Tempest: Chapter Twenty-Six: Flowering Suspicions


Being home was different and not entirely what Amara had expected it to be. Coming home was melancholic, like coming out of a dream. But none of it had been a dream, it had all been so very real and now that Amara was home, she couldn't quite stop the memories from flooding through her when Barry opened the door to the house to usher Amara and Iris inside.

And Amara didn't know why, but she froze up on the doorstep, her eyes fixing on the floor, where she'd dropped the pictures her would-be-kidnapper had given her, throwing them at his face in an effort to blind him before rushing up the stairs, trying to get away.

"What, um—" Amara's throat clogged as she tugged on her father's fingers, her eyes fixed on her room on the second floor. "Is there any—?"

She couldn't manage to ask if there was any blood still remaining from when she had shot him.

"Your room is the way it's always been," Barry promised and Iris' fingers smoothed over Amara's tense shoulders, pressing a kiss to the back of her head.

"There's no…blood?" Her green eyes were wide as she tilted her head back to look at Barry and it was a look that made him think of a much younger Amara, her eyes wide and fearful as she asked if her father would be able to find her in the Allens' house.

"No blood," Iris promised behind Amara. "You can go and see…it looks just the same, I promise."

So Amara swallowed her fears and she took to the stairs, climbing them slowly, remembering how fast she'd moved the last time she was on them, but then she was standing before the door, feeling a light shock when she finally managed to grasp the door handle and swing it open.

Her room looked the same as it ever had. The leaf-patterned blanket thrown over her bed that made it look half-neat and half-haphazard (Iris had insisted on it before she joined her for lunch that day), her closet doors were open, the vast array of dark colors with a few lighter ones thrown in hurt Amara's eyes a little (probably because she'd spent far too much time wearing red for the past two months).

Then her eyes fell to the spot where she remembered he had once lain. But there was no mark on the carpeting, like it had just been wiped clean…like it had never happened.

But it had happened and Amara could still remember it like it had just occurred moments previously. She had tried to sink it down in the depths of her subconscious for the past two months, so focused on getting stronger and hiding from Weather Wizard, but now it came bubbling to the surface.

"I think—" her voice caught and she swallowed again, willing the emotion not to betray her and knowing that wish would be ignored. "I think I need to see Dinah."

"Okay, sweetie," Iris said quietly behind her. "I'll call her."

Amara shook like a leaf, and then the movements stilled as she gained control over herself, pulling herself over to sit on the edge of the bed with a closed off expression that Barry had never seen her wear and he couldn't help but share a glance with Iris.


Amara was in Mount Justice in less than an hour. Maybe it was because of just how worried her parents were, or maybe it was because of how she'd reacted to seeing her room, or perhaps even a mixture of the two.

Dinah surveyed her carefully from the seat opposite her. It had felt like an age had passed since she'd last seen her sidekick and the time spent wrangling her biological father had moved entirely too fast that it hardly counted.

But there was something different about Amara, now that she had the meta-human sitting opposite her. Amara had always sat with her legs looped over the armchair's arm, her gaze almost determinedly fixed to the ceiling, making it abundantly clear that she didn't want to be there. But this time it had been as Amara's own request. And Amara was sitting in a perfect lounging position that was artfully tense; it was usually how Dinah sat in public, ready to move in a moment's notice.

"Where do you want to start?" Dinah asked her finally.

"At the beginning, suppose," Amara said, twisting a few strands of her grey hair around her fingers.

"Whatever you like," Dinah responded easily, "we're a bit in the dark about what you were up to for those past two months."

That turned a pair of green eyes on her in surprise. "Wait…you don't know anything about what I was up to?"

"Not particularly," Dinah arched an eyebrow as Amara pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing briefly.

"One moment," the girl said finally, whipping out her phone and making her way out of the room to shut the door behind her, leaving Dinah to stare after her in a bit of confusion.

There was muffled talking from the outside hall, swiftly followed by a loud: "What d'you mean you didn't tell Batman?!"

A moment later Amara reappeared, noticeably more flustered than when she'd left and Dinah arched an eyebrow.

"Friends don't rat out each other to their super-dads," had been Dick's reasoning and while endearing, Amara couldn't help but feel like that was only going to worsen her situation. What a complete dork.

"Sorry," she said to Dinah, "I had to, um, sort some things out."

"Evidently," Dinah said dryly as Amara found her way back to the seat once more. "Would you like to start now, or do you have another call to make?"

This time Amara's cheeks flushed crimson. "No, I'm good," she said, the words almost coming out as a squeak, clearing her throat to make it less obvious. The color from her cheeks fading quickly and her eyes grew distant in thought and memory.

