FicWad

When the Titans had retired for the night, the city was safe and secure, just as they had worked so hard to make it. And even as dawn drew close, the city remained that way in all parts, save the roof of the Jump City Penitentiary, where one dark figure stood and a second crouched. They talked to each other as loudly as they deemed necessary, which to the first was a fairly low volume.

"I don't understand why I can't just bust in there myself," the decidedly male voice said to his companion. "It'd be a lot faster, and we don't have much time."

The second, though he was whispering, sounded like he could be screaming his response. "Because of the alarms, scuzzbrain!" He reached a short arm around his back and pressed something on an attached pack shaped like a disc, from which four spider-like arms extended. Each of the arms extended in front of him and arranged into the four corners of a square large enough to fit a female body through; just what he was intending to do. Simultaneously, the tips of the arms began spinning like drills and chipping away at the cement.

"This is going to take too long," the larger figure protested. "The sun's going to rise soon and the Titans'll be up."

"Yeah, Mammoth, so? Those scum-suckin' Titans can bite it, for all I care. 'Sides, you wanna be in there with her?" His question was answered by the ringing of Mammoth's H.I.V.E. communicator. "Get that. It's Jinx," he ordered, and Mammoth complied.

"You springing me sometime today, guys?" the voice of the sorceress came through the communicator.

"Yeah, hold on. Gizmo's drilling in right now," Mammoth said.

Knowing that her friends could not see her, Jinx rolled her eyes in her cell, then felt something fall into her forked hair. When she reached up to brush it off, she saw that it was gravel, and looked up to find four drill bits poking through the ceiling. "You're in, Giz," she said into her communicator. "Now stand back; I'm gonna blast it." She saw the bits retract and readied her hex.

A prisoner in a nearby cell watched a concentrated wave of pink energy fly from her hands to the ceiling and the subsequent rain of stone, and remembered when he had been on the receiving end of that magic, though indirectly. He watched when two others, the names of whom he did not know, dropped down from the hole (that, from what he could hear, was now much larger than what they had planned) and landed in Jinx's cell. When he saw that they appeared to be freeing her, he pounded on the glass panel in the door of his specially made cell to get the attention of one of them.

It worked. Jinx turned her head to the noise and saw a familiar green face behind the sheen of the glass. Gizmo and Mammoth both noticed her staring before they noticed the noise, but they were paying more attention to getting her out than they were anything else.

"Who's that snotbag?" Gizmo sneered towards the window.

"I think he's with the Teen Titans," Jinx started. "I remember fighting him a couple weeks ago. He put me in here."

"Why does he think we'll help him, then?" Mammoth asked.

"Heck if I know. Some crudmunchers'll do anything to get out of jail."

"But he did something to get into jail, too," the sorceress said, then continued with a tone of voice that said she had an idea. "And I've seen what he can do. If he's in here, that means he's not with the Titans any more. He could help us instead."

"Are you crazy?" Gizmo almost screamed. "We get him and the guards'll get us for sure!"

"Then you'll just have to make it quick," she shot back. "We could use a new recruit. The Headmaster isn't helping us with finding any new people, so we gotta do it ourselves. And I say this guy's the prime choice."

"But what if he's not?" Mammoth doubted her line of logic.

"Then he'll be an outcast. The Titans obviously don't want him back if he's here, and it's not like there's another do-gooder team in the city." Her words appeared to have won over Mammoth, but the final member of the team still had concerns.

"How are we even gonna get in that pit-sniffin' cell? It's alarmed into next week!"

Jinx just smiled. "I heard how they keep him in there. He can turn into any animal he wants to, so the bottom edge of the door is lined with pesticide. He can pretty much trash any locking mechanism he wants, so they don't even bother, but if the door opens more than an inch without proper authorization, every alarm in the building goes off."

Gizmo stared blankly before he tried to apply his brand of logic - actual logic - to the situation. "So what are we gonna do? The cludgehead can't get out without being an ant, and he'll die if he does that. He's stuck!"

