Hunt
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 stares in worry as Raven's tears dry up, and an ominous black glow begins to shine through her eyes.
The psychic's teeth clench, and she forces herself to take slow, measured breaths as her vision begins sharpening without her willing it to.
Anger had always been the strongest catalyst for her uglier nature, and accepting that part of herself hadn't changed much in that regard in the last year.
Only when she forces her eyes away from the markings on her arm and into Jinx's concerned pink orbs does she start to feel more human.
As her vision dulls, she wraps her unmarked arm tighter around the meta's waist and pulls her close.
She dares not put the cursed markings anywhere near her beloved if she can help it, especially with her own demonic side so close to the surface and undoubtedly fueling them.
"Rae, talk to me. You've got that I'm gonna' rain hellfire on someone's ass look."
"I- I do not have a look for that," Raven argues, even as she appreciates her lover's concern.
Despite the situation, Jinx giggles at that.
"Yeah, you do, hon. And it takes a special class of bastard to bring it out. So just talk to me. You'll feel better," she promises with her Cheshire smile.
Raven stares at her for a moment before releasing a heavy sigh.
"Perhaps it would bee better to show you?"
Despite her trepidation, Jinx grabs a tight hold on her lover's hand and nuzzles into her neck.
"Do it."
Raven's eyes glow black, and their minds connect…
********************************
Raven stands next to Jinx in a small, enclosed meadow.
Both women occupy the Dream-Raven's mind, seeing what she sees and giving Jinx a headache.
Seeing herself as Raven sees her is awe-inspiring, to say the least.
Both Dream-Raven and -Jinx are garbed in large, flowing gowns of dark purple.
Dream-Raven smiles and raises their joined hands to her gaze, taking in both of their ring fingers.
On each one sits a small band of gold. The circlets end in a pair of hands, holding a small heart-shaped diamond that points up their arms.
The rings are warm to the touch, adding to the pleasant sensation of their entwined hands.
Four cords of silk are draped over their joined hands, shining in a small corona of colors against their skin.
Jinx doesn't quite understand the meaning to the ribbons, but she can tell from Dream-Raven's emotions rolling through both of the women that they have some significance.
"Nicole and Rachel, as your hands are bound together now, so your lives and spirits are joined in a union of love and trust," a gruff, elderly and masculine states.
Dream-Raven's eyes leave their hands and meet Jinx's counterpart, both of them smiling brilliantly at each other.
Jinx understands what Raven's dream is then, and she finds herself wishing that her astral self in this strange dream realm had its own eyes to see what her Raven thinks of it.
The soft caress on her psyche tells her that Raven has more autonomy in the dream than she herself does, and that she isn't unpleased with this part of her dream, at least.
The unseen man reads a few more lines to the women, and soon Dream-Raven and -Jinx are kissing.
The feeling of warmth that floods Dream-Raven makes Jinx's head spin.
Suddenly the warmth vanishes, leaving Jinx's psyche shivering just the same as if she'd been thrown into a meat locker in her real body.
Dream-Raven's gaze leaves -Jinx's, and turns to face the invaders on their nuptial scene.
Jinx feels Raven tighten her psychic hold around her psyche, and understands the need for extra protection when suddenly, she finds herself seeing what Dream-Raven sees through four demonic eyes.
Seeing all the detail sends a spark of pain through the meta, and she finds herself thanking every deity in existence that she's not a normal human, who would've had her psyche burnt to ashes under the sensational assault.
The pain subsides after a few seconds, and when Jinx opens her psychic eyes again, she finds herself, and Dream-Raven, staring at a ring of people.
The Justice League and Brotherhood of Evil stand side by side in the field, seeming far more focused on Dream-Raven than each other.
The hatred in many of their stares sends a primal instinct into action inside of Dream-Raven.
The world turns black for an instant, and when it resolves again, Dream-Raven and -Jinx are wrapped in a bubble of soul-self.
A series of chuckles sounds at the pair's other side, and Dream-Raven's head turns to take in the others.
Six figures, wrapped in shadow and almost missing from Dream-Raven's vision entirely, stand on the other side of the meadow.
While their bodies are nearly invisible, the red, fiery Mark of Skaath on each and every one of their foreheads is crystal clear.
Dream-Raven pulls Jinx into her arms as the field catches on fire.
The ground springs flames in large, spewing columns of smoke and heat, and Dream-Raven doesn't need to gain altitude to know what is happening.
