“What’s funny?” Tigress asks, leaning closer to Zatanna’s monitor.

Zatanna directs Tigress’s attention to a number next to Tigress’s name. “You have the highest number of successful missions this quarter.”

“I do?” Tigress asks, genuinely shocked. She has been pulling double shifts, traveling between Star and Gotham more than ever, but she hadn’t realized she’d been on that many missions.

“Yeah, your numbers are insane,” Zatanna says, nodding before she tilts her head. “Do you sleep?”

“Only on monitor duty,” Tigress snorts, before she sits back and smiles. “This is perfect. Next time you-know-who calls me a house cat, I can throw my numbers back at him and–”

“Oh no, you’re going to want to hold off on that,” Zatanna interrupts her and points to another name on the list. “Flash just updated his mission log. You’re tied.”

Well, there goes that, Tigress thinks, sinking deeper into her seat. “You have got to be kidding me.”

A notification pops up on Zatanna’s screen and she winces before she swipes it away.

“It gets worse,” Zatanna says with a frown. “He’s on his way up here.”

Tigress sits up straighter. “This is so not fair. I’ve been working my ass off and I can’t even get in a minute of gloating? He runs faster than the speed of sound, Zee! Of course he’s going to have high numbers. Plus, he has an entire rogue gallery on rotation and his own turf. I have to share with G.A., Black Canary, and Red Arrow. Even Batman, on occasion.”

“Maybe you should move?” Zatanna offers (un)helpfully.

“Let me look at his file,” Tigress says gruffly, turning back to her own screen and pulling up the mission log, and it only takes her a moment before she finds something of interest. “Oh, this is bullshit. Helped an old man cross the street. That is not a mission!”

Tigress throws her hands up. “Who writes mission logs for that?! These numbers are inflated. He’s cheating.”

Zatanna laughs, shaking her head. “Cheating? Since when did helping people become a competition?”

“Since you told me I was winning,” Tigress answers, her narrowed gaze trained on the outrageously detailed tiny-itty-bitty so-called missions before her. Tied my ass.

“What are you winning?”

It takes all of the self-control Tigress has in her to keep from swiping at the man who’d thought it’d be fun to sneak up on her. (How’d he do that? Surely he hadn’t dropped his habit of announcing his presence the moment he enters a room in a single day.) Tigress spins around in her seat, arms crossed and expression sour. Flash doesn’t flinch at the sight of her pinched face, so she makes sure to look extra annoyed as she regards his innocent (definitely not) smile.

Zatanna answers the question for Tigress, pointing to her monitor. “Tigress has the best mission record this quarter.”

Flash takes a closer look at the monitor and quirks his head. “We’re tied.”

“Only because you’re cheating,” Tigress says, more defensively than she intended. “No one counts giving directions as a mission.”

Flash leans against the railing of the monitor station and crosses his arms. “What can I say? Bats asked me to keep better track of my time in the field. I’m only following orders. Being thorough.”

Tigress doesn’t smile when she asks, “Does he make you log your bathroom breaks too?”

“Ha-ha,” Flash says flatly, sending Zatanna (whose snorting laughter echoes throughout the room) a quick glare before he turns back to Tigress. “Look, my numbers are good because I’m that good. You can’t exactly say I was cheating if I didn’t know this was a game with rules.”

“You know,” Zatanna starts, leaning forward in her chair wearing the same smile she’d used to drag Tigress into her discovery, “there are only a few weeks left in the quarter. We could lay down some rules right now and see who has the highest number at the end of the month.”

“I’m in,” Flash says, nodding at Tigress.

Tigress raises a brow at him. “That was fast.”

“Being fast is kind of my thing,” Flash says, and the peacocking he does as he says it is the last thing Tigress needs to see before she makes her decision to knock him off his pedestal.

“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” Tigress says, rolling her eyes as she raps her fingers against her armrest. Her gaze falls on Zatanna’s pleading eyes for a second before she sighs softly in resignation.

Flash crouches down next to Tigress’s chair and asks,  “Are you in or not?”

