Tempest: Chapter Forty: Weight of Secrets
It was rather late and the Allens were having a movie night with a movie that had a lot of rather loud explosions when Barry snuck away to meet one person outside during the one time he was sure his daughter's attention would be occupied.
She was already there when he stepped foot outside.
It was eerie how homey Pamela Isley looked in her worn jeans and floral print shirt, but the image was ruined by the green of her skin.
How could he have not seen it in the first place? How could he have not known?
"Poison Ivy," he said coolly.
"Flash," she said in reply a smirk present on her lips that was identical to the one that her daughter wore.
"I guess the reason you haven't been causing as much mayhem in Gotham makes sense now," Barry said, crossing his arms as he glowered.
"It's hard to cause trouble when you aren't spending your time much in the city to begin with," Pamela admitted.
"I don't want you near my daughter," he said quickly, careful to keep his voice low enough not to draw attention from his wife and daughter that were still within the house, still engrossed in the movie.
It was, evidently, the wrong thing to say, because the grass around her feet grew a bit greener and taller. Pamela stepped forward in a manner similar to a predator stalking its prey, all grace and precise movement, her eyes narrowing dangerously as she came to a stop directly in front of him.
The smell of flowers saturated the air.
"Amara is my daughter," Pamela said frostily, "it's my blood that runs through her veins, not yours. It's me that she resembles the most, it's my eyes that she inherited. She is mine and you can't keep her from me forever."
Barry glared. "So you'd rather she know that her mother is a villain? Just like her father?"
"I'm a neutral gray, Allen, as I'm sure you're aware from the file you've got on me in the Justice League's database." There was a dangerous glint in her eye. "Amy told me she doesn't know anything about her birth mother…imagine if she was to find out that you've been lying to her this whole time?"
Personally, Pamela didn't like resorting to blackmail, but this was her daughter, still, she didn't relish in how pale Barry's face became.
She sighed. "Look," she said, "I get that you're not pleased with me being in this city, being near her, but I'm her mother, her biological mother, you can't keep me from her. I have a right to my daughter. I don't care if she didn't come into being the usual way."
It was a rather uncomfortable situation. Barry had always hoped that Poison Ivy had never known that a child had been created from her DNA, because he remembered how Amara had been with Weather Wizard, how when she'd first come to live with them that she'd tensed every so often as if expecting a sharp jolt of electricity, or how her face had sometimes appeared to be etched from stone at the mention of Weather Wizard.
Amara had had a shortage of good parents and Barry wasn't willing to let someone else break her heart like her biological father had; no parent had a right to hurt their own child.
"She's going to find out the truth one day," Pamela pressed, "don't you think it's better for her to hear it from you than from me?"
Barry didn't even want to think about something like that, about her knowing that she was the child of Poison Ivy.
"I'd do it sooner rather than later," Pamela mentioned, nodding to his house. "Did you think it was me that was affecting those flowers of yours?"
He grimaced at the thought. The first time he'd seen the vines crawling up the side of the house towards Amara's window, he'd snipped them with some gardening shears, but the next morning they'd grown back thicker than before and with small flowers blooming along the vines. And Amara had at least two more plants in her room that hardly seemed to need attending to.
But she had never mentioned any ability to manipulate plant-life…or perhaps it was that she didn't know?
Then again, Amara was generally harried and had a tendency not to notice things if her focus was elsewhere, which it usually was.
"I'm leaving for Gotham in the end of September," Pamela said instead, making him start in surprise.
"I thought it was the beginning of October," he said, remembering Amara mentioning the fact once over dinner.
Pamela tilted her head, considering him for a moment. "Things change," she said, casting one last forlorn glance at Barry's house, particularly where Amara's room was located before turning on her heel and making her way down in the street at a leisure pace.
Barry watched her go, the tension leaving his shoulders slowly, and he had never been so relieved that Amara had decided to quit her job at Bouquet Boutique to focus on her school work a bit more, and thus limit her exposure to her biological mother.
Pamela was bubbling with anger. She could understand where Barry was coming from, she really could, and she was grateful that her daughter had been taken in by people like Barry and Iris, but Amara was still her child.
She was still the child that Pamela had always wanted and she'd do anything for her.
Pamela pulled out her phone at long last and punched in the numbers on the card that had been left with her.
"Count Vertigo," she said smoothly, "this is Poison Ivy…I'm in."
The mission had gone particularly terribly and Amara, for one, was annoyed with herself for getting taken out first by the monster known as Clayface, a monster that had appeared to be made out of –as his name had implied– clay or mud with a gaping jaw of sharp teeth that had appeared fairly formidable. He'd been sent to Bruce Wayne in a circular container before wrecking havoc on Batman and Robin respectively until the Team had been called in.