"No, he's not," Mammoth said, having figured out what Jinx had planned. He picked up Gizmo by one of the arms coming from his back and, ignoring his protests, brought him to Jinx's cell door. "Reach through the bars and push open the door from the bottom just enough so he can get through."

"How's the scrum-buffer gonna do that? He'd have to be a bug!"

Again the sorceress rolled her eyes. "Gizmo, he can turn into any animal. Rats can collapse their bodies to get through tight spaces." The other two looked at her and blinked. She sighed. "Am I the only one who pays attention in class? Look, just do it, Gizmo."

He muttered something under his breath that sounded very inappropriate and one of the arms from his pack extended out. It bent forward and went through the gaps between the bars of Jinx's cell, which the prisoner knew she could not have destroyed on her own from practice, then took a sharp right and pointed itself downward. Running along the floor, the appendage eventually reached the cell that contained Beast Boy and jammed itself underneath the door. The arm was not meant to do so much work, as evident by the strain on Gizmo's face, but with one final grunt from its master, the tip of the arm split and pushed the door open about three-quarters of an inch; well within the limits Jinx specified.

Beast Boy, seeing his opportunity and having heard Jinx's plan, turned his body into a common rat and pressed his nose against the door to make sure that there was only pesticide there and not rat poison as well. Detecting no danger, he pushed his snout, then his head, then the rest of his body through the all-too-tight opening. His tail was barely out before Gizmo's system gave up and the arm retracted back into the pack. The green rat waddled into Jinx's cell and transformed back into a green boy.

"Remind me never to do that again," Beast Boy said wearily while feeling his stomach to make sure all his organs were still there. He was about to ask why they had actually freed him, but Gizmo butted in.

"All right, pit-sniffers! We spent too much time here already. We gotta get out, or we'll all be stuck here!"

For once, Jinx was glad to listen to what Gizmo had to say, because he raised a good point. She led the four underneath the hole in the ceiling, then climbed into Mammoth's arms to have him throw her to the roof. The kid genius pressed a button on the side of the pack and flew up to safety via his newly-formed jetpack. Beast Boy transformed into a massive gorilla and picked Mammoth up off the ground, then flung him upwards; he knew the super-strong teenager landed safely when the impact caused some more gravel to shake loose. Finally, Beast Boy changed again to a crow and flew through the hole, leaving the cell empty and the guards clueless.

-HG-

The four had relocated to an alleyway a decent enough distance from the jail so as not to be caught by any patrolling officers. Jinx broke the relative silence of the night by starting a conversation with the changeling.

"So what did you do to get in there?"

He surprised her when he refused to tell her specifically, instead saying, "Something I'm not proud of. At all. But not something I wouldn't do again."

"Not a bad answer, kid," Jinx said after appearing to think for only a second. "You might be H.I.V.E. material after all."

"'Hive'? What's 'Hive'?" he asked her, but cut her off before she could even start. "Forget it. I'm not looking to join anybody."

Mammoth, who had not had the opportunity to get a closer look at the H.I.V.E. pledge, now saw the orange-and-black "S" logo emblazoned on the front of the green kid's leotard. "Clearly. You're already with Slade." Jinx gave a sharp gasp, and Beast Boy a sharper one.

"I'm not with Slade!" He looked down at his uniform. "Okay, I know what it looks like, but I'm not with him."

"'Cause you screwed up, crud-muncher!" Gizmo mocked. "He wouldn't want your sorry butt back anyway!"

"Great," Beast Boy said, almost happily, "because I don't want him either!" He put one hand on his chest and tore the emblem clean off the leotard, leaving a gaping hole in his costume and exposing part of his bare green chest. He threw the symbol of his former life - one of them, anyway - out of the alleyway and into the street, where he could only hope a car would run over it.

Jinx was growing suspicious. "So if you're not with Slade, then..."

"I'm not still with the Titans, either," Beast Boy was quick to correct. The last thing he wanted right now was a fight. "I'm not with Slade. I'm not with the Titans. I'm not with anybody, and I don't want to be with you three."

