Disclaimer: I wish I owned Young Justice, but my luck doesn't work like that, so I own nothing.
A/N: Hey, I'm so sorry this is so late, but I'll let you read the story before I explain.
"Hey, Zee." Zatanna looked up when she heard her name to see Dick standing in the doorway to her room.
"Oh, h-hey, Dick, what's up?" She mentally cursed herself, she needed to get over this shyness when she's around Dick, it wasn't helping anything. 'At least I can get a full sentence out around him now, though, that's an improvement.' She thought.
"It's our turn to go get the groceries." Zatanna nodded and followed him down to the kitchen/dining room, where most of the others were. They had a system in the Young Adults dorm, every week, two of them would go on a grocery run since they ran out really quickly; they were given a weekly budget for groceries from Brown. "Ok, we're going on a grocery run, anyone have any requests?" Dick said when they walked in. They had a list already, but it was always easier to check what people wanted too instead of finding out when they got back or getting texts while they were there with what everyone wanted.
"I need some chicken for dinner tonight." Megan said from her position at the counter, she was usually the one who cooked, she was better than pretty much everyone else, though they kept an eye on her whenever she decided to bake, Wally was the only one who would eat burned cookies.
"I think we're out of fruit." Kaldur added from where he was reading at the table. Everyone else there gave negative responses.
"Coffee." Suki called from the couch in the media room.
Zatanna and Dick walked in and Zatanna glanced at her, she was typing on her laptop and she had a huge book opened next to her. Zatanna walked over while Dick wrote down the other's requests. "Whatcha doin'?" She asked.
Suki sighed, "Trying to make sure I don't fail out of my first year of law school before the year even finishes."
"I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that's why you need the coffee?" Zatanna said, glancing at the paper Suki was writing; she hardly understood any of it, but she didn't speak lawyer.
"Yeah, you try to balance Olympic training with law school, I barely get any sleep as it is, coffee would be greatly appreciated."
"What do you mean, you barely get any sleep? You can't possibly have that much work." Dick said as he joined the conversation.
Suki rubbed her temples, "Dick, you're just going to have to take my word for it, I'm not up for explaining everything to you right now, I really need to finish this."
"But, why-"
"No problem, Suki, we'll get the coffee. Let's go, Dick" Zatanna cut Dick off. She patted Suki's shoulder before grabbing Dick, saving Suki from further interrogation, and setting out on the walk to the store. Before they walked out the door, Dick grabbed a little push cart; Zatanna raised an eyebrow at him.
"What? If you want to carry everything back here, be my guest, but I like prefer not to have sore arms, it's much more asterous." And he walked out the door.
Zatanna just rolled her eyes, he had a good point and most everyone had long since stopped trying to figure out what he meant when he used a word that wasn't really a word, but she was still interested. This one was new to her, "'asterous' what's that one mean?"
Dick turned back to her with a grin on his face, "It's the opposite of disaster, instead of meaning bad things are happening, it means good things are."
Zatanna shrugged, "Sure, why not," she tried to appear nonchalant, of course that got her thinking, "so would chalant be the opposite of nonchalant? Like, it would mean caring instead of not caring."
"Zee, you're a genius. I can't believe I hadn't already thought of that." Zatanna smiled with his praise, of course, in the back of her mind somewhere, she knew the others wouldn't be happy that he had a new word to confuse them with, but in her opinion it was worth it. She looked up, they were at the store.
"Why don't we make this more fun?" She asked.
"How so?" Dick turned to look at her. She took the shopping list out of his hands and tore it in half, ignoring his shocked expression and exclamation about how hard he had worked to make it look like a masterpiece of writing. "Whoever finishes their half of the list first has to push that cart thing back with all the groceries and carry the other piggyback."
Dick smirked, "Well, I hope you can carry me, Zee."
"Don't get so cocky, Grayson, I'm not one to give up without a fight." She said putting her hands on her hips.
"Alright then, on go, one, two, three, go!" both her and Dick sprinted off to the separate areas of the store to finish their list.
