Framed
Raven observed the scene with a detached kind of expression, the one she always wore in the face of the truly horrible. A bit more rigid than her typical 'I-am-the-untouchable-Raven' expression, but a not quite emotional enough for one to think it genuinely disturbed. She hovered a good yard above the rotten planking, examining the decrepit docks for some other clue besides the obviously dead body sprawled like a broken doll on the walkway. The cold black waves lapped against the moaning pier, voiceless, yet whispering of what they'd seen.
She glanced over her shoulder toward her teammates, concerned for them.
Starfire's emerald green orbs had grown overly bright with sick horror, her delicate Tameraian sense of justice going haywire at the sight of such mindless death and gore. Beast Boy, kind hearted, innocent kinda jokester he was, couldn't find anything funny to say in the face of this crime. He half-heartedly sniffed the area as a bloodhound, kept stopping, shaking his head and snuffling all over again.
He reverted to his elfin form, crouched at the edge of a slowly browning arc of blood and gazing at it with a morose kind of fascination. He'd never seen a murder scene like this before. The aftermath of a gang war, gunshot wounds and one guy with a missing ear, but they'd all died in a familiar fashion. Bullets kill. TV had desensitized him to that kind of suffering enough to stand it, but the sight of such…senseless…brutal…so much blood…
Raven touched his shoulder. Startled green eye bounced up to her, shocked out of his reverie. Soft mauve orbs gazed gently down at him and she motioned with her chin toward Starfire, who had a small crowd of night-shift dock workers trying to get a glimpse of the corpse. He nodded and moved to help the girl, grateful to get away from the metallic scent of death.
The empath hesitated…then looked toward Robin. She spotted him at the edge of the dock, standing just outside the police tape with his arms folded across his chest and a familiar, dark expression across his masked features. The red and blue sirens of the police vehicles cast his sharply attractive countenance into a kind of multi-colored shadow, his hair looking abnormally spiky in the weird lighting. A tall and heavy set man with a chin-full of eleven PM shadow and a large, navy-blue police jacket explained the situation to him.
The police had received an anonymous tip from the man too scared to stick around as an eye-witness. The message, however hastily conveyed, was that a man dressed in a black costume had appeared on the docks with the bookie. They spoke, they argued, Peterson never saw the blade until it ripped his jugular open.
"It's a mess," Commissioner Ryan Jones was saying. "Peterson kept all the booking around here. Maybe he saw something he shouldn't have or made a deal with the wrong guy. Our people took all the evidence photos into forensics but except for the murder weapon it's a clean kill." He sighed and ran his fingers through his obviously bed-rumpled hair.
"Do you have the weapon?" Robin asked tonelessly. Raven grimaced privately at the sound.
He held up a paper sack with a small white label attached. "It's weird. That's why my boys called you up. Figured maybe you know of a criminal who uses these. We'll tell you if anything else turns up."
Robin took the bag and stared at the badly dressed dead man, a sense of both pity for the man and disgust at the atrocity radiated from his aura, touching Raven's mind like a bitter medicine taste. He thanked the Commissioner and they shook hands before parting ways. Robin watched him a go a moment before walking over to join his teammates.
She glided over and landed next to Starfire and Beast Boy, who'd finally dispersed the crowd. Now that the police had cleaned up the body and shipped it off to the morgue, the people's gruesome interest waned. Starfire eyed they bag worriedly, obviously not looking forward to more gore this late at night. Beast Boy rubbed his nose like something stank.
"Sorry guys. I tried to catch a scent, but all I can smell is blood," he said miserably. "Dude. This is so messed up."
"I admit. We haven't seen this kind of murder for a long while," Raven agreed. "I hope this was a one time act of rage."
"I wish Cyborg were here," Starfire sighed. "He chose an inopportune time to leave for Steel City."
Robin glowered as he opened the bag and reached inside. He felt around and finally pulled large plastic bag out of the void. The lights from the police cars danced across the dark crimson angles of the blade. Recognition hit the Titans like a sledgehammer to the gut and every single one of them sucked a sharp breath.
"Dude…no way," Beast Boy breathed.
Glittering in Robin's hand was none other then a crisscross, red shuriken…a very familiar weapon to all the heroes. Robin's hand tightened over the shuriken and Raven felt a cold wave of self-loathing and hatred boil up in the teenager's aura. She shook her head slowly, the others missing her moment of disbelief. It can't be, she thought. It couldn't be…him.
