Author's Notes: Every once in awhile you write a story that haunts you.
This story idea came to me in a dream the night before "Complications" aired. How would things change in the YJ storyline if Artemis was in deep cover for months rather than weeks? What does it do to people over long periods of time to carry such a façade of hate that it requires total emotional isolation to pull off? I couldn't watch the episode, or the rest of the season, the same way with the memory of this possibility hanging over it and so the lovely Cerina suggested I write it out. I've been holding onto it for months now without a clear idea of whether or not I was going to publish it, but I figured with the new surge in Young Justice interest with the release of Legacy, this might be my last chance.
I am quietly entranced with how it turned out.
There's no secret to living
Just keep on walking
There's no secret to dying
Just keep on flying
-"Lonely Soul," Unkle
Coming from someone who'd been outside the Earth's atmosphere, the ocean was infinitely scarier.
Space promised you light. Galaxies far off and lifetimes away, but they were there. You could see the stars you were hurtling towards.
Beneath the light threshold of the Pacific, the ocean promised only ink and infinite solitude. You could travel thousands of miles and still feel like you weren't moving at all. Turn on a light and all it met was falling particles of things that died without a name.
This is how they live, she and Kaldur. Gliding through the water inside an iron shell for months on end and feeling like they haven't moved an inch. At first, it had been doable. They'd surface occasionally for missions, they'd pretend to fight Nightwing or actually fight the team. They'd see their friends, if only on the other side of the battlefield.
But the frequency began to decrease. Manta needed Kaldur and his personal guard for more top secret missions. The melees were left to Deathstroke or Manta's lackeys. The last time she'd fought Miss Martian had been weeks ago, and she'd been so starved for human contact even back then that she'd almost smiled at the start of a telepathic tingle in her mind. But Kaldur slammed M'gann across the room before Artemis even had to worry about her near slip.
She wondered how he did it. How he hated them all so convincingly and beat on his friends without a chink in his armor.
Sometimes, he'd even convince her, when they stood at attention in front of Black Manta. Kaldur would reply with such contention, such venom in his baritone that Artemis would believe for fractions of seconds that he really would snap Dick or Wally's neck at his father's command. Sometimes, in combat, he'd hit Wolf hard enough that she could hear a crack.
When they'd get back on the sub, he'd radio his father that the job was done and if she was the only one there, he'd look sad in the moment the radio crackle died out.
And only in those moments would Artemis remember that Tula was really dead and Artemis Crock was really not and Kaldur had been pretending to blame his friends for her death for more than two years already. She wondered if, sometimes, it was just easier to stop pretending.
She'd only been undercover for a few months and she was already starting to show signs of wear. Not just with M'gann. When Dick made a smart comment in the middle of a battle, even when he wasn't her opponent, if she could hear him, she'd entertain the humor in her mind while keeping her face perfectly aligned. It was harder than it looked when she missed him so much. When Conner came at her, furious and violent, she had to remind herself she couldn't joke with him about losing his temper because he was doing this to Tigress because Artemis was dead and he hated Tigress the way he did because he loved Artemis so much in comparison.
She didn't even have the luxury of fighting Wally. She hadn't seen him since Blüdhaven, and that was taking its toll worse than the face staring back at her in the mirror every morning. She'd find herself staring at her metal coffin ceiling and wondering what he was doing. She wondered if he was running again. She wondered if she would drown down there without ever knowing.
They passed information to Dick, tried to keep any prisoners they took safe until they could coordinate a rescue, but little to no information ever got back to them. It was too risky. They were in too deep.
When she feels her shakiest, she excuses herself from a minor war meeting and asks Kaldur to accompany her to the tiny tin bathroom of her quarters. She locks the door, turns on the sink, turns on the shower at its hottest, the steam and noise fogging any possible surveillance. But when she turns to explain to him, to talk to Kaldur and not Black Manta's son, to ask him how he does what he does, she can't find the words.
She sits on the sweating porcelain and puts her head between her knees and breathes deep and tries not to choke.
"How do you do it?" she whispers.
And Aqualad answers, "I do not."
She starts to cry and it's girly and stupid but the glamour charm is strangling her and she misses Wally so much she's going to suffocate trying to preserve the memory of his face.
Kaldur gets down on his knees and holds her. He pulls his mask off and she presses her face into the skin of his throat and it's the first human contact she's had in three months. She cries until both the water from the sink and from the shower go cold and Kaldur sits there the whole time rubbing her back and whispering her name over and over and over again because there's no one else to remind her of what it sounds like.
Seven months later, buried under millions of pounds of water, they've heard nothing, seen no one, and haven't surfaced since July.
Their 'showers' are sporadic at first but become a steady occurrence over time. They agree that escaping their façades too often or too completely would jeopardize the mission. But when it starts to garner gossip from the henchmen, never to their faces, they use one more misconception to their advantage.
They share a few more glances. They stand a little closer. They pretend to be pretending.
The closest person Tigress has to a confidant, Deathstroke, tells her on patrol that Manta's boy is a minefield and leaves her to piece together exactly what that means and how much he actually knows.
They milk the suspicion, and it's one more smokescreen to the truth, another layer of armor. She can bear the chatter. Even after half a year, it's so much easier to pretend to be involved with the son of Black Manta than it is to pretend to be Tigress.
She and Kaldur take turns or shower back to back. He makes her recite back to him every element of her alias and she asks him how he's managed to be both Black Manta's son and Aqualad all this time.
"I am not Aqualad anymore," he says from behind the shower door as she towels off.
"You're Aqualad now," she points out stubbornly.
"No," he says. "Aqualad died when Tula did. He is here no longer."
