Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was an outsider trespassing in Central. Nobody knew anything about this new player. He was quick, quiet, and a little unsettling. In five seconds, this new guy would strip everything of value. In ten, it would be too late to call for help because the thief would be long gone. His process and efficiency spoke of talent, premeditation and, most importantly, experience. 

God knows how long he’s been here, but this kid had been playing in the Rogues’ sandbox without their permission.

And Captain Cold wasn’t going to put up with that.

“Everybody freeze.”

They knew the drill. Captain Cold walked further in the store, his cold guns raised as he inspected the people he had gathered in the middle, all well-dressed upper class citizens who had the common sense and cowardice to sit quietly as the robbery commenced. 

“Hmph.” This was going to be an easy job. Cold lifted the gun up higher to the ceiling to freeze the cameras before any could get a good shot of him—with his signature ice technology, there really wasn’t much point in concealing his identity, but it was the principle of the thing—only to find that the camera domes embedded in the corners of the ceiling were already shattered and broken. 

Surprised, Captain Cold looked at the people huddled in the center of the store. Someone had obviously intended to hit this store before he had arrived, but no one had panicked until he came in here, cold guns smoking. Either someone had gotten to the store before he did and no one noticed that they had been robbed, or Cold had the bad luck to have hit a jewelry store at the exact same time as someone else. And as slim as the odds should’ve been, Cold wouldn’t count against the possibility. Sometimes it seemed like the less likely something should happen, the more likely it would happen.

Captain Cold glanced down at the jewelry cases, all of them still full and decided, yep, reality was a bitch. Someone was hitting Jackson’s Jewelers the same time he was, and that was a bitch move too, because no one made a big hit in this town without some form of coordination with their fellow criminals. 

As soon as Cold came to this conclusion, his suspicions were confirmed as all of the glass of the jewelry cases shattered as a whirlwind passed through. He covered his face instinctively at the sound of breaking glass—because he could never be sure enough whether or not he was about to get stabbed in the face—but it was apparently unnecessary. There was no attack on him, and he looked up to see another man, his inadvertent rival, standing before him, head tilted forward and hands obscuring his face as he adjusted his own hat.

“Huh.” The stranger eventually lifted his head slightly, his eyes to meeting Cold’s. 

Cold had mistaken this man for just another customer, dressed in a waistcoat, a fedora and trousers. Now, with a mask obscuring his features, he was a bit more recognizable as either a new superhero or fellow supervillain. Either way, he was messing with Cold’s routine, and he wasn’t welcome.

He eyed Cold with what may have been a calculating expression behind the domino mask.

“Didn’t expect company,” he finally murmured, loud enough to hear, but quiet enough it seemed he was almost talking to himself, in a slightly quiet, faintly accented voice.

“Who are you?” Cold demanded, pointing his ice guns at the man. 

“Seriously?” he asked, pointing at the mask resting on the bridge of his nose. “You really expect me to answer that?”

He had a point. 

Cold eyed the broken glass on the floor. At least with this kind of unnecessary collateral damage, he could say with certainty that this guy was either a crook like himself or a terrible hero, and Cold was pretty sure it was the first.

“Central City is full,” Cold told the thief, a note of warning in his voice. “We don’t have room for any new costumed criminal.”

“Well unfortunately, I’m stuck here for the next few years, so someone’s going to have to make room,” he replied. “Because if no one does…”

“You making a threat?” he asked the stranger. “Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m the one holding a gun in your face.”

“I’m just saying, I’m here to stay, and if no one makes room, there will be some serious toe-stomping around here until I can leave,” he said, looking completely undaunted as he stared down the barrel of the cold guns. 

“Stay out of the way,” Cold warned him. It really was in the kid’s own interest that he kept out of the shadier businesses here. Central City was Rogue territory, and if this guy thought owning a fancy whirlwind machine entitled him to a place in this city, then he had another thing coming. Weather Wizard owned the market on weather gimmicks, ranging from hurricanes to tornadoes to lightning. It might’ve been enough for whatever backwater town he came from, but little gusts of wind just weren’t going to cut it here. 

“Sir yes sir, Cap’n,” he said, tipping his hat to Cold in a mocking manner. “I’ll be getting out of your hair then.”

He lifted the jacket that he had been holding, folded against his forearms and shook out pieces of glass that had gotten caught in the creases. It was then that Cold had realized that there hadn’t been any secret weapon, no kind of special equipment that had created the whirlwind force strong enough to break the jewelry case. This guy had broken it with his jacket wrapped around his arm, and he had done it so fast that Captain Cold hadn’t even registered what had happened.

And if he was fast enough to do that…

Cold looked down at the jewelry cases, realizing that they weren’t just broken. They were empty. And in that moment spared to look away, the new guy had taken the opportunity to make himself scarce, just as he said he would, and Cold caught a glimpse of his running form, a blur of white and gray, outside the window as he disappeared.

Son of a…

Well, at least this one wasn’t as bad the Flash, not as quick and certainly not as heroic. Though, like the Flash, it seemed his appearance had derailed his plans. It was supposed to have been a simple smash and grab.

Well, with the diamonds on display gone, he might as well salvage what he could from the situation. He pointed his gun at one of the workers in the store. “You! Open this safe!”

He hated speedsters.

Cold couldn’t complain too much about the interference on his last job. The diamonds were valuable, but hard to fence if one didn’t know the right people, and the Rogues had an arrangement with Central’s black market networks. If the new speedster wanted a profit, he’d need to sell the jewelry. With word out via the Pied Piper that the Rogues were on the lookout for a newly arrived jewelry thief, it was just a matter of time before he heard back from their contacts.

It was only once Cold got to Rick’s, an obscure bar hidden in the corner of downtown Central, that he realized that finding the thief wasn’t the only predicament he was facing. In the past few days, he’d already gotten several calls from dealers in the city, telling him about the kid who came in with handfuls of gold and diamonds and left as quickly as he rushed in.

“No way,” Sam said, shaking his head. “I can zap someone inside a mirror, but it isn’t exactly pleasant. There’s no way I’m going to use it on myself. There’s no saying I’d be able to get myself back out.”

“Where the hell did this guy come from anyway?” Digger asked. While people with increased speed weren’t exactly rare, those who could reach the speeds that Cold had described—speedsters—were considerably less common. He was even tempted to say he was in the same league as Central’s resident heroes. 

“Do you think he’s got anything to do with the Flashes?” Hartley asked, drumming his thumb against the side of his flute absentmindedly. 

“As far as I can tell, they don’t even seem to be aware the guy exists,” Mark said. The Weather Wizard was brandishing an ice pack and a black eye, courtesy of a certain speedster during an encounter just hours ago. “Hey. What if they took each other out? A speedster for a speedster? I’d root for the thief. Sure would make our lives easier.”

“Take one Flash down, angrier one’ll show up to take his place,” Cold retorted, though he had to admit, there would be something cathartic about seeing a speedster one-upped by his own kind. “Besides, if you met this new guy, you wouldn’t be rooting for him. Obnoxious little shit, running around this city without any regard for the rules. Someone’s gotta sort this guy out.”

And by sort him out, Cold meant beat some sense into him, because nobody stole on Rogue territory so blatantly. While smaller shops were open to anyone who wanted to make a quick buck, high-end stores were reserved for the Rogues alone. Anyone who tried to move in on their ground paid the price. Some might complain about how unfair it was that the Rogues practically owned the entirety of Central City. Most of them stopped complaining about it at gunpoint.

They didn’t put up with backtalk coming from anyone who couldn’t back it up.

“Well, it looks like we might just get our chance, if you want to do the sorting yourself, Cold. I put word out to our contacts in the market that there’s a thief peddling jewelry that came from our turf,” Hartley said, picking up his phone and displaying the screen to Cold. Hartley had always been better when it came to navigating around the black market network. His patience dealing with their kind probably had something to do with his blue-blooded background and his experience on the business front back when he was playing the obedient heir to the Rathaway fortune. “You better head out soon if you want to catch him.”

“Catch a speedster? Fat chance,” he snorted, though he got up anyway. The address on Hartley’s phone belonged to Nicky Jr. The shop was close enough that Cold actually had a chance of getting there before the thief left, if the speedster was adequately stalled. 

“So you’re going?” Hartley asked. 

“Gotta try and put a stop to him,” Cold said, putting down some money to pay for his drink, which sat mostly untouched on the table. “If this guy’s anything like the Flash, he’s going to be zipping all over town like he owns the place, and if he’s a real crook, that means he’s going to be edging on our turf.”

And the Rogues didn’t put up with that kind of disrespect.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that Nicky’s pawn shop was within walking distance of the bar, Cold wouldn’t have bothered trying to track the thief down to it. Even though getting there would only take only a few minutes’ time, the kid was still a speedster, and Cold didn’t put too much stock in the possibility that the kid would still be there by the time he arrived. 

As luck would have it, though, the sign in the shop window was flipped, reading “closed” in large bold letters to deter any other costumers from coming in. Nick was still doing his business. Cold peeked inside through the glass window and found the thief, hands gesturing and looking frustrated by the conversation he was having with the shopkeeper. 

“Are you blind, old man?” the thief asked, not noticing as Cold cracked open the door, freezing the wind chime ‘alarm’ still so that his entrance would go mostly unnoticed. Mostly. Nick, who appeared to be haggling with the thief, glanced briefly in Cold’s direction and gave him an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement as Cold crept inside. “I’m not going any lower than three thousand.”

“Nicky wouldn’t pay any more than fifteen hundred for it,” Cold announced. The kid jumped, spinning around to see who had spoken and tensed at the sight of the Rogue. “Those’re stolen goods right there. That’s Rogue property.”

The thief glanced anxiously at the door, but with his loot in the dealer’s hands, he was hesitant to leave. Still considering it, Cold could tell, which meant the kid at least had a good head on his shoulders, willing to leave his goods behind if it meant he could go free for another day.

“I was at Jackson’s first,” he ground out stubbornly. “I already smashed the cameras, and nobody even noticed what was going on until you came in, guns blazing.”

“I worked this city first. Jackson’s Jewelers, and all of Central, is Rogue territory. If you cross us, you’re gonna regret it.”

“What’re you going to do, growl and shake your fist at me? You’ll have to catch me first,” the speedster scoffed. He spun around, back to Cold, and rudely snatched the silver and diamond bracelet from Nicky Jr.’s hands. Grabbing at all of the jewelry he had brought in with him, he stuffed them back in his pockets, and the jewelry that didn’t fit quickly enough went around his wrists and neck. “See you later, losers,” he quipped.

“Hey!” Captain Cold shouted when the thief—definitely abso-fucking-lutely a kid—darted close to him and actually fucking stopped in front of him for a brief moment, long enough to snatch the sunglasses off of Cold’s face on the way out. He tried to grab at the thief, for his sleeve, his hat, his back, but the speedster was too fast, even when he wasn’t using his superspeed.

“Souvenir!” the asshole declared with a cocky laugh, Cold’s sunglasses raised high above his own head like a trophy as he left. Cold missed the opportunity to freeze the little shit solid as he stumbled into the door, which, as it turned out, had to be pulled rather than pushed to leave. Before Cold could unholster his cold gun, the thief had already left.

Nicky snorted as Cold lumbered forward, taking the stool that the thief had abandoned. “Close, but not quite,” the merchant said. He picked up one of the bracelets that the thief had left behind. “Score. You’ve got great timing.”

“At least you got something out of this,” Cold muttered. 

“What’s your beef with the kid anyway? Tripped you up on a heist?” Nicky asked, putting down the bracelet off to the side and picking up a pendant to start polishing it. Cold wasn’t stupid. He recognized when someone was digging around for information, and obviously, the fact that the thief had run out of the store without the use of his powers meant that he was trying to lay low, and Nicky didn’t even seem aware of the thief’s abilities. Cold was going to keep it that way. The less people knew about the kid, the less complicated it would be when he kicked that thieving ass out of the city. He didn’t like the complications that metahumans brought along with them.

“He’s stealing on Rogue turf without passing ‘inspection’,” Cold answered, and it wasn’t a lie. This was just one of the many things about this new thief that peeved Cold, and it was only the second time they’d met.

“Hah!” Nicky scoffed. “I don’t know much about this guy, but I do know that he is not gonna just go up and introduce himself to you,” the broker said. “Kid's not focused on the money. He’s focused on not getting caught.”

Cold glanced at the other bits of jewelry lying scattered around the table. The kid hadn’t bothered to take with him in the rush to leave. “Evidently. What else can you tell me about him?”

“Hm… not much, not much,” Nicky said thoughtfully. “Light haired. Young. Maybe late teens, early twenties. Rumor has it he probably came from a small, out-of-nowhere town. He’s got a bit of an accent, so he probably ain’t local, that’s for sure. Didn’t give me a name or a way to contact him when he walked in here asking to make a deal. Really, that’s all I can say.”

“That’s it?” Cold said, fighting down the usual brand of irritation that came with dealing with speedster. 

“Well…” Nicky paused. “Kid’s got a snazzy hat.”

Chapter Text

Wally slipped out of the sprint and into a light jog once he was safely halfway across the city and a few streets away from home. The jewelry dangled against his chest and threatened to fall off of his wrists, and Wally would’ve felt a little silly with all the knickknacks hanging off him if it weren’t for the fact that it was, well, invigorating.

Eventually, Wally slowed down to a stop under a fire escape that hung several feet above his head. Hard for most people to reach, but Wally took several steps back and ran toward the wall, managing to make it several feet up before the soles of his shoes began to lose their grip against the bricks. Kicking off the wall, he reached his arms out and caught hold of one of the ladder rungs, and Wally could feel the dusty surface slipping underneath his fingers. After the first day he had moved into this apartment, however, Wally had learned to prepare for an unreliable grip and held on as tight as he could until he managed to pull himself up and steady himself with his feet safely on the bottom rung.

After that, he looked around to make sure no one was looking and began to climb up, as quickly and quietly as he could manage. Six flights up, he pulled a keychain out of his pocket, a tiny yellow lightning bolt jangling against the few keys he had. Wally unlocked the window to his bedroom and stepped inside, extra careful not to kick and knock over the lamp that stood next to his desk. 

He really ripped himself off today, taking jewelry that he couldn’t even sell. Not for a good price. The Rogues, apparently, had some sort of arrangement with most of the dealers in the city, if their hesitation to work with him was anything to go by. The last guy had alerted the Rogues to him, and Wally was pretty sure he’d left some of his goods behind on the table in his rush to get out. What a waste.

Wally made sure that his mother was in the living room and his door was firmly shut before emptying his pockets of their contents. A few wallets he’d picked out of people’s pockets and handfuls of jewelry. He pulled the rest from around his neck and wrists and tossed them all onto his bed, easily covered by his blankets if he needed them to be. 

Next time, he needed to go for the cash first. He didn’t need to exchange that. But the day’s loot hadn’t been so bad. Hard to get a good deal in Central, but it wasn’t anything a little run down to the West Coast couldn’t solve. Not that he needed to go so far just to find a store that the Rogues didn’t have some sort of hold over, but it was in the middle of summer, and a small trip to the beach didn’t seem like a bad idea.

There were perks to being able to run faster than the speed of sound.

On the other hand, going to the beach by himself would probably be considered pretty lame. It had only been two weeks since he’d moved back to Central; not even a week since he’d started his summer classes. It wasn’t as if he’d had time to meet people. 

A little voice of logic in the back of Wally’s head, however, pointed out that even if he hadn’t worn out his patience with people, he couldn’t possibly be expected to juggle a social life with his part time job and all the classes he planned on taking. People expected him to be busy. 

After all, the more studious and swamped he seemed, the less people would suspect him of ‘extracurricular activities’. 

Wally sorted out his goods, disentangling the various pieces of jewelry that he hadn’t pawned off yet and separating them from the folded cash and the wallets. 

And, of course, there were Captain Cold’s sunglasses. It was probably a terrible idea, pissing the robber off like that. He really didn’t want to draw the attentions of the Flash’s enemies because, duh, they were the Flash’s enemies, and Wally was pretty sure that even if he hadn’t antagonized them, they’d put anyone even remotely related to the Flash on their shit list. And Wally was a little more than remotely related to him.

Not to mention, the more involved he got with the Flash’s Rogues, the more likely he was to draw the attention of the Flash, which Wally also preferred to avoid. 

...But he had to admit, Cold’s visor sunglasses made a pretty great souvenir, even better than the gold and silver and diamond knickknacks he’d been picking up lately. There was just something sentimental about it. Heh.

With a wide grin, Wally picked the sunglasses back up and put them on. They were too large for his face, but Wally pushed them as far up the bridge of his nose. 

“If you cross us, you’re gonna regret it,” he said, imitating the villain’s deeper, gruffer voice with his face scrunched up and both hands forming finger guns. “Pffft. ...What killed the dinosaurs...? The Ice Age!”

“Wally?” his mom called, and Wally managed to toss the glasses across the room onto the corner of his bed and strip down to his boxers in one second flat, because if she was going to walk in on something he didn’t want her to see, it might as well be something that she’d immediately close the door on once she did. Still, it didn’t mean he wanted her walking in, so when he heard his mom stop just outside of his door but didn’t take any step further, he let out a silent sigh of relief. “Are you laughing by yourself?”

“No, Mom!” Wally said quickly, tossing the folded blanket over his bed and quietly striding halfway across the room to grab some clothes. “Just,” he let out a fake cough, “choked a little. On... spit.”

“Oh,” she said. Her feet scuffled against the floorboards outside his door for a moment, and he could hear the brief hesitation in her voice. “I’ll get you some water.”

“No, I’m good, you don’t have... to...” Wally’s voice trailed off as she had already left to get it for him. He stuck his head out of the doorway to catch a glimpse of her just as she turned left to the kitchen. “Okay.”

Well, that wasn’t weird at all. The weird was inevitable, but it made Wally briefly wonder if she’d left to get the water to avoid the awkward silence that would’ve fallen between them or if she just felt weird in general, living with her son after he had spent the last several years in his father’s custody.

While he still had the opportunity, Wally flipped back the covers of his bed and rolled everything he had dropped onto it in his dress shirt and pants and headed towards his closet. Jewelry and emptied wallets got dumped hastily into the duffel bag to join the rest of the loot he’d slowly been building up the past week. The cash went to his pockets, and Cold’s sunglasses... Wally hesitated. Those could get scratched. He reached further into his closet and pulled out a cardboard box, the one filled with the few things he had bothered to bring along with him from Blue Valley. 

Most of it was cash.

Wally picked up one of his high school yearbooks. For a minute, he couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic. Well, a few seconds, at least. He tossed it aside and reached for the notebooks underneath—his personal notes on the Flash and his formula. Wally opened it and began to skim his notes. His work at thirteen was a mess. Now this was nostalgic, in a mortifying way. His handwriting hadn’t improved by much in the five years, but he smiled at the sight of his handiwork. The first draft alone took nearly this entire notebook. He was glad he’d decided to experiment further before testing some of these formulas on himself. He probably would’ve ended up putting himself in the hospital. 

Wally closed the notebook, turning it over in his hands. He should burn it. Get rid of it, shred it, make sure no one could ever find this, because hell if he knew what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands. 

But as he held the journal in his hands, he knew he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to let it go. All of his work—proof of his very first accomplishments, proof that he was more than his dad said he would be, proof of his own brilliance—was in this room, and at the very core of his success were the journals he had used to dissect and study the Flash formula. Wally flipped through the pages of another notebook, noting little mistakes in his observations and where he’d made changes in his experiments. His final result hadn’t been perfect. Wally doubted that it was perfectly identical to the original formula that had created Central’s superheroes, but the overall results seemed pretty close.

Wally wondered if he’d ever get to be as fast as the Flash and smiled wistfully, putting his old notes back in the box and leaving Cold’s sunglasses inside with them as another memento among his work. He doubted he’d ever even be able to compare their respective speeds, not unless he was running from him, in which case he’d have bigger things to worry about. 

Still. A kid could dream.

Talking with Aunt Iris face to face still felt a little strange to Wally. Even after Wally and his parents had moved away from Central, he and Iris always spoke on the phone, and after the popularity of the internet began to explode, they had switched to sending each other regular emails, updating each other regularly on their daily lives. She may have been his aunt, but Iris was also technically his oldest friend. 

Now that he had moved back to the city to attend Central University, his aunt was determined to make up for lost time, and Wally found himself frequently invited to lunch after his classes. This was the seventh time in three weeks that she had bullied him into having lunch with her, and Wally was pretty sure she was just testing the waters to figure out when she could make it into a weekly thing.

Wally headed back to the booth and settled in his seat across from Aunt Iris, back after excusing himself to go to the bathroom. Their lunch was mostly finished; she had finished her soup of the day, and Wally’s sandwich was half-eaten, his second lunch of the day. The knowledge that his aunt was footing the bill left him feeling a little less hungry every day. She always refused his attempts to pay and gave him a look whenever he ordered the most inexpensive meals off the menu. Wally resolutely picked the sandwich back up and continued eating.

“So,” Iris started, as Wally sat down and settled into his seat. “School. Anything interesting happen?”

Wally knew what she was asking but shrugged. “Took a test. Aced it. And then I sat through a few more lectures. That’s pretty much it,” he shrugged after swallowing. “Boring.”

“Poor baby,” Aunt Iris sighed, patting his shoulder mockingly with false sympathy. “Being some kind of genius must be so hard.”

“It is,” Wally said in the whiniest voice he could muster, though he couldn’t undo the grin on his face when he did. 

“Maybe you’d be a little less bored if you tried to meet people,” she suggested, and when Wally didn’t really respond, she tried again. “Are you at least making friends?” she asked, a little exasperated but still with a sense of good humor, her head tilted gently to the side.

“You sound like my mom,” Wally said sarcastically.

“Oh really?” Aunt Iris said. Not really, but it sounded like a mom-like thing to say. Trying to reconnect with his mother was an interesting experience. She was honestly trying hard to act like a mother again, and Wally like a son, but the conversations were strained and the little interaction they had throughout the day was lacking. “Well, it’s good advice; maybe you should take it.”

“I don’t have time for that kind of stuff,” he insisted. It was true. Technically, he had plenty of free time, but not free time he could use, if that made any sense. If he wanted to keep avoiding the Flash, he’d need to keep his schedule flexible and free. Wally put his sandwich down, a little less hungry at the thought of what he was doing. 

“You could make time. Come on, you’re in college now. You’ve barely even celebrated your high school graduation,” his aunt said, reaching across the table and giving his arm a playful little smack with the back of her hand. She was more accurate than she realized, about his high school graduation. The first thing he did once he got his diploma was start packing his bags. Still, Wally could look in her eyes and find a certain amount of cautiousness in them every time. There was a sense of calculation to everything she did nowadays, even more watchful of him than he was of her. She was worried about him, and it made Wally feel all the worse for making her feel that way. “It’s time to have some fun. You deserve it.”

Wally shook his head a little at the irony because he really, really didn’t. He wasn’t sure if he smiled or grimaced, but Aunt Iris looked ready to insist he get a social life a little longer, so he glanced at the clock and back at her. “I’ve already set most of my class schedule for the next semester. I don’t exactly have enough free time to be joining frats and clubs.”

