Enigma | A Young Justice Fanfiction

Chapter 6

After spending those two weeks in the hospital, and missing both Christmas and New Years, Aspen was finally out and back home at the Queen Mansion.

Aspen smiled as she walked into her room, which had stayed the same after four years. When Ollie adopted Aspen, he wanted to give her the second biggest bedroom in the mansion, which Aspen flat out turned down. She’d never had a big room, and she opted for one of the smaller guest rooms.

Her bed was still pushed into the corner, and a small desk in another. Multiple pictures and pieces of artwork decorated the lilac walls. A small bookshelf sat next to the desk, overflowing with books ranging from various fictional books to nonfiction ones.

She was happy that Ollie and Dinah didn’t change anything, but she knew it probably caused them more grief while she was missing.

Roy and Artemis were supposed to take over the explanations when they got back, seeing as the only thing left to explain was more about the Team, which they knew more about than Dinah or Oliver. However, Roy only told her a couple of things and didn’t stay for long, much to Aspen’s dismay, mumbling something about ‘going back out to find him’ under his breath when he hugged her goodbye.

“What was that all about?” she asked Artemis after he left, still not knowing who ‘he’ was. The two girls were sitting in Aspens’ room, Aspen laying on the bed and Artemis leaning against the wall.

“Which part?” Artemis jokingly asked, looking up at Aspen. “Roy’s always in a rush to get somewhere else, most of the time somewhere I’m not.”

“The thing he said about ‘going to find him’. He said something about it when you guys visited me at the hospital the other day—pausing his search for ‘him’, I think?” The archer’s face turned more serious.

“Oh, that.” She rubbed the back of her neck nervously. “I don’t know if he really wants me to—”

“Come on!” Aspen interrupted. “ I’m sure others know about it! How bad could it be?”

And then Artemis told her everything about it. How Roy—the real Roy—was abducted during a mission and cloned, and that the Roy that Aspen saw today was the clone. She told her how he was a sleeper agent and unknowingly was a mole and was programmed to try to join the League at any cost. And how now, his only focus was on finding the real Roy Harper, whom Aspen apparently only knew for a year before he went missing.

“Oh. That’s what that was about,” Aspen said. “But to be honest, and I know this is going to sound really bad,” she continued, holding her hands up defensively, “But I called it!”

Artemis’s mouth fell open and she gave Aspen a look of shock. “What do you mean you called it?”

“Hello? I imitate others almost daily. I notice a lot about how people react to different things and how their moods change. I thought something was up as soon as Ollie found him.” When Artemis still gave Aspen a shocked expression, she elaborated. “All he ever talked about was joining the League—which to be fair, he did talk about a lot before the whole cloning incident, but by that point, it was getting excessive. Also, his mood sucked when he didn’t get his way. At first, I wrote it off as a result of being abducted, but after a while…” she trailed off figuring Artemis would understand what she meant.

Apart from Artemis giving Aspen super in-depth breakdowns on The Team, the two girls soon found themselves straying from the topic. Artemis ended up joining Aspen on the bed and the two girls talked about their personal lives.

Aspen found out that Artemis joined the Team after secretly helping them on a mission, and pretended to be Olivers niece for a couple of months.

“Wait, but Ollie doesn’t even have siblings,” Aspen laughed, shaking her head.