Writer's block sucks. D:

But anyway…

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Prompt #9: Orange

The rocking of the ferry matched her queasy stomach.

Kid Flash squeezed her hand reassuringly, and she was too sick to her stomach to yank her hand away. Even if it does feel good, she thought absently, before mentally slapping her mind. No. It does not feel good. It is a silly and overrated gesture of comfort.

"Are you nervous about meeting them?" He traced a swirl on the back of her hand with his thumb, and she had to concentrate to keep her expression frustrated. Frustration was good. It was understandable. Anxiety? That was like tossing a meaty bone to a starving dog—no one ever cut you any slack when you were scared.

Jinx frowned slightly. "No." But when she saw his mouth twitch at the corners, just a little, she sighed. There was no point giving him BS. He was just too damn smart to fall for it. She scuffed her toe on the ground and scowled when the rough floor scraped away part of the leather on her boot. "Yeah. A little." Then she paused. "A lot, actually."

He was too much the gentleman to call her on her fears. All he did was rummage through one of the almost-invisible pockets at the side of his suit. "Hang on, I think I have something…in here…somewhere…" He trailed off, scrabbling around in his pocket, and Jinx couldn't help but admire the way his muscles rippled along his shoulders.

Another mental slap. That was the fifth time today, and it was only half past ten. In another hour her brain was going to look like the victim of one of those girly catfights from junior high.

Kid Flash made a triumphant little noise and pulled out a slightly smashed stick of gum. The wrapping was ragged and there was a bit of pocket lint sticking to one corner, but he looked pleased anyway. "Here. Gum. It helps with nerves."

She arched an eyebrow, just a little, but accepted the gum from him anyway. "Gee, thanks. I've always wanted a stick of gum for Christmas."

He smirked. "Good, because I didn't bother buying you anything else." She swatted at his arm and he responded by ruffling her hair. He knew she hated that.

"Watch it, buddy!" she snapped, and patted her cotton candy-pink mane back into place. "I have to impress these people."

And with that, Jinx suddenly remembered why she was standing on a ferry with Kid Flash.

To go meet the Titans. The Titans. And beg them to let her be part of the team.

Jinx did not do business meetings. She didn't do begging either. And yet somehow she was standing shakily on a ferry that was towing her across the bay, Kid Flash by her side, dressed in a skirt she didn't like and a blouse that made her look like a nun, waiting to do both of these things in front of the Titan's leader.

"Oh, God," she mumbled, suddenly feeling even more sick to her stomach. "I have to impress these people. I have to go impress the Titans. My mortal enemies."

No, of course she wasn't nervous.

Kid Flash looked pained. "Teammates, actually. We might be working with them after this." Her expression must have turned alarming, because he hastened to say, "Or we might not even talk to them. Except for the annual balls and charity events and things. You know. Protocol."

To hell with looking tough. Jinx was scared out of her mind.

They're going to hate me. Which wouldn't be too bad, really, except they're my lifelines. I have nothing besides this. Who's going to take in a reformed criminal with a track record like mine? I couldn't get a job at the crappiest restaurant in town if I had a recommendation from the president.

They were going to hate her. Seriously. They were going to open the door, laugh hysterically for a while, and slam the door in her face, and as soon as they had finished flinging the door closed they were going to wonder aloud if they broke her nose. And then they'd laugh. Again.

She'd have to move out of Wally's guest bedroom. Her pride would force her to. And then she'd have to live on the streets for a while until she eventually found a job at some dive.

A thought:

What if I can't get a job?

She wasn't going back to crime. It wasn't worth it. She wasn't going back to puking her guts out every time she laid a finger on someone else's jewelry.

She'd need a fake ID, at the very least. Some hair dye as well, and maybe colored contacts. Hell, her face had been plastered onto so many "Wanted" notices over the past few years that she'd probably need plastic surgery.

It gave her a pang. She didn't want to lose this face. It reminded her of her mother's.

