Tempest: Chapter Twenty-Four: Selective Information
The shrapnel was starting to sting when Amara left Oliver's bunker, almost running into Green Arrow himself and Black Canary on her way out, and it was only through employing some very swift maneuvers that she managed to make her getaway unseen.
But was she really trying to run away from her mentor and GA?
Amara passed under a lamppost as the sun began to set slowly in the sky, her jacket shielding her injuries from sight, which was a good thing, because Amara didn't really want to have to explain why someone would be walking around with shrapnel in them so far from where the bombing had been.
She took another right, practically feeling the last of her adrenaline wearing off and the pain of her injuries taking its place.
Why hadn't she just dropped Roy off at the equipment cache and left? But Amara would never have done that, it wasn't in her nature to leave Roy behind without making sure he was safe (and the irony wasn't lost on her being the one who had disappeared without a trace and subsequently shot her own partner).
Amara punched the correct code to enter a small apartment complex, making her way inside, taking the stairs rather than the elevator, and action she later regretted with just how many stairs she found herself climbing in order to avoid being seen by others in the elevator. It was exhausting and the apartment complex wasn't exactly in the best working condition, but that was probably why Roy had chosen it to house his own equipment cache.
She tapped the second code into the door, entering and hastily shutting the door behind her, a move that jarred her injuries and made her grit her teeth as she stumbled towards the metal table and chair against the wall where the medical supplies were located. It was a good thing that Roy had a tendency to over-prepare.
Amara shrugged the jacket off with difficulty, looking down at herself to assess her injuries. It was safe to say that between her and Roy, she had taken the brunt of the blast and it was probably going to be easier to dress the wounds if she took the shirt off completed rather than just holding it up.
The wounds burned as she pulled off the loose shirt in order to see the extent of her injuries more fully. The largest piece was embedded in her abdomen by a good inch, everything else appeared to be rather small in comparison, but the bruises had been given enough time to form in the time it had taken her to get Roy to Oliver's equipment cache and dress his wounds.
Bombs…Amara was going to give Cupid a serious shock when she saw her again, –if she ever did see her again– she was going to deliver a sharp shock to her central nervous system. If Amara had to deal with another bomb anytime soon, it would be too soon.
She grabbed up the medical tweezers and wrenched out the first piece of shrapnel, biting down harshly on her lip to keep from crying out.
Roy's message had been very cryptic, so Wally had been almost completely certain that it had to do with Amara (when didn't it? Roy was going half out of his mind looking for his partner) so he had taken a Zeta-tube to Star City, arriving rather soon after Dick who had his shades over his eyes and there was a distinct frown on his lips.
"What's wrong?" Wally couldn't help but ask as they rounded the sidewalk together to come to the apartment complex address that Roy had left them with, but before Dick could respond, they'd caught sight of Roy leaning against the elevator's side, clearly waiting for them to show up and both of the younger sidekicks had to stop and stare.
Roy was still wearing his arm in a sling, though he was due to get it off rather soon, but it didn't account for the new bruising and the way he was careful about moving too much.
"Dude! What happened?" Wally demanded as they all made their way into the elevator.
"You look terrible," Dick added, eyebrows raising over his shades. And he did.
"Painkillers would be nice," Roy grunted in agreement, "but too busy for that."
"Too busy?" Wally repeated flummoxed. "What're you talking about?"
"There was a bomb on South Street," Roy informed them both, "Amy knocked me down about the time it went off and then dragged me off to one of Ollie's equipment caches."
"You saw her?!"
Dick wasn't sure he'd ever heard Wally's voice go quite so high, but an eagerness had lit those green eyes of his and it dawned on Dick that this was the first time he'd had a legitimate lead on his cousin's whereabouts since her abrupt disappearance.
"She's Masquerade," Dick added, "it's not like he didn't have a run-in with her before."
Roy scowled. "There's no way that was her! She shot me!"
"It was definitely her," Dick snorted, "I ran into her literally yesterday, she dropped the accent for a second."
"Tell me she kicked your butt."
Dick gave his best friend a glower that nearly had him cackling and Roy rolled his eyes. "I managed to put a tracker on her when she wasn't looking, but I don't think she really cared about that."
"Why not?" Dick asked, his brow furrowed as the elevator dinged and they stepped off to make their way down the hallway before punching the code into the door and swinging it open, allowing three pairs of eyes to stare at what lay within.
"Admit it," Amara said, holding medical tweezers in one hand, the end of which was clutched a bloody piece of metal, "this is not the worst position you've caught me in."
