Chapter Text
The sky was never quite the same after the Reach invasion. The stars, if they even dared to peek through the ashen clouds, felt colder—distant and mocking. Once, Artemis had gazed at those stars with Wally at her side, their fingers intertwined as they pointed out constellations. Now, they only served as a reminder of everything she’d lost.
Everything they’d lost.
The Resistance, what was left of it, had fallen weeks ago. Mount Justice had been turned to glass. The League had been dismantled. Blüdhaven was a crater. Atlantis hadn't been heard from in over a year. No one said it out loud, but everyone knew the sea was gone, poisoned from the inside out. Magic, what was left of it, was a flickering candle in a hurricane. Zatanna had tried. So had Doctor Fate. And Klarion, for all his madness, had screamed when the Reach got to him.
And Wally—Wally had died running. Running straight into the magnetic heart of a weapon hidden beneath the North Pole. No one had expected him to go, least of all her. He’d looked back at her over the comms, his voice shaking with adrenaline and fear and hope, and said “I’ll be back before you know it.”
But he never came back.
Nightwing had died six months after that, trying to dismantle a Reach communication relay that exploded just as he called in their success. Artemis had been too far away to stop it, too slow to save him, too weak to carry him out of the wreckage. He died with half his mask melted into his face, still smirking, always the strategist, always thinking they could win if they just tried hard enough.
The others—Kaldur, Conner, M’gann, Raquel—they went one by one. Or maybe in groups. Sometimes, she wasn't sure anymore. The timelines blurred together when survival meant fleeing from one burned-out husk of a city to the next. There was no time for grief. No time for mourning. Only time to run. To hide. To keep fighting even when it felt like there was no one left to fight for.
But Artemis Crock was nothing if not stubborn. She didn’t know how to stop fighting. Even when it was stupid. Even when her fingers trembled from malnutrition and sleep deprivation, when her body ached with old wounds barely healed. Even when she went days without speaking a word to another living soul. Even then—especially then—she kept going. Somebody had to.
That was why she’d stayed behind when the last stronghold fell. The Reach had come in waves, sleek black ships with red-lit underbellies slicing across the sky like knives. The resistance had scrambled, of course. They always did. But this time there was no backup. No fallback. No one left to cover the retreat.
So Artemis stayed.
She planted explosives with hands that no longer remembered what stillness felt like. She lured them in with stolen codes and old League frequencies. She set traps and bait and smiled bitterly at the thought of Wally telling her she was being reckless. He’d have kissed her anyway.
And when the fight started, she fought like a cornered beast. Like a shadow from the past. Her arrows didn’t miss. Her blades found seams in armor like they’d been born to. She was fast, cruel, desperate. She fought like someone who had nothing left to lose—because she didn’t.
But the Reach were endless. And Artemis wasn’t.
She dropped to one knee beside a wrecked column, her quiver empty, her body slick with blood—some hers, some not. Her breathing was ragged. The static in her ear was long dead, the last comm towers gone. The sky was a riot of fire. The ground trembled with approaching boots. She gripped a shattered piece of rebar in bloodied fingers and clenched her jaw.
She was going to die. Here, alone. Unmarked. Unmourned.
And still—still—somewhere in the mess of grief and exhaustion, she hoped.
Not for herself. But for something better. For someone to survive. For a future she’d never see, built by people she’d never know. For kids who might one day laugh under a sun that didn’t feel like judgment. For a world where the names on the memorial walls weren’t the end of the story.
That was when the light came.
It was sudden. Brilliant. Bluer than the deepest sea, purer than the clearest sky. Artemis reeled back, shielding her eyes with a trembling arm. The light didn’t burn. It warmed. Her pain dulled. The tremble in her limbs stilled. The roar of war faded like a tide pulling back.
A voice, calm and resonant, filled the space around her.
“Artemis Crock of Earth. You have suffered great loss… and yet you have held onto hope. You inspire hope. You can bring it to a better tomorrow.”
She blinked into the glow, barely able to breathe. Before her hovered a ring, elegant and simple. Blue, impossibly blue. A faint symbol etched into its surface pulsed with gentle energy.
