Tempest: Chapter Six: Consequences
Iris stepped into the hospital room that had been set aside for Amara at the Hall of Justice, just across the hall from the one holding Roy who was still unconscious from whatever had occurred during his time missing in action.
"Ow-ow-ow!"
Amara was scowling at the doctor that had finished setting her broken arm and Iris couldn't help but sag in relief at the sight of her daughter looking for the most part uninjured. Her eyes roved over Amara's visible injuries; she could see the broken arm clearly, as well as a few cuts and bruises to the side of her face, and a taped rib under her shirt.
"Amara Pamela Allen," Iris said in exasperation as she strode forward and Amara –understandably– winced as she grinned sheepishly towards her.
"Hey, Mom…long time no see," Amara said in what she clearly thought was a voice to win over her mother.
"Don't take that tone with me," Iris reproached as she came forward to inspect Amara, touching her cheeks lightly where the skin was unbroken and unbruised. "You're in so much trouble."
Amara grimaced again at that. "How big're we talking? Like—?"
"Huge," Iris supplied. "Massive, colossal."
Amara braced herself for the dam to break.
"What were you thinking?" Iris demanded. "Ten years old and running off to find your friend without a word to your father or I! Do you have any idea how worried we were?"
Amara recoiled on the hospital bed in the face of her mother's anger. Iris' eyes held a fire she had hardly seen before, the one that was usually only present when she yelled at her husband when he returned home after a battle, his injuries still healing.
"I understand how much you wanted to find Roy," Iris continued (being one of a number that knew Speedy's true identity). "And I understand why you felt the need to try to find him, but Amara you are only ten years old, you can't just run off into the darkness on your own! What if something terrible had happened to you?"
Her daughter chewed on the corner of her lower lip, undoubtedly trying to come up with a suitable response to Iris' words, but in the end she didn't seem to come up with one.
"Sorry," she muttered out, her eyes shifting awkwardly away from her mother.
Iris deflated slightly, releasing a sigh as she did so. She knew Amara was sorry, she could see it on her face; the green-eyed sidekick wasn't as adept at hiding her feelings as she believed.
The red-haired reporter cupped her daughter's cheeks gingerly and leaned forward to press a kiss to her uninjured forehead.
"I know you're sorry, sweetie, but that doesn't make it any better," she said, her eyes soft. "Don't you ever scare us like that again, alright?"
"I promise," Amara said, and the sincerity in her tone couldn't have been faked.
Iris embraced her gently, keeping a wary eye on where her injuries were so that she wouldn't aggravate them. "You're grounded," she told her once she'd released her grip on the metahuman. "No missions for two and a half months."
Amara opened her mouth, gaping at her mother in horror. No missions for two and a half months? That was the worst sort of punishment she could give Amara! No kicking villains butts with Black Canary or driving Roy's motorbike as he fired arrows at their enemies (Oliver had been the one to teach her to drive one with the promise of buying her her own when she was older, which she assumed to be around the age of fourteen or fifteen, going off of when Roy got his) or throwing off bolts of lightning that shocked their enemies.
But then she drew short at the look her mother was giving her, the one that clearly said that she deserved the punishment she was getting and if she complained, it could only get worse, and Iris was the more lenient of the two; Barry would have probably upped it to six months.
"Can she come home with us?" Iris asked the doctor that had set Amara's broken arm and cleaned her cuts.
The woman lifted her eyes from the clipboard she had been inspecting to give off the impression that she wasn't listening in on the conversation between mother and daughter. "We'd like to keep her overnight, if that's alright with you," the doctor said, "she received a concussion in the explosion and we want to keep an eye on it."
"Can I stay in Roy's room?" Amara asked immediately, her green eyes pleading towards her mother who automatically wanted to say no, because she knew how much rest Amara needed and if she was in the same room as Roy (definitely in very separate beds) she would try to keep herself up just to keep an eye on him than get any rest of her own. But Amara would be even less likely to do so if she was kept in another room.
"We can move another cot into his room," the doctor offered, "as long as his IV drip isn't disturbed…and a doctor can check on them every half hour to make sure everything is alright."
The latter part was directed towards Iris and flew entirely over Amara's head.
She gave them both an odd look. "Roy's not going to do anything to me…he's unconscious…"
Iris gave her a smile and swept a stray strand of Amara's grey hair behind one ear. "Fine," she said at long last and Amara pumped one fist in excitement before abruptly wincing and Iris gave a sigh of exasperation.
