field test, but given the circumstances, it would do.

"What was that about us leaving in handcuffs?" asked Jinx, relishing the look of undisguised astonishment on Cyborg's face more than she had imagined humanly possible. She snapped her fingers, more for effect than anything else. That would come later.

"Take 'em down."

Her teammates obliged.

As always in these sorts of fights, complete anarchy ensued. She knew the Titans usually tried to coordinate, but coordinating the Hive was like herding cats... deaf cats. Accordingly, she let the others pick their targets and go to work while she chose one for herself. With no time to sit back and formulate even a personal plan, she simply conjured a hex and flung it into the midst of the Titans to scatter them. The sea of Billy Numerouses (Numeri?) enveloped her a second later, blocking off her view of what was going on, and she lightly flipped up into the air to try and get a better picture. A starbolt nearly took her head off, and she aborted her jump, landing hard atop an overturned forklift, and whirled about to fire back, but Starfire was already gone, flipping through the air like a gnat, trying to avoid See-More's laser beam as it carved random patterns into the cavern wall in pursuit of her.

A blueish glow lit up the immediate area and half a dozen of Billy's doubles went flying about like bowling pins as Cyborg's sonic cannon cut a swathe through the sea of red around him. Cyborg himself, standing out as always ('not as always, actually', she thought with a grimace), had his back to her, a perfect target almost as large as the proverbial broadside of a barn. She summoned another hex and another and another, and hurled them down at Cyborg like a vengeful goddess hurling thunderbolts, pelting the ground around him and upsetting his balance, sending him toppling over. Allowing herself a triumphant cackle, she gathered up the entropic energy she wielded for yet another strike, and was preparing to unleash it when the forklift blew up.

Had something hit the forklift, she could have dealt with it, but instead the entire machine went off like a bomb with no warning whatsoever, and the next thing she knew she was flying through the air before slamming into the rock wall of the cavern and sliding to the ground. The surprise was worse than the impact itself, and she sat up and looked around for the culprit even as she gathered her energy about her. For a second she thought Robin had tossed an explosive birdarang her way, but Robin was on the other side of the cavern dealing with Mammoth and a half dozen Billies. So who could...

... oh right... him.

Devastator was standing a good fifty paces away, keeping near to Cyborg, but while Cyborg was facing away from her, trying to fight off part of Billy's one-man army, Devastator was looking straight at her, his baton still smoldering red and pieces of the detonated forklift laying all around him. She scrambled back to her feet, thankful that the newest Titan hadn't had the presence of mind to follow up his attack, and flipped open her Hive communicator. Devastator was small potatoes.

"Gizmo," she said, "deal with the newbie. I want Cyborg."

For once, Gizmo didn't respond with a smart remark. "Got it," he said, "he's toast," and Jinx saw Gizmo fire a barrage of rockets at Raven to keep her occupied while he disengaged and turned around to actually follow orders. Miracles never ceased.

Then again, it was hardly miraculous for Gizmo to want to show off, and show off he proceeded to do, screaming his own brand of garbled insults and launching another hail of micro-missiles out of his harness at Devastator, who prudently sought shelter behind a massive stalagmite, the front half of which disintegrated beneath Gizmo's assault. Jinx shook the rock fragments off of her shoulders and sprinted towards Cyborg, who spotted her as he was turning to support Devastator, and opened fire with his sonic cannon. Too little, too late. Jinx easily sidestepped the blue beam and flung a hex at the ceiling above Cyborg, which crumbled like stale bread. Cyborg had no choice but to fall back or be crushed, and selected the former option, diving backwards as a piece of rock the size of a car shattered against the spot he had just been standing. Jinx laughed again, and prepared to follow up her attack when she heard a series of blasts from her left, and turned to see something she had not expected.

Gizmo was laying on the ground on his back, screaming nonsensical epithets at Devastator, who, confronted with Gizmo's rocket assault, had apparently targeted the pair of jet boosters the pre-teen gear-head was using to fly with, and blown both of them to bits. A small carpet of debris rained down around Gizmo as he tried to struggle back to his feet, held down by the unaided weight of his own harness. He pressed a button, and four mechanical spider legs emerged from his backpack, hoisting him back into the air with a flourish, but before Gizmo could so much as gloat over this accomplishment, Devastator stepped forward and swung his baton like an orchestra conductor, up, down, left and right, and blew all four limbs off at the roots, dumping Gizmo unceremoniously back onto the ground.

Gizmo, understandably enough, was livid. "You snot-guzzling, crud-munching..."

"Next time, don't use pure titanium," said Devastator as he moved forward, presumably to finish the job. Though smallest of the Titans, Devastator was still much bigger than Gizmo, and had a flaming metal baton to boot, while Gizmo was laying on his back like an overturned turtle. Much as Jinx wanted to to get some payback from Cyborg, this decision was open and shut.

Devastator never knew what hit him as Jinx blindsided him with a wave of entropy, tossing him back away from Gizmo into the mouth of the tunnel that led to the vault they had just ransacked. In retrospect, she realized with a frown, sending Gizmo after Devastator was a mistake. She should have handled him herself before dealing with Cyborg. Fortunately, there was time enough to rectify that little error...

Devastator stood back up with a groan as Jinx moved past Gizmo to face him down. He froze as he saw who was advancing towards him, an understandable reaction maybe, but one that would cost him, as she instantly took the opportunity to blast him again. The pink wave of energy hit him square in the chest and threw him fifteen feet down the tunnel, near to where the tunnel forked into two branches. Rapidly, he scrambled back to his feet, narrowly evading a third energy wave and snapping his baton like a tennis player. Jinx had no idea what he was targeting, but she did not wait around to find out, and rolled forward, narrowly avoiding the chorus of explosions that erupted from the ground behind her, and coming up with yet another entropic blast, which caught Devastator in the stomach and slammed him back into the wall, hard enough to shake dust loose from the light fixtures above.

"Should'a stayed home, newbie," said Jinx with a grin as Devastator moaned softly, holding his stomach with one hand as he lifted his baton and swung it around again. Jinx heard the wall behind Devastator's head creak as a lunchbox-sized chunk of it was blasted towards her like a cannonball. The rock would have clocked her right in the nose, but with a flick of her wrist, her entropic powers shattered it to pebbles. Brushing them out of her face, she raised her other hand and blasted Devastator's baton from his grip, instantly extinguishing its flames as she tossed it down one of the two tunnel branches.

The rest of the fight still raged behind her, and thus there was no time for the customary bragging that normally would have gone on. Shorn of his weapon, Devastator had a bit of a deer-in-headlights look to him as he stared at Jinx, unsure of what he ought to do.

"Who taught you how to fight?" she asked, "your grandmother?" She knew the real answer of course. Devastator's stance, his mannerisms, everything smacked of Robin's tutelage, but this kid was no Robin, and to prove the point, she conjured forth another hex in one hand and casually pitched it right at Devastator, planning to knock him unconscious in a single solid blow.

The plan was working perfectly right up until the point where the floor exploded under her feet.

What with the flames and all, Jinx had rather assumed that the baton was integral to Devastator's powers. It appeared however that this assumption had been in error, for no sooner had she reached forward to blast him than he aimed his hand out at the ground beneath her and the rail car tracks she was standing on blew apart, throwing her into the air like a rag doll. Her hex, already in mid-launch, flew upwards and back as she flipped end over end, slamming not into Devastator, but into the tunnel ceiling behind her, which shattered like a pane of glass, weakened already by the repeated impacts and shocks of the raging battle. With a roar like a raging waterfall, the tunnel supports gave way, and the entire ceiling came crashing down in an avalanche of rock and dirt. Jinx managed to hit the ground rolling, narrowly avoiding being crushed under thirty tons of rubble, and blindly scrambled ahead as the entire tunnel section imploded. Desperately lunging forward to get out of the way of the cascading debris, she hit the ground just as a fist-sized rock smashed into the back of her head, and everything went black.

O-O-O

Jinx woke up with a splitting headache.

She was laying on the bare ground up against the side of the mining tunnel, completely covered in dirt, the black shawl around her shoulders torn and flecked with bits of crystal. Her hair was matted with what she hoped wasn't blood, and her entire right side was on fire from where she had slid across the uneven rock floor. With one hand to her head, she carefully picked herself up off the dirt. Her sleeve was torn, her arm scraped raw, but nothing seemed to be broken, and though scuffed and bruised, she didn't appear to be bleeding. Still, her arm throbbed mercilessly, and she grimaced as she rubbed it with her other hand, blinking in the dim light cast by what few overhead bulbs were still working as she tried to figure out what the hell had happened.

By the look of things, the broad tunnel between the main cavern and the fork that led to the diamond vault had completely collapsed, a massive wall of dirt and rock blocking the passage from end to end. The fork itself was still clear, the supports having held, but the way back to her teammates was sealed by tons and tons of debris. She was standing on one side of the tunnel fork, staring at what could well have been fifty solid yards of imploded debris, so thick that she could hear nothing of what was happening on the other side of it. Around the corner to her right lay the diamond vault they had just robbed, but already she knew that was a dead end, while behind her, the tunnel stretched on deeper into the dark reaches of the mining complex.

"David, come in! Can you hear me?"

Jinx' eyes shot open, for though the voice that had just spoken was soft and distorted and cross-cut with static, she recognized it instantly as Cyborg's, and she froze as still as a statue and did nothing but listen and try to pinpoint where it was coming from. There was a shuffling sound from around the corner, from the other fork of the tunnel that led to the diamond vault, and Jinx heard someone stand up with a groan and the soft click of a communicator flipping on.

"Cyborg? Hello? Is anyone there?"

The reply from Cyborg's tinned voice was almost instantaneous, and the relief in his tone was obvious even through the static. "Goddamn," he said, "are you all right, man?"

There was a soft groan and a rattling of small pebbles as whoever was speaking shook himself off. "I think so," came the reply, followed by a moment's silence. "The... the tunnel's blocked off."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "Jinx brought the whole thing down when you blasted her. Where are you?"

"I'm... I'm not sure, lemme look around." Jinx heard the sound of shuffling and footsteps turning in place, and very, very carefully, she made her way towards the corner of the fork in the tunnel. Even had she not recognized the voice from before, Jinx already knew who it was that would be waiting for her around the corner. Her suspicion was confirmed a moment later when she peered around into the tunnel that led to the vault, and saw a red and orange-suited figure standing with her back mostly to her. Quickly she ducked down behind the corner, barely peeking around it so as not to be seen in the low light of the hallway.

Devastator turned around several times, clearly without a clue in the world that he was not the only one who had survived the cave-in. "I'm in front of a... metal door of some kind."

"That's the vault door," said Cyborg. "There should be a fork in the tunnel near you..."

"Yeah... I think I see it," said Devastator as he continued to describe his surroundings to Cyborg. Jinx ducked back entirely to avoid being spotted as she tried to decide what to do with this Titan. Much as she relished the idea of beating his head in while Cyborg watched helplessly over the communicator, Devastator was, as before, small potatoes. She had the diamond after all, and nothing else was...

Jinx froze, her hand held over her unexpectedly empty pocket, as the conversation between Cyborg and Devastator filtered back to the forefront of her mind, and she peered once more around the corner.

"... tip said somethin' about a jewel heist," said Cyborg. "The Hive are idiots, but they wouldn't'a just left a four hundred carat diamond behind. One of 'em musta taken it from the vault."

"Yeah, well, whoever had it, they don't anymore," said Devastator back as he reached down into his own pocket and pulled out the very diamond Jinx had expected to find safe in hers. She realized with a curt groan that it must have fallen loose when she had dove to avoid being crushed by the collapsing tunnel. Just great...

Despite the situation, Devastator spent a moment turning the priceless diamond over in his hand before putting it back in his pocket and returning his attention to Cyborg.

"Is there any sign of Jinx?" asked the half-robotic Titan. The Hive all scattered after the cave-in. BB and Robin are tryin' to track 'em down now, but none of us saw where she got to."

Devastator glanced around again, and Jinx ducked back. "No... I don't see her," he said, and a note of worry entered his voice. "You don't... you don't think she got..."

