This may be becoming a theme for me
Title: Got Your Six
Fandom: Young Justice
Characters/Pairing: Artemis, Roy
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,355
Summary: Overworked, overstressed, and nursing a nasty case of the flu, Artemis pushes herself a step too far and passes out while patrolling unfamiliar territory. For better or worse, someone finds her.
A/N: I wrote this for a prompt on yj_anon_meme asking for Roy looking after a sick Artemis, because A) apparently I'm a sucker for fic in which someone takes care of the tough one who don't need no help from nobody, and B) I'll jump at any chance to write snark. This is my first time writing Roy; hope I did okay.
Missions with the team, crimefighting with Green Arrow, school, homework, friends, keeping up the appearance of normality, training, a part-time job on the weekends, working harder than everyone to keep up with more experienced heroes and adapt to a new school and meet her father's expectations and take care of her mother and hide her past from everyone around her…
It was a little tiring.
Just a bit.
Okay, screw it - Artemis was exhausted.
And now the flu, on top of all that?
This was just stupid.
Wherever she'd picked it up, it had been from the same place Ollie did, and now he was being a giant baby who wouldn't go out patrolling because he wouldn't do any good like this and didn't want to end up passed out in the rain.
Oh, and it was raining, too. Torrentially. Of course.
But crime didn't rest in Star City just because of a little rain, and Count Vertigo wasn't the type to lie low even after they'd nearly apprehended him last week. Someone had to get out there and do the right thing, and with GA convalescing and Speedy - Red Arrow - whatever…off wherever he was, tonight Artemis was Star City's lone defender.
Now if only she could aim straight.
It must have been the rain, cold and soaking her through to the bone and clouding her sight with sheet after wind-whipped sheet of downpour. Her vision wobbled almost as much as her leg did when she took that next step - damn it, she just wanted to grapple onto the next building so she could repel down from the roof - and her arm shook with strain. She felt hot then cold then hot again, pins prickling up and down her limbs; her head spun, and the ground seemed to be shrinking away, then rising up to meet her…
Ah. That would be because it was, or rather she was taking a fast trip to meet it. Maybe Count Vertigo really was making his move.
Artemis lay on the roof, eyes screwed shut against the rain and the ache lancing through every inch of her body. After a moment, she sat up, waited for the dizziness to pass, crawled to the edge of the roof, and promptly threw up over the edge. She wiped her mouth on the back of her bracer and curled up into a ball on her side. In the rain. She groaned. Stupid, stupid, this was so stupid…
On top of it all, Artemis was pretty sure she had no idea where she actually was. Was she even in the city proper anymore? How had she even gotten here? And why was her vision narrowing into black points at an alarming rate?
God damn it, she thought to herself, immediately prior to losing consciousness, I hate it when Ollie's right.
*
When Artemis next woke up, she didn't want to open her eyes. She had a feeling it would either make her head hurt even worse or she simply wouldn't like what she would see.
She was still sore, exhausted, queasy, feverish, and oversensitized, but it was no longer raining, and past the chills and general discomfort she could sense that she was situated on top of something soft and underneath something warm.
Great. She'd passed out in the rain, and some two-bit criminal had dragged her back to his lair and was just waiting for her to wake up so he could tell her all about his clever plan and then kill her…
Except…except, if it were a villain's lair, it probably wouldn't smell like fresh laundry and - was that chicken soup?
Artemis opened her eyes to find herself staring at a white ceiling, and, as she shifted her gaze around the room, white walls decorated with a few scant band posters and a calendar with a picture of a motorcycle. She was on a sofa, covered in a couple of threadbare quilts; the room was populated with crappy, mismatched furniture, a television sitting on top of a tote box, and a card table scattered with magazines and an abandoned coffee mug and - arrows?
Ollie. No, she'd only seen his front room, but this place probably didn't even have a front room. Who--
It was at that point that something metallic clattered loudly and someone's voice - male - erupted in a sudden, muted string of…of words, Artemis supposed; it didn't sound like gibberish, exactly, so she probably wasn't having an insane fever dream, but none of it made any sense.
But that didn't matter. The point was, there was someone else here. She tried to sit up and got as far as propping herself up on her eyebrows, which was enough to reveal that there was an attached kitchen on the other side of this - well, it probably counted as a living room. There was a man standing there with his back to her; he looked to be in front of the stove, and was shaking one hand out as though it were burned and using the other to cautiously prod at whatever was in front of him with a ladle.
Whoever it was, he had red hair and exceptionally strapping arms and…red-fletched arrows on his card table.
