The Project •On Hold•

🚀 Chapter Fifteen 🚀

Raquel lead her friends to her apartment. She was debating whether or not to tell them about her parents. How they had just left, only coming back to officially get her emancipated. She came to a decision.

When they arrived at her apartment, she saw the way everyone was looking at modern/minimalistic look of it. Modern because of her parents, minimalistic because, well... she couldn't afford anything else. "So... where ya wanna start?" She asked.

The door flew open, and Artemis entered the room. It didn't look like she had so much as cleaned her cut. "I'm so sorry, Rocky, I have to go back to my apartment, Mom is..."

Paula was having some sort of episode again, Raquel recognized Arty's panicked face from when she'd seen it once before. "It's fine, Arty, go help your mom. You know this already!" Raquel was suddenly very happy she had gone with her gut feeling the day before and told her early. Artemis nodded, and hurried back out of the room.

"Alright, so where were we?"

"How about what your parents do," Dick said.

"Umm... they're both lawyers, I think. Never mattered to me. My mom is retired though."

"All right. Who do you live with?" Zatanna asked.

"None of them. I'm emancipated."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. My parents didn't want to put up with me anymore, and I didn't want to put up with them, either. So I got the law involved."

"Oh, Rocky." Megan gave her a hug. "I think that your parents are idiots."

Raquel cracked a smile. "Thanks, Megan. But it really is kinda nice to be by myself. I do the exact same things that I was doing before, but don't have to hear my parents fighting all the time. It's a win in my book."

"So far I've come to the conclusion that our families really do all suck in their own ways."

Everyone nodded in agreement with the statement."

"Seriously, though," Wally said. "My dad was an asshole, Zee's mom kinda was too, so were Rocky's parents. Conner's dad is pretty negligent, and Kaldur's foster parents are great, but his biological dad, not so much. Arty couldn't even come today because she was too busy dealing with her mom. Our parents are the adults, but they're really leaving us to do adult things on our own."

"I think we all need a vacation," Dick stated.

Everyone else agreed.

"Where should we go?" Wally asked.

"Paris!" Megan laughed.

"The Caribbean!" Raquel cheered.

"Australia!" Wally grinned. "We've all got enough experience with venomous snakes!" That snarky comment got a round of laughter.

"How about Vietnam?" Dick suggested. "Artemis has family there, right? Maybe we wouldn't even need a hotel!"

Minutes turned into hours as the teens planned vacations far away from not just their town, but their troubles as well. Detailed plans took them around the world for years, growing into adults long before their return home.