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Artemis tastes blood in her mouth. She screws her eyes shut in an attempt to ignore the soft crying of M’gann.
Zatanna raises one hand and backhands her again, and Wally shouts something that Artemis doesn’t hear.
“Zatann—” she starts to growl, but the girl punches her in the jaw enough to knock her head back against the wall until it rattles her brain.
“The looks on your faces,” Zatanna breathes with relish, turning nonchalantly to the rest of the Team, battered and held in place by some spell they had not heard until it was too late. “God. I thought at least one of you would’ve suspected something.”
She shoots a particular sneer at Robin, whose darkened gaze never strays from her, his masked face uncanny and calculating.
“I didn’t think it was going to be easy at all,” Zatanna whispers. Abruptly, she whirls around and slaps Artemis with her pristinely gloved knuckles, grabbing her throat and clenching it with brutish strength. “But you all fell for it.”
Artemis would say something, anything, but she can’t breathe, and she wants to scrabble against Zatanna’s grasp but her limbs hang uselessly in place.
“Put her down! Put her—” Wally shouts, but his sentence is violently eradicated by a shriek of “taorht eht hsurc!” and he chokes.
“W—” Artemis manages to eke out, and Zatanna drops her in a crumpled, unceremonious heap.
“Was that a why or a Wally, sweetheart? En-un-ci-ate,” Zatanna murmurs, and kicks her in the gut.
Artemis grits her teeth and makes no sound.
“I almost think I’ll miss how stupid you are. Almost,” the magician’s daughter tells them. “But… nah. You’ve all kind of lost your charm.”
“If you’ve been here to kill us all along, then just do it!” Superboy bellows furiously.
M’gann manages to draw enough strength to clasp his limp hand. Artemis hears tears in his voice.
Zatanna blinks, eyes protuberant with ambivalent surprise, and lets out a laugh. The sound is clear and artificial from the pinkness of her mouth and tongue.
“Even when it comes to dying you’re impatient. God, Superboy. Really?” She strides over to the clone and crouches down – her stockings stretch. “Maybe you’ll change your tune a little when I say I’ll kill your girlfriend first.”
M’gann chokes. Superboy’s eyes grow wild with rage and Artemis can feel the palpable want to destroy emanating from his tensed muscles.
“I’ll slit her throat,” Zatanna whispers. “And I won’t even have to use a knife.”
“Don’t touch her.” Artemis’s voice is so strangled and raw that she cannot believe it is hers, but it crawls out of her throat like bile and permeates the floor. Zatanna freezes for a moment before turning her head toward Artemis, black hair cascading flawlessly down one shoulder.
“Ohh,” she draws out, slinking over to Artemis. “What was that, Art? Didn’t catch it.”
“I said,” Artemis hacks, “don’t touch her.”
“Why not?” Zatanna hisses, sounding vaguely amused and vaguely aroused and vaguely infuriated. “Haven’t you ever heard a Martian bone break? It sounds like rocks rolling over each other. It’s a nice sound, Art; we can listen—”
“This isn’t you,” Artemis murmurs, and she wants so badly to believe it to be true, because she thought she knew this muted slip of a girl; she thought she knew the curve of her spirit and her wants and her being.
Zatanna throws her head back and laughs again, but it is different from the soft chuckles that had once gathered in the space between Artemis’s neck and shoulder – her pale throat is exposed and open and Artemis could shoot an arrow right through it now if she had her bow, if she could move.
“Like you’d know,” Zatanna retorts, hiking herself up to her feet. “If I tricked everyone else, I could trick you.”
✦
“Zatanna,” Artemis whispers as Zatanna, in the drizzle of Manhattan on Halloween night, moves slowly against her, watching her through the flicker of her dark eyelashes.
“Say it again,” Zatanna sighs. “Backwards.”
Artemis frowns, but obliges her.
“Annataz,” she repeats at an imperceptible volume. Zatanna raises one gloved hand to rest her fingers against Artemis’s hot cheek and closes her eyes as if listening to a tune she has long since forgotten.
“I’ve never heard it that way,” she says. “Never. It sounds…”
Artemis, dizzy with want and confusion, closes the distance between them and takes Zatanna’s lips into her own. The drizzle turns to rain and no one knows, or wonders, where they are.
✦
Kaldur’s eyes, blind with pain, close, and Zatanna is grinning wickedly down at his feebly curled form, one hand raised commandingly over it.
“Nrub,” she is chanting. “Edisni eht morf.”