"Oracle is an active presence on BlackNet," she explained, "and I've gotten a few allies by helping people out…one of my contacts had dropped me a warning that someone was trying to find me, and by me, I mean Amara Allen, not Oracle."

"And this contact knew your secret identity?"

Amara winced.

"Amara," Dinah said with a voice full of warning, "there is a reason that those identities are secret."

"I trust her," Amara said stiffly and she did. Jade might have had a lot of flaws, but if there was one thing she knew, it was that Jade didn't have the slightest bit of interest in revealing her identity. Oracle was too valuable an asset to lose (or was it that Amara was too valuable an asset to lose?). "She mentioned to me that she'd heard some rumors about someone looking for me and that was when she left me with the gun." Amara ground her teeth together slightly. "I told her I was a better shot with a crossbow, but she still left it with me."

Dinah leaned forward with interest. Using guns had never been something that she or Oliver had taught their sidekicks to use. Roy preferred arrows to bullets and Amara could throw lightning bolts; they hadn't thought they might need to know any gun safety.

"I was running late," Amara continued, her legs fidgeting until she crossed them. "I was supposed to meet Mom for lunch, but I'd gotten side-tracked, but I was on my way out of the man at the door told me he had something for me that I needed to look at immediately."

"The pictures," Dinah surmised and Amara nodded, running a hand through her hair and knotting at the base of her skull.

"I didn't really have a lot of time to think," Amara acquiesced with a grimace. "He was a lot bigger than me and I wasn't allowed to use my powers at home so I distracted him by throwing the pictures in his face and running upstairs to my room, locking the door behind me. I had the gun in the duffle under my bed –I didn't even think about the crossbow Roy gave me– but before I could grab it, he'd broken through and grabbed me."

Amara rubbed her finger against her thumb with enough friction to make small static sparks appear.

"He got me with a needle—" Amara's fingers probed the spot on the side of her neck where the syringe had penetrated her flesh. "—I managed to get him to drop me for a moment and that was when grabbed the gun."

Amara swallowed thickly and her fingers ceased their friction as she clenched her hand into a tight fist.

"Do you think killing someone makes you a bad person?" she asked Dinah, her eyes large and imploring.

So that was the source of her inner turmoil, and it was certainly understandable. It had never been the Justice League's policy to kill their enemies; capture had always been their goal. And Amara had never killed anyone, not until her hand had been forced and her safety had been threatened.

Dinah couldn't imagine how jarring it was for a twelve year old child to look down to the floor and see a man who had, moments previously, been alive suddenly dead and by her own hand as well.

"If someone was attacking…Wally, and the only way to stop them would be to shoot them, would you do it?"

Amara's eyebrows drew together, showcasing what she thought about the matter, and it was clear that if anyone tried to have a go at her cousin in front of her she would physically pummel them with her fists.

"Yes," she said finally.

"Would you have shot him if you'd had any other choice?" Dinah pressed.

"No," Amara said, propping her head on her hand and rubbing in a circle over her forehead. "I wasn't really aiming," she said, and it almost sounded like she was trying to convince herself rather than Dinah. "I pulled the trigger and then he went down and everything was spinning…"

The hand covered her eyes, so Dinah couldn't quite tell what she was thinking, but she could see her tightness in her jaw and a tension in her legs where they were crossed.

"There is a difference, Amy," she said, "between self-defense and murder. Your attacker might have ended up dead, but you were scared and only reacting."

"I thought you said to only act, never react," Amara said without lifting her hand.

A faint smile adorned Dinah's lips and she allowed herself a small chuckle at her sidekick's words. "That's also true, but that applies to combat on equal ground. You were caught off guard and without your powers. Sometimes reacting is your only option."

Amara sighed and drew her hand back. "He wouldn't be dead if Mardon didn't want me so badly."

Dinah was quick to notice how Amara called the Weather Wizard. Before, she had still called him her father –thus making it confusing about which father she was talking about– but something had changed since then, since the previous battle in Central City. Perhaps Mark Mardon had said something to her whilst she had clung to his back, her arm blinding him.

"That is Mark Mardon's fault, not yours," Dinah promised her, "he has always hated things he can't control, and you were always one of those things."

It wasn't exactly a very cheerful thought.

"Tell me what happened next," Dinah suggested as a way to distract her, but it didn't really help.

"I thought maybe he'd gotten me with something to knock me out, but I was fine, so I tried to get the last of the substance analyzed, and that was when I found out about it being a subcutaneous microtransmitter, but I didn't have any of that counteracting solution that Robin had given me before, so I had to settle for the next best thing."

"Which was?"

"A jamming cuff around my wrist," Amara said, her tone just short of sounding a bit obvious. "Then I packed up my things and headed off for Mount Olympus…"

This was going to be such a long story.


"How screwed are you?"

