Treachery
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.
Jinx holds the shaking empath tightly to her, gently running a hand through her purple hair and making soothing murmurs.
"This cannot continue," Raven growls in her mind.
"Your control has slipped from the moment you began your liaisons with Jinx. This result is only surprising in how long it took to achieve it, and that you actually slipped enough for Psimon to get in here and humiliate you," Wisdom's voice whispers back.
"I think you should just stop thinking so hard and do what we should have done years ago," a higher and more upbeat voice chimes.
As Raven ponders this, her body ceases shaking, and slowly, her senses return to the world around her.
"Rae, talk to me. What the hell did he do to you? I couldn't get you away from him, and then his barrier drops and he gives this scream, and you start lookin' like you're bout to have a seizure, and-"
"I was not the only one who may have been killed. And likewise I should have known she would be fine enough to not let him distract me enough to get past my blocks. When I arrive in Nevermore, all of you had better be at the forum. We have things to discuss. Incompleteness will not be the cause for my death."
Many affirmations rise in her mind, and Raven tunes them out to focus on her panicking girlfriend.
"Jinx, let's get out of here," she interrupts.
Jinx stares at her with wide eyes, a slow nod her only reaction before blackness wraps around the two.
When they come up through her floor, Jinx immediately moves to the couch and stares at Raven.
Said psychic kneels before her, gently grasping her hands and holding her gaze.
"The time I mentioned, weeks ago? I can't expect you to wait any longer for the answers to your questions, which I'm sure number greatly. I do not know what you witnessed while I was entrapped, but I can surmise that separating right now may not be the best idea. I must, nonetheless, selfishly ask for half an hour reprieve, to get ready to bear my soul, as it were."
"Raven, you looked like you were going to die," Jinx interrupts. "I was throwing everything I had at whatever Psimon had around you, but I couldn't do a damn thing, and you were bleeding, and turning freaking red, and-"
"You saved me," Raven argues. "I… Psimon brought some things to light I'd thought dead and forgotten in my mind. If I had to guess, my… transformation… and my bleeding were the results of my mind being crushed by the darkness. Your voice pulled me out of that."
Jinx's eyes widen at that, Raven not so much as blinking.
"I need to give a report before Nightwing discovers our fight through other means as he did with Sebastian. Half an hour at most, and I will answer fully your every question. If our visits to Gotham have taught me anything, it is that I cannot continue as I have been."
Jinx squeezes her hands, looking for something in her gaze.
"There's more than just what you didn't tell me about Brother Blood and what Psimon did to you, isn't there?"
"While I'm gone, it may be prudent to hunt down any sources of alcohol you have here," Raven responds, a grim look taking her girlfriend's expression.
Raven hesitantly presses a kiss to her lips, her own fear alleviating somewhat when she eagerly responds.
With only a moment of hesitation, she shifts through dimensions and steps into the Titans Tower.
She quickly finds Nightwing in his and Kori's room, typing away furiously on a computer.
He doesn't acknowledge her presence, but his emotions tell her he's aware of it.
"The item I went to search for was in the hands of Psimon. A ring. He didn't seem connected to our thieves. I was, surprisingly, subdued by him, long enough for him to escape my grasp. The item is moderately powerful, but not one on our lists, as would be expected with how recent the theft is."
His suspicion slams into her as a physical force, her already weakened barriers doing nothing to stay the mental assault.
"How did he manage to subdue you? You're far stronger than him," he says with a growling quality to his tone.
Glaring at him, Raven senses warning bells going off in her mind that are as unhelpful at identifying their source as she has become accustomed to with the man.
"An illusion, which he used directly after keeping my mind occupied with attacks on multiple fronts. The nightmare from long ago was… unpleasant… and difficult to break free from."
His chair swivels, and she meets his hidden glare with her stoic mask in place.
"I can't think of many things that would do that to you. Should I be worried?"
"It was… when we destroyed Trigon, for weeks I had a thought plaguing my mind. The question of what would have happened if you had not found me and convinced me to fight against him after his arrival. What would have happened if I had not fought for my powers and my home. It was a silly thought, but it was enough to distract me while he escaped. I'll be ready next time."
"Make sure you are," he agrees.
The warnings in Raven's mind become louder, and the feeling of his suspicion give them credence. Once more, she finds herself wondering what the sense of wrong about the man is.
As she prepares to leave, Zatanna appears in a burst of smoke.
When the two are together, Raven's mind becomes further assaulted. An increasingly familiar emotion sparks in the air between the two, seeming somehow twisted and wrong compared to Jinx's own.