“You have the ability to instill hope. You belong to the Blue Lantern Corps.”
She reached for the ring.
Her fingers closed around it like they’d been waiting to all her life.
The light flared.
Then came the pain.
She didn’t scream—her body locked up too quickly for that—but it tore through her like a thousand knives, searing and alien and endless. Every nerve in her body caught fire and she swore she could feel her atoms being shredded and reassembled again, over and over, vibrating through timelines, memories, futures that never were and might never be. For a brief moment, she forgot her own name.
The last thing she remembered was light. Not warm. Not blue. Just blinding.
Then—
Silence.
No wind. No smoke. No scorched sky. No Reach ships hunting through the clouds.
Just the hum of a distant city. And a fan spinning lazily overhead.
Artemis sucked in a breath like she was drowning and bolted upright. Her body ached in that strange, all-over way that followed major surgery or a really long fall. Her lungs burned. Her hands were trembling. But she was alive.
And the ceiling above her was familiar. Too familiar.
She turned her head slowly, disbelieving.
The peeling paint. The water stain in the far corner. The ratty fan with its soft creak. The faded posters on the walls. Her desk—clean-ish but cluttered, as she always kept it. A cracked window, and beyond it, the gray Gotham skyline.
“No,” she whispered.
She stumbled out of bed, nearly tripping over a pair of scuffed sneakers by the footboard. Her room. Her old room. Her knees hit the floor as she crawled to her nightstand and yanked open the drawer. Inside was a stack of old notebooks, her cracked MP3 player, and—
A phone.
Her fingers trembled as she powered it on. It took longer than she remembered, slower than any of the tech she’d used in the field.
The date blinked at her.
June 14, 2010.
“What the fuck,” she said aloud.
This was—this was before everything. Before Mount Justice. Before the Team. Before Wally. Before aliens. Before heroes.
She reached up and ran shaking fingers through her hair.
The Blue Lantern ring was still there, glowing faintly on her middle finger. The soft pulse of its light was the only thing grounding her.
You inspire hope. You can bring it to a better tomorrow.
She stared at the date again, numb.
The ring hadn’t just meant she could inspire a better tomorrow.
It had meant she could make one.
Holy shit.
The floorboards of her room creaked softly under her steps as Artemis paced tight circles across the warped wood, the worn-out rug underfoot providing the only buffer between her and the cold truth pressing in on all sides. She was back. Somehow, impossibly, back. The ring on her finger glowed faintly in the dim light of her bedroom, a soft blue hue that cut through the otherwise stale, yellowish light coming from the overhead bulb.
June 14, 2010. That date blinked mockingly at her from the phone’s lock screen, confirming again what her senses had been slow to accept.
She hadn’t gone to the afterlife. She hadn’t just been healed. She’d been sent back.
She ran a hand down her face, still shaky, her other arm folding across her stomach. Her fingers twitched in a nervous rhythm against her ribs. Everything felt too real. The scent of old Gotham air drifting through the cracked window. The faint yelling from the apartment next door. Her closet door that never quite shut all the way. The familiar ache in her knees from years of running and dodging. This wasn’t a dream. This wasn’t a simulation.
She was home. Home in a world not yet broken. Not yet buried.
“Oh my god,” she breathed, stopping in her tracks.
She had to make a list. She needed a plan. She couldn’t just… sit here. If she wasted time panicking or gawking, the weight of what she could do—what she had to do—would crush her.
Snatching her old, beat-up composition notebook from the desk, she dropped onto the edge of her bed and flipped past some doodles and half-finished poetry from a different life. She found a clean page, the lines blurred slightly by how hard her heart was pounding, and scrawled a title at the top:
Things to Change / Prevent
She underlined it twice.
Her hand hovered over the page for a moment, then started writing.
- Start prepping for the Reach invasion early.
- Get the League to believe her BEFORE it starts.
- Stop Roy from infecting the Justice League
- Don't let Kaldur be a double agent.
- Be a better double agent.
- Convince Dick to let others in before he burns out.
- Don't be a hypocrite and let others in.
- Treasure the small moments
- Murder?