Wally immediately slammed his hand over his eyes and Dick coughed uncomfortably. "God, Amy! Why aren't you wearing a shirt?!" To his credit, Roy didn't seem all that surprised; he had sewed up some of Andy's wounds before just like she had for him. ("It'll be good practice," Dinah had assured them both.)
Amara, on the other hand, looked rather unperturbed, despite wearing only a bra to cover her modesty. "And make it more difficult to stitch up myself? No thanks."
The red gem dangling from her ear swung with every movement of her head and Dick couldn't quite accept her with red hair. The black suited her better, but not as much as the grey. And he could see a circular scar in her side which must have come from Roy's arrow, as well as a few similar ones in her chest that were from Merlyn's violent attack, but those marks were faint discolorations against her skin. The thing that captured Dick's interest the most was the dark pink branching scar over her chest almost in a fern-like formation.
"What is that?" he asked, startled at the sight of it.
Amara looked down at her chest, a bit flummoxed. "Oh, it's a Lichtenberg Figure," she said in a manner that said she clearly thought that explained everything, "you know, fractal scarring? Or I guess you could also call it 'lightning flowers' I think it's prettier that way."
But Amara had never been one for pretty, so Dick settled for staring at her dubiously.
"They're caused by the rupture of capillaries under the skin due to the passage of the lightning current or the shock wave from the lightning discharge as it flashes over the skin," Wally added, his explanation carefully recalled from his memory and Dick got the feeling he had looked it up back when Amara had first been adopted by his uncle. "They're not usually permanent but it's not like the human body can sustain the amount of voltage Amy took from Weather Wizard when she was eight."
Amara gave him a blinding smile. "Oh, I missed you, Walls. No one understands my sciency talk like you."
"Where've you been?" Wally demanded of her, surging forward a few steps only to draw short before he came close enough to touch her, typical in the usual big brother fashion.
Amara shrugged, only to wince at the jarring movement, dropping the piece of metal she had carefully pulled out of her skin, placing the medical tweezers on the table to reach for the needle and suture thread to suture her open wound shut. "Here, there, everywhere. Trained with an assassin for awhile, stole from people for awhile, got myself a safe house, you know, normal girl stuff."
Dick smacked himself in the forehead at the nonchalance her words held, but he couldn't say he'd really been surprised.
"You are Masquerade, aren't you?" Roy asked, a distinctly annoyed frown on his lips at the mere thought.
She gave him a sheepish smile. "A girl's got to make a living."
Roy mouthed wordlessly for a moment before his tongue managed to work correctly. "You shot me!" he snapped, incensed.
"It was a through and through," Amara said, arching an eyebrow as she looked from his arm in its sling to his face. "It's practically healed, anyways."
And Dick couldn't help but think of when Roy had been absolutely certain that Masquerade wasn't Amy because his partner wouldn't shoot him. And here his partner was, admitting to it rather shamelessly. He sniggered with Wally.
"You shot me!"
Amara slid back slightly in her seat, both of her eyebrows rising on her forehead in her surprise at his response. "Chill, Arrowhead," she said, "it's not that big of a deal."
"Not the big of a—?" Roy spluttered and Dick couldn't help but be impressed how quickly Amara had made him lose his cool, but it was hardly surprising; she was the one that knew him best.
Amara ignored him in favor of threading the needle and sewing the broken flesh back together and she hardly winced; Dick wondered how many times she'd had to do it herself.
"Let me do it," he suggested, watching her fumble with tying the thread off so it didn't unravel and Amara relinquished her materials to him and he dragged a chair over to sit beside her. "You're probably going to end up breaking something."
"Aw, that's so sweet, Robin," Amara said in a simpering voice, fluttering her eyelashes towards him, which made the other two snort for good measure. "Offering to stitch me up, so romantic!"
"I'm going to stick you with this needle," Dick promised, "painfully."
She grinned feral-like. "Bring it. Remember who was the one that kicked your ass with my batons—ow, ow! What're you doing? Sticking me on purpose, you sadist?"
Dick pulled the next piece of metal out. "Don't whine."
"Next time you get shrapnel in your chest I'm gonna tell you not to whine, little bird, and see how you like it," Amara muttered, wrinkling her nose and Dick could smell the flowers filtering through his nostrils.
"Can you not do that?"
"Do what?" Amara asked flummoxed as Roy leaned against the wall and Wally perched on the edge of the table.