"No way," said Cyborg with certainty, and Jinx couldn't help but smirk. As if a cave-in was enough to take her down. "She probably snuck off somewhere in the middle of the fight. You just sit tight, okay? Star, Raven and I are gonna get you out of there."

"Right," said Devastator, who didn't sound too overjoyed at the prospect of staying here too long. "Just be careful, okay? I can see stress fractures in this rock. You try to blast your way in here, and the whole complex could collapse..."

"Hey, you're talkin' to Cyborg here," said Cyborg in that ultra-confident tone Jinx remembered with something less than fondness. "I got everything covered. Don't you worry about a thing."

Devastator gave a nervous laugh. "Sure," he said. "Devastator out." The Titan flipped the communicator shut and took a long, deep breath, before drawing his baton once more. As Jinx watched, the flames surrounding the baton sprang back to life at his very touch, and yet she noted that despite the fact that they were licking his hand, he showed no sign of pain or discomfort. With his other hand he took the diamond back out of his pocket, holding it up to the red light emitted from the baton and turning it this way and that to watch the flames dance within the heart of the gem.

As carefully and quietly as a cat, Jinx slowly stepped around the corner. Devastator's back was to her, his attention focused on the priceless jewel in his hands. Carefully, she formed a hex in her hands, taking her time so as to make no noise whatsoever, bringing her arm up to pitch it into Devastator's back like a baseball. One clean, powerful shot would be enough. Carefully she collected the entropic energy, and -

The Hive communicator at her hip chose that moment to speak. "Gizmo to Jinx! Jinx! Jinx, where are you?!"

Both Jinx and Devastator froze.

And then, both Jinx and Devastator acted at once.

Jinx lunged forward with a shout, flinging the stored up energy of her hex at Devastator, but her moment's hesitation had doomed her brilliant plan, and Devastator dove to the side as the energy struck the vault door and tore it to ribbons of steel like construction paper. He hit the ground rolling, and snapped his baton backwards as he did so, a pair of nearby rocks blasting towards her like grapeshot. One missed high, one she disintegrated with a flick of her wrist, and with her other hand she broke off the bases of a series of stalactites looming from the tunnel overhead, which plunged down towards Devastator like missiles.

Devastator's reaction was faster than she had expected. The briefing had claimed that he had trouble with complex compounds like rocks, yet faced with them, he drove his baton-hand up as though trying to impale something above him, and the three nearest stalactites instantly burst like artillery shells. The rest shattered against the floor of the tunnel. Unfortunately for him, Jinx had not been waiting to determine the results of her attack, and a half-second later, a wave of entropic energy that she had sent roiling along the ground slammed into him and unceremoniously swept him through the open vault door and into the vault itself, where the aftereffects of her entropy caused half of the unopened jewel boxes inside the vault to explode, showering Devastator with diamond dust and semi-precious stones.

"Is that all you've got?" she asked with a grin as he scrambled back to his feet.

He replied by snatching a fist-sized chunk of quartz off the ground and spiking it at her as though they were playing dodge ball. Jinx spun like a dancer to avoid the thrown rock, and yet while the quartz missed, it exploded as soon as it was within two feet of her, threw her off her balance, and sent her tumbling to the ground. Or rather it would have, except the floor beneath her feet blew up as she was falling to meet it, the blast catching her right in the sternum and flipping her over twice before dumping her unceremoniously on her back.

... now she was mad.

She did not do anything so undignified as scramble, but instead positively leaped back up, conjuring entropic energy from both hands and hurling it at Devastator, who had emerged from the interior of the vault and taken what cover he could behind fallen rocks and piles of debris. He swung his baton like he was orchestrating some mad symphony and pieces of the wall and ceiling burst at his command, but she contemptuously swatted the projectiles he fired at her aside with waves of entropy and tore his cover apart with repeated bursts of the same. Running out of things to hide behind, he desperately targeted the floor beneath her feet, but she was ready this time, and used the blast to flip backwards like a gymnast and land perfectly on her feet, before conjuring another hex and -

All of a sudden, the fight stopped.

Devastator's baton still flared, the hex still crackled in her hands, and yet both Jinx and Devastator stopped dead in their tracks as the entire tunnel began to shake and quiver. Dust and pebbles fell from the ceiling as a mighty rumble filled the air around them. Having suddenly forgotten both Devastator and diamond, Jinx rapidly looked around the quaking corridor, before her eyes fell upon Devastator again, who was staring at her with a wide-eyed expression that told her he had just come to the same conclusion she did. And then the ceiling caved in with a roar, and both of them ran.

The tunnel collapsed in sections, the most badly damaged ones first, and it was this fact alone which prevented both Jinx and Devastator from being crushed into jelly. Jinx did not look back, nor did she even consider what Devastator might be doing, as she sprinted around the corner and down the tunnel that led into regions unknown, and the full-throated roar of splintering beams and imploding rock behind her told her everything she needed to know about what would happen should she trip. She did not. Rocks thundered in her ears, clapping against one another like enormous castanets, until finally a slab of granite as large as an office building crushed a section of the tunnel several feet behind her, and then suddenly everything was quiet again.

Jinx ground to a halt, one hand on the tunnel wall, listening and feeling for more tremors. For a few seconds, she could hear nothing save for the sound of her own thumping heart and ragged breath, and it took a moment before she even realized that there was still someone else in the tunnel with her.

Devastator was standing on the other side of the tunnel, doubled over and trying to catch his breath, his baton still held in one hand, once more reduced to bare steel. He was more winded than she was, at least from the looks of things, but that didn't stop him from watching her even as he struggled to catch his breath, shifting his baton around to his right hand as though she wouldn't notice. For her part, Jinx had dispelled the entropic energy she was using when she started running, but it was still there, ready to call upon should there be a need for round three.

Another tremor, much more subdued, shook the area, and both of them froze and listened and watched for any sign that it was about to become necessary for them to run again, but it settled down without further collapse, serving only to underline just how bad an idea it would be to resume hostilities when one of the two of them wielded raw entropy, and the other supernatural demolitions

It was an idea that Devastator had apparently gotten as well, for he made no effort to restart the fight. Instead he was watching her like a rat watching a mountain lion, saying nothing, just waiting for her to move or act. Jinx got the sense that Devastator knew himself to be outmatched, and decided to try and play his fear.

"Give up?" she asked.

He didn't reply immediately, but took a few moments to consider it. Still, his answer was not 'Yes' or 'I surrender,' but "How about a truce?" Apparently he wasn't quite that afraid of her.

"Give me the diamond, and I'll think about it."

His free hand automatically slid to his side where the diamond was being held. "No way," he said.

She gave him her best maniacal grin, the one that never failed to unsettle the other Hivers. "You know what happens if we start up again, don't you?"

"Yeah," he said, very nervous but still defiant. "And so do you."

"So what makes you think I won't do it?"

"Because Cyborg says you're not crazy."

That one stopped her short.

She continued to watch him with a defiant look, but while he seemed to be trying to phase through the wall away from her, he gave no indication that he was about to hand the diamond over to her, and she knew that even if she could take him down conventionally, there was no way she could do so before he made use of his own powers and potentially killed them both. Accordingly, all she could do was groan in frustration. "Fine," she said. "Keep it for now." She pulled her own communicator from her belt, the one Gizmo had interrupted her over, and contemptuously turned her back on Devastator, flipping it open. "Gizmo?"

A screenfull of static greeted her, along with a flashing yellow light in the corner of the communicator's screen that indicated no signal. She pointed the communicator in several directions, even hit it a few times, but it stubbornly refused to show her anything other than a black and white haze. However much of the tunnel had imploded, it was blocking the signal.

She looked back over at Devastator, who appeared to be laboring under the same difficulties, his own Titans communicator in-hand, the hiss of static emanating from it. The Titan using it glanced furtively at Jinx, as if not entirely certain she wasn't about to leap for his throat or blast him with a hex, and after a few more moments fiddling with the thing, he clipped it back onto his belt and turned to face her.

"I can't get through," he said, as if she was somehow in doubt. "Can - "

"No," snapped Jinx angrily, frowning as she considered the massive granite slab that had fallen behind them. "And since you decided to fight instead of just handing the diamond over, now we're stuck here."

Cyborg would have protested that he had done no such thing, that she had been the one to fire the first spell, but Devastator did not. "Cyborg said they were tunneling through to get us out. All we need to do is..."

"That was before all this," said Jinx. "Even if we didn't just collapse the entire cavern, what are they gonna do? Drill through a hundred yards of solid rock?"

"If they have to," replied Devastator, who was clearly more scared than he was trying to let on. "They're not gonna give up just because of another cave-in."

"The hallway imploded, you idiot! There's no tunnel left for them to follow. They could dig for three weeks and never find us."

Plainly, Devastator had not considered that possibility, and even in the dim light of what few overhead bulbs were still working, he quite clearly turned paler, his hands starting to quiver visibly. Jinx felt her own stomach starting to tighten at the prospect of being trapped down here to starve to death, and quickly made sure not to let any of it show, certainly not in front of a Titan.

"Well... I mean... what about this tunnel we're in?" asked Devastator. "Do you know where it goes?"

Jinx growled as she took the map out of her pocket and unfolded it once more. After a few moments' study, she shook her head. "This thing doesn't show it. It must be too new..."

"... or too old," ventured Devastator, who was looking up at the ceiling and walls. "This place looks like it's ready to collapse too."

"Well then maybe you shouldn't blow anything else up?" Jinx asked rhetorically.

"Yeah," snapped Devastator back bitterly, "instead you should throw more of those pink things around. They really help."

Jinx nearly blasted him then and there for that, but the threat of imminent death managed to stay her hand. "... all right," she said through clenched teeth. "No more powers until it's not gonna kill us both?"

"Sure..." agreed Devastator with undue haste.

A soft groan, like a tree moaning in a windstorm, emerged from somewhere overhead, and more dust filtered down from the ceiling. Devastator backed several paces down the tunnel, and Jinx had to remind herself not to do the same, at risk of appearing worried.

"I really think we should get out of here," said Devastator, and Jinx had to admit that she agreed, not that she was about to tell the Titan that. Instead she wordlessly turned and started walking down the tunnel, leaving Devastator to catch up or not as he liked. She did not glance back to see that he was following her, acting as if, as far as she was concerned, he was the last thing on her mind. It wasn't true of course, for he still had the diamond, but she had a feeling that he wouldn't fall too far behind.

And besides, it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go...

O-O-O

For a good hour, Jinx and Devastator walked down the abandoned mining tunnel in stony silence. Jinx refused categorically to so much as glance at Devastator, save for once or twice when she was certain he wasn't looking, giving off as best she could the impression that she had forgotten he was there. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth, but no matter how much she forced herself to think, she could not come up with a way to divest Devastator of the diamond without potentially bringing the entire tunnel down on both their heads. Accordingly, she had decided to simply wait and see what opportunities presented themselves for getting the diamond back.

So far not much had developed. The hallway's uniformity was mind-numbing, no turns, no twists, no change in the dim overhead lighting that was somehow still deriving power despite all the cave-ins. By now they had to have covered at least three miles, but still there was no sign of anything up ahead, though Jinx supposed she should count herself as lucky that they hadn't come to a dead end.

She had taken the lead, if you could call it that. Devastator had stayed a few paces behind her at all times, probably wanted to keep her in sight, and she had been content to simply let him follow her. She wanted to put him off his guard, give him a chance to make a mistake and let her get the drop on him. A single good hex would do the trick, but she wasn't sufficiently confident that she could knock him out with one shot without drawing a reply. Getting the diamond would be of no use if it meant getting crushed to death. Neither of them had said a word since leaving the scene of the last cave-in, which was fine by Jinx, and apparently fine by Devastator as well. It wasn't as though they had a lot to talk about, after all.

The first interruption to their silent walk came suddenly.

One moment, Jinx had been walking under automatic control, concentrating intently on the problem of how to get the diamond away from Devastator, if only so that she wouldn't have to consider the problem of what they were going to do if this tunnel turned out to come to an abrupt end. The next, without any warning whatsoever, the entire ceiling gave way above their heads with a crash, dumping tons of loose dirt and sand down on top of them.

