Re-aquaintance
Disclaimer: I do not in any way, shape, or form own the show Teen Titans, nor the various DC comics on which this fanfiction is based.
Raven floats silently above the city, keeping out of sight as she follows the gem's signature.
Apparently, the Church's peon hadn't been entirely wrong. The H.I.V.E. Five had, in fact, had the gem.
And yet, even with the gem's power and Wykkyd's teleportation, someone else had taken them down in a five-on-one fight, which was no small feat.
Her mood becomes progressively more irritated as she travels through the air, pondering the scene.
There had been a sixth signature in the room, one she had definitely felt before. Even ignoring the gem's influence and bringing the barest traces of the attacker's aura that remained to her mind, though, the signature feels wrong, somehow.
Whoever she is hunting, something very drastic has changed their personality since their last encounter.
Finally, she finds the trail becoming stronger, and lowers to the ground, wanting to give whoever it is no warning if it can be helped, before it's too late for them.
When she reaches the thief, though, she falters. Her mind strains to recognize the features before her, the same feeling of familiar yet changed the only thing reaching her senses.
The woman before her is stunning to look at, brunette hair falling to her shoulders, and ending in neon pink strands of color.
She wears a tight leather jacket, a shade of grey almost black with how dark it is, which accentuates the black biker leathers wrapped around her legs.
Almost painfully contrasting this all in the darkness is the neon pink shirt beneath the jacket, as well as the pattern weaving through the jacket of the same color.
When the woman suddenly stops moving, Raven tenses.
Her head turns to the side slightly, and Raven finally recognizes her prey, the large, cat-slitted pink eyes and light grey skin giving Jinx's identity away.
"Two years has done wonders for her physique," Raven muses, eyeing the muscles where there had previously been twig-thin limbs.
Jinx takes Raven's appearance in for the span of five utterly silent seconds, and then she takes off in a burst of speed.
As she rounds a building's corner, heading into an alleyway, a bright flash of scarlet betrays her current ownership of the gem, hanging from a thick metal chain around her neck.
Raven lifts off the ground and flies after her, impressed to find the feline metahuman using the close walls of the buildings making the alley as springboards, rising higher with incredible grace and speed.
"Looks like wherever you were in your absence has improved your skills," Raven notes nonchalantly, rising to the top of the buildings just as Jinx reaches them.
Jinx remains silent, her eyes flaring bright pink as the air crackles with her energy.
With a wave of her hands, a ring of her hex energy expands outwards, knocking Raven from the air.
She bounces across the building, her cloak mostly preventing any of the otherwise assuredly horrible brush burn and cuts.
Rising with a grunt, Raven shakes her head to clear the spots dancing in front of her vision. Bad luck and internal organs was not a good combination, even for someone with her robust physiology.
"What, no banter? You were always so talkative before," Raven mocks, tasting the woman's restrained emotions on the air.
The gem hanging from her neck gives a bright, red shimmer around Jinx's body, and the glow to her eyes seems to turn redder and darker.
A bolt of hex energy shoots from the meta's index finger, smoke rising in the air as it launches towards Raven.
In response, her own black energy creates a glow of its own, her eyes sparking with obsidian flames.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she intones, hand flung outward.
From her arm shoots a black claw, rising in an uppercut into the incoming bolt.
With an explosion of red, the bolt detonates under the assault, red smoke quickly vanishing in the dark night air.
Before Jinx can attack again, Raven presses forward with her soul-self, grasping her in a psychic deathgrip.
Jinx grunts as she's slammed into the rooftop, the concrete cracking beneath the impact.
"I don't know why you're here, after your absence, or why you attacked their team. Frankly, I just don't care, Jinx. What I care about is that gem sitting around your throat, trying to burn through my hold on you. You can shut the power supplying off and give it to me, or I can knock you unconscious and retrieve it from you then. Your choice, but make it wisely and quickly, as my patience tonight is limited."
In response, Jinx's eyes flare brilliantly with pink light, and the soul-self containing her explodes.
The meta quickly presses her hands on the roof next to her head and pushes, rolling backwards and onto her feet.
As soon as her feet meet the ground, she presses off and cartwheels backwards, narrowly escaping another grabbing, black fist.
"Raven, wait," she says, hands raised in a way similar to talking down a cagey animal.
"I already told you my patience is limited tonight, Jinx. Your banter should've come earlier," Raven states, sending another grabbing hand at her.
