Chapter Text
He wakes up in the middle of the city with no idea where he is. His head is foggy, and it’s so bright and he nearly trips over his feet while he turns, trying to get his bearings. A gloved hand comes to rest against shaggy red hair. He’s in costume.
Well, that’s a start.
He takes one stumbling step, and then another, blinking blindly in the glare. He has no idea what time it is, but the heat and the light make him put it at maybe late afternoon? Early evening. It must be summer. A hand moves, groping at the snack compartment on his arm: the first line of defense against his body’s obvious lethargy. Empty. He pauses, in the square, and takes stock. He is in costume. He can’t remember what happened. His snack compartment is empty.
He must be well and truly boned.
Hands and muscles tense feebly as he spins, trying to assess the environment. Even in the waning light the square is full of people. Cafe tables are occupied, cups of something cold and colourful sitting in tall glasses. There’s a group of children near a small park, adults supervising from a nearby bench. Everything is the picture of normalcy, happiness. But it’s wrong. It takes him a moment to place it, thoughts jumbled as they are. There’s a stillness here. He glances down, checks limbs and heartbeat just to make sure it isn’t him, moving too fast to see the world in anything but slow motion. It’s more than that. It is eerily, conspicuously quiet. He can’t put it together, can’t make sense of the vision he must be having, because there’s no sense of danger or foreboding. What on earth is going on?
He starts at the hand that taps him timidly on the shoulder. He didn’t hear them coming. (He didn’t hear them coming). He moves to strike, to defend, but he is so slow, even to his own eyes, and that’s probably for the best when he sees the young lady standing, bewildered, terrified, before him. His mind snaps into a place he knows intimately.
“What’s the problem, ma’am?” Not deaf, then.
Skin pales perceptibly at the sound of his voice. “Are you . . .?” She gestures vaguely, helplessly at the insignia on his chest. “Is it really you?” she tries again.
An eyebrow quirks, confused. “. . . Kid . . . Flash?” he asks, because he isn’t one hundred percent on what she’s getting at. She nods — a quick, jerky movement — and stares, eyes wide and low and sad. He doesn’t understand. “Yeah. Kid Flash, the one and only.” It’s a shadow of his usual bravado, but it will have to do for now. He just needs to get some food in him . . . “Look, where’s the crisis?”
“Crisis?” Her words are too slow, slow, slow, like she’s having trouble pushing her words into speech. Breath escapes in little gasps, and she’s smiling. “No, there’s no crisis, I —”
A fan? He nods understandingly to himself, and tries a tired smile. “Listen, I really need to jet, but. Thanks for the support!”
The rest of her words are caught by the wind as he spins on his heel and runs away. He comes crashing to a stop in an alleyway a block from his house, dry-heaving over a nest of empty cardboard. What the hell. He’s more out of it than he’d thought. He sloshes through sludgy memories and is met with nothing but an endless reserve of white noise. Static-y, like lightning.
He changes out of his suit and sits on the dirty floor, head in his hands, for half and hour, maybe more. The throbbing pushes it’s way through the soles of his feet, shooting loudly into his head after stopping at his heart. A wave of nausea overtakes him, and this time the brown is splattered with something filmy and white. His mouth tastes like ash.
It’s dark when he finally stumbles to his feet. The streetlights are on, stars winking out at him from behind the gauzy veil of clouds. The cool touch of the night breeze soothes the fevered skin at his forehead, and his skin turns to ice, sweat chilling in the air. He’s sick in a way he’s never been sick before, not really. His legs waver beneath him, and he barely manages to catch himself with each step, treading the familiar route back home.
Back to her.
Fingers fumble numbly in pockets as he stands at the front door. He can’t remember anything else, so why should he remember where he put his keys? He shuffles, rocking back and forth on his heels until his balance becomes too precarious too continue. A hand raises, hesitant. What time is it? Two in the morning? Three? After midnight, he thinks. At least.
He knocks twice, hard and loud.