Jinx may not have been concentrating on her surroundings, but her reflexes were honed to a razor's edge, and she reacted automatically, diving forwards and hitting the ground in a tight roll, coming up on her feet and sprinting out of the way. Devastator, further back and with less experience under his belt, managed to avoid the bulk of the collapse, but could not avoid being clipped by it, and was driven to the ground under hundreds of pounds of sand and dirt.

As soon as it became clear that the rest of the tunnel wasn't about to implode, Jinx quickly decelerated to a stop, turning back to see what had befallen the Titan. Devastator was pinned face-down on the ground by an enormous pile of dirt, completely buried save for his head and his right arm, the rest of him held motionless by the weight of the collapsed debris, his baton having rolled out of reach over to the side of the tunnel. As she watched, he struggled to claw his way free with his one available arm, without success, finally looking up at her with an expression halfway between apprehension and expectation.

The look on Devastator's face brought a triumphant smile to hers. "You're not actually gonna ask me for help, are you?"

He tried to reply, but the weight of the debris was squashing the air out of his lungs, and he only managed a soft "please" before collapsing into a coughing fit.

She giggled as she opened her hand and let her entropic energy form into a hex. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't blow your head off and take the diamond."

"You'll... bring the... hallway... down."

She actually might, which she knew of course, that being the reason why she hadn't simply done so instead of asking. Entropy and bad luck were fine weapons, but not the most discriminating in terms of what they destroyed.

She shrugged and let the energy disperse. "Fine then," she said, crossing her arms, "I'll just wait for you to suffocate."

She had expected him to plead with her and beg for his life, which might have been fun. Instead however, he shut his eyes tightly and tried to steady what little breathing he still could do as he extended his one free arm as far as it could go. For a few moments, she wasn't at all certain what he was doing, and then she heard the rocks lining the tunnel near her starting to groan. She looked around, and saw, to her surprise, a layer of... frost... forming all over the walls and ceiling.

"What the - "

"Help me or... or I'll... blow the tunnel in..." choked Devastator between clenched teeth, his eyes still held shut.

Generally speaking, few things surprised Jinx, but this one did. "You're going to kill us both?" she asked, more confused than anything.

"That's up to... to you!" he managed to cough out. "I can't... I can't hold it... forever!"

Despite the warning, Jinx took a few seconds to consider the situation, watching Devastator, who cracked his eyes open and looked up at her expectantly, sweat standing out on his brow, either from the strain of maintaining the explosive energy, or the strain of breathing.

The suspense was apparently getting to Devastator. "Please!" he finally exploded. "I can't... I... help m-"

"Fine," she said, cutting him off, her voice glacially cool, or so she deemed it, and with a very controlled, casual gait, she walked over to the pile of dirt, crouched down, took his hand, braced herself, and pulled. Very slowly, Devastator came loose of the debris that was crushing the air out of his lungs, and he gasped for breath as his chest was released, before finally struggling the rest of the way out and flopping down onto his hands and knees in front of the dirt pile, breathing heavily.

Jinx crouched in front of him, frowning at how easy it would be to blast him or even to simply hit him over the back of the head and knock him cold, and yet he had those damned explosions ready to go in the walls and ceiling, like some kind of twisted version of a dead man's switch.

"I don't suppose you'll give me the diamond out of gratitude?" she ventured. What the hell, it was worth a shot.

Instead of defiantly refusing her, Devastator gulped down more air for a few moments before sitting up and shaking his head in incomprehension. "What do you want with this diamond, anyhow?"

Jinx laughed. "It's worth a hundred million dollars, what do you think I want with it?"

"Yeah," said Devastator, "but you can't sell it! Every newspaper in the world's been talking about this thing ever since they dug it up. What are you gonna do, walk into a jewelry store and say you found it lying in the gutter?"

"I don't have to sell it to a jeweler you know," said Jinx with a frown.

"No, but you have to sell it to somebody. Even a criminal wouldn't buy this, it'd be like putting up a sign saying 'I buy stolen goods, arrest me!'"

"Look who cares why I want it," snapped Jinx, suddenly tired of the questions. "I want it. And I get what I want."

"Is that why you're stuck in a mining tunnel?"

Jinx refused to be baited. "I'm getting out of here," she said, crossing her arms. "You may not be. And when I get out of here, it'll be with the diamond."

"Well since the instant you have the diamond you'll probably blow my head off, I think I'll keep it for now." He had apparently recovered sufficiently to be ready to move on, and stood up. "Let's go."

Jinx rolled her eyes as she stood as well. "Lead the way, fearless... wait a minute... what about those bombs you set?"

Devastator stopped. "Bombs?"

"The rocks you were gonna blow apart if I didn't pull you out."

"What, those?" asked Devastator, sounding genuinely confused. "I let those go once you pulled me out."

Externally, Jinx did her utmost not to appear perturbed. Internally, she was screaming very creative epithets at herself, Devastator, and whatever malicious god had set this situation up.

"Thanks, by the way..." offered Devastator, before turning and walking off down the tunnel.

"... don't mention it," said Jinx through clenched teeth, barely managing to keep the groan out of her voice as she turned and followed Devastator away from the dirt pile.

O-O-O

One could only keep one's mind focussed for so long before it began to slip. Jinx wasn't quite as bad as Mammoth or Gizmo, but hours of walking down the seemingly endless tunnel with nothing to occupy herself beyond plotting how to steal the diamond back from Devastator exceeded her attention span very quickly, especially since there was clearly no way either of them could take down the other while they remained underground. She neither knew nor cared nor asked what Devastator was thinking, but the mindless trudging seemed to be getting to him too, and given that fighting was out of the question, he appeared to think no harm of complaining.

"How far does this thing go?"

"I didn't build it," snapped Jinx. "I don't know if it goes anywhere."

"A six mile underground tunnel?" replied Devastator. "It goes somewhere."

"Eight," corrected Jinx, kicking a small rock aside and imagining any one of several people's heads stenciled upon it "at least eight so far."

"Whatever. Nobody carves an eight mile tunnel through solid rock for no reason."

"Well what makes you think I know where it's going?"

Devastator didn't respond instantly, and she could see him eying her carefully. "Nothing," he said. "Nevermind."

She rolled her eyes and kept going, and Devastator made no further attempt to make conversation, but the almost oppressive quiet that wrapped around them once more left her with an urge to fill it with something, so fill it she did, as he had.

"Knowing my luck, it leads to a volcano or something."

"What do you mean?"

Jinx had no intention of explaining, but when she noticed suddenly that Devastator's footsteps had stopped, she turned back, only to find that he was staring at her with wide eyes, one hand on the handle of his baton, as though he was expecting her suddenly to attack. If he was trying to look scary, he failed miserably, but she did pause for a second. "What?" she asked.

"What do you mean by 'knowing my luck'?" he said, and there was a very serious edge to his question that had not been there before.

She blinked a few times and then addressed him like she was talking to a four-year old. "I'm bad luck," she said condescendingly, "where do you think I got the name Jinx? Knowing my luck, we're about to walk into a - "

"I know your powers are all about bad luck," said Devastator, cutting her off, "But I thought we agreed not to use them until..."

Jinx rolled her eyes and groaned theatrically before lowering her head in frustration. It was enough to cause Devastator to fall quiet. "I don't just use bad luck you idiot," she said, "I am bad luck. You know, just like Cyborg is a jackass? I can't just switch it off whenever I feel like it."

He seemed to get the point. "... oh," he said, clearly embarrassed. Jinx considered pretending to be outraged and insulted, just for fun, but she decided against it. Right now all she wanted to do was get out of here alive, and with that damned rock.

"Do your homework next time," she said with a smirk, and turned away.

Devastator followed. "... sorry," he said.

She laughed. "Thanks, I really need your apologies. They make everything so much better."

Her sarcasm stung, she could tell, and he frowned. "Fine, I'm not sorry then. And by the way, Cyborg's not a jackass."

Of all the subjects she didn't want to talk about... and yet did she let it pass in silence? "Uh, yeah he is."

"Just because he's a Titan doesn't make him..."

"First of all, yes it does, second of all, you don't know what you're talking about again, and third of all, shut the hell up, okay?"

She hadn't actually meant to say any of that, well... maybe the first part but... well it didn't matter now. Devastator was as surprised as she was, and she read the confusion on his face as plainly as a neon sign before he decided to back down.

"Fine... whatever you want..." he said, and turned, and continued on, shaking his head. And Jinx knew she should have left it at that, and just walked on after him, except that... well goddamnit Cyborg being a Titan had nothing to do with it, and this thing with her and Cyborg wasn't just some damned adolescent snit and...

"He joined the Hive, okay?" she said all of a sudden, and Devastator froze like he'd been suddenly placed into stasis. Only then did Jinx remember that Devastator had only been with the Titans for a few months. She waited for him to recover and to turn around, and before he could ask what the hell she was talking about, she answered his question for him.

"Robin sent him to sneak into the Hive academy and find out what we were up to. He joined us."

"I remember," said Devastator. "I mean... I remember he told me once. So what?"

"So what?" How could he not see this? "He didn't just join the academy, he joined the Hive Five, us! We gave him a communicator, an initiation, everything! I even took him to the stupid school dance! And what does he do? He turns around and stabs us all right in the back."

"You were trying to help Brother Blood build a superweapon!" protested Devastator

"That's not the point!" shouted Jinx. "Robin and the rest of those idiots stopped us from finishing that ion amplifier, but Cyborg actually joined us, promised to help us, tried to be our friend, and then pulled that! And the worst part is, he doesn't even think he did anything wrong! And you all agree with him!" She spat on the floor of the tunnel. "'Jackass' is being charitable..."

"Jinx, I know Cyborg. He didn't go in there just to - "

"I don't care why he went into the Hive," said Jinx, "I care that he did it. You know what it's like to find out one of your teammates has secretly been playing for the other side all along?"

"No," said Devastator, "but the rest of us sure as hell do."

"Oh, right, that thing with Terra? That makes it even worse! He knew what that was like and he did it to all of us. Terra wasn't our plant, we didn't send her in to spy on you guys! You made all this noise about how bad that was, and then turned around and did the same exact thing back to us!"

Devastator had no reply to that, but Jinx wasn't done. "I bet he jokes about it, doesn't he? Laughs about how stupid we all were to believe him? I know all of you guys think we're a bunch of idiots anyway, but - "

"He never mentioned it to me," said Devastator softly.

"Doesn't matter," she said with a wave of her hand. "he did it, and he meant to do it all along, and that's why he's a jackass and always will be. And I know he's your friend and all, and you guys are on the same side and I'm just a Hiver, but since you don't know a goddamn thing about it, shut up."

As was probably inevitable, Devastator didn't let that one pass quietly. "I do know something about it," he said.

Jinx laughed out loud. "Really?" she asked with as much sarcasm as she could muster. "They picked you up a month after the Terra thing, so I guess they weren't so afraid of it happening again, now were they?"

"You don't know what the hell you're talking about," said Devastator in what apparently passed for an intimidating voice. Jinx had been more intimidated by bowls of soup.

"No, really, I'm interested," pressed Jinx, still laying the sarcasm on as thick as butter on bread. "What do you know about this sort of thing? What with all your vast experience and everything in having people do that to - "

"I know that Raven's been expecting me to do the same damn thing ever since I showed up!" yelled Devastator angrily.

Both Jinx and Devastator let the echoes of Devastator's voice fade away, staring at each other in silence, before the essence of what he had just said gelled in Devastator's mind, and he clenched his eyes shut and lowered his head, growling at himself. "Shit..." was all he could say.

"... seriously?"

"God damnit..." whispered Devastator to himself in frustration, and did not raise his eyes.

Jinx laughed, a reaction clearly unanticipated by Devastator, but that was too bad. "Raven thought you were a plant?" she said. "What? Did she think we sent you or something?"

"How should I know what she thought?" he snapped in annoyance as he looked back up at her. "She... suspected me for a while, okay? It's done."

Jinx crossed her arms. "I don't think it is done..." she said with an appraising smile. "She still thinks that, doesn't she?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but no, she doesn't."