Jinx, too, knows that the fires springing to life are making another Mark of Skaath around Dream-Raven's protective bubble.
A horrid scent, made of burning grass, wood, and sulfur, rises to Dream-Raven's nose, and Jinx finds herself glad that she can't vomit in astral form.
Pain flares through Dream-Raven, and Jinx's lover extends a massive wall of soul-self around both of their astral forms.
Laughter sounds as Dream-Raven writhes on the ground, and even Raven's shield cannot protect them from the fear that comes with knowing the pain on her forehead comes from her own Mark appearing against her will.
Dream-Raven tightens her hold around -Jinx, and takes to the sky.
Feeling gravity literally stop working around them, experiencing what her lover does when she flies, makes Jinx momentarily wonder if there is some way that she could talk Raven into that being her next lesson.
When Dream-Raven stares down at the forces gathered on the meadow, though, the thought vanishes.
"I have fought stronger than you. You won't win, no matter how hard you try," Dream-Raven boasts.
The silhouettes of what have to be Raven's siblings, all brothers by the sound, just continue laughing at Dream-Raven's expense.
Seeing several of the people below react, Jinx understands that the threat, to them, probably sounds like it's directed at them.
Dream-Raven's attention moves away from her siblings and instead to Zatanna, who stands in front of the groups.
Yet another Mark glows black, though it's nearly invisible even to Dream-Raven's eyes, on the sorceress's throat.
"Hear that!? I told you all, and I was right. She's as much a demon as the rest of them!"
Doctor Fate appears, his eyes glowing ominously as he stares at Dream-Raven.
"Why would you betray your friends? Your world? Even your betrothed?" he demands in a booming voice.
Dream-Raven's fear is more than matched by Jinx's own.
Jinx realizes in that moment that she'd never truly heard the sorcerer angry, and if Raven's dream, whether imagined or brought from personal experience at some point, is even close to the truth, she never wants to.
Fate's voice echoes, seeming to charge the air around them with thousands of voices both whispering and screaming in chorus.
More laughter sounds on the other side of the meadow, and a thought occurs to Dream-Raven that causes Jinx to press her psyche more firmly into her lover's protective embrace.
Fate's last comment causes both Dream-Raven and Jinx to tremble.
Their vision moves slowly downward, and Jinx once again finds herself glad she has no stomach to empty in her astral form.
Dream-Jinx rests in -Raven's arms, staring blankly back at her.
Her eyes are frozen in horror, and the pink glow, the mark of both her powers and, if Raven's explanation had been correct, her very soul, is incredibly dim in her eyes.
Her forehead shares yet one more Mark, though instead of the fire of the demons' symbols, hers is black and charred, as if it had been branded into her skull and healed over.
At Dream-Raven's apparent horror, the laughter increases in volume.
"One sacrifice willingly made by the prodigal daughter, and the gates open so easily," one of her siblings mocks.
Dream-Raven's eyes move away from -Jinx, and she finds herself staring into the massive symbol on the ground.
More worryingly, she finds herself staring at the swirling pool of black light that rests in the center.
A powerful rage sets off in Dream-Raven, equally matching the sorrow.
Once again, Jinx finds herself staring through four eyes, and she hopes that the dream ends soon before her eyes stop working correctly.
As Dream-Raven begins flying towards her siblings, a hand wrapped in a massive claw of soul-self while the other clings to Jinx, a movement at her side appears.
Before she can react, an orange fist slams into Dream-Raven's face, sending her crashing to the ground.
Jinx winces as the pain rushes against Raven's shield, the ground cracking in a small tidal wave around the crumpled body.
As orbs of crackling, green energy rain down on the pair, Dream-Raven wraps herself protectively over -Jinx's husk.
Mournful tears leave her as the agony goes all but ignored, her gaze never leaving the apparently brain-dead meta.
The starbolts continue ripping Dream-Raven's body apart around Jinx's counterpart.
As pain rolls in waves through her, the laughter yet again grows in volume, until the rest of the world seems to be completely drowned out.
Even the sounds of the ground exploding around her are overtaken by the siblings' laughter.
Suddenly, a particularly large bolt of energy lances through Dream-Raven's chest, exploding on -Jinx's body.
Her eyes alight once more with her pink energy, and for a moment, Dream-Raven sobs in relief at the return of her lover's life from the energy.
Then the hole opens on the meta's chest, and her eyes slide closed as blood pours in and seems to fill the entire crater around their bodies.
