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Artemis had wanted to get out of the life. She had. At least, she thought that she had.
She isn't so sure anymore, after spending months undercover with Kaldur, and then saving the world from the Reach.
She had felt so alive, so at home when she was back on the job. She'd missed that adrenaline rush, but she'd missed the feeling of helping people too. She's not so sure she wants to be retired anymore.
She ignores the itch for a while. She ignores it as it grows. She ignores it until it feels like a burning pain, a searing need to get back into the game, to put some ointment on the burn and finally feel that relief again.
She tells herself that it's just one night when she zetas to L.A. and goes out on patrol.She wears the Tigress suit. No one would have ever known it was her if Zatanna wasn't there.
"Artemis?" Zatanna asks, as Artemis lands a decisive punch to a man’s jaw. The guy goes down, and Artemis turns around to face her. There isn’t really any way out of this one.
“Hi,” Artemis says awkwardly. She hasn’t really known how to interact with Zatanna since they were teenagers. They'd been close friends, but then she found out that Zatanna had feelings for her and things got weird. It's hard to keep a friendship afloat when you know the girl likes you and you can't help thinking "if I weren't with him, I'd be with her".
They aren't exactly close now.
"I thought you stayed out of the game, after the Invasion. Are you back on the Team?" Artemis could lie. She could avoid this whole awkward conversation altogether. But if she lied then it would be a big one, an obvious one. Zatanna would find out in a few days that no, she's not on the Team. She might tell people that Artemis has been patrolling again, and well, Artemis knows exactly how Wally would feel about that. He has grand plans for their future, and none of them involve her moonlighting as a superhero again.
Artemis decides to tell her not-really friend the truth right now so she can keep lying to her significant other. She realizes how wrong that sounds. She just doesn't care.
"I haven't.”
"Wally doesn't know,” Zatanna says. Artemis shrugs and tries to look nonchalant.
“You can be chalant with me, you know,” Zatanna says. Artemis rolls her eyes. Dick and Zatanna and their made up words.
"Look, this isn’t worth mentioning to him. He’d get all worked up about nothing, This is just a one time thing."
"Sure," Zatanna says dryly, "a one time thing." Artemis doesn’t respond as she leaves the conversation. It was awkward anyway.
When Artemis gets back to her apartment, Wally is sitting on the couch in his boxers, reading through one of his engineering textbooks at his speedster reading pace. It reminds her of that scene in the Incredibles when Elastagirl busted Mr. Incredible for doing hero work behind her back. Artemis doesn’t like thinking about those parallels.
“Where were you?” he asks, looking up from his textbook.
"I was babysitting Lian.”
“Why didn’t you let me know.” It’s an accusation, not a question. Artemis knows that she should have expected this. She is doing the one thing that they agreed to leave in the past. She is violating the fabric of their relationship.
“Jade called last minute, said if I didn’t come by right then she’d take Lian out on the job with her. I like it when I know my sister doesn't have my niece strapped to her while committing crimes." She feels a little skeezy that she can lie about it so easily, and she feels awful about how relieved she feels when his look softens.
"I’m sorry,” he says, “I was just worried."
"You were worried I was patrolling behind your back, weren't you?" A completely founded worry, Artemis thinks.
"I know, it sounds stupid when you put it like that." Artemis laughs, and she shrugs. She knows what he’ll read it as. He’ll see it as a “well, yeah” response instead of a confirmation.
"We're still on the same page, right?" He says this cautiously, like he;s afraid she’ll say no. She knows the question he's asking: you still want a normal life with me? And she wants to want it, she does. She wants to want it so much. She loves him, and she wants to make this work.
"Yeah," Artemis says with a confidence she no longer has, "we are." Wally smiles, a bit of his usual confidence returning. Artemis does love seeing him smile like that.
Artemis tries to stay away. She really does, but it’s only about a week and a half before she’s back on the streets of L.A. running another patrol. She runs into Zatanna once again. She thinks that she should have chosen a different city to patrol.
"A one time thing, huh?" Zatanna says.
"I got antsy," Artemis says.
"It's been a week, Artemis."
“A week and a half,” Artemis says. Those three extra days are important. They show that they have slightly more self control than that. Zatanna sends her a disappointed look.
"I'm going to quit. I am,” Artemis says. She knows that it sounds more like she’s trying to convince herself than Zatanna.
"You are?”
"I know- I know I sound like an addict, but it's not bad, okay. It's not bad to be a hero."
"Then why are you hiding it?" The way that Zatanna says that doesn’t make it sound like a witty zinger. It doesn’t sound like she’s just trying to get under Artemis’s skin or rile her up. She sounds legitimately confused.
Why is she hiding it? Artemis hasn't really figured that out yet.
Artemis goes two weeks without heroing this next time. This time when she breaks her fast, she doesn’t have to find hero work. Hero work finds her. Artemis goes to a movie with her friend Linda Park the next Friday night. It’s the midnight premiere, so when they’re walking back to Linda’s car it’s after 2 o’clock in the morning. It’s also when Linda is almost mugged. Artemis saves her.
