Work Text:
one
He is not a morning person. Artemis Crock is up before the sun rises, and Wally West would rather wait until after it sets.
And so she makes him coffee, strong and black and almost tar-like, and he drinks it piping hot in three gulps and kisses her with his coffee breath as she pours herself a second cup of tea, and she slaps his arm gently and he kisses her harder and she spills her tea everytime.
two
Neither of them sleeps well. When Wally wakes up, thrashing in defense from enemies that he hasn’t fought fought in years, she’s already awake, tears rolling down her face, fingers tracing long-gone bruises in the shapes of her father’s hands up her arms. He pulls her down and holds her, and he wonders if it’s selfish that he needs her protection as much as she needs his.
three
She sets three alarms every night, and he wonders if she’s aware that there is exactly one for every person who has disappointed her to the point of heartbreak. He promises himself he will never become alarm number four. He never wants her to lose sleep over him.
four
He loses sleep over her-- while she’s away, he sits up every night and watches cable news and goes on runs through the dark and empty streets, orders Chinese food that he never touches. He flips through her magazines, the one’s he keeps telling himself he’s going to cancel, but never does, and sorts his socks in their drawer and sleeps on the couch because the bed is too big without her.
When she gets back, tired and emptier than before, he sleeps through the night for the first time in months, his fingers intertwined with hers, her body pulled close enough to convince him that her warmth is real, her gentle breathing is not the hallucination of a half-mad man in a too-empty house.
five
There is a hole in her heart the approximate shape and size of the indentation on the other side of a mattress she will never sleep on again.
She sits at the kitchen table, pretends there is no Chinese-takeout with a WW scrawled across the top in red Sharpie, and watches the clock on the oven tick slowly by. She listens to each alarm as they happen-- the radio clock in the bedroom she won’t enter, her phone, the radio in the kitchen, until the oven beeps at her four times.
Artemis buries her head in her folded arms and cries.