"What are you doing?" she asked Speedy - Red Arrow - whatever, her voice rasping a lot more than she would have liked.
He went very still. Artemis was impressed, but then, that must be the training; better to freeze when startled than jump. He was silent for a long time, and then, "Swearing incessantly under my breath." He pulled a bowl from the counter up to the edge of the stove and proceeded to ladle a helping of, Artemis presumed, chicken soup into it.
Artemis watched as he turned off the stove and used a pair of potholders to lift the steaming bowl. He turned around, and she was shocked to see that he wasn't wearing a mask. No costume at all, in fact; he was dressed casually, jeans and a gray t-shirt.
"Glad to see you're finally awake," he told her, in a tone that seemed to suggest he wasn't, in fact, particularly glad. He dragged the card table over to the sofa, swept a few things aside, and set the bowl down on top of it. "You've been unconscious for over an hour."
"What language was that?" Artemis asked. There were plenty of better questions to ask, she was sure, but her head felt like it was stuffed full of congealed pudding and she'd just have to remember them all later.
Red Arrow went back into the kitchen and opened the freezer before answering. "Navajo." He came out with a couple of ice cubes, dug a spoon out of a nearby drawer, and made his way back to drop the ice into the soup. He extended the spoon to Artemis in a silent offer. She looked up at him in silence. His eyes were blue.
Artemis accepted the spoon and, with some difficulty, hauled herself into a full sitting position. "Is this your house?"
"You were on my turf," he informed her, in the same gruff and vaguely annoyed tone of voice; Artemis assumed that meant 'yes'.
Artemis pulled the soup closer and stirred it while Red Arrow took a seat in a nearby chair. He didn't exactly sit stiffly, but certainly on guard. He watched her critically for a long moment. Artemis was unsure how to feel about all this, but she knew staring pissed her off, so she put the spoon down and stared back.
"You can take your costume off," he said after awhile, evenly. All of Artemis's training couldn't keep her eyes from flying wide open at that, but Red Arrow grimaced. "In the bathroom. I can give you a change of clothes to borrow. You're soaked."
Artemis looked down at herself and noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing a blue bathrobe over her costume. "Sure," she said awkwardly.
Red Arrow got up and disappeared into another room. He came back a second later with a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants he must have already laid out for her, and dropped them onto her lap. "I'm not going to ask you for payment," he said, and he sounded pretty pissed off, but Artemis was beginning to gather that that was just the way he talked, "and even if I were, not from somebody who obviously has the flu. Bathroom's on the right."
He walked back into the kitchen to mess with the soup some more. Artemis got shakily to her feet and headed for the bathroom. "How did you know it's the flu?" she asked, just to challenge him, really, because it was clear he had the upper hand here and she wanted him to know she wasn't going down without a fight if it came to that.
He didn't look up. "Let's see, the fact that you were passed out in the rain with a fever and puke on your bracer might have something to do with it. Besides," he added just as she was closing the door, "GA has it too."
Artemis stripped out of her wet clothes with unsteady hands and contemplated the implications of that last part.
She trudged out of the bathroom in her borrowed clothes a few minutes later and half-collapsed back onto the sofa. Red Arrow was still in the kitchen. "Should I be letting you see me without my mask?" she asked - well, more or less; the sentence ended up broken into pieces by a sudden coughing fit.
Red Arrow eventually came back into the living room with his own bowl of soup. "You're seeing me without mine," he said, quite casually, and sat back down.
"You trust me?" Artemis asked, suspicious.
"Green Arrow trusts you." It was hard to tell whether it was a correction or a confirmation.
Artemis still felt nauseous, but the gnawing hunger behind it was starting to get to her. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her mouth and tasted it; it was…well, it was definitely soup, and there was a distinct suggestion of chicken. That was just about all there was to say for it. Still, she was starving, and it wasn't totally unpalatable. She took a few more bites.
Eventually, Red Arrow spoke. "Roy."
It took her a second to process that. "What?"
"My name. It's Roy."
Artemis thought back, and…yeah, she vaguely remembered Ollie calling him that once. "Right. I forgot." She ate some more soup and considered the situation as thoroughly as she could given her current level of brain function before saying, cautiously, "Artemis." Then, sardonically, "No, really."
"I know," said Roy. Artemis looked at him. He raised an eyebrow. "You think I didn't find out everything I could about you as soon as I knew Ollie had a new sidekick?"
Artemis narrowed her eyes. "Why?"
"Because," he said slowly, staring her dead in the eye, "Green Arrow trusts you."
Silence stretched on until Artemis tilted her head and told him, "You have pretty weird methods of showing affection."
