Pairing: Spitfire (Wally/Artemis)
Disclaimer: If I owned Young Justice, I'd be Batman.
Lessons In Love
She catches you off-guard when she whispers in your ear that day. It's a cool and crisp Autumn day in October, one of your favourite months. You've managed to remove your shirt and are clad in only a pair of faded, dark jeans, ripped at the knees from the countless times you've used them while harnessing your speed and, in the process, tripping onto numerous pavements. Practice makes perfect, you've always believed, and these jeans have seen the more painful side of that saying.
You like these jeans and you like that they get to experience these moments with you. Maybe it's stupid to think of what you're wearing right now but you're a sentimental guy and there's nothing more a girl likes more than a sentimental guy. Besides, you don't see any of the other guys on the team currently locked in their room making out with a smoking hot and simply incredible archer of a girlfriend.
Actually, she was the first one to take her shirt off. You plan to never tell her but you've always thought that she was the hornier one in the relationship. The "evil" ones always are.
She does that thing where she scratches the base of your skull ever so lightly, right where the nerves are all bunched up, and you're granted all sorts of shivers up your spine. It doesn't help that her lips are all over your left earlobe and that the nails of her toes are tickling your calves through your jeans and oh, right, the rain today. You love rain.
You both love rain.
The rain doesn't kill the mood at all. In fact, it gives you both more rhythm and the sense that it's all real. The pitter-patter, the drip-drop, the occasional thunder. These are all forces of nature that somehow find a way to soothe your senses and remind you that this is all real.
It's one of those rare Sunday afternoons when the rest of the team gets to laze about and do nothing. Perhaps the rain is your saviour today. There's a muggy feeling in the air outside Mount Justice that just weighs down on any villain, common thug and brilliant mastermind alike. No one wants to leave the indoors. It's just too comfortable inside to step outside.
It's definitely getting far too comfortable in your bed.
"Wally…" she whispers.
You continue your ministrations and swallow your heart, which managed to jump into your throat at the sound of your name off of her lips.
To be honest, you're not sure what to make of these … emotions. You're not sure what to make of the butterflies that invade your gut or of the dryness that rakes your throat. You're not sure what to make of the fact that your stomach drops whenever you put your hands on her and she no longer reacts in disgust. Instead, she pulls you close 'til you're held flush against each other. It was never like that before. And you find that you like it.
You're slowly coming to realise that you can no longer imagine a life without her by your side.
It's that reason that you whisper, "Not yet, babe. Not yet," and pull her hands away from the waistband of your jeans, re-buckling the silver metal of your belt buckle and dragging your lips away from her neck. She shudders pleasantly and you smirk into her collar bone before pulling away completely. Perhaps not even a year ago, you didn't even imagine the possibility that you could feel so puissant and in control. You have such an effect on this girl, this wonderful, beautiful girl, and it gives you a sense of purpose and importance and, yeah, okay, it also gives you a surge of confidence every now and then.
She moans softly in disappointment and whacks you on your shoulder lightly before dropping her head back onto your pillow. You chuckle and shake your head at her impatience. She shuts her eyes in contentment when you tenderly tuck her hair back behind her ears and leave your fingers at her temple.
She opens her smoky eyes suddenly and slowly locks her gaze into yours. Her normally shifty and steely eyes have a soft look upon them. What exactly is she thinking?
"I love you," Artemis whispers.
Oh.
…oh.
Consciously, you feel your eyes widen by about a millimetre – a micrometer – barely even that. You blink to keep your eyes from revealing any more of your surprise. You open your mouth to do something, anything. You want to press pause so you can sit up and hold her hand tightly and think about this for a while. You are a scientist and this is not one of the outcomes you expected from today's scheduled make-out session.
You stammer and utter something incoherent like, "Bah - do - guh -" and surprisingly, she laughs. It's one of her real laughs, one she uses for when you tell a joke that's actually intelligent and not perverse, or when one of the guys make you look bad in front of her and she laughs to remind you that you're still hers no matter how lame you are. No matter how awkward and idiotic and lame you are, she'll still have you.
And now, apparently she loves you.
This is the first time she's ever said those three words. What do you say to that? Do you even love this girl?
Well? Do you?
