Disclaimer- Do not own Young Justice or any of it's characters.
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Chapter length: 3,382 words
o.o.o.o
Artemis laughed, pausing in her cleaning of Wally West's home lab table.
He grinned at her, juggling several freshly scrubbed beakers in his arms, transferring them to a stark white cabinet in one corner of the room.
"I'm not even joking!" he insisted, stacking them in very meticulously. "Bart has been trailing behind me since he got out of highschool! He begged me to put in a good word for him at my work."
She smiled to herself, pushing some loose blonde hair from her face. The two of them had spent the evening together, messing around with some chemicals and testing out a few useless yet very intriguing science experiments Wally had looked up online. Some of them Artemis had already been familiar with, but still others had been entirely new.
Wally had enthusiastically shown her an experiment involving sodium acetate that in her opinion winded up looking like a very large, very lumpy old wax candle.
"Wait, wait, so this shit is used in heating pads?" Artemis had asked in wonder, staring at the not-wax curiously through her protective goggles. She was dying to poke it to see if it felt anything like wax, but she wasn't sure if Wally would slap her hand away or not.
"That's right!" Wally had beamed. "Basically you melt some sodium acetate trihydrate way past it's melting point, and it dissolves into its water of crystallization, which by the way is basically water that forms inside the crystals. Anyway, if you let it cool back down to room temperature, it becomes supersaturated and won't form the crystals again. So in heat pads they put this supersaturated solution into a pouch, along with something like a metal disc, and when you squeeze on it a nucleation centre is created and the solution reacts and solidifies back into crystals, a process which is exothermic, meaning it—"
"Releases heat, got it," Artemis had finished for him, beyond amused by his childlike enthusiasm. He had told her he spent his weekend looking up random science experiments on the internet, and he clearly had a knack for memorizing the processes once he had read about them in full detail. She imagined he found them on science kid websites and then spent like five hours going into the complicated details online.
In fact, he affirmed as much when he got entirely too upset over a particular experiment he'd stumbled across.
"And they called it 'The Magic Ketchup Experiment'," he had exploded while they were eating lunch together on a break from the lab. It was almost comical how mad he got about it. "Magic! Can you believe that? It's science. Good, wholesome science that makes that damn ketchup pack float! You see, the salt—"
"Wally, it's for kids," she'd told him, interrupting his tirade. "They don't care."
"Well I do!" he'd protested, and honestly she'd started to kind of tune him out after that because it was much funner to watch his freckled face contort and move with his animated motions. Especially when his neck got red the more flustered he got about the whole thing.
What a dweeb. A very smart dweeb. She supposed it was a good thing she was pretty damn smart herself, though she sure as hell was no science prodigy. But Artemis Crock knew her stuff.
Luckily Wally found her knowledge of tetragametic chimerism and other forms to be very interesting. He asked her about it quite a lot, clearly curious about how she'd gotten so interested in the subject.
"I was uh, home schooled," she'd told him. "I really liked the science my mom taught me and, well, I had a lot of free nights to spend googling anything and everything."
The redhead had nodded in understanding, and then he was bombarding her with questions about it, while Artemis bit the inside of her cheek. The truth was that she was indeed home schooled, but the reason she had stumbled upon the subject of chimerism was because she had always sought out an answer for why she was what she was. By all accounts it made no sense to her, but when she had found the page about chimerism she had felt she was somehow close to some form of answer.
It was at least a comfort for her, and she'd combed the same wikipedia page again and again to put herself to sleep at night.
"I guess your cousin really looks up to you," Artemis said presently, dropping the bleach soaked rag back into it's bucket before shoving her safety goggles up onto her forehead. It was rather hot in the cozy room; the fan in the window did little for room temperature, as it was facing backwards in order to suck out foul odors and fumes. She rolled her sleeves up, crossing her arms under her bosom as she began meandering around while Wally finished cleaning up.
