Raven felt it more than saw it at first.
The shadows were her domain, and she easily felt sensed another presence slide past her in the darkness cast by a warehouse next to the docks. She lashed out with her energy to pin it, but it was already gone.
"Starfire," She said evenly, slightly lower than normal volume, but the Tamaranian heard her anyway and was suddenly circling over the alley, scanning the alley with her hands glowing green in front of her in preparation for an attack.
Raven muttered under her breath, moving dustbins and boxes out of the way in case their target was hiding somewhere close, and expanding her senses to try and pinpoint him that way.
And then, she could feel him—clear, clever eyes watching the alien girls carefully, with a hint of…amusement? She searched hurriedly, trying to figure out where it was coming from before he… but then he was gone again.
How had he gone so fast? And without so much as a hint to their physical senses he'd been there at all. Only her empathic abilities told them he was even there, which… wasn't human, was it?
"He's playing with us." She frowned, dropping her guard as she felt him slip out of their range.
Starfire landed curiously beside her. "Why would he play? Does he not wish to fight?" She asked.
"He seems to find us funny." Raven frowned deeper. "And by the level of his skill, I think we can safely attribute it to thinking we're pathetic. I felt the same things from the more egotistical villains we've faced, who've called us children."
"Is he old then?" Starfire wondered.
Raven tried to remember what his mind had felt like. It was… confusing, far too complicated for her to follow with emotions that didn't quite add up… not unlike Nightwing's often was. He'd felt… impulsive, yet highly self-restrained, uninhibited by what his emotions told him, and… lonely?
It was a strange kind of lonely though, not the heartbreakingly lonely, but a petty lonely. It was like the irrational crying toddlers did when their mom went to the store for an hour and left them with babysitters.
"I can't see him being that old, but… not much about him makes sense. I could be wrong." She hedged.
Just then, and small explosion rang out by the piers, sounding as if it'd been on the water itself.
They girls exchanged one look before flying off to find the source, and quickly rounded the building to see Cyborg blasting at a shadowed figure slipping here and there on massive boxes waiting to be loaded on to ships in the harbor.
"Argh! Stay still!" Cy bellowed, sonic cannon shooting out laser after laser, but none seeming to come close to the figure.
"What? Bored already? And I thought we were having fun…" They heard an unfamiliar voice tease the massive robot boy.
The figure landed on a crate and actually held still for a second, giving them just long enough to catch a glimpse of him. He had a red helmet cover his head, a black leather jacket and baggy black army cargo pants. He had gray boots, gloves, and a tight gray shirt, and everywhere there were weapons strapped to him in black leather. Hunting knives, handguns, grenades and… were those birdarangs? They were eerily similar to Nightwing's, and dozens of them were clipped to the same position on his belt that Nightwing kept them. And, as Raven looked, she noted two grapple launchers identical to Nightwing's as well, plus several other tools matching their leader's. And, she'd seen some of the stranger tech Nightwing came up with, she shuddered to think what this psychopath had in all those pockets of his jacket and cargo pants.
Their view was ruined as the box Red Hood was standing on exploded, a massive green hippo exploding from underneath it and trying to snap the vigilante/villain up in its jaws.
Hood simply launched into the air with the box and twisted mid-air to avoid its jaws. He hit the ground again with a quick roll and resumed dodging Cyborg's blasts. Raven signaled to Starfire, who immediately began swooping here and there in the air, shooting blast after blast of green energy as fast as she could at their target, while Raven muttered, moving boxes here and there to create obstacles and occasionally throwing one at him to try and pin him underneath it. She couldn't do that too often for the boxes were too massive for her to gain complete control over, and could end up pinning Beast Boy or Starfire as they perused Red Hood across the docks.
"Nightwing? Nightwing!" Cyborg yelled into his communicator before giving up with a grunt. "Our communications are down, I can't get a hold of Wing." He called to his team, who- though nervous—just kept after Hood.
"He'll catch up, don't you worry!" Hood interrupted them, doubling back and slipping past all four of them before they could react and running the opposite direction they'd just come from.