"You're lying," said Jinx, not that she was certain, but it seemed a safe bet. Why else would he still be upset by it?

"Whatever," said Devastator, which, Jinx noted, was not a denial. "The point is, I know what it's like to have people think you're a traitor without being one."

"Oh, so... you're not a plant?"

Devastator's reply was almost instantaneous. "Don't even start that."

Jinx laughed and started to walk away. "Well you and Cyborg can go form the 'wrongfully accused' club then if you want, but I know what Cyborg is, and I won't just forget it."

"Whatever you want..." said Devastator, still clearly upset with himself for having let something slip, his mind obviously racing to determine what the implications might be.

"Relax," said Jinx, "I can't use it to kill any of you. All it means is that Raven's a bigger idiot than I thought."

"She's not a... wait... what?"

"Anyone with eyes can see you're not a plant." explained Jinx.

"How do you know that?" asked Devastator.

"Well... for one thing, you're a terrible liar."

Devastator considered that one for a moment. "... really?"

"Oh God yes. You're as bad as - "

But Devastator was never to know who else was as bad a liar as he was, for at that instant, with no prior sign of any instability, the lights failed.

The tunnel shook violently and there was a loud crash, like another landslide, but before Jinx could locate the source of it and react appropriately, she was plunged into what was quite literally the most profound darkness she had ever imagined. The shift was so stark that she nearly fell over, for the darkness was absolute, no light of any sort in any direction whatsoever. Jinx' cat-shaped eyes usually afforded her excellent night vision, but this wasn't like the night, it was like someone had torn her eyes out and cast them on the floor. She could not see her hand in front of her face, could not see the hexes she reflexively conjured, simply, absolutely could not see.

... now they were in trouble.

"Oh shit..." she said, not caring this time who heard the fear in her voice. She groped outwards for the wall of the tunnel, and found it, pressing her hand against it tightly. "What the hell - "

"Jinx," came Devastator's voice from behind her, curt and sharp but surprisingly calm. "Don't move."

It was the last thing she had expected to hear. "What? What are you - "

"There's a big hole in the floor three inches in front of you and I can't remember if you can fly or not."

... well that certainly got her attention.

"How do... can you see?" she asked, suddenly worried that the lights were still working but that she had spontaneously gone blind.

"Er... sort of," said Devastator, clearing nothing up. "Hold on." A moment later, the immediate area was illuminated by a burst of red, and Jinx turned her head to see Devastator holding up his baton, wreathed at his command in red flames. The light it cast was enough to reveal the deep hole that indeed yawned right in front of her, but not much else.

"What the hell happened..."

"I don't know," said Devastator, looking around. "I think there was an shift or something. These holes all opened up, and the lights are dead."

Jinx turned to ask him what he was talking about, but Devastator was staring off into the darkness, not even glancing at the flaming baton-turned-torch he was holding. The light from the baton barely penetrated two feet into the omnipresent gloom, yet Devastator was squinting, as if staring off into the distance.

"I think... I think we're okay," he said carefully. "It looks like we can keep going, for a while at least."

Jinx didn't even try to disguise her confusion. "How the hell can you see anything?"

"I can't," he said. "I can sense it... sort of. I can sense the difference between the rock molecules and the air ones, like... look it's not important. I can see where we need to go..."

Jinx was well prepared to just take his word for it, especially as this little fact didn't help her a damn bit. "Well congratulations," she said. "Meanwhile I've got a little problem, so if you don't mind..."

"Here," said Devastator, turning his baton around to point the end of it at her. "I'll lead the way, just hold on and try not to trip."

Jinx blinked. Was he actually offering to... He certainly sounded serious enough, and as she had just been saying, he was a terrible liar, but...

"What, you think I'm stupid?" she asked. "You'll lead me right off a cliff or something."

"If I wanted to do that, all I'd have to do is walk away and leave you here," said Devastator, a trifle annoyed by the sound of it. "Now come on,"

Jinx wasn't sure what to think. "... it's on fire," she said.

Now it was Devastator's turn to laugh. He touched the business end of the baton, still wreathed in flames, to the back of his free hand with no ill effect whatsoever. "It's not fire," he said. "It's some kind of weird energy field. It won't burn you."

She wasn't entirely sure she believed him, but she touched the end of the baton gingerly. It was warm to the touch, but not hot, and in fact seemed to be... pulsating somehow, from cool to warm and back again. She was not entirely certain she liked this plan... indeed she was entirely certain she didn't like it, but she held onto her end of the baton and looked up at Devastator, who was dimly visible in the red glow of the baton. "Go slowly," she said, trying to sound properly defiant and ignoring the obvious fact that he would go any damn pace he liked without reference to her, for she had run out of trump cards.

Still, rather than doing as she would have and reminding her of that fact, he just nodded. "Follow me," he said, and slowly he picked his way around the hole that had opened in the floor of the tunnel, and over the rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, and on down the tunnel. It was utterly nerve-wracking to be led into the blackness, avoiding chasms that just seemed to appear as if by magic in front of her feet, and yet clearly Devastator could see, for he avoided each and every one of them easily, and soon enough they were clear of the more immediate obstacles, and the tunnel was relatively clear again, though still as dark as pitch.

"So wait a minute," said Devastator's dis-embodied voice from somewhere up ahead, for the baton's 'flames' had faded down to mere embers, and she was once more unable to see him. "You took Cyborg to a school dance?"

"I tell you what," said Jinx with a resigned sigh, "I'll pretend to forget what you said about Raven, and you never mention that again. Deal?"

That one provoked a laugh from up ahead. "Deal."

O-O-O

If it had been hard to measure time before, now it was impossible. They moved at what could charitably be called "crawl" speed down the tunnel for what seemed like a thousand years. She didn't like the idea that this Titan was the only thing preventing her from being lost in the darkness for all time, but she liked the idea of actually getting lost down here a whole lot less, and so she put up with it. The flames on the baton had soon disappeared altogether, plunging her back into the absolute blackness of before, but that didn't seem to phase Devastator in the slightest, who pressed on with the same assurance she would have if she had only been able to see.

Still, even this lost its novelty after a while, at least once she gained reasonable confidence that he wasn't about to walk her off a cliff either accidentally or on purpose. Once or twice she stumbled and lost her grip on the baton, but he always dutifully waited for her to get back up and pressed the metal stick into her hands before continuing. They didn't speak a whole lot, he appeared to need to concentrate in order to maintain whatever he was doing, and she needed all her wherewithall just to avoid falling. Other than the occasional warning of debris or a turn ahead, they passed the hours in silence.

Finally though, after God-knew how much time had passed, Devastator stopped. For a brief, horrible instant, Jinx worried that they had finally come to a dead end, but he disabused her of that notion immediately.

"I... I gotta stop for a while," he said, and his voice sounded pained, though of course she couldn't see what the problem was.

"What? Why?"

"I get..." he said hoarsely, "I get headaches when I do this for too long. I just... I just need a little bit, okay?"

It wasn't like she was in any position to tell him what he could and couldn't do just now, but if he wanted to ask her permission, she was willing to pretend. "All right," she said. "How long do you need."

"I don't know..." said Devastator. "There's... the wall's about a foot to your left, and there's nothing around here to fall into. Just... wait there or something."

She reached over and found the wall, and slid down it to a seated position. They had been walking for hours upon hours, and she hadn't realized how tired she was.

The sound of someone scuffing against the rock wall opposite her told her that Devastator was doing the same thing, and she heard him sigh with relief, probably when he switched off whatever his 'sensing' powers were. He was quiet for a few moments, then unexpectedly spoke up

"How long have we been down here?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Jinx, shaking her head even though she knew Devastator couldn't see her. "All night, probably."

He considered that for a moment. "If... if this tunnel doesn't go anywhere..."

"I really don't want to even think about that," she replied, not letting him get to wherever he was going.

His train of thought was apparently persistent. "I'm just wondering. I don't... know the rest of the Hive very well. Would any of them find us?"

"What?" barked Jinx back. "Of course they would! What, you think, because we're 'bad guys' we don't care what happens to each other? They're looking for us right now, or at least for me!"

"Calm down," said Devastator. "That's not what I meant. I meant could any of them find us? I don't know what they all can do."

"Oh..." Jinx thought about it for a moment, but the more she thought, the more sure she was that the Hive had no idea where they were right now. For all of Gizmo's equipment or See-More's detection capabilities, neither of them were as good as Raven, Robin, or Cyborg at this sort of thing, and quite obviously they hadn't found them yet.

"They... might," she said, not willing to say 'no' out loud. "I don't intend to leave it to them."

"Me neither," he said, "I was just wondering."

"Why?" she asked. "Afraid the Hive'll find us before your Titans do?"

"Aren't you afraid of the opposite?" he replied.

She honestly hadn't even considered it. "They'd have found us already if they could," she said. "Same with my friends. We're gonna have to get out of here ourselves."

"And what happens then?" he asked.

She could perhaps have spoken platitudes or lied, but that just wasn't her style. "Then I knock you out, take the diamond, and ransom you back to the Titans," she said.

It might have been the wrong thing to say, but Jinx was fairly certain she had this do-gooder's measure by now. Even if the sane thing to do was to leave her here, both of them knew that he wasn't going to do that.

He chuckled then, either because he didn't believe her or just at the absurdity of the situation, she couldn't tell. "We'll see," was all he would say.

"Oh, what?" she asked with a weary laugh. "Did you think you were taking me to jail?"

"I think I'm trying to get out of here," he replied, sounding equally tired. "I'll deal with that part once we're out, if that's okay with you."

"Not like I have a choice," she said, trying to make herself sound nonchalant and uncaring that this kid was the only chance she had of ever getting out of here. Not for the first time, she wondered what in God's name she had been thinking letting Mammoth carry all the flashlights...

Distant echoes rattled down the tunnel from Heaven-knew where, soft groans in the rock from unfathomable pressure being applied to some immovable object deep within the bedrock. She shuddered involuntarily, wishing she could see something, not that that would save her if the tunnel chose to collapse, but being stuck in a lightless tomb that threatened to implode at any time was enough to give anyone a bit of a scare after all. She cursed herself for being so nervous, especially in front of a Titan, and wondered for a second if Devastator was as well, and decided that he had to be, and that even if he wasn't, it was only because he could see if he chose to, and then wondered if he was watching her right now, because how could she even tell if he was or not, and if he was then had he just seen her shivering and if so would he realize that this place was really starting to -

"Jinx?"

"Yeah?" she replied instantaneously, and a moment later she actually cringed at how nervous she had sounded just then, so much so that she didn't bother to reflect on the same stark sound in Devastator's voice.

"I was... just wondering..."

He trailed off, not saying what he was just wondering about. Was he actually wondering something, or just trying to think of something to say to fill the eerie near-silence that predominated. Either way, he didn't finish whatever he was trying to say, leaving it hanging, until Jinx couldn't stand it any more and blurted out "Well? What?" if only to be able to listen to something other than the groan of underground rock.

"This... Hive academy... the one Cyborg infiltrated... you were a student there?"

"Yeah," she said, "what about it?"

"I just... I don't get it," he said. "It was like a high school for bad guys?"

"Pretty much," she said. "Why?"

"Well... I mean how did you even get into that kind of a thing? It's not like they could have an open house..."

She chuckled. "How do you think we got in? We applied."

"We?"

"Me and Gizmo and Mammoth," she said, not sure where this was going, "We had to show 'em our stuff, beat up some goons, rob a jewelery store, Gizmo had to get some kinda age waiver from the Headmistress, but that's all there was to it."

"Who builds a school for villains?"

Jinx had wondered that herself more than once, but she feigned indifference. "Don't know, don't care. It was there, and we all applied as soon as we found out about it."

"Why?"

"What do you mean 'why'?" she replied. "How many villain academies do you think there are?"

"I never even knew there was one," he explained, "but I meant why the hell would you apply to a place to learn how to be a crook?"

"So that you can be a really good one?" suggested Jinx in a tone that was meant to indicate that Devastator was stupid for asking.