Zatanna was proud to say that she only considered finishing her list by magic for three seconds, at max. She was getting more used to not using magic around people when she wasn't in costume. She had had to stop herself so many times those first two weeks. As she set off down the frozen isle to get Megan's chicken she felt her phone vibrate. She had used magic to help it pick up on police signals and this was one of those times. 'Now? Really? This couldn't happen in like an hour? I wish there were other heroes here, I don't want to have to carry Dick all the way back.' She was pretty sure the whole incident with Rocket was a one-time thing since she hadn't seen anything to the contrary so she ran out of the store and changed, setting off in the direction of the crime, apparently a hostage situation with Captain Cold and they suspected two others, completely unaware that her shopping partner was heading in the same direction, for the same, and other, reasons.
'Captain Cold. Central City ice villain and one of Flash's arch-enemies. What the hell is he doing in Colorado Springs?!' Nightwing thought as he made his way to the institute. According to his police scanner, Captain Cold was holding one of their leading scientists in technology, a Dr. Bennett, and a few students hostage. He just didn't get what Cold had to gain from this, money maybe, but it seemed like too much of a hassle to only be about money when he could just try and rob a bank. But he didn't have any more time to ponder Cold's possible motives; he had just reached the institute.
"Nightwing! Wow, we must have a popular town here." The police chief said when he walked past. Of course it caught his attention.
"What do you mean?" He turned back to the chief.
"Well, Zatanna got here just before you did and went in to deal with Cold and his kids."
Nightwing didn't have a chance to question the chief about Zatanna; there were more pressing matters at hand. "His kids? As in Kid Kold and Ice Kate? All three of them are here?"
"That's right. In fact, Zatanna could probably use your help in there." The chief was looking at him weird. Nightwing realized he had gone off into space thinking about all this.
"Right, I'm on it. Make sure your men are ready to get the hostages out of danger, they might not be coming out with Cold's permission." He called as he ran into the building.
He stepped right into the middle of a battle. Zatanna was fighting Ice Kate and Kid Kold at the same time. Captain Cold was guarding the hostages while one was at the computer, downloading something it appeared.
"Take Ice Kate, I've got Kid Kold." Nightwing called to Zatanna as he ran at Kid with a spin kick aimed at his jaw, it ended up connecting with his arm as he blocked it. Nightwing knew that if one of them attacked Captain Cold while his kids were still up and fighting one or more of the hostages would probably die and icy cold death. Zatanna didn't seem too pleased that he was there, but complied with his idea all the same.
Nightwing pulled out his eskrima sticks and lunged at Kid. Kid shot a beam of ice at him, forcing him to change tactics and dodge. He was so used to fighting Mr. Freeze; he didn't really know the best way to fight Kid Kold. He usually just aimed any blow that could break glass at his head and avoid the ice beams. 'Well, this isn't that different, I just need to focus on knocking him out instead of breaking glass.'
Kid came at him again and he used his acrobatic skills to jump over him and landed a kick on his back, sending Kid tripping forward and him to the other side of the room. He chanced a glance at Zatanna to see how she was doing at keeping Ice Kate occupied and away from the hostages and was met with a fist ot the gut in his moment of distraction.
"Not so good away from Bats, are you?" Kid taunted him.
"You wouldn't say that without your gun." He replied.
"I can fight you without this." Kid said cockily, he threw it away from them.
Nightwing smirked; that was all he needed. He straightened up and lashed out with his eskrima sticks. Kid didn't even stand a chance. Now able to check out the rest of the battle without getting punched, he looked over at Zatanna and Ice Kate. Zatanna was doing pretty well, she was shooting fire at Ice Kate's stream of ice, but she was too fast for Zatanna to actually stop her from moving.
Nightwing decided to change that. He threw a few of the marbles he always kept with him in her path, knowing they would at least trip her up, and turned to Captain Cold.
"It's over, Cold, you can't beat us both."
"Ah, but I don't need to, young hero, I've got what I need." With the flash drive in his hand, he gestured to the computer which had the words 'File Transfer Successful' right across the center. Nightwing attacked, trusting Zatanna to get the hostages out. Cold just laughed and dodged his attack. "Do you really think you can beat me with speed, young hero, I fight the Flash, fighting speed is my specialty."