Beast Boy swooped as a falcon past him, landing as a gorilla directly in his path and roaring furiously to stop him. Hood didn't even break stride, leaping into the air and catching BB with a powerful roundhouse kick directly to the chest. The gorilla went flying, but it was a green boy who hit the ground with a resounding smack.
Cyborg was right there, trying to hit him from behind, but Hood ducked instinctively, grabbing his massive arms and judo flipping him. Beast Boy only just got out of the way before Cyborg crashed down on top of him.
Starfire swooped, throwing a barrage of green energy blasts, but Hood flipped and twisted in the air as he rapidly backed up, missing every one of them. Mid-flip, he was suddenly holding two handguns in his fists and opened fired.
Starfire, with all her alien strength, was thankfully bullet resistant, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt like hell. She hit the ground, momentarily forgetting her joy of flight as the sharp pains the bullets left on her skin.
Before Hood could even hit the ground again, he was suspended in black energy.
He glanced to the side to see Raven glaring at him, eyes pitch black as she held him there.
She felt him smirk, and the strange amusement she'd felt in him before returned, full-force.
"Boo." He said evenly with a hint of laughter.
Her mind flooded with images of acid green water, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't scream, she was going mad trying to claw her own eyes out as unholy pain beat down her back to a steady pulse and a maddened, evil laughter….
Thump….thump… thump… thump…
"RAVEN!" She snapped out of it to find herself on the ground, laying with her cheek pressed against the warm concrete of the loading dock. Cyborg had a hand on her shoulder, and once he saw she was awake, he gripped her by the shoulders and dragged her to her feet.
"Starfire and B forced him down the dock some, but we need to catch up quickly, they won't last long without us." He told her, pausing at the paler, shaky look in her eyes. "Are you ok? Can you keep fighting?"
She shook her thoughts clear and inhaled deeply, mentally repeating her mantra over and over again to gain control.
"I… yes, I'm fine. Let's go." She nodded blankly, struggling to keep everything locked up tight.
"What happened? You had him and then you just hit the dirt…?" Cyborg asked cautiously. After all, if it happened again, they needed to know before trying to fight him again.
"I… got too close, I think. Keeping him suspended also means his mind is a lot closer mentally to my own, and somehow… somehow he knew that and used it against me. He has some… unpleasant memories that I was not equip to deal with." She slowly put together. "I won't try that again, and so long as I don't there should be no problems."
Cyborg nodded in accent. "Right then. We need to go help them then," He nodded breaking into a run heading down the docks and Raven soared beside him.
"He's not going anywhere." She said as the piece fell into place in her head.
"What do you mean?" Cy asked.
"I mean that he's waiting for Nightwing. While he doesn't mind hurting us, he's not going to shake us loose until Nightwing gets here. He's… skilled. Far more skilled that any hero or villain we've met before, and if he'd wanted to lose us, he never would've been found in the first place. He's waiting for something."
She didn't know how she knew it, but she did. Perhaps she'd learned more from her brief mental encounter with Red Hood than she'd originally thought. Hopefully that would backfire on the vigilante/villain who'd tried to use her powers against her.
They knew they'd caught up when Starfire went whipping past them, crashing and skidding into the ground after the blow she just took.
"Come on you guys, just a minute or two more and bird brains should have caught up finally… you know, for midget genius he sure is slow at this." Red Hood cackled cheerfully.
"Who are you!?" Cyborg demanded, aiming his sonic cannon at the villain again, but not firing. In return, Hood didn't move out of the way, but stood casually in his line of fire with his arms crossed over his chest as he tisked in dismissal.
"A friend." He said simply with a little noncommittal shrug.
"Friends do not attack us." Raven said coldly to him, narrowing her eyes dangerously.
"'Attack' is a bit harsh, don't ya think?" Hood said in mock-hurt. "I was only playing around, it's not like I'd've killed you, right?" He said innocently, with that over-done note that told him he wasn't being completely serious about that statement.
