This is actually relatively old, but I realized that I never posted it to FFNet. Might as well, right? People have been sending me the occasional PM on here asking for more Wally/Artemis, so... this may be cheating, but at least it's something. I miss these idiots.
Part 4 is the place where the M rating comes in, so, uh. Stay alert?
01.
It's nine days and sixteen hours before they talk about the kiss. Not that Wally, y'know, counted, or anything. It's an approximation. Who needs specific and accurate data, anyway?
"Hey, so, uh," is what Artemis opens with on a dreary January morning, and that's about as far as she gets before Wally, startled, chokes on his popcorn and almost falls off the couch.
"Sec," he wheezes out, doubled over and coughing. Artemis's whole posture is rigid, and one hand is hovering in the air, obviously torn between trying to help him and leaving his dignity intact.
When he recovers, hacking up a kernel onto the floor, he lets out one more heaving breath before darting back into as laid-back and cool-headed a position as possible; that is, upside-down with the popcorn bowl balanced on his stomach, tossing buttery pieces into his mouth with ease.
"You required an audience with the Wall-man, babe?" he prompts her with a waggle of his eyebrows, even though his voice is still comically hoarse. He clears his throat and the effort of holding in another coughing fit makes his eyes water.
"Uh," Artemis replies pointedly, in that way that only she really can – seriously, the girl's "uh"s are a sentence all their own. "No. I required an audience with Wally."
That almost makes him start sputtering all over again, but he expertly maintains his composure, jiggling one foot ambivalently and flicking another piece of popcorn onto his tongue.
"That implies there's a difference," he retorts, but, after a moment's silence, and after he dares to glance over to see her, inverted, scowling down at him with folded arms, he appends, "Whiiich there is. Okay. Wall-man on pause. What's up?"
To punctuate the change, he rights himself, his legs dangling askew over the right arm of the couch, the bowl now cradled against his arm. He blinks at her, perplexed. Her cheeks are noticeably flushed, and she's hunched over with her arms even more tightly crossed, biting her lip. Lip. Artemis. Lips. Incidentally, based on acquired data, they're very soft and they taste nice and she has a warm little tongue that darts out from between them and slides across his teeth. Crap. What were they talking about?
"I dunno, I just figured we should—" She gives a stilted shrug without unraveling her arms. "Talk."
"Talk?" he repeats dumbly.
"Talk," she confirms.
She takes a seat in the armchair opposite him, lifting her bare feet up to rest on the seat so that her knees half-obscure her face, bumping rhythmically together. Wally marvels at her, at how unabashedly blatant her self-consciousness is, at how it fills the entire yawning room. He taps his foot to a silent beat and stuffs a mouthful of popcorn in, chewing it loudly.
"So talk," he mumbles through his bulging cheeks. "What's the problem?"
"Obviously," she snaps back, "It's the fact that I think you look really cute right now."
Wally would like at least a pat on the back for not spitting out all of the popcorn.
"Mm," he grunts back, understandingly, with three too many quick nods and a smile halfway between gleeful and gobsmacked.
Artemis covers her face with her hands. "That was, without a doubt, the grossest thing I've ever said."
"I dunno, I kinda liked it." Wally tries to sound smooth and witty, but his voice cracks twice. "Y'know, I thought it was very – ar…ticulate?"
"Shut up," Artemis says frankly, dropping her head back against the back of the chair.
Wally rolls his eyes and reaches for more fortification, pawing around for a good few seconds before he realizes that he's eaten all of it.
"Do you like me?" Artemis explodes after a taut pause, so fiercely and sharply that Wally actually jumps.
"Huh?" he splutters, eyes bulging.
"Do you," Artemis repeats in a growl, clearly wrestling out every syllable, but her gaze is still riveted onto the ceiling, "Like me."
"In… what sense, exactly?" Wally asks, tugging nervously at his collar. He chuckles for a little too long, his eyes darting hither and yon (neither of which is anywhere near Artemis's face).
Artemis chews her lip again, her eyebrows prodding against each other and making her entire expression look pretty adorably lost. She curls her bitten nails against the fabric of the chair before shoving her hands under her butt, shifting, reevaluating.
"I'm not asking if you'd, like, take a bullet for me, or anything," she babbles. "I'm just asking if you – you know. If you like me."
"Well, I mean, it's kind of a vague question—"
"It so isn't," she interjects, finally looking him dead in the eye, socking him invisibly in the gut. "Just level with me. You don't have to commit to anything; I just – I just wanna know."