"Well, I mean I guess I can't blame him," Wally said cockily, picking up more cleaned beakers from the sink and drying them off. Artemis rolled her eyes at him as she began gazing at some trophies and plaques on a small shelf in the corner. She had glanced at them from afar a few times, but now she actually picked them up one by one, reading the deeds and feats they proclaimed.
"Right, yeah. Who wouldn't want to follow in the footsteps of the first place winner in the Central City County Fair hotdog eating contest!" Artemis exclaimed, reading the words off a little bronze trophy that pictured a giant frankfurter; classy as hell, really. "You're an inspiration to us all!"
"You think that's a clever comeback until I tell you about how Bart started entering those contests with me every year. Never could make more than fourth place!" Wally seemed incredibly proud of that fact, puffing his chest out and shining the nails of one hand on his stained lab coat. "Eating contests take years of discipline."
"Or a naturally bottomless pit," the blonde supplied, setting the item back down.
He huffed behind her, muttering about his metabolism again, before continuing on with his stories about all the times Bart had followed in his footsteps or tagged along when he was severely unwanted. These times included a date Wally had scored with a college girl, science conventions, Comic Con, and a once in a lifetime trip to the Large Hadron Collider.
Artemis had to admit even she was a little jealous of that last.
As Wallace blabbered on in barely concealed fondness for his so-called obnoxious relations, Artemis's steel eyes alighted on the largest trophy of the bunch. It was perched on the top shelf, all on it's own, polished and shined so lovingly that it made her eyes water a bit. Even her keen eyes had trouble making out the words due to the lights reflecting off it's brilliant silver surface.
She reached up for it, confident that, like the other silver trophies she'd handled so far, it was fake.
How very wrong she was.
Artemis yelled out in shock the moment her palm rested on the round metal beneath the handle. She jerked her hand away so fast that the trophy toppled from it's perch, denting with the force it landed with.
"Artemis!"
Real silver. It was real fucking silver.
Artemis held her quaking palm out in front of her face, horrified by the terrible second degree burns that stood out in angry red blisters. Smoke furled off of her olive skin, a thin white veil of it that she knew Wally could probably see. She didn't care, it was burning horrendously, making tears pinprick on the corners of her eyes as she yelled out again, crouching down on her knees and cradling the ravaged skin to her chest.
Her body trembled with pain that radiated out, searing her skin down to her elbow even though the actual burns extended no farther than the place of contact.
Artemis sobbed through clenched teeth.
"Artemis!" Wally yelped again, crouching down beside her, his warm presence overwhelming her. He placed one hand on her back, the other reaching around to grab her forearm. Her first instinct was to snarl and jerk away, but she bit her lip to stifle the action, instead allowing him to pull the suffering limb out into the light. He muttered an expletive at the sight. "What in the world," he gasped, green eyes darting to the trophy.
Artemis followed his line of vision.
There was a tarnished imprint of her palm burned into the silver. She stood up quickly, walking away from him despite his protests. She yanked the lab door open, tears drying on her cheeks.
"Artemis, wait!"
She didn't.
The blonde moved through the kitchen, yanking her goggles off with her good hand and slinging them with a clatter onto the table surface, hard enough that unbeknownst to her in that moment, a hairline crack in the plastic spiraled along one side.
Artemis was furious with herself; she should have been more careful around such things, it was foolish to assume every trophy ever handed out was made of knock-off silver.
She leaned over the kitchen sink, turning the cold water on full blast, hissing at the pain that flared before the cool sensation of the liquid had her sighing with relief. She knew that the moment she pulled it out it would go right back to burning, but she would take what she could get.
"Good, that's good, just, uh, keep that under the water, I'll get my first aid kit!" Wally stammered behind her, making her tense. He left, racing back into the lab he had followed her out of.
Artemis contemplated escaping while she could.
She wanted Wally to know about her lycanthropy, she did, but not like this. Not here, not now, not because of a mistake that was honestly pup worthy. He had seen everything, he had seen the smoke and the handprint and the burns, and Artemis Crock knew for a fact that human beings did not get nearly hospital worthy burns from touching room temperature silver.
