fic: Words Can Hurt
Fandom: Young Justice
Story Title: "Words Can Hurt"
Summary: He was just trying to help out. Set between 1x12 and 1x14.
Character/Relationships: Dick Grayson, Artemis Crock
Rating: K
Warnings: None
Story Word Count: 500
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Notes: For Claire, who I absolutely adore! This is just one of your presents, lol, because it's so short. Plus I think this was your original request anyway, so. Claire is amazing and funny and a phenomenal writer. She's the Steph to my Dinah. She's also a Dick-o-phile, which is the only reason that I wrote him for her, because I hate writing Dick. Hate, hate, hate it! But Merry Christmas bb!
The words floated in the air, heavy and tangible, like they were really spelled out in front of them and hung from the ceiling.
Even though he was a mathlete, Dick liked words. He liked dissecting them, cutting and rearranging parts of them them until a new word was created. He liked how, at different moments in time and depending on the person, they could mean so much or so little. He liked how you could say one thing and mean another, the way that they could bind you together or cut you apart.
But he didn't like how they could linger, the way that they could haunt you, as present as any ghost. He hadn't meant to get into this argument, hadn't meant to see it, to hear the words, but he had. Dick wondered about these two sometimes. He'd told them to get a room, but sometimes he wasn't too sure that they wouldn't destroy it.
Artemis was sitting on the couch now, her previous defensive stance gone as she drew pictures on the leather of the couches in the big room. She had to have known that he was there. He wasn't trying to be a ninja today, wasn't trying to show off his training and trying to prove that he did belong here. That age was just a number, and sure his was small but he could help the team out by being like Batman.
Right then he was just trying to help out.
"I just don't understand," Artemis began, a puckered line between her eyebrows. Every emotion that the girl had played out on her face, making herself an open book for those who took the time to read it. Wally never had bothered, choosing instead to linger on some kind of wrong that she had committed, somewhere in that strange head of his. She didn't look up as she spoke, giving whatever she was drawing on the couch the same Michelangelo gave the Sistine Chapel. "I don't understand what I ever did to him."
She wasn't very intentionally open with most of the team, not even now that they all had been spending so much time together. Megan was one of the people that she talked to on a regular basis, and Wally, though that wasn't so much talking as it was arguing.
So Dick was surprised that she was coming to him, of all people, but maybe their forced partnership had brought them closer together. There were just some things that couldn't help but make people become friends, and maybe saving the whole team's butts was one of them.
"You didn't do anything. He's just an idiot," Dick supplied, hoping that it would help. Wally was his best friend, but it wasn't like the guy was perfect. And he really was unfair to Artemis, something that Dick had pointed out to him more than once. But sometimes Wally's skull was as thick as the Earth's mantle, it would take no fewer than twenty power drills to get through to him. "Sometimes ignoring what Wally says is the only way you can stand the guy."
She smiled as that, and looked up at him for the first time. There were no tears in her eyes, of course not, but that pucker was gone. "I believe it," she told him.