Amara glared at her laptop's screen as Dick's voice filtered out of the phone's speaker as she perused the BlackNet. Iris was downstairs making dinner and Barry had left to speak with Batman after having a short conversation with Dinah, which didn't bode well at all for her, if you asked Amara, and, unfortunately, Dick wasn't willing to eavesdrop on Bruce for her.

"I've been grounded for a week for becoming a thief," she said with a bit of annoyance, her fingers pausing briefly over the keyboard, "which isn't all that surprising, and given that I've been gone for two months, I think it's probably the lesser of two evils."

"Probably," Dick agreed, "it could have been a disaster, heavy on the dis."

Amara's lips curled into a smile. She had forgotten his use of what the other sidekicks liked to call 'unwords'. "It probably would have been easier to swallow if some people had already known that I was Masquerade."

There was an embarrassed cough on the other end of the phone that came out more like static, but Amara knew what it was. "But thanks, anyways," she added, feeling a warmth in her stomach.

"No problem," Dick said, clearing his throat for a moment. "So, are they keeping you locked in the house, or are you allowed to venture out into the unknown?"

Amara couldn't help but snort. "I'm not confined to the house, if that's what you mean. I've got a job to get back to and I need to check that I still have a job after being gone for two months, and I've fallen behind on my studies again…"

"I'm pretty sure that you're ahead, actually," Dick laughed. "You've spent way too much time doing schoolwork."

"What can I say?" Amara replied with a shrug. "Who's going to complain if I graduate from high school early?"

"Probably your parents, since they'll be the ones paying for college."

"No way! I'm paying for college!" Amara had earned more than enough money to pay for her tuition, especially if she wanted to be a doctor, and it was a high consideration on her list; being a geneticist proved to be the most interesting occupation she had come up with as of yet. Of course, she'd only told Pamela that she was considering ending up as a doctor. There had been a glitter of pride in her eyes that had filled Amara with a warmth she couldn't explain. "Though, they'll probably want me to get rid of the money, since I got it from thieving."

"Probably," Dick agreed.

Her phone gave a beep and she looked to it. "Ah, looks like Roy's calling. Want me to call you back afterwards?"

"Better not," Dick said, "I'm on patrol tonight and tomorrow's the last day of classes."

"Oh, are those still going on?" Amara wouldn't have known, her classes were conducted via laptop and she tended to do them year round at odd hours (she wasn't very organized with her time).

"Just barely," Dick chortled. "Wally got out a week ago so he's been rubbing it in my face."

"Of course he has," Amara muttered to herself before speaking at a proper level, "so, I'll see you around."

"Probably. See you, Amy." Then the connection cut off and Amara had just barely enough time to hit the button to answer Roy's call.

"Hey, Arrowhead," she said cheerfully, "miss me, yet?"

"I literally just saw you this morning," the older boy responded, his tone dry, even over the phone.

"Aw, Arrowhead, you hurt my feelings!" Amara gave a small pout, despite knowing that he couldn't see it. "By the way, I'm grounded for the next week."

"Wow, I'm just so surprised."

Amara glowered at the heavy sarcasm. "You're still mad about me shooting you, aren't you?" she asked after a short silence, which only earned her an even longer silence.

"I'm choosing to pretend that didn't happen," Roy decided.

"We've both got the scars to prove it," Amara pointed out, "so that doesn't really work."

All that could be heard on the other side was a string of swears that made Amara laugh.


Bruce Wayne had met with Barry Allen entirely too many times concerning his daughter, that much could be said for certain. But, at the same time, it was undoubtedly safer to have these discussions away from prying ears, particularly Amara's.

"You don't look all that surprised," Barry noticed, after the current head of the Justice League listened to him list the important details that Amara had told to Dinah, particularly the ones concerning what the thief Masquerade had been up to.

"Robin ran into her recently on patrol and I've been suspicious of her for awhile," Bruce conceded as he pulled up Amara's file on the JL database, adding into her known aliases –which had previously only held a single name, Storm Chaser, while she'd been retired, but it had been switched to Oracle in the past day– the name: Masquerade. "She and Storm Chaser had far too many similarities."

Well, Amara may have gotten good at fooling her friends, but she could only have done it for so long before she'd slipped, which she had.

"But Robin mentioned something to me today about when he and Amara collided on the rooftop," Bruce added (Barry had long since given up on wondering why he was so secretive about Dick's name, even in the Batcave and when they both knew his name). "Amara is capable of using pheromones."

Barry's blood turned to ice in his veins. All those tests that he'd had S.T.A.R. Labs do on her over the years, and she'd never shown any aptitude towards chloro-kinesis. It had been all but decided that her mother's powers were dormant and more likely recessive than anything else. He'd never seen any of the plants that Amara had been around over the years grow faster, they'd only had an increased life expectancy. He'd certainly never seen her use pheromones before, but pheromones weren't typically something that was seen.