You don't have time to think about it because she tugs you close and kisses you delicately. It's a kiss so light, you're not sure if you even felt it in the first place before she pulls away.
"It's alright, Wallman. Take your time," she pecks your cheek, "I can wait," and squirms out from under you to retrieve her sweater from the floor.
Never let it be said that there didn't exist a girl who was the one that constantly had to wait around for a Speedster and not vice versa.
She is that one girl and she is the only girl for whom you have to sprint in order to keep up.
She tells you that she's going to make you both hot drinks (coffee for her, hot chocolate for you) and you nod at her, unaware of the guilty look in your eyes. You also don't notice that she throws you a loving look that kind of says, "Oh, Baywatch," before leaving the room.
I love you is complicated but don't get yourself wrong, of course you've thought about it. You've thought about it since New Years last year when you first picked her up and started this whole whirlwind of new experiences that has permanently installed this archer into your life. But I love you is something else. You don't know what I love you is.
You don't know what an I love you is going to taste like the first time it'll roll off your tongue.
You think back to all of the I love you's you've ever known and received. A lot from your mother, a rare one from your father (like when all the parents in the world returned from being displaced into a different dimension), a bunch from Aunt Iris, bless her soul, and maybe one or two from Uncle Barry. You swear Dick muttered it once while in a comatose and drugged state after a recent, fairly rough mission. But that doesn't count. God, hopefully that doesn't count.
Is love as permanent and special as what Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry have? Is it the protectiveness and solace you find with your parents? Is it what Black Canary and Green Arrow have and hold, no matter how weird is it sometimes to be around them? Can what M'gann and Conner have for each other be called love? It just seems like something so strong; like if your significant other is in any sense distressed or upset, that magnifies into you by tenfold.
You've seen movies, you've read articles, and you've done your research on the psychic and emotional impacts of love and relationships (it was for a psychology paper). Everything you've discovered has shown that love is ridiculous and way too complex to be something that can be thrown into the air so haphazardly and nonchalantly. But she just did it, so why can't you?
You groan and run your hands over your face and roll onto your stomach, momentarily suffocating yourself via your pillow. When you've had enough and need to suck down a gulp of air to clear your mind, you roll onto your back with your hands locked behind your head.
What if you looked at things differently? Maybe if you see things at less of an analytical view and focused on the big picture, you might figure out just what the hell love could mean.
Perhaps it's the idea that after every mission, if it's late enough, she's guaranteed to be curled into your chest, tucked under your arm before the coming tomorrow. Maybe it's her biting her lip at the kitchen counter while struggling over a chemistry lab report and always, always ending up throwing her hands up in despair before yelling at you to "get your ass over here and help her out." Or it's when she steals your glass of iced coke for a few seconds and drinks a quarter of it but you don't really mind because kissing her afterwards is more refreshing than any soda you've ever drank. It might even be the fact that she is the reason behind why, these days, you're reluctant to undertake any of the missions Batman deploys because now, you never know if it'll be her last one. It could be that. It could be all of that. Love may just be all of these things wrapped into one fiery and stubborn blonde archer.
Maybe love is simpler than you think.
When she walks back into the room with two steaming cups of coffee and hot chocolate, you stop thinking just for today, and pretend that the L-word doesn't bother you for the next few days.
(It helps that she sleeps with you in your room every single night.)
It's only a few days later during an assignment against Sportsmaster that a bit of sense is literally knocked into you.
Everyone is taking a bit of a beating and Sportsmaster is almost two steps ahead of the team. You can't let it come to that. At the corner of your eye, you know that Artemis is holding her own but Zatanna is down, M'gann is KO'd, Dick is struggling, Conner is nowhere to be found and Kal'dur is being ambushed by arrows, bullets, and fists that are coming from all directions. The Shadows' transport and delivery (it's more alien tech because the damn bad guys just can't seem to get over alien tech) are up in flames and bursts of electrical sparks shed the occasional flash of light on the dark field where the fight is happening. Everything now depends on which side gets hurt the most.
Training has done you some good because, whack, that's the nineteenth thug you've knocked out in two minutes and thirty-four seconds (Black Canary would be so proud) but that's not to say that you have your work cut out for you. There are a lot of thugs left and that's not even counting the handful of assassins that Sportsmaster thought to bring along with him. Someone shoots an arrow towards your shoulder so you twist as you run, turning a full 360° and dodging the projectile completely but at the hindrance, someone swipes a spear straight at your feet and trips you. You're falling face first – right into someone's fist.