Jinx jumps high into the air, sending two arcs of her energy out and at Raven.
As she brings her hands up to deflect the attacks, Jinx comes down on top of her, both of them slamming onto the roof with twin grunts.
As she prepares to lash out, Jinx grabs onto her wrists, pinning them to the rough surface while pushing her knee into the upper section of her stomach.
Raven gasps, effectively stalled by the efforts, and Jinx stares intently into her eyes.
"Raven, calm down. No need to waste effort fighting. Aren't you supposed to be all about talking and peaceful and simple resolutions?"
Raven goes still beneath her, glaring up.
She finds her mind being torn as she considers the situation while once more tasting the air for Jinx's emotions.
"She's right, actually. Need to calm down. She probably doesn't even know what she's wearing. And she's afraid, but not of me… or is that just nervousness? Hmm..."
Raven gives a deep sigh, her hands going limp under Jinx's grip.
"So talk, then, Jinx. Preferably without you sitting on top of me," she adds, a blush forming at the sensation in her stomach, completely unrelated to the meta's knee.
Nodding, Jinx rises to her feet, seeming to have both the caution to know not to trust Raven at her word and the confidence that she can react if she is lying.
"Different, indeed."
"You can't say anything about me being here. At all," Jinx states, casting her gaze about as if expecting something to leap from the shadows.
"Ah, that's it. She wishes to be hidden… I really must look into what Jinx has been up to in her absence," Raven muses as she, too, rises slowly to her feet.
"As stated, I don't really care what you're doing here, Jinx. I just want the gem. Either you don't have a clue what it is that you're wearing, and if that's the case, you're putting yourself and others at risk. And if you do know, then you stole it from the thieves with clear intent, and I need to remove it from you before you hurt people," Raven states while dusting herself off.
"I found them while on a job. I kept it, because Kyd Wykkyd was going to get himself killed using it without knowing anything about it. The thing's dangerous, and I get that. So, I decided to safeguard it."
Raven's eyes narrow and she moves silently across the roof, no sound coming from her steps.
With a start, Jinx realizes she's floating and that her cloak has grown to cover her feet, and a shiver runs through her. Clothes weren't supposed to do that, in her experience, and it was really creepy.
"You'll safeguard it?" Raven inquires, a slight smirk curving her lips. "Jinx, that gem's worse in your hands than his. Your power's bad luck itself, if I remember correctly, yes?"
"I… I've worked on that. Look, you're not going to kill me and I'm too hungry to shoot you again and proceed to run. Do you think we could possibly just talk this out, down where I don't have to worry about tripping and breaking my neck while you keep edging me off the roof?"
Raven's eyebrow rises at that, realizing with a start that she has, in fact, been walking the metahuman closer and closer to the edge of the roof.
"Sorry, the gem has put me in a rather fowl mood," Raven apologizes, a slight blush coloring her cheeks. "Where do you propose we talk about this? I recall you not wanting to be seen."
Jinx points down to a small structure on the opposite side of the street, apparently a small cafe of some variety.
Even from atop the roof, Raven notices that nobody else is inside.
"That's where I was going in the first place. I burned a lot of calories fighting those guys, and that's a relatively new cafe. Opened a little over six months ago, by a man new to the state. No reason he'll have any idea who I am, or possibly you are, and apparently some incredible food. And if we're in there, in a neutral zone, I'll be too busy eating to try anything, and I will no longer be too hungry to explain everything to your satisfaction," Jinx offers.
"Or I could simply pin you and snap the chain off, and then we could both be on our way," Raven retorts with a slight smirk.
"Much as I'd love to go for a roll on the ground with you, that doesn't strike me as your style. You seem like the curious type."
With a slight giggle, Jinx plants her hand on the edge of the roof and flips downward, returning to the ground the same way she'd risen.
With a stronger blush, Raven floats to the ground after her, finding her already across the street and on the way to the cafe.
"Perhaps she isn't as far off-base as I would like on her assumptions," Raven muses, following after the meta with an audible sigh...
Editor's Notes:
In the cartoon, Jinx's power is probability manipulation, like Marvel's early Scarlet Witch. In the comics, she's an Indian sorceress. I'm going to be trying to bridge the two logically in the coming story.
Hope you're enjoying, thus far. If you are, let me know. And if you aren't, let me know why, so I can improve myself. See you next time.