Wally flounders at her for a moment, his hand instinctively straying back to forage through the empty bowl. Artemis wrinkles her nose just barely, like he's lost his mind and she's stuck having to watch it scurry away, and that only makes his heart feel smaller and smaller with each passing second.
"I—" His watch clangs against the metal of the bowl. "Uh, I just, um – y'see, it's…" His voice runs away from him, then, forming around three unexpected words that had, just a second ago, been drowned out by the frantic chaos of excuses and lies rattling around his brain. "Yeah, I do."
Artemis blinks at him several times, and if he didn't know any better, he'd think he actually saw her eyesglisten, but then she folds her lips in to try to hide a smile. It doesn't work, and she hums out a couple of unbridled claps of laughter that are muffled into giggles by the tightness of her mouth, and then she just gives up, her cheeks splitting around a grin, punctuated by another exhilarated laugh. Her cheeks are still pink, and Wally softens just looking at her like this – like he's just given her the best news she could possibly hear.
"Really?" she prompts, sounding giddy and shy and all kinds of other things that make his heart trip down his ribs, one by one.
He bobs his head. "Uh-huh." Like an idiot, he appends, "Lots."
Just like that, her unfettered and childish beaming slips into an ease-carved smirk, and she raises an eyebrow, finally lowering her knees, though she's still sitting on her hands.
"Never pegged you for a sap," she says cockily, tilting her chin. "No, wait; I totally did."
"Har har."
"So, I mean…" She shifts just slightly, and the silver of her necklace glints in the fluorescent light. "You're a plan-ahead guy. How do you propose we proceed?"
Wally makes a big deal out of looking like he's mulling it over deeply, stroking his chin and squinting at the ceiling and humming pensively. Artemis snorts.
"Well," he replies sagely, "We could start with kissing again."
"That sounds good," Artemis agrees with a crisp nod. "But you're coming over here."
Wally groans, already halfway off of the couch, the bowl on its side, forgotten, behind him. As he approaches Artemis in her chair, she bites back a coy smile and glances aside with uncharacteristic diffidence. Wally kneels down at the foot of the chair and stretches up, his hands bracing themselves at her wrists, and she watches him with held breath and hooded eyes.
He leans up and carefully, curiously – much more painstakingly and gently than he had in the Watchtower nine days and sixteen hours ago, then so muddled by the adrenaline of his own brush with galactic death that he had bumped teeth with her – grazes her lips with his, his fingers squeezing down on her pulse. She is not as patient, reciprocating with ferocity and certainty, her head craning down to deepen the contact until she manages to open his lips with her tongue, and before Wally knows it, his fingers are tangled in her hair she's laughing against his nose, the tinkling sounds scurrying all the way down his throat and straight into his heart (where they've maybe been hanging around for longer than he thought).
(Artemis loses her breath when Wally's hands, buttery from the popcorn, trace the bump of her wristbone. He tastes like salt and burned popcorn and it's making bubbles swell up under her tongue. She can't stop laughing.)
02.
He can already feel the bruise forming on his forehead from where the corner of her hardcover Tender is the Night copy had cracked, flung vengefully, into it.
"Was that really necessary?!" he shouts, his hand clutching the sore spot, his teeth gritted. He tells himself that the tears distorting his vision are from the smarting pain, and not from the way she's looking at him. "I mean, did you really think that would solve anything?!"
"I'll be throwing more than that if you don't get out of my sight in the next five seconds!" she shrieks, storming for the Harry Potter books.
He should note that this is the first time he's been in her room. The circumstances aren't exactly ideal, but… she has a Bruce Lee poster, and that would be worth commenting on with alacrity if she wasn't presently trying to break his skull open.
"What'd I do?" he demands, balking away into a defensive position preemptively. "Can you give me a hint before the concussion you just gave me scrambles my brain?"
"You not knowing just proves my point," Artemis says acidly.
"What point?" Wally yells, gesticulating madly. "Artemis, come on! Throw me a bone!" And not another book, please!
"Why?" she snarls. "Because we made out a few times?"
"I, uh, considered it a little bit more significant than that," Wally retorts, masking the sharp pang in his chest with ire. "Is that what this is about? You being insecure? Again? Artemis—"
"No," Artemis bursts back in a tone that tells him that it very well could be. "This is about you being—"
She cuts herself off and gestures furiously at him before dropping her hands to her sides, her chin jutting forward as though she's just explained it perfectly. He calms, winded like he's just run a hundred miles, even though he hasn't moved from his spot on her floor for the past twenty minutes.
