and maybe she made him die twice

a sea of green

"I invited the you." She grumbled. Understanding social nuances were not one of her fortes.

"Say that again? I can't hear you." He cupped his ear and leaned in, pretending to have gone slightly deaf to any pretty aliens.

"I invited the you." Her pupils diminished into a white-hot supernova.

"Whoa, whoa. No need to go all explode the galaxy on me." Jason fluttered his cape in the air as surrender. "So. Why'd you wanna see me?"

"I require a service. Or as you said...a favor." She cringed at her own need to stoop this low. Her birthright degree of royalty hadn't worn off yet.

"If I wanted to know that, I would've just read your text." He batted the pleasantries away. Being the opposite of royalty didn't deter him from being apathetic to it either. "What is it?"

"I...I wish for you to..." She fiddled with her hair, trying to praise it in a non-embarrassing way before slumping in defeat. "I wish for you to fight me."

"Back up. What?" Even the skull on his mask looked perplexed. "Why?"

"It is complicated." Starfire hugged herself and shivered, not knowing if the sudden icy spell was from the chill of the night breeze or her heart. "If I 'vanquish' you and return with proof, Robin will not say I am too hard nor soft on criminals. I will be useful."

"It's not complicated at all." He recalled Bruce's silent treatment after an awry practice, his dad's failure to look past his benders and see that his son had cleaned the house. "You're trying to prove yourself to someone with impossible standards. I get it."

"You are not in a place to judge." She deflected his comment about Robin's flaws, the kind of blind infatuation that only came with love. "You try to emulate him. Become him. But you shall never be Robin."

"Don't I know it." He muffled the sting, one that wormed to his core, with a vengeful laugh. "Look, we don't have to fight. I'll even give you a scrap of my mask to take home. But there's one thing you gotta do for me."

"And what is that?" 

"Meet me." He juggled his pop, humming a tune.

"What?"

"You heard me. Meet me. Here. Every Friday." He mentally cleared some robberies out of his calendar.

"Why?" Starfire was working her way through the essential 'W' questions you learn in kindergarten.

"Why ever you want it to be. Maybe I want to see the error of my ways. Maybe I'm just bored.: He leered over her lecherously. "Maybe I just like you."

"You are an enigma, X of the Red." She gazed at Jason like she could decipher him through his expressionless mask. "Even you do not know what you want."

"That's better than those who do when it's the wrong thing." He jabbed at her admiration of Robin. "I assume that's a yes?"

"It is not a no," Her cheeks puffed up with a hidden laugh. "Clorbag."

"What's that?"

"That is the Tamaranian word for yes." She gave him a sweet, over-the-top fake smile.

"I can look at your face and know it's not." He made a sport out of her terrible lie.

"You shall have to find out." He watched her soar away with a giggle, a mirage of orange and green streaking across the sky. After the flame-tailed ombre was a speck in the distance, he thumbed out a pocketed bomb. Deactivated its motion sensor and wiped his sweaty brow in relief.