"That flower thing you do now," Dick said vaguely and Amara grinned widely.
"Oh, you mean the pheromones," she corrected, "pretty cool, right?"
"Pheromones?" Wally and Roy said as one.
"It's distracting," Dick admitted wryly and Amara's grin grew impossibly wide and Wally leaned forward with an interested glint in his eye.
"Oh, yeah?" he waggled his eyebrows and Roy groaned.
Amara appeared bemused and Dick wished he could feel the same.
Explaining everything took more time than Amara would care to admit, perhaps it would be better to say explaining everything that she felt safe enough to. She didn't tell them everything she stole, she didn't tell them that she'd partnered with Cheshire, she didn't tell them where she and Cheshire had trained together, she didn't tell them about the safe house at Sea Isle City, she didn't tell them.
She didn't tell them a lot, and it sat in her stomach like a lump of lead.
She didn't even tell them about her skill in chloro-kinesis –barring the bit about pheromones, she couldn't get out of explaining that–, even though it was rather negligible at this point. Amara trusted her friends so much, there was no denying that, but there were some things she didn't even know how they would react to. What would they say if she told them that Poison Ivy was at the top of her list for possible chloro-kinetic individuals that her mother could be? Having a villain for a father was bad enough, but having two? Maybe it was Amara's own insecurity keeping her from opening her mouth and spilling out her soul, but either way, she kept those thoughts to herself once all her injuries were sewed shut and healing slowly but still faster than the average human being.
"Well, I'm glad you're back," Wally told her shortly once she'd finished with her abridged explanation (and managed to get the shirt back on so as not to make her friends uncomfortable), throwing an arm over her shoulders where she didn't have any small stitches. As it was, she had six set of stitches compared to Roy's nine, but his weren't as deep since she'd bodily thrown him out of the way of most of the blast. "Uncle B and Aunt I miss you a lot."
Amara's smile faltered. "I miss them too."
Dick had her wrist in his hand, fiddling with the bracelet that kept her from being tracked by the micro-trackers still filtering through her blood.
"I miss everyone," she sighed, "being on the run isn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds."
She leaned head against his shoulder tiredly and with the red hair they looked more like brother sister.
"I'll buy you a ton of raspberry muffins," Wally promised and Amara allowed a smile to grace her lips, even as her eyes remained closed.
"All right, I'm done," Dick said, letting go of the arm he'd been holding as he investigated the bracelet.
"Any luck?" Roy asked and Dick was sure he wasn't the only one that noticed he'd positioned himself to be able to see them all clearly and any possible attacks.
"No dice," Dick said with a sigh, "the internal workings are almost completely eroded, I give it maybe a couple of hours before it stops working all together, and then…"
"Face-off with daddy-dearest," Amara said, opening her eyes to stare blankly at the floor. "Well, something to look forward to."
But was that a flicker of doubt in her eyes?
It was relatively easy to sneak out of the equipment cache, especially since Roy had had to run back to Queen Manor before Oliver and Dinah started questioning a bit too much and Dick had to return to Gotham because Bruce would notice if he was gone too long, and that left Wally to linger as long as he possibly could before promising to be back as soon as he could, but he had a curfew.
Amara hadn't realized just how much she missed her friends' presences until they'd gone. She'd missed Wally the most, Wally with his green eyes bright and his splash of freckles across his nose (when they were younger Amara had once connected them with a red marker while he slept and he retaliated by drawing lightning bolts all over hers), with his love for science, with his tendency to drop anything to spend time with her.
She pulled her jacket carefully over her shirt and the stitches didn't pull too much, so they must have been healing pretty well, but Amara didn't have time to really worry about that, the time until the bracelet broke was getting shorter and shorter and Amara was getting a feeling like there was a loud ticking of a clock echoing inside her skull and it did nothing to soothe her nerves.
The sun was just barely peeking over the horizon when Amara made her way to the hidden Zeta-tube. She was certain that her designation had a trigger on it so that if she used it the Justice League would know in seconds, and while Amara was all about the Justice League, she knew that they'd rather lock her in a box than let her settle her differences with her biological father.
Justice or vengeance?
She shook her head and ripped out the wiring in order to hotwire the Zeta-tube, tapping her fingers lightly against the keyboard until the scanner activated, authorizing her as a guest.
"Recognize: Elisa Jäger, A04," the computerized voice said before Amara disappeared, only to reappear in the center of Gotham.
