a/n: i've been so busy with school i haven't been on here in forever, wow. but here have a little something i've been cooking up. there will be four long chapters, a little bit of smut in chapter 3 and swears for the M rating. enjoy.

disclaimer: still do not own yj, unfortunately.

a ticking of clocks

by intrajanelle

five years in the future

Artemis was the last one standing, which wasn't saying much. Her crossbow had been thrown across the room, Deathstroke had her hands twisted behind her back and before she could react her mask was ripped from her face. It clattered to her feet as her long black hair fell across her eyes.

Sportsmaster stepped closer and Deathstroke lifted her up a bit, off her feet, into her father's line of vision. He leaned down, his eyes narrowing as he reached toward her.

Somewhere in the back of the room Wally was making this whimpering sound that Artemis would recognize anywhere. It was the sound he made when their printer had run out of ink at two am the day before his Vietnamese Lit paper was due, it was the sound he made when Nelson had gotten sick and had to be taken to the vet, and it was the sound he made whenever Artemis was in danger.

"Tigress," Sportsmaster whispered, tearing the amulet from Artemis' neck. As her black hair shifted to gold and stretched past her shoulders, as her black eyes flashed gray and a darker pigment seeped into her pale skin her father's eyes tapered shut and he sighed, heavily, as if the world was suddenly lost from his shoulders.

The amulet fell from his hand and shattered on the floor of the Watchtower, sending shards skittering across the room.

"I thought you were dead," her father said softly, and then louder, "I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD."

Artemis didn't respond, instead she glanced behind her, past the wide eyes of her former teammates, past Nightwing thrashing in Black Beetle's arms and past Kaldur's figure still and cold under the heel of his father's boot. Instead she focused on Wally's eyes. He was sprawled across the floor, his eyebrows knit in worry, his hands reaching toward her uselessly as three Kroloteans sat on his back, pinning him to the floor, one of them pulled at his curls and jabbed him in the cheek with a single, green finger but Wally didn't seem to notice.

"It'll be okay," Artemis hoped he could read from the tightness of her eyes, "It'll be fine."

There was still the button in her right hand, the one Kaldur had handed her hours earlier. "You'll know when to use it," he had said, "you'll know better than any of us when the time is right." And now Kaldur was strewn across the floor and her teammates were wounded and gasping and Wally was giving her that look that he always did just before she did something stupid and Artemis was sure this was the moment Kal had been talking about.

"How could you do this to your MOTHER?" Sportsmaster was demanding, grabbing a hunk of her hair and pulling her out of Deathstroke's grasp.

"Didn't know you cared," Artemis wheezed, her hand finally free. She shoved the button in her father's face so she could see the fear in his eyes before she pressed it. "Doesn't matter now, anyway. It's a thing of the past."

"No," Wally shouted and it was last thing she heard before everything went startlingly white.

*

present day

Artemis sits on her bed, her hair is tied out of her face in a long ponytail, her arrows are laid out before her, and her fingers graze the edges of their shafts.

In the room next to hers her parents are arguing, her mother's voice seeping through the thin walls, words slung through the thick air being Vietnamese and English and everything in between.

"Hãy ra khỏi ngôi nhà này. Bây giờ," Paula yells, and heavy footsteps can be heard in the hall as her father stomps from the room, "Leave our daughter alone, Lawrence. Leave one of our daughters alone."

There's a loud bang as something crashes into the wall outside her door and Lawrence hisses, "Shit."

"Từ đó," Paula says and Lawrence yells back, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SAYING WOMAN," before Artemis' bedroom door crashes open.

"Art, pack your things, we're leaving," Lawrence says, slamming the door shut before Paula can wheel herself inside.

"You're not taking her!" Paula screams, banging on the door with both fists, "Not Artemis, not my baby. Lawrence, bạn quái vật."

"Your mom isn't exactly keen on our training baby girl, seems we gotta ditch this place. Now quickly," her father says, locking the door with a twist of the knob and dashing to the window.