They talk way more about the attempted mugging than the movie on the way back to Artemis and Wally’s place. Once they get there, Artemis becomes very grateful that Wally went to Bludhaven tonight to visit Dick. She expects that he spent the night, and that she might not ever have to deal with talking about the mugging.
She hopes that Linda won’t mention it when they go back to class on Monday. However, hoping that Linda Park won’t mention that a friend of hers did something awesome is like hoping that the world will stop turning. When Artemis opens the door, she realizes that her hopes were all in vain. Wally's lying on the couch, the television murmuring in the background.
“Babe?”
"Your girlfriend's a badass," Linda says peaking through the door. Wally's eyes widen with worry.
"It was nothing," Artemis says, blocking the question that she knows is coming.
"Don't be modest, Artemis. You pinned a mugger to the ground. That's badass."
"Yeah," Wally says, "and dangerous."
"Oh come on," Linda says, "it was badass, and hot. I'd think you'd be into that." Which okay, Artemis loves Linda but that makes her a little uncomfortable.
"Okay," Artemis says, "new topic." Linda looks uncomfortable and a little awkward. She gestures to the doorway.
“I’ll just go,” she says, and she ducks out, closing the door behind her. Wally looks worried and a little angry, and Artemis doesn’t know what to do about this. If he’s reacting like this to her just taking down a mugger, then how would he react to her night job?
"Look I just saved Linda," she says, "it wasn't a big deal." But it is, it really is. At least, it is to him, and his reaction in a big deal to her.
"I'm sorry," he says, "I freaked for no reason."
"It seems like you don't trust me."
"Babe, I'm sorry, I do trust you. It's just- I don't want you to relapse."
"Relapse?"
"Yeah, relapse. Go back to hero work."
"Saving someone isn't a fucking relapse. Hero work isn't a drug addiction."
"It kind of is for you." Artemis doesn’t know if he’s right, not really, but she does know that it’s different for the two of them. Wally isn't in danger of getting back into the life. It's just Artemis. When she went undercover with Kaldur, she had felt alive for the first time in months. She doesn’t want to budget that feeling to once or twice a month, hiding it from her significant other. She doesn’t want to keep this up.
There's half of her that wants to storm out right now, that wants to tell him that she'll do what she wants because what she wants is the thrill of the fight, and that warm, all-consuming feeling after she's helped someone. But there is half of her that wants to keep this thing with Wally because she never had it before, half of her who desperately wants the picket fence and the loving husband, the picture perfect sitcom family.
"I promise I won't do it again," she lies. She loves him, and she isn't ready to give this relationship up. She doesn't know what her life would look like without him. She's kind of afraid to find out.
It’s a week before she puts on the Tigress mask and goes out to fight baddies. She feels dirty that it happens that soon, but she can’t wait any longer.
At this point, she goes to L.A. specifically to run into Zatanna. She knows that Zatanna has been assigned to patrol there on weekends, and she wants to run into her. There’s something comforting about finding the other woman when she’s trying not to find anyone. Maybe it’s just because Zatanna makes her feel a little bit less alone in this. She beats up three muggers and a wannabe super villain in a barf green cape before Zatanna finds her
"I thought that you were quitting?” Zatanna asks her.
"I told him I would. I promised that I wouldn't do this." Maybe she does have a problem. Maybe she should see Black Canary, or- or something. She has a chance at normalcy. She doesn't understand why she doesn't want it anymore.
She has a chance for true love and The American Dream, for the kind of life she'd dreamed of as a kid. She has a chance to settle down and be a normal fucking human with a normal marriage to a normal guy who wants a normal sort of happy ending. She doesn't know why she can't be satisfied with that.
Zatanna’s voice is soft and gently as she tells her, "Artemis, if you're supposed to be with him, then you should be able to be yourself with him."
"Are you trying to break up my relationship?" It's a cruel jibe, a reminder of Zatanna's (mainly) unrequited crush and her subsequent rejection. Zatanna barely looks phased.
"Are you?" The words knock the wind out of her. She hadn’t considered that, but now that Zatanna’s put the thought in her head, Artemis can’t stop considering it. At this point, Artemis doesn't know.
Artemis knows that she should tell him, that she can tell him. She’s been avoiding it because she doesn’t want to deal with the fallout.
She knows Wally. Getting back into the life is a deal breaker for him, period. Hard stop. Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars. He might be willing to wait it out with her for a few months while she meets with Black Canary and scratches her itch, but he'd expect her to stop eventually. That would all come with the expectation that she works on it, like an addiction. Wally's patience would come with the assumption that she's working towards going sober and that eventually they will have that life he dreamed of. He might be willing to wait for her to be "cured", but he'd expect that giving up hero work is the endgame. He wants a normal life, and that's what they'd agreed to. She's violating the terms of their relationship, and she really doesn't think that he's willing to redraft the contract.