And Wally West was a smart guy, too. There would be no way to explain away what had just occurred.
Artemis wanted to die.
o.o.o.o
Wally was beside himself as he crouched down, cautiously picking up the National Science Bowl trophy that had somehow caused a fiasco. He expected it to be nuclear hot on the pads of his fingers, but instead a shock of cold metal was the sensation he got. Immediately, his brows furrowed in consternation, a million thoughts trying to buzz through his brain before the running water echoing from the kitchen reminded him insistently that he had to take care of Artemis before he could figure out what the hell had happened.
He set the trophy on his clean lab table for the time being, then grabbed his first aid kit from the very back of the cabinet—seriously, he never had to use this thing… more than once a week.
Wally pried the lid open to make sure it was still well stocked, then marched back into the kitchen, his heart thudding wildly because everything had happened so fast, had been such a shock.
The fact that Artemis Crock had tears running down her cheeks had informed him the severity of it, because he hadn't once seen her cry yet, not even that first night when she'd been bleeding.
And something about seeing her cry had twisted his intestines into a jumbled knot of nerves and determination to make it better.
When the redhead arrived back in the kitchen, it was to find the water in the sink still running, and no Artemis in sight. Panicking, he turned it off and ran full speed into his living room, skidding to a relieved halt when he glimpsed her sitting on his couch.
She was cradling her palm, waiting for him with something like shame in her demeanor.
"Wally, it—" she started tensely, but he held up a hand, walking over to join her on the couch.
"Don't even feed it to me, Artemis. I know that hurts like hell and I'm going to bandage it up even if I have to strap you into a chair," he threatened, already grabbing the necessary items from the kit. She pressed her lips together, yet said no more to him.
And it was just as well because Wally West had already learned to see right through her attempts at telling him everything was okay when it wasn't.
Einstein, he'd never seen a woman so unwilling to accept help in his life. And believe him, it hadn't taken much interaction with her for him to gather that she was completely and utterly unreasonable.
"Forgot, gotta clean it first," he said, gently holding her hand and examining the burns. His scientific mind was screaming to him that this was just not possible, something like this shouldn't have happened unless the trophy had been heated. Yet his eyes were seeing that it had just happened, and no science or fact of life was going to make the open blisters on her calloused palm disappear into the plain of reason. As much as he really wished that would happen so he could avoid a major headache later.
"Come on," Wally said, tugging her up with him by her good hand. He lead her back into the kitchen, grabbed the bar of soap there and began carefully lathering up her skin, apologizing softly for every hiss or noise of discomfort she made at him. He patted it dry when they were done, then dragged her back to the couch where he pulled out a tube of Polysporin.
Artemis stayed silent the whole time. Their eyes avoided one another, his focused on spreading the ointment evenly over the area of the red flesh and bumps. He could sense something radiating off of her body in waves, but he didn't trust himself to place a name to it; he was too busy trying to keep his hands from shaking.
When he began wrapping it up, meticulously winding bandages around her hand tightly, he chanced a glance up at her through the too long strands of red hair that hung over his eyes.
The blonde looked rather somber, all of her attention on the motions of him fixing the wounds, and he couldn't help but notice the way her eyelashes seemed to brush her cheeks when her head was tilted so low. They were long and dark blonde; he watched them feather over her skin as she blinked, then wondered why on earth a person would need lashes so long. What purpose could it possibly serve? It seemed obscene to him. Yet there they were, daring to be that long, to flutter across from him like they were nothing.
He cleared his throat, and finished tending to her in a rather uncomfortable silence, which unfortunately gave his brain free roam to come up with and shoot down all the possible explanations for the burn.
"All done," he said thoughtfully, putting the bandages away. She surveyed her wrapped up fingers and Wally blurted out, "Is this how it's always going to be?"
She seemed taken aback.
"What?"