"Why would you want to be a crook in the first place?" he asked.

She smiled despite herself. Perhaps he was expecting her to have a epiphany? "Because I like messing with people," she said without even the slightest trace of remorse, "especially people who mess with me."

"Like the Titans?"

"Just like the Titans," she confirmed. "Like you. Like everybody."

"Wait a minute..." said Devastator, skeptically. "What are you talking about? Nobody messes with you guys except us, and we only do it whenever you go looking for it."

"Don't be an idiot," she scoffed at him, or at least at the darkness from whence his voice was emitting. "Nobody messes with us now that we're famous criminals and people know what happens if they piss us off. Try being the only kid in the home who doesn't want to sit around moping about their dead parents, or the only girl in your class who can beat up the boys. Try having pink hair and an attitude problem and having 'accidents' just 'happen' every time you walk over. Tell me how little you get messed with when half the kids are afraid to be in the same room with you, and the other half hate your guts, and the social workers are the same way."

Devastator didn't reply to that immediately, for which she was thankful, as she was in no mood to be accused, again, of being a spoiled brat by yet another sanctimonious asshole, but when he finally did answer, it was with something other than what she had anticipated.

"You were... you were in a foster center?"

The question took her aback a moment. "How did you..." she started to say, before she suddenly realized the extent of what she had just said, and stopped herself short. Now it was her turn to swear. "Shit," she said sharply, and groaned. "It's none of your business. You wouldn't know anything about - "

"Which one?"

She hesitated. "A... lot of them," she said, certain that there was something here she should have been seeing, but not what it was...

"Any... any in this state?" Devastator sounded... weird. Like he was scared or something.

"They were state homes," she said, wiling to play along until she figured out what was...

"Were you ever in that pit up in Redding? Or the one in Bakersfield before the Wayne Foundation replaced it?"

Now how the hell did he...

... no way.

"You can't be serious," she said, her voice now matching his in terms of being weirded out.

"Since I was two," he said in a tone that was still betraying shock. "Until about six months ago."

"State homes?"

"State homes. Almost all of them, actually."

She hadn't been through the full circuit, but then she had left early. "This is... too weird."

"Tell me about it," he replied. In some ways, she supposed she shouldn't be surprised. After all, most metahumans, good or bad, were orphans, or at least most of the ones whose pasts and identities were known. Even so though, there was a far jump from that to...

"Do you think we ever met?" She knew she should be maintaining a facade of not giving a damn about this Titan, but this was just beyond strange, and she wanted to make sure they hadn't secretly known one another for years. That would have been just too much.

"I er... think I'd have remembered you," was Devastator's tactful reply. "'Sides, you're... I mean I think you're a couple years older than me? We probably wouldn't have met."

It made sense. It was a big system after all. Still, there was one way to be sure he wasn't just making it all up to mess with her.

"So, what were you in for?"

Someone faking it would either not have understood or pretended to get angry, but Devastator didn't even hesitate.

"Car wreck," he said. "What about you?"

That was all it took, and Jinx knew he was telling the truth, which meant of course that Devastator knew that the question would have sounded surprising or even rude to anyone but another orphan, as would her freely-given answer.

"I was abandoned."

There was a few seconds' pause. "I'm sorry," said Devastator.

She snorted. "Yeah, well, I'm not. They didn't want me, I didn't want them. Worked out for all of us."

"So then how'd you hook up with the other Hivers?"

"I told you already," she said, "I applied to the Hive."

"Yeah, but you said you already knew Gizmo and Mammoth then. Don't tell me they were in the system too."

"Gizmo was," she said, and she knew in the back of her mind that she probably shouldn't have been talking about all this, but she just didn't care anymore. "I met him inside. We both left the place in Crescent City about four years ago."

"That was you?"

Jinx laughed. Runaways from foster care weren't all that uncommon, but runaways who literally blasted their way out... well that tended to draw attention. She could only imagine the stories that must have circulated after they left.

"So... why'd you guys leave?"

She scoffed at him. "Better question is, why didn't you?"

"Me?" he asked, sounding confused. "Why would I?"

"Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't anybody?"

"Jinx, this isn't a Dickens novel. We weren't in poorhouses eating gruel. I know it wasn't that bad, even in the worst places, so what gives?"

"It wasn't that bad for you maybe. You could hide it."

"Hide what?"

"That you're weird. That you had powers. I'm bad luck, remember? People noticed. That's why I started hanging out with Gizmo."

"What, Gizmo has bad luck too?"

"No," she said irritatedly, and groaned before explaining. "He was like six when I met him. The other kids picked on him a lot because he'd skipped two grades ahead and had glasses and hung out reading science magazines instead of dinosaur books or whatever kids are supposed to do. And because they thought he was really funny whenever he got mad. He'd shout at them all about how much he was going to kick their asses and everybody knew he was full of it. So I'd come in and scare 'em all off with a hex and he'd yell at me that he didn't need my help and he could take care of himself. Said his parents were mad scientists or something who got arrested for whatever reason and that he was gonna figure out how to break them out of prison because he was a genius." Jinx forebore to mention that she had found out years later that Gizmo's parents had simply died of some unspecified illness the year before she'd met him, and that they had been neither criminals nor mad scientists. Gizmo himself didn't know that she knew that...

"So... what happened then?"

What did he want, her life story? "We got sick of people picking on us because we were different than them. Because they were jealous. We were both smarter than any of them, and we both knew it, and that drove them crazy. So we busted out, learned how to steal things, ran into Mammoth and sort of made a team, and then we heard about the Hive academy, so we joined up." There was more to it than that of course, a lot more to it than that, but she wasn't about to start telling Devastator every little thing about her.

And perhaps he guessed that, for he didn't follow up her little story with any other question. The silence reigned for a minute or so, before Jinx finally chanced a question of her own.

"What about you? Did you have a little band of fellow freaks too?"

The reply was somewhat more somber than she expected, and quieter as well.

"… no," he said. "I never… I never met anyone else like me. Least… not until I met the Titans."

There was something else going on there, something he wasn't saying, but oddly enough, she didn't feel like going after it, given the tone in Devastator's voice. Normally that was the opposite of what she would have done, but then she supposed he hadn't actually laughed in her face as she had half-expected him to. Accordingly, rather than messing with him further, she simply changed the subject.

"So, are you ready to go yet?"

"Huh?" Devastator sounded like he'd been woken suddenly from some deep thought. "Oh, um… not yet…" he said. "I just… I'm gonna just wait a little bit more. Just a few minutes. Is that okay?"

Would it have mattered if she said it wasn't? She didn't experiment. "Whatever you want," she said, sitting back against the rock wall of the tunnel. To be perfectly honest, she was pretty damn tired herself, and all the talking and surprises of the last few minutes hadn't helped her any. Neither one of them seemed inclined to continue the conversation, and the sounds of the rock creaking around them once more filled her ears, though this time she didn't feel the same chill of fear that she had before. A few more minutes, and they'd be on their way, after all, and she laid her head back and closed her eyes just to rest her eyelids before they got going again. It would just be a few minutes… just a few more minutes…

O-O-O

Jinx woke up with a start.

For a brief, horrible moment, she had no idea where she was, and the fact that everything was pitch black did not help matters in the slightest. She made a few gasping horrified sounds that she would have far preferred to take back, given the opportunity, before she remembered everything that had happened, and relaxed, chagrinned somewhat at having panicked in the first place. Hopefully Devastator hadn't heard any of that. Speaking of which…

"Devastator?" she called into the darkness.

There was no answer.

The very instant that she realized that he hadn't answered, she began to be very worried. Sixteen different scenarios, each more outlandish than the previous, entered her mind immediately, that he'd been crushed by another landslide or abducted by mole people or devoured alive by army ants, and that she was now stuck down here. And after the quarter second it took to run through all of those possibilities in her head, she suddenly realized the most likely one of all was that he had simply waited for her to fall asleep, and snuck off by himself to find his own way out, and left her here to die.

"Devastator?!"

There was no attempt to keep the fear out of her voice this time, and within her mind she was frantically second and third guessing everything that she had remembered either of them saying before she fell asleep. He'd been disturbed by something, something she'd said. Had he made a snap decision to leave her here? Had he been pretending all along, trying to tire her out and let her guard down so she'd fall asleep? Had the other Titans found them, and just decided to leave her here to die? And what the hell was she gonna do now?! She was trapped a mile beneath the earth in a lightless tunnel leading to nowhere with none of her friends within range to help and no way to get out except for a long, slow, lingering…

"Devastator!!"

There was a loud gasp from several feet in front of her, followed by the sound of someone scraping against the opposite wall of the tunnel. Someone coughed several times, and then suddenly there was a flash of red, and Devastator was sitting right in front of her, against the opposite wall, rubbing his eyes with one hand, and holding his flaming baton aloft like a road flare with the other.

"Wh… what… what is it?"

Jinx blinked in the sudden and unexpected light, and found herself completely tongue tied, staring like an idiot at the Titan. "You… fell asleep," was the best reply she could manage.

"I did?" Devastator was still half-asleep, and he shook his head several times to clear it. "S... Sorry..." he stammered, making no comment about the scream she had emitted a moment ago to wake him. Slowly, he got back up to his feet, and she noticed that the baton was considerably brighter this time, bright enough to cast a reasonable circle of light around them. She brushed what dust and dirt and debris she could off of herself as she stood up as well.

"How long was… was I asleep?"

She had to admit that she didn't know. "I fell asleep too…"

"Oh…" he said, surprised, she could tell, but not shocked. He seemed to think less of having fallen asleep in the presence of his enemy than she did, though she noted with a smirk that he didn't think so little of it as to forget to check his pocket for the diamond.

"Let's… get out of here," he said.

"Yeah,"

They both turned and began to walk off down the tunnel, Devastator in the lead again. They hadn't gone more than thirty paces before Devastator asked her a question.

"So… was the Hive hard to get into?"

"Why?" she asked, "thinking of joining up?"

"Of course not," he said quickly before her laugh clued him in that she was teasing. He shook his head and continued walking. "What, is that your idea of trying to get me to switch sides or something?"

"What makes you think we'd let you in?" she said half-mockingly. "Unlike the Titans, we have standards."

The joke sounded mean, perhaps it was even meant with mean-spirit, but it set both of them to laughing as they continued on their way, and thus accomplished what it had been spoken for. They might have been laughing for entirely different reasons, but at that moment, who gave a damn?

O-O-O

The tunnel was sloping upwards, steep enough to be a climb rather than a walk, which was a good sign, as far as Jinx was concerned, though it did make the going slower, as it quickly became obvious that Devastator was much less agile than she was, to the point where she had to actually help him up some of the rougher patches. By now she had stopped remarking on the oddity of her doing this for a Titan, in favor of just getting the hell out of here. Besides, he had the only light.

"You actually know Marcus Beachman?" asked Devastator

"I used to beat him up in sixth grade," said Jinx, remembering fondly the look of pure terror on Marcus' face that she had been able to engineer with merely a disapproving glance. She grabbed Devastator's arm and pulled, and he scrambled up the six-foot wall to join her on top of the ledge above it. "He liked to pick on Gizmo a lot, so I taught him a few lessons. How'd you know him?"

"Gizmo wasn't the only one he liked to pick on," said Devastator with a grimace, looking around before finding a way further up the tunnel and trudging on ahead.

"So why not just blow him up?"

"Because I'm not insane."

It sounded more insane to Jinx to let someone beat you up than it did to fight back, but Heroes were weird… "So you're saying he's in Jump?"

"Yeah," said Devastator, "only he doesn't call himself Marcus anymore."

"So what's he call himself?" she asked.

"Heard of a guy called 'Adonis'?" he said nonchalantly. Jinx nearly fell over.

"You're kidding me…"

"Nope," said Devastator. "Tried to tear me apart, last time we met. Beast Boy beat the stuffing out of him."

"Wow…" said Jinx, shaking her head. "Wait 'til I tell Gizmo. We have to screw with him."