“Kaldur,” M’gann sobs. “Kaldur – Kaldur’ahm…”
“Shut up,” Zatanna commands her. From across the room, Wally moves his irises towards Artemis’s and they lock gazes, but Artemis can hardly see them through the shifting wet surface over her eyes.
Kaldur is murmuring something desperately and raggedly under his breath – Artemis catches snags of Tula – and then, very suddenly, terrifyingly, he goes utterly silent.
“One down, five to go,” Zatanna announces lazily, picking off her gloves finger-by-finger. “Who’s next, then? The Boy Blunder?”
“Right here,” Robin tells her with a rebelliously jutting chin, and Zatanna twitches, eyes darting down to his spread-eagled form. “I wouldn’t want to keep a lady waiting.”
“You shut your smart little mouth,” Zatanna hisses, bending down over him with obsidian eyebrows sharp and glowering. “Or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Ooh, Zee, your wit! It falters!” Robin taunts her with a lilting cackle. “And I used to think you were so clever—”
Zatanna grabs him by the hair and lifts his head up roughly and he does little more than squint.
“You were always an annoying little prick, you know that?” she growls in his ear, and one corner of his mouth curls into a smile.
“I do my best,” he answers, and she, disgusted, drops him. “Anyway, I’m all yours, mademoiselle. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Funny, Boy Wonder.” Zatanna straightens up and brushes off her knees. “But I have to be in a certain mood to deal with you. Let’s go with…”
She turns, slowly, deliberately, toward Wally, and the mad satisfaction dancing in her gaze crackles imminently.
“Bring it on,” Wally says, one black eye swollen shut, but hardly enough to douse the roar of his smile.
Zatanna, with delicate calculation, raises one hand until the palm is parallel with the ground and begins to speak.
Artemis closes her eyes.
✦
She and Zatanna would always somehow be drawn together into the dark privacy of an unused room after a mission, and the Cave was vast and inviting like the surface of Zatanna’s bare, black-skirted forehead. No one ever questioned where they went, because they were Artemis and Zatanna – thick as thieves ever since Halloween, “girl friends” in a way M’gann grew to envy, but they hardly knew; oh, Artemis would think with delight, they hardly knew how she made Zatanna gasp and how Zatanna made her flush – they hardly, hardly knew how nice Zatanna tasted on her tongue. Like snowfall. Like home.
✦
It never occurred to Artemis until seconds too late, exactly what it meant that Zatanna never really spent time with anyone else on the Team.
In her blind want for contact, for a listener and a questioner, she had ignored the solitary coldness of Zatanna’s ways. She had ignored the fact that, always, Zatanna gazed up at her with far more unending adoration than Artemis had ever imagined or wanted to reciprocate.
✦
Wally is screaming, and the sound is so dry and peculiarly deep and jagged – Artemis has heard it before, somewhere, somehow, in the snowy depths of a land she no longer existed in. It is anguished and afraid and gut-curdling and she opens her eyes to see the speedster curling in on himself as Zatanna recites puzzling gibberish over him.
“Oh, I’m taking my time with you, Kid,” she cries with glee and excitement. “After what you did to me…”
Artemis begins to sob and the sound bleeds into M’gann’s, a refrain to back the repeated shouts of the boy’s name from Robin.
Wally lets loose another round of screams and Artemis shrieks his name with such desperation and terror that it echoes off the cold walls and turns the room to silence. Zatanna’s spell ceases and Wally shivers and whimpers on the floor, eyes wide and unseeing.
Artemis is breathing heavily, gaze trained on Zatanna, and the presence of her restraining spell bears down upon the room with greater viciousness. Zatanna faces her, looking down at her as if bored.
“Wow,” she says calmly. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Art, hearing you care about someone besides yourself that much.”
Artemis doesn’t reply. After a moment, Zatanna whispers, “I knew it.”
At a greater volume, she repeats, “I knew it. I’ve seen the way you… look at each other.”
“Zatanna,” Artemis wheezes.
“Don’t say my name!” Zatanna shouts with quavering fury. M’gann flinches. “You – you… God, Artemis; I loved you.”
Artemis vaguely notices that there are tears rushing down Zatanna’s cheeks, tracing her mascara into drawn-out spiderwebs.
“Did you know that?” Zatanna demands. “Did you know, Art? Did you know I loved you?”
“Please,” Artemis chokes out, “let them go.”
“Them?” Zatanna asks harshly. “Or just him?”
She gestures to Wally, who coughs raggedly.
