Chapter Text
With his chin resting against his palm, the Flash continued to stare down the screens in front of him with disinterest. Huge monitors took up all the space of the wall in front of him, images and text blinking by at a rapid pace, speed up specifically for him and his abilities. Even with the faster speed, the repetitive text had felt slow and tortuous for the past hour.
The monitor room, as it was so pointedly named, was closed off from the observation deck. Barry couldn’t even doze off staring into the twinkling expanse of space outside the windows to ignore the very bland, and very boring, round of monitor duty he had been assigned to.
Monitor duty, as the Bat would constantly tell them, was incredibly important. Anything could happen at any time, and this was there one way to catch the problem before it escalated to the point of them having to be called in anyway. And Barry agreed! It was a super important role that the Justice League needed to do!
He just wished it wasn’t him that had to do it.
Nothing fun ever happened during monitor duty. It always ended up being Barry trying to keep his eyes open and on the screens that showed the same boring, dull reports over and over again. All the important events like aliens or cities getting taken under siege happens when Green Arrow or Supes were on duty. Even then, Barry couldn’t imagine getting those distress calls were entertaining.
The entertaining part was the fighting! Or getting called out onto the field!
At least this wasn’t filling out Batman’s reports, though… Those were downright miserable. Batman had even more intricate reports that he required all of them to fill out after missions or emergencies then any sort of report he ever had to fill out at the precinct, which was saying something. A lot of his paperwork was redundant and useless information had the time, just in case. Batman somehow doubled that amount.
A short ping sounded from a monitor off the the left, but as soon as Barry turned his head, the screen went black, leaving all the other monitors to whir on with their information while it stayed dark.
“Oh you have got to be kidding me,” he said as he stood up, immediately reaching into the small space between the screen and the wall to press against the power button to no avail.
He cursed under his breath, already shaking his head in defeat. There wasn’t much he could do to try and fix the monitor now, so he would have to leave it until someone else came in. And pray Batman didn’t make him fill out a report for it.
Another ping interrupted his string of thoughts as yet another screen went out.
And then another.
Soon enough, as if the first had only been the start of a snowball rolling down hill, each monitor began to blink off until Barry was left staring at only remaining screen, one of the smaller ones off to the left.
“Oh for fucks sake- Hal is never going to let me live this down.” The Flash was left staring rather dejectedly at the wall of dead screens, his shoulders beginning to droop. Even with how much he hated monitor duty, something told him all the tech blinking out in the Watchtower was not going to make his shift any easier.
It was a long moment before he hesitantly pulled out his communicator, ringing the open line for the League.
“Hey! May need some tech support and a second pair of eyes,” the laugh with the words was strained at best. “Most the monitors are out… so I guess my shift is being cut sho-”
The final monitor made an awful, huffing sound as it, too, went dark.
“Make that all of them… I thought you said this was all the latest tech Batman?”
Barry didn’t get to hear anyone that could respond as the communicator in his hand let out a loud squeal, making him pull it away fast enough to see the little display short out.
Every ounce of tech within the confines of the Watchtower that was not the overhead lights went dark. Unusable.
A laugh of pure disbelief pulled itself out of Barry’s chest as he turned in a quick circle before speeding around the whole satellite, searching and scanning, but everything the had been working fine not even a full minute ago was completely dead.
In his sudden absence, every single monitor blinked back to life. A solid wall of static color while Flash was zooming through the halls in a panic. He may not have seen it, but he certainly heard when the speakers crackled to life.
“Welcome! How would you like to play a game?”