Roy scoffed, but there might have been an amused snort somewhere in there. "Somebody has to watch the old man's back."
Artemis rolled her eyes. "I know. Luckily he decided to be a huge wimp tonight and stayed home."
"Because you're so good at taking care of yourself that you could have looked out for him too, huh?" Roy said dryly.
Artemis glared at him, but couldn't really say anything in her own defense. She'd passed out in the rain and had to be dragged home and fed soup, for god's sake.
Roy picked at his soup and sighed. "You have a fever. You can barely stand, let alone shoot, and it's pouring rain on top of that - what were you thinking?" He looked up, gravely serious and slightly more angry-looking than usual. "What if it hadn't been me who found you? What if some criminal had used you for ransom to lure Ollie's flu-stricken ass into a trap and gotten you both killed? And you know, plenty of assholes in this town don't have nearly as many qualms about cute girls with germs as I do."
"I know that," Artemis snapped, although every cell of her was struggling not to wilt under that scowl.
"I don't think you do," Roy snapped back. When he spoke again, his voice was more level, if stern. "Look. Just because you're a hero, and just because you know how to look out for yourself, doesn't mean you can go around taking stupid risks that can get you and others hurt. Not out of some blind sense of duty, not out of ignorance, and not to prove something."
Artemis didn't think she'd ever seen someone so perfectly serious. But she wasn't trying to prove anything; she was just trying to do what was right - she was always trying to do what was right, these days, after her dad… Her dad, who was always demanding that she be better, faster, stronger, more, always pushing her to keep going, never letting up, never…never letting up no matter what, even when she was stressed and overworked and sick and couldn't manage perfect 24/7.
Her dad, who never made her soup when she had the flu.
Artemis watched a scrap of celery float lazily to the surface of her bowl. She opened her mouth to speak, but what could she say?
What could she say?
Roy was still watching her steadily when she looked up.
"Thanks," said Artemis.
Roy didn't smile, but the tense, irritated lines in his face smoothed out and faded away. "You're welcome." He picked up his bowl and dug a remote control out of his chair, which he tossed onto the sofa beside her. "Eat your soup," he told her, and took his bowl back into the kitchen.
Artemis flipped on the old junk TV to some documentary about zebras, suffered quietly through her symptoms while Roy transferred leftovers to a tupperware container, and ate her soup.
Fandom: Young Justice
Characters/Pairing: Artemis, Roy
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,355
Summary: Overworked, overstressed, and nursing a nasty case of the flu, Artemis pushes herself a step too far and passes out while patrolling unfamiliar territory. For better or worse, someone finds her.
A/N: I wrote this for a prompt on yj_anon_meme asking for Roy looking after a sick Artemis, because A) apparently I'm a sucker for fic in which someone takes care of the tough one who don't need no help from nobody, and B) I'll jump at any chance to write snark. This is my first time writing Roy; hope I did okay.
Missions with the team, crimefighting with Green Arrow, school, homework, friends, keeping up the appearance of normality, training, a part-time job on the weekends, working harder than everyone to keep up with more experienced heroes and adapt to a new school and meet her father's expectations and take care of her mother and hide her past from everyone around her…
It was a little tiring.
Just a bit.
Okay, screw it - Artemis was exhausted.
And now the flu, on top of all that?
This was just stupid.
Wherever she'd picked it up, it had been from the same place Ollie did, and now he was being a giant baby who wouldn't go out patrolling because he wouldn't do any good like this and didn't want to end up passed out in the rain.
Oh, and it was raining, too. Torrentially. Of course.
But crime didn't rest in Star City just because of a little rain, and Count Vertigo wasn't the type to lie low even after they'd nearly apprehended him last week. Someone had to get out there and do the right thing, and with GA convalescing and Speedy - Red Arrow - whatever…off wherever he was, tonight Artemis was Star City's lone defender.
Now if only she could aim straight.
It must have been the rain, cold and soaking her through to the bone and clouding her sight with sheet after wind-whipped sheet of downpour. Her vision wobbled almost as much as her leg did when she took that next step - damn it, she just wanted to grapple onto the next building so she could repel down from the roof - and her arm shook with strain. She felt hot then cold then hot again, pins prickling up and down her limbs; her head spun, and the ground seemed to be shrinking away, then rising up to meet her…
Ah. That would be because it was, or rather she was taking a fast trip to meet it. Maybe Count Vertigo really was making his move.