"Pheromones," he repeated, the word falling dubiously from his lips.

"Pheromones," Bruce concurred, "perhaps she's inherited something from Poison Ivy, after all."

And that didn't bode well.


"We should get a house together, Daffedoll."

"Oh, yeah?" Pamela asked, her lips curling as she sautéed some mushrooms in a skillet for her dinner (she had gotten surprisingly good at cooking since she'd come to Central City, probably because one day she'd be cooking with Amara and it might be good to have some skill in that area). "In Gotham?"

"Well, of course in Gotham!" Harley whined. "You promised you were gonna come back for good in the next few months, remember?"

Pamela grimaced. She remembered the promise, but the thing that she was dragging her heels on the most was the second part of her promise to Harley, which involved her telling Amara that she was her biological mother. And Pamela wasn't quite sure how she was going to break that detail to the twelve-year-old meta-human; kidnapping her and telling her in a remote location was surprisingly high on the list.

"I did," Pamela said, "and I will, I promise, I've got until the end of October…but you think we should get a house?"

That was oddly domestic of Harley. Pamela couldn't remember her living anywhere but that old, cramped apartment of hers.

"Well, if there's you, and me, and the little Petal, then we're going to need some space," Harley said in a considering sort of manner.

Pamela stifled her amusement at Harley's nickname of Amara, despite the two having never met. She was sure that when they did, it would be pure chaos. And Pamela wanted Harley and Amara to meet, but as her girlfriend and her daughter.

"Good thing we're so successful doctors," Harley joked on the opposite end, and she wasn't wrong. Pamela had her doctorate in botany and toxicology and Harley had hers in psychiatry, and they both had made a bit of money in their esteemed professions before they had made themselves into villains (or perhaps it was the circumstances that had them into Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy), even without factoring in Pamela's large inheritance from her now-dead parents.

"Why don't you come up with a list of places and when I come over for the weekend, we'll look through it together?" Pamela suggested, twirling a lock of her red hair around her finger.

"Whatever you want, Girlfriend," Harley replied slyly and Pamela knew that if she'd been in the room, Harley would have been giving her a seductive wink.

"I love you," Pamela told her with certainty.

"Oh, I know," Harley laughed.


Sandra was sweeping a few stray petals and leaves from the floor when the bell at the door jingled as it opened.

"Welcome to Bouquet Bouti—" Sandra had started to say the typical greeting when she turned around to see that the person who had entered was none other than Amara Allen.

Amara's dark curls were just a bit longer and her face was tanned a bit from the sun, several shades off of her typical fairness, but it was definitely her. And Sandra was definitely not going to comment on the thick bandage wrapped around her arm, where it could be seen under her jacket's sleeve.

"Hey, stranger, haven't seen you around in awhile," Sandra said, resting her hip against the shaft of the broom as she gave Amara a wink.

"Yeah, sorry about that," Amara said a bit sheepishly, rubbing at the back of her neck as she did so, "I forgot to tell you that there was this two month exchange program…and I was wondering if I still had a job."

Sandra scoffed, giving a careless flick of her wrist. "Still have a job? Of course you've still got a job! Get behind that counter and get to work!"

Amara laughed, loosening her light jacket from her shoulders to hook it onto one of the coat-hangers behind the counter.

"Where was it that you were abroad?" Sandra asked her once the stray petals and leaves had been cleaned up.

"Fiji," Amara said after a moment, giving her boss a bright grin, "you wouldn't believe how many plants I collected for science class." The lies came off her tongue effortlessly when they contained a sprinkle of truth, and particularly when they were told to her boss, who she needed to keep in the dark about her being in the heroing business.

"Ugh," Sandra groaned, throwing her head back, making her braids swing around from the movement, "that is so unfair. I haven't been on a vacation in years!"

"It's good for the soul," Amara agreed with another laugh before asking, "where's Ella? Is she out today?"

"It's her day off," Sandra agreed, jabbing a thumb towards the shift schedule pasted to the wall behind the counter. "She'll be back tomorrow, though."

Amara was surprised about how disappointed she was, not being able to see Pamela, but maybe that she because she'd helped her out back when her arrow wound had been infected, without too many questions asked.

"I've got some Chrysanthemums that need to be trimmed. You up for it?"

Amara positively beamed.

It was dark and the house was quiet but Amara was sitting at the desk staring down at the small pot in front of her that had been recently seeded with a pansy seed.

Amara frowned, looking at it in suspicion before pressing her fingers to the moist dirt, feeling a warmth wash over her as she drew her hand up, and with it, a sprouting flower followed until, a few moments, later, there was a pansy in full bloom.

And it didn't help one bit.