Nightwing knew he was right, he would have to rely on technique to beat Cold, not speed or agility. 'How do the Flashes do this?' He wondered while still debating his options. He decided to do the same thing he had with Kid Kold, use his acrobatic skills. Cold had backed up so much in dodging that Nightwing was now next to one of the desks. He jumped up onto it and then jumped again, this time spinning and successfully kicking Cold in the jaw. The villain staggered with the blow, hitting his head on the wall behind him and falling, unconscious.
After again checking that Zatanna had taken out Ice Kate and gotten the hostages to safety, Nightwing took the flash drive from Cold's pocket and went to check the computer to find out what the files were. He furrowed his brow at what he found. The files were all about Dr. Bennett's research in automatons. 'Why would Cold be after this?' he pondered while finishing his inspection of the files. To his dismay he found that the files hand been uploaded to not one, but two places. The first was Cold's flash drive which had now had in his belt, but he couldn't identify the other, it was outside the computer. In fact it looked like it had been e-mailed to the other place, but it had been done so that he couldn't track it. 'Damn, not good,' was all he could think as he gathered up Captain Cold and Kid.
Nightwing handed the Cold family to the cops with a disgusted look on his face; he couldn't believe he'd let Cold get that information to another location, so even though they were caught, and they would break out anyway, they still managed to get the information they were here for in the first place.
"Wow, could you be any more chalant about the hostages?" Zatanna said in an annoyed voice as she came over to him. He had completely ignored the hostages in favor of taking the criminals to the police. He was about to tell her that when he registered exactly what she'd said.
Behind his mask, his eyes widened, "Did you just say 'chalant'?" He asked, trying to keep his cool while slightly freaking out on the inside.
"Yeah, you should try expanding your vocabulary, Nightwing." She said before creating her disk and flying away.
Nightwing ran. At her rate she would reach the grocery store before him, that is if she was indeed heading there. He couldn't risk being too far behind her in any case, though the possibility that hero Zatanna and Olympian Zatanna were the same person definitely sped him up.
"I won!" Zatanna called as he found her at the register. She'd just gotten back and grabbed as many of her items as she could before using magic to get the last two or three. In her defense she'd been gone for a pretty long time, she had fully expected to lose.
"Yep, dang it, I hope you aren't heavy, Z." Dick remarked before falling into line behind her.
"Don't worry, I'm not, but I'm going to have fun with this." She smirked.
"Hey we're back with the groceries!" Dick called as they walked through the kitchen door. The he changed his voice to one like a child announcing what they did at school. "And guess what, I learned a new word!"
Everyone groaned; Zatanna smiled sheepishly.
Ok, wow I really have no excuse, just had writer's block I guess. I'm not going to guarantee that I'll update really soon because I just don't know if I will, but I will guarantee that I won't give up on this story. So, no matter how long it takes me to update, just know that I will, I refuse to put this on hiatus.
Reviewers:
Superbubbles: Wow, that's a lot of ships; well this one is kinda chalant. I think next I'm going to do Supermatian since I feel like I'm ignoring them and then probably Aquarocket, but there will definitely be more of the other ships, too. I might do a traught friendship just because I love them like that and I also don't think Wally would be jelly of an 18/19 year old talking to Arty.
Numbah435spiritsong: Oh, thank you so much. Lol, yeah me too, I love kick-butt girls in books or TV or anything. Thanks, I really do like some hard rock, but they're definitely one of my favorites. Again, thanks (I kinda feel like I should have said that for everything in here though), and I hope you liked this one.
Booklover1498: Thanks, hope you like this one too.
ShadowlightStarlight: No problem, I'm glad to respond to any questions. Thanks, glad you liked it.
Tigrun: It's not selfish at all, I like writing them, though I hope I did the ship justice, I just love that they're both kinda little trolls, I really want to do more of that in future chapters.
Believe-daydream-Fly529: Thanks, that would be really interesting to write.
Wow, almost everyone who reviewed wanted something with chalant. How can I argue with that? So if you want a particular ship or a specific villain/hero fighting, let me know and I'll see if I can use it for the story.