Artemis lay on the roof, eyes screwed shut against the rain and the ache lancing through every inch of her body. After a moment, she sat up, waited for the dizziness to pass, crawled to the edge of the roof, and promptly threw up over the edge. She wiped her mouth on the back of her bracer and curled up into a ball on her side. In the rain. She groaned. Stupid, stupid, this was so stupid…
On top of it all, Artemis was pretty sure she had no idea where she actually was. Was she even in the city proper anymore? How had she even gotten here? And why was her vision narrowing into black points at an alarming rate?
God damn it, she thought to herself, immediately prior to losing consciousness, I hate it when Ollie's right.
*
When Artemis next woke up, she didn't want to open her eyes. She had a feeling it would either make her head hurt even worse or she simply wouldn't like what she would see.
She was still sore, exhausted, queasy, feverish, and oversensitized, but it was no longer raining, and past the chills and general discomfort she could sense that she was situated on top of something soft and underneath something warm.
Great. She'd passed out in the rain, and some two-bit criminal had dragged her back to his lair and was just waiting for her to wake up so he could tell her all about his clever plan and then kill her…
Except…except, if it were a villain's lair, it probably wouldn't smell like fresh laundry and - was that chicken soup?
Artemis opened her eyes to find herself staring at a white ceiling, and, as she shifted her gaze around the room, white walls decorated with a few scant band posters and a calendar with a picture of a motorcycle. She was on a sofa, covered in a couple of threadbare quilts; the room was populated with crappy, mismatched furniture, a television sitting on top of a tote box, and a card table scattered with magazines and an abandoned coffee mug and - arrows?
Ollie. No, she'd only seen his front room, but this place probably didn't even have a front room. Who--
It was at that point that something metallic clattered loudly and someone's voice - male - erupted in a sudden, muted string of…of words, Artemis supposed; it didn't sound like gibberish, exactly, so she probably wasn't having an insane fever dream, but none of it made any sense.
But that didn't matter. The point was, there was someone else here. She tried to sit up and got as far as propping herself up on her eyebrows, which was enough to reveal that there was an attached kitchen on the other side of this - well, it probably counted as a living room. There was a man standing there with his back to her; he looked to be in front of the stove, and was shaking one hand out as though it were burned and using the other to cautiously prod at whatever was in front of him with a ladle.
Whoever it was, he had red hair and exceptionally strapping arms and…red-fletched arrows on his card table.
"What are you doing?" she asked Speedy - Red Arrow - whatever, her voice rasping a lot more than she would have liked.
He went very still. Artemis was impressed, but then, that must be the training; better to freeze when startled than jump. He was silent for a long time, and then, "Swearing incessantly under my breath." He pulled a bowl from the counter up to the edge of the stove and proceeded to ladle a helping of, Artemis presumed, chicken soup into it.
Artemis watched as he turned off the stove and used a pair of potholders to lift the steaming bowl. He turned around, and she was shocked to see that he wasn't wearing a mask. No costume at all, in fact; he was dressed casually, jeans and a gray t-shirt.
"Glad to see you're finally awake," he told her, in a tone that seemed to suggest he wasn't, in fact, particularly glad. He dragged the card table over to the sofa, swept a few things aside, and set the bowl down on top of it. "You've been unconscious for over an hour."
"What language was that?" Artemis asked. There were plenty of better questions to ask, she was sure, but her head felt like it was stuffed full of congealed pudding and she'd just have to remember them all later.
Red Arrow went back into the kitchen and opened the freezer before answering. "Navajo." He came out with a couple of ice cubes, dug a spoon out of a nearby drawer, and made his way back to drop the ice into the soup. He extended the spoon to Artemis in a silent offer. She looked up at him in silence. His eyes were blue.
Artemis accepted the spoon and, with some difficulty, hauled herself into a full sitting position. "Is this your house?"
"You were on my turf," he informed her, in the same gruff and vaguely annoyed tone of voice; Artemis assumed that meant 'yes'.
Artemis pulled the soup closer and stirred it while Red Arrow took a seat in a nearby chair. He didn't exactly sit stiffly, but certainly on guard. He watched her critically for a long moment. Artemis was unsure how to feel about all this, but she knew staring pissed her off, so she put the spoon down and stared back.
"You can take your costume off," he said after awhile, evenly. All of Artemis's training couldn't keep her eyes from flying wide open at that, but Red Arrow grimaced. "In the bathroom. I can give you a change of clothes to borrow. You're soaked."
Artemis looked down at herself and noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing a blue bathrobe over her costume. "Sure," she said awkwardly.
Red Arrow got up and disappeared into another room. He came back a second later with a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants he must have already laid out for her, and dropped them onto her lap. "I'm not going to ask you for payment," he said, and he sounded pretty pissed off, but Artemis was beginning to gather that that was just the way he talked, "and even if I were, not from somebody who obviously has the flu. Bathroom's on the right."