“You sure?” his aunt asked. “Because the Flash fanclub is a lot more popular here.”

“Aunt Iris, please don’t ever mention that again,” Wally groaned, covering his face. He doubted she’d listen though. Not when her husband was the Flash, because the whole thing was probably absolutely hilarious for her. 

“Alright, alright,” she said. “So what’re you studying again? Chemistry?”

“Physical chemistry,” Wally said. “It’s one of the harder areas of chemistry, but it’s not so bad if you're really good at math.”

“And you’re really good at math?” she asked him, and Wally realized that he had never really brought up much other than biology and chemistry to her before.

“I’m really good at everything,” he said with a playful grin. “Anyway, I figured if the university is footing the bill for all my classes, I might as well take advantage of it and do something fun.”

“Like physical chemistry.”

“Exactly.”

Iris grinned. “Well, just in case your schedule hasn’t been finalized, I’d recommend a psychology course. You’ll have to take a social science for your major anyway, so it might as well be that. It’d be an introductory class, of course, so it's low-maintenance. Easy grade. Most people like it, I think.”

“Psychology? Sounds interesting, I guess, but I don’t know if it’s really my thing,” Wally said. Of course, it wasn’t really psychology. Most social and behavioral sciences weren’t really his thing, actually. He preferred hard science.

“Well, if I remember right, you’ve got a choice between that, economics, or world politics,” Iris said.

“All of a sudden, psychology sounds incredibly appealing,” Wally said. He looked at his cell phone. “I have to head out for work.”

“Right now?” she asked.

“Well... no. Chester doesn’t care what time I get there, so long as I get all the packages delivered for the day,” Wally shrugged. Not that it would take any more than a few minutes to get through an entire week’s work, but Wally liked the freedom his job gave him. While everyone was assuming he was busy working and in transit between deliveries, he could do whatever he wanted. “I should still get going soon, at least. I don’t want to be late.”

“You need a car,” Aunt Iris commented with a frown on her face. “It won’t be fun riding a bike in bad weather.”

“It’s still summer,” Wally said. “Nice weather so far. Besides, cars are expensive. I’m good with a bike.”

Technically, he was good on foot, but the first day he had moved back to Central City, his mom had surprised him with a good bike, brand new, and he couldn’t just let it go to waste. He didn’t want her to think he was ungrateful. Not when she went to all this trouble to get him back.

“You and your mom know that Barry and I will always be willing to lend you a bit of money if you need it,” Iris said to him, a conversation topic she always tried to work into every day they had lunch. 

“We’re alright now,” Wally said, maybe a little too defensively. “And delivering packages might not sound fun, but it’s not that bad, and it pays alright too.” And Wally’s other ‘job’ paid loads better, but he couldn’t exactly explain the appearance of his money. 

“Well, at least let me pay for my poor nephew’s lunch,” his aunt said, rolling her eyes a little, though she was proud of him. He and his mother never accepted any of the money she offered, and even though she wished they would, she still felt some satisfaction with their honesty. 

Wally always guiltily found his aunt’s assumptions about him both flattering and depressingly inaccurate, but he didn’t say anything and let her pull out her purse because the logical side of him knew that someone making the amount of money he was supposed to be making couldn’t be paying for lunch so often.

But the moment the purse came out, Wally jumped in his seat at the sound of a crash, and before anyone else even had a chance to look up, he was grabbing Aunt Iris and pulling her underneath the table as the wide window beside them broke, shattering into pieces and raining the area around them with broken glass. Overhead, he spotted a white blur overhead, making an arc around the room before flying back out the window. 

“Everyone down!”

“Captain Boomerang...” Wally muttered under his breath, cursing his luck. There was something wrong with Central City. Really. This was his third encounter with a Rogue in the past two weeks. “What’re the odds?” he sighed.

“In Central City? Not as low as you’d expect,” Aunt Iris said excitedly, pulling her cell phone out from her purse. For one breathtaking moment, he thought she was going to call Barry and Wally was going to get to see the Flash up close and in action. Instead, she fiddled with the buttons and held the phone up, recording the robbery on her phone.

“What’re you...?” Wally sputtered. 

“I left my camera at home,” she said simply.

“Really, Aunt Iris? Are you serious?” he hissed.

Iris didn’t looked worried at all, zooming her phone in on Captain Boomerang as he entered through the broken window, the glass door only a few feet to the man’s left. 

“It's the twenty-second of June, 2011,” Iris said in a low voice. “We’re at a small cafe in midtown called Coffee Grounds, and Captain Boomerang’s just arrived. Cashing in on the cafe’s recent success, no doubt,” she reported with a completely straight face, though the edges of her lips twitched a bit at the expression on Wally’s.

“What do you mean it’s empty?” Captain Boomerang bellowed. “Check it again!”

“Sir, there aren't many places in a cash register that money can be hidden—but I am checking again,” the waiter said, his voice rising a few octaves as the villain held a boomerang of questionable effect up to his throat. Wally was just going to guess that it was incredibly sharp and dangerous up close. “It... it really is empty. I don't know how, but it is.”

Wally guiltily glanced at his backpack that rested on the back of his chair, a little heavier with the contents he had emptied from the cash register. It had been an impulsive grab, one he couldn't resist, when he had excused himself from the table earlier to go to the bathroom and saw one of the waiters open the cash register beside him with devilish timing. 

“And there is apparently nothing in the cash register,” Iris said in a low voice, probably just loud enough for her phone to pick up. “I think somebody’s already... emptied it?”

“Aunt Iris,” Wally hissed again, a little desperately, because his aunt wasn’t being very subtle about recording everything on the phone at all. And considering the fact that he had everything Captain Boomerang wanted in his backpack, he really didn’t want the man’s attention any closer to him than he had to be. “You work for GBS. You’re not going to get any brownie points, risking your neck for a fluff piece on... on Captain Boomerang.”

“And what’s wrong with a bit of Digger on the front pages?” Captain Boomerang said, and Wally was struck by the sudden realization that the Rogue was standing behind him and slowly turned to face him. “You don’t think I’m worthy of a headline?”

Honestly, Wally didn’t think the man was even worth mentioning in a footnote, but he wasn’t exactly going to say that out loud. 

“Not even a footnote.” Oh god, apparently he was.

“What’d you say?” the Australian Rogue asked, grabbing Wally by the front of his shirt and actually lifting him up to his feet until Wally was left standing on his toes. 

“Well, I mean come on, she works for GBS. That stands for Galaxy Broadcasting System. You barely qualify as global material. I mean, let’s face it, you guys are local. The only thing you’re known for is amassing huge amounts of property damage and making insurance hell to pay. I mean, sometimes you guys really ruin lives, but you don’t ruin them that bad,” Wally rambled on, wondering why he wasn’t just shutting up. Off to the side, Wally caught a glimpse of Iris’s concerned face, and then he just felt embarrassed because she probably thought he was scared of Captain Boomerang, puked on one drunken night and refused to speak of again.

He was more concerned with the fact that he was face to face with Captain Boomerang, the Rogue who was standing in his face. The more memorable Wally made himself, the more worried he was over the fact that he could run into him as a thief one day and be recognized as that nephew of the famous reporter. Okay, yeah, he was mildly concerned with the possibility that if the man punched him, he was going to have to stand there and actually take it. It was especially annoying when he had superspeed. Waiting for a fist to hit him in the face in slow motion was never really fun, ever, even if the impact was going to be cushioned by a truly gross amount of knuckle hair. 

But rather than wait for the fist to hit him, Wally watched as Iris grabbed her drink from the table and tossed her soda in his face. Captain Boomerang sputtered and released his hold on Wally’s shirt, and Iris immediately stood between him and Wally, one hand in front of Wally and gently pushing him back. 

“Back. Off,” Iris said firmly. “He hasn’t done anything to you.”

“You think I’m scared of you?” Captain Boomerang sneered, and Wally couldn’t help but realize just how much the man loomed over him and his aunt. Still, there wasn’t a single sign of fear in her slighter frame, despite the fact that, even though he was named Captain Boomerang, he was still a violent criminal.

“I think that if you touch me or my nephew, we’re going to have trouble,” Iris said, taking a step up close to the man to jab a finger against his chest. She was more right than she realized, because if Digger laid a hand on her, Wally was going to start wailing on the guy, secrecy be damned. He could always say it was the adrenaline.

Still, he really preferred not to have to resort to that and tried to pull her further back and away from the criminal. She didn’t budge. 

And when the man raised his arm, possibly to back hand her, Wally didn’t even need to intervene as Captain Boomerang was taken down by what most people would see as a pair of blurs.

So fast. Wally watched as the red one punched Captain Boomerang in the face and the yellow one grabbed the wrist of the back-stretched arm and yanked it with enough force to spin him away from Iris and bodily toss the criminal overhead, sending him crashing into a nearby table.

“Just to be clear, I was first,” Flash—oh god it was the Flash—announced. 

His sidekick stared at him with what appeared to be a baleful expression, though it was hard to tell with so much of his upper face covered. “Yeah, but I took him out.”

“Y’missed...” Captain Boomerang gritted, slowly getting back up to his feet. 

“No,” the Flash said thoughtfully. “No, he got you pretty good.”

In response, the Rogue raised his arm back, a boomerang in hand. Wally wasn’t even sure why the man bothered. He didn’t have a chance with the Flash here, let alone both the Flash and his partner. He managed to throw the boomerang but nothing more than that as the Flash caught the boomerang in midair before it could hit a woman by the cashier, leaving the Rogue to his partner. 

Wally watched with reluctant admiration as the younger hero sprinted forward, taking the Rogue down with a series of strikes, evidence of years of experience working alongside the Flash. That could’ve been him. It took several strikes before the criminal went down, but that was partly due to the fact that the flurry of lightning-quick strikes continued even after the man’s knees began to buckle until he fell down to the ground completely. 

With Captain Boomerang down for the count, the yellow-clad hero turned around and began to head his way. Wally froze. What did he want? Wally was glad for his own lack of reaction when the Flash’s partner stopped and he realized he had only come over to return to the Flash’s side. 

The Flash, who was standing particularly close to Iris, but not so close that any eyebrows would be raised.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite GBS reporter. Fancy running into you here,” the Flash said. His partner, standing off to the side, made a face at the pun. 

“Today seems to be a day for funny coincidences,” Iris smiled at him, though there was a tinge of seriousness to her voice. “When Captain Boomerang said you missed, he wasn’t completely wrong. You missed a person. Someone came here and robbed this place before he’d even arrived...”

As Iris gave the Flash an impromptu debriefing, Wally looked to his right again and saw the Flash’s partner was watching him now, red-on-black eyes trained on him. After meeting his eyes for a split-second, Wally stared back at his aunt’s and the Flash’s general direction, feeling incredibly aware of the fact that in his backpack he was carrying an particularly large amount of cash that didn’t legally belong to him. 

Wally snuck another nervous look at the heroes until his sidekick gave him a borderline annoyed, “What are you looking at?”

“Um. Nothing.” Wally shrugged and tried to tear his attention away from him but found that this time he couldn’t, because now their curt interaction had drawn the attention of both the Flash and his aunt. Now he had three pairs of eyes focused on him. “His, um... eyes are red,” he said pointlessly. 

“I’m surprised you could see that from behind Iris,” the sidekick replied, and then he winced, either at his own words or from the disapproving look he got from the Flash and the glare he got from Iris. 

“Rude,” Iris said sharply.

Wally got a mumbled apology, but the hero seemed more preoccupied with the crime scene. Most customers had already left, some of them leaving behind a small bit of cash to cover their meal—a level of honesty that actually impressed Wally. The sidekick darted over to the register and back and confirmed the missing money. 

“Do you think it’s... Peek-A-Boo?” he asked, sounding almost hopeful. 

The Flash shook his head. “She can’t exactly make a quiet entrance. Iris says no one realized the money had gone missing until after the fact. I’d guess Mirror Master, but the Rogues usually coordinate their robberies. They wouldn’t make a mistake like this.” He glanced over his shoulder, making sure that the Rogue was down. “So. Iris, are you going to introduce me to your friend?”

Iris grinned. “Flash, this is Wally, my nephew. Wally, meet Flash...” 

“Pleased to meet you,” the Flash said. There was a note of restraint in his voice, as if there was a joke hidden in the greeting. Wally had a pretty good idea what the joke was. The Flash extended his hand, and Wally shook it, not caring how dumb he looked with his overly large grin.

“...and this lump is Zoom.”

Wally shook his hand too, some residual enthusiasm leaking over into this handshake from the Flash’s. 

“That was rude of me earlier...” the Flash’s partner started. It wasn’t quite an apology, but Wally didn’t really care either, more preoccupied by the pattern on the gloves, which seemed to have something installed inside of them, like brass knuckles. Overall, his partner’s costume was a different from the Flash’s too. The Flash’s costume was streamlined, made of light material that Wally couldn’t identify. Zoom’s seemed just as lightweight, but less aerodynamic, which really struck Wally as odd. Wally looked up from Zoom’s hand to realize that the hero had gone silent and everyone else was staring at him just a little. 

“Sorry. Your glove looked interesting,” Wally said lamely, letting go and giving the hero back his hand. 

“Uh, right.” Zoom said. He looked at his own glove, fiddling with it until he brought his hand up to his earpiece. He didn’t move for a minute, listening to whatever message he was getting, and then looked up. “Flash. The Top is trying to work a bank heist.”

The Flash nodded, probably getting the same message over his own headset. “Stay safe and don’t offend any more criminals,” the Flash said to Iris, leaving his hand on her shoulder a split second longer than strictly necessary before leaving. 

“I’m not promising anything,” Iris said loudly as Flash and Zoom left at a speed that was impossible for Wally. She sent Wally a glance and smiled at his slumped shoulders and wistful expression. 

“You’re really familiar with them,” Wally commented. “First-name basis?”

“Hm?”

“They know you by your first name.”

“Oh, yeah. I worked with Flash a lot before I got my big break and moved on from local news. And when Zoom came along, well, Flash introduced us,” Iris said. She elbowed Wally gently. “He likes you. Well, Flash does, anyway. Zoom doesn’t warm up to people so easily.”

Apparently, the sidekick had better instincts than the Flash.

Wally shifted from foot to foot, feeling the weight of the backpack on his shoulders, heavy with things that didn’t belong to him. He would’ve given it all up for a chance to be where Zoom was now.

Chapter Text

Cold watched as Captain Boomerang was led inside the back of a police truck, a bitter taste forming in his mouth and annoyance in his stomach as he realized he and the other Rogues were going to be staging a breakout soon. The news reporter on television showed a video taken from the security camera at the cafe. 

“Hey look, it’s Iris,” Mark said. The Weather Wizard stopped spinning his wand between his fingers to point at the figure on TV. Cold squinted and saw that the woman Digger had been about to backhand was, in fact, Iris West-Allen. Cold was going to have to have words with Digger once they got him back. The Australian needed to be reminded of the rules. Granted, he didn’t know for sure whether or not Digger meant to cause any real damage, but that reporter was too high-profile. 

All the Rogues collectively winced as both the Flash and Zoom double-teamed Digger and took him down almost immediately. It had been a while since they had to worry about both heroes working together. It'd been several years since Zoom's initial appearance, and he had since graduated beyond needing to be babysat by his mentor. Or so Cold had thought. But whether Zoom was under some sort of supervision or he and the Flash had decided to reignite their relationship, Cold didn't care. The 'why' wasn't important. He needed to revisit some of the older Rogue strategies for dealing with the speedster duo before his own team started questioning his abilities as a leader.

“I guess I’ll go pick him up,” Hartley sighed. He glanced at the other Rogues and paused. “If Digger’s down for the count, I’m going to need help, though. Can’t play my tunes and carry him out at the same time.”

After a beat of silence, Cold was worried he was going to have to volunteer, but Mick stood up alongside Hartley. “Nothing better to do,” he said, reaching behind his back to bring out his flamethrowers. 

Cold sent Hartley a glance, and hopefully Hartley knew it meant he wanted an eye kept on Heat Wave at all times. Mick had a habit of being transfixed by his own flames, from time to time. It was an issue none of the Rogues were really willing to address.

After Hartley and Mick left the table, the rest of the Rogues—Cold, Mark, and Sam—continued watching the rickety old television set that sat above the bar. 

“Rick,” Mark called in a louder voice. “Turn that up.”

The barkeeper looked up at the TV and reached up, dialing the volume up a few more levels. 

“What is it?” Cold asked.

“Listen.”

“…no one knows who the culprit was—” the reporter said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Cold said irritably, having missed the earlier part of the news report.

“He said someone got to the money before Digger did,” Mark said. “Someone who can, say, get in and out of places without being seen or caught.”

Cold immediately realized what Mark was hinting at. His mouth twisted in a grimace at the thought that the thief had made another appearance, showing one of their own up and getting away with it. That little shit.

The shot glass in Cold’s hand shattered under the force of his grip. Put out by the inadvertent waste of alcohol, he shook the broken pieces of glass from his gloves and wiped his hands off against the side of his pants, and if the barkeeper had any problem with the broken glassware, he didn’t say anything about it.

Sam looked up at something behind Cold and scowled. “What’re you doing?” he asked. 

Cold looked over his shoulder to see a man standing there, thick arms crossed in front of his wide chest. 

“I’ve got business with you,” the man said. 

“You can take your business to someone else, somewhere else,” Cold said. “We don’t do outside jobs for just anybody with the guts to walk up to us.” Cold had to admit, the man was either pretty brave or pretty stupid. The Rogues might’ve been frequent visitors of this bar, but they weren’t exactly open to visitors. The other bar patrons, some of them costumed criminals in their own right, knew better than to try and strike up a conversation with them. 

“Blacksmith told me to come to you. It’s about your thief.”

None of the three present Rogues said anything in response to that for a moment. Blacksmith… wasn’t the type of woman who took no for an answer very easily. Especially considering the fact that Cold did owe her a favor for spreading word of a new thief in town, as futile as his efforts to catch said thief were. 

“Pull up a chair,” Cold said. “What’s the job?”

“Mom?” Wally ducked his head inside the apartment and looked around to find his mom sitting at the kitchen table. 

“You’re home a little later than usual,” she commented, not looking up from her work.

“Delivery took a little longer than usual today,” Wally said, crossing pass the dinner table and heading straight for the kitchen. “And before that, I was at lunch with Aunt Iris and a guy tried to rob the place, could you believe that?”

“Sounds like it was awful,” she said distractedly. 

“Not really. Flash and Zoom came and stopped it,” he grinned as he opened the fridge and pulled out the milk carton. “Wasn’t as cool as I thought it’d be. I mean, it was cool, but I guess you can’t really do anything really impressive when you’re just fighting Captain Boomerang. I mean, it was two-on-one, so couldn’t have expected them to go all out or anything.”

“Mm-hmm,” his mom nodded noncommittally, but Wally knew better than to try and press for further conversation while she was looking at the bills and headed towards his room with a glass of milk.

Kicking his door shut with the back of his heel, Wally set his milk on top of his dresser before dropping his backpack on the bed and dumping out its contents on the mattress. 

Including the pockets picked the last week, it put him at a total of two thousand bucks, which, even though it wasn’t close to what he could’ve made if he didn’t have to worry about running into the Rogues or Flash, was pretty good for a college student. Satisfied with the week’s work, Wally finished up his drink and jumped on his bed, going through the food he had brought in his backpack. 

Sports drinks and energy bars. Wally wasn’t sure what he would do if he ever got tired of them. Drumming his fingers against his knee as he chewed on one of the bars, he skimmed his textbooks at his desks. He already finished reading the two semesters’ worth of material for most classes.

Wally snorted at himself. Aunt Iris was right. He had too much time on his hands. But the thought of friends left his heart racing unpleasantly and his lips twisting into a grimace. True, sometimes when he was sitting by himself, he felt pretty pathetic, but when he sat with people, talked to people, and felt just as alone? It was worse. 

Unable to completely dismiss the subject from his thoughts, Wally’s knee bounced up and down restlessly under his desk until he finally gave up on trying to focus. Forcefully slapping his textbook shut, he began pacing around the room, eventually stopping in front of his closet and reached inside for his box. 

He sorted through the surviving pieces of his old chemistry set, and the notebooks he’d pieced together the Flash formula in until he found his yearbooks. Picking one of the books at random and ignoring the well-wishing graffiti in its pages, he flipped it open to find his page. Various scribbles surrounded his yearbook picture—Flash symbols and word bubbles and the yearly playful jibe at his name because everyone knew he hated being called Wallace, and everyone else thought Wally was an equally silly name.

On the opposite page were the school clubs. The very first club listed was the General Academics Club that had started with Wally's chemistry group and, under his organization, slowly became a coalition of every single academics-related club at his school. He’d been pretty proud of it. 

The club was probably still going strong, even after he left Blue Valley, and the thought of it made his face heat and his throat constrict. Burying the feeling down, he flipped down a few pages over to find the picture with the Flash Fanclub picture. It was a running joke at school, how there’d only been two members in the club, and only because Wally’s friend was dedicated enough to him to put up with Wally’s fanboy-ish tendencies. They weren’t wrong.

Colton had always been pretty good-natured about Wally’s… his everything. All the corny jokes, short attention spans, blatant Flash-worship, and occasional bullheadedness that had other people glazing over conversations, Colton had put up with like a pro, and for all their history, Wally was willing to tolerate his best friend’s fascination with magic. He took Colton’s attentions and company for granted though.

Wally took one last glance at the Blue Valley Academic Club, vast in its members, one last time before closing it. They hadn’t taught him much, but he did learn how he could be surrounded by so many people and alone at the same time. 

Sick of the nostalgia and berating himself for giving into the temptation and looking at his yearbooks in the first place, Wally shoved them back into the box and pushed them back into the closet, but not before rearranging the contents so the books wouldn’t crush the sunglasses he’d stolen from Captain Cold. 

New life, new memories, Wally told himself, standing back up and noting the suit in the back of his closet. He felt a lot cooler, running around Central like a thief with his pockets full of cash. When he did, any bitterness over his last year of high school just kind of fell behind in the dust, feeling too distant to need to mull over. The fact that he made more money in a week than most classmates with his course load would ever make in a month went just as far in soothing his irritation.

Wally ran his hands through his hair, strands shifting under his fingers and holding the position. He massaged the sides of his scalp with the meat of his hand, easing the headache that was beginning to form, and caught sight of his reflection in Captain Cold’s stolen sunglasses, his image distorted but still his features still distinguishable.

He wasn’t too bad looking. Actually, he was pretty good-looking in his clearly humble, unbiased opinion. He was in better shape than when he left Blue Valley too. In his usual t-shirts, it wasn’t really too noticeable. The clothes he wore on a ‘run’, however, fitted him well enough to accent his body. It certainly wasn’t as… exposing as Zoom’s costume was, but the waistcoat was form-fitting and still had enough room for pockets. Which was more than the Flash’s partner could say. 

