Deny All Charges | A Teen Titans fanfiction

Chapter 2: An Eye For An Eye

The world flipped and stretched like an overabundance of silly putty, the courtroom blurring to darkness and the fleeting panic etched across her face permanently embedding into his memory as the void encompassed them both, seeping over his vision and blocking her one last plea from his ears.

And then he fell.

It wasn't a gentle plummet of swoops and dives, a simple skip, hop, and leap from one place to another, like some he had experienced when traveling by Kyd's voids, nor was it pleasant, filled instead with twists and turns and drops and inclines that churned his insides and rattled his bones. He had never imagined the demon's method of transportation could hurt so much.

Perhaps he deserved it and this was just Kyd's quiet way of getting back at him for leaving the rest of them behind to face the consequences...for being a coward, focused solely on saving his own skin without a second thought for anyone else who might have been lost in the fight against the Titans. 

He'd run away in their greatest moment of need. He hadn't stopped to try and save the others. How could he? In the blink of an eye, they'd been betrayed and frozen and all eyes, both Titan and villain, had turned on him, the last of the HIVE 5 to avoid detection. She'd seen him and in that moment, everything had gone dark. He didn't remember what happened next, all he recalled was his legs running as hard as they could and hearing of the Brotherhood's takedown the next morning from random passerbies on the street.

In a way, he had been relieved of the news. Now the Titans wouldn't be looking for him as hard, now that the greater villains were behind bars (or frozen for the next quarter century) and not out on the streets making trouble. They would be forced to focus their efforts on keeping the Brotherhood in jail and not on one lone thief who preferred to slip off undetected into the night.

But there was one thing that still bothered him; Jinx. Or, more accurately, how quickly Jinx had turned on them--on him. All because of one smooth-talking hero who clearly found her as charming as the others found her gifted. And in the end, she had chosen charming over that gift.

"No one quits the HIVE! You're a part of our team now and our team is our family!" 

Our team is a family. That was what she had told him that cold dreary afternoon when he had shown up on the HIVE's doorstep after a miserable defeat and chase that had almost left him in prison for petty theft. He had looked worse than death, out of breath, soaking wet from the storm with no stolen items to even prove his worth, but Jinx hadn't cared. She'd welcomed him in and given him a place to dry off (even when the others kept a suspicious eye on him) and a home to call his own.

No one had ever given him anything like that before. In that moment, tv blaring in front of him and a warm blanket over his shoulders, he knew he had found his place. The HIVE had made him feel welcome, like he had found the people who would look out for him no matter what, and in return, he swore he would always have their backs.

He hadn't kept his promise to them and now he was paying the price of his betrayal. 

The portal abruptly came to an end, curving and diving into a freefall and disapparating even before Seemore had a chance to register what was happening and he hurtled toward the ground at an uncontrollable and certainly breakneck pace.

"AHHHHHH!" the scream exploded from his lungs as he flailed desperately in a feeble attempt to right himself. The trees shot up to meet him, their limbs catching and contorting his body before tossing him away to their companions nearer to the ground. "OW! Ouch! Oh, come on! Ow!"

And then, just as he was about to collide with the cold hard earth and become a permanent addition to the already ruined landscape, a second plume of darkness shot out from the nearby trees, wrapping around his waist and yanking upwards, abruptly ending his descent and leaving him with an extreme case of whiplash.