"Bullshit," she says. "You dream about Atlantis."
There's a knock on the door of Kaldur's room asking for Tigress. She answers in Kaldur's high collar robe to hide the glamour charm. Black Manta asks them to be more discreet.
She stops thinking about Wally. When she thinks it can't hurt anymore, it does. So she does the unthinkable and cuts him out, stores him away in a little tin box in her mind. Valentine's comes and goes and this time it is she who forgets.
She stops looking in the mirror.
The time she used to spend wondering a million things about her friends, her family, Wally, she instead does what Kaldur did. She kills Artemis Crock. She reenacts her death at Kaldur's hands a thousand times in her mind from a thousand different angles until she has reasonably convinced herself it really happened. That a girl named Artemis Crock, daughter of Paula and Lawrence, sister of Jade, sister of M'gann, superhero, died at the hands of Black Manta's son in Cape Canaveral.
She was a chump, she thinks as Tigress from inside a steel box.
They stop talking about Conner and Dick and Zatanna in the shower and start talking about battle contingencies because once they get the word from the Reach that the plan has gone into full fruition, they have to plan the appropriate counterinsurgencies, and in the middle of her sentence about possibly reinforcing armor to withstand Blue Beetle's shock waves, Kaldur says, "I have noticed that you are doing much better, Artemis."
She's steady as she scrubs her elbow and asks, pleasantly, "Who?"
But that night she can't sleep. The ocean is too cold. The steel echoes the sound of her name on Kaldur's lips and suddenly the memory of sharing a bed with someone is ardent enough to convince her it happened yesterday and not nearly a year ago.
The little tin box in her mind threatens to explode and kill her with the shrapnel.
So she gets out of bed, dresses herself as Tigress, crossbows and swords to the hilt, walks outside into the perpetual hallway, and pads down to Kaldur's room.
He opens the door for her when she knocks and doesn't say anything as she stands in the corner and strips back down to her plain gray tank top and shorts and gets into the bed. Kaldur only takes the other side again and they lay there, isolated with a foot and a half of space between them, and Kaldur says, softly, "My apologies, Tigress."
She turns away from him and tucks her legs up. The tin box quivers but doesn't shake and she surprises herself by falling into a restful sleep.
In the morning she tells herself it's because the room was warmer and not because Kaldur was too.
A year passes. Artemis is still dead.
So is Tula.
They surface at last to speak to their alien comrades. Tigress goes to the hood of the ship as it floats, a black speck of island in the infinite ocean dropping off on all horizons. She feels something surge in her necklace. A message.
She ignores it.
Eventually, curiosity gets the better of her, and she forces herself to look at her reflection in the mirror to unclasp it. She struggles, though, and Kaldur unhinges it for her. They read the message together. The destruction of Earth is all but upon them. Soon, the time will come to declare their true colors. Dick leaves specific instructions.
And he says he remembers today is Tula's anniversary. He says he hopes to every god that ever was that they're both all right.
Kaldur and Artemis look at each other. It's the first contact that's gotten through to them in over a year.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
She knows she can't kill Tigress. Not yet.
She does, however, try to slowly peel back the tin box where Artemis resides. She could never do it like Kaldur does it: switch on, switch off. She has to do it little by little. And if she is to ever remember, she has to start pulling back the bandages now.
But things have gone stale. M'gann's voice in her mind is hazy, a ripple too far out from the source to make a difference. Conner's face looks just like Superman. Dick sounds just like Batman. And when she tries to remember the feel of Wally next to her in bed, all she feels is Kaldur's weight.
So she goes to him. Kaldur doesn't answer when she knocks on his door. It's a first. She opens it with his key code anyway and walks in.
He's sitting slumped at the end of his bed, hands folded, staring at the floor. He's still in armor, his mask tossed carelessly.
She locks the door and removes her weapons and her mask and sits beside him.
"I forgot," he says. "I forgot about today."
"Bullshit," she says, but there's nothing like strength in her voice.
"I miss her so much," he says. "I miss her so much."
"I know," she says.
And she kisses him.
Because Tula is dead and she is not. Because being Tigress is simpler than being Artemis. Because it's easier to stop pretending.
She tells herself that if it's the wrong thing, he won't kiss her back. If it's really wrong, he'll make her stop.
He doesn't.
They do the stupid thing.
And afterwards, in the dark warmth, it's Kaldur who tries not to cry as she whispers, "Kaldur'ahm. Kaldur'ahm. Kaldur'ahm."
She surprises herself.
When the time comes, when the double cross is seconds away and she realizes what it means, what it all means, Artemis closes her eyes and exhales Tigress in a breath.
Wally's a yellow blur on the battlefield and for a second she doesn't understand what it means. She doesn't remember what it means that he is so fast.
He whisks her away from her battle with Deathstroke and she's too mad to say anything snappy, but he hasn't said anything either. And before she remembers why it matters, why it's different, he comes to a skidding halt behind a fallen building. He puts her down against a wall, snaps her glamour charm clean off, and kisses her at the speed of sound.
She races to catch up with him, reflex reminding her of how to move, where to go, but her mind is still a hundred miles behind and a thousand miles below.
He's so fast, she thinks. Was he always this fast?
After, when the world is really saved and the endless ocean is really ended, they sit before the team aboard the Watchtower and explain everything.
Almost everything.
She and Kaldur agree some things are to remain buried at the bottom of the sea.
Dick talks mostly. Wally holds her hand. Kaldur breathes the air and becomes more and more of Aqualad with each inhalation. He doesn't look at anyone, least of all Artemis.
Artemis watches the stars.