an incredibly short little doo-dad. Oh well. Here you go!

"Look!"

It's a jolting sort of alarm clock – after the bomb going off and the knife against Robin's throat and the way Artemis looked at him, dusty and mangled, for the split second before she leapt up again – and it is enough to shock Wally out of the fitful half sleep he found himself in on the way home. He sits up sharply, fast enough that he would've fallen out of his seat if not for the seatbelt.

No one else is awake but M'gann, who sits at the helm and seems to be ignoring the cries currently coming from the back of the ship, and Artemis, who has gotten out of her seat to crouch by the window, gazing at something down below. "Oh my God – someone come here and look at this," she says impatiently. She turns around and fixes him with such a reproachful glare that he immediately scuttles over to where she is hunched.

They're flying above the ocean, and for a few moments he is completely certain that she's still sleep-walking, because the water seems cold and undisturbed to him, and although scientifically he knows life stretches on infinitely under the surface, he can't seem to acquaint that fact with the ocean he sees now. "I don't –"

"Wait," she says. She's almost begging. "Just wait."

And then there is a tiny flicker on the ocean's surface. Infinitely small. Barely counts for anything. "Whales," say Artemis, triumphant despite her exhaustion. "Real actual whales."

He really doesn't know how she could possibly know that to be true, how from miles up in the air Artemis could squint down at a hazy painting of an ocean and see what's really there, but it is three in the morning and he finds that he very much would believe anything she told him right at this moment. It has something to do with the way she held not only her own, but his against the enemy earlier that night, but it also has something to do with the way she rubs her elbow absentmindedly and the way she smiles to herself as she looks out the window. And it above all, it has something to do with now, something to do with her. It's three in the morning, and the ship rocks them gently, and Wally believes in whales.

"M'gann," he calls without looking away. "Can you get us closer?"