Wally is banned from buying groceries. Indefinitely, or at least until he figures out a way of making enough variations of bacon sandwiches to satisfy both Artemis and himself.

It's not like Artemis isn't used to coming home from school to find Wally (sometimes sans pants, like today) already there, but finding both of their Adidas duffel bags crammed to bursting with what looks like half the local supermarket does seem a little excessive. He's in the process of keeping Brucely away from a brown paper package wrapped in string when Artemis hangs up the keys to her Prius and observes the mess strewn across the table.

"Uh, babe?" she asks, and Wally sets the package down on the counter momentarily to press a kiss to her cheek. He smells like brown sugar and semisweet chocolate, a departure from the usual magical woodsy cologne Zatanna had given him as a gift for his eighteenth birthday. Never runs out, she had promised, and it'll always keep you smelling fresh. "What's all this for?" Artemis gestures to the heaping bags that threaten to break the table. "Are we having guests? Like, your entire extended family and everyone that's ever been in Mount Justice?"

"Hey, remember when you bought an entire fridge's worth of food, too? Oh, and my day was great, I missed you too, babe."

"That was for Valentine's day. What's special enough about a Wednesday that asks you to buy all of Walmart? Also, I saw you two hours ago." Wally's mock offense is not enough to stop her from grinning and kissing him back, though.

Wally opens his mouth to reply, then shuts it, flushing slightly at Artemis' smirk. "I wanted cookies?" he offers. Artemis picks up three bags each of brown and white sugar, as well as five pounds of sugar and a case of butter, and looks at Wally skeptically. "C'mon, babe, it's just for a snack."

"More like breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of the week," she teases.

"Well, at least it's not like the time we filled the freezer with ice cream last year."

Artemis's stomach churns at the memory. For context, she had come home before Wally one day and opened the freezer to start dinner, only to be greeted by a shelf full of Ben and Jerry's 'Blondie Ambition'. The carton closest to her, coated in ice crystals, advertised 'buttery brown sugar ice cream with blonde brownies and butterscotch toffee flakes'. A pale yellow post it note, obviously left by Wally, had been stuck to the lid.

To my favorite ambitious blonde,

You can butter me up ANYTIME you want, sugar.

Love,

Wally

In retaliation, Artemis had replaced every carton with one of 'Chubby Hubby' (with a less lewd but equally endearing 'the flavor says it all' xoxo Artemis), which had led to Wally trying to 'prove' his muscle tone to Artemis.

(Not that she particularly minded. Maybe she should buy this flavor of ice cream more often.)

"You know, if I remember correctly, you didn't refuse my offer the first time," Wally says with his trademark wink. "And you certainly didn't look like you were trying to stop me from taking my shirt off the second time."

"I still think you put on a few pounds," Artemis teases. "Not even Kid Flash himself is immune to the freshman fifteen."

"We were sophomores, Artemis!"

"Fine—sophomore seventeen." Wally puts a hand over his purportedly rock solid pecs, feigning offense, before his features rearrange themselves into a smirk. There are a lot of ways he knows to show Artemis the 'sophomore seventeen' is a myth inapplicable to the amazing Kid Flash, the Wall-man himself.

"I have homework to do, Wally," Artemis says firmly, knowing exactly what each of Wally's endless variations of smirk mean.

"Well," he says, obviously disappointed and ready to try an alternative, "wanna make chocolate chip cookies?" As far as alternative things to do with Artemis go, baking chocolate chip cookies is pretty high up on the list. Not that he has a list of enjoyable activities to do with Artemis, and certainly not a subcategory of this hypothetical list detailing things to do alone. And it's certainly not like he's told one or two or ten or thirty-two of the list's items to Dick, and it's not like Dick laughed at him and almost told Zatanna, who would have totally told Artemis and caused a complete disaster.

Sure is a good thing that none of this actually happened.

"Homework," she says, trying in vain not to laugh. "We're Stanford students, Wally."