Artemis slides her emergency bag from behind her headboard, rolls up her arrows and straps them to her back before meeting her father by the window ledge. She glances back at the door, it's still vibrating under the force of Paula's fists and she can hear her mother sobbing now, deep throaty wails that echo through the walls, shaking Artemis to her bones.

"I'm staying," Artemis says, staring at the doorway, "I have to stay for mom I-"

"Not an option," Lawrence says, grabbing her waist and pulling her against him. The last thing she sees before he shoots his grappling hook onto the roof across the street and pulls her into the night sky is the door of her bedroom bursting open and her mother's wide, puffy eyes following her out the window.

*

"It's probably best if you just stay here," Cheshire teases, her voice lilting and gentle and sending red sparks of anger floating across Artemis' vision.

"No," Artemis says, pulling her bow off her belt and hefting it in front of herself, "I'm coming with you, I'm ready."

"If you insist," Cheshire shrugs, planting her mask on her face and jumping lithely from the helicopter, her limbs splayed out to catch the wind.

Artemis growls in frustration and jumps after her, the sky swirling around her as she cart wheels through the air and lands on all fours on the roof of Happy Harbor High School without a sound.

"You've improved," Cheshire admits; her gaze focused on the air vent as she unscrewed the ventilation cover.

"I know," Artemis says, pulling it from its hinges once all the screws are lying at their feet.

They crawl on all fours through the shaft, peering inside the room below intermittently to see a small group of teens huddled around their target: Dr. Serling Roquette. They are all silent, although the gestures thrown between them suggest they are having a lengthy conversation. One of the boys, his only feature visible from the vent his red curls flopping over his cowl, chews incessantly on a granola bar and seems to be gesturing wildly at an Atlantean boy standing in the corner — or at least Artemis is fairly sure he is Atlantean, considering the tattoos lining his limbs and the water bearers strapped to his shoulder blades.

"Kid. Shut up," the boy Artemis recognizes as Robin shouts aloud, jumping from his position against the wall. "We are all trying to get through this mission with any slip-up's and you're hardly helping. Considering you shouldn't even be here you should stop picking fights with Dr. Roquette."

The boy with the red curls groans skyward and suddenly Artemis can see his face. If it hadn't been for the black uniform Artemis would have recognized him instantly, it's Kid Flash. The boy that is always on the news flirting with reporters and woman he'd rescued and any girl with a pulse; the boy with the curly red hair and bright yellow uniform and impossibly crooked grin.

"Ouch," Kid Flash groans as he grasps his right arm, and it's only then that she recognizes it's in a thick white cast. The boy throws one last glance around the room at his teammates before saying, "fine, how about I just help Miss M and Supey patrol the perimeter."

"Good idea," the Atlantean seems to say with a firm nod and in an instant Kid Flash is nowhere to be seen.

"Time to go to work," Cheshire says, her voice lilting upward as if she's a kid at a playground.

Three minutes, two smoke pellets and one kidnapping later Artemis sits in the back of the helicopter leaning over Roquette as Cheshire shoves a computer into the doctors hands.

"Reverse whatever those sidekicks had you do, we wouldn't want anything stopped the fog now would we?" Cheshire says, stepping around the doctor and into the cockpit.

"Great, all that work for nothing," the woman sneers, pulling the computer open with a shake of her head. "Well, at least this laptop has more RAM than that kiddie computer those sidekicks had me working on, I actually can't tell which situation I prefer."

"Just do it," Artemis says, sitting beside her as she deactivates the outside tracker on the fog.

"There, all sorted, now what would you like me to do? Undo it all over again? For old times sake?"

Artemis yanks the laptop from her and growls something incoherent, but before Roquette can ask her to speak up an arrow slices through the door to the helicopter and jerks it open.