"You need to get out more if that's your definition of playing around," Beast Boy groaned, rolling out of the crate he'd recently been smashed into (in incidentally crushed seeing as he'd been an elephant at the time).
"You know, that's not the first time I've heard that." Hood said cheekily to the green boy. "Hence why I decided to take a trip to Jump. Have a bit of fun and stuff, right?"
"If your definition of fun is murder, that you really are insane…!" Cyborg growled.
"Oh, trust me, I never denied it." Hood cackled, flipping off the crate as Cyborg blasted at where he'd just been.
The fight resumed again, only this time, it was painfully obvious Hood was just toying with them. He got close for no reason, slipped out of the way in the nick of time just to prove he could, and other than the occasional punch or kick (which hurt like he was a meta or something) he didn't draw his weapons.
And he most certainly didn't need them.
A well-placed jab could stun Beast Boy back into human form, and a single powerful kick to the right circuit boards could freeze Cyborg's systems for half a second and give him that golden window to escape the robot boy's range. Starfire couldn't seem to stay in the air for very long around him, as he kept finding ways of bringing her down or taking her off guard, and Raven was almost no help seeing as all she could do was throw things at him or create obstacles, and none of that did a thing to even break Hood's stride.
Then, without warning, Hood went from dodging and slipping out of their reach, to attack mode.
Ten seconds was all it took: he first launched himself at Cyborg to knock him over, fastening him to the ground by two grappling hooks shot into the concrete, then the other ends shot on the opposite sides make a large black "X" over him and pinning that strong boy to the ground—an electrical shocker slapped to his metal chest to defuse his systems for a minute. He then flipped up, missing Starfire's energy blasts, and hit her square with another barrage of bullets, and once she hit the ground she suddenly found herself caught in a webbing of steel cables launched from yet another grappling gun in Hood's belt. Beast Boy tried to help and caught a kick to the side temple, knocking him back into a crate in human form and hitting his head yet again. He slumped to the ground in a daze.
Raven was slightly harder to pin, using her ability to travel through shadows to keep away from him and not bothering to try and hold him again less he give her another mental breakdown.
Still, it was only a few seconds before she flew out of a shadow and directly into him, Hood seeming to have predicted where she would surface and got ahead of her.
She blinked, not really sure what happened after that, finding herself on the ground again with a throbbing left temple.
She blinked and tried to get her surroundings back together again, and she only just barely grasped the sound of Beast Boy getting up and running past her, his footsteps transforming to the sound of hooves on the concrete ground, before there was a thud and B gave a startled, frightened squeak.
She pushed herself up roughly, ignoring the world as it spun sickeningly, only to have her stomach drop at the scene before her.
Beast Boy, in human form flat on his back, let out another strangled squeaking noise.
"Oooh, let's see if we can get the chicken to squawk now can we?" Red Hood drawled casually. BB just let his green eyes widen to the size of saucers as he stared down the barrel of a gun. "And don't think about shifting unless you think you can shrink faster than a speeding bullet." As if to make a point he sifted the gun just that much closer until the barrel tip was only two inches from the smaller boy's nose.
"Beast Boy!" Cyborg yelled, and the others—just getting over their own obstacles—looked up and froze at the scene before them.
"I wouldn't, I really wouldn't." Red Hood said as they made to move closer to them.
"Let him go." Raven said easily, the shadows seeming to move silently and unobtrusively around her and across the ground towards where the villain held the young hero at gunpoint.
"Keep your freaky ass magic shadows to yourself then." He snapped, not turning from where he was staring down the green boy. Raven came up short, her shadows stopping but still hovering unnaturally close to the confrontation less then were needed.
"Let friend Beast Boy go!" Starfire squeaked, hands over her mouth in worry as she hover behind Cyborg and Raven nervously.
"Yeah-uh… I'd appreciate keeping my brains intact…" BB said in a weak attempt at a joke, gulping loudly, unable to take his eyes off the gun.
Red Hood snorted like he'd actually enjoyed the lame joke and Beast Boy raised two incredulous eyebrows. "Trust me B, death ain't nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be." He said, and they could almost hear the eye roll though they couldn't tell with the helmet.