He can already hear the footsteps approaching, soft soles slapping against the well-worn hardwood of their apartment. His heart speeds up, chasing his breath up his chest as he waits for the door to open. It feels like forever since he’s last seen her. Long, calloused fingers move instinctively to his hair, trying to flatten the worst of the wind-worn tangles. His ring catches on a snag instead, and he pulls too hard, ginger strands threading themselves in his jewelry.
“Wally?” The door’s cracked open, bright, and he drinks in the sight of her light he’s been dying of thirst. A soft yellow kitchen light illuminates her from behind, frames her in a halo. He is overcome with a sudden urge to weep, to throw himself to his knees and prostrate in front of her like a sinner welcomed back into the arms of the divine, but he can’t place the origin of the urge and so. Instead he shrugs his shoulders sheepishly and offers her a wry grin that makes his freckles run together at the corners of his eyes. “I lost my keys.”
Her eyes are always a study in prismatic green, but tonight they’re the luminous silver of the moon hanging above them, twins in her lovely face. They shine, happy, pulling into crescents as she smiles at him warmly. “It’s been a very long time, Wally. Especially since I had to get the door for you. You don’t look a day older.” Her tone is light, teasing, laced with something deep and heavy at the bottom that he doesn’t have the energy to dive for. “You’ve kept me waiting.” She steps back, all tall grace and elegance, and he steps around her inside as she shuts the door behind them.
His eyes, already adjusted to the dark, scan the room, take in the piles of boxes stacked against the walls. The apartment is spartan now, decorations pulled from their place and leaving nothing but faded outlines in their wake. The sofa, the dining table, the chairs — all remain, lonely little islands of comfort in the starkness of this new order. He whistles, low, and is immediately grateful that he still has the breath for that. “Doing some cleaning?”
She laughs and pads around him in bare feet, walking to the electric kettle on the counter. “I was making myself some tea. Do you want some?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer before she sets another mug beside her own. He doesn’t bother answering.
“You’re up late,” he offers instead, as he takes an exhausted seat at the table. She nods, hums low. “Couldn’t sleep.”
He wiggles his eyebrows, bright red caterpillars set against his face, even though their backs are to each other. “Couldn’t sleep without having me to keep you warm, huh?”
She doesn’t answer for a minute, and he listens silently, reverently, to the sounds of her busy hands behind him. The tear of tea packets, the sift of sugar. The sharp clink of metal against ceramic as she stirs. There’s a soft knock on the wood as she sets his cup down in front of him. “I never could.”
He smiles as he curls a hand around his mug, the dark green hand painted arrow chipped from too many cycles in the dishwasher. The small sip warms him up to the root of his being, the delicate floral scent making him feel safer. Stable. Home. He waits for a moment, but she takes her mug with her to the opposite side of the table and sits, watching him. Something unreadable flashes in her eyes, and disappears too quickly even for him to catch. She doesn’t move, doesn’t drink, just sits, eyes heavy and expression guarded.
The aloofness is a surprise. He’s assumed (maybe arrogantly) that she would run into his arms the moment he arrived, would crush the jasmine cloud of her skin and hair against him and he’d fall backwards on the sidewalk, tangled up in the warmth of her. His mind had painted a picture of her exactly as he’d remembered, but she’s different, somehow. Her hair, for one. No longer a wild mane of golden sunshine, it now falls at her shoulders, in a deep side part. Tame, like liquid honey. It suits her, in the tender lines of her face, the soft curves around her profile. A gentleness that he’s seen before, but never so clearly.
He still wants to kiss her senseless.
Instead he reaches across the table, leaves his hand at the halfway mark. She makes no move to take it. “Are you mad at me?” He asks, concerned. He doesn’t know what he’s done (to be perfectly frank it could be any number of things), but he doesn’t like it. This strange, reserved distance. Like she’s forcing herself to hold back. Even at her angriest, she’d always embraced him when he’d come home.
She considers it, seriously. “I was,” she offers, after a moment of silence. “But I’m not anymore.”
“Then what are you doing all the way over there?” The pads of his fingers tap softly on the table, and he drags his hand back. “I want to touch you.”
The surprise is a concern. It’s palpable, rolling off her in waves so dense he’d have to be dead not to notice them. “What?”
