This might be the shortest of all the updates so far? I actually posted the full full update on tumblr (it was 9,700 words), but I thought it might be better to break it up on here so it wouldn't be so bulky and overwhelming.
I am so floored by the positive reception to the last chapter; holy cow. And the fact that so many people took the time to drop a line telling me what they thought? Really amazing and thoughtful. THIS THING HIT 200 REVIEWS TODAY; I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. I kinda cried; it was pretty pathetic.
I hope these last few chapters won't disappoint. (And since a couple of people asked last time, there are about three or four left; I haven't decided.)
She winds up at Jade's apartment, mashing her thumb repeatedly against the buzzer. She's shaking and sort of hyperventilating and she feels light-headed, but she's relentless, barely able to stand still long enough to let Jade answer.
"Artemis?" Jade's voice crackles over. "What the—?"
"Let me in!" Artemis yells, sounding desperate and nearly hysterical.
She hears the door unlock immediately and she flings it open, running up the stairs and pounding on Jade's apartment door. It opens within seconds, and she gets a glimpse of Jade's uncharacteristically astonished face for a moment before it blurs into everything else as she pushes her way inside, wringing her hands, trying to will her head to stop pounding. She paces without aim.
"Artemis?" Jade prompts her calmly. "What is it?"
When Artemis doesn't reply right away, she continues, "If you're here because you're a fugitive, I'd just like to point out that I—"
"He's back," Artemis croaks, halting in the middle of the room with clenched fists and blanched knuckles. "We… it worked, Jade. We got him."
She turns to face Jade with wide eyes, shivering in terror and adrenaline.
"Wally's home," she finishes in a rasp.
Jade blinks at her.
There's a long pause.
"Sis," she finally drawls, staring at Artemis skeptically, "I'm not sure you're responding to this information correctly. Think on what you just said, in case you didn't actually hear it. This stupid crusade of yours is over because you've got your marginally stupider boyfriend back; why aren't you hanging off of him like an extra limb, exactly?"
"Because I don't know how!" Artemis shouts. "Jade, I've been looking for him for so long that I think I forgot how to have him here. I… I feel like I lost me to find him and now I…"
She covers her mouth with one hand, breathing unevenly into it before slowly running it back over to her face to rest at her scalp.
"I don't know if… if I can go back to how we were," she says in a disbelieving whimper. "I… I coped, Jade. I coped and I didn't even notice. I don't know who he is anymore. I don't know who I am – look at me!"
She throws her arms out as if stripping herself bare and stands there, still out of breath, with unkempt hair and a confusion in her eyes that seems to come from a girl far younger. Jade examines her carefully, her arms folded, for several moments.
Then she steps forward, slowly.
Artemis doesn't know why, but she starts to cry. There isn't a critical moment of decision-making, of whether to hold it back or let it out; it just starts, and suddenly she can't stop it. It's messy and unashamed and she feels like a little girl again, curled up in the corner and covering her ears so she wouldn't have to hear her parents shouting at each other long into the night.
"Shh," Jade immediately hushes her, scooping her into a loose hug. Artemis collapses against her, all pretense of sisterly abrasiveness gone. Jade reaches up with one hand to stroke her hair. "You're fine. It's fine."
"It's not," Artemis whispers, slumping. "I saw him and I just – I panicked. I ran. I don't know what—I just know I can't see him. Not now. Not yet; maybe not ever."
"Oh, stop it. Go get some sleep," Jade tells her in lieu of counsel, drawing away and bracing Artemis's slackened shoulders with her hands. "You can stay here as long as you like, provided you're still housetrained. I won't tell anyone."
Artemis's lower lip quivers against her will and, to hide any further tears, she flings her arms around Jade again. Jade groans, but Artemis can tell, on some level, that it's for show.
"Chesh?" Roy's groggy voice drifts in from the bedroom. "Wassgoin' on?"
"Nothing, dear," Jade croons back, detaching from Artemis to get the blanket for the couch. "Just my kid sister, running away from her problems." She turns to Artemis and tosses her a blanket. "I hope you'll be contributing to grocery funds."
Artemis catches the blanket and bites her lip, looking down at it with still-damp eyes.
"I'm so scared, Jade," she rasps.
"That's a good sign," Jade says. She moves to turn off the lamp on the coffee table. "After all. Being scared is what brought Alice home."
For the first time in days, Artemis closes her eyes and falls into a thick and dreamless sleep.
—
Wally wakes up to the scent of bacon.
