nothing to fear

x marks what's lost

It is such a quiet death, the breaking of a heart. 

Chapter 3

"Titans, go!" 

"Going." Red X sleepily rubbed his eyes. "Ugh, it's all the same. I steal. You stop me. Repeat. Couldn't give me a break for one goddamn day?" 

Even he could not explain why this match was occurring. 

Her act of rebellion had put Robin on call. He couldn't enforce discipline, that would only make her want to leave more.  He couldn't check in on her, because he was the problem in the first place.

So he did what he does best: fight it. Cleanse himself of that hair and those eyes and the way she purred his name, thrash it out of his body like a disease. Blood found his knuckles a friend. His morals found him an enemy. 

So he picked battles that changed the city's safety as much as the wind changed the tide, if only to check that her flames still grazed his shoulder, that the sun was still fighting beside the moon.

"Drop the Xenothium, X. Before we drop you." 

Red X gave a mocking pity-sigh. "Can't do that, traffic light. I have exactly one fuck under this X and I'm not ready to give it yet." 

The outlaw ogled Starfire's toned midriff, which was currently positioned at the angle that made heat pool to his groin. "Ok. Maybe I'll reconsider." 

"You bastard." Robin snarled. 

"Language, chuckles. This bastard's got a bomb." Casual as ever, he tossed a titanium detonator between his gloves like a baseball. 

He waggled his eyebrows. "Better stop it." 

It was an unspoken choice: protect Starfire from his advances, or protect his team. (and as a bonus one of the million bare warehouses lowlifes loved to fuck around in.) Raven's miraculous chant was out of commission by adhesive X-tape clamped to her mouth. Cyborg's wire box was so mix-and-matched by the crook that his programming was seconds away from making him do the hula. Beastboy was...Beastboy. Their convenient absence was a Deux Ex Machina, driving him to action. 

He made a silent promise to educate her on non-tamaranian tech. "I'll take the bomb. You handle X." 

"I'll handle her, all right." Robin could swear he sported a sleazy smirk under the mask, wetting his lips with a comical slurp. 

"You shall do nothing of the sort." She fired off rounds of scorching close-range starbolts at X's cape. Orbs of sun-kissed acid. 

Let your hands become machine guns, let your mind become a knife. Then Princess Koriandr, no one can touch you.

But Red X was quick. Too quick. Light on his paws with a nimbleness reserved for the ones birthed by the streets, he cuffed her ankles and wrists in bondage so she tripped over air. To further her humiliation, he pinned her wrists to the wall above, this time not with a scarlet binder but with his own two hands. 

"Y'know cutie, we never got to pick up where we left off." He tilted her chin up so their eyes were in a deadlock, stroking the underside of her jaw with a teasing brush. "And birdboy does owe me for the last time I saved his sorry ass..." 

Both prisoner and prize to him. Although she wasn't sure if 'him' was the thief in front of her. 

He mumbled sweet nothings to the base of her earlobe. "...So I guess this evens things out." 

A jade glow began to strobe at her cornea, a fight-or-flight response. Starfire blinked it away and chose neither. 

"What would be this 'even-ing out' you speak of?" His hand was cupping the back of her neck in a way that was so touch-starved it ran shivers down her spine. Her muscles pulsed into a rock-hard stiffness, repressing the urge to turn Okaara's teachings into a whir of destruction.