"Be my guest," said Devastator as he clambered up the last chunk of steep tunnel to a flatter section, and turned to offer Jinx a hand. Jinx snorted and lightly flipped up over his head, landing perfectly on her feet behind him. He rolled his eyes. "Show off…"

"If you've got it, flaunt it," said Jinx with a smirk, turning and walking off down the tunnel, letting him follow as he wished to. She'd gone at least a dozen paces before she remembered that she'd done so despite the fact that he was the only one holding the light, and had to wait for him to catch up.

They'd gone another fifty yards or so before she noticed him staring somewhat intently at the walls. "Looking for more diamonds?" she asked.

"No," he replied. "There's… something weird here."

"What?"

"How come the walls are so smooth?"

Jinx glanced at the walls of the tunnel again. They were comprised of some kind of stone of course, a channel dug straight through the bedrock, but they were perfectly smooth, as though someone had taken the time to sand and even polish them. "Maybe that's how they make them," she suggested with a shrug. "Doesn't matter."

"I guess…" said Devastator, in a tone which meant that he thought it did indeed matter, but wasn't sure how. See-More used the same tones. "… I just wonder what this tunnel is. It's way too long just to be a diamond shaft."

"I don't care what it is as long as it gets us out of here," said Jinx.

"Yeah," said Devastator, but he continued to glance at the walls periodically, as though the rock would give him some idea as to what this place was.

They had moved on for another couple of minutes, and Jinx was already trying to think of something else to say, just to pass the time, when suddenly they rounded a corner, and found themselves at the end of the tunnel.

A massive cavern, easily twice the size of the one that the Hive and Titans had fought in earlier loomed before them, but unlike the previous cavern, this one was clearly not a natural cave, but some kind of underground facility, the walls carved and shaped like blocks, the floor smooth and free of stalactites, the ground covered with extraneous bits of heavy equipment and piles of building materials, and most important of all, the ceiling lined with fluorescent lights, which flickered on one by one, illuminating the entire scene in a dull glow.

Even that dull glow was like the shining lights of Heaven to Jinx, and she stopped in her tracks and just stared for a moment, her eyes accustoming themselves to the sight before her. Devastator's baton faded out to nothing as he too blinked in the unfamiliar light and chanced a smile. He was clearly thinking the same thing she was, namely that this cavern had to be man-made, and that there had to be an exit from it, for how else could all of this equipment have been transported in here? It did not matter if the exit was locked or barred or welded shut, for either of them could dispense with such fortifications with a literal wave of their hand.

They were home free.

Which… of course… meant that it was time to consider the diamond.

"Let's find a way out of here,"

Jinx simply nodded, giving no indication of what she was thinking. The terms of their little truce had been until they were no longer in danger of killing themselves by beginning a fight. The cavern was enormous and sturdy-looking, and while it was still possible certainly that a battle between a wielder of entropy and a psychokinetic could destroy the entire cavern, it was extremely unlikely. Perhaps if she got a good opportunity, she could just blast him unconscious right here, take the diamond, and leave. He seemed to have forgotten that they were supposed to be fighting over the diamond, after all, so it shouldn't be hard to set him up…

… of course… there really was no harm in waiting just a bit longer either. After all, the cavern might lead to another pitch dark hallway or something…

"You all right?"

Jinx started out of her thoughts to find that she had stopped walking while considering her options. "Yeah," she said, "just fine." She studied his face to see if he suspected what she was thinking, but he merely nodded and moved on. Over piles of metal casings for God-knew-what and bits of equipment that looked like arc welders they climbed, until several minutes later, they came across something wholly indescribable.

It looked like a sewer pipe, save that it was at least twelve feet tall, and lain right across their path, crossing the cavern from one side to the other. It was metal, segmented, and stamped upon each section were numerical building codes of some sort. Tinted a very dark green, the pipe or whatever it was also had red lights installed along its side every so often, slowly blinking in the underground twilight.

It was… certainly an odd thing to encounter in the middle of nowhere, and it was much too high to see over. Devastator paused to consider what to do now, but Jinx had no such confusion. She broke into a run, and called on her powers at the same time, leaping into the air with a graceful flip, and using the reaction of her powers to push her up and on top of the pipe. She landed properly, steadied herself, and resisted the urge to raise her arms like a gymnast as she took a look around. On the opposite side of the pipe was what she was looking for, a large, paved tunnel, big enough to fit an 18-wheeler truck, that sloped upwards out of sight towards what had to be the surface.

"Got it," she said, turning back to Devastator, "There's an exit over here." He smiled and gave a very visible sigh of relief, and started to walk over to the pipe, and Jinx started to wonder if perhaps she shouldn't have told him there was no exit so as to put herself in a better position to get rid of him, even as she crouched down to help pull him up and over the pipe (for there was no way in hell he could do what she had just done), and all of these things and more were running through her head when the pipe itself suddenly woke up.

There was a roar, not like a landslide or a collapsing cavern, a roar like that of a dinosaur, and before Jinx could blink, she was thrown off her feet and down onto the cavern floor, as the metal pipe she was standing on bucked and twisted and rose up into the air. Jinx did not need to know what was happening to know that she should not remain laying on the ground, and she sprang up almost as soon as she touched the dirt and ran back half a dozen paces, and turned around, and her jaw dropped.

The pipe was not a pipe at all, it was a gigantic mechanical worm.

A robotic worm the size of an aqueduct was looming overhead, its head, armed with a single red eye that stared down at them, and a huge gaping maw full of razor-sharp steel teeth that was slowly opening and closing, as though the damned thing was smacking its lips in anticipation of a meal. It opened its jaws and let out an ear-splitting roar that shook rocks from the ceiling of the cavern and nearly bowled Jinx over.

"What the hell is – "

It did not give them time to ask.

The red eye glowed brightly, and Jinx realized what was coming with only an instant to spare. She lunged for one side as red laser bored into the ground where she had been standing moments ago, carving a furrow through the ground. Devastator lunged to the side as well, snatching his baton from his side and lighting it on fire as he snapped it around at the worm. A rock near the worm's coiled body exploded like a bomb, but to no effect whatsoever, other than getting the mechanical nightmare's attention.

Jinx scrambled back as the thing let loose another roar, and its head retracted into its body to be replaced by a whirling drill bit, with which it dove at Devastator. Devastator was still on his side from his last lunge, and in desperation, turned his baton on the worm itself, targeting one of the metal panels that it used for armor and blasting it to bits. The worm noticed this one, swerving off at the last second and striking the ground next to Devastator, sending a hail of stone chips flying everywhere like bullets. Jinx ducked behind a pile of rebar as the rock pieces pinged off her cover, before the worm, having realized that it had missed its target, roared once again and loomed back up into the air.

The dust kicked up by the worm was such that Jinx could no longer see where Devastator had gotten to, but she could see the worm, and that was all she needed. She stepped around the cover and spun in a circle, gathering up her entropy like momentum before releasing a wave of it in a razor-sharp slash of energy that broke against the machine's metal hide, barely scratching the paint. The worm whirled about to face her, a laser blast nearly cutting her head off as she ducked, rolled, and came up with another handful of hexes which she tossed at the ceiling above the worm. Multi-ton rocks crumbled from the cavern roof and rained down upon the worm, but they might as well have been styrofoam for all the good they did. The worm fired its laser again, this time hitting close enough that Jinx felt the heat on her face as she jumped back, before ducking behind a cement mixer for cover. A second later, the worm's laser sliced the cement mixer in half, and Jinx was sent running back down the cavern, desperately dodging left and right to avoid beams of incalculable energy.

"Zap! Zap! BOOM!"

Jinx turned back to see the worm roaring in what appeared to be pain, a smoking rent torn in its face where its laser had been emitting from. Devastator stood between her and it, his baton held high, and he swung it down like he was trying to hammer something into the ground, then lifting it and slamming it down again and again, and with each swing, a small chunk of the thing's armor blew up, rocking the worm back and forth and back again. Yet no sooner had Devastator stopped to evaluate the effectiveness of his strikes than the worm discarded the shattered laser lens, and another one slid into place from within the body of the beast. It whipped its head back down and fired, and the blast would have disintegrated Devastator had Jinx not reacted instinctively and blasted him out of the way with a hex. Even that didn't spare him a series of hard shocks as the worm swung its tail around and hit him in mid-air like a thrown baseball, sending him flying back towards Jinx to land in a heap on the ground next to her, where he lay, groaning softly.

This was no time to be laying down. "Get up!" she shouted at him, in the voice she had used many-a-time to force one of her own teammates to do something they very much didn't want to do. Apparently it wasn't all that different than Robin's version, for he winced and staggered, but managed to get back to his feet, and looked back up at the worm which was slowly advancing towards them, its drill once more extended to grind them to paste.

"Can't you just blow it up?!" cried Jinx as she flung hex after hex into the oncoming worm, scoring the metal and chipping the paint, but unable to stop the drill itself.

"It's too big," he replied, "and too complicated! It's made of an alloy I've never seen before!"

"Well you'd better think of something you can do!" yelled Jinx, backing up as the worm advanced on them. "My hexes can't get through his armor!"

Devastator was backing up as well, though they would soon run out of room against the cavern wall. He was not however watching the worm, but instead looking all around them, perhaps for something else to blow up? Then suddenly, the psychokinetic said something that confirmed every theory she'd ever had about the insanity of heroes.

"Hold him off! I've got an idea!"

Hold him off? How exactly was she supposed to do that? Still there was no time to properly throttle him, and all she could do was use her entropic powers to rip a huge section of the ceiling off and drop it on the worm's head. As the previous sections had done, this one shattered like glass as soon as it struck, but the sheer weight forced the thing's head down, and it had to rear back up before continuing. And then suddenly, Devastator was next to her, holding a length of steel rebar as tall as he was in one hand, and his baton in the other. With a swipe, he blew a small hole in the ground, and set the rebar in it, facing up and forwards like a pike, but then hesitated. "It's… it's not sharp enough…" he said, looking around for a knife perhaps.

Jinx snapped her fingers, and the top six inches of the rebar snapped off at an angle, leaving a razor-sharp point behind. "What are you gonna do?!" she shouted over the roaring worm, "stab him with it?"

"Yep,"

She did not get a chance to do a double take.

The worm roared and lunged forwards towards them, and Jinx dove to the side, but Devastator did not, at least not instantly. As the monstrous robot closed in, he stood his ground, his baton held low, watching the worm as carefully as he had watched Jinx earlier in the evening. And then finally, when the worm was so close that Jinx was about to blast him aside again, Devastator swung his baton upwards, and the sharpened rebar stake was blasted into the air like a cruise missile, straight into the diving worm, driving into its armor like an arrow into a board, where it stuck, quivering.

The impact was not particularly powerful, though the worm did hesitate as it attempted to determine how badly it had been damaged. And Jinx was about to ask what in the name of Hell the point of that had been, when she saw that Devastator still hadn't moved, and was holding his free hand up, fingers extended towards the embedded rebar, which was now beginning to turn white with frost…

... oh that was clever…

The worm had finished determining that the attack had been nothing more than a minor nuisance, and turned back on Devastator, but it was already too late, and Devastator's fist suddenly closed. Moments later, the rebar, half-embedded inside the worm's throat, blew up, a shaped charge blast that tore a jagged rent in its armored hide, not merely peeling off the outer layers like the previous blasts, but ripping all th way through and exposing its 'throat'. The worm shuddered and roared and lunged this way and that, stabbing at Devastator and missing, but driving the Titan back into a corner from whence there was no escape at all, and it reared up again and spun around to crush the metahuman who had damaged it so, just as Devastator turned and screamed as loud as he could over the roaring machine. "Jinx! Now!"

There was a part of her, perhaps her rational brain, which told her that she could just as easily be a bit late, and only shoot the worm after it had crushed Devastator to pulp. But by the time she thought of that, she had already acted.

