Blanket Disclaimer: Poison Tonic LX does not own the Teen Titans or any characters therein. Don't sue her, please, because if you do I won't have a home anymore…-Ralph, the muse
Considering what a great thief he was, his living quarters were not the best to be had.
It was a small house on the edge of Jump City with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, which in turn connected to a tiny space with a TV and desk that many would have called the 'family room' if he had had a family. As it was, though, he didn't.
But these sparse lodgings were all he needed. He was only home when planning another heist anyhow, so what need did he have for a lavish home?
Besides, people would have found it highly suspicious if he, of all people, had suddenly come into enough money to purchase such a home.
At this point, some background information may be needed in order for you to understand the above statement:
Caleb Dawson (alias Red X) was orphaned at five years of age.
It's not important how his parents died. In fact, he had no recollection of ever knowing or being told how he'd come to be at the orphanage where his first memories were made.
Maybe his parents had abandoned them. Maybe he had been kidnapped. Maybe they had died.
The point is, when his story begins at five years old, he was in an orphanage, with no parents or relatives (or even memories) to speak of.
The woman running the orphanage was a tyrant, only giving her charges enough to live, and not a bit more, though she got enough money from the government to give them much more.
Caleb had hated the orphanage and its autocratic headmistress from the first moment he could remember them, and so, after a scant month of putting up with it, he ran away.
He was quickly and easily caught and returned, but was not to be deterred, running away a ridiculous amount of times and being caught and returned accordingly.
Until, that is, he was six, when he finally made his escape, never to return to the orphanage.
He lived on the street after that.
He tried to live off people's good will and things he scraped up around soup kitchens, but soon found that trying to live strictly by the law was a waste of time, and could even be considered suicide.
There would never be enough kind people in the world to feed a homeless six-year-old boy.
And so it was that he turned to thievery.
It was awkward at first, but even in his earliest attempts he managed to escape unscathed, though not always without being caught.
Luckily, though, most of the people he stole from were kindly and understood, to some degree, why he stole. Many of them even gave him money to buy food.
Eventually, though (by the time he was eight, by his reckoning), he didn't get caught anymore.
When first he began stealing, it was only enough to live on. Sometimes, he didn't even steal a noticeable amount. It was discredited as miscounted change, or a few misplaced bills and coins.
But after a while, it seemed a waste to only use his talents for himself.
He started to steal for others, too—other penniless fools like himself who needed an extra coin or two in order to feed themselves, and in some cases their families. He stole enough for himself and a few others, then dropped the coins near where he saw some needy person.
Soon, that didn't satisfy him either, especially when someone saw him stealing and tried to make him steal exclusively for them.
He hadn't killed That Man like he had wanted to, but he did hurt him, and escaped to another city where no one would recognize him.
He learned something from That Man, though—something he had known, but hadn't quite wanted to admit: some people (not all, but some) took advantage of others' misfortunes.
After the fiasco with That Man, he stopped giving to others, but he didn't stop stealing more than he needed. In fact, he started to steal even more than what he'd stolen before the incident.
When he was twelve, he pulled off the first heist not on some poor idiot stumbling the streets with a surplus of money in their wallet.
He was small for his age (always had been, in fact) and, thanking his lucky stars for his small stature (for once), crawled into the air vents of a manufacturing company and stole a rather valuable chip.
He sold the chip for a nice sum, and began to see the profit in doing big time jobs.
He took jobs from various sources.
At first, his employers were taken aback by his size, but his renown grew with each successful heist (and there were only successful heists), until anyone and everyone was clamoring for him to do a job for them, and no one cared how small or young he was.
So it was, though not by any choice of his, that people began to call him the Shadow.
But then, when he was fifteen, he went to Jump City and saw something he decided he must have for himself—it would be the first larger item he'd stolen for himself in all his time stealing.
It was a costume.
It once belonged to the brash leader of the Teen Titans—he preferred to call him the Kid, mostly referring to his inexperience stealing than his age (since the Kid was the same age as he, or thereabouts)—but almost as soon as it had been hung up and forgotten about…it belonged to him.
He was happy—it was amusing to see the Titans fret over the things he did, and at times he had to admit they could be quite a challenge, but the suit had been designed to thwart them, and it performed this job perfectly—and his experience and fighting skills were more than enough to take care of the Kid and overcome its other shortcomings.
He especially enjoyed flirting with the Dolt and making the Kid jealous, though in truth he wasn't at all interested in the naïve alien.
His sights were set on the other female Titan—the Sorceress.
He worked hard to figure out why he was so fixated on her. He'd spent most of the past years of his life making sure he felt nothing for anyone, so why this sudden obsession?
It was his first…crush...and it rather frightened him.
Certainly she was beautiful in her own dark, exotic way, but throughout his lifetime he'd seen much prettier, darker, and more exotic women.
He'd seen other women as emotionless as her...more so, even.
There were better fighters, better magicians, with better retorts and such.
So why her?
Was it that, although he had seen all of those things, they had always been in different women?
She was the first woman he'd met to possess all of these qualities—these things he found to be so intriguing and even sexy in their own right.
Or perhaps it was that, along with all these and in spite of her emotionless demeanor, she was also stubborn, fiery, and sarcastic to a fault?
Maybe it was because he wanted to be the first, even before her friends, to see her true smile?
...And to smile along with her?
(THE RUSH)
Just in case anyone gets confused, since this is Red X's POV, he'll be calling the Titans by his own names for them in the narrative part of the story. Here's the key:
The Kid: Robin (obviously)
The Dolt: Starfire
The Sorceress: Raven (also obviously)
The Metal Man: Cyborg (do I have to say it?)
The Comic Relief: …If you haven't figured this out by now I'm not even going to bother…