He gestured wildly to her hand, to the couch, to her side. "This, you getting hurt very seriously and me having to drag out the first aid kit that normally collects dust? Because if this is how it's going to stay you might as well go ahead and buy an urn for my ashes cause I'm going to have a massive heart attack and HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE!?" he yelled, losing his cool. He ran both hands through his red locks, combing through enough times that he knew it'd make him look mad, but he didn't care. "I've never seen anything like this!"
The only explanation he could figure right now was that Artemis Crock attracted accidents to herself like protons to electrons. Like, maybe she was just so dead set on being in perilous situations that the universe had simply manifested itself into an outrageously impossible second degree burn on her hand?
Oh man, now he was talking nonsense.
No. No there is a scientific reason for this and I am going to find out what it is! Wally told himself firmly; and indeed, that trophy would be heading with him to work tomorrow, where he would spend his lunch break testng it in every way he knew of.
"Wally, what are you thinking?" Artemis demanded abruptly, jumping to her feet. Her facial expression challenged him, and he deflated, rubbing a hand across his face and shaking his head before staring at her in defeat.
"I'm thinking… I'm thinking that, ugh, I don't know. It was possibly some sort of really extreme allergic reaction? Has this… has this ever happened to you before?"
Artemis looked away from him. Somehow that was all the answer he needed.
"I need to go."
"Fine," Wally said. And the only reason he was letting her go without such a fuss on his part was because his brain wanted to kick into maximum warp overdrive on the situation, and he could see that his prying would only make her walls go up more and more. She was clearly very upset, and he couldn't blame her; if he'd been suddenly and inexplicably burned by a lukewarm silver trophy he'd be upset by the ludicrousy of it too. He stood up as well. "Just… promise me you'll go get that checked out? I really don't think this is the kind of thing you should just… ignore. It seems pretty extreme if it is an allergen of some kind."
Artemis was already walking toward his window. She had already slipped her fingers beneath the sill and lifted it up when she finally answered him.
"I will," Artemis growled out begrudgingly.
Then she was gone. And he knew she wouldn't actually go get it checked out.
"And I'm thinking I hope you're going to be okay…" Wally added in a whisper to himself, staring at the open window she'd disappeared through. He felt tired all of a sudden, but he knew he had some extensive research to start doing.
He fired up his coffee maker and went to find his laptop.
o.o.o.o
Artemis shut herself away from Wally.
Her burns healed in three days, thanks to her mother's impressive wolfsbane ointment, and then for two more days after that Artemis threw herself into patrolling the slums much more quietly, scoping out areas and then using the GCPD tip hotline to pass anonymous messages of concern for people on to officer Grayson. It wasn't the type of work she would prefer, especially when she was feeling antsy, balled up with stress or worry or anger.
Or any other emotion from the werewolf spectrum.
Artemis had always prefered taking her emotions out on people that deserved it, but thanks to her disaster with Ojo five days ago, she couldn't risk putting anymore of the innocent lives she was trying to help in danger just to stifle her passions.
Over the last month and a half she had actually begun finding comfort in texting Wally aimlessly when she was frustrated, but now that wasn't an option for her. She couldn't bring herself to answer any of the texts he sent, even if they were all so sincere and genuinely sweet that it made her heart ache for him.
After a while the messages stopped coming at all, following a simple text telling her that he realized she obviously needed some space from him, and he wouldn't pry, but he would be there still when she was feeling better.
That particular message tore guiltily at her insides; she'd nearly broken down and texted him back, but then she'd remembered the silver burns.
She just wasn't ready to face whatever judgements he'd come to about it. She wasn't ready for him to know what she was, and she was still wallowing in self-hatred for allowing her guard to slip so idiotically around a human.
Around Wally.
So the blonde turned her cell phone off, and slipped it into the drawer of her computer desk.
o.o.o.o
Poor Artemis.
Shit's gettin' real son. Wally is going to come to some realizations next chapter, I can tell you that much!