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Her temples are pounding with red and white, gnashing her teeth together until they hurt, when she whirls on him.
“Shut up!” she shrieks, her voice reaching a shrill and furious pitch that she only ever seems to use around him.
“No, you shut up!” he snarls back, shoving his goggles back onto his forehead so that the green in his eyes can better stab straight through her. “I had your back in there, but you’re the one who decided to ignore that! What’s your problem?!”
“I don’t have a problem; you do!” Artemis snaps, her ponytail flipping over her shoulder when she jerks her head back in his direction. “I don’t need your help, Wally. Don’t be pathetic.”
“Pathetic?” he shouts. “Pathetic?! What’s—what is wrong with you?!”
“You are!” she screams, shoving his chest until he stumbles back, and the freckles she has counted on lazy summer afternoons are now twisted into his visage of hurt and outrage. “I take care of myself! Always! Nobody takes care of me; you got that?! It’s none of your business! You were just – you were trying to make me look bad!”
“I was trying to make you not get killed!” Wally exclaims, throwing his arms out. “What’s with all this Lone Wolf crap? This isn’t Team Artemis, for Pete’s sake; there are eight of us and we’re supposed to look out for each other! You wouldn’t be pissed if Robin did this, or Aqualad! So what problem do you have with me?”
Artemis’s face contorts and her cheeks are sending indignant heat into her every limb.
“I don’t want you to do stupid things for me!” she barks, finally honest, her voice raw. “I don’t want you to gethurt because you’re trying to play the hero! I don’t need protecting, you moron; and if you think I do, you’re dead wrong.”
Wally opens and closes his mouth, frowning at her, and that only makes her angrier.
“I’m leaving,” she spits, stalking for the zeta tubes. “If you try following me, nobody will ever find your body; do you understand?”
“Arte—” And his voice is quieter, and so apologetic it makes her bones twitch in regret.
“Don’t talk to me, Wally!” she practically roars until her throat hurts, hoping it will drown out the black feeling in the pit of her stomach. The zeta tube drones out her designation number and she hates herself.
Artemis tries to knead the soreness out of her joints as she sits with her knees raised on the couch at the Cave, trying to force the chaos of the latest mission out of her mind. She’s never liked fires. Or guns.
Wally is asleep next to her, his hand dangling toward the floor, his mouth agog as he drools. She glances over at him and grimaces, rolling her eyes and shaking her head and pressing down on the purpling bruise forming over her elbow.
Her prom is in three weeks and she has not bought a dress; she hasn’t even considered the possibility of going, honestly, because it’s at the museum if sciences in Gotham City, and she knows that if she ever reveals that tidbit to Wally, he’ll leave her no choice but to do herself up and go with him.
Something in the center of her heart warms, watching him sleep. There is a white band-aid over his right eyebrow (it had split when he’d been bludgeoned by the butt of Mallah’s gun) and a few tiny cuts on his cheek from the shattered glass of his goggle lenses. The muted nature documentary playing on the television screen splashes his face in hues of dim green and blue and orange.
Artemis, exhausted, stretches out beside him – practically on top of him, really – and tucks her head under his chin. Automatically, his arm slings over her waist and he lets out a contented, sleepy sigh, and Artemis does not remember the fight they’d had last week; rather, she remembers the grin on his face as he’d shaken her mother’s hand for the first time, a two years ago, filling the dark corners of an apartment made of shadows with sunlight.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” she says to him, once, after a mission.
“Me too,” he ripostes with a toothy grin, and she huffs and whacks him upside the head.
“I’m serious,” she mutters, avoiding his gaze. After a moment’s pause (probably for him to process what she means, the obtuse idiot), the red Kevlar of his gloves brushes against the inside of her palm and it feels like she’s holding the whole world.
(They had fought back-to-back with fluid motion and bleeding noses, punching and kicking and never turning around, so naïvely confident that the other would not fall. She counts his breath like ticks in time and falls asleep to the rhythm.)