He pouts, and Artemis braces herself for the stuck out lip and the pitifully folded arms. Artemis thinks she might have regressed from her teenage days—sixteen-year-old her would have walloped KF upside the head and told him to bake cookies by himself, knowing full well he would probably just add a handful of chips to M'gann's preexisting dough and proudly announce himself a fully fledged sous chef. Seven years from that event finds her in the kitchen of the house they own together, rolling up the sleeves of his XL red flannel and tucking in the extra yard or so of fabric into her shorts. If M'gann could see her now…

"The first batch?" he pleads with her.

"You're just trying to get out of writing both of your Lit papers," Artemis deduces, and she is rewarded with a bright white grin and a wink for her sleuthing. Okay. It's one batch of cookies. So she clears a space on the table and jumps up on it, not bothering to pull the raw edges of her denim shorts down even though they ride up a little uncomfortably. It's worth it—within moments, Wally's freckles disappear under a hot red blush. Let it be known that the amazing Kid Flash can be brought to his knees by nothing but a girl and a pair of Daisy Dukes. "One batch," she says firmly, jabbing one neatly manicured nail at him for emphasis. Wally pumps his fist in excitement.

"Okay," he says, his voice speeding up in a manner not unlike his Uncle Barry's or cousin Bart's, "butter, and sugar and vanilla—nothing bad ever comes from butter and sugar, except maybe diabetes, but hey, Dick's not here to tell me that and neither are M'gann and Kaldur—eggs and flour and salt…" He disappears to a red blur as he rushes around gathering ingredients, and sets them down on the counter. Miraculously, he hasn't tripped over Brucely once; the pitbull is lying curled up at the leg of the table, snoring serenely. "Did I miss anything?"

"Baking soda," Artemis reminds him, tearing into the bag of chocolate chips and popping a handful in her mouth. Her bare legs make the softest of swishing noises as she swings them back and forth, waiting for Wally to retrieve said baking soda.

"Hey!" he protests, upon catching sight of Artemis flicking chocolate chips into the air to catch with her mouth. She catches every piece just in between her teeth every time, without ever breaking the actual chocolate.

"It's a ten pound bag," she says, eyes twinkling. "More than enough to share." Another chip flies up, but Wally intercepts it in midair and ends up nose to nose with a slightly disgruntled Artemis.

"You challenging me, Kid?" She can feel him exhale ever so slightly on her upper lip, and their foreheads press together so Artemis can count the splash of freckles across his nose and cheekbones. (They've perfected the angle. It took a few tries, to say the least, most attempts initiated by Wally, but a surprising amount by Artemis).

"Not yet," Wally says, the mischievous crinkles at the corners of his eyes making a reappearance as he grins. His breathing gets warmer as he leans in, and aw shit, I'm never going to get anything done now. The corners of Artemis' lips twitch upward.

"Pass the sugar, would you babe?" he says, suddenly leaning back. Artemis hurls the bag of brown sugar at his chest—playfully though, so it's not like it hurts, but he will definitely tell Artemis it does, because he's Wally West, drama queen extraordinaire.

"Ow," he whines. Called it. Artemis has to bite back a snarky comment; she knows what Wally's answer would be to the rhetorical question of "aww, want me to kiss it better?".

"Whoops," she says innocently, popping another chocolate chip in her mouth. The mixer whirs away in the background behind Wally, and the scent of vanilla beans and bourbon disperses throughout the house. She slides off the table to wrap her arms around his neck and press a kiss to the spot just below where his jaw meets his neck. Short enough to still be considered chaste, but lingering long enough for his heartbeat to pulse against her lips, hot and fast.

"Oh, sure," he says, upping the mixer speed. "Accident."

"Aim's a little off today," she says sweetly.

He laughs—a real one full of mirth, the kind that causes him to double over and wrap his arms around his midsection. "Artemis, I watched you shoot at a target upside down while moving at almost the speed of sound."

"Hey," she says, planting another kiss a little further down his neck, "everyone's got their bad days. Are you done?" She eyes the bowl of ingredients, where Wally is currently beating in the second egg with no mercy. The instructions said to beat in the eggs one at a time, completely, not to stir as if the eggs had done you a personal wrong in life.

"Not yet," he says, measuring out two cups of flour and leveling them off with the side of a butter knife. He kisses his bicep loudly and pats it lovingly. "Don't let me down, beautiful."

Artemis has never rolled her eyes harder.