Of course, the Flash’s partner probably didn’t have to worry about pockets and where to put stolen valuables, all things considered. And his costume was probably more aerodynamic and easier to run in. Wally reached out and grabbed his slacks from a hanger, inspecting the material. It was a relatively new pair of pants, but he was already seeing where the fabric was stressed. Zoom probably didn’t have to worry about that, with his access to better materials and a community of heroes in the same line of work. 

He wanted that.

But being a thief had its perks too, Wally assured himself. It was easier to blend in with people when he wasn’t stuck wearing a brightly colored suit and a big red target on his chest. Dressed in slacks, a button up shirt, and a waistcoat, hiding was as simple as peeling off his mask and running through a crowd of people downtown. And even though there were rarely ever witnesses to his success, as a thief, he was… pretty cool. The domino mask didn’t do much to hide his face—chosen because it was easier to take off in a hurry than a ski mask was—but it covered most of his freckles, and the fedora helped obscure the rest of him. At first glance, he looked older than he really did, and if no one looked too closely, he could pretend he was somebody else.

Wally jerked up at the sound of a tricorder and glanced around for his cell phone, which lay on his desk. Jogging over too it, he picked up his phone and glanced at the screen in mild confusion—he didn’t get too many phone calls unless it was from his aunt or occasionally his uncle. It wasn’t a number he recognized, but it was maddeningly familiar and the area code implied it was someone from Blue Valley.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to pick it up. In retrospect, deleting everyone’s numbers from his phone’s address book might not have been a good idea. Of course, if it was a prank call, he could always try and figure out who it was, run over to their house, and steal the wheels off their car. Wally didn’t care about being mature. He preferred getting even. 

Wally typed in his phone password and unlocked it to read the message.

Hello? It’s been a while.

Wally paused, thinking over how to respond before answering with a ‘who is this?’

Your father? 
This is the right number, right?
Wally?

Oh.

“Huh,” Wally muttered to himself with a frown. “Weird.”

He and his dad hadn’t really been on talking terms since… well, for a really long time. Wally couldn’t pinpoint the exact spot they began to drift, but the thinning relationship definitely burst wide open after Rudy lost his job as an overseer at the chemical plant and started working overtime in a more menial job position. In the occasional moments of self-pity, Wally sometimes wondered if his father even noticed any difference after Wally had moved out. Back in that town, Wally had mostly been left up to his own devices, which made his descent into robbery considerably easier to hide. 

Sheepishly adding his dad’s number back to the phone book, Wally sent him a text back a response. 

Wally: Oh. Didn’t recognize the number.
Dad: Still figuring out how to text too.
Dad: Was worried you changed your number.
Wally: Did you need something?

It was probably rude, but by the time he realized it, it was too late. He’d already sent the message. Still, he meant what he said. They didn’t talk much, but if his dad needed money, Wally definitely had enough to spare. It wasn’t as if he spent it on much. 

Dad: It’s just quiet around the house now.
Dad: You’re away in college and all.

Wally didn’t respond immediately, a little perplexed by the thought. He and his father rarely spoke. Between his father’s work hours, Wally’s personal life, and the years of lingering awkwardness between them, the house had always been quiet, even before Wally had left. He was surprised his father even cared about Wally’s absence, and Wally felt a little guilty for the ripple of satisfaction that he did, even a little.

Wally: Hah. Miss you too.

A lie, but his dad didn’t need to know that. Wally honestly hadn’t given him too much thought, and whenever he did think about home, he usually directed his thoughts away from it. And now that he thought about it, there was a little something in him that did miss home, just a little bit. He missed the familiarity, if nothing else. 

His text didn’t leave much room for a response, but Wally wasn’t sure what to add to that. His father persisted anyway, responding with another text. 

Dad: So how’s Central? Having fun with your mother?

This was the first time in a long time that Rudy had ever mentioned his ex-wife in a neutral manner. After the divorce, they’d eventually just stopped bringing her up. Wally really hadn’t minded, still stung by the fact that when his mother left him with his father to go back to Central by herself, and even after the hurt went away, there was just little reason to bring her up. Except when he started planning to move back to Central for their university’s chemistry program.

Wally: Mostly the same as when I was with you. Quiet. She got a job and ends up working a lot.

She hardly worked the same hours his dad did, but now that he thought about it, moving in with her hadn’t been too huge a change. Unlike his father, she still put an effort into maintaining a conversation with Wally, but those efforts were beginning to dwindle down as her workload and living situation began to pile up. The notion made Wally a little uncomfortable. It was because he was there. 

Dad: That’s good to hear.

That was surprisingly civil of him.

Dad: About time.
Dad: I guess.

There it was.

Dad: So Central? How is it?
Dad: Have you met the Flash yet?

Wally really hadn’t expected his father to bring up the Flash either. Neither of his parents had much love for the superhero. It wasn’t that they had anything against the Flash specifically, but the amount of property damage the superhero had caused on a regular basis had been troublesome back when they had lived in Central as a whole family. 

Wally: I actually saw him today. He stopped a robbery at a cafe Aunt Iris and I were eating at.
Dad: Was it exciting?
Wally: It was Captain Boomerang. I wouldn’t expect Flash to bring his A-game against a B-list. Total overkill.
Dad: No kill like overkill. How are your classes?
Dad: You’re taking summer classes, right?
Wally: Easy. I knew the material since middle school.
Dad: Of course you did.
Dad: Glad you’re doing well.
Dad: I wouldn’t expect any less of you.

Wally had to lean back and sit there for a moment, a little dazed by the sudden warmth of pleasure from the comment. His father had always been a bit terse, even with his rare praise, but the amount of pride Wally felt from such a short, oblique comment was actually a little embarrassing.

Logically, the reasons behind his father’s view of him were obvious. He’d known since Wally was a little kid that he was something of a genius. First-semester college courses would’ve been a cinch, and second-semester not much harder. Of course Rudy expected Wally to be doing well. But hearing him say it out loud was a different story and Wally hadn’t expected the scarcely hidden flattery and outright acknowledgement to go so far. 

Dad: Wally?

Realizing he had waited too long to respond, Wally picked his phone back up to type up another message. 

Wally: Sorry, I got distracted.
Dad: Well, you can afford to be a little distracted.
Dad: Do you spend a lot of time studying?
Wally: A bit? Depends on how much a lot is, but I guess technically not.
Dad: You should go out and treat yourself. Relax a bit.
Dad: Have you been to Central’s mall?
Wally: Not yet.
Dad: You should. It’s a major tourist attraction now.
Dad: Different from when you were younger.
Wally: I guess I’ll check it out next Saturday.

There was a small gap between Wally’s last text and Rudy’s next one.

Dad: That’s good.
Dad: I have to get back to work now.
Dad: It was nice talking to you again.
Dad: It’s been a long time.
Wally: Yeah, same. Bye.

Wally left his phone on his desk and flopped down backwards on his bed, thinking about the day he graduated high school and got his diploma. There hadn’t been any fanfares or celebration, he just went home, started packing everything that he hadn’t already sent ahead to Central, and left the next morning with the bare necessities to make a fresh start in college. He could start a new collection.

He hadn’t thought he’d be missed. That his father would text him out of the blue, and it would feel normal, despite years of relatively little communication in the time they had lived together. The conversation tonight had been a little disjointed, but still a decent if brief conversation.

Thinking back to the first time he’d seen his mother in years—he’d been greeted with a hug and a smile, the start of many future awkward silences between the two of them—Wally couldn’t help but wonder maybe he had miscalculated something.

Iris had to admit, she was a little surprised when she heard someone knocking on the door and opened it to see Hunter, somehow managing to stand taller than her and still appear small and embarrassed. Standing there with his shoulders hunched and a hesitant, sheepish grin on his face, Iris had to sigh, reminded of the kid who, years ago, decided it was a good idea to take a wrench to a ticking time bomb doomsday device. Sometimes, he could just be an idiot.

“Where’s Barry?” she asked. “Did he tell you to come?”

“Dealing with a fire. I thought I’d… drop by,” Hunter said awkwardly.

Iris nodded, satisfied that that he usually knew when he was taking things too far, like when he had met Wally. She hadn’t even had to call him to come over. But even though he recognized what he did had been downright rude to Iris’s family, Iris wasn’t letting him go that easily though. She stepped to the side and motioned for Hunter to come in. Iris marched them over to the dinner table and sat him down at his usual spot so she could cross her arms and look down upon him disapprovingly. 

“I tell you about my nephew moving into town. I tell you that he’s a bit self-conscious around people. I tell you that he’s family, and it’d be nice for you two to get along—and that is how you act?” Iris demanded. 

“He was staring,” Hunter said defensively, but his refusal to meet her eyes told her he understood exactly what he’d done, and that contrived excuses just weren’t going to cut it.

“Hunter,” Iris said with mocking patience, “your eyes turn red, and they glow and spark. That’s what people do when you look like you’ve crawled out of hell and put on a yellow suit.”

“No, you know who looks like that? Eddie—”

“Do not change the subject. This is about your being rude to my nephew. My poor, sweet, kind of odd but well-meaning nephew,” she said. “Now, I know things haven't been great recently and that you’ve been in a perpetually bad mood, but all dickery towards my family stops here, do you understand?”

“Your ‘family’ was hiding behind you.”

“No, I was standing up for him, Hunter. There’s a difference. Families protect each other,” Iris said before taking a moment to wonder whether or not that was a little insensitive towards Hunter’s own background, but if he reacted to the possible barb, it had been too fast for her to notice.

“You need protecting, Iris,” he insisted.

“Well, I had you, didn’t I?” she said. “You and Flash showed up. Everything turned out alright.”

“What if we hadn’t shown up?” Hunter asked. 

“Well, then, Captain Boomerang would have hit me in the face,” Iris said. “And then I would’ve hit him right back. In fact, I would’ve had an opportunity to teach Wally how this family deals with Rogues.”

“I just don’t like having convicts running loose near…” Hunter stopped in mid-sentence, and Iris knew what he was thinking about.

Her lips felt too tight around her smile, and her cheeks felt a little too stiff under the forced expression, but she gave him the best smile she could nevertheless. “Near your… family?” she filled in for him. Hunter's complexion, combined with his tendency to blatantly abuse his powers and give himself a moment to compose himself, made it hard to detect any redness on his face, but he shrugged and stared resolutely at the clock on the wall with the most casual look he could muster at the last minute. Iris sat down in the chair next to him, deciding she’d had enough with the lecturing. “So. On the subject of my family.”

“You won’t go five minutes without going back to talking about your family,” Hunter deadpanned. 

“Well, then,” she huffed, rolling her eyes and taking a seat next to Hunter. “Since you already know my thoughts on them, what’s your opinion?”

“What do I think of Wally? Well, when I got there, I saw him hiding behind you,” Hunter said, though he immediately backtracked under Iris’s glare. “But, as you’ve said, I walked in at the wrong moment. My first impression basically counts for nothing. So I’ve got nothing.”

“You. You talked to him and didn’t get anything?” Iris asked skeptically. 

“I just…” He waved his hands a little helplessly in front of him, probably filtering through all the more disparaging remarks and looking for something positive to say. He sat there, mouth open and face frozen for several moments as his brain tried to compute the requirements. “He’s very… I don’t like him.”

“Hunter,” she glared at him. 

“I’m sorry, but I’m serious!” Hunter said defensively. “I can’t think of anything good to say about him. Not that there’s not anything good about him, just nothing worth mentioning. And if I can’t pick up anything interesting about him, well… he seems kind of boring. I mean, you told me he’s a huge chemistry buff.”

“Barry and Jay are chemists.”

“…Yeah,” he sighed. “I can’t sit still and listen to them talk science either. Look, I’m not saying chemistry isn’t interesting. It’s just that I’m not interested.”

“Well, I hope you find something interesting about him soon, because you are going to be meeting him if I have to introduce the two of you myself,” Iris said. 

“I’m a little old for you to be setting up play dates,” Hunter protested, which was a total lie because the team of superheroes he worked with was a giant play date in itself.

“Okay, this isn’t about you. You had your chance,” Iris scoffed. It was only half a lie. “I want this for Wally.”

“Wally can’t make his own friends?” Hunter asked skeptically. 

“Wally doesn’t want to. He doesn’t talk to people or reach out any more than he has to. He’s too…”

“Satisfied with his life?” he finished for her, and Iris fixed him with an annoyed look. 

“He’s completely cut off everyone from his old life, but he’s not exactly setting down roots here either. Wally’s mother says he isn’t really talking to her, which I guess isn’t surprising since it's been a while for them. But I really thought he and Barry would hit it off again. He loved Barry when he was a kid.”

“People grow up.”

“And if they’re lucky, they’ll have friends while they do. Look, Wally, he…” Iris paused, struggling to find the right words to say. 

“Did something happen?” Hunter asked. 

“He just needs a friend,” she said. “A friend who’s… brave. Honest. Careful. Smart.”

“Iris.”

“Tall. Protective. Strong.”

“I know what you’re doing.”

“Someone decent looking.”

“Decent?” 

Iris wasn’t sure if Hunter was honestly offended by that or if this was just one of the rarer moments where he played along to her jokes, but she grinned anyway. “But you’ll do,” Iris said teasingly. “He could use someone a little less judgmental, but at least you make up for it with good instincts—”

“This isn’t making me feel very friendly,” Hunter muttered.

“Aw, and you’re usually such a sweet-tempered guy,” Iris shook her head. “Will a bit of blackmail help your attitude?”

He scoffed. “What could you possibly have on me?” he asked, which was a pretty silly question in Iris’s opinion because he knew she recorded and saved as many of the Flash and Zoom’s exploits as possible.

“A video file and access to the six o’clock news,” she smirked, and when Hunter didn’t get it, she added, “I’ll have you dancing to my tunes, yet, Zoom.”

The cocky look on Hunter’s face disappeared almost immediately as he realized what incident she was referencing. “You—kept the footage?”

Of course she did. Those files on her computer were the closest thing she had to a scrapbook for the Flash family. She had some pretty precious memories, with many of the Flash and Zoom’s most impressive feats and humiliating slip-ups caught on camera. “Priceless footage,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes mostly directed at the ceiling as if she were reminiscing some of their more embarrassing moments. “Maybe I’ll show your team! I know Robin would get a kick out of it.”

“No.”

“All you have to do is give Wally a chance,” Iris half-blackmailed, half-begged. And she couldn’t help one last parting shot. “Plus, he’s a redhead. You like those, right?”

“Iris!”

Chapter Text

Wally had never been a huge fan of shopping. Even if Blue Valley had a mall worth hanging out with friends at, looking at things he couldn’t buy sometimes put a damper on his mood. Of course, he didn’t have that kind of trouble these days, because superspeed made just taking what he wanted so much easier. Not to mention, he had enough money in his pocket to buy what he wanted if the thrill ever wore off.

But it didn’t, so shopping was easy and fun and, most importantly, free. Well, except when he paid for his suits. He remembered the first time he walked into the store, looking as out of place as he felt when he came in wearing an old t-shirt and ragged jeans. The looks on the tailor’s face when he made his order and paid in cash had been downright satisfying.

It wasn’t as if he was a hero or anything—he didn’t have to worry about being some kind of role model for kids to look up to so, really, he could afford to throw a little money around or take part in the five-finger discount.

Wally was convincing himself that his suit needed a pair of cufflinks at a small-time jeweler at the mall, playing with the Flash insignia between his fingers when he heard boom echo outside of the store. Wally immediately pocketed the Flash cufflinks and ran out of the store to see the commotion and found Zoom wrestling with several men dressed in orange and green, which could only mean it was Mirror Master and his doppelgangers that Zoom was fighting.

First Captain Boomerang, now this. Wally was running into these people everywhere.

Shoppers everywhere were scattering, evacuating the stores with their shopping bags in tow. They ran around in a panic, skidding to a stop and running in the opposite direction every time they ran into a mirror doppelganger. Wally watched as one of the doppelgangers wrestled a purse out of a woman’s grasp, and he looked around in search of Zoom, wondering why the speedster wasn’t dealing with this when he realized the hero was still preoccupied with the other doppelgangers, punching one and wincing as it shattered into glass.

Rubbing the back of his neck and unsure of whether or not he ought to get involved, Wally decided he was trapped inside the store anyway, with the current doppelganger standing in between himself and the exit, and made his decision. Grabbing a coat from a nearby clothes rack, Wally wrapped it over his arm and, once he’d smashed the security camera, he ran for the doppelganger, punching through its face. It began to fall apart, starting with the face until the rest of the body had disintegrated into tiny shards that continued to dissolve until there was nothing left to show of the mirror copy’s presence other than a pile of fallen loot.

The woman had gone, the store clerks had abandoned their shops, and after looking around briefly to check for anyone else who might’ve been left inside, he scooped large amounts of it into his backpack. Waste not, want not, after all.

Wally ran out of the store. Most of the mall had been emptied by now, but if he stood still enough, he could still hear faint sounds of a scuffle. Looking off across the mall, he saw broken glass. Not from the Mirror Master, but from the clear display where someone had fallen through, and Wally was pretty sure it was Zoom.

He ran over to watch the fight against his better judgment. Peeking his head past the corner of the wall, he watched Zoom struggling with several mirror doppelgangers. Wally made a face, not sure why the Mirror Master’s mirror-made henchmen weren’t falling apart so easily under Hunter’s own strikes. Wally had needed a running start, but he had shattered his own doppelganger with a single blow.

Maybe Zoom wasn’t sure which one, if any, was the real Mirror Master and was trying to show some restraint and avoid any fatal strikes. Wally winced just slightly, at the realization that there’d been a slight chance that he could’ve broken a man’s neck if, on some off chance, that had been the real Rogue. Not likely, but still. He hadn’t thought about it.

Zoom seemed to be having a hard time dealing with the doppelgangers; every time he nearly landed a clean strike on one of them, at least one more would intervene, forcing Zoom to move and reducing his strike to a grazing hit.

Wally looked at the narrow metal security panels, folded up against the corner of the jewelry store. After only a second of hesitation, he grabbed the edge and dragged it across the exit with a loud screech as metal grated against metal. He looked up to see that he had drawn the attention of both the hero and all dozen Mirror Master duplicates, and Wally was struck by the realization that he had just locked himself inside a room with a superhero and a supervillain—the last two kinds of people he would want to be trapped in a room with, not just because he was the kind of person disliked by both of them, but also because this was some crossfire he did not want to be caught in.

Nevertheless, most of them disregarded Wally as a real threat; only two of the copies even bothered to pay him any attention, making a beeline for him while the rest of the copies focused on their fight with Zoom. The two that came after him, Wally darted past easily. They hadn’t expected him to be so fast. Just as Wally reached a switch on the far side of the wall, he turned around to see the two copies narrow their eyes as they realized just who he was. That thief with the superspeed.

And that was the last thing they saw as Wally flipped the switch down and all the lights in the store went out. The sound of fighting stopped, punctuated by the sound of falling bags of jewelry.

Zoom’s deadpan voice was the first thing to break the dead silence.

“…What?”

“…Holt’s theory of light particles,” Wally said, a little breathlessly, unable to help the cheek-aching grin that spread across his face. His heart was pounding with excitement because, hell yeah, he just saved Zoom’s life. Or at least a good few seconds of fighting. He turned the light switch back on, and the room was empty, except for him and Zoom, the latter of whom was still looking around in confusion. “No light, no reflection. No reflection, no mirror mastered by Mirror Master. Well, that last part wasn’t a part of his theory, but I figured it could be applied well enough. Probably. It was a bit of a gamble because I wasn’t sure if he actually followed those principles—”

“Thanks,” Zoom said with a touch of carefully restrained impatience, cutting Wally off before he could ramble on for too long. Right.

He walked past Wally, and started pushing at the panels that Wally had dragged shut. With a loud squeal, Zoom began pushing the security gates open again. Wally moved to help him, but by the time he crossed the room, at normal human speed, of course, it was open far enough that they could leave through the door.

Zoom stepped aside for Wally to walk through it first. The redhead looked to the side, where the display case had been shattered and the mannequins knocked over.

“…We probably just could’ve walked through that,” Wally said, eying the whole in the window. It would’ve saved Wally a bit of a headache from the shrill security gate that apparently needed oiling. He snorted and shook his head and didn’t miss the twitch at the edge of Zoom’s lips. Zoom left without another word, and Wally couldn’t help but walk with a slight spring in his step. He’d managed to beat a Rogue, steal a handful of goods right under Zoom’s nose, and save the hero’s life.

He was bad ass.

“I didn’t even get a chance to jump through the mirrors. First Zoom, and then that thief got in the way!” Sam spat angrily, slamming his fist against the table. After a moment of impotent silence, unable to find the right words to express his anger, he slammed his fist down again.

“It’s the second time in a week that we’ve run into him,” Digger said. In the past few days, the swelling in his face had gone down, but the speedsters had still left some pretty remarkable bruising. “That kid is fucking with us!”

“What’d he look like?” The man who had approached them leaned back in his seat. He had introduced himself as Robert after their first meeting a week ago. They doubted he was who he said he was, but so far he hadn’t done anything to warrant suspicion, and they really didn’t give a damn about his real name. “Robert” still sat a respectful distance from most of the Rogues but close enough to listen in on their angry conversations.

“Looked like a redhead. Skinny. That’s it.”

“Hm.” Robert picked up his drink, pausing only slightly at the description, but otherwise remained silent as he drank.

“Shouldn’t you’ve run this bastard out of town already?” Digger grumbled.

“Yeah,” the Top said, in a mockingly thoughtful tone. He might not have had anything personal against the thief, having never met him so far, but as far as he was concerned, the kid was a distraction and could easily end up throwing a wrench in all his plans if he were as much of a busybody as he was beginning to seem. “Maybe if you shared with the rest of us what you were up to, we wouldn’t have this thief running all over the city like he owns it.”

“Well, you’re practically letting him. From the way you guys just sit around kicking back beers and whiskey, it looks like Central’s up for grabs,” Robert said. Most of the Rogues bristled at the backhanded insult, but otherwise, they controlled their tempers as the man held up his hands peaceably. “I kid, I kid. I’m on this. Believe it or not, I’ve got money at stake too.”

“You’re always here drinking,” Mick muttered, fiddling with a lighter. Robert eyed him, looking for the most part relaxed, but the fact that his eyes were on Heat Wave’s lighter meant he was taking them seriously, at least. “You make promises, but I don’t ever see you doing anything.”

Robert held up his phone and gave it a little shake. “You see this? This is me being productive,” he said. “I don’t do physical labor, you see? That’s your thing. But relax. I’m sorting this mess out.”

“Well, give it here. Let us see,” Digger said, but Robert pulled the phone back out of his reach.

“Nuh-uh. That’s for my eyes only,” he said, depositing the cell phone in the relative safety of his pocket. “This is mine.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we Rogues are kinda famous for taking shit,” Digger said.

“You know what?” Robert said, nodding slowly. “You kind of are.”