Artemis jumps aside as a tall boy with muscular upper arms and a scowl leaps aboard. He takes one glance around the cockpit, pulls Roquette to his side, wraps an arm around her waist and launches himself from the helicopter again before Artemis can even react.

"Mmm, now who in the world was that?" Cheshire moans from the door to the cockpit, before laying eyes on her sister. "Did Roquette perform her task?"

Artemis nods and crawls to the open door of the helicopter where air threatens to pull her into the dank night sky if she isn't careful. She leans over the edge and peers at the building below.

Or she would if there was a building below. Just as she's adjusts her vision Wayne Enterprises falls to the ground in a puff of smoke, an ash cloud filtering into the sky. She ignores the dust and instead narrows her eyes at the parking lot where a foreign red ship is setting down.

The sidekicks run from the ship, Kid Flash a blur in front of them, Robin practically invisible in his ochre cape, the others following along slowly, in shock as they reach the perimeter of the building and look up at the ruins. They're too late.

"Hey babe," a familiar voice coos and lazy circles are drawn on her skin as someone breathes in her ear, "Artemis, Artemis I love you. I really really love you."

She's saying, "I really love you too, dork," but she doesn't even recognize her own voice and then she turning around and her whole world is green eyes and a splatter of freckles and a smile so crooked she could die.

Her heart does one of those silly little leaps in her chest and she's falling into that smile, falling so fast and hard and intimately and then they're kissing and Artemis doesn't even know how she knows how to kiss this well, because the last time she checked the only boy she's kissed is Cameron Mahkent, once, in the seventh grade.

And then there's an alarm and she really is falling, off her bed at the Shadows base and she's alone and there's no boy with green eyes and freckles who can kiss her like he's been doing it every day for years and years and she finds it ridiculous that she wants to cry but there are tears pouring down her cheeks. A few minutes later when she is standing over the sink splashing water on her flushed skin she can't remember why she'd been so sad earlier.

It was just a dream, and the fact that she's standing in front of the mirror wearing her first official shadows uniform and pulling her mask over her face that is reality.

She doesn't look half bad either. For some reason Crock women make good cats.

*

It's been a month since she's seen her mom.

It's October. Gotham is always so much quieter in October, at least during the day. It's as if all the loonies come out when the sun goes down and save their strength during normal waking hours. But it doesn't matter, because it's ten in the morning and her father won't be looking for her to commit grand theft until at least after midnight. She has a few hours.

She steals Jade's motorcycle.

*

Whatever possessed her to sneak off the Gotham clearly should have possessed her to bring a sweater, because it's freezing. She breathes into her hands and then rubs them together, her teeth chattering as her thin, ¾ sleeved leather jacket, while stylish, fails her in the practical department.

She's left her motorcycle a few blocks back, parked behind a shed where she knows no one will see it. She can't exactly walk it to her house seeing as her mother had been trained in engineering as a teenager and she knows the sound the single cylinder engine Jade has in her vehicle made by heart, she'd practically built it, she'd know Artemis was there in no time at all; although Artemis is regretting her decision to park it so far away.

There is a crowd of neighborhood drug dealers clumped outside Marty's TV World, an old fashioned television outlet where the old man Marty has several TVs in the windows displaying the local news. Artemis has always thought this was stupid seeing that they live in Gotham and all an aspiring robber would have to do would be throw a rock through one of those front windows, grab a TV and they'd be halfway across the city before even Batman could catch them. But perhaps what is even stranger than Marty's unorthodox methods is the fact that the dealers in out front aren't even dealing, they are staring at the TVs, mouths ajar.

Artemis pushes past them, ignoring the grunts and passes as she locks eyes on one of the screens.

It seems Robin has a new friend in the Flash's mentor, Flash Boy, the subtitles scroll along the bottom of the screen, the two bested the Penguin and a dozen of his accomplices just this morning and-

Artemis rolls her eyes, shoves her hands into the so-called pockets of her jacket (and really why are they even allowed to be called pockets? They are miniscule) and makes her down the street, towards her old apartment.