“I’m in,” Tigress says as she looks down at him and crosses her arms. “Here are my terms. No more mini-missions, like saving a cat in a tree or helping old people find the train station. There need to be actual bad guys involved for it to count as a mission.”

Flash nods and purses his lips before he adds, “And if we have a joint mission, whoever takes out the most perps wins the point for that mission.”

“Fine.”

“What do you want if you win?” Zatanna interjects, turning to Tigress, her eyes sparkling.

Tigress thinks for a moment before she says, “If I win, Flash has to be my coffee runner for a month.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Flash says, scoffing.

“That’s because you don’t know about her coffee addiction,” Zatanna notes, gleefully writing down the terms on her monitor. “You’re in for it.”

Flash scoffs before he smiles and says, “When I win, Tigress has to go on a date with me.”

A what now? She’d been expecting anything ranging from shaving her head to being his hype-woman around the Watchtower but a date was– well, that wasn’t– how dare–

“But–What–” Tigress sputters (out loud this time), “why is that what you want?”

Flash grins brightly as he answers her question. “Because you’ll hate it.”

Of course. She’d been thinking too small with the coffee lackey idea. Too late to turn back now.

Tigress narrows her eyes and holds out her hand. “Fine. Deal, but only because I know you’re going to lose.”

“Keep underestimating me,” Flash says, smirking as he shakes her outstretched hand. “I’m going to leave your numbers in the dust.”

Tigress snorts, releases her hand from his grip and uses the tip of her boot to lightly push Flash’s knee. He topples back onto his butt against the floor. (Zatanna loses it, burying her mouth beneath her hands and slamming her foot against the ground to quell her laughter.)

Tigress smiles down at him and asks, “Who’s leaving who in the dust now?”

-o-

Tigress enters her apartment (through the window, as one does) as the sun rises, and she can’t run to her laptop fast enough. She enters her missions in the log, her heart racing, and by the time she finishes her reports, the sun is high in the sky and she’s got a seven point lead on the enemy.

Take that, she thinks, before she closes her laptop and leaves it on her desk. Satisfied, she takes off her necklace, places it on her nightstand, and makes her way to the shower. While there, Artemis contemplates the many coffee orders she’ll be putting in over the next month. The opportunities are endless when your delivery boy can break the sound barrier and has access to the Zeta network. She finishes her shower and gets ready for bed with a full heart and a mind full of overly complicated caffeinated drinks.

Not even a minute after she shuts her eyes, her phone buzzes on her nightstand. On her screen is a picture of the mission log, and a single message. The picture shows Flash ahead by two missions.

🏃💨Better luck next time, 🐯.  –⚡[9:57AM]

Artemis dreams of crimewaves and espressos.  

-o-

“Look, I know the only thing you have on the line here is your dignity,” Rocket says, “but I’d like to remind you that I’m running the risk of losing a significant amount of capital if you lose.”

“Me too,” Superboy says.

“Can we talk about this later?” Tigress asks, kicking another robot monkey into the empty the elevator shaft.

It’s not like Tigress wants to lose (and she’d argue she has a lot more than just her dignity on the line), but there are only so many hours in the day during which she can rack up points. The only real advantage she has is the surging crime rates in Star City and Gotham (and those aren’t exactly things she wants to brag about).

Rocket shakes her head and traps a group of robots in a bubble. “Later would be too late. You need to win this one, right now. Another wave incoming.”

Tigress sends an arrow through a monkey’s eye. “How many is that?”

“Seventeen,” Superboy says, tossing two more monkeys out the broken window of the abandoned office building.

“How many do you think he’s taken out by now?” Tigress puffs, wacking another monkey away with a wooden board. Okay, no more of this. Time for swords.

Superboy squints at the wall for a quick second. “A grand total of none. He’s still at his post.”

“Do robots count?” Rocket asks.

“Ugh, I hate monkeys,” Superboy groans, grabbing a robot off his back and chucking it into the elevator shaft. “I’d say these qualify.”

“How much did you two bet on the bet?”

When they don’t answer, Tigress turns around and repeats her question in a sterner tone.

Superboy shares a look with Rocket before he coughs.

