Title: Birthday Wishes
Summary: Artemis Crock has a lot of wishes.
Pairings: Spitfire / Artemis-eccentric.
Rating: K+
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Young Justice whatsoever.
When she was eight years old, her mother went to jail for her a crime her father committed. On the day she turned nine; full of naivety and wistful thinking, she wished for her mother to come home and take her away from the nightmare of the world she was living in.
In the same year her mother went to jail, her sister ran away from home. She spent nearly a year hoping that her sister would come home one day and take her away from their abusive father; and on her tenth birthday, she wished that her hopes and prayers would come true.
She spent her next two birthdays hating her father and wishing for him to stop putting her through many rigorous training exercises.
On her thirteenth birthday, she witnessed her father kill a man on what should have been a training exercise. She then wished to never grow up to be like him.
On her fourteenth birthday, her father's emotional and verbal abusing has finally gotten to her. She wished for a way out.
On her fifteenth birthday, she wished for nothing but for her father to leave. Her mother was coming home soon and that was all that mattered.
Before her sixteenth birthday, numerous major events had happened. She met the team; all of them giving her the support and love that she had been deprived of for most of her life. They were her family; all of them were there for each other. And she met a guy who challenged her, agitated her, and oddly enough, cared about her. And for her sixteenth birthday, she wished nothing but the best for her friends for the years to come.
For her seventeenth birthday, she was in love. She didn't want to admit that she was in love, because that meant showing signs of weakness. But then she got her father's mentality out of her head and as she watched her boyfriend beg her to hurry up and blow out the candles before his metabolism kills him, she wished to be forever happy with him.
For her eighteenth birthday, she was surprised when he got her a dog for her birthday; especially when their apartment did not even allow dogs in the apartment building in the first place. As the dog gave her slobbery, wet kisses, she wished that he would always surprise her like this.
For her nineteenth birthday, she spent it trying to keep Wally from drenching the back of her blouse with his years. She wasn't on team Alpha. She wasn't the one who was sent to a fiery grave by the Joker. She had been with Zatanna the entire time on a surveillance mission. But he wouldn't hear of it. He begged her to quit the life with him, to settle down and be normal humans for once. They had already wasted their teenaged years; it wouldn't be fair to waste their young adulthood as well. And seeing the wistful look on his face, she wished that it would be easy to give up on the life she had grown to love.
On her twentieth birthday, she spent it wondering how to tell the love of her life that Dick had a plan that would force her out of an early retirement. And while she knew that it was her life and that she shouldn't let Wally control it for her; she knew that Wally had a right to at least know about said plan. And as much as she knew he would object to it, she wished that it wasn't going to be hard when she finally tells him about it.
For her twenty first birthday, she had only one thought on her mind. She wished for Wally to come back to her.
-fin-