The constant beeping of the heart monitor was entirely too irksome on Roy's seemingly heightened senses…he blamed whatever drugs he'd been shot up with.
Roy peeled his eyes open at long last, grateful that the room he was in was dark and he released a sharp sigh of relief at the sight of the Justice League symbol painted onto the wall. He didn't know where he'd been for how long he'd been gone, but he did know he'd missed being home.
He'd missed Green Arrow and Black Canary's shameless flirting and how Amara always cocked an eyebrow but didn't comment on it. He'd missed hearing the jibe of "Arrowhead" that was always followed by "Storm Warning". He'd missed how his adoptive father ruffled his hair and smiled when he did something that impressed him.
Roy blinked a few times to clear the haze over his eyes and leaned forward slightly before noticing how his body felt like lead and leaning back once more. And this was when he noticed the weight on top of his hand.
He lifted his eyes to look to it in surprise.
A smaller hand rested lightly on it, outstretched from the bed beside his, one finger hooked around his hand so as to keep the hand locked on his while its owner slept on.
Her grey hair was spilling across her face, looking more spiky and less poofy than it had been when they first met ("You look like you've been playing with an electric socket." "Oh, stuff it, Arrowhead."), but her hair couldn't hide the purpling bruises mottling her face in conjunction with a number of cuts, and the blanket that had been thrown over her didn't hide the new cast on her arm.
On the opposite side of the bed was Amara's father still wearing his Flash uniform only with the cowl drawn back to expose his head of blonde hair as he slept with his arms crossed loosely, leaning back slightly in his chair.
Roy turned to his opposite side to discover he too had someone watching over him.
Oliver was slumped against his hospital bed, his face hidden by his arms, but Roy knew that he was far too tense to be sleeping as Barry was.
The red-haired archer released a loud sigh and Oliver raised his head, his exposed face lined with relief as he saw his adoptive son and sidekick awake.
"Roy," he murmured, and Roy knew that was more to keep the Allens from awakening beside him than for the red-head's own benefit. "You're awake."
"I know," Roy said annoyed, but his voice didn't quite make it. It was a croaky rasp from disuse and Roy could practically hear Amara crowing in his head about it ("I know your voice is supposed to crack, but I don't think it's supposed to crack that much!").
Oliver's mustache twitched as he smiled. "At least your attitude is still intact."
Roy would've glared at the man if the act of doing so wouldn't give him a headache and then he looked back to Amara who was still fast asleep. She looked younger than he remembered, but maybe that was because he hadn't seen her with so many injuries at one time.
"What happened to her?" he asked quietly.
For a moment there was a tense silence in which Oliver considered how his sidekick would respond to the truth of the matter.
"She got those breaking you out," he said and Roy's head predictably snapped towards him and he stared at him wide-eyed.
She liked him, sure, he'd known that for awhile, after all, Amara had told him she only had two friends, him and her cousin, but to go off and risk her life to find him…that wasn't the careful and methodical Amara Allen that he remembered.
"And you let her?" Somehow the idea of Oliver just letting a ten year old Metahuman with a tendency to shock people into unconsciousness (whether by accident or on purpose remained to be seen) go off on her own seemed very unlikely, even given how lax Oliver could be.
Oliver snorted at the thought. "Don't be ridiculous," he scoffed, "she was MIA for two weeks before she met up with me, and the only reason she broke you out was because she was the only one small enough to fit through the air duct without detection."
Amara was very flexible, her movements fluid like a cat (Roy wondered if she'd met Catwoman), and her small size was certainly a plus. He'd lost count how many times they'd used her size to their advantage, which usually involved Amara causing a distraction behind their enemies.
"The hospital we found you in was abandoned," Green Arrow told him, causing his thoughts to shift to the present once more, "and wired to explode. Amy tripped the explosion when she grabbed you and threw both of you out the window."
Roy stared at him like he'd only just seen his adoptive father clearly since he'd awakened.
"She…tripped explosives…knowing she was tripping explosives?" Roy asked blankly.
"Well," the corner of Oliver's lips twisted upwards slightly, "Dinah hasn't gotten into defusing bombs yet in her training."
"What a travesty," Roy remarked dryly as Amara shifted in her cot, a crease forming between her eyes as she slept on, though it was difficult to tell if it was from her dream or from the broken arm set in a cast that she was currently sleeping on.
Roy hid a wince; that couldn't feel good.
"She's going to have almost three months to work on it."
"What're you talking about?" Roy gave him a look of confusion at those words.
"She's been grounded for going MIA," Oliver said, leaning back in his seat. "No missions for two and a half months."