Wally does take her to prom. It takes them one belligerent argument and one shared bed and one hickey on her neck, but he triumphs in the end, and Artemis wears glittery green and ties her hair into a bun and, just as she’d predicted, they spend more time looking at the science exhibits than they do dancing.
He grasps her hand and leads her into the empty planetarium, firing up the projections, just like in an old movie she saw once. The stars shift tirelessly around them and when he kisses her, all of the planets inhale and emerge.
“Okay, don’t kill me,” Wally implores her with a hopeful sort of grin, his hands tactfully placed behind his back. “But I may or may not have brought home a housewarming gift, to us, from me, and it may or may not be alive.”
Artemis drops the plastic Superman plate (a hand-me-down from Robin) and freezes, staring at him, and he has to bite his lip to keep from laughing at the sight of her, doe-eyed and rigid in her Alice in Wonderland pajamas.
“You didn’t,” she says, half a plea and half a command, and Wally winces.
“I did,” he confesses. He shifts his arms around, bringing them forward, and there, nestled snugly between his two hands, is a roly-poly white pitbull puppy.
Its pink tongue comes lolling out and it blinks up at her with protuberant, overjoyed brown eyes. Artemis goes sort of limp in the shoulders, sighing unreadably, and Wally hopes against all hope that he’ll survive the night.
“West,” she mutters, shaking her head without taking her eyes off of the puppy. “I hate you so much.”
“That’s a thank you, right?” Wally beams buoyantly as Artemis steps forward, crossing the kitchen to meet them at the couch. She lifts a tentative hand and scratches the puppy behind one floppy ear, which makes it kick its leg gleefully.
She sighs, lifts her hands to Wally’s head, and takes his face between them. He grins more widely, like it’s supposed to endear her to not murdering him, and she smiles wearily, leaning up and kissing him, more of a push than anything else (and it is definitely the most grateful kiss on record since the one she’d given him on New Year’s, four years ago).
Wally closes his eyes and hums and starts to step closer to her, but the puppy lets out a yelp, squished against her chest. He laughs against Artemis’s teeth and they both glance down at the furball simultaneously, smirking.
“I can’t help but feel like there’s something coming between us,” Wally says, and Artemis groans, shoving at his forehead.
“If it craps anywhere, you’re cleaning it up,” she orders, pointing threateningly at him. “And I don’t want it being loud. Or peeing on the carpet. Or—”
Before she can finish, the sound of liquid hitting fabric suddenly interrupts her. She steps back, wide-eyed, in time to see a trickle of urine sprinkling onto the carpet from the puppy, who Wally is now holding at arm’s length.
She curses. Wally gulps and grins apologetically at her.
“Uh…” he offers lamely. “Good reason to invest in hardwood floors?”
“Great, on your dime,” Artemis retorts crisply, striding into the kitchen to find a paper towel. “You always were a generous guy.”
“The things I do for love,” Wally laments to the puppy in his hands, who just pants up at him, its paws raised at its chin.
“You?” Artemis exclaims incredulously from the kitchen, and right on cue, a towel hits Wally square in the face. “Don’t make me laugh. Clean up your dog’s mess.”
“The dog’s for you,” Wally insists through the pink fabric, setting the puppy gingerly down on the carpet, where it promptly starts snuffling around the spot of its latest incident.
He takes the towel off of his head and looks her in the eye.
“Because when people are in love, they buy each other dogs,” he finishes. “And uh, I figure maybe this’ll help you redirect all of the yelling you do at me to something else.”
“Don’t quote me on this,” Artemis says, and the smile she gives him makes his knees sort of shiver with warmth and lightness and all the things he had been, as a teenager, embarrassed to admit to. “But this might be the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
Her blonde hair hits her shoulders the way the sunlight hits a mountainside and he wants nothing more than to run his fingers through it until the morning comes, but there are so many things he wants to do with Artemis that he’s saving for brighter and bluer days (and every day, really, is bluer and brighter than the last, when she’s involved).
“I’ll keep it under wraps,” he tells her, his lips quirking. “Love you.”
“You too,” she answers (and every time she says it, it is so fraught with meaning that it may as well cripple him). “Now clean up your mess, Kid.”