Anger immediately blossoms in Raven's heart, anger on behalf of the off-world Koriand'r, and anger at herself having had faith in Nightwing's intelligence.
To the pair, though, she shows nothing, giving them nothing to sense as her barriers slam back into place.
Something else distracts the psychic, though, an unexpected hostility smacking like raging tide against her tender blocks.
When Nightwing reads something into the sorceress's expression, his own emotions begin taking on the hostile quality.
"If I didn't know better, I would say she suspects some great evil of me… And he seems to agree."
An image of a bizarre, glowing iron cage fills her mind, and she immediately closes herself off so no more of her telepathy manages to reach them.
But the image is enough to cause a flash of thought to take form.
"If you'll excuse me," she says before floating away from the room.
As soon as she is in a blindspot of the camera watching the hallway, her soul-self flashes into existence around her.
The power quickly expands, and a black raven slides through the walls, placing her in the ventilation above Nightwing's room and masking her from Zatanna's detection.
"We need to talk," Zatanna growls, pointing her thumb at the door.
"I think we do," Nightwing agrees, quickly standing up.
As the pair leaves, Zatanna throws a glare at him.
"You'd better hope that damn cage is ready, Dick. Things are worse than we thought."
The words send a spike of worry through Raven, who brings her emotions as subdued as possible in the witch's presence.
When she feels their presences leave the Tower entirely, she slips through the metal and stands in front of Nightwing's computer.
A small spark of soul-self moves through the wall and sends her desired illusion of nothing amiss taking firm hold in the image camera monitoring his room.
Raven's soul-self extends, black hands flying across the keyboard of his computer faster than her own hands had any possibility of achieving.
Cracking the man whose mind she had shared in her youth is a simple matter, life secrets never spoken quickly giving rise to passwords as she digs into the mainframe of the Titans.
A folder suddenly catches her attention as she scans through. It is named innocuously enough, sounding like a dull blip of data nobody would ever have a point to look into.
But for her, the name is enough.
As the folder reveals its contents, horror and revulsion quickly ripple through Raven, her mask giving way to a snarl.
"You utter bastard," she hisses, reading quickly through document after document detailing his contingencies.
Each and every Titan on Earth is named in a document, and each one of them reveals the way in which her leader planned meticulously how to destroy them should they ever turn rogue.
"Or piss him off," she snarls internally.
Her own teammates' are the most detailed.
For Cyborg, a meticulously written virus engineered to make him blind and deaf in his mechanical elements, and routing the power away from his sonic cannon to disable his ability to fight.
For Beast Boy, simply overloading his senses until he is rendered unconscious.
As the others open for her, her eyes begin bleeding red, her mind quickly snapping reigns on her emotions lest she call the witch and her lover back.
Evidently, Nightwing had managed to obtain the manner of hand-cuffs that had originally rendered Starfire helpless on her arrival, which when combined with a drug that would make her, in his written words, agreeable, would render her helpless.
She vaguely notices Zatanna's surprising name among the documents, but she focuses on her own.
A hand flies over her mouth as she finally understands what cage Zatanna had referred to.
A detailed blueprint for a cage constructed entirely of iron is what begins his plan, along with notes on how to properly wire electricity so as to keep her contained but not harmed. No doubt supplied by Zatanna, a detailed series of anti-magic, and very specific anti-demon, runes are drawn.
The cage would undoubtedly be enough to contain her.
But her stomach turns at the details of how to amplify a Belle Reve inhibitor collar, where to acquire a pair of iron handcuffs, and how to best gag her so as not to choke her but to keep her from using spells.
"This plan would not just capture me. It would make a husk of me," she growls, unable to keep the rumbling sound from rising out of her throat.
Her body begins to violently shake, and with another growl, she quickly puts skills learned from observing both Cyborg and Gizmo into action.
All presence of her activity on the system vanish in a matter of key clicks, not wanting to give him so much as a hint that she's aware of his plan before she's enacted its ruination.
"You will know of how ill-thought your plan truly is, Richard, on this I swear," she snarls, her body quickly fading into a portal at her feet.
She steels her resolve, putting thoughts of preparation and revenge to the back of her mind in favor of readying for undoubtedly uncomfortable questions…
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Author's Notes:
I was hoping to avoid my dislike of Nightwing as a character coming through, but realistically, the man was raised by Batman and trained by a few unstable people, Deathstroke among them (in the cartoon, not sure on the comics). Anger issues, paranoia, and vile but effective contingency plans are kind of par for course. And the mysterious fog amplifying it all doesn't seem to be helping matters, either.
Hope you're all enjoying yourselves so far. Let me know what you do or don't like with my writing. See you next time!