Disclaimer- Do not own Young Justice or any of it's characters.
Gonna pump these out fast. I think my giant gap caused a lot of people to lose interest so uh... Gonna just get this out fast. Still, appreciate reviews and glad there are people that still enjoy it! :)
Onward.
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Chapter Length: 2,091 words
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Three days.
Three days since Wally West had last seen Artemis Crock, and he was about to unravel under the growing burden of worry on his shoulders. All he could think about was their last moment on the fire escape, with her desperate gray eyes locking onto his, urging him to stay inside of his house and wait out the storm.
All because the two of them had been caught making love together in the woods. It had been so natural and had felt so right; the absolute last thing the redhead could have imagined was that it would put both of their lives in great danger. Artemis had grown to trust and love him so completely, that she had taken what was obviously a great risk to herself and to him by taking him to the most special place he'd ever been. It should have been the best night of his life, and it would have been if only fate had dealt the two of them a better hand. Worry, guilt, and anger replaced what should have been content, happy memories that made him flush and feel sixteen years old again.
But thanks to the wrong pair of eyes catching them in their blissful act, nothing was playing out as it should. Wally was panicking and Artemis—stupid, beautiful, stubborn Artemis—was trying to take the brunt of it all for them both.
The knowledge that she was knowingly risking herself like that nearly drove him to the edge of his sanity. There was no way he could do as she had asked of him, so of course he hadn't listened to her asinine instructions to keep his head down. No, the night it had happened, he had given her all of twelve hours to show back up at his apartment, to call, some kind of sign that everything was okay. That she was okay.
When she hadn't contacted him, Wally had gone straight to Dick, the one person in all of Gotham that might have enough resources to help him find his apparently missing girlfriend.
It didn't matter that the redhead had not even the vaguest clue of where to begin the search. It seemed so ludicrous now, that after so many months spent in Artemis's company, after getting to know her and falling in love with her and dating her, that he still had no inkling of her precise residence. How could he have been so stupid to never ask her after the protective walls had started to lower between them? Shouldn't he have taken interest in such a thing?
A negligent boyfriend—hell, a negligent friend. That's what Wally West was. And now Artemis was possibly paying for that negligence.
If he had only ever acted on his many impulses to ask her where she lived, then maybe he would be one step closer to finding her. The only thing he knew for certain was that it was somewhere in the slums, and that her mother lived with her, and… oh Einstein, her mother. The woman was probably out of her mind, just like he was.
Yet Wally had no way of contacting Paula Crock. He'd already tried Artemis's cell phone too many times to count with no answer. And he knew no home phone number, if there was such a thing. The simple, sad fact was that none of these things had ever been discussed between them; he'd known that she lived in the slums with her mother and that had been good enough for him all this time. He had always figured that when Artemis was ready to share the information, or invite him over to dinner or something, that she would just do it.
Though in hindsight, he realized Artemis would never invite him over with werewolves running amok, and he was a damn fool for thinking it.
So Dick was all he had. One of the few people besides himself that was in on it all, the only person in the GCPD that stood a chance of tracking her down. But even that was proving to be hopeless, considering three whole days of lying low had passed and Wally was close to pulling his hair out at the roots. He was fast losing his patience with the only man in the world that was one hundred percent on his side at the moment, yet he couldn't stop himself from dialing Dick up fifty times a day and demanding any newfound information.
"Have you found anything yet?"
"Where is she?"
"Have you tried all the abandoned places?"
"I'm going nuts!"
Until finally he completely blew it after four days of what was supposed to be "normal" living on his part.
Wally couldn't concentrate at work that day; how was he supposed to pretend everything was okay when it absolutely wasn't? His girlfriend was missing and he was playing with chemicals in a lab instead of trying to hunt down the werewolves that had probably taken her, and that was supposed to just be acceptable!?
Unacceptable!
He'd snapped at Bart during lunch, much to his cousin's very hurt confusion, but he hadn't had the patience or compassion to apologize to him. Then he'd had a fit of misplaced anger and swiped a whole mess of thankfully empty beakers into the floor, all because of a sudden onslaught of memories from his ventures in the lab with Artemis. After that he'd been sent home early because his boss was livid and suspected he might be going through some kind of weird episodic fit.
His boss wasn't far from the truth.
So now Wally was at home. He was on the phone with Dick, and his voice was raised even though he knew it wasn't right, that it wouldn't bring Artemis home to him any quicker.
"Why haven't you found her yet!?" Wally demanded, situated at his kitchen table, hair tousled and cheeks red. One arm of his lab coat dangled down to brush the floor and the other still clung to his arm persistently, which was resting on the table in a tight curve at the elbow, with his fist balled up at the end.