"I don't… think I get it," he mutters, his fingers still prodding cautiously at the swollen spot on his forehead. He grimaces, hissing through his teeth.
"I don't either," Artemis croaks.
His gaze wanders back to her – she's still in her costume, even though the mission to perform recon on the Brain's new research compound in the Louisiana bayou had ended hours ago; her hair is matted and damp and there are smears of dried blood under her nostrils, and her knuckles are scraped and scabbing. Only her combat boots have been removed, so that he can see her callused toes (painted in atrociously chipped silver) curling onto the hardwood floor, and her mask has been pulled back to bunch up like a hood under her ragged ponytail. There's a split in her lip and a fire in her molten eyes that singes his insides.
"Beautiful" has never suited her more.
"What?" she demands of him, curling her beaten hands into fists.
"Nothing; I just—" He lets out a shaky breath. "It's just… nice to see you. You haven't talked to me for a week and a half, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Right." Artemis scoffs, her voice wobbling. "Like I could just not notice you being totally gone from my day-to-day. Whatever, Wally. Just go home."
"I don't wanna go home," he insists. "I wanna talk."
Artemis's jaw wrestles against itself, making a muscle in her cheek twitch. She glowers aside, her nostrils flaring as she huffs out a long breath, her fingers drumming fervently against her thighs.
"Yeah, well, I don't," she mutters back.
"Then we're not gonna get anywhere," Wally tells her quietly. "Artemis, we're not gonna last if you can't talkto me."
"Who says I want us to?!" Artemis spits out, and Wally knows it's only the spite and the petulance talking, knows she doesn't mean it, but he's out the open window and bolting through the rain before she can even get it in her head to tell him she's sorry.
03.
It's unusual, seeing him in red. It really shouldn't be, since half of his entire stupid costume is in red, and it's not like she hasn't seen him in maroon (his mom knits sweaters, and one of his favorite button-downs is faded into this color anyway). But his waffle-knit long-sleeved shirt is a bold scarlet, almost too bold for him when he's just Wally in civvies instead of Kid Flash spinning the world like a basketball on one finger, and he hasn't tucked it into his jeans the way he normally does, and he keeps glancing unsubtly over at her over the rim of his plastic cup of M'gann's raspberry punch.
"Hello?" Zatanna swats Artemis's arm, startling her back to attention. Her eyes tear away from Wally's and she blinks at her best friend, dazed.
M'gann's second annual Valentine's Day party at the Cave is even pinker than the last; there are coral and crimson streamers festooned from every corner of the ceiling, and the line of glass snack bowls along the island in the middle of the kitchen is jammed with assorted heart-shaped candies and themed M&Ms, and the Cave's speakers, usually only reserved for emergency broadcasts, are pumping out dance music.
"This is so pathetic," Zatanna laments under her breath, dropping her face into her palm.
"What is?" Artemis bristles.
"You," Zatanna replies simply. "Him."
She jerks her head in Wally's direction and Artemis follows the gesture. When Wally notices that they're both fixated on him, he starts sputtering on his punch and desperately flailing at Dick in an attempt to look like he's in the middle of a conversation.
"And everything about the two of you," Zatanna finishes, bracing her hands on her hips. Her bright red lipstick is perfectly applied to her bow lips, and her deep magenta strapless dress conforms effortlessly to her ever-maturing figure. "How long's it been, now? This 'break' thing, I mean."
"Uh…" Artemis shrugs, stirring her punch with her finger and sticking out her lower lip like a child being chastised. "About three weeks? M-Maybe four."
Part of her's a little happy. Whenever they have squabbles like this, at least they're always after their anniversary.
"And why is it happening, exactly?" Zatanna presses her further, clearly struggling to keep her voice even. When Artemis doesn't answer, she glares and adds, "If you don't tell me right now, so help me, I am locking the both of you in a closet. I will personally turn your life into a sitcom."
Artemis's head whips around to shoot her an adequate murderous scowl, but those looks had stopped intimidating Zatanna long ago. The younger girl cocks a penciled eyebrow and Artemis groans, slumping.