Rocket shakes her head and says, “It’s better if you don’t know.”

“Then the monkeys count,”  Tigress declares, spinning back around and stabbing her sword through two of the robots at once before she tosses them back from whence they came.

-o-

Robot monkeys don’t count! – ⚡[1:23AM]

Majority vote says they do. Better luck tomorrow, ⚡. – 🐯[1:25AM]

-o-

“Did you see that?” Artemis’s stunned eyes snap back to Megan.

“See what?” Megan turns away from organizing her locker to look at Artemis.

“That,” Artemis clarifies, waving a hand at the doorway as the second bell rings. A few kids run inside, nearly tripping over each other in their haste to get to class.

“The two-minute rush?” Megan asks, shutting her locker carefully. The pictures of her summer trip to Chicago still fall from where she taped them inside the door. She sighs, defeated.

“No, it was- the woosh-... nevermind,” she grumbles, picking her backpack off the floor. “Let’s just go. Wouldn’t want to keep Carr waiting.”

As they walk to class, Artemis struggles to shake off the strange bubbling of excitement and anxiety she felt in her chest when Wally waved at her in the hallway. It has to be a trick of the mind, or indigestion from last night’s Big Belly Burger, because there is absolutely no way Wally West could have that kind of effect on her. Ever.

She’s proven very wrong at lunch.

When her fingers hit the cold metal of the lunch table instead of her food, she comes to realize just what kind of an effect Wally has on her. She tears her eyes away from where he’s chatting with his track friends to rejoin her own group’s conversation, only to find half of them gone and the other half staring at her...staring at Wally. Shit.

“Where’d it go?” Artemis asks, quickly pointing at the spot her pistachio bag once occupied.

“I’m sorry.” Karen pulls the bag out from behind her back. Instead of giving it back, she tosses it to Megan across the table. “You have eaten fifty-seven pistachios in the last five minutes. We’re cutting you off.”

“You were counting?” Artemis asks in disbelief.

“We couldn’t look away,” Megan admits, her concerned eyes glancing from Artemis to the bag. “It was like a car accident. We had to step in.”

Karen nods. “I could’ve thrown a pebble in there and you would have eaten it. You were so zoned out.”

“Yeah, zoned out,” Artemis repeats, nodding quickly. ‘Zoned out’ is better than ‘honed in on a certain redheaded track star’. She couldn’t help it, really. She’d already spent half the morning trying to find the moment when Wally West, the patron saint of bad pick-up lines and geekhood, became, dare-she-say, desirable to her. Sneaking glances at him throughout lunch didn’t clear anything up. If anything, it made her painfully more aware of the new tan and pronounced freckles on his face. His hair kept wooshing every time he threw his head back to laugh at some (probably) immature joke. It was awful. “Thanks for not feeding me rocks. Where are Bette and Wendy?”

“Where aren’t they? They’re running around campus introducing themselves to everyone again. Wendy’s running for homecoming coordinator this year and Bette wants to be a princess.” Karen goes on to discuss the controversy surrounding the janitor and last year’s vote processing, but all Artemis can think about is the fact she has history class with Wally after lunch. A copy of his schedule is bunched up at the bottom of her backpack, still right where she threw it after it fell out of his last letter. She sneaks one last glance at him from across the yard before throwing out the PG-13 thoughts that keep invading her mind whenever she looks at him.

She resolves to keep them away for the rest of the day, or at least until she can figure out why the hell they even exist.

It’s easier said than done.

-o-

History goes better than expected, mostly because she expected the worst.

Ms. Lance lets them sit wherever they’d like and Wally chooses the seat directly behind her at the back of the room. For the first half of class, she’s perfectly fine with the arrangement. Out of sight, out of mind. She’s never been more interested in 18th century New York. Then a folded up note falls onto her desk as Wally passes by to “sharpen a pencil” and all hope of making it through class without thoughts disappears. Ms. Lance definitely sees his attempt at slight of hand, if the look she gives Artemis is anything to go by. Artemis sends her an apologetic shrug before slipping the note into her lap and hoping for mercy. Ms. Lance lets it slide and goes on with her lecture, most likely because Artemis babysat for her and Coach Oliver over the summer. Those seemingly endless hours defusing the Ticking Tantrum Bomb (also known as Sin) paid off in more ways than one.