She doesn’t want to live with the terms of their relationship anymore. Zatanna was right, she is trying to break up her relationship. Maybe not consciously, but she realizes now that it’s not good for her anymore. It’s not what she wants moving forward. She wants to see her friends on the Team again. She wants to go on patrols with Ollie, with Dick, with M’gann. She even wants to keep seeing Zatanna.
She’s just felt so isolated from the family that she built herself since they got out of the life. She’s felt isolated and stagnant, like what she’s doing with her life isn’t helping anyone, not even herself. She feels like she’s been sitting around rotting, and she knows that she can’t keeping doing this anymore. However, Artemis isn’t ready to break up with Wally.
She's been with him for so long, she doesn't know what life without him would look like. The idea scares her.
She decides to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, just maybe, she’s wrong about how he’ll react. Maybe it won’t be the end of them, her wanting to be a hero again. Maybe it won’t be the nail in their coffin.
She waits until the next night to bring it up, until after Wally gets home from his engineering society meeting. She’s sitting on the couch, her Tigress costume and mask tucked into her backpack, which she laid on the ground in front her.
“How was the meeting?” He shrugs. That particular club isn’t one that he normally comes home excited about. He zips over to the spot next to her on the couch, and the air around Artemis blows a little.
“Wannawatchamovie?” Artemis is only able to decrypt that because she’s dated him for years. Speedsters’ speech always speeds up when they just used their superspeed. Artemis really thinks about it for a minute. She could let him put on a movie. She could put her head on his shoulder, and kick the backpack out of the way and pretend that none of this is happening. She doesn’t let herself melt back into their routine.
“I actually have something to talk to you about.”
“What is it?” he asks. He sounds concerned, but not angry. She knows that won’t last. She pulls her backpack up into her lap, and unzips it. Then she pulls out the Tigress costume and mask, and she drops the backpack back on the ground. Wally is looking at her in total confusion.
“I’ve been patrolling,” she says, running her thumb over the mask. She looks at the mask instead of him, tracing the black stripes under the eyes.
“You have been doing hero work,” he says, and he sounds angry and betrayed. And Artemis understands, god she does. She’s been lying to him for so long. She knew that finding out that truth was going to hurt him.
“Yeah, I have.” She expects a piercing retort. When Wally’s mad, he gets cruel. He can find the cracks in your armor and send a poison dart through them. The insult she's expecting doesn’t come.
“But you’re telling me now,” he says, and his voice sounds soft and hopeful. That’s the opposite of what she expected.
“You’re telling me this because you want to quit. You want me to help work through this with you.”
“No,” she says, and he stiffens a little,”that’s not why.”
“Then why are you telling me?” he says, and she can hear a little of that cold, cruel tone of his in the words. It’s just a hint. If she didn’t know him as well as she does, she wouldn’t even notice it.
"You need someone who wants a normal life, Wally. That isn't me. It never was." She expects a barb now, a retort that will get right into the chinks in her armor. What he says might hurt worse.
"We can still make this work."
"Wally, I'm not quitting again. I can't." His face changes, like he just popped a candy he expected to be sweet into his mouth and it ended up being sour. He yanks the mask out of her hand and the suit off her lap.
"It's me or the suit,” he says. It’s not as cold as she expects, not as cutting, but it’s far more final. Artemis yanks the mask out of his hands, grabs the suit, and walks out the door.
As Artemis expected, she ends up in L.A. beating up baddies. She runs into Zatanna soon enough. Apparently, her emotional distress shows on her face.
“Are you alright?” Zatanna asks. She sounds concerned. It's far more concern than Artemis deserves from her. Artemis has been nothing but a pain in the ass to Zatanna. One who keeps bringing up old memories and making Zatanna help her work through her relationship issues.
“Not really.” She won’t elaborate if Zatanna doesn’t ask. She doesn’t want to burden her with the shitshow.
“Do you want to talk?” Zatanna asks. Well, Zatanna did ask, so Artemis dumps the entire situation on her.
“That’s a lot,” Zatanna says.
“Yeah.”
“What are you gonna do now?”
"I don't know,” Artemis admits. Her mom told her never to let that happen to her, to never build a home out of a person, because people change. Sometimes they don't end up being who you planned they'd be.
Wally didn't change, but Artemis did. Life’s weird that way sometimes.
"You have other options, you know,” Zatanna say. If Artemis didn’t know any better, she’d say that sounded flirty.
"Are we talking school or something else?" Artemis asks. Zatanna shrugs.
"You'll have to figure that out." She smiles at her, like it's an inside joke. Then Zatanna turns right back around, and walks away. Artemis doesn't know if that's a door that has opened, not really, but even a complete lack of doors will be better for her than the one she just closed. She knows, deep within her, that she made the right decision.