He blinks his eyes open with grogginess and confusion, because the last thing he remembers is running, and snow, and wondering if Artemis is going to be happy that she finally gets to stretch onto the left side of the bed. A short bump of pain shoots from one temple to the other at his consciousness and he groans, rolling over and instinctively pulling the sheets under which he's curled over his head.
It's dark, and he's in a bed. The pillowcase smells so familiar that it makes his stomach jerk, though not painfully. As he comes to more fully, he can hear a small clock ticking somewhere close to him, and a lot of birds outside, and the sound of sizzling and running water and a whirring mixer. The bed is just slightly too short for him, and his toes keep slipping over the edge.
He shifts back infinitesimally, his fingers curling over the hem of the comforter and tugging it down to his nose.
He frowns blearily at the ceiling overhead and mumbles nonsense, pushing himself up into a sitting position with his palms flat on the mattress. The comforter puddles in his lap.
He glances down at himself, lips pursed. He's wearing a worn-out t-shirt with Einstein's face on it and a pair of red plaid pajama pants, and his left hand is bandaged. He tries to clench it into a fist, but it throbs sorely in retaliation, making him immediately release it and hiss through his teeth.
His eyes drift up and he gives a slight start. The room he's in is nothing but dark and empty walls, a barren desk with a slightly dusty swivel chair, a bedside table with only an alarm clock and a glass of water on it.
That's not what unsettles him, though. There is practically a kingdom of cardboard boxes stacked up in a labyrinthine arrangement around him, each of them labeled, in shaky black handwritten letters, with his name.
His mind catches up to him, then, and in an instant, he tears the covers off of him and zooms out into a hallway he knows like the lines on his palms. He's mostly able to ignore the surge of wooziness behind his eyes at the sorry lack of fuel he has for this sudden burst of energy, but still manages to crash into the wall.
He grits his teeth and forces himself to stand up steadily, but still sort of stumbles down the rest of the hallway before coming to a lurching, speechless stop at the doorway to the kitchen.
His mother is there. She doesn't seem to have noticed him. Ordinarily, he would zip in and try to procure a sample of whatever she's cooking, or announce his presence with some terrible pun, but there's something in her behavior that stuns and petrifies him into utter silence.
She's bustling around at her usual speed, but there's something off about it – it's not natural, but desperate and anxious and tincture of terrified. Her hands are shaking and everything she touches wobbles in her fingers; she's murmuring to herself and her eyes are wet and she looks like she hasn't slept in days. Her cardigan is a color he's never seen in her wardrobe in the twenty years since he's been born: gray.
She hovers over the bacon cooking on the stove and tucks some hair behind her ear, her fingers quaking as she does so. She gingerly picks up an egg from the counter, no doubt to fry it, but it's still tottery in her fingers.
"Mom?" Wally finally murmurs, with concern and astonishment.
The egg falls and smashes to the floor.
Mary jumps, her hands jerking to her mouth and clapping closed over it, but she doesn't turn around. He knows that she had heard him – her disconcertingly frozen posture is likely an indicator of that – but she's shivering and unbudging. Her palms muffle the gut-wrenching string of sorrowful, breathless noises that she's suddenly making. Wally's eyebrows go up in shock when two tears slip swiftly down over her fingers.
"Mom," he tries again, unable to mask his concern. He enters the kitchen, his bare feet sliding across the tile. "D'you… need me to set the table, or anything?"
She seems so much smaller, as though she's perpetually doubled over with a tired-out sob that makes no sound. Her skin is a little more ashen and her hands look a little more wizened and her eyes are red at the edges when they finally meet his – when they do, she lets out a quiet whimper and closes her eyes tightly, like the sight of him is breaking her to pieces.
Not knowing what else to do, he moves toward her and pulls her into a hug.
"Hey, Mom; it's just me," he murmurs. "What's the—"
She's crying, loudly, unabashedly, and that, honestly, makes him want to cry, the same way it always has. Her fingers are bunched in his t-shirt and her face is buried against his chest and her shoulders are shaking, and she's weeping without restraint, but also without sorrow.
"Wally," she's sobbing out, and when her hands release the fabric, she cuffs him in an embrace that knocks the breath out of him. "Wally, Wally, Wally…"
She doesn't stop saying his name, and it grows louder and more garbled with every mention, but eventually, the bawling turns to tearful, unrepentant laughter. That's when Wally spots movement out of the corner of his eye, and looks up just in time to see his father come in.