An eyebrow draws low over spring green eyes. “Is that a shock?”
“. . . Kind of,” she murmurs, knuckles going white around the handle of her bright yellow mug. “This isn’t how this usually goes.”
“How what usually goes?” He waves it off, impatient. “I mean, I did expect a hug, you know. At least.”
She stiffens, then stands, walking jerkily, hesitantly towards him like a puppet held on uneven strings. He reaches a hand out to steady her, cups the cool skin at her elbow, and she almost jumps back, electric. “Are you okay?”
Ripe peach lips gape soundlessly for a moment, even now so beautiful, so distracting, that he doesn’t notice what’s happening until the moisture runs down her chin and drops, warm, against the flesh of his hand. Tears are pooling, swimming against the silvery liquid of her eyes, carving deep swathes down the skin of her cheek. “Artemis?” he asks, all concern now, the deep baritone of his voice growing lower with worry.
Long, golden arms encircle his neck and suddenly he can’t breathe for all the hair suddenly spread against his face. He can feel it, the way her shoulders shake heavily beneath him, and he clutches her, holds her steadily in unsteady arms as she cries silently. He strokes her back, makes soothing, swirling patterns with the tips of strong fingers, until she suddenly turns her head against him, face nestled in the crook of his neck. A feeling so familiar he sags in the chair, feels her slide into him. “You’ve never felt so real,” she whispers, muffled against the damp fabric of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” he begs, atonement falling from his lips like water and nestling into the sweet jasmine strands of her hair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He doesn’t know what’s wrong, can’t understand why she’s acting like this, but he’ll do anything to make it right again. He’ll fix it. He’ll find a way. Her shoulders are shaking again, but this time with unsteady laughter. “Don’t apologize.” Her beautiful, elegant hands press against his chest, a shield against his heartbeat as she lays her head against him.
He plays with the shorter ends of her hair, so manageable now, so smooth. They slide through like strands of silk and he finds he can’t stop touching them. Fingers catch, on a caress, on a slight chain encircling her neck. He lifts it slowly in his hand, bringing it closer to the light.
He’s never remembered Artemis wearing a necklace before. Not to bed.
She pushes away from him, eyes searching until they alight on the chain in his hands. The stiffness in her joints returns, full force, and his eyes snap back to her, wary. “Are you mad?” she asks, hand curled tight around something at her neck. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, why he could ever have any cause to be mad at her. Not right now, not like this. Slender fingers unfold slowly, and he sees the golden band dangling on the twisted chain.
“Where did you find that?”
She looks away, the other hand fiddling with the hem of her white silk shorts. “When I was —” and here she gestures towards the boxes on the wall. “You didn’t do a really good job of hiding it.”
“It was in a single popcorn cheese packet. I resealed it!”
“I could feel it through the packaging, Wally.” She looks up at him through a thick fringe of lashes. “Are you mad?”
A sigh, long and loud and slightly exasperated. He drops his forehead into her hair, breathes in the musk of vanilla and jasmine shampoo and some other, indescribable scent. He can’t be mad. Not at her. Not now, not like this. “Only that I didn’t get to ask, I guess.”
A wry smile tugs at the corners of her beautiful lips. “I guess I’m mad about that too.” She runs soft fingers through his messy hair, brittle nails catching and tugging at his scalp. He leans into her touch, lets himself feel the weight of her, pressing on him.
“I love you,” he breathes, words hot in her ear, and he can feel it again, the slick moisture of tears working their way down her face. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
“I love you too,” she whispers, breathless, and this is it. The dam is breaking, he can feel it, and she tilts her face up into his and suddenly her lips are sweet and open and so, so close and. He falls into her like a river, twisting and turning with every kiss, buffeted by currents turning rapid. And he’s starving he can feel it — in the ache of his bones, in his muscles, in his joints. But she is a saint and her kisses are like ambrosia and he feels like he can live forever, even if he takes and he takes and he thinks he’ll never be full.
There is fire and heat and energy in him now and he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop.