“Oh, no, Artemis,” Zatanna mutters, eyelids low. “No, no, just wait. I’m going to pull him apart. And then I’m going to kill the rest of them, and then you. But… oh. The things I have planned for him.” She inhales through her nose pensively. “Just wait.”
“No.” Artemis’s hair sticks to her lips. “I’ll—”
“The way you look at each other,” Zatanna recites under her breath. “The way you look at each other. I saw it. I saw.”
✦
Wally’s hands had cupped her face with an ardent tenderness that Artemis did not comprehend and he had kissed her, deeply, reverently, with vigor and meaning. The warmth of him, the buzzing hum of his skin against hers and his forehead pressed to her cheek, had taken her to places she had never travelled.
“My dad taught me everything I know,” she had blurted out suddenly, and inexplicably, she had begun to cry. “I’d be nothing without him. I’d be dead.”
She had swallowed. “And – and… he’s bad, Wally. He’s one of the guys we fight; he’s – not one of the good guys. And he raised me to be like him, and—”
“You’re not like him,” Wally had whispered to her, fingers lacing through her hair, nose barely skirting the corner of her eye, breath spreading over her cheek.
“B-But… I could be; I might be; we—”
“I don’t care,” Wally had told her, the words gathering in her ear, and that was when she had known – that was when she had, without shame or confusion, let herself cry in front of the boy she had sworn to hate, and had let herself love him as he had held her to him in the black corners of the his closed bedroom, beside the invisible glow of the floor heater. The calloused toes of his bare feet had curled beneath the sheets and Artemis had never wanted to be closer to anything in her life.
✦
Artemis’s collarbone had been tender with bruises between Zatanna’s exploring teeth.
“Zat—” she had begun to say, but the pale girl had kissed her with feverish need and she had quieted.
✦
Artemis is yanked out of her reminiscences by a hand dragging her up by her ponytail. Zatanna is lifting her, grinning, the sharp curves of her hollow cheeks prominent.
“Redlouhs reh tuc,” the magician recites quickly in Artemis’s ear, and a gash is suddenly torn across Artemis’s right shoulder, causing her to cry out in shock. Blood snakes down her arm. “Kcen reh tuc.” A slice goes over Artemis’s collarbone. More blood. Zatanna throws her to the ground, still holding onto her hair, where Artemis lands with a crack. “Kaerb reh mra!”
Artemis’s arm twists and cracks, and Artemis screams.
“I’ll kill you!” Wally is bellowing. “I’ll kill you; I’ll kill you; I’ll—”
“Shut up!” Zatanna interrupts, heels clicking as she strides over to him. “You’ll what, Fastest Boy Alive?”
“I,” Wally growls, “will kill you… if you touch her again.”
“KF, stop it,” Robin warns him. Zatanna’s head whips in the direction of the Boy Wonder and she leers.
“C’mon, Dick,” she coos, and he winces. “Don’t you at least have the decency to call your best friend by his real name?”
“How does she kn—?” Wally begins, shocked, perhaps hurt.
“Oh, he told me,” Zatanna answers immediately. “That night on the balcony, right, Richie? When you—”
“Stop it,” Robin orders her, and the cold firmness of his tone is enough to briefly still even her. “Just stop it, Zee.”
“Kaldur,” M’gann whimpers softly from the corner, weakly moving one quivering hand toward the unmoving heap beside her. “K-Kaldur… please…”
“Keep dreaming, Green Cheeks; he’s long gone,” Zatanna taunts her. “Now, where were we? Oh. Right. Artemis.”
She returns her attention to the fallen, panting archer and turns her over with the toe of one boot.
“What did he have that I didn’t?” Zatanna demanded in a hushed tone. “Huh? Tell me. I want to know. I need to know.”
“He…” Artemis begins.
“Artemis,” Wally wheezes.
“Was it the way he said your name? The way he held your face? The way he moves, the way he talks, the way he looks you in the eye? Tell me, Artemis.”
Artemis is silent.
“Tell me!” Zatanna shrieks, enraged. She grabs Artemis by either side of her shirt and lifts her bodily up, jostling the broken arm, and their faces are so close that Artemis can see the fresh tears in her eyes. “Tell me. I need to know before I…”
“He…” Artemis gulps, head lolling back. “He… Wally…”
“Artemis,” Wally answers desperately. “Come on, Artemis; just hang—”
“Hang on? How cute!” Gone is the helpless expression of heartbreak – gone is the blue wetness between her eyelids.
She lifts a hand and turns her head toward Wally, not releasing Artemis.
