Work Text:
It’s as he’s carefully pipetting the 10 mL water counterbalance for the centrifuge that his fingertips go numb.
There’s been a sucking at his feet with every step he takes since he dropped Dick back outside the gymnasium. They’d taken lunch together at a little hole in the wall restaurant in Sydney. Dick likes their seafood and Wally likes their accents.
Each step forward now feels like he’s going to be drawn ten feet further than he’s intending to go. The Speed Force carrasses his chin as he looks to the clock over his shoulder.
Stomach bile splashes in the back of his throat. His vision blurs yellow.
He ejects the auto pipette’s tip into the disposal, demonstrably slow. The palms of his hands tingle. He clicks down the centrifuge’s lid. His elbows spasm.
After starting the centrifuge, holding air in his chest so it can’t crackle into blue plasma, he peels off his gloves and inches his shaking hands into his lab coat pockets.
Left side holds his phone, the Impulse case he can’t look at, scratched from where Titus stepped on it. Right side holds a spiky metal ball. He curls his fingers around it, rolling it in his palm.
Cass shipped it to the Penthouse after Dick called her, asking some vague questions about League upbringing. A video call, so she could get what he was really asking. Damian turned his nose up at it and refused to engage with the fidget.
His spine tingles. Every atom feels tugged forward and back, seesawing, ricocheting. He knows he’s crying but he’s too scared to reach up to wipe away the tears.
Even slipping his eyes shut feels like tempting fate. Like they’ll rip forward in time and backward in space because he’s initiated any sort of motion.
The cool metal slowly warms in his hand. The electrons jabber excitedly against his palm. He presses harder, focusing on the pinpricks of pain so unlike anything he lived in the Speed Force.
Blue-red-yellow bursts against his eyelids, a hypnotic illusion, a siren song.
His locked knees are fuzzy. He thinks if someone tried to touch him, their fingers would pass right through him.
He forces an exhale and then an inhale soon after.
Oxygen deprivation will do him no good. There are two bodies in the morgue right now that confirm just that.
He tunes into the rumbling hum of machines. The mass spec is beeping, results uploaded to his drive. His email pings, probably Detective Miller asking for an update on the DNA samples for the Davidson case as if PCR doesn’t take time.
Time.
He should check the time. Make sure he’s still in the correct millennium.
None of his extremities are speaking to his central nervous system. His limbs may have darted into the alluring call of the Speed Force for all the control he has over them.
Okay. Okay. He can do this. He’s- For all the testing they’ve done, they’ve never found any evidence that the SF is dragging him back in.
Wally’s a scientist. He knows how to test a hypothesis.
Observation. His molecules have unraveled and he’s floating in space-time-speed, untethered from his home reality.
That feels. His tongue is too big in his mouth, like an allergic reaction to fear alone.
He’s gotta. Cognitive distortion, right? Probably, probably, that’s not true and he should pick a better observation because that’s not so much a start of an investigation as the looming anxiety that pins him to the bed each night.
Take two.
Observation. His body is numb.
There. That’s better. That’s testable. That’s falsifiable. Any day he’s distinguishing himself from Freud is a good day.
He squeezes the spikes, the rounded points digged sharply into his skin.
Hypothesis. If his body is numb due to the Speed Force, then he will no longer be in the correct timeline.
If, then, baby. Wally’s favorite sentence structure since third grade and kinda-sorta the reason he blew up his uncle’s garage.
Okay. Testable. His other hand clenches around his phone.
Experiment. Check the temporal, geographic, and multiversal data on his device.
Sort of a naturalistic observation, technically. But hey, if those can get published in fucking Nature, then they’re good enough to challenge the anxiety buzzing in his skull.
Okay. He does another deep breath, just to prove he can. Nitrogen, with its one fewer proton, coats the upper reaches of his lungs while oxygen tumbles lower through his alveoli. A couple moles of argon, heavier still, tickle at the base of his lungs.
He peels his eyes open and brings his trembling hand into view.
His phone, like any good piece of haptic-enabled technology, lights up. It’s a little before 2:00 PM.
He swipes up with his thumb and pretends the keratin in his nail doesn’t dissolve into yellow fractals. The facial ID unlocks and he’s brought immediately to a page of tracking data.
Babs coded it, a readable display of his current time, location, and multiverse, plus a daily digest at the bottom. Today, he’s been to Gotham, Keystone, and Sydney. He hasn’t slipped multiverses once. His timeline has remained stable.
Record. Note the lack of SF activity.
He presses down on the power and upper volume button of his phone. A little notification dings on the top fourth of the screen.
Report created, it states innocently.
There. A little more data to add to Barry’s model of SF activity. More evidence that the draining call of the Force is all in his head. Hurrah.
Already, the tingling has started to abate. His fingers and toes are still numb, but numb is better than vibrating out of control. He breathes and doesn’t feel like his next inhale will be shattered apart into an entropic haze of acceleration.
Analyze. Probably, there wasn’t a surge in Speed here just now. Probably, he didn’t stir up the SF by taking Dick on a date down under. And probably, the spinning, ringing disorientation will diminish into nothingness. Until the next time the fizzling light at his periphery seeps into his vision.
On the smooth rubber counter in front of him, his centrifuge slows to a stop. There’s a soft ding and the lid pops open.
He stares at it a moment. He… needs to deal with that. If his hands are shaking too much to properly pipette the density-sorted molecules, then he should at least put it in the chiller and page a lab tech to come do it. He needs to attend to the mass spec results anyway. But first.
Share Results. Dick gets a notification on his phone when he logs SF events, but science communication is Wally’s passion.
He exits the tracking app and navigates to his texts with Dick. He missed one.
Boy Wonder <3
Lmk when you get back to work!
He gives it a quick thumbs up, then types out:
Me
Can you pick me up from the Gotham ZT after class?
He schedules an Uber for five minutes after his shift ends. It takes a few tries as feeling sporadically returns. It’s a grueling thirty minute drive to the zeta-tube straddling Central and Keystone and today, Wally looks forward to slow.
He gets a response back as he’s puffing out a new pair of blue plastic gloves.
Boy Wonder <3
Im covering for Lanas 7pm class 2nite :(
I can send a WE driver?
I'm sry Walls
A bit of the numbness creeps into his heart, but he dismisses it. Dick only picks up classes when he believes all of his loved ones are having good days. And Wally was, for the record, having a good day.
Just. Not anymore.
Me
No worries, have fun with the oldies
WE driver would be great, I’ll see you after class?
Does Damian know you won’t be at dinner?
He hopes so. Damian tolerates Wally. Or, the displays of competency with his emotional support knife seems decreasingly murder-assassin-fury and increasingly testing-stepkid-uncertainty.
Right now, he’ll take a stab wound over the flooding chills that accompany tapping into the Force. He doesn’t think they’re yet at the point where he can just tell Damian he’s not in the mood for play stabs.
Boy Wonder <3
D knows, he will b on his best behavior, promise!!
Love you
Cuddles in ur future <333
He pockets his phone and the fidget he’s kept tucked in hand, even as he types. There are red imprints dotting his palm, but he didn’t break skin. Lashing yellow light flickers at the edges of his vision. He ignores it.