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Sighing, Wally turned to Peter, steeling himself for the worst.
He was stuck only 100 feet outside the warehouse where El was being held hostage, and the negotiations weren’t going well; it was clear from their faces that the agents all knew it too. Peter looked like he was barely clinging on to sanity, probably knowing if he gave into his panicked urges he’d be removed from the scene altogether.
El’s life was on the line, and Wally wasn’t willing to let her die just to keep his secrets.
“Peter.” Wally said gently, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
Peter turned to him, “What.”
Of all the ways to reveal himself, this definitely wasn’t in the top ten (he’d made a list; most were jokes, but some were actually pretty good ideas)—but, while he probably could've quickly resolved the whole situation by himself, it would be ten times easier if Peter was onboard.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” He nodded his head toward the door of the van.
Peter hesitated, glancing at the monitor displaying security footage from inside the warehouse. “I-”
Wally cut him off, “Just a minute, Peter. Please.”
Peter nodded. “Okay.”
The two of them ducked out of the van and walked a few feet away. Wally quickly glanced around and, seeing no one within hearing distance, leaned in and spoke quietly into Peter’s ear, “I can save El. I can leave and come back with her, no catch, no ulterior motive. She’s my friend, and I wouldn’t lie about this—but to pull it off, I need your help.”
Peter’s eyebrows furrowed. “What? No! This is serious. None of your suicide missions or stupid improvised plans. No! We’re not doing this today, Neal.”
Wally met his eyes. “Peter, please trust me. I can get El back here, and both of us out alive and well. I just need you to keep everyone's eyes off the cameras for like thirty seconds and I can corrupt the footage later. I could cut the feeds, but that's a lot more risky. Please.”
Peter’s voice was a harsh whisper as he gripped Wally’s arm, “No, Neal! No! You’re not doing anything! Get back in the van! Now!”
Wally took a deep breath and pushed Peter’s hand off. “If you really consider me a friend, you need to trust me on this. I’m not lying when I say this will work. I’ll promise I'll explain everything later, but I’m planning to do this with or without your help, and you not helping just makes this a lot more likely to go wrong.”
“I could kick you off the scene and put you under surveillance.”
He rolled his eyes. “We both know that wouldn’t stop me.”
Peter’s eyebrows furrowed as he glared at Wally.
“Please, Peter.”
Peter remained silent.
“Fine, fine. Okay. Listen…” Wally swallowed hard. “Okay. Shit. Fine. I’m the Flash.”
Peter blinked and shook his head. “Wait, you’re who?”
“…The Flash. Like… the speedster, from Central. The city. Central City’s Flash. The Hero. Central City's hero, Flash. The running guy.”
Peter took a breath. “I- What do I even say to that? I’m not even sure if it’s true or if you’re just fucking with me and trying to shock me into saying yes to your inasnity. Just… I don’t even care if you’re bullshitting me right now. Can- Can you really promise no one will get hurt? El will be fine? You’ll be fine?”
“Yes!” he exclaimed.
“Then fine, but we are talking later. Got it?” Wally nodded as Peter continued, “And I don’t even know how you want me to distract everyone anyways. There’s like six people in the van, and a SWAT team on standby.”
Wally grinned. “The swat team doesn't see live video, so you’ll only need to deal with the guys in the van—and I know exactly how you can do that.”
After a few minutes of spying on the inside of the van (Dick’s occasional bat-espionage lessons helped greatly; speedsters were very powerful, but not remotely subtle), Peter made his move.
He played the distraught husband well (probably due to the act being deeply rooted in truth), dramatically making a scene of wanting to send SWAT in immediately. The agent wasn’t doing anything more than what would get him a stern talking to later, but his acting skills had gotten better than Wally had realized. ‘Neal’s’ skills must have been rubbing off on him after all this time.
It was time to make his move.
He had to be careful how he handled this, he didn’t want word to spread about a speedster being in New York. While most people wouldn’t give it a second thought, the people who did were the ones that they were worried about.
Wally entered flashtime and stretched his shoulders before strolling casually into the warehouse, looking around to get the lay of the land.
It seemed like a pretty standard hostage-in-a-warehouse situation, but he would have to handle it a little differently from the norm. The inability to take down the kidnappers pained him, but he didn’t want to make anything seem too out of the ordinary. When they reviewed it later, the feds would easily be able to believe that El freed herself and snuck out in the brief moments the footage ‘gliched’, but they probably wouldn’t believe she’d knocked out all her attackers and tied them up.
He jogged over to where El was tied to a chair and fist pumped when he realized that none of the kidnappers were currently facing her direction.
They must’ve assumed she couldn’t get out, but if he brought her outside they would just assume she escaped, which was the ideal situation.
He untied El and deposited her right outside the back door before going back to check if there was anything else he could do before he returned to normal time.
Damn, he wished that he could just take them all down.
After a moment of consideration, a grin spread over his face.
He could definitely at least get away with inconveniencing them a bit.
Wally took his time removing one bullet from every single gun and jammed the firearm of the one standing closest to the warehouse door since the feds would most likely storm the place the second they realized the hostage was free. One of the men was drinking a glass of water and Wally smiled as he tipped the glass just a little further, knowing that when time restarted the water would spill down his front.
He made his way out to El and arranged her so she would be sitting comfortably against the wall when time returned to normal. It took a while for non speedsters to learn to quickly recover from being abruptly displaced, and this was her first time.
He grimaced.
She would probably puke, but most people would argue that was a much better alternative to being shot.
The SWAT team would only take a few minutes to find them once he re-entered normal time, so he’d have to talk quickly. His priorities were to stall El’s questions and convince her to lie to the agents about escaping by herself. He would be leaving her with nothing more than a promise to explain later, so it all came down to a question of trust, and Wally trusted her.
(He was pretty sure she trusted him too.)
El would do it, she was just great that way—not to mention, she would definitely hunt him down if he tried to run away from that conversation, secret identity be damned.
Wally readied himself, cracking his knuckles. He took a deep breath and returned to normal time.