New Jersey was three hours ahead of California, so Amara was rather unsurprised to find the sun a bit higher in the sky than she'd seen it in Star City. But still, it was rather early, so the chances of being seen by anyone were rather slim.
Amara closed her eyes, moving her hands slowly in a circular manner that wouldn't have looked amiss with turning cogs. A crease formed between her brows as the air around her condensed, thickening and forming into clouds with a bit of effort and Amara's legs balanced on them easily before directing her body upwards, disappearing into the clouds above as she made her way towards Sea Isle City.
It was a good hour away from Gotham –and for good reason– by car, less by motorcycle, and even more so by air, so Amara was making good time when she found herself hovering high in the air above the spot where the safe house was located.
Cloud control had never been the easiest thing for her, and she'd been the first to admit that. Her specialty had been more of utilizing her lightning in offense, and sometimes in defense (but those tended to backfire with Amara going flying via a minor explosion caused by using the lightning as a shield, which usually ended with Roy laughing at her and telling her she should have just gotten out of the way), creating clouds was one thing but managing to remain atop them for extended amounts of time wasn't something she had really been very good at until Jade had forced her to remain in the air for hours upon hours, sometimes with only fear of serious injury keeping her on her wavering cloud.
For that, Amara was glad that Jade was so harsh. Dinah was a great mentor but she was also protective and Jade hadn't been afraid to break Amara's boundaries and push her to her limits.
But Amara really missed Dinah, she was far easier to be around than Jade and Amara really would rather wear the dark new Storm Chaser outfit than the red one that Masquerade preferred.
Amara dropped out of the sky, her descent rather sharp and fast, only slowing a few times to keep her from impacting against the sand with a speed great enough to fracture bones.
The sand curled around her shoes as her feet sand slightly into it by landing in the sand just as a wave crashed against the shore, but Amara didn't mind, breathing in the scent of the sea water in the air.
She liked the safe house well enough, but she still missed the grass and the flowers and the climbing tree outside the window of her room back in Central City. It was cool in New Jersey right now but she was sure that it was warm in Central City and Amara missed the warmth.
She missed her parents more, though. She missed Barry's laughter and Iris' cozy hugs. She missed going to work with Pamela and Sandra. She missed patrol with Roy and late night calls to her friends.
She missed a lot of things.
Amara sighed, traipsing up the stairs, stopping before taking them up to stoop and pull open a trap door and disappear inside.
The beach house wasn't much suited for her needs, she'd be the first to admit it, though it was very nice, that didn't stop it from being very open. Dinah's idea of a good safe house was one without windows, and, sadly, the beach house had those.
Luckily for Amara, Melanie Archer's ex-husband had been something of a fanatic and had actually had a sort of bomb shelter built, which Amara used to her advantage (though there was no denying the trap door might've been better suited directly under the house, there was no changing its location).
Amara slid down the ladder to land on light feet.
The only glow from the room came from a precariously swinging lamp hooked to the ceiling and the screen of her laptop that she had hooked up.
It was rather bare, but it wasn't as though Amara had much equipment to start with. Amara strode over to the desk to pull the rucksack out from under it, drawing out the dark uniform that she hadn't dared to don since her abrupt disappearance from Central City.
More like she'd been too afraid to.
Another crack appeared on the bracelet and Amara stiffened glowering down at it before taking a deep breath and calming her nerves. Masquerade was all nerve, unafraid to challenge any security measures that kept her from her prize, but Storm Chaser was fraught with nerves and uncertainty. It was true that the patrol she'd gone on with Artemis had nothing go wrong, but Amara still worried.
Her father was a very powerful man, even if his powers came –for the most part– from that wand of his, and Amara certainly didn't like to be on the receiving end of his attacks.
She rubbed her chest self-consciously. Amara wished she'd had the same gall and arrogance that she'd had as a child, racing after her father and believing herself strong enough to stop him, but she knew better know, and she doubted.
But Mark Mardon hadn't seen her in years and he knew less about her strengths and weaknesses, being out of her life for so long (for which Amara was glad). She could hold on her own and she was sure with the other Star City heroes she could manage it. She didn't need to fight this battle on her own.
In a matter of seconds, Amara was dressed in the dark outfit, strapping her batons securely against her thighs before removing the earring from her lobe, returning her locks to their wild grey.
Storm Chaser drew the dark mask over her eyes. "Time to get to work," she said.
Storm Chaser would show Weather Wizard what an atmo-kinetic meta-human with a distrust of villains was capable of.