As her lover dies, something in Dream-Raven's mind snaps.
The change is almost enough to break the real Raven's barrier.
"Almost… done," the demonling's voice whispers, her voice strained despite the soothing effect it has on Jinx.
The world around them flashes red, and Jinx watches in horror as everything shifts.
Just like in their fight with Wotan, the dimension shimmers and seems to melt around Dream-Raven's body.
Obsidian speckles the ground around them, and columns of lava explode up from the ground.
As they burn the very air from their heat, the sky is turned black.
The people in the field back away from the monster before them, and ash begins raining down from the scarlet clouds.
Before they make another step back, their bodies freeze and glow a dark, horrifying black.
When the glow vanishes, everyone on the meadow is stone.
Even the siblings, still unseen, are entombed in rock.
The world dissolves around Dream-Raven, and when it becomes clear again, the statues are all pressed together into a massive pile.
The top of the pile, to Jinx's and Raven's horror both, looks distinctly like a throne.
Dream-Raven's body trembles in horror as she looks around herself.
Suddenly, the warmth in her arms turns icy, and she reluctantly lets her eyes fall.
She finds Dream-Jinx's body to be stone, and as she watches, the rock cracks and turns to dust…
********************************
Jinx comes awake with a gasp, her body drenched in sweat and her limbs shaking.
She finds Raven still right beside her, the psychic's eyes leaking waves of tears to more than match her own.
Jinx simply stares at Raven with wide eyes.
The normally energetic and talkative metahuman is completely speechless from the horrors her lover had just gone through, in her mind where she couldn't do a thing to help her.
Unable to find any adequate words, Jinx simply wraps herself around Raven's torso and holds her.
The demonling trembles in the embrace, the horrors just as terrible as the first time.
"Okay," Jinx finally sighs. "So, you said this wasn't just a dream, and it sure as hell won't be a premonition as long as I can do anything about it."
"It could happen, you know… If I ever lost you like that, I wouldn't just kill those who had destroyed you, I would destroy everything… If I caused you to… to-"
"It's never going to happen," Jinx declares with a confidence so genuine that it surprises both women. "I won't ever let it happen."
Raven smiles against her collar, her tears drying up quickly while in Jinx's arms.
Once again, the woman had seen her in what was, essentially, the state of a raging demoness, and hadn't even blinked.
Worse, she had jumped head first into a dream of her own death, and was comforting Raven instead of asking for comfort.
She can understand from the tight hold and shell-shocked look to her gloriously fiery and alive eyes that her lover is taking just as much comfort from the hug as she herself is.
Unable to resist, she places a chaste kiss on her lips before focusing on the discussion again.
"Nor I. And as I said, it wasn't a dream or a prophecy. It wasn't something my mind came up with. And it was certainly more concrete and detailed than any prophecy I've ever experienced would be."
Jinx stiffens at that, her arms tightening just a little more.
"We never really made sure that Psimon was dead. Thinking about the dream, it looked like recent events, plus our, uh, discussion earlier, together with what he can do… But, I mean, how? There're mid-class demons that can't get through all the shields and wards we put around this place."
Raven winces, her arm pulsing angrily at her.
Sighing, she reluctantly pulls back from Jinx and puts her glowing arm between them.
"This would be how. It wasn't Psimon. He couldn't have gotten close enough to run into me like that, and he doesn't know demon magic," Raven explains.
Jinx stares at the marks, her own eyes beginning to glow slightly pink in anger.
"The asshole who ran into you."
"The same. It had to have been. And I think that he may have been a messenger," she adds with an almost-growl indicating how much her demonic blood is still raging.
"I know I'm not gonna' like the answer to this… What was the message, exactly?" Jinx reluctantly asks.
She finds herself desperately hoping the message wasn't meant to scare Raven away from her, though she'd never let it work if it was.
"The tattoos in tandem with the dream that was forced on me leaves two explanations. Either someone was testing out a new trick and decided I would be the perfect guinea pig for their play."
"Or…?"
The red in Raven's eyes flashes brilliantly bright, nearly overpowering the rest of the color in her irises.
Jinx stares in surprise, the sight of only Raven's irises turning red without the whole of her eyes becoming red lenses is something she'd never seen before.
Somehow, it's more startling to the meta than even the looking at the world through four eyes had been.
"It means that my brothers are here, in Jump City, and they've sounded a call for war," Raven finally responds.
The color that does exist in Jinx's face drains, and she tightens her hold even more around Raven.