"Let's go guys," Robin said coldly. He folded the evidence into a small square around the murder weapon and tucked in into part of his belt. "Spread out. We're searching the area. Then the rest of the city. Starfire, go with Beast Boy. Raven…you come with me. No one gets caught on their own."
Starfire looked startled that the boy hadn't chosen to go with her, but didn't remark on it. "Robin? Are we to assume that -,"
"Yes. We assume," Robin cut in icily.
They all knew what he meant. Raven looked strangely distant as they all parted ways, Starfire and Beast Boy taking to the western end of the city, Raven and Robin to the east. As they spread out across the dark alleys of the lower cityscapes, moving deeper into the middle to lower class apartment complexes, the violet haired girl suddenly looked up at Robin as if to confirm something. Slade kills people…I'm just selfish. Isn't that what he'd said? She visualized the bloody shuriken as Robin stuffed it violently back in the bag. Had he lied?
"So…" she began.
Robin looked slightly ill as he gritted it out. "Red X…has become a murderer."
-heist-
I love my life, Red X thought dizzily.
The light overcast cleared away just a moment and the pure moonlight hit X like a searchlight, making his plain black of his tattered cape standout like an oil splash against the granite stones of the old church. Slung over his back, the fruits of his labor for the last couple hours rested against his shoulder blades. He'd just pawned off the Una Notte Scura to a very wealthy art collector in the Brazilian mafia (or so said his underling at the trade) and received a huge pay off. Now he had the thick stacks of cash securely strapped to his person.
The belt about his narrow waist hummed, cooling from the last use and going into power-save mode, a nifty little feature X had added in himself for late-night strolls like this. The thief sighed happily as the moon hid its face behind the clouds against, casting him into shadows once more and perched on the shoulders of a beefy stone gargoyle that jutted out over the street almost ten feet. He propped his elbow on the monster's horns and stared out across the glittering expanse of Jump City.
"Home sweet home," he remarked softly to himself.
"I'd like to know where you keep your welcome mat," said a familiar voice tersely.
X braced his arms against the gargoyle's neck and leaned back, tilting his head over his shoulder to stare over his back at the shadowy, athletic figure of Robin standing, arms folded, shoulder braced against a deep crevasse between two elegant stone rain-funnels. His familiar black and white eye-mask narrowed darkly, his spiky black hair and expression a dark contrast to the cheerful red, green and yellow of his uniform. The steel plating along the bottom of his boots made a mean grating sound when the vigilante kicked himself off the wall and stepped fully into the moonlight.
The thief smiled, swinging a leg over the side of the long stone ledge and leaning back comfortably against his stony pal. "Hey, there Rob. Haven't seen you for a couple months. Been busy?"
The thin line of Robin's mouth pulled into a crooked smirk. It looked sour. "Too busy for you, thief."
"You wound me," X chuckled darkly, voice rising and falling, distorted and unrecognizable. "And I thought we were buds."
Robin tensed about the shoulders suddenly as if those words slid nails along a chalkboard in his brain and Red X had to pull a very hasty backhand spring onto the statue's thankfully flat skull as one of Robin's bird-a-rangs bit a chunk out of the stone where the burglar's kidneys had been a couple seconds earlier. The intense Teen Titan planted a heavy boot out on the first block of the jutting stone gargoyle, flicking several high-density throwing disks between his long, gloved fingers.
"I'll wound you alright and we're not buds, X!" He spat the syllable like a bad taste. "You're going to jail for the murder of Charles Peterson!"
A long pause. Red X blinked, Robin glowered, the moon shone, traffic zoomed around beneath them and finally the accusation sank in on the burglar's end.
"Wait. Say what?"
"YAH!" Robin hurled the disks with prejudice.
Red X swore and dove off the end of the gargoyle just as the disks detonated against the stone, sending up a cloud of thick mortar dust and smoke. The thief snagged himself on a lower ledge, managing to catch himself on the lip of a long stone arch thrust out from the face of the cathedral tower. He swung himself up on the arch, straddling the narrow stone stretch and flicking the power-save mode off his suit. He flicked four explosive shuriken into his hand and hurled them up.
The Titan leader, having just dashed along the length of the busted looking gargoyle to peered down at the thief, hissed something and pitched himself off the stone too. X's throwing stars struck the abused statue and blew up in a rain of stone, flame and smoke. Robin plunged by the thief's perch, hurdling toward the unmerciful ground with gravity pulling him eagerly to the concrete demise.
But the Boy Wonder hadn't gotten that name by sitting on his butt and writing detailed criminal reports, he got the name by doing amazing things.