She doesn't have time for Kid Flash or Bird Boy, she has to see her mother before Sportsmaster realizes she was missing and sends a platoon of assassins to collect her.

And without any warning she's standing across the street from the old brownstone. The TV is on in the living room, Artemis can see the flashes from the window. Her mother must be home, watching Vietnamese drama, eating pho, hanging her laundry on the drying racks in the kitchen, alone. Completely alone.

She should go up, take the elevator just to prove the super fixed it, to calm her fear that her paraplegic mother has to haul herself up four flights of stairs every day. She could knock on the door and hug her mom and they wouldn't have to say anything at all, they could just hold each other and maybe she'd give her some leftover noodles and they'd drink tea and talk about how Artemis is getting an 'A-' in archery class back at the Shadows base because Sportsmaster doesn't believe in perfection. But she never could. If she went back now she'd just be putting her mom in danger. She'd be hurting the one person she so desperately wants to protect.

She takes a step forward, maybe to just get a closer look, see if she can make out the top of her mom's head from here but she stops herself as her eyes wander from the living room window; and then she is running down the street, forcing tears down by squeezing her eyes shut and she wants to scream. She wants to tear her father's throat out, but she just runs, because no matter what she does now she can't change the fact that her bedroom window is still open.

She runs right into someone's chest, someone's hard, skinny chest and she reels backward scraping the tears from her eyes.

"Why hello there, beautiful," a voice boasts, and it's a familiar voice, like something she'd heard once years ago or in a dream.

She looks up at the boy, he's about her height and undoubtedly muscular but wearing ridiculously baggy clothing. His hair is a mess and his smile is crooked and his eyes are warm and green and he's wearing a cast.

She backs away.

"Oh, no, no it's okay. I'm sorry, I'm Wally West, sorry about bumping into you like that," the boy says, reaching his good hand toward her as if he expects her to shake it.

She doesn't move and he lowers the hand and says, "you don't have a concussion do you? I've been told my pecs are pretty hard but I've never given a girl brain damage upon immediate collision before."

"You're not from around here are you?" she says, because she can't imagine anyone from Gotham starting a conversation with someone they'd just bumped into that didn't involve the words 'fuck you'.

"No," the boy laughs, "you can tell? I'm- ah, visiting a friend. I'm from Central City."

"Central City? Your friend isn't very smart letting you wander around by yourself. You'd probably walk right up to the Joker and ask for his autograph."

"I'll have you know the Joker would beg to give me his autograph, I'm quite the debonaire," the boy says as he flashes her a grin.

"Oh are you?"

"I am, and I'll prove it. Why don't you show me around?" the boy says, leaning closer, his eyes wide and hopeful. "Since you seem to be the expert on Gotham and all."

"I-" Artemis says, glancing just down the street. There's Jade's motorcycle, or there's the shed it's hidden behind so well she can't even make out the rearview mirrors. She should go, she should because Sportsmaster is going to storm into her room any second now hoping to get in some training; and he'll probably teach her the three best ways to slice a man's jugular and she'll have to pretend how enlightened and happy she is that she now knows a couple hundred ways to kill a man; and she'll have to hide the fact that she's dying inside because her mother's been sitting in that empty house every day for a month expecting her daughter to come home. "Fine, but only because if I just leave you here unattended you might end up on the evening news: IGNORANT TOURIST SLAUGHTERED BY NINE YEAR OLDS, quite tragic."

"I knew you'd come around," the boy grins and follows beside her as she storms down the street. It's funny, no matter how quickly she walks he keeps pace, walking as lightly as if he's floating on air. "I'm Wally by the way, Wally West."

"Artemis C-" Artemis tenses, she hadn't meant to give him her real name dammit, but now she's stuck with Artemis and he's staring at her wide-eyed as if he's never walked with a girl that wasn't his own mother before and she sighs, "Artemis Nguyen, nice to meet you."