The second Ms. Lance flips the lights off and presses play on the cheesy “Welcome Back” video the student leaders put together over summer, Artemis flips open Wally’s note and smothers a smile.

‘Nice to finally see you today, even if it is the back of your head. Sorry I couldn’t stop and talk this morning. Of course my alarm didn’t go off on the first day of school. Just my luck. Anyways, I owe you one (maybe even two). I barely avoided getting Mean Janine as my lab partner. Cross intervened, just like you said he would. I hope you’ll tell me how you have all the teachers wrapped around your finger someday. On that note, Help Me! I’m begging (again)! Please tell me you have an in with the new librarian, Artemis. I forgot to return my bio book before I went to camp and now I owe like thirty dollars in late fees. Jenni would’ve voided them but she’s gone and the new lady honestly scares me a little. Save me. P.S. Conner is my lab partner now. He was reluctant at first, but I told him it wouldn’t be like Chem and he believed me... he’s too trusting... that poor kid...’

Artemis moves the paper onto the desk and tucks it into the pages of her notebook. She pens her reply with unprecedented care, pretending to take notes on the reading schedule Ms. Lance has outlined on the board.

‘Let’s be real; you owe me at least seven by now. And keep hoping. It’s a trade secret. (By the way, Ms. Lance totally saw you pass this note. You aren’t stealthy. She didn’t chew you out because of me. That makes eight.) As much as I’d love to have you grovel at my feet, you should know that Jesse (new librarian) is extremely nice. You should be begging her for help, not me. And try not to hurt Conner. He’s too pretty, and Megan will be upset if he has a black eye in their homecoming pictures. I won’t be able to save you from her. Speaking of Megan, are you going to her party next Saturday or not? RSVP-ing is a thing, you know? Don’t write back. I don’t think Lance will let you get away if she catches you a second time. Tell me after class. I’ll let Megan know.’

Artemis reads over her words twice before scrawling a quick ‘P.S. Welcome back, West’ at the bottom of the paper. She folds the note back up, tucks it in her palm, and makes sure Ms. Lance is facing the board before fake-tucking a stray hair behind her ear and tossing the note onto Wally’s desk behind her in one fluid motion. That’s how you do it, she smiles to herself.

When the bell rings, Artemis turns around in her seat and immediately regrets it. Way too close.

“Hey,” Wally greets her with a bright smile and equally bright eyes. “I’m definitely going.”

“Cool,” is all she replies before turning back around and stuffing her notebook into her backpack. Stop it, she orders herself. It’s just Wally for god’s sake. She stands and puts on her backpack before nodding for him to follow her out of the classroom.

“I’ve got Prince next. You have... Kent last right?” He asks, examining a strip of paper he had pulled from his pocket. It’s the tiny copy of her schedule she sent in her last letter. “Nice.”

“Yeah. I got pretty lucky,” she says, smiling. “I could’ve gotten Hall. Or worse-”

“Snart.” They say in unison, laughing as they pass the door to the coldest classroom on campus. One prepared student puts on a scarf before they enter the room.

“He does it on purpose, you know?” Artemis shakes her head. “He thinks that a colder environment makes you more focused on the task at hand.”

Wally rolls his eyes as they turn a corner. “When I was in his class, I was more focused on keeping my fingers and toes from turning blue than on the nuances of geography.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Artemis says with a snort. They reach a fork in the hall and stand near the lockers to avoid blocking hall traffic. It isn’t until the two-minute warning bell rings and people start speed-walking that they look at each other and sigh.

“I’ll see you later?” Artemis asks. The hopefulness in her tone surprises herself.

“Totally,” he says with a smile and a nod and Artemis feels the same bubbling excitement from the morning return with a vengeance. As he turns away to walk to class, his hair wooshes.

She takes a deep breath, strides towards Mr. Kent’s sunshine-filled classroom, and asks herself the question she’s been trying to answer all day.