"Wally, I'm doing everything I can," Dick answered him calmly. But perhaps it was the wrong attitude to have, because the tone lacked the care Wally expected to hear, and just made him angrier. Dick didn't seem to think Artemis was important enough, and it made his stomach knot with anger. "There's not a lot to go on. No leads. I'm sorry, man, but we're trying."
The redhead snorted viciously, laughing more bitterly than any laugh that had ever burst past his lips in living memory. The words came out scathing and hot before he could put a lid on his spiraling emotions.
"If you were a worth-a-damn cop you would have gotten to her already!"
He hung up the phone, his hands trembling with rage and a mild sense of guilt for what he'd done. But the rage won over everything else. The worry.
Where in the world was Artemis Crock?
A week and a half into her disappearance, Wally decided he couldn't wait anymore. He couldn't just hide and try to be normal while he paced his house, anticipating a call from Dick with news that was never going to come.
So he went to the slums. He had not been in to work for days because his boss had insisted he needed a break, so without even that to keep his worried mind occupied, he could find no other alternative than starting to look for her himself. Danger be damned; he didn't care if he got mauled by an entire pack of werewolves while he was there. At least that would be something he could finally have to work with. Acknowledgement that werewolves still existed, that they hadn't taken his beloved Artemis and fled the city entirely.
He packed up a bag, pulled on a light jacket, and headed out to look.
He never made it past Bibbo's diner.
"Wally?"
Dick had pulled up alongside the sidewalk in his cruiser, Barbara in the passenger side, her eyes wide and understanding.
"What the hell are you doing?" Dick called out, sounding mad.
Wally swallowed thickly, pausing in his determined treck, his fists clenching so hard he felt his blunt nails biting into his palms.
"What's it look like I'm doing?" he snapped without sparing a glance back at them. He heard the car door open and slam. Dick was in his face in a heartbeat, his eyes livid as he yanked off his sunglasses and pierced into Wally's very being with those harsh blue eyes.
"It looks like you're about to impede an ongoing investigation to me!"
Wally's mouth dropped open. "Are you kidding me with this, Dick?"
"I am one hundred percent serious right now!" Dick growled. "You're being unreasonable!"
"No, I'm not! I'm getting her back, something you can't seem to do!" Wally snarled, elbowing Dick harshly in the chest and stepping past his best friend to march onward. He had never been so torn up in his life; his limbs were quaking and he felt something stinging his eyes.
He heard Dick snort derisively behind him.
"What are you going to do, Wally?" he asked, voice raised loudly so that it carried to the man with his back turned. "What can you do that the police can't do? Are you just going to walk into the slums, tap your heels like Dorothy and know where Artemis is? Don't you think me and my men have been doing everything we can? Don't you think me and Babs have been busting our asses looking for her!? I know what you're going through and I know it hurts to sit at home, but I think you're forgetting that we want to bring Artemis home just as much as you. But go ahead, Wallman, go ahead and find her alone without any of the resources we have. We'll be waiting right here for your miraculous return."
Wally stopped right on the threshold of the slums. He turned, and saw Dick walking back around to the driver's side of the car with his head bowed and the bridge of his nose pinched between two of his fingers. Barbara looked imploringly at him through the front window.
The redhead felt something inside of him deflate. He cast a look at the slums, something thick and obstructive forming in his throat. All at once the sheer size of that sinister part of Gotham seemed to really hit him; the dilapidated buildings reared up around him mockingly, appearing to grow in size the longer his gaze lingered hopelessly on them. Artemis could be somewhere in there, amidst the distant car alarms and the sounds of discord that rang out from dawn til dusk. Amidst gang violence and werewolves and dark alleys full of shattered glass and blood.
And Wally was just one man. Just a scientist; with no resources, no leads, no weapons. Just a backpack full of money and food, and a heart that had a gaping hole right in the center.
He sniffed, wiped at his eyes then clenched his fists reflexively, and walked back to the police car. He climbed into the back of the vehicle without a word to either of them, fixing bloodshot eyes onto the window. In a tense silence Dick took him back to his apartment. The bars that separated the back of the car from the front made Wally feel like a prisoner, which at the time seemed so appropriate to him and all the things he was feeling.
A prisoner of helplessness, and his best friend was the jailer.
"If you try anything like that again, I'll have you arrested, Wally. I don't care if it's an abuse of police power. I'm not going to have you risking your safety, too," Dick warned with a stern business-like voice as he watched Wally get out of the car with a loud slamming of the door.
"Fuck yourself," Wally murmured out icily as he disappeared into the cool apartment building.
He missed the upset sigh that Dick gave, the tightening of his knuckles on the steering wheel, and the soothing words of Babs as she patted his stark white hands.
"He doesn't mean any of it," she assured him, ginger brows furrowed sadly in the direction of the complex.
"I know he doesn't, Barb," Dick breathed out, peeling out of the parking area. "I know he doesn't"