Captain Cold had been satisfied staying out of most of the interaction so far, but he had to reach out and grab Digger by the arm to stop him from punching the other man. He saw how three other figures from the far end of the bar were watching them, and how they had reacted the moment it looked like all the Rogues were about to convene on the guy. He didn’t know if the folks watching them from the other side of the bar were with Robert or if they were Blacksmith’s crew, but he wasn’t about to risk biting off more than they could chew to find out.

Digger, unaware of the threat, sent Cold an odd, curious sort of scowl. All of the Rogues did. Cold leaned back in his seat. “A peek at a cell phone isn’t worth a fight. Leave it and have a drink. I think we’re all a bit tense today.”

Cold didn’t miss the handful of resentful glares sent his way, but he ignored them. “So how would you do it?” he asked, mostly to appease his teammates. “Dealing with the thief?”

Robert seemed acutely aware of the fact that he’d narrowly avoided having a fight on his hands. A fight that he, in the center of it, probably wouldn’t come out of unscathed, watchful eyes be damned. So, wisely putting away his cheek, he nodded a bit more seriously. “Well, as you’ve probably noticed by now, a speedster on the move isn’t easy to keep up with in a fight, let alone when he’s hightailing it.”

“We could probably trap him in one of my mirrors,” Sam pointed out. “He might be fast, but I doubt he’s faster than light, and if I can’t figure out how to get him back out, well, I don’t think anyone’s going to complain.”

“No,” Robert said immediately with a look in his eye that said he wasn’t going to back down. “The thief has something I need, but what should concern you is the fact that the thief comes with a lot of baggage. And believe me, if he disappears, shit is going to go down, and I’m not afraid to point fingers if it means protecting what’s mine.”

“He’s connected?” Cold asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Robert said vaguely. “He’s got family. And he’s got leverage.”

“…You know who he is,” the Top concluded.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he said. “So cool your weapons, keep all your laser pistols and weather wands out of it until I say otherwise. We’re not going to attack him. I’m going to knock on his door, and he’s going to let me into his house.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

All Hunter’s assumptions about Iris’s nephew just went out the window. It was hard to compare the antsy teenager he encountered at the cafe Captain Boomerang had vandalized to the reckless, disheveled Samaritan at the mall the other day. Timid? Overly analytical? Easily intimidated? Not with that shit-eating grin, he wasn’t.

It wasn’t a big deal. In the face of new information, psychological profiles had to be altered all the time. There was a process to criminal—well, people profiling, and sometimes the initial profiles were close to the mark, other times they could be miles off. But even though logic dictated that, even if Hunter had underestimated him, Wally West wasn’t anything special. He was smart, true—incredibly smart if his aunt and his gamble against Mirror Master was anything to go by—but Hunter had worked alongside some pretty outstanding superheroes and geniuses, and Wally had a lot to compete with if Hunter was ever going to describe him as awe-worthy.

But he had to admit, the stunt Wally pulled, dangerous and untested and not something a civilian ought to be doing, was pretty awesome.

Still. Hunter wasn’t sure why he couldn’t just let it go. Hunter had met his fair share of helpful civilians. He’d misjudged people in their psychological profiles before, too. Why couldn’t he just stop thinking about him? Stop thinking that there was something… off?

Because he hadn’t misjudged Wally, Hunter realized. He hadn’t been wrong, not completely.

He would’ve run away from Captain Boomerang, if given the opportunity, but not because he was scared. He had been scared; he was just stupidly brave too. And he definitely wasn’t comfortable with people, or at least not with Zoom, yet he didn’t look like the typical victim of bullying. He carried himself like someone who knew he was stronger than others but backed off at the first sign of animosity.

He hadn’t been wrong about Wally, who would run away from his problems if given the opportunity. Hunter had just underestimated Wally’s depth. He’d run away from his own problems, and charge headlong into someone else’s.

With anyone else, Hunter might not have cared. But with Wally, he couldn’t help but feel as if he were being drawn into the perplexity of his being. Hunter wasn’t sure if he was a puzzle or a mystery or some sort of charade. He didn’t understand Wally.

“Hey.”

A pair of bright green eyes looked up and stared into Hunter’s with a complete lack of recognition.

“You’re Wally West, right?”

He wanted to find out more.

“My name’s Hunter Zolomon. Your aunt and uncle told me about you…”

Mary knew her son was home the moment she heard the door open, and rearranged the envelopes in front of her in an attempt to make things look a little less disorderly.

“How was your day, Wally?” she asked absently, as he walked into the kitchen area, setting his things on the counter between them. When he headed straight for the fridge, Mary closed her eyes and wanted to wince. She’d forgotten to buy groceries.

“Eh. Met a guy today,” he said, discreetly closing the refrigerator door without saying anything and foregoing his usual after school snack for a glass of water.

“A friend?”

“Sorta,” Wally said.

“That’s nice…” Mary said tiredly, rubbing a hand against her forehead to release the stress headache that had been building up for a while these past few days.

“He’s Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris’s friend. Uncle Barry got him an internship at Central PD as an assistant criminal profiler or something, which sounds pretty cool. He’s cool. He’s also a teacher’s assistant. We met up after class. I’m pretty sure Aunt Iris put him up to it. But for a glorified undercover babysitter, he’s alright…”

She nodded along with his conversation absentmindedly, not realizing he had stopped talking until well after the usual silence began to set in again, and Mary looked over her shoulder to see Wally on his toes, trying to surreptitiously look over the counter at the bills that were on the table. Mary started shifting the papers around again; it looked worse when everything was all over the place, like every electric and water company was trying to get in front of the other to get their payment first.

Wally was still quiet when he walked up next to her at the table and pulled out his wallet—was that a new one?—and started pulling out folds of bills, so many that Mary’s jaw dropped.

“What…? Wally, what is all this?” she asked as he left the money on the table in front of her.

“It’s been about two months,” he told her, watching his mom count out the money, her face completely frozen and blank, other than her wide eyes. “That should be enough if I’m paying for half the rent.”

“Wally, you’re my son,” Mary said, a tinge of her frustration escaping into her voice. “I am not going to charge you for rent—”

“I didn’t come cheap. You bought me a bed set, a desk, drawers, a lamp, a—a new apartment for me. And me moving here? It wasn’t as if it was something we’d planned out, it was all at the last minute. I know I eat a lot of food.”

“And it’s okay,” she said.

“I know it is,” Wally said. “We’re good right now. But with me, we’re closer to the red than we need to be.”

“We’re not that bad off,” Mary told him, but Wally shook his head.

“But we’d be better if we had more,” he said. “For emergencies. Just take the money, I don’t really use it. And if it helps, don’t think of me as your… ah, think of me as someone who’s just renting the room.”

Son. He was probably going to say son before he switched out the words, Mary was sure of it. She couldn’t say that the implications didn’t sting a little, that Wally hadn’t forgotten being left behind with his father after the divorce. She felt the urge to apologize and hug Wally and tell him she did want him, that he was her son and that she still loved him, but ignored it. She knew better than to think he would accept it. Whenever she played the scenario out in her mind, it always sounded stiff and stilted, no matter what.

But now another thought was beginning to rest heavily on her mind. There was a sinking feeling in her gut. A sense that something was going on and she didn’t know what it was. Something that she maybe didn’t want to know. “…You don’t make this much money delivering packages for Mr. Runk,” she said quietly.

“I know,” he shrugged, his expression not changing as he admitted this, and Mary felt her chest tighten a little. Something in her expression must’ve given her inner doubts away, because Wally smiled and gave her this awkward one-armed hug that eased her thoughts, and she couldn’t believe she needed this so badly from her own son. It was the mother’s job to take care of her child. “Don’t worry, Mom, it’s not like that,” he said. “I’ve been working since I was thirteen, and I’ve barely spent a single dime of it on anything. I saved up a lot. Like, a lot.”

Mary smiled, returning her son’s hug and felt a little guilty about her suspicions.

Wally would never do anything irresponsible or dangerous.

Wally did deliveries for Chester Runk’s company, Chunk Incorporated. He had a pretty decent wage, according to the shoes he wore and the wallet he carried and the way he tipped waiters. Hunter made a mental note to check out the company. It wouldn’t do Wally’s record any good if he turned out to be an unwitting drug runner in one of Central’s local ops.

He was also a self-proclaimed air hockey champion. When asked about his favorite sports, that was the answer Hunter had gotten. It wasn’t a straight answer, but Wally was deliberately sidestepping the question. More likely, he just hadn’t been taking it seriously. Wally probably wasn’t into sports, though he did have the right build for a running sport. Maybe track or soccer.

Wally also knew a lot about cars. Not just how to change the oil or a flat tire, but apparently he knew enough about the mechanics that his old classmates could consider him “cool”. He liked the attention. Which made his present behavior a bit odd. He was being deliverately unassuming.

He definitely didn't like the attention anymore.

Hunter filed away these little facts and tidbits about Wally, little nothings picked up through conversation and observation that ultimately meant nothing. Partly because he was curious, mostly now because it turned out to be more entertaining than he realized. These sorts of things he usually didn’t do unless he was profiling a criminal.

“No, no, let me figure it out myself,” Hunter grumbled, shaking his head vehemently as Iris opened her mouth to describe Wally’s family. The three of them were sitting around the dinner table as Barry passed out the dishes between the three of them. Hunter hadn’t visited the Allens' as often for the past few months, barring their weekly Saturday night dinner, but lately, he had taken to post-mission desserts, a tradition that Barry and Iris didn’t mind bringing back.

“I thought you didn’t like Wally,” Barry said with a smile. His mentor hadn’t brought it up since the encounter with Captain Boomerang, but there was definitely a note of relief in his voice. It made sense, actually. While Hunter hadn’t intended to come off as overtly antagonistic of their nephew, Barry and Iris were probably worried they’d have to try pull a balancing act between their family and Hunter.

“I might’ve been a little too quick to judge him,” he admitted with as casual a shrug as he could muster, but his shoulders were still a little stiff from his most recent tussle with Count Vertigo. “I haven’t had this much fun since I tried to figure out Robin’s secret identity.” And with Wally, he didn’t have to worry about Batman suddenly appearing a hand’s length in front of his face, telling Hunter to essentially back off.

“I guess you two are getting along better than I thought you would,” Iris said, looking rather pleased with the turn of events. “Since, well, you got off on the wrong foot with him.”

“Well, my gut instincts are usually pretty good,” Hunter said. “Besides, you’re the one who gave me the weird first impression. Whenever you asked me to be his friend, you made him sound like some kind of weirdo. …I mean, he is, but he’s, you know, a tolerable level of weird.”

“I’m glad he meets your standards,” Iris scoffed.

“I’m just saying,” Hunter said, “he’s pretty good at acting normal for a guy who spends his spare time studying particle physics for fun. Really smart. And a big Flash fan. He picked up electrochemistry years ago, just because he somehow heard about the Flash’s experiment. Which, by the way, how did he know that?”

Barry frowned at the question Hunter had directed towards him, surprised and then taking a moment to remember what had happened.

“Oh. Wow, I didn’t realize he remembered that,” Barry said thoughtfully. He laughed and shook his head. “Sometimes I forget how scary smart he could be. You see, it was way back, when Iris was first introducing me to her family, and I really wanted to impress them. I got along with Mary and Rudy well enough, but Wally? He was kind of giving me the cold shoulder. I definitely shouldn’t have tried to start a conversation by talking to him like a child, apparently. Anyway, he was really unimpressed until I started talking science. He was a kid, but I don’t think he ever had anyone really challenging him until he met me. In retrospect, I guess we did skirt a bit close to the details of my experiment.”

“You told him things about your secret identity?” Hunter said, disapprovingly of his mentor.

“He was seven, I didn’t think he’d remember anything,” Barry shrugged. “Besides, I don’t see the harm in inspiring a love of chemistry. What could possibly happen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he could get doused in a bunch of chemicals, struck by a high-voltage electricity, and then find himself with superpowers?” Hunter suggested, but then he shrugged, and scoffed at his own suggestion. “…Okay, that does sound dumb. Completely unlikely.”

“Hey, now, that’s mean,” Barry said, his hurt tone betrayed by his short bark of laughter. “But, what, you’re saying that Wally, of all people, could turn out to be a supercriminal?”

“I think the geniuses of our time are a little confused, priority-wise,” he said.

“Yeah, his priorities are a bit off, aren’t they?” Iris pointed out. “Wally won’t even take lunch money from us if we let him get away with it. When his mom bought him a bike for graduating high school and his Central U scholarship, and he paid her back. He’s obviously confused.”

He would have pointed out that Hartley Rathaway had been born the heir to the Rathaway fortune but sacrificed his luxuries to instead become a low-life criminal, except Hunter really wasn’t in the mood to bring up the Pied Piper. “Not all criminals do it for the money,” he pointed out, but he had to concede the point. “But yeah, there’s no way he could have his heart set on crime.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if he did get powers, though?” Barry laughed. “We could invite him into this family. I could use another sidekick.”

“What am I, a hobby?” his current sidekick asked crossly.

“No, you're an adult,” Barry said. “Come on, you’re twenty-one years old. You’ve been fighting crime since you were sixteen, you even have your own team, and the only reason we ever go on patrols together nowadays is for the company. Now that we're back on solid ground, I think you're pretty much ready to do your own thing.”

Hunter didn’t smile at that—because smiles weren’t things he handed out very often lately, but he knew Barry could see the gratified expression in his eyes. He’d worked with Barry long enough for his mentor to recognize those looks easily. Still, this was a familiar conversation, and Hunter knew where this was going. Regardless of Barry’s sincerity, he did not want to go there.

“Look, Barry, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to be the Flash,” he said apologetically.

“The Flash is a legacy name,” Barry said, a note of resignation in his voice. “I need to make sure there’s someone who can wear the cowl after me.”

“The Flash is a speedster legacy,” he corrected. “You need to make sure there’s a speedster who can wear the cowl after you. Which I’m not.”

Barry noticed the growing irritation in protege’s voice and backed off. If Hunter didn’t feel ready, then he wasn’t ready. It felt like such a waste, though. Zoom’s ability to manipulate time had been difficult to keep in check at first, but once he had managed to control it, it had become an incredible gift, one that made him a unique resourceful hero.

Barry understood his frustrations, though. Speedsters often had strength advantages that Hunter didn’t, which sometimes made it dangerous for him to face an enemy up close and, more often than not, forced him to use alternative methods to take down more dangerous opponents. As valuable as his versatility was, it was contrary to his straightforward nature and preferred fighting style. As much as he might wish it, Hunter wasn’t a speedster.

“Well then maybe we were onto something with Wally and my experiment,” Barry joked, changing the subject to lighten the mood at the table. “Think we can arrange a little chemical accident?”

“People do fall into vats of chemicals every other day,” Hunter nodded solemnly. “OSHA, eat your heart out.”

“If you two get my nephew killed, there will be no one to call themselves Flash because no one will ever find your bodies,” Iris warned them.

“So if he survives, it’s okay, right?” Hunter asked before Iris got That Look on her face that generally signaled the end of a bad joke. “Okay. Well, one Flash is better than no Flash. So I guess we’re back to your lack of successors.”

“Which is, by the way, totally unfair,” Barry said. “There are a countless number of good people on earth, and no one else is having a life-changing chemical experiment that’ll give them superspeed? Okay, I’ll buy that. But how did the almost the entire League get a matching set of mentors and protégés? Even the last Kryptonian managed to find someone with Kryptonian powers. But you and me? Not that our partnership isn’t awesome, but it’s not as if I had the qualifications to teach someone how to manipulate time.”

“You didn’t do a bad job,” Hunter offered and Barry grinned in thanks.

“Well, if I ever have to help train another superhero, I hope it’d be a speedster. Maybe someone’ll make a clone. Those’re always popular.”

“Well, if the experiment affected you on a genetic level, I guess,” Hunter said doubtfully.

“It could’ve. Oh,” Barry said, looking shocked and then a little delighted. “Iris, what do you think about having a kid?”

“Are you about to ask me if I want to spend nine months carrying a child—a part of it which would be spent unable to move—and then a few additional months or years raising and teaching him, just so you could have a new playmate?” Iris asked him in a deliberately level tone of voice.

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of raising or teaching her,” Barry amended, a little more delicately this time.

“Finish your dessert,” she said a little sternly. She seemed a little mollified by the comment, not enough for her to ‘break character’, but the furrow between her eyebrows smoothed and Hunter didn’t miss slight dimple in her cheek that always appeared even when she tried to hide her smile. “Then we’ll talk about making babies.”

“Can you at least let me leave the room first before you start making googly eyes at each other?” Hunter asked.

“When you dated Ashley, we had to put up with you making googly eyes at the wall every time you mentioned her,” Iris said. “Deal with it.”

Chapter Text

Dad: So I heard talk about a special demonstration coming up in C.City today.
Dad: Some kind of chemistry conference?
Wally: Yeah, Ace Chemicals made this lubrilon thing. Supposed to have lower friction than even teflon.
Dad: You planning on going?
Wally: As much as I like science, I can’t see a demonstration of low friction being too interesting.
Dad: You sure?
Dad: I heard they were showcasing its efficiency in air hockey.
Wally: Oh man, I’m there.

Leading a double life wasn’t very hard with superspeed. Wally would know—his was a triple. There was his normal life, for one, where he spent it as Wally West the college student. Then there was the thief and pickpocket. And the third, Wally had recently come to realize, was the one with his father.

While he’d lost track of all the reasons his parents fought, all that mattered now was the fact that Wally knew better than to mention his mom when he lived with his dad, and he didn’t mention his dad now that he lived with his mom.

Things were simpler that way. He and his mom had a hard enough time talking without bringing his father up into the mix. Keeping her from finding out was simple enough, since he paid for his own phone bill now.

Wally put his phone away. He was done making small talk. He pressed his mask down against his face, making sure it stayed flat against his skin so it wouldn’t fall loose. In action, he usually ran too fast for people to make out his presence, let alone his face, but there was no sense in taking risks when he shared a city with two heroes who could easily match him for speed.

It was a small neighborhood; gated community, low crime rate, had its own neighborhood watch. Flash didn’t patrol this area very often, if at all. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t planning on walking away with much.

He pulled out a stopwatch, a cheap one that he had picked up at a sports center on the way here, literally. He didn’t see why a decent stopwatch should cost so much.

0:00’00”00

Wally ran up to the door and with a quick look around to make sure no one was watching, he knelt down in front of the door, chewing on the edge of his lip. He inserted the tension wrench into the keyhole first before trying out the first rake. He felt around for the tumblers inside the lock, hearing little ‘plinks’ as they shifted around his lock picks. After several tries, Wally finally pulled back the rake and twisted the tension wrench and heard the lock click.

Success.

He twisted the door knob and pushed the door open, seeing the inside of the house. Wally checked his stopwatch.

0:08’42”22

Almost nine minutes. The edge of his mouth twitched slightly in irritation. He didn’t have anyone to practice with and compare his time to, and, ever the overachiever, his results with this new kind of lock left him feeling rather dissatisfied. He was a speedster, and he wasn’t breaking into simple school lockers anymore. The thief needed to up his game.

Wally shut the door without taking anything. Whoever lived in this house would never know that he had been here. There was a sense of intimacy when it came to homes, and Wally wasn’t into the sense of violation that came with breaking into them.

Wally glanced down the street at the row of houses, all of their occupants at school or work, ripe for the picking practice.

He had a little less than an hour before his next class started. He might as well squeeze some more practice in and see how many locks he could run through before he had to get back to school.

“Don’t go to the chemistry conference.”

“What?” He hadn’t expected much enthusiasm when about chemistry, even if it was Uncle Barry he was talking to, but it still wasn’t really been the response he had expected. Wally sat up, now holding the phone more firmly against his ear, and waited several moments before speaking up again. “Why not?”

Barry remained silent for a few moments longer, and Wally wondered what his uncle was doing—or who he was talking to—on the other end of the phone line. “It’s going to be really hot outside,” Uncle Barry finally said, as if there hadn’t been a long and awkward gap, but Wally had to remind himself that the gap hadn’t been as long as most normal people would have noticed.

“It’s going to be indoors,” Wally said, matter-of-factly.

“But you’ll be biking there,” he replied. Wally couldn’t argue with that, but it was still a pretty poor excuse to stay inside. It might’ve been mid-summer, but Wally was still kind of enjoying the weather, as hot as it was.

“Good point,” Wally conceded. “But I still really want to go. There’s going to be a display of some of the newest products, and I want to stay up to date when it comes to these sorts of things. There’s going to be some demonstration of lubrilon chemical polymers. There might be Cavorite, too, which supposedly has electromagnetic properties that can repel objects from the earth. I’m not completely sure about the details, though.” “Are you sure?” Barry joked, but something about his tone sounded slightly strained. “Sounds like you know plenty to me.” “Ah, yeah, I read up a bit today when I heard about it,” Wally admitted. “They're also releasing research on Promethium alloys too, and there’s something about Xenothium, and I have no freaking idea what that is.”

“Xenothium?” Barry sounded curious. “That sounds pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll go with you.”

“You can’t just take the day off work like that, can you?” Wally asked him. He knew his uncle’s schedule pretty well. When it came to avoiding the Flash, it helped to know when Barry was busiest during the day.

“Right. Of course—oh, Iris wants to talk with you,” Barry said, sounding a little rushed, and before Wally could even respond or say good-bye, his voice fell silent as Barry’s cell phone exchanged hands.

“Wally!” Aunt Iris’s voice greeted his ears. “Hey, how’s it going?”

“Alright,” Wally said, partly amused but mostly confused.

“I heard you’re getting along with Hunter pretty well. What do you think of him?”

Oh. This again. Wally sank down into a slouch at his desk, resisting the urge to roll his eyes, because she could always seem to tell whenever he did.

“He’s okay…” Wally said suspiciously.

“Well, I was thinking, why don’t you go with him to this chemistry convention?” she asked.

“Conference. It’s a conference. Not a convention,” Wally said insistently, and he could almost swear that the small laugh he got in return sounded a little stilted. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure this isn’t his kind of thing.”

“Hah, no, he loves these things. He’s already planning on going, so you might as well go together,” Iris urged. “I’ll text you his number.”

“Aunt Iris,” he tried to cut in as he almost immediately got a text from her. “I’m not really in the mood for—”

“Have fun!” she ordered cheerfully, not letting Wally finish his sentence as she hung up on him.

“…company,” he finished to himself, under his breath. He read the number on his phone for a good long moment, contemplating whether or not he should call Hunter. If he didn’t ask Hunter about it, it wouldn’t take his aunt long to find out. Then again, if he did ask Hunter, there was the possibility that he would say yes.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Hunter, he just didn’t like being around him. If that didn’t make sense, he could blame that one on Hunter, too, because it was Hunter who made things complicated, tracking Wally down and striking up a conversation. As if things hadn’t felt overwhelmingly complicated enough with his family, he had to have another set of watchful eyes on him—and a superhero to boot. Hunter Zolomon. Zoom. Cute. Not at all a dead giveaway.