That was…disappointing.
Roy scowled as he looked back to his friend still in the throes of sleep. The little idiot.
It was three weeks into Amara's exile and one week since Roy had been released from the Justice League's medical ward declared at full health.
There hadn't been hardly a peep from Amara, which wasn't so uncommon, considering how she was sometimes unnervingly quiet. She'd blubbered over him when she'd awoken that day in the hospital room and Roy had patted her back awkwardly, trying not to aggravate her arm.
"Don't you ever get kidnapped again," she'd warned.
"You're just saying that 'cause you're the one that's grounded," he'd retorted and she'd jabbed him sharply in the ribs with one finger.
So Roy found himself outside the house that he could only assume was the Allens; Dinah had texted it to him without much of an explanation.
He looked at the box in his hands and sighed. Storm Warning was making him soft, he swore. She was like a viral fungus that literally grew on you and you couldn't get rid of…and he had a feeling she'd snigger at that analogy.
He knocked twice on the crimson door, wondering if the Flash had this thing about his signature color, and then the door opened to expose Amara Allen.
The cuts and bruises that had once covered a good portion of her face had faded and healed, but her arm was still in a sling. And her hair was black.
Roy couldn't accept it.
"I don't like the hair," he told her before anything else could be said.
Amara blinked in surprise before bursting out laughing, as if that was the thing she'd least expected from him.
"Well, the grey hair is kind of my trademark," she sniggered, raising a hand to the single earring dangling from her right lobe, a silver chair ending in a swinging small ruby. "Dad got it for me from Zatara; it was red first, but I decided I liked black better."
Roy considered her, trying to imagine her with red hair and he just couldn't.
He must've made a face because Amara giggled as she opened the door wider to let him in, and that was when her eyes caught the box in his arms.
"What'cha got?" Green eyes went wide. "Ooh! Raspberry muffins!"
A kickass Bird of Prey might've mentioned Amara's love of raspberries to Roy as a backhanded way of saying "She's grounded because she went after your sorry ass, so the least you can do is bring her something with her favorite food in it."
She shut the door and grabbed the box from him in an awkward manner that had more to do with the fact that her arm was in a sling than it was broken.
Roy chanced a look around the Allens house with mild interest. It was nothing like Oliver's place, that was for sure, but it was very homey.
There was a fireplace that was alight and flickering to stave off the cold brought on by winter and there were a number of pictures adorning the room, some with Amara's mother and father, some with all three Allens, and some with a red-haired boy with green eyes like Amara's and two people that must have been his parents, and there was one with Amara and the red-haired boy sitting with an older couple, all four all smiling.
"Grandparents?" he guessed, looking back at her in time to catch her removing a muffin and taking a generous bite out of it.
"Nope," Amara said once she'd swallowed, "Henry Allen died in prison and Nora Allen was murdered, and Mom's parents were in a car crash a few years before she and Dad met me."
Roy stared at her. "Wow."
Amara snorted humorlessly. "Wait until you find out who my biological father is," she said, but she didn't elaborate. "Anyways, those are the Garricks, Jay and Joan, they're kinda like me and Wally's grandparents…kinda." She squinted at him for good measure.
Wally…that was her cousin. Roy remembered her mentioning him…actually, she talked about him a lot; he was her closest friend on top of being her cousin after all.
"I'm not very good at making friends," he told her and she tilted her head slightly in a cat-like manner (he swore the day she met Catwoman was the day he called quits on his career as a Leaguer).
"That's 'cause you've got a stick up your butt," she informed him and his mouth gaped at her. "Once you get past that, you're pretty fine."
"Stick up my butt?" he repeated dubiously, shortly followed by, "Pretty fine? What d'you mean pretty fine?"
Amara waved her hand carelessly. "We've all got problems, Arrowhead, some of us just choose to wear ours on the inside."
Roy's eye twitched and the rest of her giggles were hidden as she swallowed a bit more of her muffin, her eyes glancing over him as though searching for something unseen, something that would say he wasn't quite healed from his kidnapping, but she didn't find anything.
"How are you?" she asked, fixing him with a look that he wasn't familiar with.
"Fine," Roy said evasively, but Amara cocked an eyebrow at that, not believing him for a second. "I'm doing better," he then acquiesced and Amara accepted that response better.
"What about you?"