He and Rudy stare at each other with what have to be very similar shocked expressions for a time that, to Wally, seems so long that it stretches him, but eventually Rudy's eyes start to glisten and well up and he strides forward in two steps, throwing his arms around Wally's shoulders, taking care not to knock into Mary.
Wally has only ever seen his parents cry once, and it had been when he'd graduated from high school. He's only ever been hugged by them this way once, as well, when he'd sped back into a house a part of him had feared would be empty, with a cast on his arm and dirt still in his hair and cat scratches on his cheeks; but there hadn't been tears, then, just them running to each other, colliding in the middle of the living room in a small embrace that seemed to him, then, to take up the whole block, and he had never felt safer or more wanted in his whole life.
When Mary finally releases him, she beams up at him through her damp cheeks and frames his face with her cool hands. He grins down at her, cheekily, and tries to ignore the sudden, unexpected shock of how much taller he's gotten since his sixteenth birthday, when his head had barely reached her neck. Now it doesn't quite seem like she's embracing him anymore – it feels like it's the other way around.
"Jeez, Mom; you'd think I'd just aced a Chem test," he jokes, which only makes her lower lip wobble more.
Rudy's scoff poorly disguises the emotional sob he's been holding in. Mary's palms go to Wally's temples, and to smooth down his hair, before finally lingering at his shoulders. She sniffles loudly, and two more tears spring out to join the others, curving around her upturned lips in wet lines.
"Look, not that I'm trying to sound ungrateful, or anything, because, hey, home-cooked Mom breakfast, but…" He scratches the back of his head. "What am I doing back at home, exactly?"
Mary and Rudy exchange unreadable looks, their faces gradually sombering. Wally can't explain the uneasy feeling in his stomach, and that doesn't exactly do wonders for his comfort.
"Sweetheart," Mary finally says in a voice sounding significantly older and heavier than he remembers. "This is probably going to be a lot to take in, but…"
"Actually, Wally…" Rudy continues for her when she has to gulp down an emotion that makes Wally's insides go cold even though he can't quite identify it. "I think maybe you ought to sit down."
That is, arguably, the precise moment that Wally realizes, with a swiftly sinking heart, that something is incredibly, irreparably wrong.
He thumps his foot incessantly on the floor for what feels like a few seconds short of eternity, evaluating the new cell phone in his hand with furrowed eyebrows. He has to roll his eyes at least six times before he finally hits the "dial" button.
It rings three times, each one of them making him increasingly tense. Finally, there's a click, and he straightens up.
"Nguyen residence," a voice drawls.
"Hi, Jade," he greets, and then grimaces – too familiar. "Uh, I mean, Cheshire. This is… Wally."
There's a pause.
"I'm sorry; I don't know anyone by that name."
He scowls.
"Kid Flash?" he tries again, and she hums negatively. "Your sister's boyfriend?"
When he receives no response, he grits his teeth and slumps.
"The Ginger Disaster?" he grinds out.
"Oh, right, you," Jade replies. "That's right. You're alive now. Well, congrats on your survival, Freckles. I'm sure the world is just bursting with jubilation. How's your hand? I heard it got a little banged-up on the landing."
"Is Artemis there?" he asks shortly, ignoring her question.
"Now why would Artemis be with me when she could be with you?" Jade coos. "After all, she was soexcited after you came prancing on back through that tube thing—"
"A-ha!" he exclaims, pointing at nothing. "She is there, isn't she."
"Maybe she is; maybe she isn't." Jade's voice remains serene. "But if she was, then I can safely say that anyone stupid enough to try crowding in here and bothering her would come out of the experience with significantly fewer limbs. You feel me, Flash Boy?"
Wally gulps against his will, the nickname that had once incensed him going straight over his head.
"Look, I just want to talk to her," he says in a tone frighteningly close to a whine. "Please. It took meforever to find this number and I just… I don't know. Hearing her voice would be – nice."
"Aw, precious." Jade's sneer shines through the speaker. "If you were here right now, I'd be pinching your little cheeks. But the fact is, she's not ready to see you yet. Give her some space. She might come around."
When he doesn't respond, she huffs.
"I'm sure she'll want to," she adds. "Eventually. So just be patient. I know how hard it must be for you and your obnoxious speedster processing pace, but I'm sure you'll pull through."
Wally blinks in astonishment.