"How do you know me?" Beast Boy blinked rapidly in surprise. No one ever called him 'B' unless they were good friends.
"Believe it or not, I've known you since before you could do the freaky animal thing Gar." Hood said cheerfully, and they could hear the smirk in his tone.
Raven and Cyborg just exchanged wary and slightly confused looks as Beast Boy floundered.
"Jason!" A familiar voice shot across the empty docking area, and all eyes turned to see Nightwing flip over a few upturned crates and start walking –no, marching—across the open area towards the confrontation, looking angrier than the Titans had ever seen him… which made no sense at all seeing as he should be worried rather than angry right then.
Wait… did he just call Red Hood… "Jason"?
"Oh, hey there big brother." Red Hood called casually.
The Titans balked.
…
…BROTHER…!?
…
Nightwing grit his teeth in anger as he brushed past Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven and got much closer to the gun-wielding villain/vigilante, seeming to not be concerned at all that he would shoot his teammate.
Blue eyes met green beneath masks and they made a silent little truce. Neither was happy about the slip of information, but they could call it even and continue without bringing up more of those caliber secrets. Jason hadn't come here to spill civilian IDs after all, and he certainly wasn't willing to bargain his own secrets for pissing off his big brother. He was only mildly surprised Dick was willing to open up so quickly, but he had a feeling Dick was only doing it so Jason's mission would be complete in a minimal time possible so that he could leave before he did more damage.
Which, was fine by him. Consider it mission accomplished in record time…!
"You know this guy!? I know this guy!?" Beast Boy said shrilly in panic. Red Hood was looking at Nightwing now, his posture still casual, but his arm was still fully extended and gun still pointing directly at the shape-shifter's head.
"Unfortunately, yes." Nightwing said in a long-suffering sigh.
"Aw, I'm hurt bird boy, and I thought we were friends." Red Hood teased, seemingly not to have changed his in-control, casual persona upon seeing the new arrival, except now Nightwing seemed to be acting the same way.
"Not when you point guns at my teammate's heads." Nightwing growled.
"Eh, you know I wouldn't hurt him exactly…" Nightwing lifted one eyebrow but didn't say anything. Hood shrugged. "Ok, maybe I would've, but I would have regretted it, maybe, your teammate and all…" Nightwing didn't move, simply crossing his arms over his chest, eyebrow still raised. Red Hood sighed in annoyance. "Ok, ok, probably not, but you weren't here and I was bored!"
Nightwing threw his arms up in the air helplessly. "And god forbid you wait an hour before starting to kill people! For god's sake Jay, this isn't your city!"
"And don't I know it!" Hood huffed. "Perky little twits are they? Criminals give up and sell each other out in three seconds flat-"
"After you kill their partners as warnings." Nightwing cut in.
"Yeah, well, bunch of scared headless chickens as soon as they see a gun…! Heaven forbid they work in dangerous environments! They carry their own guns and yet heroes aren't allowed to use them? You're city is full of idiots, Goldie, thought you ought to know."
"Thanks, for that." Wing said dryly, laced with sarcasm.
"Um, you know, I don't mean to interrupt this little reunion or whatever, but I thought I'd be a bit higher on the list of priorities right now or something…?" Beast Boy pointed out, gesturing to the gun in his face.
"Yes, fair point, so Hood if you'd be so kind as to drop the gun…" Nightwing said reasonably.
"But he's rather jumpy about it isn't he?" Red said tilting his head to the side and pressing the gun closer, watching Beast Boy flinch. "What kind of training are you putting him through that he can't handle a gun, birdie?" He said incredulously.
Wing rolled his eyes. "Put the gun down and we'll talk about it, right?" He challenged. "Or should I be telling Kon about this?"
"Kon?" Hood said in confusion.
"Kon- you know, the guy you used to be friends with… that is until you pointed a gun at his girlfriend's little brother…"
Red Hood straightened up. "Damn, haven't talked to him in forever… and this little twerp is Megan's little brother? I forget they have that whole blood thing…" He asked, dropping the gun in distraction and looking Beast Boy up and down.
