For Traught Week

Prompt: Someday


Chapter 2


Once the glowing had started and her fingers dissolved into particles, Artemis was sure she was done for.

I'm dead. I'm so dead. I'm definitely dead…

Her eyes filled with angry, frustrated tears that dried from her cheeks as she disintegrated.

Why did life hate her so much? Just when things were going good, all of it had to come crashing down. She had to just go and die.

It's not fair, she thought as her vision swam in the scorching yellow substance.

The yellow of her father's hair (a reminder of him that she had considered dying brown at least half a million times). A yellow of buttery spread or a brilliant sunset. She had no doubt it would be the last thing she would see before she passed on to the next world.

But if she hadn't been so distracted about dying, she might have found the color beautiful.

However, instead of ending up in heaven or hell or wherever the universe wanted to deposit her today, a strange sensation filled the remainder of the body. It felt as if she had been frozen in a pure, thoughtless state of existence with the world continuing to move around her at a blinding pace. It was similar to traveling by zeta tube but accelerated a thousand times.

Emotions like sadness, happiness, regret, and anger filtered through her consciousness as she traveled…forwards? Backwards? Down? She couldn't tell.

Just when it seemed like the feelings had become too intense and rapid for her to contain, reaching a painful climax beating against her soul, her strange journey came to an unannounced halt.

The yellow faded from her mind and was replaced by flurried confusion, like every cell in her body had morphed into a swarm of bees trying to fly back to their respective wax cells in their honeycomb. Then, instead of a snowstorm of sensations, she solidified into a thing with a torso, legs, elbows, hands, ears (she heard wind whistling), nose (she smelled the scent of an old fire), and nerve endings (it was cold).

Lastly, her eyes reformed, and her eyelids peeled back slowly. Her vision smarted as if she hadn't seen daylight in a long, long time.

She was standing in the charred remains of a building. Her feet were ankle-deep in ashes, crumbling rock, and metal. Hurriedly, Artemis tried to step out of the ruins, hoping desperately that this area wasn't the sight of a nuclear explosion (because what kind of fire burned through stones and metal?). She was not in the mood to die slowly from radiation poisoning.

Wait? Was she even alive? She pinched her arm and looked around. Well, she was pretty sure hell didn't have green grass and heaven didn't include burned wreckage…so…

"Hey. I'm back."

Artemis turned at the faint sound of a voice. A man a few years older than her was standing a few feet away from her. His back was turned towards her, his left hand was buried in his jean pocket, and the other hand loosely held a bouquet of yellow Gerber daises.

He seemed to be concentrating on a spot on the ground, but from her angle, she couldn't see what he was looking at.

"I know you didn't care about flowers, but I brought you some just 'cause."

Just when she was about to try and quietly run away from this crazy person chatting with the dirt, he crouched down on his haunches. His pants stretched over his shapely butt as he reached to place the flowers on the ground.

Artemis took a moment to appreciate "Okay, at least crazy guy has a nice…" before she saw what exactly he had been talking to.

A granite gravestone.

Aw dang it! She thought, and her chest pinched with guilt. Did I just really check out a guy's ass in a graveyard? That's just wrong…

She groaned and brought a hand to her face without thinking about it. Hearing the sound of skin-slapping skin, crazy-grave-visitor-with-a-nice-ass stopped conversing with the dead to turn around and look at her.

She covered her mouth in embarrassment and wondered how in the world she was going to explain how a girl in green spandex had appeared in the middle of nowhere. Then his face paled to a pasty shade of white.

"…Artemis?"

Now it was her turn to be shocked.

In the heat of the moment, Artemis automatically went to her default response to stress: aggression. Striding forward, she grabbed the collar of the guy's sweater, pulled him off the ground, and yelled into his face, "Who are you and how the hell do you know my name?!"

"Dick…Night…I mean, Robin!" he choked out, his eyes bulging and his cheeks turning purplish.

Robin? Artemis' eyes narrowed but she didn't relinquish her grip. Well, Robin had black hair and pale skin, but so did half of the meta-human population (Batman, Superman, Superboy, and Captain Marvel to name a few). She also didn't know what color Robin's eyes were because he had never taken off his mask.

"Why should I believe you?" she demanded.

He answered her in a single muddled breath. "Your name is Artemis Crock; you live in Gotham with me; your mom was Huntress; your zeta tube code was…"

She released him in surprise, and he fell to his hands and knees coughing and sputtering,.

"How did you know about my family?" she asked, eyes wide in desperate fear.

"I've always…um, you told us." Rubbing his neck as he stood up, he surveyed her with cautious interest. "You know, for a person who just came back from the dead, you look pretty good, 'Mis."

Her eyebrows shot up. "What do you mean, 'came back from the dead'?"

His mouth twisted in bitter humor.

"Hate to break it to you like this, but it's 2016, and you've been dead for seven months."