[o.h] boy wonder & pretty bird; oneshots/gap-year chapters

Team Year Two: Wolf Pack

Summary: While Green Arrow investigates a theft from the Star City Zoo, Reese enlists the Team when a series of strange attacks may, in fact, be connected to the same missing pack of wolves her adoptive father's also investigating.

Note(s): Sorry that this chapter took so long; I really didn't mean it. (TW: Animal Death) On August 15 of 2023, one of the dogs at the doggy daycare I work at tragically passed away WHILE I was working, and it kind of sent me into a tailspin, and because I was working on this chapter at the same time, it burnt me out of writing for DC for a while, so I took a step back, got out of my head, and worked on some other stories in the meantime, and think I'm finally back to normal because I DO want to continue writing Dick and Reese, they mean so much to me, so I hope you enjoy this return to Lovebird!

I also meant for the cult angle to NOT be as prominent a plot point it ended up being, so if it suddenly feels as if the storyline swerved about halfway through, that's why.

Mindset for this chapter: Wolf-napping gets a little cult-y, Dick has a bit of a guilt complex, and Soleil is best girl

Warning(s): Bad Spanish translations probably (I'M SORRY), Mentions of PTSD, explosions, mentions of apparent suicide, minor mentions of cults/extremist religious practices, very brief mentions of terrorism, claustrophobia, minor panic attacks, brief mentions/references of/to sex, minor animal abuse/neglect, animal cruelty, & animal trafficking

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S T A R  C I T Y
February 7, 10:30 PST

Reese thought she was done receiving birthday presents. Her birthday had been almost two months ago now, and she had been home in Star City on essentially bed rest for a little over a month and a half. And, even back near her birthday, all the celebrations had been lowkey since Reese had barely even been able to walk and was recovering from both a major surgery and getting kidnapped by a beast from Germanic folklore.

She was, in fact, able to walk around now and move pretty easily without her ribs hurting, and her nightmares concerning Krampus had more or less stopped. However, she was still barred from training as hard as she usually did--or training at all, for that matter--and stairs were still her worst enemy. So she continuously used the elevator in her apartment building whenever she needed to get back home instead of forcing herself to survive going up the ten flights from the ground floor to her family's apartment.

But, considering she, Ollie, and Dinah were moving in six months, Reese was banking on the fact that she'd be able to re-conquer stairs by then. If only because their new place was, in fact, an old place, since Ollie was thinking of fixing up his family's ancestral estate, and the house itself was three floors and over 15,000 square feet and had two massive grand staircases.

But, for now, she had to deal with the upscale luxury apartment in the center of the city, and since Reese had also gotten a minor infection from her splenectomy, the doctors on the Watchtower (and Alfred, who had been an army doctor in his pre-Wayne family days) had put her on a diet of bland food for the next two weeks.

She had had her fill of plain yogurt (gross-give her vanilla any day of the week, thank you), pasta, and rice for the foreseeable future, thank you very much. As it were, she was making her way through a container of vanilla yogurt now that she had managed to dig out of the back recesses of their fridge as she reclined on the couch in the Queens' Star City apartment, reading.

Or at least, Reese was trying to read. She was bored at home alone. Dick was at school and currently in class, so she couldn't exactly contact him through the golden arrowheads and look through her boyfriend's eyes without raising a lot of unwanted questions. Dinah was at her office since, aside from being the Justice League's and Team's resident therapist, Dinah Lance was also a registered psychiatrist as a civilian and had plenty of normal, non-superpowered, human patients to help at her practice in downtown Star City. She needed some way to make money; contrary to some of Oliver's pre-Reese exes, Dinah Lance was no gold-digger.