Electricity would've taken him out quickly, as Batman had proved when he'd brought some electricity-generating cables, but Amara had stupidly pushed Robin out of the way of an attack that had knocked her out on impact.
But they'd all gotten their asses kicked, so it wasn't like she was the only one suffering, though the throbbing head wasn't helping her situation.
Amara was still grimacing when the Team made their way through the Zeta-tube in low spirits only to find Batman standing there, waiting for them to arrive.
"I need to talk to Aqualad," he'd said when they'd arrived. "The rest of you, hit the showers and head home."
They were all covered in varying levels of mud and it wasn't an exactly pleasant feeling, and personally, Amara was dying to get out of her uniform and into some loose cargo pants.
"Head home?" Superboy asked sourly, the mission affecting his mood as he walked past Batman. "I am home."
The showers weren't separated by gender, but there was a way to draw a screen from one end to the other in order to make it a bit more private, even with there being the ability to draw private screens out of the wall and around one showerhead, with cubbies in the walls for clothes.
"How's the arm?" Amara asked Artemis through her screen as she washed the mud from her hair. Artemis had gotten grabbed there by the villain and Amara was sure the grip was tight enough that it was going to bruise.
"I'll survive," Artemis grumbled. "I'm pretty sure M'gann got the worst of it."
"I may have to stay off my leg for the next few days," M'gann concurred, "but I'll be fine."
Amara snorted. "That's because you can levitate."
"Yes, it is," M'gann's voice was tinged with humor.
Amara could hear the distant sound of male voices on the other side of the screen and the sound of water turning off; the boys weren't going to waste anymore time in the shower than they had to.
She could barely hear her cousin's voice as he called out to her from the door.
"Amy, I'll be in the monitor womb!" he called.
"Okay," Amara called back before focusing on ridding herself from a particularly stubborn spot of mud.
"Okay, but seriously, how is he so sweet on you? I don't get it," Artemis mentioned a moment later and Amara stared at the wall blankly since she couldn't see Artemis' face due to the screen.
"What're you talking about?"
"I mean, he's all right, I guess," Artemis admitted off-handedly that might have been a bit forced, "as a friend and a teammate, but he's different with you."
"I'm very likable," Amara declared and she could hear M'gann's laughter.
"I'm with Artemis," M'gann said, "he's…softer, it's very sweet."
Amara frowned, thinking of when she'd been in the hospital after Merlyn had shot her off Queen Industries, and how often he'd been there, trying to keep her mind off the lack of feeling in her legs. She remembered how positively white Wally had been when she'd finally come round.
"Well, he's seen how I look when I've been shot off a building that's several stories high," Amara mentioned, sure that Artemis and M'gann were staring in her direction at that. "It'd make anyone be sweet on you, just ask Roy."
It was easier to make light of the whole situation now that she was fully functioning, but it had been rather bad when she was still in the hospital. Amara still had the scars and sometimes the places where his arrows had pierced her still ached and the soles of her feet tingled.
But Amara had a lot of scars, most of which had come from the job.
Amara rubbed a hand over the fractal scarring on her chest where her father had shot her full of lightning. She'd had enough unfortunate occurrences to last her a lifetime.
She shut off the water and dried off before pulling her clothes on and ruffling her hair for good measure, before making it out of the showers in search of the living quarters.
Each member of the Team had their own designated room, though room was putting it lightly, as they were rather small and cramped, generally only for sleeping.
Amara keyed in her room's code on the keypad, the door sliding open so that she could grab her bag full of school things that she hadn't gotten around to finishing before they'd been called out to assist Batman and Robin.
"You take forever," Wally complained when she made her way out to the monitor womb, where he was leaning against the wall, fiddling with his phone which he shoved into his pocket upon her arrival.
"I have more hair than you," Amara pointed out dryly, jabbing a finger in the direction of her head, making her cousin roll his eyes.
She took his hand when he extended it to her before taking the Zeta-tube back to Central City, stepping out of the out of order phone booth.
"Has Dad been…off to you?" Amara asked him suddenly and Wally looked at her oddly.
"Off? He's a guy that can run at the speed of light," Wally snorted before noticing Amara's frown. "Why?"
"I don't know, it's just something." Amara wrinkled her nose. "It's like he keeps expecting something to happen, he's always tense."
He was always distinctly uncomfortable when Amara went to work, but she still had another two weeks left and had only just given her two weeks' notice. Barry had never really liked the idea of Amara working around plants, though, and Amara still didn't know why that was.
"It's probably nothing," Amara decided after a moment. "Do Uncle Rudy and Aunt Mary know you're spending the night with us?"
Wally scoffed, waving his arm carelessly. "Uh, yeah, you know, since we're marathoning Star Wars like the geeks that we are."