Jinx fired one of her most powerful hexes with the aim and poise of a marksman, and the hex slammed right into the worm's unarmored thorax, shredding the circuitry and demolishing the machinery that gave the unholy thing life. It let out an ear-shattering screech, writhing about like it was being murdered, which she supposed was true enough in a way. It jackknifed, twisted, and then spontaneously lashed out, slamming its tail section into her like a bullwhip and throwing her through the air like a rag doll. She hit the cavern wall awkwardly, and felt something pop in her left knee, and screamed as the pain bit through her, but her scream was lost in the sounds of the dying war machine. Desperately she crawled for cover, but the worm's death throes had begun to destabilize the entire cavern, and rocks were falling from the ceiling all over now. She could see the exit, three dozen yards away, tantalizingly close, but she couldn't make the difference on her feet, couldn't even stand up unaided.

But fortunately, she didn't have to.

Devastator just appeared, though in all practicality she wasn't watching for him and he might well have just walked over, and grabbed her arm. He shouted something, it might have been "Come on!", but the noise was too much to hear. She took his hand and managed to stand up, biting her lip until she drew blood from the pain, and with one hand over his shoulders, managed to hobble towards the exit as the cavern began to implode behind them. They were not moving fast enough and she put weight on her injured leg in desperation, and found that it would take it, though doing so made her lightheaded with pain. They reached the exit tunnel bare seconds before a fifty-ton rock landed before it, blocking the way back to the tunnel, and raced as fast as they could up, up, up, until Devastator could drag her no further, and she risked passing out. They waited only a moment or two to catch their breath, before moving on, both armed, her limping, him sore and exhausted, until finally the tunnel straightened out, and they found themselves staring at the surface.

They were standing in a desert of some sort, facing towards the coast, and in the distance, the skyscrapers of Jump City could just barely be made out in the morning light. The sun was just beginning to wink over the mountains to the east, the mountains they had just emerged from. Jinx had absolutely no idea where they were, save that they were somewhere east of Jump City, and that they had gone much further than she had thought, for the diamond mine itself was not visible from Jump. She did not know if it was the morning after her attempted burglary, or the one after that, and she did not care. The sounds of the collapsing cavern behind them gradually faded to silence, and they stood in the entrance to the cave they had just emerged from, at long last, and listened to the wind blowing through the sagebrush, and the distant sounds of cars on a nearby road. They had made it.

"Nice job," she said. It seemed the most appropriate thing to say.

Evidently he agreed. "Thanks," he said. "You too," and she nodded and even managed a smile.

And then she shot him.

The hex caught him flatfooted, square in the temple, and had it been a rock or something she would probably have killed him outright, but hexes didn't quite work like physical objects, and this one she had not taken the time to shape into some kind of overt slashing or bludgeoning implement. It did have enough force to drop him like a puppet with his strings cut, but it didn't knock him out cold. For one thing, in her present condition, she wasn't sure she could manage a hex like that. For another, she didn't need to risk it.

Devastator landed on his back, hard, and lay fairly still for a few moments before slowly picking himself up to a seated position, only to find Jinx, still leaning against the wall, with entropic energy crackling over her hands and a triumphant smirk on her face. "Can't say I didn't warn you…" she said mockingly.

"Are you crazy?" he demanded, rubbing his head where the hex had hit him, not immediately reaching for his baton, perhaps realizing that it was futile.

"No," she said lightly, "just pragmatic."

"You're hurt," he said. "You think you're in any shape to beat me now?"

"Maybe, maybe not," was her reply, "but I don't have to beat you." She pulled her communicator off of her belt, and showed the screen to Devastator. It showed a series of moving blips rapidly closing on a stationary one. "They do."

It took Devastator less time than she expected to realize how much trouble he was in.

"Well lookee here!" came a voice from behind Devastator, who jumped and scrambled to his feet, snatching up his baton and turning around in time to see four copies of Billy Numerous walking towards him from around the side of the cave. A second later, Gizmo appeared, flying on a new set of rocket boosters, with some kind of enormous device in his hands that could as easily have been a sonic screwdriver as a scanner. Mammoth and See-More were further back, having had the furthest ground to cover, See-More floating with his eye as a hot-air balloon, Mammoth jogging across the desert towards them all.

"As soon as we got into the cavern, we were close enough to the surface for a signal to get through," said Jinx as Devastator turned from one Hiver to the next in something approaching horror. "I hit a silent alarm, and let them know where we were. I don't suppose you did the same thing, did you?"

The expression on his face told her the answer.

"Jinx!" shouted Gizmo, relief apparent on his face, to the extent that he even omitted his usual epithets in the face of the Titan. Indeed, he seemed to have momentarily forgotten that the Psychokinetic was even present. "Are you okay?! What happened?!"

"I'm fine," said Jinx, and she meant it this time. "Brought us all a little present."

"Those Titans ran us all outta the mine," said Mammoth. "We lost all the jewels we wuz gonna get."

Jinx smirked. "Not all of 'em," she said, and the other Hivers followed her gaze to Devastator, who looked rather like he was trying to decide a prayer for a bolt of lightning to strike him dead would go over well.

Gizmo and the others, as always, could sense fear. "Cool…" said Gizmo in a very disconcerting voice. "I say we play with this one for a while. Let me cut him open and find out how he works."

"Nah," said See-More, "let's see if there's someone who wants to buy him."

"That Cyborg beat the snot outta me!" roared Mammoth, punching his fist into his open hand. "I want some payback!"

With each recited alternative, Devastator looked more and more like he was about to be sick. His baton was still in his hand, but he made no effort to raise it, turning from Hiver to Hiver before finally returning his gaze to Jinx.

"Well," said Jinx with a controlled smirk, "first things first. Let's have the diamond."

Devastator did not react immediately, but even he could see that there was no point in resisting. One of the other Titans might have refused on principle and been beaten to a pulp for it, but he simply slid a shaking hand into his pocket and pulled out the fist-sized gem he had been carrying, and gently tossed it to Jinx. In the natural light of day it seemed even more beautiful, and Jinx permitted herself a second to admire it before she slid it into her own pocket.

"So what're we gonna do with the snot-guzzler?" asked Gizmo impatiently.

That seemed to be the question Devastator wanted an answer to as well, and he stared at her mutely, fearfully, like a prisoner awaiting judgment. She honestly hadn't thought this far ahead, and so she took her time, trying to decide what they ought to do with this Titan, this enemy, that had now fallen right into their hands, for not in a million years could Devastator hope to take on the entire Hive by himself.

She pondered the matter while her teammates waited and while Devastator sweated and quivered nervously, and went over the various options in her mind, before finally coming to a decision she was comfortable with.

"Let him go."

She wasn't sure who was more surprised: Devastator, or the other Hivers. Devastator choked and clearly thought he had heard Jinx incorrectly, but Gizmo, who had been so happy to see her a moment earlier, nearly fell out of the air, while Mammoth just stood confused, and See-More looked frankly horrified, as though she had suggested vivisecting the Titan.

"Are you out of your stinking mind?!" yelled Gizmo. "Let him go?! Why should we do that?!"

"Yeah, I'm wonderin' the same thing, Jinx," asked See-More, albeit without the histrionics that Jinx was still hoping Gizmo was going to grow out of.

"Because I said so," said Jinx, looking almost bemused. "He's learned what happens when you mess with the Hive 5. I'm not about to kill the only do-gooder who's ever figured that out. We'll send him back to his little friends and let 'em know that we could've killed him if we'd wanted to, and there wasn't anything they could've done about it. It'll give them all something to think about, next time we show up."

"So would killing him!" insisted Gizmo.

"Killing him would just get all the other Titans on us harder than ever," she said. "And I've had enough fun for one day. We'll kill him next time."

Gizmo wasn't happy. Mammoth wasn't happy. See-More wasn't happy, and Billy seemed to be vaguely confused by the whole thing, but she didn't much care. She was in charge of the Hive, not them, and she knew they'd do what she ordered, albeit with a lot of griping. One by one, the Hivers turned to go, and Jinx waved them off, telling them she'd catch up in just a minute. Devastator looked like he still expected them to kill him at any moment, and it wasn't until the other Hivers had vanished that he asked the obvious question.

"What the… what are you doing?"

"I'm letting you go," she said.

"Why?"

"Because I feel like it," she said nonchalantly, which was not the most accurate reason, but was the one that required the least explanation.

"But…" he said, still not quite able to believe that it wasn't a trick, "but I don't… I don't get it…"

"Relax," she said, "there's nothing to get. You… saved my ass back there, with the worm, and when the lights went out, even though I told you I was gonna take that diamond from you when we got out. So I figure you deserve a free pass this time. Besides, you're not as annoying as the other Titans."

He plainly had no idea what to say, but decided on the obvious once again. "… thanks," he said. "What… what happens… next time we…"

"Next time I'm gonna beat the stuffing out of you, just like I would have this time if that cave-in hadn't happened. You're an okay kid, and you helped me get out of there, but get in my way again and I'll mop the floor with you." Her words were harsh and threatening, but her voice was simply tired, as was his, and so rather than cringing, he simply smiled and nodded.

"What makes you so sure I won't beat the stuffing out of you?" he asked.

"Because you're not good enough," she said, plainly.

"We'll see, I guess," he said, and with a nod, he started to walk away from the cave in the opposite direction that the Hivers had gone. Even if he called for the Titans right now, it would take them some time to get here, enough for her to escape, she knew. Before he had gotten more than a few paces away though, he stopped and turned back.

"Hey, um… could you do me a favor?"

"You mean besides not killing you?"

"It's a small one. When you and Gizmo go and er… see Marcus next, could you tell him I said hi?"

Jinx grinned. "Should I tell him Devastator says hello, or David?"

Devastator's eyes shot open in surprise. "How did you – "

"Cyborg called you that after the first cave-in," she said with a laugh. "Is that your real name?"

"Um… sort of…" said Devastator, "it's a long story. But yeah, tell him David says hi."

"Sure," she said.

Devastator turned away, and walked off, and Jinx prepared to follow her teammates, who would be waiting for her nearby, but before she did, she called after him one more time.

"Hey, David?" She wasn't sure why she wanted to tell him this, but… well… why did she do anything?

"Yeah?" he said, stopping and turning his head back.

"We'd have let you into the Hive."

He did not say anything to that, simply stood there, and watched her, and then finally nodded slowly, and turned away. Jinx watched him leave, and then did the same, still limping on her injured leg, as she followed her teammates who were waiting on the other side of the entrance. Gizmo was still grumbling, but clearly relieved to see her all right, peppering his questions liberally with the insults and angry threats he used to disguise the fact that he'd been worried sick, and Mammoth offered to carry her back to the vehicle, which she refused of course, but which still made her smile a bit, and See-More wanted to know what had happened in the tunnel and what all that noise was about a mechanical worm, and all of them made snide comments about Billy, who Jinx decided would probably make a fine addition to the Hive, even if he did brag way too much, and she made a mental note that she'd tell him as soon as they all got back and could prepare for the initiation.

It was good to be home.

O-O-O

Starfire tested the door to the roof, and found it unlocked, not that she could not have torn it from its hinges and flung it across the city with one hand even had it been locked, but she had learned that such things were best reserved for moments of dire need.

As she expected, the roof was in use, so to speak, though there were normally no activities to be done up here, save for the occasional game of volleying the ball or basketing it (the sheer number of things that people on this planet did with a ball never ceased to amaze). At present however, there was neither basketing nor volleying occurring. Instead David was standing upon the roof, staring off over the city in a manner she recognized quite easily, for she had done the same thing more than once from a similar vantage point.

She stepped onto the roof and shut the door behind her, and David must have heard her, for he turned his head to see who it was. She was afraid that she might be disturbing him, in the way that Raven did not wish to be disturbed, but he smiled and turned back to the cityscape beyond, and she walked up towards where he was standing, well back from the edge of the roof, but still staring across the bay at the city.

"You are feeling better, friend?"

David smiled and nodded. "Yeah," he said. "It was just some bruises and scrapes. Nothing serious."

"That is wonderful news," said Starfire. "We were all most distressed when Cyborg and Raven were unable to determine where you were located. We feared that you might have been crushed by one of the collapses that struck the diamond mine."

"So was I," said David, "Got lucky, I guess."

"Well, whether as a result of chance or another factor, we are all very glad to have you back among us once more."

That brought a smile to David's face, which was of course the reason she had said it, though it was not as whole-hearted as she would have hoped for. "Thanks, Star," he said, and she could tell he meant it, but that his mind was on another subject. She did not press him however, she found that doing such things rarely led to anything positive.