"W-wait, what do you know about Megan!?" BB cried, glancing from Nightwing to Red Hood in alarmed confusion.
"You have a sister?" Cyborg blurted out in surprise.
"Yeah-well, not really—but yeah! But how do you know about that?!" He demanded of Nightwing, who sighed heavily.
"We'll talk later." Nightwing said tensely, moving forward and grabbing Red Hood by the arm and dragging him away from Beast Boy. For the rough and not-so-respectful treatment, Hood didn't seem to care. In fact, his body language suggested he was highly amused by this whole situation and not at all worried that Nightwing would actually hurt him despite the fact he'd just attacked his team.
But something else was nagging at Raven's mind.
"Red Hood is your brother?" Raven hissed quietly. Nightwing locked eyes with her and they were both remembering his recent leave of absence about his mysterious brother. Had this been that brother? Had this murderer been the reason that their leader was suddenly marginally happier? If so, there was something very, very worng…
"Didn't tell you he had a psychotic mass murder as a little brother, did he? Eh, it's fine, I don't tell people I've got a good-for-nothing teacher's pet as a relative either. Bad for the image, ya know?" Hood cackled.
"You are not helping." Nightwing growled gripping Hood's arm tighter until the taller boy actually flinched a little.
"Yes, and historically I've always been such a helpful person." Hood drawled.
"Just leave. You have twenty minutes to get as far away from Jump as you can, got it?" Nightwing hissed, and even his teammates stepped back a little under the fierceness and violence in his glare.
"But I just got here!" Hood complained cheerfully.
"And now a dozen people are dead. Congratulations, you've met your daily quota of graves filled before lunch: now go."
"Or what? You'll call dad?"
"Perhaps."
"Isn't the point of living in Jump and hiding your identity all to hide from him? And you're just gonna call him up and tell him I'm here?"
"That's irrelevant right now. And besides, who do you think he'd going to come after: the wayward eldest who simply has a conflict of perspectives and in the middle of giving him the cold shoulder or the mass murdering nutcase who tried to kill him?"
"…touché."
"This is… your… brother…" Starfire said slowly, confusion and worry growing on her face.
"Beast boy has a sister, Birdie has a brother, will the family reveals just keep coming!?" Hood mocked dramatically.
"Oh shut the hell up!" Nightwing snapped, cuffing him over the head so hard that Hood stumbled forward a bit. Hood whipped around to punch him back, but Wing had already moved, pushing his arms down and spinning until it was pinned behind the taller boy's back in a painful lock. "Seriously, how many times are you going to fall for that?"
"Probably forever. I'm not a fast learner." Hood grunted as he struggled to keep from dislocating his shoulder.
"You're down to eighteen minutes." Wing repeated sternly. "To be well on your way home- and don't even think about taking a detour to Metropolis because I'm totally calling Megan and Kon to warn them about you."
"You are not— you haven't talked to them in longer than I have, there's no way!" Red panted against the hold.
"Watch me." Wing snarled pushing him forward roughly. Hood stumbled but came up in a casual walk, dusting himself off as if that happened a lot.
"Well you're no fun." He pointed out lightly.
"Well, I tend to be put out when people start dropping dead around me, now don't I?" Wing quipped right back. "Seventeen minutes. And please don't procrastinate, you do that and then you lose track of time and never make it, so just go, right?" He sighed heavily.
Red Hood cackled an evil laugh and walked past Nightwing with his hands raised in mocking defeat. "Fine, fine, I'll go… nice to see you too midget."
"Really? You're gonna bring that up now?!" Nightwing hollered at him as the distinctly taller boy flipped up onto the cargo in an eerily similar way to how Nightwing had arrived.
"It's never a bad time for that joke bird brains!" Hood shot right back, doing a flip and disappearing through the boxes.
There was a silence in which Nightwing pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation at the mess his brother had left in his wake, and the Titans just watched their leader with wide, shell-shocked eyes.