The metahuman blinked as he gestured towards her arm in its sling. "I'll be good as new," she promised with a sheepish grin, "the break's not as bad as it seems, and I'm a metahuman, so I'll heal faster than usual." Faster than a typical human, but definitely not faster than Barry; his ability to heal so fast was one of the most aggravating things Amara had come across in her short life. "Better me than you, right?"
Roy's eyebrows drew together in confusion.
"Well, it'd be hard to fire an arrow with a broken arm," Amara had to admit.
She was grinning widely at him and Roy shook his head; she was entirely too cheerful about her injury (and herself in general). What had he done to deserve a partner with such a sunny disposition for their stormy nature?
Christmas was one of the best times of the year, especially in the Allen family. Wally's family and the Garricks would come over for Christmas dinner and then they'd open presents.
Amara hadn't seen Wally since before she'd gone rogue and had only spoken to him over the phone, since she was grounded, and the first thing he did when he saw her was hug her o tightly that she swore she saw stars.
"W-Wally! Can't breathe!" she gasped before her red-haired cousin released her with a sheepish expression and she massaged her ribs for good measure.
"Sorry," he said apologetically, his green eyes frantically taking her in as if she would still have any of her injuries (aside from the broken arm still in a sling). "It's been so boring without you!"
Amara scratched her cheek sheepishly at that with her one good arm. "Sorry," she said, "I'm grounded for another month and a half."
Wally pouted. "You won't get to see me put on the Kid Flash uniform for the first time!" he complained. Wally's thirteenth birthday had come while she was off trying to find Roy, but the uniform was still in the process of being made at S.T.A.R. Labs, so he wasn't yet patrolling the streets with Barry, much to his disappointment.
"I patrol in Star City, Wally," Amara said with a snort as Wally's parents moved past the pair to greet Barry and Iris. "I probably wouldn't see it anyways."
"Aw, don't rain on my parade!"
Amara rolled her eyes for good measure as another car pulled into the driveway, one that she immediately recognized as Jay's.
"Dad! Jay's here!"
She was out the door before her father could utter a reply with Wally at her heels, throwing his arms around Jay, vibrating in excitement as the first Flash caught him easily with a laugh that sounded much younger than the body it belonged to. Amara, on the other hand, went for Joan who gave her a kindly smile that softened her eyes as she carefully embraced the girl she considered to be a granddaughter.
"Hello, Amara," Joan chuckled lightly, "I hear you've been making waves."
Amara's cheeks flushed a red at that. Jay was not so out of the loop that he wouldn't have heard about Amara upping and disappearing in the night, and if Jay knew, then Joan definitely knew.
"Only a few small ones," Amara wheedled, making the older woman chuckle slightly and ruffle the metahuman's hair with one hand, looking around in interest as the cold-whipping wind seemed to avoid them, as did the swirling flurries.
She looked down to Amara who was grinning widely before Joan allowed her to be tugged inside into the warmth.
Dinner was great, heaping piles of food that made Amara's mouth water. The non-speedsters got first pick of food, obviously, because they didn't have such a heightened metabolism as their companions. Wally pouted a bit at that, but he still ate more food than Iris and Amara combined (though still not as much as Barry).
No one mentioned Amara's disappearance, which was the thing she had been worried most about, the verbal chewing out. She had a feeling Uncle Rudy and Aunt Mary would have been the least understanding, given the fact that they themselves were not in the League, but the only brief mention of it was when Amara had been with Joan.
And Amara was glad, especially glad with how understanding her own parents were, because they'd understood even through their anger towards her for disappearing without telling them. Anyone else would have probably kept her off active duty for anywhere to six months to a year.
"Presents!" Wally cried, distracting Amara from her thoughts as he dragged her into the living room by her free arm, where a tree had been set up some weeks ago (Amara had only been able to decorate the bottom half).
The stockings were filled mostly with chocolate and Wally made a face at Amara's dark chocolate, but she liked dark chocolate, it tasted way better than the mild chocolate he liked so much.
And then there was a small pile around her as Wally went about sorting the gift pile at super-speed, much to the exasperation of his parents and the amusement of the speedsters.
The first gift was from Dinah, Amara could tell from the slanting handwriting and she opened it silently, reading the letter taped to it first.
Amy-
Knowing you, you can't wait to be back on active duty, and GA, Speedy, and I miss having you around; I think we're coming to rely on you, if you ask me (Amara smiled at that). I know you aren't one to fall behind in training, but I thought this might help as something you can use offensively and defensively.
-Dinah
Amara's hands roved over the items that lay within and she smiled, feeling the sleek metal of the expandable batons that could undoubtedly form a bo-staff.
It was perfect.