"Wasn't my idea," she mutters. "He said that I, uh. That I don't trust him yet. Whatever that means."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't it take you eight months before you actually showed him your bedroom?" Zatanna drawls. She curls a strand of hair around her pinkie. "Sorry, Art. Gotta side with him on this one." She perks up, her attention focused somewhere over Artemis's shoulder. "And speaking of sides, and him, he's going to be at yours in three, two, oh wow are those Hershey's Kisses?"
Before Artemis has even finished opening her mouth indignantly, or even started mentally indexing escape routes, Zatanna has breezed away, and Artemis's whole body has gone rigid at the sensation of vibrating air originating at her elbow.
She turns her head slightly to see that Wally is slouched beside her with one hand in his pocket and the other scratching his head.
"Hi," he says.
"H—" she starts to reply, but he cuts her off.
"Can we – talk?" he asks hurriedly.
The currently playing song honeys out words about sparks before the dark and getting closer. Artemis gulps.
"I guess?" she replies in an effort to look aloof. And then, because her on-again-off-again boyfriend works in mysterious ways, he reaches forward and clasps her wrist in one hand, leading her resolutely out of the living room.
Artemis doesn't even think to wrench her way out of it. The music fades away, but the beat of the drums still nudges, muffled, against every wall. They come to a halt at the door to Wally's quarters, and the door slides open.
Artemis is floored, as usual, by how strongly it smells of him – dry grass and burned toast, along with an undercurrent of his mother's preferred brand of scented laundry soap. It's as unkempt as ever – the bed hastily made, the desk laden with askew books and tossed-aside papers, the carpet cluttered with untied shoes and unwashed t-shirts.
"What're we doing in here?" Artemis asks, which is a pretty impressive feat, considering the tightness of her throat. "Don't tell me you're going to ask me to be your Valentine."
"It's not you who doesn't trust me," Wally blurts out. "It's the other way around. I'm so freaking scared that you're just gonna up and bolt one day, because sooner or later you're gonna have to figure out how not special or important or good enough I am, and you're gonna figure out that you'll like it better if I'm not always crowding around in your space, and if that's how you want things, then that's okay; I just – I'm sorry for doing this; I guess I just always wanna be ahead of the rest of the crowd; I wanna cross the finish line as early as I can, even if I'm not giving anybody else a fighting chance. And it freaks me out, you know? It freaks me out how freaked out I am at the thought of you cutting me out of your life. Which is bound to happen, by the way. I mean, look at us – look at me. L-Look at that…" He trails off, gesturing weakly at her, his teeth gritted. "Look at that dress. Oh, man."
Artemis glances self-consciously down, even in the wake of his heart-pinching monologue. Zatanna had picked the thing out – it's bright red, with spaghetti straps and a loose cut that falls in wide triangle pleats down to her knees.
"Babe," Wally tells her, sounding dizzy. "You knock me out."
"You know how you—" Artemis gulps, feeling vague warmth pulse somewhere in her core. "You said you wanted to talk?"
As she speaks, she advances on him, and he only takes one step back, his resistance obviously crumbling. He stares, mouth agog with want, down at her, and she reaches both of her hands up to comb her fingers through his hair. He closes his eyes and exhales.
"Uh-huh," he mumbles.
"We can save that for later," she says. "I mean, just a suggestion."
"I don't think that's how this works," Wally rasps, his lips twitching to fit around a wan chuckle. His voice is thick and distracted.
Artemis closes her eyes and brushes her lips against the side of his neck, his earlobe, his temple, his cheek, his nose. She comes to a halt just centimeters from his mouth, her hands lowering down to rest on his shoulders.
"Well, rules have never been my thing, so," she whispers. When he doesn't reply, she opens her eyes again, staring sleepily up into his, which are glistening just slightly, though she could be imagining things in the dim light. "Think of it this way. On the off-chance that I do go anywhere… I'm sure you're fast enough to catch up."
She doesn't realize exactly how much easier it is to breathe when he's bringing air out of her in gasps until she's curled against his sleeping form on the bed, and they're on-again, and the dress is crumpled in a pile on the floor.
That might, arguably, be when her brain clicks something into place: She is so, so, dangerously, humiliatingly in love with this boy. And there's something about the way he had once told her that she had nothing to prove to him, and something about the way she had once tasted sand in her mouth and clung to him, that makes this revelation much less scary than she would have expected.
04.
She's out of breath, and not in a fun way. Her calves are pulled taut, and sweat is glazing her scalp, and there's a stitch jabbing at her side, but she doesn't stop sprinting.