Wally ignored the slightly bitter resentment that budded up towards the surface whenever he thought of Hunter. Of Zoom. Zoom was a little brusque, but aside from that, it wasn’t as if he had done much else to earn Wally’s animosity. And now that he thought about it, there was an advantage to knowing a bit more about Hunter’s day-to-day schedule, when he was available for his duties and when his real life schedule left him unavailable to respond to emergencies.

Well. That was an asshole idea.

Wally pushed the traitorous thoughts to the back of his mind along with the resentment and saved Hunter’s number into his phone before calling. It took several rings for Hunter to pick up on the other end, sounding terse and slightly short of breath.

“Hello?”

“Hunter?” Wally said.

“Who is this?” Hunter asked a little haltingly. Wally could hear the shuffle of movement in the background and wondered what was going on. He entertained the thought that Hunter was running around as Zoom, but he doubted it. That outfit left absolutely no room for pockets to keep a cell phone in. Then again, he did have those earpieces.

“It’s Wally,” he answered.

“Oh… hey.” There was a pause, confused silence. “How’d you get my number?”

“Aunt Iris?” Wally said. It really was a suitable explanation for anything.

“…Of course,” Hunter said, both of them well aware of Aunt Iris’s insistence that Hunter watch out for Wally. “What’s up?”

“So,” Wally started, self-consciously rubbing the back of his neck. They might’ve spoken often a few times, but the two of them were still practically strangers, stuck at the stage where they were prodding tentatively at the other. They were definitely not ready to be inviting each other to do things just yet. Plus, he was somewhat sure Hunter had about zero interest in the subject, despite Iris’s insistence to the contrary. “I heard you like science.”

“You heard wrong,” Hunter said absentmindedly, almost the exact moment the words left Wally’s mouth. “Why?”

“Oh. Well. Huh,” Wally said awkwardly. “So I was going to some trade conference tomorrow. Some engineering stuff, but it’s mostly a lot of chemistry babble. Aunt Iris thought you were going, and since I was too, she thought we could meet up.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” came the blunt response, and Wally couldn’t help but feel legitimately annoyed by it.

“Yeah,” he said snappishly. “Yeah, I get that now.”

“No, I mean, uh…” Hunter backtracked, his voice trailing off as he struggled to find something to say. “I mean it’s going to be hot tomorrow.”

Seriously? He and Barry… “It’s indoors at the Museum of—doesn’t anyone read the brochures?” Wally said. He would’ve thrown his arms up in the air if he hadn’t been on the phone.

“Not really,” Hunter said unrepentantly. “You should tell me more about it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” he echoed, confused.

“Yeah, I’m going to meet you there, right?”

“I… what. Yes?” Wally said, not even sure how to react.

“Great. I will… see you there,” Hunter said haltingly, sounding almost just as confused as Wally, before hanging up.

Wally stared at his phone, his cheeks a bit warm and a scowl on his face because he had no idea what just happened. He had a feeling—no, he knew something was going on. Something was going down, tomorrow at the conference, and Barry and Iris and Hunter couldn’t give him a proper warning without giving their source of intel away. Wally glanced at his closet, where his mask and suit were hanging inside.

He might as well be prepared for whatever came the next day.

In retrospect, there was really no way he could have prepared for any of it.

“This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” Wally murmured out loud.

Most of the other people around them murmured their agreement and moved on to the next display or simply ignored him, but one of them, a guy his age, turned to look at him with a curious expression written on his face. “I do not understand what this is,” he said, his voice heavy with an accent Wally couldn’t quite recognize.

“What? What kind of backwater town did you come from?” he asked. When the foreigner stared at him, looking partly offended and partly hurt, Wally held up his hands apologetically. “Sorry, sorry. You’re from out of… country?”

“…Yes,” he replied, nodding slowly. The suspicion was still present in his eyes, but it was far from the worst response Wally could’ve gotten.

He grinned. “Well, then let me introduce you to a little thing called air hockey,” Wally said, approaching the table. It was out on display, but no one had been willing to be the first to touch it. Wally had no such misgiving when it came to air hockey, dropped his backpack beside his leg, and pointed at the surface of the table. “Normally, air-hockey tables come with little holes that blow air up through them. It makes the puck, here, lighter and more receptive to movement. It has to do with the vectors.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s not what we’re keeping score on anyway,” Wally said. “This table doesn’t have the air holes—which means this technically isn’t air hockey—because they’re using a lubrilon polymer as the surface. Because of that…” Wally took the puck and hit it against his mallet, sending the puck across the table and into the goal on the foreigner’s side of the table. Wally grinned at the look of surprise on his face as he jumped at the sound of a blaring buzzer. “…it moves pretty quickly.”

“What…?”

“I scored on you,” Wally announced. He picked up his mallet and waved it for the other person to see. “Get the puck and don’t let me do it again.”

“I was not ready. That was cheating,” the other player accused him. The puck shot across the table, ricocheting off his side of the wall and back to the other player’s side.

“Let’s face it, between you and me, you never stood a chance,” Wally grinned as the puck bounced off his wall again, and he hadn’t even needed to lift a finger so far. “This is your first time playing, isn’t it?”

“As it turns out…” The third bounce went into Wally’s goal. “I believe have played a similar game in Atlant…a…”

The foreigner faltered at the small cheer and claps from the bystanders around the display.

“Oh,” Wally said, one hand covering his mouth with mock seriousness. “I guess this means I can’t go easy on you.”

“You should not show ease with me,” he said. “It would make my victory less than complete.”

“You need to work on your trash talk,” Wally snorted. The foreigner gave him an odd look but didn’t respond as Wally brought the puck back to the table.

Wally didn’t use his superspeed against the foreigner. He didn’t need to. Wally had always been pretty good at air hockey, even before the experiment that gave him his superpowers, and using those powers was overkill. The foreigner wasn’t a bad match though. Wally was only ahead by three points when he got distracted, and the other player got scored another goal on him. “Hey. Your eyes are purple,” Wally commented. The puck flew into the goal, unhindered as Wally’s opponent faltered, and he was three points ahead again.

“It is a… rare condition,” he said a little too calmly as he slowly brought the puck back out, and Wally had the distinct feeling he had clumsily stumbled upon a sensitive issue.

Wally shrugged. “So am I,” he said with a casual grin. “Red hair, green eyes, and freckles. The local lore says I have no soul.”

The purple-eyed foreigner regarded his joke seriously. “The lore of my people indicates that I will bring back a banished king and unleash an army of the undead,” he said.

Wally sent the puck flying into the crowd. “Sorry!” he sheepishly called out as someone picked it up and handed it back to him. “Wow,” he said, turning back to the foreigner. “Uh… pretty heavy stuff.”

“I have so far proven them wrong,” he said proudly, and Wally had to grin at the earnest look on his face.

“I’m Wally,” he said, sending the puck gently across the table like a handshake.

The guy warily sent the puck, returning it faster than before, but not fast as he could’ve if he had really been trying. “My name is Garth.”

“So, Garth. That was some pretty heavy lore. I mean, I’ve never been to Georgia, but I’ve never heard of that kind of stuff,” Wally said as the game picked up in speed again. “Then again, Atlanta isn’t exactly a foreign country.”

“It is in Central America,” Garth replied stiffly, struggling to respond to Wally’s show of aggression.

“You really need to brush up on your geography, Garth,” Wally teased.

“While I normally couldn’t agree more, Atlanta is in Central America,” someone cut in. Wally looked up, ignoring the buzzer that rang over his head to see Hunter standing beside their table, arms folded in front of his chest. “Nicaragua, to be more specific.”

“…Really?” Wally asked.

“Really,” Hunter nodded, and he turned to Garth, looking a little less pleased to see his apparent acquaintance. “Garth. Aren’t you supposed to be… somewhere else? You should go back to where you belong.”

“Heeey, mean,” Wally interjected, and Hunter turned a little red.

“I didn’t mean it like… I’m not that—I’m not that kind of person,” he spat out hastily, making a face. “Garth is supposed to be watching over a certain part of the conference as a part of his cultural integration… class.”

“He goes to CU?” Wally asked.

“No,” Hunter said quickly. “Community school. From a small town. He doesn’t even go here. This is his project.” He looked at Garth again. “Garth, your job. Focus.”

“This area needed watching,” Garth said, giving Hunter a stubborn look.

“This area is watched,” he said, throwing his arms up and looking frustrated. “You win, okay? I’ll watch it. Just go.”

Garth nodded and left with a little wave. “Good bye, Wally,” he said, curling his fingers into a fist and pressing the thumb side of it against his forehead.

Wally grinned goofily and responded in kind. “See you later, Garth.”

Hunter scowled. “Don’t encourage him,” he said to Wally, sounding exasperated by the exchange.

“Uh, racist,” he said.

“I’m not. He’s adjusting a little… slowly to America. Smart guy, but slow on the uptake. I had to help him get dressed today. Oh. Shut up,” Hunter said when Wally waggled his eyebrows at him. “Don’t say anything. He’s just a friend of a friend.”

“Do you have any other friends hanging around here?” Wally asked.

“A few of them, around,” he gestured vaguely.

“We were in the middle of playing, you know,” Wally said. “You owe me a good game.”

“A good game? He wasn’t going to win in a long shot,” Hunter snorted. “I’ll give you a better game.”

“I hope so. I was the reigning air hockey king of Blue Valley,” Wally said, tossing the puck up in the air and then catching it before it could land on the table and scratch the surface. “You sure you don’t want to reset the score?” he asked, his scores against Garth leaving him two points ahead of Hunter.

“You were the reigning air hockey king of hicktown,” Hunter said. “You can keep the handicap.”

“Your trash talk offends me. It’s so bad.”

“My trash talk is better than your air hockey,” Hunter said, and he smirked smugly as the puck darted past Wally’s hand and into his goal. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t reset the scor—?”

Wally shot the puck back into Hunter’s in retaliation, holding onto his three-point lead. “Not really,” Wally said. “Now you’ll just use it as an excuse for when I win.”

“How much you want to bet on that?” Hunter said. Wally slipped up again, this time turning red when he knocked the puck into his own goal and scored on himself.

Wally tapped the puck against the surrounding rail as he thought. He was bothered—and to be honest, almost a little angry—with how familiar Hunter was acting around him. Yeah, banter could be expected when it came to playing games, but Wally was falling into this brand of contentment too quickly, like wheels rolling into a well-worn rut. He was trying to avoid getting caught in the ditch.

“A friend,” Wally said finally. The puck slid slowly across the table, straight into Hunter’s goal. He just stared at Wally.

“What?”

“If I win this game, you introduce me to your friend.”

“Garth?” Hunter said incredulously.

“Do you have any other friends here?” Wally asked. Hunter hesitated. Yes, he apparently did. “So, you can introduce me to any of them. Preferably someone good-looking,” he added with a smile, but really, he would’ve settled for anyone who wasn’t Hunter.

“Fine,” Hunter huffed. “But if I win…” He paused. “…You have absolutely nothing I want.”

“Ouch.”

“Fine. If I win, you do the same.”

“Same what?”

“You introduce me to a friend.”

“What? I just moved here; I don’t know anyone.”

“Well then, I guess you’d just have to go out and meet someone, wouldn’t you?” Hunter said with a leer that let Wally know he was well aware of how much Wally didn’t care for making new friends.

“Your friends better be worth it,” Wally muttered under his breath.

“My friends are all out of your league,” Hunter smirked.

Wally snorted. He was counting on something like that. It was an interesting experience, to say the least, pushing each other until both of them were using their abilities as much as they could without raising any suspicions. Playing with those sorts of limits was a little bit annoying, but it was definitely fun to see Hunter’s smug face disappear as he began to take Wally seriously. His eyes were narrowed and his gaze intense. It made Wally suddenly want to laugh out loud, just to break the tension over this game.

It got even better when Wally reached seven points first and won the game. There was just something satisfying about seeing the concentration break into disbelief.

“What the hell?” Hunter said in response to Wally’s laughter. “Rematch, that wasn’t even fair.”

“No,” Wally shut him down quickly, and picked his backpack up from where it sat by the leg of the table. “You got cocky, and I won. If you wanted an even match, you should’ve restarted the game. Now we’d have to wait in line.” He eyed the other people beginning to corral around the table, drawn by Wally’s games against Garth and Hunter. “Or you could just quit dawdling and hold up your end of the bargain.”

“I’m not dawdling,” he said sulkily, though he still left the lubrilon display. “I was protesting an uneven game.” He paused, frowning at Wally, unknown thoughts running through his head. “Why do you want to meet my friends anyway?”

Wally shrugged. “The fact that you have any kinda surprised me,” he said. The force of Hunter’s glare bounced off Wally’s grin. He couldn’t be a superhero, but at least he could beat Zoom in a slightly stacked game of not-air hockey.

“You know what? We’re not friends,” Hunter said to him.

“That’s okay. You’re giving me yours,” Wally laughed.

“I’m not giving you my friends,” he said. When Wally moved to follow him, Hunter put his hand on his chest, stopping him from getting any closer. “No, you wait here. I’ll find someone and bring them back.”

“…You better not come back with a stranger. I’ll ask them something personal about you!” Wally shouted.

“You don’t know anything personal about me,” Hunter called back before leaving.

Wally shuffled awkwardly, standing next to the tellurium display, thinking about how, even though he managed to beat Hunter at air hockey, Iris had somehow managed to played them both without even being there. Someone cleared their throat, and Wally looked to his right to find a teenager, no less than maybe a few years younger than Wally with dark hair and a pair of sunglasses covering his eyes, standing next to him. Wally stared at the shorter boy, waiting for him to say something or go away, hoping it was the latter, and made no real effort to break through the dead air between them.

“Nice game,” the boy finally offered.

“Thanks,” Wally said, a little less tersely than he expected to be, but he didn’t really care enough to be actively unfriendly. He was, like Wally and Hunter, among some of the younger people present at the conference, even if he looked ill-fit with his wrinkled Punisher t-shirt and decidedly less than standard hygiene. He looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, but Wally wasn’t going to nitpick. Everyone had their bad days. “Fan of air hockey?”

“Fan of you,” he corrected with a smile, and Wally wondered if he was missing something. “You know, I didn’t think you were the type to use your powers in public like that.”

Wally felt his heart drop. “Wait, what?”

“It was pretty reckless of you to try and pull that off while I’m around, actually. I mean, I’m assuming you’re here because of me,” he said. He leaned in closer to Wally, who in turn leaned down to hear him better. “Where’s your team, Zoom?”

Wally couldn’t hand the burst of air that escaped his lips, a silent mixture of a sputter and a laugh. “You think I’m Zoom?” he whispered back, the widest grin on his face.

“I doubt Flash and Zoom would let just anybody run around in their city, not even a speedster,” the teen said. The cocky look on his face had been wiped away now that he realized he’d made some sort of error, but he didn’t look at all daunted by his mistake, moving on smoothly as if he hadn’t just given his own information away.

Zoom didn’t just have friends. He had a team. And this guy was somehow connected to them. Wally was pretty sure this person was probably the reason Barry didn’t want Wally going to the conference.

“That’s because I’m a nobody,” Wally said under his breath. He wondered if the stranger had picked up the bitterness that he hadn’t thought to keep out of his voice.

“I’m sure I can help you find a place if you need one, Mr. Nobody,” he said. “It’s all about knowing the right people.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Wally said. “I’m not ready to make any kind of commitment just yet.”

He eyed the teen’s knapsack. Wally’s own bag was light, carrying nothing but his clothes, really. In comparison, there was definitely something heavy inside of the guy’s bag.

Noticing the direction of Wally’s gaze, the teen’s grip on the strap of his bag tightened almost imperceptibly. There was something in there he didn’t want Wally—or anybody—to see.

“I think you’re a little less than neutral though,” Wally said. He lunged forward at less than full speed because the teenager was standing right before him, making it more difficult to build up a decent pace. The stranger seemed to be expecting this, however, taking a step back and rolling his shoulder just out of Wally’s reach, one arm grabbing the front of Wally’s shirt to keep that distance between them and to flip Wally over onto his back.

“Nice try,” the kid said with a broad grin.

“Thanks,” Wally said, a little dizzily and not too concerned, because unlike this guy, he’d been paying more attention to the people around them instead.

“Hey!” Hunter shouted, appearing by their sides and grabbing the guy by the arm, but Wally watched in slow motion as the teen struck Hunter’s forearm and flipped over his shoulder at a moment’s thought.

But Hunter was faster. He struck his palm against the hand was on his shoulder, causing the teen to lose his grip in mid-flip. With his sharp change in trajectory, he ended up back to back with Hunter. He instinctively looked over his shoulder, focused but alarmed, realizing his jump hadn’t taken him as far as it should’ve. That moment was all Hunter needed to spin around and catch the boy’s arm again, twisting it behind his back. The teenager spun around, untwisting his own arm, but before he could do any more, someone stepped forward, away from the gathering crowd, and kicked him in the face with enough force to send the guy flying and spinning through the air.

Wally saw Hunter’s reaction from an angle. It was a relieved, relaxed laugh that Wally hadn’t ever really seen before on him, and he watched as the girl returned the look, a self-assured smirk. He didn’t hear what she said, but Hunter gave her arm a friendly backhanded punch.

She looked at Wally and nodded in his direction. “Hey, are you okay?” she asked, flipping her blonde hair over her shoulders after realizing her kick had sent her hair flying messily into disarray.

Hunter walked over and lent a hand to help Wally up. “I saw that,” Hunter said.

“What part?” Wally asked a little uncertainly.

“The part where you got flipped by a guy who barely even reaches your shoulders. What happened?”

“That guy happened,” Wally said, leaning around Hunter to point at the teen, who was still lying prone on the floor. The blonde woman who had delivered the take-down was checking for his pulse and making sure there weren’t any broken bones. “He’s got something in his backpack!” he said, pointing at the teen. “I was just looking at it because it looked kinda heavy, and when I pointed, he freaked and judo-flipped me.”

The blonde girl paused, hearing Wally’s accusation, and glanced at the backpack underneath the guy’s body. She reached over him to grab the bag, when Wally noticed the teen’s hand reaching down towards his belt buckle. It began to glow an eerie red and—

“Hey!” Wally said at the same time that Hunter shouted for her to watch out. Before the girl could react to the warning, she rocked backward, her face suddenly covered in a red substance. In an instant, the kid had flipped back onto his feet and made a run for it.

Hunter wordlessly ran forward and grabbed the girl, who was clawing at her face, and he took the edge of the stretchy material, sliding his fingers underneath it so she could breathe. “Wally!” he called, and Wally came running over. “Hold this up for her so she can breathe,” he said, and Wally slid his fingers underneath the thin red material.

“What’re you doing?” Wally asked as Hunter stood up.

“I’m going after the guy,” he said before sprinting off ahead after the apparent criminal.

“This is a little awkward,” came the muffled voice from underneath the giant red cross that covered her face. It was a little strange, feeling someone’s lips moving underneath his fingers. Her hands were still roaming around her face, trying to peel the edges off.

“A little bit,” Wally admitted.

“What the hell?” she said suddenly, jerking forward and nearly head-butting Wally in the face

“Whoa, stop!” Wally shouted.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“Wally! Wally West.”

“Oh, you’re the guy who…” She paused. “…Hunter left me here, didn’t he?”

“…Yeah.”

“Son of a bitch,” she shook her head, only to stop when she realized she was dragging Wally’s hand along with it. “Help me get this off?”

“Sure,” Wally said, though he wasn’t exactly sure how to do it.

“It’s starting to stick to my face,” she said, her voice still muted under the substance. “Just slide your fingers around so when it hardens it’s not, like, stuck there.” She started moving her fingers back and forth underneath the material to show Wally.

“It hardens?” Wally asked a little anxiously.

“Believe it or not, this is so not the first time this’s happened to me,” the girl said in a long-suffering voice. “I’m just glad this one doesn’t seem to be combustible.”

“What?” he yelped, resisting the urge yank his arms away from her face, but his hands were the only thing keeping the material from covering her nose and mouth. Without him, she wouldn't be able to breathe. Nervously, he started peeling the red off her skin, a little faster and warier this time.

“Relax, if it hasn’t gone off yet, it’s probably not going to. Now if it started heating up, that’s when you should start to worry,” she said. Most of the material on the lower half of her face had been loosened, and her voice was clearer now than it was earlier. “The name’s Artemis. You’re Wally, right?”

“Yeah. Um… Artemis. Small problem,” Wally winced.

“…What?” she said worriedly.

“It’s not coming out of your hair,” he told her. He couldn’t hear the words she muttered under her breath, but he was pretty sure she was swearing.

“Okay, at least this means it’s a little… easier to loosen up,” Artemis said, sounding as if she were gritting her teeth. “Hold on.” She pinched the material from the bottom and began to slowly peel it upwards over her face. The bits that stuck to her hair went up with the sticky red substance until she finally managed to get the last bits up to her forehead off.

Artemis sat there for a moment, her arms raised over her head, with handfuls of her hair stuck to the red glob, and she sighed. “I’m going to have to cut this,” she groaned. She turned to look at Wally and made a face. “What?” she asked, and Wally realized he’d been staring.

“Uh, nothing. I, um, your face was just… I didn’t see it. And you’re, well, yeah,” Wally gritted out, a little painfully. “And… yeah.”

After a beat, the edges of her lips turned up. “Thanks.”

“Yeah.” Wally paused, looking for something to actually say. “Your hair’ll be fine. I mean, you’ve got plenty to spare.”

She snorted. “I guess I’m overdue for a haircut,” she shrugged. “Where’d Hunter go?”

Wally looked around in the direction he’d last seen Hunter and pointed toward the far back of the museum where the conference ended and the rest of the museum continued on to their usual exhibits. “I think they went that way,” he said.

“Thanks. Hunter has a tendency to run after everyone. Rogues, purse snatchers, jaywalkers… He’s dumb like that,” she said, patting Wally on the shoulder before dashing off after them. “Take it from me: you don’t want to do that! Watch yourself while I drag him back.”

Of course she would tell him not to go after bad guys while doing it herself. Wally watched Artemis run off in the direction he’d pointed her in.

Stay out of it, huh?

The weight of Wally’s bag resting against his back felt a little heavier than it did before. Wally had two choices before him: he could either put on the suit and check out what was going on for himself or he could avoid getting involved like the people around him were choosing to do. Wally scoffed.

As if.

Chapter Text

Wally darted from exhibit to exhibit, looking for any signs of action and listening for any sounds of fighting. He ran up the stairs and winced as he realized they were musical steps, all the notes blaring to life almost simultaneously as he ran up at superspeed. The museum seemed empty, as far as he could tell, and he had been on the verge of turning back when he spotted something off down one of the hallways. 

Upon closer inspection, he realized parts of the dinosaur exhibit had been trashed, and Wally knew that this absolutely had to stop. He followed the signs of fight, now that he knew what to look for. Small puncture marks in the wall, unsettled dust, cracks in the ceiling. He kept his eyes skyward, eyes scanning the rafters and ceilings for movement.

And when he found what he was looking for, he watched the fight unnoticed, a respectful distance away. From where he stood, he could just barely make out the moving figures above him. Some were easier to notice than others. He caught flashes of red and yellow in the rafters along with a white speck that floated in the air. 