Another pang. She didn't want to get plastic surgery. The hospital bills alone would require pawning off a stolen Rolex, and Rolexes were pretty scarce in Jump.

"Hey, Jinx?"

Kid Flash nudged her, and she opened eyes she didn't remember closing.

They were at the drop-off point. They were going to make her get off. Actually get off. At the foot of Titan's Tower. And then they were going to motor away. And leave her.

At Titan's Tower.

She was going to be sick.

Kid Flash put a hand at the small of her back and gently led her to the door of the ferry. As they passed the driver's seat, Jinx had a wild idea of punching the overweight man idly tapping the wheel, tying him up somewhere, and hijacking the ferry. She could probably do it. Knock the security guards unconscious, push Flash off the boat and maybe break the driver's nose to shut him up. He looked like a glass jaw anyway.

She could definitely do it—if she wasn't on her way to repenting her sins and converting to the light side.

And maybe if Wally didn't have an iron grip on her waist—like he knew exactly what she was thinking, and had already slapped three plans together for putting her out of commission if she tried anything stupid.

The boy had a brain. Even if he didn't act like he did all the time.

Suddenly Wally had guided her down the gangplank, and they were both blinking in the bright winter sunlight. She shivered and Wally wrapped an arm around her waist. She would have complained if he hadn't been so warm. Like he had just shoved his arm into the microwave.

"I run at a toasty one-oh-one degrees in the winter," Kid Flash said easily, as if her mind was a movie and he just happened to have a VCR player in his brain.

"Stop reading my mind," she snapped, even though she knew that was the Dark One's deal and not his.

"I think you're confusing me with Raven, babe." He winked at her, all devilish charm and effortless charisma. "It's an easy mistake. We look oh-so-similar, don't you think? I think it's the hair."

"I told you to stop it, twinkle toes," Jinx hissed, but before she could try to put together some kind of scathing comeback, they were standing at the front door to the Titan's place, and then all the words evaporated from her mind like water in the sun.

Because they were there.

Standing at the foot of the most honor-bound building in Jump.

Jinx felt her stomach churn angrily, and if she had been able to force anything down at breakfast, she probably would have puked it out right there. She distantly heard Kid Flash chattering into her ear and vaguely felt him rubbing her back soothingly, but it was all kind of blurry in the face of her terror.

"Hey, Jinx?"

She pulled herself back to reality from a stupor so deep that it was almost sticky. "Wha—?"

"I said, you might want to start chewing that gum now."

She looked up at Kid Flash, feeling all the blood drain from her face, and saw him glance down at her worriedly. Something about the intense blue of his eyes made her flush—which made her flush even harder, because she didn't know why she was flushing. Vicious cycle.

"It's going to be fine," he soothed, and Jinx knew it was only his arm around her waist that was keeping her anchored to this moment in time. She felt a wave of terror rise up in her—whirling first in her stomach, then flooding her chest and finally drowning every word in her throat. She squeezed the stick of gum in her sweating hands, tighter and tighter, like she could force the terror out of her body and inject it into something different.

"Stop ruining a perfectly good piece of gum, Jinx," Wally reprimanded. "Just chew the thing already." He took it from her white-knuckled grasp, unwrapped it, and somehow slipped it between her lips.

The brush of his fingers against her mouth made her head spin. She felt dizzy for a second and wanted to touch her lips, to see if they were actually tingling or if it was just her brain. But then her tongue registered the flavor of the gum, and she made a disgusted face.

"Ew. It's orange." Jinx wrinkled her nose.

Kid Flash looked confused and a little skeptical. "You don't like it? What kind of person doesn't like orange?"

"Ugh. It's too sweet. Real citrus doesn't taste like it's been pumped full of eleven tablespoons of fructose."

There was a strange sort of glimmer in Wally's eyes, but it flickered in and out of sight too quickly for her to label it. He shrugged nonchalantly. "Fine."