She silently curses the failure of an architect who designed the new Cadmus. It's a nightmare, navigation-wise – an endless stupid maze of lab doors and storage closets that all look the same, and it's so far underground that her tracker is completely useless.
All right, backtrack – why is Artemis pushing herself to the brink of collapse in the deep caverns of Cadmus? Because Cadmus kidnapped and possibly cloned and may have already gotten rid of her—…well. Of Wally.
To be fair, Cadmus had kidnapped all of the "sidekicks" who they believed to have "aspects worth duplicating" – that is, Dick, M'gann, Zatanna, Kaldur, Conner, and Wally – to replace them with a few little carbon copies of their own (or, in Conner's case, just do a bit of reprogramming). Artemis and Raquel had carried out an infiltration and rescue mission without notifying the League, because there wasn't enoughtime for that, and they'd managed to free everybody.
Well. Not everybody.
And Artemis knows how Cadmus treats its "originals." Judging by the grave looks on the rest of the Team's faces when she and Raquel had busted them out of their pods only a few minutes ago, that phase has already gotten started.
"They took him first," M'gann had blurted out, her face streaked with tears. "He's t-two levels down; I can't—he was scared, just a second ago, but I-I can't feel him anymore—"
Artemis presently rounds a corner just in time to see a guard punching a security code into the pad beside a round metal door. Throwing stealth to the wind, she whips out and looses a high-density polyurethane foam arrow – the last in her quiver; thanks for the restock, Ollie. It hits the guy square in the back, bursting into enough foam to engulf him and keep the door open.
Artemis clambers hastily over the sticky purplish mountain, kicking clingy bits of it off of her boots, and lands in a cat-like crouch on the other side.
"Hey!" the stocky male scientist at a pod control panel exclaims. "What do you think you're—?!"
"Save it," Artemis retorts, straightening and firing off another arrow with fearsome agility. The stubbed tip catches the man in the jaw, knocking him backwards and subsequently out cold.
Artemis, panting, and now certain that all enemies have been neutralized, finally scans the room. Her eyes dart around desperately for only a few seconds before they find him.
Her breath hitches. He's strapped upright by the wrists in a pod lit with eerie blue, his head slumped limply forward. She curses weakly under her breath, twice, her throat starting to close up, but then she sees that his chest is slowly but steadily rising and falling, and her heart stops feeling like it's just leapt into her nose.
She scrambles forward to the control panel and slams her fist onto the red button that reads "OPEN." The glass paneling slides down, but his hands are still restrained. Figures. She frowns down at the pad of assorted buttons, but none of the others are labeled, except for one that makes bile spike in the back of her throat – "TERMINATE."
Startling her, Wally groans loudly back into consciousness, his head lolling. Artemis shudders out an alleviated sigh and steps up to stand on the floor of the pod in front of him, collapsing her bow and clipping it back onto her belt.
"Wally," she says, cautiously, because honestly, if she's got the bad guys' number, this could just as easily be a Cadmus clone put here to trick her.
"Augh," he whines, his voice gravelly and raw. "Man. I feel like the other side of a carbonite block."
Okay, it's him.
With clear effort, he grimaces and lifts his head up. His eyes go round when they meet hers, and she jerks just slightly back, now that the distance between their faces has been significantly reduced. His breath heats her sweat-stung lips.
"Yeah, well, try to stay conscious while I figure out how to get these open," she orders after clearing her throat, stretching on her tiptoes to fumble at the wrist restraints.
"Have you tried just pressing all the buttons on the control panel?" Wally asks, screwing his eyes shut and exhaling through his nose when her elbow accidentally whacks his cheek.
"No, I haven't, genius, but if you'd like to risk being turned into Kid Flash Jell-O, then we can give that a shot," she retorts. Her fingers are too sweaty, slipping and shaking. "I can't—I don't know what I'm doing—"
"All right, take a deep breath," Wally advises her, shifting slightly. His back cracks three times. When Artemis doesn't obey him, when her breathing starts to become faster and more shallow because if she'd been five minutes slower he'd be dead right now, he tries again: "Artemis, stop; look at me."
Artemis's hands are palpitating beyond her control, and she's twisting her tongue around in her mouth until it hurts. She knows that no matter how much of a break they're supposed to be on, if Wally's wrists were free, he'd be doing that impossible thing he does where he calms her down with a single touch, but right now, he's pinned to a wall and her windedness is catching up to her and she can't even remember how her hands work anymore.
