FEBRUARY 27, 2012

9:07 P.M.

AMAZON RAINFOREST

This place is giving me the creeps, Kid Flash says telepathically. Robin knows what he means. The Boy Wonder can deal with concrete-jungle variety creepiness, but something about rainforests…that business in India last year didn't help, either. It takes most of his considerable self-control not to flinch when a bird—he thinks it's a bird, how many legs did it have?—flies past his face. He takes a glance back at the team to reassure himself he's not separated, despite walking a good few feet ahead.

We are almost there, Aqualad tells them, looking at the small GPS. Watch out for traps.

Yeah,yeah, Superboy says, and steps on a land mine.

There's half a beat after the soft click where everyone takes what shelter they can. Robin just runs. He makes it about half a step before the blast slams him into a tree.

Bones break—ribs, an arm—and tiny stars burst in front of his eyes. The roar of the blast is so loud, it's like silence, filling his whole world. It lasts for about half a second before everything goes quiet and black.

He drifts in and out for a while, never long enough for what happened to really register, until one day he wakes up in the Mount Justice infirmary. His head aches, along with just about everything else, but at least he can wake up.

A pair of dark eyes watch him from a nearby bed. He almost doesn't recognize Artemis with her hair down, and his bare fingers instinctively go to his face, finding the soft fabric of his mask. "Good morning, sunshine," she says, her low voice oddly muffled—it's almost like his ears are filled with water. "Don't worry, Batman wouldn't let any of the medics mess with the mask."

"Good." His voice sounds odd, too; Robin decides it must be the blast. He sits up, using his uninjured right arm to prop himself and ignoring the twinges of pain. "He'd be…" Robin shakes his head. Truth is, he's not sure. Bruce wasn't so mad when Wally figured things out.

"He seemed worried about you, when they brought us in," Artemis says. "You were out for most of it, so I guess you don't remember. And I couldn't hear a thing. But he was…" She frowns. "Hovering, I guess."

Robin shrugs not showing that hearing that makes him feel warm and—not fuzzy—chalant. Very chalant. "He's practically my dad. You know how they get." He instantly regrets the words—doesn't Artemis only live with her mom? But she doesn't say anything, just frowns briefly. Robin still changes the subject. "How's everyone else, did you know?"

At this, Artemis scowls. "Oh, they're fine. Saved by superpowers." She makes a disgruntled (is the opposite of disgruntled, gruntled?) noise. "I think M'gann got a bruise."

Robin sighs, and in that moment he takes stock of his injuries, just from what kind of pain he's feeling and where. Broken left wrist and arm, broken collarbone, at least three broken ribs, probably more. Extensive bruising. Lacerations to the head, but nowhere else. "Lucky jerks," he says.

"Mmhmm. You got it worse than me, though. I was further away. And I didn't hit a tree."

"Good for you," Robin says.

"Yep."

A nap sounds really good by now. Robin leans back and tries to find a comfortable way to lay down. That's not exactly easy when you have multiple broken bones, but Robin will manage something—he's had to do this before. Life as an acrobat and then as a superhero gives him plenty of practice in life as an invalid. It's only a few minutes before he falls asleep.

The League has access to better technology and healers than the rest of the world, and Robin's let out only a few days after that first really lucid moment, Artemis with him. His left arm is in a cast from mid-finger to elbow, and it will stay that way for a couple of weeks at least. The whole team signs his and Artemis's casts before they leave.

"You're staying in Gotham until you've healed," Bruce says on the drive home from Gotham's zeta tube. "No more jobs here until then, either."

"What?" Robin protests. "But when KF broke his arm—"

"Kid Flash uses his speed," Bruce says. "You need your arms." Robin doesn't even try to argue with him this time. Bruce is using the Batman voice; resistance is futile.

What Robin—although just Dick Grayson, for the next few weeks—hears is, "You don't have any powers that can make up for an injury like that."

Sometimes he wants to pull a Wally. Stand under a bolt of electricity with a bunch of chemicals, make his own powers. It would disappoint Bruce, though, and that's the last thing he wants. So Dick nods and sighs and looks out the window on the way home while some crap about beautiful souls blasts through the radio.

Artemis finds him at school the next day. He should have figured. Her signature—an arrow in bright green marker—takes up half of his cast, and sticks out from beneath the sling.

The first thing she says is, "Your name is Dick?"

Then, "Are you kicked out 'til you're all better, too?" She waves her plaster-covered right hand and arm, the one she landed on. A red bolt of lightning runs on the inside of her arm, from one end of the cast to her palm. "Rob, the Master of Aster" is written in tiny, cramped letters circling one end of the cast, the same thing repeating over and over. "I can't shoot with this crap."