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
Jade snorts. "Cherish it, because I'm tempted to make it a one-time offer. Frankly, Wallace, seeing you right now would probably give her a heart attack, and I'd really prefer my baby sister live long enough for at least sixty more babysitting sessions."
"Okay… fine," Wally mutters, scrubbing a hand over his face. "Just tell me; is she – is she okay?"
There's a short silence. Wally is slightly concerned that Jade isn't responding with derisive laughter or an off-the-cuff retort.
"Hardly," she replies at last in a falsely airy voice. "But what do you expect? I mean, really. I've known ever since I decided not to kill you for the first time that you're stupid, kid, but if you really think she's going to be fine, then you've knocked all of my expectations out of the park."
"Excuse me for wanting to talk to my girlfriend after I've apparently been dead for a year," he snaps without being able to stop himself. "Excuse me for asking how she's doing. I get that you don't like me; okay? I don't care. Just take…" He runs his fingers through his hair and flops back onto his bed, staring at the ceiling. "Just… take good care of her."
Jade hums unreadably.
"See, that's your problem," she says. "I like you just fine, Flash Boy. Why do you think you've lasted this long?"
Wally opens his mouth, bewildered, to reply, but she continues talking over him.
"But okay." She sighs briskly. "Consider it done. As long as you do not call me ever again. The only time I want to see your face is when my sai is a few inches away from it, and the only time I want to hear your voice is when it's begging me for your life. Got it?"
"Whatever," he grumbles, but then, "Thanks."
"I'm not doing it for you," she replies simply. "Welcome back to the world of the living, buddy boy. I wish you the best of luck."
She mocks blowing a kiss, and hangs up.
"You broke into my apartment so you could steal your dog back," Zatanna deadpans into the phone. "I should have you arrested."
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't," Artemis grunts back as she shoulders open the door to her apartment. She releases Brucely's leash and he goes flailing inside with a thrilled loll of his tongue and a whuff of joy.
She glances around the apartment, putting her free hand into her pocket and closing the door behind her. Somehow, facing down its dreariness (excluding Bart's little string of lights over the couch) quells the churning in her stomach.
"So you're back at your place now?" Zatanna asks her a bit testily. "Are you, like, officially coming out of hiding, or what?"
"Yeah," Artemis mutters, slumping against the wall. "Jade didn't… kick me out, exactly, but she said that six days was enough cowering time and I needed to get over myself."
"Does he know where you live?" Zatanna's voice is soft.
Artemis grimaces. "Let's hope not."
"I don't get it," Zatanna murmurs. "This is what you've been wanting for months, Artemis. This is, like… this is the happiest ending you could get. He's not even dead. He's literally been chilling out at his parents' house for days. I just saw him yesterday, and he…"
Her voice hitches. "He looks… fine."
"Yeah, well, kinda hard to make room for somebody who you've spent the last year of your life getting used to not seeing or hearing or talking about," Artemis snaps. "I gotta go, Zee."
"Artemis—" Zatanna starts to say, but Artemis hangs up.
She nudges her suitcase more fully into the room with her foot. One of Gotham's famous summer rainstorms is hurtling down outside, its thick, warm droplets thundering against her windows. Brucely shakes the water out of his fur and trots into the kitchen, no doubt to try to find his food dish.
Artemis runs a hand over her face. It feels like she's rubbing herself raw. Some thunder growls in the distance and the rain seems to respond by coming down harder.
Her fingers halt at her shoulder and she realizes that she's hugging herself. With a sigh, she lets her arms drop and moves to pick up her suitcase and carry it into the bedroom.
Before she can, however, there's a knock at the door.
She freezes, one hand poised stiffly over the handle of the suitcase, and stares out the window at the rain. She knows that there's no possible way she could guess who's on the other side of the door, but something in her ribs and in her lungs and in her throat works its way into a name that makes her knees feel like they're about to give out.
She stands perfectly still, in the deluded hopes that he'll assume he has the wrong apartment and move on. But knuckles tap against the wood again, knowingly, and she has to gulp down the lump rising at the back of her mouth.
"Coming," she hears herself say, slowly straightening up.
The doorknob feels freezing in her hand when she grasps it and turns it. With movement that she's entirely sure is not her own, she tugs the door open, stepping slightly back, and looks up.
Her heart bolts down to her knees.
Wally is standing in the hallway, holding something in one hand, utterly sopping. His hair dribbles water onto his nose and his sweatshirt clings to him uncomfortably, and his skin doesn't seem to have much color. He's breathing a bit heavily, as though winded.
"Hi," he says.