Great. So this is what happens to her when he almost dies. Good sign.
"Artemis!" he exclaims, sharply, and it catches her off guard enough to freeze her. She stares at him, her hands hovering and spasming at her chin, clapping her mouth closed to withhold her panting.
"Yeah?" she whispers.
"I'm fine, all right? I'm good," he assures her. "Just – calm down, okay? We'll figure this out. It's probably totally simple; we just need to take it slow and then things…" His voice trails off, and something shifts in his eyes, something hungry and weary and yearning. "Things'll work out."
Artemis makes a valiant effort to gulp, but her throat is dry and she just winds up hiccupping instead. Wally's mouth twitches and in any other situation she would knock him upside the head for even thinking about laughing at her, but right now, she just slumps forward, her face dropping against his chest, her eyes pinned against him by her own body.
She can't contain a couple of heaving sniffles, but she screws her eyes shut so tightly than nothing compromising can leak out of them. Wally bristles, but even she can tell that it's only because he desperately wants to wrap himself around her limb-by-limb until her shoulders aren't shaking anymore.
"But, uh," he adds after a few seconds, "A little haste actually wouldn't make waste, since this place is crawling with goons, so—"
"Right, right," Artemis replies, immediately recovering, springing back and swiping at her eyes and setting her mouth into a solemn line.
"Robin got these open once," Wally continues, craning his head back to better survey the cuffs. "Little jerk has a mini-skeleton key in his glove—where are those guys, anyway? You'd think they'd be a little more efficient about this whole rescuing me thing, what with me being the first for the Cadmus chopping block… uh, babe, you okay?"
Artemis barely hears him. Moving back has given her a much clearer view, and now that she's actually paying attention to it, and not to the possibility that he's dead or something, there's something about it that's making her heart start to hammer.
He's stretched out in the pod so tautly that his lean muscles are pulled prominent against the Kevlar, and his hip bones are pronounced along the jagged line separating gold from red. He's pried open and upright and his whole body moves when he breathes, and right then, right in the middle of the Cadmus termination room, Artemis does something pretty unthinkable.
She kisses him, hard – with such force that the back of his head slams into the pod wall behind him and his teeth bite down on her lower lip. She can practically hear the sirens of bewilderment wailing in his head, but she frames his face with her hands, clutches it the way she'd clutch a lifeline in a tempest, ramming out her tongue and wrenching her eyes closed.
Wally arches against her, his body pushing onto hers, his arms straining in the pod's straps. The initial paralysis tossed aside, he makes a low noise in the back of his throat halfway between a whimper and a growl of approval, and heat gushes between Artemis's legs, up her belly, down her thighs. The fact that his hands aren't on her is just making her want to touch him more, everywhere, every uncharted inch, every freckle she knows by heart, every bruise and fading hickey. When she abandons her assault on his mouth to lick the underside of his jaw – the only thing his mask is giving her – he whines in frustration, rattling his arms violently against the cuffs.
"Artemis—" he gasps, and when she glances up, she sees that his pupils are blown ferally out. "I thought we were, um—"
"Shut up," she orders. Her hands rove over his torso, raking up and down his ribs, to his armpits, his elbows, back down to his stomach. He bites down on his lower lip as she grips his hipbones, her thumbs digging mercilessly into the indentations.
"You are beyond nuts," he rasps. "Somebody could come in and—"
"And get an arrow through the eye," Artemis finishes hazily for him, and then she's on her knees, her palms running along his thighs. She knows for a fact that there's a zipper over his spine, but she's not about to do him the favor of using it.
"Get back up here right now or I swear, Artemis, I'm gonna figure out a way to terminate myself," Wally implores her.
She obliges him. She rises and shifts until her body is flush against his, until she can feel his erection straining against her inner thigh, and she drags her fingers up to the crown of his head, combing them through the mussed copper hair.
He watches her with a haze in his eyes that makes her costume suddenly feel too tight at every stitch, so stifling that she's overcome with the compulsion to rip it off and then his, too, until she can brand his freckles onto her own skin, until she can leave teeth marks in his shoulders. His mouth is agog, and his breathing is shallow, and he's flushed at least down to his neck.