The city shone in the darkening sky like a glistening mountain of diamonds, and Starfire watched it in silence for several minutes, before asking another question.

"Forgive me, friend David, but… is there some reason why you are up here watching the setting of the sun, rather than downstairs with the rest of us?"

David did not answer immediately, but waited a moment or two "I'm… just thinking about some of the things that happened in the mine."

She nodded. "Robin mentioned that you encountered one of the drilling machines Slade used to try and destroy our Tower back before you were a Titan. We... did not know that there was a fourth."

"Yeah," said David, "that might have been where he built them or something. Robin said he might have drilled that tunnel to be able to sneak into the diamond mines whenever he needed to."

"Those machines were extremely fierce," said Starfire. "Was it... difficult, confronting one?"

David shrugged. "We managed," he said simply. "That's not... I was just… thinking about Jinx, and… some of the stuff we talked about."

Starfire clenched her fist. "You and Jinx were trapped for many schlorvaks," she said. "If she caused you undue harm, then we shall – "

"Nono," said David quickly. "No, it… that wasn't it. Jinx is… a lot of things, but… she's also exactly what she pretends to be. No… deceptions or hidden agendas…" he made a sound that Starfire recognized as a sigh (though on her planet it formed part of a traditional challenge for single combat to the death). "I guess… after everything that's happened… I just sort of miss that."

Starfire nodded. "If you spoke to Jinx for the length of time you were trapped, then you would know her far better than any of us do," she said. "Did you… forgive me… 'make friends' is the term, yes?"

"Yeah, that's the term," said David, "and… no, we didn't. She promised me that next time she was gonna kick my butt, and I believe her." He paused, and his voice fell somewhat, a slightly more somber tone. "But… I think that if… if things had been different. Then we could have been friends."

"Different for her?" asked Starfire.

David shook his head. "Different for me," he said. "And… that scares the hell out of me."

Starfire was familiar with the idiom David had used, but she did not get his meaning. "I… do not understand," said Starfire. "Why should that be cause for fear?"

David took a nervous breath and let it go slowly. "What… what if I hadn't been in… the Wayne Center in Jump when Cinderblock attacked it?" he asked. "What if there'd been no Cinderblock at all? None of this conspiracy stuff. I'd never have met any of you, right?"

"Most… likely not," said Starfire now hoping that she didn't understand. "Are you… thinking perhaps that this would have been preferable?"

"No!" insisted David instantly, to Starfire's relief. "Nono, Star… no, I… you've gotta believe me… meeting you guys has been the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. By a million miles. If it wasn't for all the other people that got killed, I'd say that it was worth having Cinderblock do all that stuff to me that he did if it meant I got to meet you all. That's not what I meant."

Starfire smiled and put a hand on David's shoulder to indicate that she understood, and he lowered his head to go on.

"But… it was because of Cinderblock that I met you all. If that hadn't happened, I'd probably still be back in some other Center or something, or… at least that's what I always thought."

"But you no longer think this?"

He did not answer the question directly. "What if… I'd met the Hive… instead of you guys?"

"The Hive?"

"Jinx and Gizmo met up inside the system, the same place I was. They were in the same system I was in, and had it a little worse off, and turned into bad guys. I didn't. If I'd been there with them, if they'd met me and found out that I had these powers, I'd probably be in the Hive Five right now. I'd be fighting you guys every other week, just like they do."

"I do not believe you would," said Starfire. "You are a hero, not a villain, and that is not entirely a matter of circumstance."

"I'm not heroic though, not like you guys. I mean… I go out with you and we do the hero thing, and I… I do it now because it's… instinct and rote memory or something, and because Robin's trained it into me, and because I've had all this time with you guys, but I just don't… think like a hero. And… I'm not freaking out about this, I'm really not, because there's nothing to do about it anyway, but… I always used to assume, back before I joined you all, that… if I ever wound up using my powers, it'd be as a bad guy, not a good guy. That's one of the reasons I never used them. And if… I'd been in some other facility, and I'd met Jinx instead of you and the others… that's what I'd be."

"No it is not."

David seemed legitimately confused by her certainty. "It's… not?"

"Jinx has decided to act in the way that she has, as have all of her friends, but you did not. You have made choices that have caused you to be here, now. Whether or not you sought to become a hero, you have done so, with our help or without it. You are a hero, a 'good guy'. If it were not for chance, I would not have arrived upon this planet, and none of us would have found one another. You should not discount such things just because - "

"I tried to kill Terra."

Starfire stopped dead in mid-sentence. David had spoken calmly and without inflection, as deadpan as anything Raven had ever said, and his eyes had not deviated from the horizon, but his words were precise and uncluttered with evasions and extraneous terms. A simple declaration that made no sense.

"I... I do not understand. You were..."

"We were fighting, and she kept going on and on about how stupid I'd been to trust her in the first place, and how bad it was going to look once the rest of you found out about it. She said I'd led you all right into a trap with Slade and that you were all gonna die knowing that I was the one that had set it all up..." he paused and took a long, slow breath, his voice slightly hollow but calm as the waters below. "... and I just lost it. We'd been fighting, hurt each other, that's how these things work but... that was different. I wanted her blood. I went after her like... like I wanted to rip her throat out and blow her guts all over the street." He paused again. "I still do. And I almost succeeded."

David's voice was calm, but Starfire could tell how disturbed he really was just by how quietly he was standing. "But you did not kill her," she said.

"My powers gave out," he said. "I got too... excited I guess. Overused them maybe, who knows..." he fell quiet again for a second, and Starfire thought he was done and was preparing what she wanted to say, when he dropped another bomb. "... and then I did the same thing to Raven."

"What?" she couldn't help but let some surprise out this time. Neither David nor Raven had said anything of a -

"She shot me," he said simply. "Thought I was part of Slade's plan. She had plenty of reasons to, and I caught her at a bad time, but she just up and shot me," he drummed his fingers against his shirt. "Right here. And her powers failed. I don't know why, but I was hurting really bad, and wasn't thinking too clearly, and she'd just tried to shoot me, and I got…" he was having trouble continuing, "…I got so angry, and just lashed out…"

Silence reigned for a few seconds. "And… then what happened?"

"Nothing," said David. "I was too badly hurt, and too upset. I couldn't make the powers work. I collapsed, and she helped me, and we got through it." He took a long, deep breath. "But… what happens on the day I don't collapse?"

"You should not fear your powers so," said Starfire.

"I'm not afraid of my powers, Star, I'm afraid of me. My powers do what I want them to, and sometimes I want to just… blow someone like Terra to pieces. And every time I practice with them or use them… they just get easier to use. Used to be if I got upset I couldn't use them, now I have to be really upset. And I'm more precise, and more powerful, and everything… and one of these days I'm worried that I'm gonna…"

"David," said Starfire, "forgive me once more, but you have… missed the sharpness?"

David hesitated in confusion, and Starfire knew she had made an error with the idiom. "the… point?"

That made more sense to him, and she continued. "Forgive me if this is surprising to you, but… the King of Tamaran is my Knorfka. If I wished to, I could summon a billion Tamaranean warriors to invade Earth and subjugate it, so that I might rule it as queen for all time. Or perhaps I could have them come and exterminate all of my enemies in one sweep. These things are within my power to do, but I am not afraid that I shall one day do them, for I know that I will not."

"Well, yeah, Star… you're a hero."

"As are you," said Starfire, "and not because of what Cinderblock's actions were. He provided the opportunity, but you took it, and made of it what you would with your own character. Robin would not have accepted you for training if you were as Jinx is, even if your powers were thirty times what they are. The 'point' which you have missed is not that you wished to kill Terra, but that you did not kill her."

"I would have if I could," said David.

"Perhaps," said Starfire, "but you could not, and so we shall never know. Perhaps you would have thrown her to the ground and then not killed her. We do not know. But we believe it to be thus, and you have not yet shown us any reason to believe otherwise, and so until you do, please do not worry that you are the same as Jinx or as Gizmo or the other members of the Hive, and that you are here simply because of luck. None of us would have accepted you as a Titan or a friend if that were so."

She knew it had worked before he spoke, for a small smile crossed David's face, and he lowered his head in a manner Robin would describe as "sheepish", and when he looked up again, much of the worry that had been inscribed on his face was gone. Not all of it of course, but much of it.

"Thanks, Star," he said simply, and she knew it was heartfelt. "I hope you're right."

"Come friend David," she said, "this worry is merely because of Jinx' escape with the precious jewel she sought. The next battle you engage with her in will not result in your butt kicking, but hers."

David smiled and began to laugh, and Starfire hesitated, for she had not intended to be funny.

"Did I… speak something incorrectly?"

"No," said David, "well… sort of actually. Jinx got away, but not with the jewel."

Starfire frowned in puzzlement. "But you said that you returned the gem to her when she – "

David reached into his pocket and pulled out the largest diamond Starfire had ever seen, a flawless gem as large as the egg of a Denubian Slime-worm. Starfire was generally not impressed by most earthly jewels, but this one elicited a small gasp, and she stared at it in disbelief. David simply smiled, and handed her the jewel, and she held it up and squeezed it hard enough that glass or plastic would have shattered, and yet the gem did not.

"But…" she said, "you… you said that you gave it back to Jinx!"

"I said I gave her a gem. Not that one."

"But then… if you did not give her the diamond… what was it you gave her?"

David chuckled…

O-O-O

The Man in Gold turned the jewel over in his hands carefully, taking his time, inspecting it, which was only to be expected, but Jinx dearly wished he would hurry the hell up.

"My dear," said the Man in Gold in a calm tone, "do you believe that I am an idiot?"

Calm though the question was, it stung her like a slap to the face partly because of the surprise.

"What… what are you?"

"This is not the jewel I asked you to retrieve. In fact, this is not even a diamond."

"What?!"

The Man in Gold lowered the gem and placed it on the table in front of him. "This is a cubic zirconia," he said. "A fake. A fraudulent gem that I must assume you are giving me because you believe I am an enormous fool who cannot tell the difference."

"That's…" Jinx literally did not know what to say. "That's… that's impossible!"

"It's not merely possible," said the Man in Gold, "it's the truth, but I have no time to play games with you, so if you have the real diamond, I suggest you produce it, now, and if not, then I suggest you leave, now."

Jinx' head was spinning. How could the diamond be fake?! "I took it from the vault just like you said!" she insisted.

"Yes," said the Man in Gold, "and then you let it fall into the hands of someone who can identify materials by sight and sense, and proceeded to follow him into a place where you could not see what he was doing. Zirconia and Diamonds look identical to you and I perhaps, but to Devastator, it would be as comparing apples to flaming meteors. No doubt he simply picked up an appropriately-sized Zirconia from somewhere in the tunnels while you were busy playing Blind Man's Bluff."

Jinx stared at the fake diamond in horror as the Man in Gold turned his back on her.

"Now go away," he said. "I've a lot of work to do preparing the apocalypse, and I cannot be bothered with doomed fools."

"No!" shouted Jinx. "No, wait… you… you've gotta give us another chance! There's gotta be… gotta be something else we can do."

"Something worth sparing your lives when my lord returns? I think not. You couldn't even manage a simple jewel heist. You needed Devastator's help to get past that damned mining worm. What will you do for an encore? Rob a parking meter?"

"Come on," said Jinx. "We're willing to do whatever it takes, okay?" She thought suddenly of a card to play. "Surely since you're so busy, you can think of something you need done that you just don't have time to deal with yourself, can't you?"

The Man in Gold paused, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Hrm," he said, and Jinx' hopes brightened. "Well… now that you mention it, there is something you can do for me. Something perhaps more up your alley than mere jewel theft."

"Name it," said Jinx with relief. "Just name it."

"It's not all that complicated," he said. "All I need you to do, is to destroy Robin…"

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Author's Note: I apologize again for the lateness of the chapter, and the length of it, and I hope if you have read this far that you have enjoyed the chapter. Please leave a review if you can, and I hope to see you again for Chapter 26 (much quicker than I did for this one).

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