Robin. That first one was definitely Robin, the first sidekick ever known by the public. The other figure, presumably that teenager Hunter had left to pursue, was up among the rafters with Robin, fighting him. It was difficult to make out their bodies; Robin’s body obscured by a black cape and the black-haired thief was dressed in dark gray clothing that helped him blend into the darkness.

The surrounding heroes were easier to see, if a little less recognizable. He identified the figure that glowed purple in the dim light as Rocket as soon as he saw the force bubble form, but her target narrowly avoided the trap, jumping outside of its range as the bubble appeared on rafter. With a split second’s worth of a barrier between him and Robin, the thief took a gamble and made a running tackle towards Rocket, who had made the mistake of hovering in the air too closely to the fight. 

The next thing Wally knew, the thief and Rocket were making wild, out-of-control dives, spins, and turns all over the room. Wally winced when he saw the two of them making a high-speed beeline towards the ground. At the last minute, the thief finally detached himself from the girl, jumping away in mid-air and leaving Rocket alone to crash-land into the floor. She didn’t get back up. The thief looked up to see Robin shooting his grappling gun and swinging down to meet him.

It was then that both Wally and the thief noticed the other figure, just beyond the range of the fight with her hair badly disheveled and a compound bow in hand. Immediately, the thief reached down towards his belt, which glowed red under his touch. When he raised his hands back up, he brought up what looked like a large X, flat and pointed like some sort of ninja star, and as he did, the star began to spin in front of him. The arrow bounced harmlessly off against the edge of one of the star’s prongs.

Not so harmlessly, actually. It struck the ground further behind the thief and burst into some kind of heavy foamy material. The moment the arrow exploded into foam, the thief ran forward and threw the over-sized ninja star in the direction of the archer—Artemis, that was almost definitely Artemis, though it looked like her hair had been hastily hacked at with a knife and then tied back. 

Artemis ducked and rolled out of the way, and the movement forced her off of the rafter she had been perched on. As she fell from the rafters, Wally took several steps forward, prepared to catch her if he needed to, but it seemed that he didn’t. In mid-air, she shot an arrow up at the rafter she had fallen from. The arrow attached itself to her former perch, and she slid down the length of rope that trailed from the end of said arrow.

Wally turned his attention back to the thief, who was engaged in battle with Robin once again. With Rocket down and Artemis delayed, the thief glanced at Robin and, without hesitation, made a run for it. Robin chased after him, caught off guard by the lack of confrontation. 

Wally followed after them.

He wondered briefly where Hunter was. Had he been injured and fallen behind somewhere? Wally hadn’t seen any sign of Zoom in the museum. It wasn’t hard to keep up with Robin and the thief. It was hard, however, to keep up without being seen, and whenever the thief looked over his shoulder to check whether or not Robin was closing in on him, Wally found himself making a sharp turn to hide behind some display case and then making a wide arc around it to continue the chase. 

Wally found out where Hunter had gone in moments as the thief began to cross an intersecting hallway. A blur of yellow and red smashed into him, sending the thief rolling into the ground. At the same time, another figure appeared, in a dark shirt with a red S-Shield printed on the front. He appeared above the thief, so fast that the force of his stomp probably could have caused some major bodily injury, but the thief had reacted fast enough to release another red cross into the air with enough speed to send the S-Shield-wearing superhero back into the air and pin him to the ceiling.

Wally almost laughed, but he was too astonished by Zoom’s speed to pay too much attention. The only reason Zoom hadn’t followed up on his first attack had been to give the other hero an opening, but the moment he ended up trapped on the ceiling, Zoom jumped back into the fray. Wally noticed with some vague feeling of jealousy that, even with the speed he’d been running, Zoom had been able to make an immediate stop. No flailing arms, no skidding around, no wide turn. To the thief’s credit, he fended off the lightning-quick attacks. It wasn’t effortless, but he was doing an impressive job at blocking every punch, countering every grab, and avoiding every kick. 

It was only when the thief’s fist began to glow red that Zoom backed off, but he didn’t retreat quickly enough. It looked as if the punch, wildly thrown in response to one of Zoom’s own strikes, had barely grazed the hero, but it was enough to send them both flying apart. The thief spun with the force and landed on his feet. Zoom, on the other hand, had been caught at a poor angle and didn’t land nearly as well, hitting the ground heavily and, when he tried to get back up, dizzily staggered left and landed back on the ground.

In the time the thief had taken down the suspected Kryptonian alien and Zoom, Robin had caught up with a flying kick, which the thief narrowly avoided. Wally’s heart raced as he watched them right. They were out of his league. The team. The thief. They were all out of his league. Wally couldn’t imagine pulling off what this thief had done, fighting off an entire team of young heroes. He could barely imagine fighting off even one of them. Then again, he couldn’t imagine himself fighting like that at all. Flailing wildly was more up his alley. 

Robin and the thief were, more or less, evenly matched, and the Batman’s sidekick fought like a guy with a grudge, his movements bold and sharp. Despite the aggressive style he had shown earlier, the thief seemed almost relaxed. He shied backwards when he could’ve taken the offence and darted out of reach of Robin’s blows when he could've countered. It took Wally a moment to realize the thief was talking to Robin. He was saying something. Wally couldn't make out what it was, but they clearly had issues with one another. Or, at least, Robin had issues with the thief. 

After several exchanged strikes, though, the thief backed away, his body at an angle and his fist hidden. The angle he stood at hid his side from view, and Wally realized, from his own perspective outside of the battle, that the thief’s fist was glowing again. Zoom… He was a speedster. A metahuman of some sort at the very least. He had a body that could probably endure more than the average person. The kind of force behind that glowing red punch, Wally wondered how badly it would injure an ordinary human like Robin. 

Wally had a split second to decide what to do. Hearing the warning cry from above from the hero pinned to the ceiling, he made his choice and ran forward. 

The thief didn’t expect anyone else to come. Wally used that to his advantage and, as he ran forward, he slowed down behind the thief, grabbed him by the backpack, and hauled him bodily away. Wally could hardly tell with the scratched up skull mask that covered the thief’s face, but he must’ve been caught completely offguard, because Wally had managed to cover quite a bit of distance before the thief managed to react again. A ribbon of red shot out from his hand and attached itself to the wall, and Wally found himself slowly being drawn back, like a stretched rubber band finally reaching its limits, before snapping back in the opposite direction he’d been running. 

“Oof!” The breath had been knocked out of Wally as his back struck the distant wall next to the spot the thief had attached the end of his rope to, not too far from the exhibit where Wally had separated Robin from the thief. Said thief extricated himself from the backpack, freeing his arms from the straps, and while Wally was still dazed, he found himself pinned to the wall by the same material that had attached itself to Artemis’s face and pinned one hero to the ceiling. The red band stuck to his chest and was attached to the wall on both his sides.

The thief regarded him for the entire span of a breath, looking Wally up and down.

“You really aren’t Zoom,” he said with a smirk. He reached down for the backpack, still gripped tightly in Wally’s hand at his side. When Wally didn’t let go, the thief met Wally’s gaze with an amused look through the perfectly cut eyeholes. It was more of a helmet than a mask, covered in scratches from rough use and smeared messily with white paint. There were finger-shaped outlines in the strokes of the acrylic paint, and the eyes behind the helmet were far less fear-inducing than the skull painted on the helmet would have led him to believe. It occurred to Wally that he was getting an alarmingly closer look at the helmet, especially when it bumped into his face, like an odd, misplaced head-butt. The helmet made a small click against his teeth. Surprised, he let go of the thief’s bag. “Nice try, though, Rookie.” 

Wally would’ve been offended at being called a rookie by someone who was clearly younger than him, but even if he hadn’t been thrown off by the sudden feel of rough paint against his nose and mouth, he didn’t exactly have a chance to act on his offence as the thief looked up at the skylight placed way too conveniently over their heads. 

“Catch you later,” the thief said, hefting the backpack back over his shoulders and raising an arm to extend a thin red chain-like rope from his glove. The rope broke through the skylight and shortened, lifting the thief up to the ceiling and breaking him through the skylight

“Uh.” Wally stared up at the broken glass above him, some of the pieces falling to the ground not too far away from where he stood. He leaned forward, pushing as hard as he could with his arms mostly restrained, but he could hardly move under the stretchy material. He twisted and turned and tried to wiggle his way out, and his efforts doubled when he noticed a figure running toward him.

Robin. 

Panicked, Wally made a mental note. His hat was still on his head and his mask still covered his face, but he doubted that made much of a difference when his arms were trapped by his sides and he was practically taped against the wall. Robin would only need to reach out, take the hat, and peel off the mask to see his face. Wally doubted any stranger from Gotham would recognize him, but Hunter wasn’t too far away. 

Robin stopped only a few feet away from where Wally was trapped, looking at the broken glass that had fallen from the skylight, up to the skylight itself, and back at Wally. 

“Nice try,” he said, echoing the words that the thief had spoken to him just seconds earlier. 

“Just don’t,” Wally groaned. Robin took a few steps forward and Wally froze his eyes widening as Robin stood directly in front of him and reached his arm forward. “No, don’t,” he said, finishing with some sort of hiss at best. It was more of a hoarse, desperate whisper. He ducked his head as the hand reached for his face. 

He couldn’t be arrested. No one knew a thief with superspeed existed. He hadn’t been caught doing anything illegal. Even the property damage here, that was on the team. 

But the thought that he’d have to stop? Indescribable, inexplicable fear gripped his heart and he could barely breathe. Wally ducked his face from the hand, the brim of his hat bumping softly into the hand. 

Robin stopped moving.

His hand touched Wally’s hat, pushing it a little more firmly down on his head. 

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Robin said teasingly. Wally didn’t look up, but he could practically hear the smile in his voice. His hands traveled down, past his face and stopped at the thick red cross over his chest. It took Wally a moment realized that in Robin’s hand was some sort of bat-throwing knife that held a sharp curve at both ends. “So who are you?” he asked as he began to saw away at the material that held Wally against the wall. 

“I’m nobody,” Wally said, a little anxious by how close the hero was to him. 

“Well, you saved my hide. And almost stopped a notorious criminal,” he said, a little lightly to try and loosen the almost painfully tense atmosphere. “But you get points for trying. That thief is…” Robin’s voice trailed off a bit before he cleared his throat. “…tough.”

“He’s such a dick,” Wally muttered under his breath, though he felt a little more spirited as he saw Robin’s blade nearing the end of the material. With one final, extra hard yank, the blade tore through the material and Wally was free. Without another word or waiting for another response, he pushed past Robin and ran for it, his heart pounding and his breath short. 

Too close. Way too close. Absolutely never again.

Wally ran down the hallway, avoiding the exhibit that the thief had left, sparing only a second to look over his shoulder to see Robin still standing there, unmoving, by the torn remains of the red X.

The whole mission had been pretty surreal already without having a new mystery to latch onto. How long had this speedster been here, living right under everybody’s noses? Barry and Hunter obviously didn’t know of his existence, or else they would have mentioned him at least once. A speedster was big news. There weren’t too many good speedsters in the world.

This speedster obviously didn’t want to be found. Dick reran the speedster’s reaction to him through his mind. He’d been tempted to take off the mask and hat and see who wore the costume underneath. He was tired of people picking up costumes and causing havoc without regard to the consequences. But this outfit hardly counted as a costume. He had been wearing a suit, not the thicker kind that heroes or criminals wore in order to protect themselves in their line of work, but an actual suit, with a tie and waistcoat and everything. 

This guy didn’t want to stand out. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the kind of work that the heroes on Robin’s team or the criminals they fought did. As far as Dick could tell, all this speedster wanted was to be left alone, no affiliations, no trouble, no risking his life.

Well, there seemed to be a little bit of risky behavior, the way he decided to come in and stop the fight at the last minute, but for Dick, that counted for him, rather than against. This stranger didn’t deserve to be dragged out into the spotlight where he clearly didn’t want to be. As Batman told him once before, everyone was entitled to their own secrets. There was no need to tell Hunter or his mentor about this speedster. 

If the speedster turned out to be trouble after all, well, Dick had a tracer planted on his hat just in case.

Dick jogged back over to the exhibit where Conner and Hunter had been left. He ran at a slower pace, now that the pursuit of Red X proved to be in vain. His ribs ached and his entire body would be sore for a few days. 

Artemis, who had caught up first to the fight, was helping Hunter back up to his feet. It seemed Rocket had recovered as well and was airborne once again, now helping Superboy down from the ceiling where he’d been stuck by the elasticized Xenothium. He watched for a moment as she expanded a force bubble around Conner, allowing him enough space to crawl free and then jump down. He landed on the museum’s marble floor with a heavy thud, and Rocket floated down, level with the rest of the team, and touched the floor more gently. 

Dick smiled at Rocket, relieved by her presence. He’d been worried her high-speed collision with the floor had seriously injured her. The team was always careful enough to avoid most severe injuries, but accidents could happen. 

“That,” he said with a slight wince, “could have gone better.”

“Tell me about it,” Artemis muttered, running her hand over her disheveled ponytail. Dick looked regretfully at her hair, uneven from hastily sawing chunks of Xenothium out of it. A terrible casualty, but it could’ve been worse. 

“Next time…” Hunter said dazedly, still sitting on the floor beside Artemis, “M’gann would’ve been useful in here.”

“M’gann and Bumblebee needed to cover the perimeters. We all know how mobile Red X can be. We needed eyes on all exits, and personally, I don’t think we had enough. We should probably make sure we check for rooftop exits too,” Dick paused. “…Next time, then. Next time, Zoom covers the ground exits, M’gann covers the skies, and Bumblebee and Aqualad help us against Red X—”

“No,” Hunter said insistently. 

“Zoom, you’re going to have to deal with it,” Dick said firmly. 

“Aqualad is—”

“A part of our team, whether you like it or not,” he cut Hunter off. 

“He’s barely just learned how to walk on land, let alone fight,” Hunter argued. 

“And that’s why I assigned you to teach him,” Dick said, his voice strained with frustration and entire body tense. With everything that had been happening lately, it was hard for everyone to adjust. Garth’s presence on the team was helpful when it came to certain missions, but it placed a certain amount of stress on the team itself. “Zoom, please do not argue with me right now. We’ll discuss future strategies later, let’s just….”

“Go home?” Artemis asked hopefully. Dick considered it. 

“I guess that’s a good idea as any,” he nodded. He leaned over Hunter, holding a hand out like a silent truce. Hunter looked up at Dick and took his hand, pulling himself up. Dick didn’t let go of his hand though. “You still look a little shaky. Does your head need to be checked?”

Hunter straightened his back. “Don’t baby me,” he muttered, looking a little embarrassed. Dick’s age was rarely mentioned in the early days of the team, but now, he was starting to catch up to Hunter in height and the half-embarrassed, half-affectionate teasing about Dick’s age and his position as leader of the team had become a small running joke between the two of them. “I’ll just need to sleep it… off.”

He faltered in midspeech. Dick’s brows furrowed in concern, but Hunter held up one hand to Dick, ushering him and the rest of the team to be silent, and the other hand to the earpiece on his suit. He’d gotten call from Barry.

“Flash. …Yes. …No, but I just finished this mission. Yeah, pretty tired. What do you need?” Hunter asked. Dick watched the expression on Hunter’s face as it went from dazed but restless to angry and then worried. “Well, I can’t just sit on my ass now, can I?” he asked. “The team’s still here, I’ll ask.”

“What happened?” Artemis asked. 

“Weather Wizard lost his shit and did a number on a chunk of midtown,” Hunter said tersely. “Just tore the area apart. He got away, but there’s a lot of collateral damage. I need to help Flash, but we could use some heavy lifters and, well, any help.”

He looked at Conner while he spoke. Right. Hunter didn’t have the kind of strength the Flash did at superspeed. 

“Well, since we’re already here, I don’t see why we can’t help out,” Dick said. “Everyone up for another round?”

He knew what they were going to say before they even answered. The team left, exiting through the skylight that Red X had blown through, where M’gann, Garth, and Karen waited in the bioship. 

“No luck?” M’gann asked, looking disappointed. 

“He got away,” Conner grumbled as he took a seat beside her in the bioship. 

“Night’s not over yet,” Rocket informed. “Zoom’s got a Rogue that needs beating.”

“I think the beating part is over with,” Hunter said. “We’re the after-party.”

“I don’t understand,” Garth said to him. 

“I’m pretty sure what Zoom means is that we’re the clean-up crew to Central’s latest mess,” Karen answered. 

“This mess is bigger than usual, Bumblebee,” Hunter said. “You and M’gann were stationed outside. Didn’t you see the storm clouds? It apparently got bad.”

“We were paying more attention to what was going on inside,” M’gann said, a little apologetically, but Hunter shrugged. “Where to?”

Hunter paused, activating his headset again to contact Barry for the location. “The team and I are coming to help. It’s no problem. Where are you? Got it. …Oh. That’s… not good. Yeah, I’ll relay that now,” he said, before turning back to the team. 

“Directions?” 

“East Grey and Fifth Street. East of here. You apparently won’t miss it,” he said, rubbing his eyes tiredly and looking down at the bioship’s console in front of him. As M’gann turned the ship around, Dick leaned over to see what Hunter was typing. “Barry’s cell phone is in his civvies,” he explained to Dick. “He wanted me to send Wally a message.”

“Oh,” Dick said, having forgotten about the Flash’s nephew and how he’d essentially walked right into a League mission. Because of his presence, Dick had had to re-evaluate their strategy for the entire mission at nearly the last minute. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for Wally’s presence, Red X’s thievery probably would have gone unnoticed until he’d been long gone. “Right. Letting him know you left?”

“I should probably do that too,” he said idly. 

“…What did you tell him, then?” Dick asked. 

“Midtown. Wally’s mom apparently works in the area. Barry wants me to give Wally the heads up,” Hunter said. 

“The heads up that she’s okay?” Dick tried, hoping Hunter hadn’t done what Dick thought he had done. 

Hunter paused, sensing a certain wave of disapproval from his friend. “No.”

“…You just told someone his mother might be dead over the phone?”

“…I texted him.”

Distinctly aware that something was wrong with the situation, the red eyes behind Zoom’s cowl began to fade to black as he deactivated his powers. Which was progress at least; not too long ago, he couldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge the psychological distortion his own powers caused. Dick detached the cape from his costume and accessed the bioship’s storage system in the walls to pull out his civvies. 

“No, Hunter, you get your head together later,” Dick said before Hunter completely inactivated his powers. He slipped a jacket over his head. “Your cool-down time takes too long, and you have work to do. I’m going to salvage things with the Flash’s nephew. I left my bike there; I’ll take it back to meet up with you.”

“Wally’s feelings are hardly the priority here. Hello, lives at stake?” Hunter said. “You’re just going to leave? Who’s going to be in charge?”

“You’ll thank me for this later,” Dick said. He motioned for M’gann to open the bottom of the bioship so he could let himself back out. “Hunter, I think you can handle an emergency response team. You take the lead on this one.”

“What?”

“It’s not as if we’re fighting an alien invasion. Your city, your rules. Everyone will follow your lead. Bumblebee, you keep an eye on him for any bad calls,” Dick said. Hunter looked a little resentful, so he grinned and gave his arm an apologetic slap. “Have fun, boss,” he winked before jumping out the ship.

Over the past year, Wally had become kind of a champ when it came to ignoring laughter when he was the butt of the joke. It was a practiced skill, one he thought he’d never need again after he had gotten away from the torment in Blue Valley. 

After the encounter with that thief that left him tied up and at the mercy of Robin, Wally hadn’t been in the mood to stick around to explore more of the conference. No one even seemed to notice the stolen chemicals. Wally had been mildly offended that anyone would steal from a science fair, but now, he was too relieved to care. Robin had every opportunity to unmask him, but he hadn’t. Wally had been contemplating whether or not he ought to stick around a little longer to see if Hunter would come back and introduce more of his friends—heroes—to him, when he’d gotten the message from him. 

Hunter: Where does your mom work
Hunter: Because I got news weather wizard went ballistic
Hunter: And turned east grey into tornado alley
Hunter: Don’t panic though

Wally didn’t panic, though he did find himself three blocks down the street before remembering he had to go back for his bike, still padlocked and chained to the bicycle rack outside of the museum. Rationally or irrationally, he realized he couldn’t just leave it there where it could be stolen, and he went back for it. 

This time, Wally only got as far as the end of the block when he felt something snap with a quiet ‘chk!’, and suddenly, he lost control of his bike. It wouldn’t speed up, it wouldn’t slow down, and steering suddenly became difficult too. Before he could lose control and hit the people around him, Wally twisted the handles and forced himself into a sudden stop and tumble. 

The passing crowds watched with a mixture of amusement and disapproval at his haphazard biking and spectacular fall, and no one offered to help him back up. He was okay with that. It was easy to pretend they didn’t exist because he had bigger things to deal with. 

Wally wiped at the blood on his calf, just a shallow scrape, before straightening up and regarding the situation with as objective a mind as he could muster. He’d broken it. The chain on the bike that interlocked with the gears had snapped and fallen to pieces on the sidewalk. He took a deep and shaky breath that was supposed to be calming but actually did absolutely nothing for him. Well. Never mind keeping a cool head. He needed to make a decision now. Snappy decisions then. Ditch the bike even after he’d gone to the trouble of doubling back for it? Or just pick it up and run home at top speed, subtlety be damned?

Wally felt something brush his arm and then take hold of his shoulder. He spun around to see an incredibly familiar face. A dark haired teenager sporting a jacket and sunglasses and a motorcycle helmet under his arm stood before him. Wally was reminded of a better groomed version of that Red X thief and was instantly wary of whoever this was. 

“What?” Wally asked in a voice that was probably harsher than this stranger deserved. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” Wally replied roughly. 

“Well, you’re bleeding and standing there and didn’t even notice me,” the stranger said, not at all thrown off by Wally’s brusque behavior. “I’m not exactly walking stealth,” he said, motioning toward the motorcycle parked at the curb. Wally wondered if this guy was even old enough to hold a license for that thing. “Besides, I think after the news about your mom, you might need someone to make sure you don’t lose your head, just in case.”

Wally froze. He wasn’t exactly panicked; a kind of numbness had settled into his body, keeping him from feeling as overwhelmed as he would’ve expected to be. He still felt a muted worry as to how this stranger had known about his mom. “How—?”

“—did I know?” the stranger finished for him. “I’m a friend of Hunter’s. I felt he should’ve told you the news in person. It wasn’t very thoughtful of him.”

Wally wanted to laugh. Hunter’s inability to pull his punches had been the last thing on his mind.

“Need a lift?” 

Yes. Yes was the answer that made sense, because anyone else stranded next to a broken bike would certainly need to be picked up. But no, no, Wally did not. He didn’t need a ride. He needed this guy to go away so he could run. But then, whether or not he could run was what he had been trying to decide earlier, right? To leave his bike behind?