Artemis pulls his mask back over his head with one hand, and it tugs his hair away from his forehead, sweeping it aside. He has a tan line that fits around the contours of the downward triangles and eye holes. He wets his lips, but he makes no effort to meet them with hers, staring covetously at her.
Artemis grinds her pelvis against his, and it's a little awkward, since they're both standing, but her ribs all clench when his eyes roll back into his head and his eyelids flutter and he groans out her name, his whole body buzzing out a short, sharp vibration of arousal that shakes Artemis to her core. She kisses him sloppily and palms the damp point in the crotch of his suit, rubbing it slowly.
Wally curses when she breaks off. "I hate you."
Artemis fingers aside the neck of his loosened mask and sucks on the curve of his throat, pulling the skin between her teeth. She's marking him tonight if it's the last thing she does. She can taste his sweat and feel his pulse banging against her tongue and, automatically, instinctively, she starts to align herself to his thigh, rolling her hips against it until her belly is aflame and her underwear are sodden.
She gets herself off right there, humping him like some horny teenager, and he manages to maneuver his head so that he's kissing her ear and whispering encouragement to her. She starts stroking his dick with her palm and her fingers and her wrist until his hips start to jerk, once, twice, and her name bursts out of him in a strangled moan seconds after she mewls his, and that is, of course, right when they hear a crash behind them.
"My friends!" Kaldur exclaims. "We are here!"
Artemis and Wally both freeze. Artemis is suddenly glad that he's the only one forced to face toward the door.
"Uh, hey, guys," Wally greets them with a nervous chuckle. "We were just, uh—"
"Oh my God," Zatanna groans. "Are you serious?!"
"That could have been my pod," Conner mutters in blank shock, and then, after it sinks in, he furiously repeats, as though mortally offended, "That could have been my pod!"
"Babe," Wally murmurs in Artemis's ear as she buries her face in his shoulder, "I think you forgot to lock the door."
Artemis starts laughing, an exhilarated giggle that moves into an all-out guffaw, and Wally joins her, nuzzling into the side of her neck, and they stay like that, close, even as Dick quips his way up to the top of the pod to jimmy open Wally's cuffs.
05.
"Just… think of it as another break," Wally suggests lamely the night before she packs a bag for the imaginary afterlife. "Y'know. A long one. With risk of life and limb."
Artemis breathes out a wan laugh and turns when his hand tugs at her hip, bracing her palms on his chest. He's smiling down at her, in his black long-sleeved shirt and his faded freckles, and Brucely is snoring on the couch.
"Shouldn't I be the one dishing out the ineffectual platitudes here?" she asks, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow.
He feigns a grimace. "Ineffectual? You sure know how to hurt a guy."
Artemis feels her lower lip starting to tremble against her will, and to hide it, she folds it in and flings her arms around Wally's middle, embracing him tightly and earnestly. He reciprocates without a moment's hesitation, and she breathes out long and slow – he always gives such enveloping hugs.
There's a pleading in the way his arms clutch her, though; an unspoken desolation in the way his fingers curl into the hair at the nape of her neck. He closes his eyes and holds her more firmly, inhaling her, and Artemis looks to the ceiling to keep the edges of her eyelids from dampening.
"I mean, we can make it official, if that's easier for you, psychology-wise," he offers, and Artemis, as an answer, kisses him, open-mouthed and concise, her hands flat against his shoulder blades.
They don't say anything about missing each other, being scared, being in love. Those kinds of things have always gone without being spoken anyway – it had just taken them a while to accept that.
He strokes the side of her face as though she is the last good and worthwhile thing in the world the next night, and she almost loses it, almost cries, but Dick intercedes before she can.
"Promise me it won't go wrong," Wally had asked her, quietly, the morning before.
Artemis had dotted his cheek in fluttering kisses and done the stupid thing: "I promise."
+.
She sets her quiver down on the coffee table, beside the broken Tigress mask.
"I know it's a dumb question," he murmurs, his hands hovering at her elbows from behind, his mouth finding her earlobe, "But how'd you – how'd you wait this long? F-For me."
Artemis raises her fingers to entwine them with his. A car passes by outside, slicing a square of gold light across the far wall of the apartment. Bart is asleep on the couch, mumbling nonsense, no longer the boy who wakes in the middle of the night sobbing in terror.
"It's not like I haven't done it before," she answers, her lips quirking. He rests his chin on her shoulder and they stare, together, silent, at the empty street through their bedroom window.
It is July. The Arctic snow is far behind them.