Amara laughed.
"Want to race home?" Wally's eyes gleamed.
"Yeah, absolutely, let me race a speedster home, that sounds like great idea," Amara drawled in return which only made him laugh as well.
Jay Garrick's birthday was a rather rambunctious affair, but that had mostly to do with Amara and Wally talking over each other in telling their surrogate grandparents of their heroing escapades while Barry sat back, interjecting every so often on Wally's stories that had Mary and Rudy for the most part exasperated; they heard what their son was up to in the news, of course, but hearing it from the boy himself was something else.
"And then Amy tripped on nothing—"
"I didn't trip on nothing!" Amara was quick to refute. "You ran past me and stuck out your leg when I was trying to triangulate a signal!"
"Oh, yeah," Wally admitted with a bit of realization. "That did happen, didn't it?"
Laughter exploded around them and Amara positively sulked, swallowing the last bit of her potatoes before her father stood with a grin.
"Here, let me get that—" He speeded around the table, picking up plates and silverware as he did so, "and that and this and those and these."
"Thanks, Uncle Barry!" Wally called after his uncle as he disappeared into the kitchen with his heaping piles of dishes.
There was a faint "You're welcome, kid" and Amara rolled her eyes drowning herself in her apple juice.
"You're a lucky lady, Iris," Mary winked before glancing towards her son. "Our Wally certainly isn't that fast, not when it comes to clearing the table."
Wally, who had disappeared into the kitchen after his uncle let out a loud "Mom!"
"Neither is my Jay, believe me," Joan chuckled, patting her husband's hand when he gave her an outraged look. "I know, I know, you're a retired speedster, and since it's your birthday, we won't argue."
"Lucky break, Jay," Amara stage-whispered to the former Flash, making them all laugh for good measure.
"Wally's fast when he wants to be," Barry mentioned with a chuckle, stepping back into the dining room while holding a cake with thick chocolate icing with a single lit candle flickering. "We're suddenly out of ice cream."
Everyone turned to look at the boy in the kitchen with an arm around the ice cream container, a spoon in his mouth, looking every bit as guilty as he was.
"Wally!" his mother reproached.
"Uh…happy birthday," Wally said around the spoon.
"Outrageous!" Amara called over the other's heads. "You didn't save any ice cream for me?"
"I hate algebra," Amara declared with a growl where she and Dick were sitting in the living room, books and papers plastered around them. Tutoring Amara gave him the opportunity to work on his own homework too, because it sometimes took quite some time before she'd admit to having trouble.
"You've said that before," Dick said without looking up from his English homework.
"I hate you," Amara added with emphasis.
"You've said that before too," Dick snorted, his eyes glittering in amusement as he smirked.
"That's 'cause it's true," Amara muttered distastefully under her breath only to be startled by her phone buzzing on the table. "Oh, thank God!"
Dick rolled his eyes as Amara answered her phone. "Hey, Goddess, tell me you need me?"
"What? Why?" Artemis sounded vaguely surprised.
"Math study session with Robin," Amara grumbled and Dick threw a look her way that said he was slightly insulted.
'I love you!' Amara mouthed and he shook his head in exasperation.
"Oh," Artemis said in understanding, "still having math troubles?"
"Like you wouldn't believe," Amara complained, "I keep screwing up my polynomials, its murder. Robin's good company, at least." Amara glanced towards her friend. "Not very talkative, though."
She could see his smile behind the book.
"So, what's up?" Amara asked.
"What do you think about Gotham Academy?" Artemis asked her and Amara set down her pencil, furrowing her brow.
"It's a prestigious school, obviously."
"Yeah, I know that," Artemis grumbled. "But I've been awarded a full Wayne Foundation Scholarship to Gotham Academy."
"A full Wayne Foundation Scholarship?" Amara remarked in surprise, giving a significant look towards Dick, who ducked his head. "That's pretty great. You were complaining about Gotham North's lack of exciting extracurriculars."
"Yeah," Artemis conceded, "but switching schools? Being the new girl has never been exactly fun for me."
"It makes me glad I'm home-schooled," Amara grinned widely. "I never have to worry about being the new girl."
"Or showing up at school with cuts and bruises."
"That too," Amara admitted, twisting her pencil between her fingers. It was one of the reasons she'd liked the idea of being home-schooled in the first place; it made it easier to explain away her League-related injuries. "But I hear Gotham Academy isn't too bad."
"How would you know?" Artemis snorted on the other end.
"I know a guy that goes to school there," Amara said and Dick jerked his head up, shooting a look of warning towards his friend.
"Oh, yeah? And what's he like?" Artemis sounded amused.
"Oh, he's not that bad," Amara smiled, looking him over. "Pretty eyes."