The teenager somehow, got himself flipped around in the air and snagged the horn of another statue as he fell by and using it to reverse his momentum managed to slingshot himself down and around and straight back up to the rain gutter, landing almost perfectly beside the burglar. Suffice to say, Robin himself looked a bit shocked at his genius so no one can blame X for just sitting there and staring up at the Titan standing next to him
"Whoa," he said.
"Yeah…" Robin agreed. Then he punched X in the side of the head.
The thief went with the force of the punch, wrapping his arms around the rain gutter, rolling with it. He pitched off the side of the narrow ledge, pin-wheeling his legs as he went over and his heel caught Robin in his jaw, knocking the teenager off the building. X hung dizzily from the bottom of the rain gutter, feet dangling over the open air between him and the sidewalk so far below. Robin had vanished, which meant the little pest would come back to nail him again so he'd best get up.
The felon swung his legs like a pendulum, gaining momentum and then tossing himself into open air. He free-fell, arms and legs eagle spread as he pitched forward into gravity's thrall. He heard the tell-tale burst and hiss of Robin's grappling hook and hit the centre notch of his belt. His body fluttered out of existence just as Robin's boots plowed through the newly vacated space.
Red landed with a heavy thud on the roof top two streets over, the long distance teleportation throwing off his aim and dumping the thief ten feet over his predestined target.
To his shock, the sound of someone's boots crashing into the brick behind him signaled Robin had managed to catch up with him somehow. The tell-tall clomp of boots and heavy breathing indicated Short Dark and Spiky hadn't given up chase yet and the thief began to wonder if Robin often suffered from stomach ulcers what with all the world not behaving the way his heroic head had in mind.
"X!" Robin snarled, far closer than comfortable for the thief. "You murderer! Get back here!"
"I'm not a murderer!" Red X spat. "What's your damage? I didn't kill Peterson!"
Something hissed through the air with a sharp 'ziiiiii-zit' and a strong length of cords slung themselves around the burglar's ankles. He cursed and stumbled to the ground, hitting the stone hard and sliding across the rooftop until he smacked into an outside ventilation duct. He twisted around to see Robin's throwing ropes wrapped about his legs. The Titan himself skidded to a halt and made to seize the fallen thief, but X had other plans. He lashed his arm out like a striking snake, the high whine of the suit's rotary blades slicing the air, inches from Robin's chest.
The vigilante lunged back, but by the time he recovered, X had cut the bonds and taken off running again. Robin sprinted after him, irritated to see the thief had a perfect running stride. He'd have to slow the criminal down. Red X had the same idea however, because he spun around to face the Titan, looking like a trapped cat at the edge of the roof.
"I didn't kill anyone!" Red X snarled.
Robin stopped a good distance away, but still near enough to present a threat. "Tell that to Peterson's family!"
"I didn't kill anyone!" Red X sounded pissed off now…and if Robin didn't know better, confused. "Why are you saying that? I thought you were supposed to be smart. If there's a murderer going around, it's not me!"
"Then explain why your weapon was found lodged in his throat," Robin spat. He reached back into his belt and threw a wadded paper bag at the thief. He caught it awkwardly, as if stunned by the accusation. He opened the bag and stared at the grisly contents. The narrow eye sockets of his masks grew wide.
Robin glowered. "Someone ran a loop through the city surveillance at the docks at the time of the killing. Only a rough half hour ago and you're out and about in that stolen suit. You're the only one who could have done it. I know plenty of people who can connect you to Peterson." Red X couldn't think of anything to say in the face of such a well designed accusation, just standing there with the stained shuriken in his hands.
"Guess you forgot it while you were running," Robin added.
"I wasn't running. I didn't kill him!" Red X hissed. He threw the bag back at the Titan. "Keep your damn evidence. It's a set-up. Someone's trying to frame me."
"Don't lie when you're caught," the teen hero said coldly. He whipped his bow staff from its sheath, snapping it into full length. "It's not very classy."
"I didn't do it!"
"I don't expect you to admit it."
Rage blinded the young thief like a thick haze and suddenly he couldn't even see straight. He couldn't explain it, couldn't control the rampant emotion and before he could reason himself out of it he whipped his arms straight. The motion activated the crimson crisscross blades that sprouted from the back of the burglar's hands. Robin charged the thief, but didn't shout a battle cry, silent as an assassin. Red X couldn't find words in his fury.
The two met at the middle, crashing together with a sharp metallic grinding of metal against metal. Robin's bow staff spat sparks against the criminal's wrist blades, their arms trembling with the conflicting forces of their bodies, each struggling to overpower the other and finding themselves evenly matched. Robin's boots ground loudly, skidding on the concrete roofing while X's soft soled shoes silently ghosted across the dusty stone.