- Save anyone you can if there’s a chance.
The pen hovered for a second longer, then she added:
- Figure out if there’s a way to stop the war without everyone dying this time.
Her handwriting was shaky, but legible. As her mind whirred, she underlined a few of the items and started adding bullet points beneath them, sketching out dates, locations, key moments. So many things she hadn’t been there for the first time. So many places where if she could just nudge the situation a little differently, it might unfold better.
But she couldn’t be too obvious. No one could know she wasn’t from this timeline. There was no telling what would happen—Butterfly Effect, paradoxes, the Green Lanterns yelling at her for cosmic disruption. Hell, she didn’t even know if this timeline was the original one anymore or if she’d branched off into something new.
She looked down at the ring again, its glow unwavering.
The Blue Lantern insignia looked like a symbol of salvation. She wasn’t a Lantern, not really. She didn’t know how to be one. She had a general idea from missions with Hal or John Stewart, sure. She remembered enough about blue rings boosting green ones, about how they ran on hope and needed it to survive. But the specifics? The rules? The limitations?
And what if the ring wasn’t supposed to have followed her here?
“I should go to Odym,” she muttered, rubbing the side of her neck. “I need to go to Odym.”
The homeworld of the Blue Lantern Corps. Somewhere far, far from Earth. She didn’t know what it would take to get there or how the ring even knew where it was, but if she was going to figure this out, she had to start there. She had to let them know she wasn’t a threat, that she wasn’t some time-traveling ring thief here to screw with the universe.
“God, how does this work?” she muttered, standing again and pacing anew.
Rings chose their wielders. That was the thing, right? Will for green. Fear for yellow. Rage, love, compassion, avarice—they all had their own metrics. But hope? It seemed to have found her in her lowest, darkest moment and decided that was enough.
She wondered if there were any Blue Lanterns still active in this timeline. Had the Reach invasion happened already in the background? Were the Blue Lanterns even formed yet?
And then there was another uncomfortable question crawling into her mind.
Would she remember everything if she left Earth right now? Would the people she needed to warn be too young to act on it yet?
She had to start gathering information. But first—
Artemis turned toward her window and squinted at the skyline. Gotham was still Gotham, ugly and gray and beautiful in that gritty way she had always both hated and loved. She wasn’t on the team yet. She hadn’t even met them. She was just Artemis Crock, invisible high school student, troublemaker daughter of two ex-villains, and somehow, also a spacefaring light-powered pseudo-guardian of the universe now.
She let out a sharp, humorless laugh.
“Great. No pressure.”
But at least there was one silver lining to this mess.
She wasn’t on the team yet. She wouldn’t have to see them—not until she was ready. Because the thought of seeing them again, alive and young and hopeful, hit her like a gut punch. Dick with his awful puns and relentless optimism. Wally, full of kinetic energy and big ideas. Kaldur with his quiet strength. Conner. Raquel. M’gann. Zatanna.
She would’ve cried if she saw them right now.
She rubbed the sleeve of her shirt across her eyes just in case.
At least her mom wouldn’t notice if she was gone for a bit. Paula Crock loved her in her own way, but Artemis had always known she didn’t exactly watch her closely. As long as Artemis came home eventually and didn’t get arrested, she could vanish for days and no one would come looking.
That had been a curse before. Now it was a gift.
One week. She could sneak off-world for a week, maybe less. Figure out what her ring could do. Talk to someone who understood it. Learn to use it properly so she didn’t blow up a city block trying to light a fire.
“Okay,” she exhaled, brushing her hair back. “Okay. I’ll go to Odym. Learn everything I can. Come back. Then… then I start changing things. Quietly.”
It was a start. A plan.
The ring pulsed, as if in agreement.
She drew in another breath and held it this time. She needed to believe she could do this. That she’d been sent back for a reason. That the universe hadn’t just handed her this miracle only to let her fail again.
Because if she didn’t make it right this time—if she didn’t use this second chance—
She didn’t deserve the ring.
Artemis squared her shoulders. She was going to be better. Smarter. Stronger. She was going to bring hope, like the ring said.
And first?
She was going to space.