He walked back into the kitchen to mess with the soup some more. Artemis got shakily to her feet and headed for the bathroom. "How did you know it's the flu?" she asked, just to challenge him, really, because it was clear he had the upper hand here and she wanted him to know she wasn't going down without a fight if it came to that.
He didn't look up. "Let's see, the fact that you were passed out in the rain with a fever and puke on your bracer might have something to do with it. Besides," he added just as she was closing the door, "GA has it too."
Artemis stripped out of her wet clothes with unsteady hands and contemplated the implications of that last part.
She trudged out of the bathroom in her borrowed clothes a few minutes later and half-collapsed back onto the sofa. Red Arrow was still in the kitchen. "Should I be letting you see me without my mask?" she asked - well, more or less; the sentence ended up broken into pieces by a sudden coughing fit.
Red Arrow eventually came back into the living room with his own bowl of soup. "You're seeing me without mine," he said, quite casually, and sat back down.
"You trust me?" Artemis asked, suspicious.
"Green Arrow trusts you." It was hard to tell whether it was a correction or a confirmation.
Artemis still felt nauseous, but the gnawing hunger behind it was starting to get to her. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her mouth and tasted it; it was…well, it was definitely soup, and there was a distinct suggestion of chicken. That was just about all there was to say for it. Still, she was starving, and it wasn't totally unpalatable. She took a few more bites.
Eventually, Red Arrow spoke. "Roy."
It took her a second to process that. "What?"
"My name. It's Roy."
Artemis thought back, and…yeah, she vaguely remembered Ollie calling him that once. "Right. I forgot." She ate some more soup and considered the situation as thoroughly as she could given her current level of brain function before saying, cautiously, "Artemis." Then, sardonically, "No, really."
"I know," said Roy. Artemis looked at him. He raised an eyebrow. "You think I didn't find out everything I could about you as soon as I knew Ollie had a new sidekick?"
Artemis narrowed her eyes. "Why?"
"Because," he said slowly, staring her dead in the eye, "Green Arrow trusts you."
Silence stretched on until Artemis tilted her head and told him, "You have pretty weird methods of showing affection."
Roy scoffed, but there might have been an amused snort somewhere in there. "Somebody has to watch the old man's back."
Artemis rolled her eyes. "I know. Luckily he decided to be a huge wimp tonight and stayed home."
"Because you're so good at taking care of yourself that you could have looked out for him too, huh?" Roy said dryly.
Artemis glared at him, but couldn't really say anything in her own defense. She'd passed out in the rain and had to be dragged home and fed soup, for god's sake.
Roy picked at his soup and sighed. "You have a fever. You can barely stand, let alone shoot, and it's pouring rain on top of that - what were you thinking?" He looked up, gravely serious and slightly more angry-looking than usual. "What if it hadn't been me who found you? What if some criminal had used you for ransom to lure Ollie's flu-stricken ass into a trap and gotten you both killed? And you know, plenty of assholes in this town don't have nearly as many qualms about cute girls with germs as I do."
"I know that," Artemis snapped, although every cell of her was struggling not to wilt under that scowl.
"I don't think you do," Roy snapped back. When he spoke again, his voice was more level, if stern. "Look. Just because you're a hero, and just because you know how to look out for yourself, doesn't mean you can go around taking stupid risks that can get you and others hurt. Not out of some blind sense of duty, not out of ignorance, and not to prove something."
Artemis didn't think she'd ever seen someone so perfectly serious. But she wasn't trying to prove anything; she was just trying to do what was right - she was always trying to do what was right, these days, after her dad… Her dad, who was always demanding that she be better, faster, stronger, more, always pushing her to keep going, never letting up, never…never letting up no matter what, even when she was stressed and overworked and sick and couldn't manage perfect 24/7.
Her dad, who never made her soup when she had the flu.
Artemis watched a scrap of celery float lazily to the surface of her bowl. She opened her mouth to speak, but what could she say?
What could she say?
Roy was still watching her steadily when she looked up.
"Thanks," said Artemis.
Roy didn't smile, but the tense, irritated lines in his face smoothed out and faded away. "You're welcome." He picked up his bowl and dug a remote control out of his chair, which he tossed onto the sofa beside her. "Eat your soup," he told her, and took his bowl back into the kitchen.
Artemis flipped on the old junk TV to some documentary about zebras, suffered quietly through her symptoms while Roy transferred leftovers to a tupperware container, and ate her soup.