The two leaned into their attacks, faces so close to one another they could hear the heavy panting from the other's lips. Robin's face had no trace of the smirking Teen Titan back at Chang's lair. None of the wry humor or amusement, just cold righteous fury. Red X, for a moment, felt a spark of dread in the face of such desire to simply hurt him…a lot. They spun, each anticipating the other, thief and vigilante, one trained, righteous and looking to end a criminal streak, the other wild, raw and hoping to keep his streak alive. Ice and fire? Maybe…maybe not.
Robin let loose a wild cry, spinning and whipping his staff in a deadly spinning circle, shoving Red X off his weapon.
Red ducked under the follow through attack and dodge-rolled to Robin's right, slashing up, aiming for the Titan's utility belt. It snagged part of the teenager's uniform, but X had to spring back like an agitated cat as Robin's angry roundhouse kick hissed by the young burglar's skull. He doubted that iron plating would be merciful to his cranium. He sprang up and the two arch-rivals began to circle each other with only the moon as their witness, staring with her pale face as they paced the roof. Moonlight shimmered along the crimson face of the rogue's twin blades, glinting from the length of Robin's bow-staff
"You've gone too far, X," Robin articulated. "I'm taking you in this time."
Red X scowled. "Wake up and smell the manipulation, Bird Boy. Someone wants me out of the picture and their using you to do it."
"Right. I've never heard that one."
"I'm telling the truth! I'll prove it!"
"How?" Robin leered.
Good question, Red X thought dimly.
Robin attacked him again, leaping into the air and swinging his staff overhead with all the force he could muster. X sucked a breath and spun out of the way, metal cracking against the stone before Robin used his staff as leverage and nailed Red in the back. The thief sprawled. He gasped, shoving himself into a sideways roll as Robin's staff bit the concrete beside his skull. X reacted so quickly it startled even him. He snatched the bow-staff before Robin could pull it back and yanked it toward himself. The move, in turn yanked a startled Robin right into his waiting boot.
"Oof!"
Robin staggered back, clutching his belly. He grimaced, wincing up at the burglar who struggled up as well, looking pained. Red X panted, breath coming in short bursts, adrenaline pumping through him like an injection. Sweat might have dripped from his skin if he hadn't had the mask. He could see the sheen against Robin's forehead, the way the Titan's chest heaved.
"If you won't believe me…" Red X sputtered. "Then…then...I'll find the killer myself!"
Robin looked pleasantly shocked. "What?"
"You heard me," X said, trying to sound smug whilst fighting to hide his own panic. What the hell was he doing? Was he serious? Find the killer? Him? The irony was almost laughable. Nevertheless, the thief thrust a finger at the startled Boy Wonder, having abandoned the rotary blades in favor of verbal combat. "I'm gonna find this bastard and bring him in myself. You Titans are a joke. I'll do this thing before any of you self-righteous morons get close!"
"You're not a hero!" Robin snarled.
"I'm not a murderer either!" Red X retorted. He spun around and leapt like a great black cat to the top of the rusted water tower on the roof.
"X! Stop!"
Robin raced over to the foot of the tower, bow-staff useless to him now that X had leapt out of range. The thief narrowed his eyes at the Titan below him. The fury and hatred he saw in the young hero's face made the burglar sick, knowing it all stemmed from the belief he'd done something so…so… Slade! The thief shuddered, both cold and hot with revulsion and he felt something bitter, like lead fill his mouth. He refused to get framed!
The villain saluted him inappropriately.
"Catch me if you can, Robin!"
Then he leapt off the water tower and buzzed out of existence.
-heist-
Red X, by the time he got home, couldn't hardly see straight anymore. He tried to figure out how he'd gotten so sloppy that some two-bit bastard with a grudge managed to slap together a crime-scene convincing enough to fool Boy Wonder. He then tried to solve the mystery of why his head ached so badly, even though he'd already taken his mask off. He decided that he blamed the ache on a punch to the head, which he blamed on Robin… and for Robin's actually managing to hit him he blamed on lack of sleep…which he blamed on Slade…for whom he blamed Robin…and there the entire cycle began again, getting him no where.
The thief rumpled his flaming red hair and threw both his belt and his mask and his nightly earnings at the far wall, letting them smack the stucco and slide to the carpet. He didn't even care anymore, all he could hear, see, or think about was those terrible words coming out of Robin's mouth again and again and again like a sour and broken tape record:
You're under arrest for the murder of Charles Peterson.