“Oh, I’m Dick. Dick Grayson,” he introduced himself, probably misreading Wally’s silence as reluctance to take rides from a stranger. And suddenly, the familiarity of the stranger’s face made sense. Dick Grayson was famous for being the kid who’d been adopted by Bruce Wayne, who in turn had made adopting poor orphan children a trendy and popular pastime. “Let me give you a ride home.”

“I don’t want a ride,” Wally argued. He glanced back at his bike. “I need—my bike, I can’t just leave it—”

It could get vandalized or someone might steal it. Even if Wally hadn’t drilled it into his own mind to never leave his things alone and unsupervised, it had never really been in his nature to leave his belongings out in the open for anyone to have access to, and it made him something of a pack rat. He felt paralyzed at the realization that something had happened to his mom and he’d broken the last thing she’d ever given him and then berated himself for being such a little drama queen for getting sentimental over a bike. 

Somehow, Dick ended up walking the bike to the nearest bicycle rack with Wally following mutely behind him, and Wally found himself sitting behind Dick on the motor cycle. 

“Yeah,” Dick said, handing the helmet over to him with a sense of sympathy. “I know how you feel.”

Chapter Text

Dick watched Wally enter the doors of his apartment complex and resisted the urge to follow him up to make sure he got in alright. He had already spent enough time indulging himself.

Talk about surreal, though. All things considered, Wally had calmed down a lot more easily than Dick had expected. More than Dick had when his parents had fallen to their deaths. But then, Wally hadn’t watched it all happen. Wally still had hope because his mother could still be alive.

With Wally safely away, Dick pushed back his sleeve to use his holographic computer gloves, sending the team the heads up and letting them know he was heading out. Luckily, Wally’s place had been on the way and he hadn’t had to make much of a detour. 

He pulled his helmet over his head and started his bike back up, heading towards the scene of the disaster. Once he was in range of M’gann’s telepathy, he called out to her, and she added him to the mind link.

Status? he asked.

We’ve spread out to cover more ground, M’gann told him. Artemis is handling relief and distributing first aid. Zoom is switching between support by gathering first aid equipment and clearing rubble. Superboy and I are locating survivors and freeing them. Bumblebee is helping locate those lost in the rubble, and Garth’s sorcery is keeping the water stable and the people below safe until we can remove them.

I’m on my— Dick’s thoughts were cut off by a rush of air as something rushed by and passed him on his motorcycle. —way. Actually… I’ll deal with things in this area and work my way to you guys.

Understood, M’gann said, and then the line fell silent as she and the rest of the team focused on their tasks at hand.

Parking his motorcycle nearby, Robin pulled off the jacket and khakis and shoved them into the small compartment. He briefly fiddled with his cape as he fastened it back over his shoulders, briefly considering just keeping it in the compartment, but there wasn’t enough room for both it and the civvies.

With his grappling gun, Dick swung up to the rooftop of one of the more stable buildings. He was still on the outskirts of the wreckage that was midtown Central. He turned on the holocomp on his wrist and activated the tracer he had left on the hat of the speedster he encountered earlier. As he suspected, it was the speedster from the museum, darting around just a few buildings away.

Dick leaped and climbed and found the speedster from a better vantage point. It was definitely him, a blur that disappeared in and out of buildings. He wore the same getup as he was earlier, with the suit, domino mask, and fedora combo. His sleeves were drawn up past his elbows, and his hands were already dirty with dust and mud and the occasional smudge of blood as he searched for people, carried them out of buildings, and laid them out the street where it was at least somewhat safer.

He was young, as far as Dick could tell. Maybe only a little older than himself. The stranger looked up in alarm and ducked behind a car moments. Dick couldn't understand why until the Flash, a red blur barely visible by Dick’s eyes, ran past. A few moments passed by before the younger speedster left the sanctuary of the wrecked car.

Dick chose then to leap from the rooftop, jumping down from wall to wall until he landed lightly on the ground. The speedster, already on alert because of the Flash, glanced around at the nearly imperceptible sound of Dick’s padded soles hitting the concrete. He froze at the sign of Robin.

Dick met his gaze head-on and didn’t move a muscle in case this person took it as his cue to run and disappear.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Dick said with a casual grin and a subtle reminder that, if Robin had meant to do him harm, he had had the perfect opportunity to do so earlier.

Whether it was the passing of the initial shock from Robin’s arrival, the reminder, or the tone, the tension in the speedster’s lean frame melted away. Or some of it, at least. He seemed a little less alarmed by his presence but just as wary as ever.

“…Oh,” he finally said with a small smile. “I knew you looked familiar.”

“Have we met?” Dick asked cautiously.

“I’ve seen you at the museum. Obviously,” the speedster said. He paused, as if unsure whether to finish his thoughts. “But in the tabloids too.”

“They never get my good side,” Dick joked, putting a hand over his eyes, though he kept his eyes trained on the speedster through the crack between his fingers just in case. Something felt off about his comment.

“I thought you looked pretty good at Wayne Industry’s charity ball last year. Very dashing. Didn’t recognize you without the mask,” the speedster said. Dick’s hand dropped from his eyes in surprise. It could’ve been a bluff.

But it didn’t feel like one. He had a hunch that the speedster was being completely straightforward; said hunch made his stomach twist in anxiousness. Dick tried to think of what Bruce would do in this kind of situation. The short list of possibilities didn’t sit well with him.

Realizing that he was treading on a sensitive subject, the speedster held both hands up instantly. “Wait, I didn’t mean… you didn’t look at my face. I won’t tell anyone about yours.”

It felt sincere. But it also felt like a threat. Dick couldn’t tell if this part was gut instinct or Batman-induced paranoia.

“I owe you. I’m no hero, but I’m not that big a scumbag either,” the speedster insisted, looking almost hurt by Dick’s doubt. Batman’s lessons taught him never to trust any stranger with his secret identity. His hunch, though, told him this speedster’s sincerity was genuine.

The edges of Robin’s mouth twitched upward, the closest he could get to a smile without feeling like he was forcing it. “Some people might argue about the hero part,” he said. He was changing the subject. He was choosing to trust this speedster.

The speedster looked almost surprised; not by the change in subject, but by the fact that he had been called a hero.

“Some people are just lucky,” the speedster said, a little more somber now than he was before. “I’m just here looking for someone I know.”

Dick winced at the implications, the realization that he, too, had been personally affected by the disaster. “Sorry.”

After several long moments, the speedster seemed unable to find the right words to say and took a deep breath to keep his calm composure. He glanced around the ruined street, beginning to grow impatient and anxious.

“Doesn’t matter,” he grunted out finally. “I’m just… I’m not a hero. I’m not doing this because I’m a hero. Not like… like you and the rest of your people.”

“You could be,” Dick pointed out, and he immediately regretted it when he saw the stricken look on the speedster’s face. “But it’s your choice,” he added to sooth the sudden disquiet.

“…Yeah,” the speedster muttered.

The reluctance to put on a costume and fight was understandable, as was his reluctance to call himself a hero. The fights between vigilantes and criminals could often seem vicious to the ordinary person. It was probably discouraging to most.

“If you want, though,” Dick offered. “You wouldn’t have to start out alone.”

He scoffed with a light smile that was both amused and wistful. “What, and join your little team?” he asked.

“I don’t see any reason why not,” Dick said. It was a bit of a lie, actually. Everyone who had joined the team had a bit more experience under their belt before officially joining, but there wasn’t any official requirement or anything.

The speedster’s shoulders slumped slightly. “That’s because you don’t know me.”

And before Dick could argue the point, the speedster decided he’d wasted enough time on conversation and darted off, effectively ending the conversation. Dick raised his wrist-mounted display and checked the GPS tracking program to make sure the tracer was still working properly. He watched the screen as the metahuman blinked from block to block before turning the device off.

Just in case, Dick told himself.

Wally’s stomach was beginning to hurt when he realized he’d been working all day. According to the time on his cell phone, he’d been at it for several hours now, and it was already beginning to grow dark.

He’d forgotten to check his phone, which was full of missed calls and ignored text messages, all from his father, Aunt Iris, and Uncle Barry.

Wally checked Aunt Iris’s messages first. She and Uncle Barry were offering him a place to stay so he wouldn’t have to be alone at his mom’s apartment, an offer Wally was sorely tempted to accept.

And then there were his father’s messages, concerned questions asking him if he was alright and that he was driving down from Blue Valley to check up on Wally in a few hours, which eventually became questions asking for him to open the door and where the heck he was and why he wasn’t answering his phone.

Wally felt his stomach twist, and not just out of hunger for having not eaten for several hours. His dad had driven all the way down from Nebraska and was worried about him and was outside his apartment asking if he was okay, and Wally wasn’t even answering his phone to open the door.

Everything was aching—his stomach, his arms, his legs, his fingers, his head—but he felt a rush of adrenaline as he ran full speed back home, hoping his father hadn’t left the entrance of his apartment just yet because he could really use someone to talk to right now.

People probably noticed him rushing by. He wasn’t running at his top speed—couldn’t, from lack of a proper meal, and thank god his apartment was in speedster sprinting distance—but at least he was probably too fast for them to react to or make out. Wally grabbed his backpack, which he had left inconspicuously wedged between two couches in the lobby, and darted past the front desk. Wally ran into the staircase—the elevators had cameras—and changed out of his current clothes and into the pair of shorts and T-shirt he had worn to the museum. Ignoring the gnawing hunger in his stomach and the ache in his body, Wally ran up the stairs, taking several steps at a time, until he reached his floor and saw, much to his relief and guilt, his dad sitting outside the apartment door.

“Dad!” Wally said.

“Wally,” his dad said, sounding almost angry as he stood up from where he sat. “Where’ve you been? I must’ve left a dozen messages for you.”

“Sorry, I didn’t get your messages until just now and I didn’t know you were in Central and I was busy…” Wally apologized breathlessly.

His dad ran an impatient hand through his hair, shaking his head. “You should check your phone when these things happen. I didn’t know where you were or if you were even okay…” His voice trailed off. Wally realized his father was looking at his hands, which were painfully red and scraped.

“It’s worse than it looks,” Wally said quickly, knowing that with a good meal and night’s rest, all signs of the day’s work would be gone by the next day, tops. He was just relieved he thought to change his clothes, which were covered in dirt and smeared blood from the injured people he’d helped out of buildings.

“You were looking for your mother,” he said blankly.

Wally didn’t deny it. “She was in the Rogue attack,” he said quietly.

“I know,” his father said. There was a strange tone in his voice, an undercurrent in his expression Wally couldn’t quite pick out. “Open the door,” he told Wally. “Your hands need to be cleaned up. You look like you need a break.”

Wally nodded, pulling his keys out of his pocket with a grimace—his fingers were still a little raw—and he opened the door to let his dad inside.

Wally went straight to the kitchen sink, turning on the faucet to hold his hands under the cool water. He winced as he washed the dirt and dust out of his scrapes. Past the counter, he could see his dad walking around the apartment, looking at the home of his son and ex-wife with a sharp eye. Luckily, Rudy kept any pointed comments he had to himself. Wally wasn’t sure if he could handle an argument with his father at the moment.

“Oh, dad, can you close the door?” Wally asked, realizing that his father had left the front door open when he had come inside.

“In a bit,” he said distractedly, practically ignoring Wally as he walked beyond Wally’s range of vision, down the hallway towards the bedrooms. Wally felt strangely uncomfortable. Something didn’t feel completely right, but his dad had always been hard to talk to. It was probably just easier for them to talk over text messages.

Drying his hands, Wally headed back to close the door himself, but when he got there, he felt something slam into his face.

Stumbling back and clutching his nose, Wally found himself facing two men and a woman, dressed in matching blue and white costumes, and in the blink of an eye was back on his feet and lunging toward the intruders. He could count the number of times he’d been in a fight in his entire life on one hand, but with his speed, he was sure he could take people on now.

Which was why it came as a total shock when they reacted just as quickly, and Wally found himself thrown back another several feet.

How could they be so fast? he wondered dazedly as he clumsily righted himself, leaning against the chair.

They weren’t as fast as Wally, but Wally wasn’t in top condition either, after working so long on so little food.

He jumped back to his feet, panic flooding his mind, unable to grasp what was going on. Wally retaliated and managed to strike one of the older men square on the nose. The man was knocked into the corner of the wall behind him. In the time it took for him to take out that man, the woman had struck back, kicking him Wally in the chest and sending him flying. He hit the lamp stand beside the couch, sending both the stand and the lamp toppling down.

His dad had to have heard that, even if he was in the back of the apartment.

“Dad!” he wheezed, and only then realized he had had the air knocked out of him. After a gasp of air, he tried again. “Dad!”

“Wally?” his dad said, walking out of the hallway and into the room. He looked down at Wally and then at the intruders. “…Oh.”

“Get out of here!” Wally shouted, getting back up to his feet.

The woman saw him charging, of course. He was running on empty, but the adrenaline now coursing through his veins made up for that, and he was sure he more than matched them in speed. He saw her shift her weight as she prepared another kick, but as she struck, he twisted himself sideways, and as her leg slide past his ribs, he could see the expression of shock.

He was faster than her. Faster than all of them.

He drove his fist in her ribs, striking her with as much force as she had kicked him, and the angle of his blow had knocked her down to the ground. In the time it had taken for the other two to react, he struck her eight more times, in the stomach, in the face, ignoring the pain in his knuckles. When he felt someone’s hands grab him from behind, Wally got back up from his knees and thrust his elbow back and felt something crack satisfyingly. He continued to spin around and punched the man in the face.

The first man he punched had already recovered and charged Wally, who was prepared to take the blow until he saw something snide in the man’s face and hesitated.

Whether Wally hesitated or not wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because the next strike had come from behind. His head lurched forward with the blow, and before he could turn to see what had happened, he was tackled to the floor by the intruder.

But all he could see was his father standing over him, with pieces of the broken lamp still in one hand, and a familiar looking notebook in the other.

“D…dad?” he said hoarsely, unable to process what had just happened.

His father wasn’t even looking at him anymore, more interested in the notebook he had in his hands than his son on the ground.

“You’re a smart boy, Wally,” his dad said. “I never thought you’d manage to succeed at anything worthwhile in your life, but you’ve proven me wrong. Christina. Gregor. You two are alright?” he asked mildly, as the two others slowly got back up to their feet. They nodded.

“I am fine as well,” the man holding Wally down said. He sounded irritable and spoke in what seemed like a heavy Russian accent, but Wally couldn’t tell for sure. It sounded Russian.

“Dad, what are you doing?” Wally asked. His head reeled from the confusion. Or from its repeated contact with hard objects.

“Is this really the Flash formula?” his dad asked, flipping through pages. “I can barely read your handwriting, Wally,” he added in a chiding, condescending tone.

Wally didn’t say anything. It was one of the older drafts, imperfect and incomplete, but he didn’t trust himself to say anything, and didn’t trust his father, despite how all logic told him how he should. He just lied there on the ground, blinking and trying to mentally shove away the lingering darkness and the blurs that stained the edge of his vision.

“You know, I am actually proud of you,” his dad said, counting bits of cash that had been stuffed in the pages. “I guess I never said it enough.”

He wasn’t going to cry. He didn’t cry whenever he got hurt, he didn’t cry when his parents essentially fought over who wouldn’t have him, and he wasn’t going to cry now. Though his hitched breaths sounded much too close, and he heard someone laugh. His hands were grabbed, wrists clamped together, and he tensed when he saw the rope brought out—handcuffs, he might be able to pick—but his father’s voice cut through his daze again.

“Don’t.”

“We are not taking him with us?”

“Think of it as insurance in case we need an extra copy of this,” his father said, holding up the notebook. “Think of him as a stash of information. He’s not going anywhere. Has to look after his poor dear mother in case something happens to her again. Right, Wally? And the point of stashing something is to make sure it’s not close enough that someone else might find it either.”

“The Rogues will not be happy we reneged on the deal,” the woman said. Christina, Wally committed to memory. The woman’s name was Christina. The other man’s name was Gregor. The third was unknown. Wally knew too well that his father was Robert Rudolph West, and that they had made some deal with the Rogues, and he wasn’t ever going to fucking forget this.

“The Rogues aren’t fast enough to lay a finger on him. As for us, we’ll be too far away for them to do anything about,” he shot back. “Leave him.”

And they…did.

Wally felt the weight lift off of him as the currently unnamed third man removed his foot from his chest, and despite all the instincts screaming at him to get up and fight and make these people hurt, he couldn’t muster up the energy to get back up. It was like all his strength had been sapped out of him, and he just didn’t want to move anymore.

Before his father left, he stood over Wally, and he could feel his impotent anger welling up in his chest as he stared up at him.

“By the way, I wouldn’t call the police, if I were you,” his father said, holding something over his eyes with an amused grin on his face. Wally dimly recognized it to be one of his spare masks, which he had kept hidden in the back of his closet. “It might be hard to explain just what I took.”

Wally was vaguely aware that they still didn’t close the door after they left, the assholes.

He closed his eyes and rolled over on his side, his arms curled around his side and his thoughts focused on breathing. He wanted to get up and chase after his father. Wanted to beat the crap out of him and those totally random-ass Russian lackeys of his. But this all happened because he hadn’t used his damn brain, didn’t take a moment to wonder how on earth Rudy had known about the accident his mom got caught in or why he had suddenly started talking to him out of nowhere after years of silence.

After his mom had left him in Nebraska, he’d essentially lived alone. He and his father rarely spoke, yet the moment he started texting him, Wally had wholeheartedly believed that his father had suddenly grown an interest in him. He didn’t even stop and question his father’s sudden change of heart. So stupid.

So stop being stupid, Wally thought to himself. And just think.

First things first; he needed to get rid of the evidence that this had ever happened. Wally had no intention of calling the police on his father. Even if it hadn’t been for the threat to expose Wally as a thief, it was too personal for Wally to simply leave up to the police. Broken furniture needed to be replaced. He’d buy new ones, figure out later what to tell his mom. His mom. Wally wanted to close his eyes and never open them again.

Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris. They had messaged him earlier. Wally slowly pulled the phone from his pocket and felt some relief that it was still in one piece. Message them back, don’t let them worry. Otherwise they might come here to check up on him.

Pack a toothbrush and some clothes to sleep in before staying the night at his aunt and uncle’s house, because there was no way in hell he was sleeping here where people had just broken in. Where he had let them in because he was stupid enough to trust his father—though the emotional part of his mind was being surprisingly logical about it, because it was his father and he was supposed to be able to trust him.

Wally sat up and groaned. His head was pounding, his chest felt too tight and cramped (like they’d been kicked in by a large Russian woman), and it was hard to breath, especially through those damn hiccups.

Everything hurt.

Chapter Text

To say Aunt Iris looked horrified at the state of him was a bit of an understatement. The moment he showed up at her front door, she took one look at him with her jaw dropped and, without asking a single question, pulled him inside the house and marched him towards the living room.

“Got mugged,” Wally said simply. It was true enough. “They took my wallet.”

“Oh god,” she shook her head as she brought out a first aid kit for his hands.

“They didn’t take the rest of my things, thankfully,” Wally said, though he really wasn’t feeling very thankful now. He pointed an elbow towards his backpack. “Guess they didn’t want my clothes.”

He winced as she dabbed alcohol against his scrapes.

“It’s worse than it looks,” Wally said. “Though I could use ice for my head.”

“If they hit your head, we should get you checked out at the hospital,” Aunt Iris said as she headed toward the kitchen and came back with a bag of frozen mixed vegetables.

“I don’t want to,” he muttered. It would seem suspicious if they managed to record all of his injuries, only for them to heal a few days later. “Wasn’t a clean hit anyway. Where’s Uncle Barry?”

“He’s… helping the CCPD,” she said hesitantly. The subject of Wally’s mom still hung over his head.

“So…” he started, “no good news for me then?” he asked.

“Not yet. But there weren’t many casualties so far,” Iris said hopefully. “Most people are turning up fine.”

“It’s been a few hours,” Wally said quietly. He hid a wince as she hugged him, and instead leaned into the touch.

“It’s going to be okay,” she told him.

Wally didn’t respond. He didn’t yell, didn’t crack, didn’t cry. Too many things happening in one day. She rubbed his back. It hurt, but he didn’t mind.

“I’m going to order takeout,” she said, running a hand through his hair. She felt the bump on the back of his head and winced worse than Wally did before replacing her hand with the bag of frozen veggies. “Hold that there,” she ordered.

Wally did so, and then sank into the couch. Behind him, he could hear Aunt Iris on the phone. Not calling for pizza. She wouldn’t sound so concerned for pizza. Uncle Barry, then. Probably telling him what happened.

Wally closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about it.

He wanted his mom.

Wally woke up to the faded smell of food with an old blanket draped over him. He laid there, head still resting on the armrest of the couch as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. The lights were out, but Wally could see the dim outline of the clock that rested above the fireplace.

Just past ten o’clock—a little early for bed but Aunt Iris must’ve had a long day, covering the Weather Wizard fiasco on TV.

Slowly, because his body still ached from the day’s labor and abuse, Wally pushed the comforter off of him. He rubbed his neck, stretching out the kinks, and looked down at the blanket. He recognized it, red with the Flash symbol splashed in its center, as the one Aunt Iris had bought for him when he was younger. Back in the day that he used to visit almost every weekend.

It was still soft and only slightly worn, much like he remembered.

Wally walked into the kitchen and saw that Aunt Iris had left him a note on the fridge.

In case you wake up, I left pizza in the microwave. Barry’s working overtime to help with relief efforts. I promise he’ll find your mom. Everything’s going to be okay.

He sat at the kitchen counter, eating the pizza his aunt had left for him in the microwave and grabbing a few extra slices from the refrigerator, eating it cold as he reread the short note left behind for him a few dozen times, the feeling of dull frustration building up again.

It wasn’t okay.

His dad did it. He had set all this up and hurt so many people just to keep Wally off-balance, to keep him from questioning his presence. His father had used him to get to his work.

Somehow, he’d gotten the Rogues in on it too, getting them to act as destructive distractions to keep Wally from thinking over the situation critically.

Even Flash, with all the years of animosity between them, never got this kind of reaction from the Rogues. And Wally, he had never deliberately gotten in their way, never beaten them up, and never put them in jail. Wally knew he’d been a thorn in their side, but it didn’t warrant this level of destruction. It just wasn’t right.

They should’ve known better.

They’d gone too far.

Wally crumpled the note in his fist and dropped it on the table. If the Rogues wanted to fuck with him, he was going to fuck them up right back.

Rick’s bar was unusually quiet and bare, and for good reason. The atmosphere around Weather Wizard was tense as the Rogues contemplated the situation before them.

“Well, if you idiots won’t say it, I will. I know the rules, and I’m out,” Mark Mardon said soberly as he peeled off his mask and tossed it on the bar. His last job would make retirement easier, hopefully keeping him afloat until he found a way to get back into the business. “I mean, not like there’s much else I can do—”

His quiet speech was interrupted by a sudden rush of white and gray that blurred past the bar, ruffling everybody’s clothes and causing a bit of a stir.