While Wally occupies himself with stirring together the flour and butter, she dumps a generous two cups of chocolate chips into a bowl, and continues catching chips in her mouth. The chocolate leaves a warm taste on her tongue, sweet and rich.

"You could use more," Artemis says thoughtfully, estimating the ratio of chips to dough to be roughly 2 to 5. Wally's hand edges up the side of her thigh, fingers curling under the edge of her shorts. She inhales sharply, swallowing a gasp while her heart beats like rabbit on a sugar high. Shit.

"More what, babe?" His usually easygoing smile curves up on one side into a lopsided smirk, and he pops his lips for emphasis.

"Chocolate."

Wally quirks an eyebrow. "Well, that's new. It's hard to get out of the sheets, though. Still, I'm down." He bites his lip ever so slightly on 'down', and if Artemis hasn't been wanting to punch him in his stupid, beautiful mouth for the past fifteen minutes, she does now. "It's a good thing we have stain remover."

"Wally!" Her lips are pressed tightly together in the way they always do when she's trying not to laugh, the way that makes her eyes crinkle up and reveals the slight dimple in her left cheek.

"Oh," he says, dragging it out to three syllables, "not what you meant."

"How would you know, anyways?"

"I spilled hot cocoa on my favorite blanket when I was nine," he says informatively. "What else would I be doing with melted chocolate in a bed, Artemis?" He wiggles his eyebrows at her, feigning a completely transparent look of innocence.

"Just hurry up and make your stupid cookies so I—we can do your physics homework."

"I'd rather be doing a lot of other things," Wally mumbles. "Ow!"

Unsurprisingly, a bag of chocolate chips is a very effective tool to knock some sense into your boyfriend and his plethora of poorly timed innuendo. Very effective.

"O-kay," he says indignantly, after mixing in the last colossal 'handful' of chocolate chips courteously provided by his girlfriend, "better now?"

Artemis sticks one finger in her mouth and ponders. "Better," she says decisively. A smear of sugar runs across her upper lip, and Wally fights the urge to pick her up and spin her around and—

Yeah.

"You've—" he gestures with his thumb, "you've got a bit. Right there. No, right there."

"Here?"

"No, where I'm pointing to." She's gotten like, half of it off, but he neglects to mention this to her, justifying it with the fact that she looks so cute trying to wipe her face and failing. And when she laughs, turns her face so the soft gold of her hair is backlit by the warm afternoon light, it leaves him just as breathless as the first time he thinks he fell in love with her.

"Here," he says, in the most suave George Michael voice he can muster. "Allow me to assist." His hand presses gently against the slope of her neck, and her arms automatically come up to pull him closer to the counter she's sitting on. She tastes like sugar and chocolate laced with the dizzyingly sweet bourbon from the vanilla.

"To quote the kid himself," Artemis murmurs huskily, between moving her lips along the plane of his jaw and letting his roam over the softest parts of her neck by her collarbone, "you're a dog."

He laughs, the sound vibrating over her skin. "Are you complaining? You get to experience the original, for yourself," he teases. She lets out a sharp sound as the cool of his fingers meets the burning skin at her waist.

"Enough," she laughs, pushing him away and crossing her legs again. Her strong, ridiculously long legs, Wally notes. "Did you get it off?" She draws a circle around her mouth with her finger, indicating the cookie dough.

He winks. "I'm about to."

"Wally!" It's a good thing he's stepped out of her reach—he would have been feeling the effects of her hand for the rest of the week, and not in a fun way. She pulls him back in by the collar of his shirt for another kiss, anyway.

"You've got some too," she whispers, pulling her index finger away from the corner of his upper lip. Even though she's his girlfriend, whom he's been living with for years, for God's sake, he does avert his eyes, but not before he catches her lick the tip of her finger.

"Really?"

"Yeah," she murmurs, pressing a kiss right by his earlobe.

"Guess I'll be too busy cleaning up to do my physics homework, babe," he sighs in faux wistfulness. The third button on his shirt has somehow, miraculously come undone, not by his doing and most certainly not by Artemis's. "And I guess you'll be too busy helping me clean up to do it for me."

Artemis grins in spite of herself. She can spare an hour.

"Guess so," she whispers into his neck.

leave a review if you want wally to come back in s3 *wink*