Suddenly the thief felt suffocated his skin too hot for his body. Giving into the sudden compulsion, the felon ripped off the gloves and hurled them at Shi-Shi, who hissed and darted away from his owner gone mad. The feline huddled under the sofa, watching with wide green eyes as the infamous Red X stripped off his illustrious thieving attire and with a mixture of rage and disgust threw the entire thing in a corner, becoming Bannon Sasaki in less than thirty seconds.
The teenager suddenly lost his zeal and dropped into the couch, shirtless, clenching his fists against his forehead momentarily. But unable to keep them still, he ran his long fingers through his unruly copper hair, golden cider eyes wide, almost feverish. Shi-Shi ventured out from beneath the sofa and made his way over to the obviously strung out young man.
"I didn't do it," he muttered obsessively. He dropped his hands into his lap and stared sightless at the far wall. "I didn't do it. Why does he think I did it?"
The young man suddenly growled in rage and grabbed his head again, like it hurt, or like everything swirling around in his skull threatened to burst out of his brain. Bannon shook his head to clear it unsuccessfully, trying to cope in his unstable, criminal mind the ethics of being a felon, but getting blamed for a terrible, terrible crime he did not do. Furthermore, he began to question, in that skewed head of his, when it came to be that he cared so much what the Titans thought…or the police for that matter.
"Because!" he snarled out loud, leaping up and messing up his hair again. "Because I didn't do it! I go to jail for things I do, not things other people did with my stuff! Damn it, Robin! I thought you were smart!"
But then again, since when had Robin become an expert of the behaviors of Red X?
At what point had Bannon Sasaki decided that in the field of catching Jump City's resident super thief, Boy Wonder had a college degree? The redhead thought about it a moment that lasted a second and realized that somewhere between the stealing, the running, the exchange of mocking cat and mouse dialogue, Robin and he – Red X that is – had come to identify with one another, however that worked around masks criminal laws.
So Robin, being the expert that he is, should have realized something was wrong right away. Shouldn't he have picked up on that? Thieves don't go first-degree on a dime after keeping a perfect record for over a year in their thieving career. Why bother to keep one's self out of that kind of trouble only to screw it up on a twerp like Peterson?
No! Not only had his nameless doppelganger ruined his rep and got the Titans on his ass, they'd done it poorly! They'd done a half-baked, sloppy, meaningless and totally unmotivated bloodbath and pegged his name on it. They'd hardly even exerted themselves to make him look like a killer. The one criminal act with no justifiable benefit whatsoever!
And what's worse…Robin was falling for it!
The Red X in Bannon couldn't decide which was worse. He stewed on everything, all the facts he knew and all the blank spots in his knowledge. His biggest questions echoed in his head: Who would frame him? And why? His blood boiled and in a sudden reaction of anger he only half controlled he seized the nearest lamp and threw it against the wall. It shattered, exploding into a thousand clay pieces, all the shards launching themselves randomly about the room.
Shi-Shi hissed and arched his back, black hair standing on end.
Bannon paused, hand still frozen in the after-motion of throwing the furniture piece. The feline mewed crossly and with a twitch of his tail trotted off toward the opposite side of the room, glancing back at the teenager like a moody parent, trying to teach his hot-headed son a lesson. The thief didn't bother to think maybe he should put more trust in his own thoughts then that of a cat, but instead got up and followed.
Shi-Shi paused next to the article of clothing Red X had thrown, pawing energetically at the skull-mask, spinning it gently on the floor. Bannon watched his pet a moment, glowering. Shi-Shi bounced around the mask and began to purr, knitting his claws into the carpet beside the xinothium belt and tail flicking about; giant green eyes closed in contentment.
"Are you trying to tell me something?" Bannon asked his cat wryly.
"Meow."
"Uh-huh." The thief glanced at the belt, studying it. Shi-Shi blinked expectantly up at him. He sighed. "If you say so."
He grabbed the upper half of his costume and yanked it over his head, followed by his gloves, his belt and finally the familiar crimson scarred skull mask. Shi-Shi mewed, catching his attention ad drawing his gaze to the tattered cape he'd tossed over a chair near the kitchen. He wondered whether or not to go with the garment, but decided against it, figuring if he ran into Robin a second time tonight, he couldn't afford a possible handhold flapping around behind him. The Boy Wonder had a pretty decent running stride when pissed off enough to use it.
-heist-
Author's Note: I hope that was enough action for all you junkies out there. I'm having a ball with this story. Just hope I can stay on this inspirational streak for a bit longer. See you next chapter! Ja!