And before she knew what he was doing, he had tightened his grip around her waist, cradled the back of her head with his other hand, and pressed his mouth to hers.

Time slowed down, then stopped completely: spanning the time between one wave crashing to shore…

…and the next.

She felt a few things, one after the other, but they were separate: not a part of her.

There was a warm arm around her waist.

There was a soft, insistent pressure at her lips.

There was heat, everywhere: seeping between her closed eyelids, soaking through her clothes, meeting skin in a subtle electric shock.

And then nothing.

She opened eyes she didn't remember closing and found herself immediately drowning in his blue, blue stare, his eyes twinkling with silent laughter but sobered by some kind of passionate emotion she didn't quite understand—

—and then the wave broke the shore.

Reality slapped her in the face with all the force of a baseball bat.

"What the hell was that for?" she demanded, pink sparks crackling along the lengths of her fingertips. There was something else, too—a warm flush across her cheeks, a cold shiver along her spine, every temperature of her body at odds with the other—but she swatted it from her mind with a mental broomstick.

He laughed, flashing brilliantly white teeth that the tabloids were so fond of photographing. "You said you didn't like orange gum."

She blinked. "What?"

Wally grinned, then blew a bubble. A very large, very orange bubble. The popping sound was in time with one of her heartbeats and reminded her of exactly how hard her heart was pounding.

It took her brain a second two put two and two together. And when she ran her tongue across her teeth, tasting only the slightest ghost of orange and feeling the emptiness inside her mouth, she was at a loss for words.

Oh, he was good.

And that thought stayed with her for a very, very long time.

Jinx barely noticed when the Dark One opened the door, eyes blank but with the tiniest suggestion of a smile tugging at her lips. She didn't really register walking through the Tower to the living room, where the green changeling boy took one look at her vacant expression before bursting into a fit of giggles. She hardly remembered the meeting with Robin, the questions he asked, the answers she gave. All she was really aware of was Kid Flash's leg brushing against hers for a moment, or the way the sun caught his teeth or his eyes and she found herself lost in them. She didn't see the way Robin and Wally were exchanging smiling, secretive glances over her head, or the way Wally stayed behind to talk with him after the meeting was done. She didn't even notice Wally pointing at Raven and Robin reddening furiously.

She only really came back to life when she was standing back outside, ribs aching from a crushing hug from the alien—Starfire—with Wally beaming beside her.

"You did it, Jinx! You're part of the team!"

Jinx looked down at her hand, the one with the yellow and black communicator dangling loosely from her fingers, and smiled—just a tiny bit. Enough to quirk her lips a little. Enough to bring her back to reality just in time to catch Wally's expression.

Time slowed down again when he looked at her, another one of those strange, glimmering looks in his Prussian blue eyes that she was only beginning to identify as affection—or maybe something even bigger than that.

"Congratulations," he whispered, and he pressed his mouth to hers.

When she wound her arms around his neck and crushed her lips to his, she felt a tingle at her mouth that eventually resolved into a sweet, citrusy taste—and by that point she could only wonder at what point in her life she had started to enjoy the taste of orange.

But she knew.

And she was pretty sure he did too.

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A few hours later, when they were sitting on his faded plaid couch watching 101 Dalmatians for at least the sixth time, she turned to him with a sly little smile on her face.

"Hey, Wally?"

His eyes never left the screen, absorbed in watching Cruella Devil stomp around her mansion in a fit of rage. "Hmm?"

"Can I have another piece of gum?"

He turned to her, half of his face lit by the screen and the other half dark—and then he grinned: that easy, slow-as-melting-butter smile that was the first thing she ever noticed about him. And when he leaned forward to brush her ear with his lips and murmured, "Sure," she felt those ridiculous, yet arguably delightful shivers on her spine.

Then his lips met hers and the sweet tang of orange flooded her mouth, and she just didn't bother to think anymore.

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