“Traeh sih pots,” she hisses, and Wally’s eyes widen for a brief moment before he begins to choke, eyes watering. Artemis feels her chest growing heavy and leaden but she looks him in the eye and does not let her gaze stray.
“Look at me, Wally. Look at me.”
Wally does. His eyes do not leave hers, not even when his body stills and his chest ceases to move.
“Wally!” Robin’s voice carries such grief, such an achingly known sadness. “Wally!”
“Skip the melodrama!” Zatanna commands, returning to Artemis. “Tell me, Art. Tell me what made him so special. I’m losing my patience.”
“I… don’t know,” Artemis hisses. “We – nobody ever knows what changes. Love changes, for God’s sake, Zatanna. I don’t know what made me change my mind, but we – you and me – it was… there while it lasted, and then it ended. That’s how life works.”
Zatanna was shaking her head. “No; it—”
“That’s how life works,” Artemis repeats with steely resolve, moving her face closer to Zatanna’s. “Grow up.”
✦
“I’m glad I’ve got you, Zee.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ve finally got someone to talk to. Someone who listens.”
“Feel good to get rid of those secrets?”
“More than you know.”
“I love you, Artemis.”
“Mm-hmm.”
✦
Artemis doesn’t know how the League finds them. She swears that she saw Zatanna completely annihilate Red Tornado when he had flown in to attempt to rescue them, and she swears that the magician girl took down all radio communications. But somehow, miraculously, mercifully, Green Arrow is lifting her useless body off the ground bridal-style and Superman is helping Superboy to his feet and the Martian Manhunter and M’gann are embracing and Batman is holding Robin close to his chest and Aquaman is pressing his fingers to Kaldur’s temples and murmuring as water pools at his fingertips and…
“Kid?” the Flash chokes out from a few feet to her left. “Kid? Wally? Oh – Jesus – Kid. Kid. Wally – Wally – no.”
“Get him to the medbay,” Batman commands gruffly, and Green Lantern and Captain Atom are lifting the fragile form of yellow and scarlet between them and carrying him out.
“He…” Artemis mumbles, fisting one hand into Green Arrow’s shirt. “Z—tann…”
The ebony-crowned head lies unmoving on the floor, and the ends of the hair clump together in the smallest pool of blood, the white gloves frigid and still.
“I’m sorry, Giovanni,” Batman murmurs, and it echoes against the sound of a man’s racking sobs. “But she would have killed them all.”
Artemis sleeps.
✦
Kaldur recovers. He is taken beneath the surface and kept in Atlantis for nearly a month, but he recovers, but the webbing between his fingers is gone, dried and shriveled into nothingness from the heat of the white fire that Zatanna had set within him. He stares at the spaces between them with longing sometimes, and Artemis, not knowing what else to do, places hers between them in a poor attempt at comfort and hugs him the way she should have several times before the team thought that they had lost him.
✦
Batman never tells them precisely what organization Zatanna had been ensnared by, but Artemis knows it isn’t the Shadows, because Cheshire looks her in the eye on the orange-lit Gotham rooftop and tells her so in the tone that she uses when she doesn’t lie.
“We wouldn’t have hired someone to kill you,” Cheshire murmurs. “Dad would never have allowed it. And neither would I. We may be devils, sis, but if anyone lays a finger on you, they die.”
✦
Artemis is there when Wally comes to.
(He never runs quite as fast again – Batman says it might strain his heart, not like he cares, but the speed isn’t quite there, because part of it had to go to healing and restarting his stopped heart.)
She puts her hand on his, the scratchy, starched surface of the med-bay sheets hard against them, and he turns his head to look at her and frowns, face pale.
“You and Zatanna, huh?” he says.
Artemis bows her head.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Wally blinks, once, twice, and squeezes her fingers.
“Yeah,” he whispers. “I don’t either.”
✦
There are damp white roses laid across Zatanna’s grave and Artemis brings lilies. The dirt eventually grows grass of its own and Artemis stops going every week, and the years drag on for quite some time before Wally can gather the courage to accompany her one rainy April afternoon.
“I miss her. Isn’t that weird?” Artemis confesses.
Wally takes her hand in his.
“We all miss the part of her we had before…” He swallows, and Artemis can’t believe him – this is the boy who had eaten all of her cookies and belched in the middle of the night and told her that she was a replacement and a hag.
She rests her head on his shoulder.
“She was…” She doesn’t know what word she was going to use, but Wally seems to, because he nods.
“Yeah.” Thunder rumbles. “She was.”