He nods, only half-listening. Batman should have anticipated this problem—it was impossible for Artemis not to notice her huge signature on the cast. But if he hadn't said anything, well, rarely did the Bats make such an elementary mistake. It was probably okay to not try to lie his way out of this one.

Artemis makes a sympathetic face and tries to hit his cast with hers, a handicapped high-five, but he's still so much shorter than her that it hits his shoulder instead. (He hates being this short. He's freakin' fourteen—come on, Mother Nature.) She grins at him. "So, do you still have that picture from my first day?"

He nods. What's she getting at?

Nothing related, apparently. "Wanna hang out?"

"Today?"

"When else?"

"Where?"

"My house." Artemis leans down and tries the cast-bump thing again, with moderately more success. "You can teach me calculus, Mr. Mathlete."

"Do I have to?" he whines. She just laughs at him.

The weird thing is, they get along. He's never tried—never hated her like Wally does, but never tried to be her friend—and it's surprisingly easy to talk to her. She laughs at him a lot. He's pretty sure he's got a crush on her but thinks it'll pass. Zatanna's more his type, anyway.

"Do you ever wish you had powers?" she asks him one day at Mount Justice. They're watching everyone train, and he's ignoring the dirty looks Wally keeps sending his way (Wally says he's conversing with the enemy; Dick knows Wally's jealous).

The answer slips out before he can stop it. "Only all the time," he says, and starts fiddling obsessively with a plain Robin-rang.

Artemis nods. "If you could have them—"

"Please don't ask," he says. He looks from the 'rang to her and then back. "Honestly—it keeps me up at night, sometimes. Wondering. I've thought of everything." He smiles a little, too small to be his creepy-on-purpose grin. "Batman keeps telling me not to worry about it. He says he's the goddamn Batman in the freakin' Justice League and he's got no powers, so no point in thinking about it. But then something like this…" He hits his cast with the 'rang, knocking off a small chip of plaster. "Just accelerated healing would make everything so much easier."

Artemis stretches a little (Robin doesn't stare, no he doesn't, even though she's wearing that shirt that stops a few inches above her jeans) and leans back. "I know what you mean," she said. "Or—you know—super senses. Being able to see the future."

"Clairvoyance?"

"Don't correct me, Wonder Boy," she says, but she grins at him for a moment. "My whole family's got no powers, though. Just made it on brains and guts." She pauses. "And, you know, weapons."

"Those help," Robin says. "Have I heard of your family? Are they all like us?" He gestures around the room.

"Nah," Artemis says lightly. "They're all older than we are." Her tone is nonchalant, but her avoidance tells him she'll become a lot more chalant if he pries into this. "Anyway, now I'm curious. What would you want to have, if you could?"

Looking down at the Robin-rang again, the fourteen-year-old thinks about this. "I don't know," he says finally; then, only half-joking, "All of them?" Artemis pokes him in the arm.

"Seriously."

He shrugs. "Superstrength. And speed. And smarts." Another shrug. "Like I said, I've thought about it a lot. I couldn't pick."

Artemis snorts. "Man, you don't ask for much, do you?"

Robin doesn't really feel like replying to that—the topic of super powers, whether thinking or talking of them, always puts him in a bad mood—so he shrugs a third time, and Artemis leaves him alone. He watches the team go through the obstacle course and cheers for Wally; not sarcastically, because mocking Wally while sitting with someone who hates-but-secretly-likes him wasn't right.

"It's kind of cool, though," he says to her after a while.

"What is?"

He waves his arm at the team. "We could take any one of them. A few more years of experience, and we could take down some League members. I mean, I've been in the superhero business longer than Superman." At Artemis's look of disbelief, he hastily adds, "I couldn't take him in a fight, probably. But Batman could." Another look. "I'm serious! But that's not the point! How cool is it that we, with our normal, human bodies and a couple of explosives, have a chance of beating people that can fly or run super-fast or break our face with one punch?"

Artemis rests her chin in her hand. "I see what you mean," she says. A slow smile spreads over her face. "Artemis and Robin, scoring one for mundanity!" He grins back at her and raises his cast, which she bumps with hers.

"These casts still stink, though."

"Oh, definitely."

Aha. So this one totally blew up. x3 If you're wondering about Robin's crush, I don't usually ship them, but I figured teenage boy + hanging around older, sexy girl in revealing outfits normally = crush. Also, the first date is my birthday, for some reason. Anyway. Hope you liked it, R&R please.

this is a one-shot and won't be continued; please do not alert it

i do not own