Surprise colored those same eyes and a flush bloomed across his cheeks.
"You're unreal," Artemis said in exasperation.
"You've said that before," Amara said, smirking before saying, without much enthusiasm, "Gotta go, math awaits."
She dropped the phone onto the table before pulling her notebook towards her and scrawling out the next problem on the paper.
Dick cleared his throat. "You think my eyes are pretty?"
"Depends on when you can see them," Amara said slyly.
It made Dick feel just a bit flustered, but Amy liked to flirt, she probably didn't mean anything by it.
Sandra celebrated Ella and Amara quitting with cupcakes.
"Aw, Sandra, it's like you're happy we're leaving," Amara laughed as she took the vanilla cupcake with white icing, taking a generous bite.
"Oh, don't be ridiculous," Sandra scoffed, her braids whipping around as she shook her head before stating in a faux-solemn manner, "There comes a time in all our lives when we reach a crossroads and go our separate ways."
"Sandra, you are far too young to be so melodramatic," Ella laughed.
"This coming from someone that's older than me," Sandra responded dryly, stamping her foot for emphasis, but Ella wasn't that much older than Sandra; Ella had just turned twenty-seven, while Sandra was only twenty-four. "And after I went through all that trouble of making you guys going away cupcakes! Absolutely thankless employees I've got here!"
"I've got another two weeks," Amara pointed out, "and Ella's got two and a half, it's not likely we're going to suddenly up and vanish."
"I'm going to miss having you guys around," Sandra blubbered suddenly, throwing her arms around both of them which made for a slightly uncomfortable embrace, because Amara, though still growing, was rather short (though Ella had been oddly certain that she'd be a bit taller before she was done growing) and Ella rather tall.
"There, there," Ella said, patting Sandra's back in what seemed to be a soothing manner, but Amara was just doing it so that Sandra would let go of her.
"I'm going to go work on a bouquet," Amara said, darting away once Sandra's grip had loosened and she could make her escape.
In all honesty, the idea of leaving Bouquet Boutique was kind of bittersweet, mostly because she really loved her job, she loved working there and being around flowers, she loved all of it, and she loved bantering with Sandra and Ella. But, at the same time, giving up the flower shop would give her more time with her respective duties as Storm Chaser and Oracle, and give her more time with her family.
"So, what're you going to do when you leave here?" Amara asked Ella when she came back to join her.
"Harley and I've got a house in Gotham," Ella smiled fondly, remembering the day they'd bought the house in question, "it's kind of on the outskirts, nothing but forests and greenery as far as the eye can see."
"Sounds nice," Amara said, grinning, "your girlfriend must be pretty psyched about having you back."
"She really is," Ella laughed. Harley's pig-tails had been bouncing in excitement when she'd skyped her the other day to tell her she'd put in her notice.
"Why'd you even come to Central City in the first place?" Amara asked her curiously, tilting her head in order to look at Ella and she could swear for a moment that Ella's eyes had gained this soft glint.
"Personal reasons," Ella said mildly, and Amara had enough mind to drop the issue.
Amara was sitting with her legs crossed on her bed, fingers tapping across her keyboard as she looked through the data that she'd gotten on Project Amara from Cadmus Labs. She'd put it aside for awhile, being focused on other things, but now she could take the time.
There were endless videos of Amara when she was smaller with the doctors testing various kinds of skills, visual-spatial learning, kinesthetic, reaction to stimuli, normal things like that.
Then there were full-body X-rays as she grew, some for monitoring how fast she could heal after bones were broken. There was an entire section on her healing factor.
Compared to normal human's rate of healing, Project Amara has displayed an advanced rate of healing that can be attributed to the meta-human status of both parents, though the father, Donor Y, only has acquired meta-human status. It is because of this, that we believe that the majority of Project Amara's healing factor is gained from her mother, Donor X.
Amara frowned. Her healing ability had always been a bit odd. She still had scars, of course, she wasn't an instantaneous healer like Barry, but she was still faster than Wally, but she was a born meta-human, so maybe that had some kind of effect on her healing?
There was so much missing information, like Cadmus had purposefully blocked out the information concerning Amara's parents. It made her wonder how Doctor Spence had even found out that Mark Mardon aka Weather Wizard was her father in the first place.
Whatever the reason was, her biological mother and father's information had been completely scrubbed from the files.
Amara released a hiss through her clenched teeth with a bit of annoyance. It seemed like the universe was trying its hardest to keep her from finding out the true identity of her mother.
Clearly, her mother knew who she was, or she wouldn't waste her time sending her gifts and telling her she loved her. Her letter had said that by October, Amara would know the truth, but patience wasn't something Amara had when her family was involved.