She pulls away, slowly, reluctant, after a minute or hours, who can say. Her eyes are red and slightly swollen and her lips a hundred times more so. She brushes a lock of hair back from his forehead, and presses hers against it.
“I’m glad you came,” she says, and every word is like a shard of glass shattering on the floor. “I really wanted to talk to you.”
His hand rubs wide circles on her back, and he hums, almost vibrates as he stares into her face. His eyes are half-lidded, so close to closing, and he’s so tired and so electrified all at once he thinks he might be dying. This wouldn’t be a bad way to go, he thinks. If only she hadn’t been crying.
“I wrote you a letter today.” Her fingers trace small roads on his chest, but her eyes are already wandering to a space over his shoulder, just out of sight.
“Why?” his words slur, thoughts getting sluggish. He is drunk on the sight of her, on her proximity. He never wants to kick the habit.
“There were some things I wanted to tell you.”
His head drops, cheek against the crown of her head. Her hair is soft enough to make his pillow. “Tell me.”
Her fingers never stop. “Then what would be the point of the letter?”
He shrugs, but she doesn’t respond. They sit that way, encapsulated in a bubble of silence that is pregnant with meaning that he still hasn’t managed to comprehend. She shifts, long legs uncrossing, until she’s out of his lap, standing. Striding. Her feet make soft progress towards the direction of their bedroom. “Thanks for the talk, Wally.”
“No problem.” He almost laughs. A talk is nothing; he would do everything. Anything. The door never shuts behind her.
He remains seated for a minute more, toying with the edge of his mug, trying to return scraps of paint to their proper places. He can hear her, after a while, breathing quietly, wetly, in the dark of the other room. The chair tilts back precariously, balanced unevenly on back legs while he prepares to stand, when he hears him.
“Wally.”
He almost falls, back flat to the unforgiving wooden floor, but the booted foot of the man behind him catches him, spins him back upright. Jeans unfold stiffly as he jumps from the chair, turns around.
“Nightwing.” The freckled skin of his hand stops over his wildly beating heart. “You gave me a heart attack!”
“Sorry,” he says simply, although he doesn’t look it. There’s a defensiveness in his posture, in the stillness of his neck, as he regards his ginger friend. “So it’s really you, then.”
Wally runs a hand over tired eyes. “What the hell, man, I am way too tired for your cryptic nonsense in the middle of the night. Who else would it be in my own kitchen so early in the morning?” He stands, positions his spine a little straighter, forcing disks into place as he uncurls. Muscled arms cross his chest. “What are you doing here?”
“I caught your signal. On the computer.”
No more explanation seems to be forthcoming, and the reason for the visit doesn’t do him the favour of making itself immediately available. He wipes his hands nervously on his jeans, stiff residue flaking off on contact. Oh, right. “Am I sick, Dick?” He taps fingers nervously along his thigh. “Is that what this is about? Because I was feeling like shit, earlier?”
“Yeah. Sorry, man.” Nightwing’s posture never releases. “I came to take you to the Watchtower for a checkup. It’ll be quick, I promise.”
“Dude, I just got home.” He gestures, helplessly, to the open door of the bedroom, but his friend remains planted solidly in his path.
“Sorry,” he says again. “It can’t wait.” He walks forwards in large, powerful strides, whisper soft on the ground. This is happening, right now, they’re moving and he’s going to have to leave when he just got back and —. He catches sight of something bright white on the counter, laying against a blue-tinted cellophane bag tied up with ribbon. It has his name on it.
“Just let me grab something,” he mutters, walking around the brunet, long arms reaching easily across to grab the envelope and the bag. He hesitates on the way out, looking to grab a jacket he hadn’t been wearing. (It’s chilly, in space). He fumbles instead, trips, lightly, on the way out.
Nightwing closes the door behind them without sound, sealing the cosy apartment off once again and leaving him feel, suddenly, like he’s been stranded, abandoned, on the cold city sidewalk. He shakes the feeling off his shoulders. The sun is coming up, now, and they walk towards it, the fatigued speedster blinking perpetually into the light.
His nail worries the flap of the envelope as they walk, its contents soon to be released into his custody.
But why write a letter?