a request from anonymous on tumblr.
prompt: "I thought you were dead"
"I thought you were dead." She's crying, but for once, for this one time out of a lifetime of choked back weeping and bitter sobs, she is okay with it. "Oh, God, Wally… I thought you were dead."
Wally smiles kindly. He tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. "Of course I'm dead, Artemis. Don't be silly."
He disappears and she wakes up with a sharp breath. Everything smells like dust.
"I thought you were dead," whispers Artemis to Wally. The golden colors of the little apartment in Palo Alto start to melt together, and in a haze all she sees is him, one hand on the chipped door frame, the other shoved in his pocket, smirking at her like he has the most wonderful fascinating story to tell her. Artemis smiles back.
"Artemis." She blinks. Next to her, Zatanna is crouched on the floor, digging through a box labeledWinter Wear. She's just pulled out a sweater Wally's mother had made him and Artemis had teased him for wearing because he was so a Weasley, but secretly she'd swallowed back heartbeats at the sight of the nineteen year old frowning over the taxes in a homemade sweater. "You're… Wally's dead, Artemis." She says it carefully. She's waiting for the explosion, the crumbling. "You know that, right?"
The door frame is empty again. She kneels next to Zatanna and takes the sweater gently from her hands, pulling it onto her lap. "I know." She doesn't.
"I thought you were dead," her mother had choked out in between sobs when Artemis had come back. She'd sat on her mother's lap, like she was six again, before her mother had left and her father had stayed and everything had gone wrong, and let her mother clutch at her shoulders and wail into her hair. "My daughter… my beautiful daughter… it's a miracle. You're alive. I thought you were dead."
In the days to come, she would daydream about a similar scenario, except it was Wally returning miraculously from the grave to her trembling, shaking hands.
(But, of course, she knows that no one gets two miracles).
"I thought you were dead." She's bleeding onto gravel and her arm is bent in a rather peculiar fashion and her head hurts and yet she is content. She reaches a hand up to touch the cheekbone of the boy hovering frantically over her. The yellow and red suit is slightly more red today, smeared with her own blood. Behind the goggles she can see worried green eyes. She smiles. "Wally…"
"We need an evac stat," he shouts, to someone she can't see. Turning back to her, he grabs her face, somewhat forcefully, and turns her head to look at him. "Stay with me, okay?"
She laughs breathlessly. He's starting to spin around above her, and everything looks blurry. "That's… that's rich," she says with effort. "You didn't stay with me. It's okay. I forgive you. You're back."
For a long time, it's quiet. Artemis thinks he might be crying. "Okay," he says eventually. "I'm back. You're going to be okay."
They don't tell her what she said as she lay on the battlefield with a concussion and a broken arm and a long, jagged cut on her leg, all results of being thrown into the cliff face by Savage. She doesn't know why Bart looks slightly to the right of her when he talks to her, or why Batgirl gently asks her if she wants to sit out on the next mission, or why everyone looks at her with such horrible pity. When she finds out, she nods dully and kicks the floor and wonders why she can't just give up already.
"I thought he was dead," says Artemis stiffly when Dick tells her the plan. His face is shining, but he also looks unhealthy. It's three am and his cheeks are red and his eyes are too bright and he's waving his arms in the air, pacing back in forth across her bedroom.
"I did too," he says. His words rush together. "But Dr Strange and I have been looking at the data, and this is evidence, there is, Artemis, don't laugh -"
"I wasn't."
"- to suggest that some sort of - well, temporal anomaly has occured." He finishes, breathing heavily, looking at her expectantly. "Well?"
Artemis shifts uncomfortably. "I… Wally, we saw him… die. He ceased, remember? The chrysalis energy destroyed his molecules."
"Not destroyed! Matter can't be destroyed, remember? They transported his molecules! Instead of killing him, the added energy made him so fast that he time traveled. Don't you see? We can get him back!"
Dick is smiling at her wildly. His clothes are rumpled, his shirt inside out, and he looks frightfully thin. He's swaying on the spot. Artemis suddenly hates him with a blazing, burning passion, for breaking into her room in the middle of the night just to force her to actually hope, to imagine flipping a switch on some nameless machine to drag Wally back from the grave, so that only after few weeks or months when the high finally subsides will she realise how much of an idiot she's been, and how useless it all is. She gets up and storms to the closet. "Why are you telling me this? Can you even hear how insane this, how absolutely nuts you sound?" She yanks out a jacket, shoving her arms in the sleeves and glaring at him. "I don't care, Dick. God, I've done this so many times. I've thought of so many theories, I've figured it all out and felt like a goddamn genius hundreds of times. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change the fact that he's dead and we're still grasping at any possible loose end because we can't get over the fact that without him -" She stops, squeezing her eyes shut and swallowing back a sob with a gasp. She starts to leave, stopping at the door frame to touch the peeling paint.
"Artemis," says Dick softly. "I'm not being crazy. Dr Strange has done the math. If we can build a time machine, we can travel to where Wally was sent and bring him home. Bart said he'd help us build one. It's all ready to go. I just need you to say okay."
She doesn't turn around. "Me?" she asks. Her voice is hoarse.
"If anyone… this affects all of us, but I think it affects you the most. I know it does. I just wanted to make sure you were okay with it."
Artemis swallows. She knows Dick is as desperate as she is and twice as good at pretending to know what the hell he's talking about. Nothing is going to change. "Okay."
"I thought you were dead."
Wally, coughing and shaking on the linoleum, supporting himself with his forearms, manages a short, garbled bark of laughter. "So did I." He glances up at her. He's bleeding heavily from his forehead, blood matting in his hair and covering his eye, but the other is just the same green it was the day they went to Paris. "I'm glad I'm not. Goddamnit, I'm so glad I'm not."
When she touches his face, she doesn't wake up and he doesn't vanish, and the whole world is the best it ever will be.