"They got that close without… Oh, shit, it's because you were distracted, wasn't it?" she asks with a building misery. "Because I-"
Raven's index finger presses to Jinx's lips, cutting her off with a jerk of her head.
"You did nothing wrong. I was not cautious enough. That I didn't think on how a human would hurt me by running into me, I will admit, was because I was… preoccupied… But he shouldn't have been able to get anywhere near us without me sensing him in the first place. Somehow-"
A thoughtful expression takes over Raven's face, and she stares again at the tattoos.
"What is it?"
"What did he look like?"
Jinx's eyes widen, and she racks her brain for what the man had looked like.
Distracted or not, she was trained to pay attention to the little details of everything, or else she might come into a sudden onset of deadness.
Regardless, no matter how much energy she puts into thinking, she remembers nothing but a vague blur of movement.
He had been there one second, and gone the next.
"Shit. I can't-"
"There was nothing to remember," Raven interrupts.
Jinx merely stares blankly at her in response.
"Uh…"
"This was the man," Raven growls, glaring at the tattoo. "It was a damned Shadow."
"As in… sun over something makes the ground black, or-"
"As in this."
Raven's eyes flash black, and Jinx yelps when a woman appears in the air next to them.
The woman, seemingly made entirely of writhing shadows, speeds around the room several times and is gone in the span of Jinx's next blink.
"What the-"
"Soul-self made physical. Think of it like a golem, but with psychic energy instead of earth. If one of my dear siblings decided to make one, and attach a demonic spell on it, it could get that close without me ever noticing it before it hit me. They couldn't do any real damage with it, but they could get past my defenses with it."
"Could you always do that?"
"Yes. Well, I could always generate one, since it's nothing but my soul-self in high concentration. I've never used it, though, because it takes a lot of focus and energy to control for anything more than a burst of several seconds, which would do me no good. Evidently, I had not thought of its applications as a carrier," she grouses.
The idle chatter helps to ground Raven once more, and she gently smiles at Jinx.
"I suppose, on the positive side, this definitely puts what I saw into the category of "not a prophecy," so there is that."
"Way to think positive, Rae," Jinx quips.
Her eyes, though, show her to be progressively more worried.
"Now, one thing left to do."
"And that is…?"
Raven places her other hand on the tattoo, and her eyes glow black.
An explosion of dark energy goes off around her arm, and when it clears, the tattoos are gone.
Oily, black smoke rises into the air, and for a moment, Raven basks in the satisfactory feeling of the energy returning as a spear into the origin of her curse.
She hopes that it cripples whichever sibling had dared to torment her, but isn't that optimistic.
The warm feeling of hitting her sibling back, hard, disappears in an instant, though.
She feels a wave of energy run through the shields around her home, and her heart skips a beat.
When Jinx sees her lover's cloak materialize around her body in a dark cloud, she lunges to her feet and runs over to her own clothes.
She feels the ripples of power going through her apartment, as well, and no words need to be spoken.
"I'm sorry," Raven mutters.
Jinx merely shrugs, pulling the sturdiest pieces of leather clothes she owns onto her body.
"The things that need safeguarding are at the base with Giz. It's just a house. I don't think I'll be getting my security deposit back, though," she quips while pulling a duffel bag out of their closet.
Raven watches the meta slip a large, black tome into the bag, along with a framed photo and a small pile of clothes.
Last is a small, silver jewelry box, which gives off a warm, tingling sensation as Jinx shoves it into the bag.
Once the bag is zipped closed, she rushes to Raven's side.
"Only things that matter to me in this place. Some good memories here, but considering the memories all have you in them, I figure that anywhere that I'm with you is home," she explains.
Despite her guilt, Raven pulls her into a deep kiss, her emotions flowing into Jinx.
The meta weeps at the sensation, before a warning vibrates through their barriers.
Feeling it, a bubble of soul-self rises into existence around the women before sinking into the floor.
Raven and Jinx come up in an alley on the other side of Jump City, at the same moment a loud explosion sounds in the distance…
********************************
Author's Notes:
Not going to lie, I had a hard time with the dream. I wasn't sure to begin with how I wanted to format it, I wasn't sure how I wanted it to come across to Jinx, and since I've never been to a handfasting ritual, I pretty much stuck to the end of the ceremony as the starting point of the dream. I hope that it works out for the readers, though.
Things are about to get action-packed. I hope you're all enjoying thus far, and looking forward to what comes next. See you all next time!