"Do you have any idea what we could give you if you were part of us, kid?" Jinx asked, but that only fueled his temper.

"I'm sick of offers! I don't care what you can give me! I don't care what anyone can give me! I'm not a criminal!" He screamed the whole way through, only getting louder with each sentence. His parting words were more subdued, but it was the suppressed emotion behind them that struck the H.I.V.E. far more powerfully than the screaming. "Thanks for getting me out, but now I have my own things to do." With that, he turned his back on Jinx, Gizmo, and Mammoth, transformed into a crow again, and took off, out of the alleyway and towards a location he knew very well in his mind.

Gizmo almost took off after him, but Mammoth grabbed one of his legs and kept him on the ground. "Hey, scuzzhead! Let me go!"

"Gizmo, calm down. Let him go. He's not our problem any more." Jinx said it as if she knew the future. "He's not going to bother us."

-HG-

"I'm not the bad guy. I'm not the criminal," Beast Boy's thoughts ran through his mind, all about what he had just practically shouted to all of Jump City. At least, all of Jump City who were awake at five in the morning. "Why can I tell that to them, but I can't tell that to them? They're going to think I'm just another freak until the day they die." He was reluctant even to focus on what was going on with them. They always accepted him, up until the day he had...the accident. After that, they acted like he was not even around. "I'm not a freak," he told himself. If they could see what he had done with his powers...why, he had kept a major city safe!

"Not really, but they don't have to know that," he joked with himself to cut the tension in his own head. "But they do have to know this. They do have to know what I'm doing now." His goal was clear in his mind, and he knew just what he had to do.

However, his goal could not begin just yet. He had one more loose end to tie up, and so he just let himself be lost in the bliss of flight that somehow never got old, just to be away from his thoughts, until he arrived at his last stop in the city.

-HG-

Even in the slowly-fading darkness he could make out the exterior of Terra's room from the rest of the Tower. It was, curiously, the only room with the window open. "Was she expecting me?" he wondered to himself as he dove to fly in.

His entry was smooth, even though he got slightly tangled in the drawn curtain when he transformed back to a human, and he was not disappointed to find Terra fast asleep in her bed. It would have been much harder to do this if she were awake. Recalling from the first night he had stayed here, he knew that he was allowed to use her computer which, he discovered, was still on.

"It's like she went to bed without caring about anything else."

Sitting down on the edge of the semicircular couch, he moved his fingers warily over the touchpad, hoping that that would act as a mouse and, upon finding that it did, found a word processing program and opened it. He had had to work with the program before, for schoolwork and the like, so he knew his way around. His fingers moved across the keys quickly and not very accurately, but he knew the program would correct his spelling anyway, and came up with a three-line note:

Terra,

We are friends, and we always will be. And now, I'll be the one looking for you.

Beast Boy

The cursor flashed at the end of the last line, and he debated whether or not that was the best way to end the note. If he meant to go back into his own past, he reasoned, then he should use the name he used in the past; however, he worried whether she would understand.

He hit backspace several times and replaced his false name with /Garfield/. "She'll get it," he said softly to himself as he clicked the icon to print the note. The machine underneath the desk was too loud for his liking, but Terra proved to be a deeper sleeper than he thought; she stayed calm through the noisy printing process, until in the end Beast Boy had the typed note in his hands and the sun was only beginning to peek over the horizon.

"I can wait here a bit longer." He smiled at Terra's sleeping figure, then took the note in his mouth and changed shape into a crow, so that he was now holding his note to Terra in his beak. As quietly as he could, he flapped himself airborne and perched on the curtain rod in front of the window. Until the sun rose fully, he remained there, watching Terra sleep and forgetting about the troubling thoughts he had also wanted to avoid the last time he was a bird.

Eventually, though, the sun did rise, and so did the girl. When Beast Boy saw her get up, he dropped the note, which got caught in the folds of the curtain, and flew out the open window with his new destination clear in mind. "It's gonna be a long trip," he thought.

The silhouette of the crow flying into the sun was nearly invisible to Terra as she closed her window, but the sentiment to be found soon after was not.