“What the…?” the soon-to-be former Rogue looked around in confusion for the source of the wind, and Captain Cold felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach and discreetly shifted away from Mark. He pulled up his hood and placed a hand over his cold gun, just in case he was right about who…

…Yeah.

It was the thief that was all the talk among the Rogues. The Kid, for lack of a better name, had come in and was standing in the bar a few tables away, his eyes scanning the table of criminals. He must’ve backtracked, Cold concluded, sweeping the town—and this bar—like white and gray whirlwind and doubling back when he realized the Rogues were sitting there, most of them out of costume.

He didn’t look as sharp as he usually did, with his previously well-cared for clothes wrinkled and covered in grime and dust, his face bruised, scrapes covering his hands, and the side of his nose slightly swollen.

One look at the thief’s bruised, furious face, and Captain Cold was pretty sure Mark’s already awful luck had taken a turn for the worse. As much of an annoyance as he was, the Rogues had been relieved that the Kid was, for the most part, harmless. A threat to their easy dominance over Central’s crime, maybe, but he had never seemed interested in any kind of confrontation at all. The boy never sought to challenge them.

But now the thief had come to them. He had taken the effort to seek the Rogues out, and if his battered state and baleful expression was anything to go by, he had come out of a sense of slightly misguided retribution.

Cold quietly unholstered his gun. He could tell just by looking at him that the Kid was out for blood, and before he could tell the Kid to calm down and back off, he was gone.

And Mark was too.

The Kid had grabbed Mark and left. The door cracked against the wall; it had been flung open so hard, bits of it had splintered and fallen to the ground.

Years of duking it out with the Flash had, at least, graced Captain Cold with a particularly quick reaction time, and before anyone else could even stand up, he was already heading out of the door with a grim expression and a steeled posture, prepared to do what was necessary if the Kid wasn’t going to stop.

The speedster hadn’t made off that far with Mark, thankfully. In fact, it seemed he had stopped only a few paces outside the bar. Mark, however, hadn’t, and the inertia had sent him flying out of the thief’s presumably loosened grip. He slammed into the closed down building across the street, hitting the brick wall and falling to the ground with a heavy thud and a groan.

But in the blink of an eye, the kid closed the distance between them and was on him again, pulling him upright with one fist seizing the front of Mark’s shirt and the other raised above his head, clenched so tight it blurred as his entire lanky frame trembled.

Captain Cold would have shot the speedster without hesitation. The Flash had always struck them with enough control to avoid punching a billion-mile-per-hour fist through their heads, but he wasn’t sure he was going to trust a fellow crook to show the same amount of self-control. In spite of Cold’s distrust, the Kid kept raising his arm and throwing it down, as if to bash Mark’s head in.

Every time, he would stop, just inches short each time.

Captain Cold didn’t fire his gun. He didn’t lower it either.

The thief’s expression might’ve been murderous, but his instincts apparently were not. With a level of self-discipline that the average criminal wasn’t particularly well known for, he dropped Mark to the floor and lowered his fists to the side. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to stomp the guy into the dirt while he was down, if the twitching in his leg was anything to go by. The other Rogues, apparently, were thinking the same thing as Cold was, but they also seemed a little less willing to risk Mark’s well-being on the Kid’s level of restraint and struck first.

Apparently, they’d rather risk hitting Mark themselves than let the kid do it.

Flames licked the thief’s now definitely ruined suit as Heat Wave shot a blast of fire in the Kid’s direction, but before the fire could take a hold of the thief, he had dashed off, leaving scorch marks on the wall behind where the Kid had stood, ending just above Mark’s head.

Cold resisted the urge to swear loudly at Heat Wave’s recklessness. Of course he had been expecting them to attack. All Heat Wave had done was put the Kid on edge, put him on the run. And speedsters on the run were damn near impossible to take head-on. Except the thief didn’t run off like he usually did, struggling against his own instincts to run and instincts to lash out. He wanted to fight.

Leaves and littered trash flew up into the air, marking a path behind the thief. He ran circles around the Rogues, avoiding attacks and dodging patches of Cold’s ice on the ground, but they didn’t let their near-misses bother them. They were the Flash’s enemies. They had experience dealing with runners. He darted around them, striking at them with light, stinging blows, but they fended off every attempt at actual lasting damage. Narrowly, but dealing with speedsters was always a narrow sort of fight with little margin for error.

Cold glanced back at the Rogues. They knew the drill.

Top opened up his arsenal, dropping several tops out onto the open street. It slowed the Kid down. He didn’t seem to be playing at the top—huh—of his game, unable to reach full speed judging by his worn out appearance, but he wove around the tops separating him and the Rogues nevertheless.

Not that it mattered, because they weren’t really the explosive tops that the Kid had suspected them to be—Top knew better than to try using those against a speedster, who could generally clear the area before the thing could even explode, though the Kid’s hesitance to risk setting off the tops was proof that he wasn’t in his best condition and was well aware of it.

The Kid had guts, trying to face down the Rogues in less than peak form, Cold noted. Guts that would get him killed.

The tops spinning on the ground burst, blanketing the area in a blinding white light.

Despite Top’s distraction, he didn’t even hesitate, charging forward and gathering speed and momentum. By the time he reached Top, his “grab, drag, and throw” method had him sprinting off with the man. Top was propelled high up in the air and sent soaring down the street.

The Kid didn’t even pause to see where Top landed, moving on to the Pied Piper, who stood nearby with his flute at his lips. Hartley’s sonic technology made him dangerously versatile, thus one of the more important targets when fighting against the Rogues, and the Kid tackled him—a huge mistake.

He ran straight through Piper’s image at a speed that shattered the glass construct that Mirror Master had set up. The Kid stumbled blindly forward at top speed—a stumble that send him tripping over the curb and eating several feet of concrete. Cold aimed his gun and fired, letting out an unsympathetic chuckle at his face plant.

Flash had long since learned from his scuffles with the Rogues, and Cold felt a slightest tickle of nostalgia. It was hard to send Flash crashing nowadays. It had only taken a few missteps at superspeed to teach the hero to quite literally watch his step.

Judging by how quickly Flash had learned, it must’ve hurt.

The Kid’s face left a thin trail of bloody skid marks on the sidewalk, but as dazed as he must’ve been from the fall, he quickly jumped on his feet, ready to take off again

The way his head had struck the ground in his nasty fall, he didn’t seem to notice the unnatural chill from the concrete beneath his fingers as he had pushed himself off the ground. Maybe he hadn’t noticed that Cold had shot his gun at the ground beneath his feet. Maybe the dumb kid didn’t know what happened when people ran on slick ice.

Either way, the Kid had only gone a few paces before slipping on ice-slicked streets and landing hard with a heavy thump and a muffled yell.

This time, Captain Cold didn’t wait for him to recover and marched over, the tiny, modified crampons under his boots digging into the thin layer of frost and leaving a cracked trail where he walked. Before the thief could get his act together and recover, Cold pressed his foot down against his chest, and the Kid froze, feeling the small barbs dig through the front of his shirt and threaten to cut into his chest.

“Mick, check up on Mark,” Cold said to Heat Wave. “Get him back into the bar. Digger, Sam, go find where Top landed and bring him back.”

“And the thief?” Piper asked.

“He’s coming with us,” Cold said, lifting his foot off the Kid and swiftly replacing it with a hand, clenched in the front of his tattered shirt. He dragged the kid back up to his feet, the other hand holding a cold gun to the Kid’s face, receiving a baleful stare, “and we’re gonna have a chat about picking fights with Rogues.”

“Bite me,” he snarled, but he held his tongue when Cold pressed the ice-covered barrel of his gun against his cheek. The Kid at first tried to pull his head away from the chilly metal and finally looked away resignedly, which Cold took as a sign of surrender.

It wasn’t quite the same as beating the Flash or his asshole sidekick, but a speedster was a speedster, and beating one, even a young crook of one, felt pretty satisfying.

It took a few while to get everyone properly settled without holding their weapons at the Kid’s throat. No weapons out at Rick’s. It was a Rogue’s rule, recently implemented after the last bar they’d set up in had gone up in flames, and not in the metaphorical sense.

Piper, the first to put away his weapon of choice, took a wet cloth borrowed from Rick and pressed it into Cold’s hands, who stared blankly at him. Piper nodded his head towards the Kid, and it clicked.

Cold rolled his eyes and tossed it back at Piper with a silent ‘do it yourself’. At the look, the red-haired sighed and approached the Kid who was fuming at the bar, unable to walk on a leg and not allowed to lower his arms from the back of his head.

“Quit it,” the Kid said irritably jerking his head when Hartley tried to clean one of the heavier scrapes his face.

Poufy as he was, Hartley was a Rogue, and Rogues didn’t take that kind of disrespect, so when Piper, being the pushover that he was, didn’t react to the insult, Cold scowled and marched over to them.

He took Hartley’s hand and shoved the wet cloth in the Kid’s face in a single sharp jab, eliciting an equally sharp yelp.

“What you did tonight wasn’t right,” Cold growled, ignoring the Kid’s angry scowl, “and if you want to live to see another day, we’re going to be laying down some ground rules.”

The Kid let out a humorless laugh. “Serious? You’re seriously going to tell me what is and isn’t right after everything you’ve done? Fuck you, fuck your rules, and fuck your honor code bullshit,” he said bitterly. “East Gray? That was fucking low.”

So it was about Mark’s incident.

Cold took in his battered appearance, some of the bruises present before the Kid had actually foolishly picked the fight with the entire entourage of Rogues. He forced himself to remain calm and resisted the urge to smack the kid upside the head, because even if his mistake was justified, Cold didn’t like attitude.

It was a little impressive, at least, being able to give that much lip when surrounded by enemies who wouldn’t think twice about beating you while you were down.

“So you got caught in Weather Wizard’s tornado alley incident then,” Cold said, waiting for confirmation. It would be hard to prove that this was all just a misunderstanding, but the Kid wasn’t a hero, which meant he could probably be reasoned with.

The thief finally responded less aggressively to the cooler tone in his voice. “…No,” he said with a strained calmness in his voice while still managing to keep that young, surly attitude.

Cold frowned, thrown off by the answer. He couldn’t figure out why else he would look this ragged and embark on a suicidal attack on the Rogues if it hadn’t been about Weather Wizard’s accident.

“Wha…? Then what’s your tiff with Mark?” Captain Boomerang demanded.

“My tiff is with all of you,” the Kid snarled, his temper visibly rising again, and Cold wasn’t sure if it was in response to the question or his tone. “What did he tell you guys? Why did he do it!”

With the increasing anger and the childishly petulant tone in the thief’s voice, it occurred to Cold just how young he sounded and that the Kid was, in fact, a stupid kid. He found it a little ironic, seeing as they’d only called him the Kid because he was a new, unwanted presence and calling him Baby was emasculating for everyone. Even for Piper. In the end, it had been a close tie to the Kid and That Thieving Bastard, in which The Kid won over due to the fact That Bastard was too common a term around the Rogues.

“Might help if you told us who this ‘he’ you’re talking about it,” Cold said idly, taking back the conversation and sending Digger a glare to shut up and let him talk if no one else could keep a cool, neutral tone with the thief.

“My dad,” he hissed, his voice dripping in venom at the word, at the relation. “What did he tell you about me?”

The Rogues exchanged glances in mild confusion. No one knew anything about the Kid, let alone his family.

“By dad… I don’t suppose he goes by Robert?” Hartley asked suddenly, naming the suspicious man who had been at the bar and around the city the past few days. Despite his obscured features, he could now see a slight resemblance in the shape of Robert and the Kid’s faces, ignoring the difference in their build and weight.

At first, he didn’t seem how sure to react at the sound of the pity in Hartley’s tone. As the confusion faded, his expression contorted before settling on a quiet, neutral stare, with a sense of anger just underneath his face. His back stood straighter, his posture more alert, but he still had an appearance of someone who was more fatigued than he was letting on. But the way he closed his eyes as he realized how little the Rogues had known of the situation definitely confirmed Hartley’s question: the man who had stalked the Kid down from Nebraska had been his own father.

“Sometimes,” he muttered.

Captain Cold winced inwardly, remembering what the man had said, that the Kid would “let him inside”. He was right in assuming Robert would use a fair bit of trickery to work his way into the Kid’s hideout, or wherever he lived. It just hadn’t occurred to him that the trickery involved would include taking advantage of a kid’s trust in his father.

Not that he felt sorry for the kid. There was hardly a crook in this bar who didn’t have issues with their family, and even before the man had apparently stabbed his son in the back, the Kid had already been a pain anyway. Still, the lot of them could sympathize.

“That’s kind of fucked up,” someone muttered behind Cold. Captain Boomerang, probably. He had a son himself, as estranged as they were.

“Well,” Cold said, showing the kid no pity. He wasn’t some bleeding heart who would reach out to anyone with a sob story, after all. “Obviously, your old man didn’t tell us much of anything about you. Like the fact that he was hunting his own kid down.”

“So he didn’t tell you anything about who I was,” the thief echoed. He stood up, testing his injury to see if the sprain was okay to walk on. He gingerly increased the weight on his leg and grimaced.

“Sit. You’re not going anywhere,” Cold said. His abilities as a speedster might allow him to recover quickly, but the Kid was in no shape to run. Escape was pretty much out of the question. They both knew this.

The Kid glared at him, refusing to sit as Cold had told him to, but reasonable enough to stay when ordered.

“Talk,” he said. “Your father. What’s the issue?”

“I’m not here to talk about daddy issues,” he said balefully, but he relented slightly.

“Good, because we don’t give a shit about your daddy issues,” Cold said. “He wanted something from you, so tell me what happened and don’t skim over the details.”

“Why do you want to know?” he said angrily.

“Because nobody double-crosses us. We never would’ve let the man walk out of this town in one piece, if we knew what was going to happen,” Cold answered. A furrowed brow told Cold that the Kid was a bit lost. “Not to you. You’re not one of us, so we can’t care less about you,” he added honestly to ease the kid’s confusion. “Your old man’s people got the drop on Weather Wizard. Broke the weather device and damn near killed everyone in the area when Mark lost control of all his storms.”

“Damn near killed me. And here’s proof,” Mark said crossly, with a bag of ice pressed against the back of his head. He pushed forward the broken pieces of his wand-like device forward for the Kid to see. “Snapped in half. We don’t like you, Kid, but I don’t personally hate you so much that I’d sacrifice this just to try and get rid of you.”

The Kid was visibly disappointed, probably from his current lack of people to blame within fists’ reach. He looked like he wanted to be angry but couldn’t summon enough energy to really feel it.

“So tell us why he did all this,” Cold said, with a look that told the Kid he wasn’t letting him go without some answers.

“…He’s an asshole,” the Kid muttered. No kidding. “He did it to distract me. Make it hard for me to think. That way I wouldn’t wonder how he found out about the accident, why he came here, knew where I lived. I thought he was checking up on me.” His expression darkened. “Also… it conveniently got my mom out of the way.”

…Oh.

It took a moment for the comment to sink in as the Rogues realized what he had meant by that.

The Rogues always made a point never to outright target women and children. Mostly out of practicality, partly out of principle. The fact that this man had done both, and to his own wife and son, left a bitter taste in Cold’s mouth. It was bad enough that they lost Weather Wizard to his broken weapon and that the rest of the team would be taking heat for this.

“And if that’s all, I’m outta here,” the Kid said. He was able to put more pressure on the leg now, it seemed, as he easily turned around to leave. Cold was sure it was probably still sprained, but if tonight’s events were anything to go by, he did have guts.

Before he could run off and go back to being a thieving pest, Cold grabbed his arm, resting the ice-cold barrel of his gun under the thief’s Adam’s jaw.

“Not so fast, Kid,” Cold said. “We’re willing to forget the shit you pulled here tonight, but we’re not done here. We’ve got guidelines to set.”

“Jeez… I’m tired, I’m sore, and lectures put me to sleep,” he said, his voice growing in anger. Again. Kid had anger problems. Cold wasn’t surprised.

“You are going to sit there and listen,” he said, glaring down at the thief. Despite the gun at his throat, the Kid glared right back, and after several moments of waiting for him to back down, it occurred to him that the he did, in fact, have the Kid’s undivided attention. “First, you don’t pull off a heist without telling us. You do a job on our territory, we get a cut.”

“You guys serious? You’re taxing me?”

“Our turf, our rules,” Cold said. “Two: we heard about the stunt you pulled with Mirror Master at the mall. Helping Zoom? Maybe you haven’t heard, but heroes and crooks kinda don’t get along. Really. Try that shit again with Zoom. He’ll show you how much he appreciates your help,” he added derisively. “And last, we don’t fight each other. Unlike in Gotham. We try to keep things civilized here. And by civilized, I mean you don’t attack us, and we don’t fuck you up,” Cold finished, giving his neck an extra nudge with his gun before putting it back into its holster.

Despite the clear threat, the Kid didn’t look too concerned. He opened his mouth, looking like he was about to argue—probably about the job fee, seeing as he didn’t have a much of problem with the other two rules, but he was cut off by his phone. Whatever the message was, the moment he checked it, all the tension seemed to leak out of his body, his straight shoulders slumping and his fury forgotten.

“Reasonable enough,” he said in a strained tone. “I’m done here.” He quickly headed out the door, ignoring the limp in his step.

“Wait,” Hartley said. Surprisingly enough, the thief actually waited, looking back with a curious expression. Piper’s manners had that effect on some people. “How about you stay for a drink?”

This got a small protest from the Rogues—including a groan from Digger—and a strange look from the Kid.

“I’m not… I’m flattered…” the Kid said, actually looking embarrassed, “but… not interested.”

“Not like that,” Piper said snappishly. “I meant, with Weather Wizard out of the game, we’ve got a free seat at the bar.”

“Sitting right here, Hartley,” Mark reminded, waving at the two of them from the bar with a cross expression. “I’m retired, not dead.”

“I’m just saying,” Hartley said exasperatedly, turning to face the others. “The Rogues have got an opening, and it’d be nice to have a speedster on our side for once. Stick around a bit.”

“Getting a little cozy with this one, aren’t you, Hartley?” Digger said sarcastically. “You don’t go extending invites to anybody you want, and certainly not one of them.”

Hartley was a bit out of line, handing out an invitation to the Kid without the rest of the group’s say-so, but Cold knew what Piper was up to and it wasn’t a bad idea. The Kid was no hero, that was for sure. And the odds of him just being undercover seemed unlikely. Having a runner on the team wasn’t a half-bad idea, even if the idea of having an inexperienced metahuman amongst them left a bad taste in his mouth.

“First drink’s on me,” Cold offered, seconding Hartley’s motion, much to the other Rogues’ surprise, but with Cold backing him up, no one put up too much of an argument.

“I can already think of ten reasons not to take that drink,” the Kid said, thoughtfully drumming his fingers on the door. “Rain check.”

Despite everyone’s reluctance to invite the Kid into the group, they almost felt insulted at his flippancy. Most crooks would’ve fallen over themselves to join the Rogues.

“Is this a no?” Piper asked, surprised.

“No, this is an ‘I have to go’. They found my mom. You all can buy me drinks later,” he said, giving them the first of many cheeky grins to come as almost all the Rogues simultaneously voiced their refusal to buy him anything.

“What’s your name?”

The thief paused to think and then shrugged. “What you’ve been calling me is good enough,” he answered, and the Rogues exchanged glances. They were pretty sure he wasn’t referring to some of the ruder things they’d taken to calling him. “The Kid, right? I can work with that.”

Still working late into the night, Flash and Zoom had heard crashes a few neighborhoods away. With nothing more than a shared glance at one another, the two of them split up, Flash to continue the relief efforts and Zoom to investigate the disturbance. It was only a coincidence that he had noticed something odd. In the darkness, the street looked oddly shiny, but it wasn’t too noticeable until Zoom was running down the sidewalk and slipped, grabbing a light post for support to avoid slipping on the… ice.

Captain Cold.

He knew what he was looking for now.

The moment Zoom saw the bar, he narrowed his eyes in irritation. He and Flash were well aware that the Rogues tended to hang around in bars for months before moving on to a new haunt. Why the Flash always insisted on leaving them be, he didn’t understand. They were crooks, and the Flash would just let them hang around drinking at bars like they deserved to be free.

Zoom crept towards the side of the building to peek in through a window when the door slammed open. A figure stood in the doorway. He couldn’t make out many of his features in the dark of the night, but he could see the man was wearing a fedora and a suit that looked like it had been through some harsh abuse by its owner, singed and tattered.

Zoom recognized the voice of the person that was currently talking to him—Hartley Rathaway, aka the Pied Piper, Zoom identified—but he couldn’t make out anything else.

Creeping closer, he could see and hear the man more closely now. He wore a mask like Robin’s, covering only the area around his eyes. The mask was lighter in color and slightly blemished. It was blood, Zoom realized. A part of his forehead was scraped bloody. It was still hard to see in the dark, but Zoom was positive that he’d never seen this man before. A new criminal then.

“What’s your name?” the Pied Piper asked.

“What you’ve been calling me is good enough. The Kid, right? I can work with that,” he replied after taking a moment to think. And then he ran.

Unprepared to even need his powers, Hunter almost didn’t have time to hide, ducking behind the wall as “the Kid” took off at a run. Zoom’s eyes widened in surprise as the Kid passed him as a blur, and he felt a chill crawl down his spine. His and Flash’s abilities gave them an edge over their Rogues, but if they had a speedster on their team now… catching a criminal this quick could prove to be difficult.

Zoom looked in through the window, seeing Cold nod at the Pied Piper appreciatively and ordered the bartender to get him a drink, more support than he was probably accustomed to getting from the Rogues.

The Rogues hated speedsters. Zoom knew that. The fact that they had apparently recruited one was unlike them—they were picky about their membership and hadn’t even gone about trying to replace the Trickster since the man had disappeared a few months back.

Zoom watched them, assessing the situation before him. The Kid was definitely new to them too, from the way they broke into conversation after the Kid had left. He was a presence they didn’t like but would put up with for the sake of taking advantage of his powers. Even though Piper’s opinions never really seemed to count for much among them, he obviously had Cold’s support in this decision—he had probably been the one to extend the invitation from his position, which had been the closest to the Kid before he left.

Finally, Cold was finished putting up with the ongoing debate amongst the Rogues, proclaiming loudly enough for Zoom to pick up.

“You didn’t like the Trickster at first either, and you didn’t like Piper, and who here actually got along with each other before we became Rogues?” Cold said, glaring them all down. They all quieted and listened to him, seeming to realize that what he said was the truth.

And then he said it.

“The Kid is one of us now.”

Well, if that wasn’t solid proof that he and Flash had a new Rogue on their hands, he wasn’t sure what was. Zoom activated the radio his earpiece.

“Flash,” he called in to report to his mentor.

“Yeah?” the Flash answered on the other end of the line. “What did you find, Zoom?”

“The Rogues. They’re at the bar—”

“Do not engage,” came the immediate response.

“I won’t,” he said, straining not to show his impatience. “But we’ve got a situation. The Rogues have inducted a new teammate. It looks like a speedster, and he goes by the Kid.”