"Ugh!"
Before you know what's happening, though you're struggling, they are holding you against the ground and someone kicks the bruise on your rib that just healed and the pain is excruciating.
But then you hear her gasp in pain (how you manage to hear her hushed intake of air among all the commotion and explosions, you'll never know) and even though this really ugly guy with muddy brown hair and a disproportional face keeps punching you and your head keeps snapping to look the other way, you force yourself to find her.
She was fighting Sportsmaster, among all the individuals she could have picked, and it seems that he was able to sink a nice, deep slash at her midsection with his javelin. There's blood. A lot of it.
"Artemis!"
Ugly and the rest of the guys who were previously smothering you are suddenly gone and whining in pain. Later you will realise that you were the one who kicked, scratched, bit and did everything you could to remove yourself from their clutches in literally a blink of an eye.
Red. All you see is red and a flash of blonde, but your vision has taken on a hue of deep, dark crimson. And then, the next ten seconds are a bit of a blur.
Granted, this is the first time anyone can straight out admit that they were there to witness Kid Flash singlehandedly take out a villain of Sportsmaster's training and calibre in under fifteen seconds.
Later, Conner will give you a surprised look that he'll quickly mask with a "good job" muttered under his breath. Both M'gann and Zatanna will look at you worriedly and try not to betray the veil of fear in their eyes. Kal'dur will put his hand on your shoulder and you'll know that he means to commend you for the unexpected feat. Dick will be the one to tell you the truth. That truth that for the first time in maybe ever, people were afraid of Kid Flash. Of you. Later, you'll bounce the thought around in your head and wonder if you should be afraid of yourself, too.
But, like now, when you see that her face, so scratched and bruised (but still a face so captivating, even after taking a load of hits), is contorted in agony, you don't really think straight. You focus on her and only her. You feel like a rugged soldier or a man on a mission as you pick her up and cradle her to your chest. You run her to the bioship because you subconsciously know that the rest of the team will be able to take down the rest of the Shadows's criminals in minutes so you start patching her up. Kal'dur soon walks into the med bay to finish the job because you're shaking too much and she's already passed out. Fifteen minutes later, the team's leader walks out of the room to give you a bit of privacy. He sends you a curious glance that you ignore. She's awake, anyway, and looking for an explanation.
It's then that you tell her you love her.
You love her, you do, and you're sorry for everything and you didn't mean to make her wait so long. You vomit all of the words out, one after the other, and all of your confessions are coming out in a rush. You swear that you've never felt more emotionally frustrated than in this moment.
But you love her and you don't understand why it wasn't this clear before.
Love is simple.
Love is everything about her that angers you and flusters you. It's everything that you can't keep your hands off of and everything you can look at and admire all day. It's when she sits next to you at team dinners and her leg presses against yours. It's Friday movie nights at her apartment in Gotham where the two of you never watch a single movie and always end up hot and breathless in her room. It's that one time she dared to cry in front of you and you did the right thing and held her tight and whispered promises and comfort into her ear. And yeah, it's when the freaking sun does that thing where it sheds rays of light along her hair and if you angle things just right, she kind of looks like an angel.
Love was never a cliché or a paradox, a question or a problem you thought you could never answer; it was right in front of you all along.
You can't live without this girl. It took her father, a trained serial killer, and a couple of his certainly lethal assassins to get that into your head. Figures.
You sit yourself down on her cot in the med bay and gather her in your arms. You pour your heart out to her, not caring that she will so hold all of this against you as blackmail later (besides, you know she secretly loves it when you're all sappy and romantic).
When tomorrow comes and you wake up with her hand clasped in yours, her smirking down at you maliciously from her bed in the Cave's medical facilities, you'll drop a kiss onto her palm to take her by surprise and you'll greet her a good morning but immediately afterwards, you'll tell her the three words that end up tasting just right after all.
"I love you."
A/N: I'm a sucker for fluff, apocalypses, and action. Two of which were obviously in this oneshot. One that obviously wasn't. Hope you guys liked this (heh?) and if you can, leave a review. Besides, the new Review button is too lovely not to click!