Archive of Our Own

Dick had a working theory that concussions were truth serum with a two-hour half-life— which made him very hard to compliment sincerely, since most of a given week's compliments came from patients who, an hour earlier, hadn't been able to say what year it was.

"Guardrail, single vehicle, driver conscious and talking," dispatch said, in the flat recitation voice they all used, the one that made a car folded around a piece of Blüdhaven infrastructure sound like a grocery list. "PD's already got a unit slowing traffic. Engine's en route."

"Talking a lot or talking a little?" Donna asked, taking the exit ramp at the speed that made Dick's coffee attempt to relocate to the dashboard.

"Unable to specify," dispatch said, and Donna made a face at the radio like it had personally disappointed her.

"That's not an answer," she said, to Dick, not to dispatch, because dispatch didn't have to live with her opinions and Dick did.

"You said the same thing about 'minor bleeding' last month."

"Minor bleeding isn't a real category. Bleeding is bleeding. Either the person needs a bandage or they need a surgeon, there's no meaningful middle tier, and I will die on this hill." Donna eased them into the merge lane, checked her mirror, and shot him a look that had nothing to do with traffic. "You're quiet. You didn't finish your coffee."

"I'm awake."

"You're awake and quiet, which for you means you're either thinking about the Alvarez call from Wednesday or you didn't sleep, and I already know it's not Alvarez, because you stopped bringing that one up two days ago."

"I don't sleep well before day shift. You know this."

"I do know this," Donna agreed, in the tone of a woman filing information for later use, and let it go, because the exit was coming up and there wasn't time to push it further. Not with a guardrail and a possibly-talkative stranger waiting at the other end of the ramp.

"Everything's a category if you dispatch it enough times," Dick said, watching the road unspool, the guardrail already visible from four hundred feet out, silver where the paint had scraped off, and behind it the shape of a car that had clearly had a worse morning than either of them.

It was an old Trans Am. Dick clocked that before he clocked anything else about the scene, which said something about growing up around Alfred's car magazines that he chose not to examine too closely. A '78 or close to it, dark green under a coat of road dust, the kind of car that had been somebody's project for a long time before it became somebody's mistake for one bad second. The front end had eaten most of the impact. The guardrail had held, mostly, which was the good news; the hood had folded up like a shrimp, which was the less good news, and a thin ribbon of steam was still climbing off the radiator into the cold morning air, backlit orange by the sun coming up over the on-ramp.

Roy's engine was already there, which meant Roy was already there, standing by the pumper with his arms crossed and his turnout coat open over a T-shirt, looking at the scene with the specific unimpressed patience of a man who had been dispatched for a car fire and found a car that was, at most, mildly annoyed about its situation.

"Smoke," Roy said, when Dick and Donna came around the rig with the jump bag and the board, "was radiator steam. I want that on record. I want it on record that I stood here for six minutes waiting for a fire that was never going to happen, because apparently 'smoke from the engine compartment' means something different to civilians than it means to the department."

"Log it as a win," Donna said. "Nobody's on fire. That's a good morning by our standards."

"It's a good morning by anybody's standards," Roy said, and jerked his chin toward the car. "Driver's stable. Airbag deployed, seatbelt did its job, he's talking— talking a lot, if we're using dispatch's very precise scale— and PD says he swerved for a dog. No dog casualties reported. Dog, from what I can tell, is fine and elsewhere."

"He's talking a lot?" Dick repeated, filing it, and went around to the driver's side, because that was the job, and because a car that had eaten a guardrail at whatever speed the skid marks suggested didn't get to be a person before it got to be a patient, whatever the patient turned out to be like once Dick got the door open.

The door was already ajar— first responder on scene, a patrol officer, had gotten that far and then, by the look of it, decided that further intervention was above his pay grade — and Dick crouched into the gap with the flashlight already up, doing the count that had stopped being a conscious count somewhere around year three of the job: airbag deployed and sagging, cabin intact, no fluid where fluid shouldn't be, patient upright, patient's eyes already on him.

"Oh, thank God," the driver said, with the particular fervor of a man greeting a rescue helicopter, and then, immediately, in the exact same tone, without a beat of transition, "you're so pretty."

Dick had heard this before. Dick had heard variations of this so many times that he had, at one point, kept an informal tally on the inside of a locker door until Donna made him take it down for being unprofessional, which was fair, because the tally had included a category for marriage proposals and a subcategory for marriage proposals that specified a preferred venue. Head injuries did this. The part of the brain that filtered a thought before it became a sentence took the hit along with everything else, and what came out afterward was whatever had been sitting closest to the surface— which in Dick's professional experience was, overwhelmingly, unfiltered horniness or unfiltered fear, sometimes both, sometimes in the same sentence.

He clocked it, filed it, moved past it, the way he moved past all of it.

"Hi," Dick said instead, using the flat warm voice that worked on fear and drunkenness and on anyone whose brain had just been rattled hard enough to skip the small talk. "My name's Dick, I'm an EMT. Can you tell me your name?"

"Wally," the man said. "Wally West. You have— I'm gonna be real specific here, because I think specificity matters in a medical context— you have the nicest eyes I've ever personally witnessed, and I say that professionally, as a guy who's seen a lot of eyes, because eye contact is huge in my industry."

"What's your industry?" Dick asked, mostly to keep him talking while the flashlight did its circuit— pupils: even, responsive, a good sign— and because the redirect worked better than a correction did, nine times out of ten, with head injuries. Let them talk. Let the talking tell you what shape the injury was.

"Cars," Wally said. "I fix cars. Fixed this one, actually, most of it, it's a whole— it's a long project. It's my— okay, don't take this the wrong way, but I think I might have wrecked my own car, which is extremely embarrassing given my job, and I need you to not put that in a report anywhere my boss can see it."

"I don't have a box on the form for embarrassing," Dick said, and started the assessment properly — hands first, the visible ones, checking for the obvious, then working up. Wally's hands were exactly what Dick would have expected from a man who'd just told him his profession before Dick asked: broad, calloused across the base of the fingers, a permanent gray undertone worked into the knuckles that no amount of soap got out, one thumbnail black from an old injury that had nothing to do with this morning. There was a shirt under the open jacket with a patch stitched over the pocket — ALLEN & WEST AUTO, in faded thread, and under it, smaller, WALLY, which meant Dick didn't even have to ask twice, the shirt had already told him.

"You have a Wally on your shirt," Dick said. "That's convenient."

"That's so I don't forget it," Wally said, entirely straight-faced, and then ruined the delivery by laughing at his own joke half a second later, wincing when the laugh moved something in his ribs that didn't want to be moved. "Ow. Okay. That one cost me. Worth it, though. You laughed."

"I didn't laugh."

"You almost laughed. I could see it building. It was right there, behind your eyes, which, again, incredible eyes, I want that on the record too, next to the part where I definitely don't have amnesia and definitely know what day it is."

"What day is it?"

"...Okay, see, that's a trick question, because I know what day it should be, which is Thursday, but I also just hit a piece of highway infrastructure with my car, so my confidence in my own Thursday-based reasoning is currently at, I'd say, sixty percent, which I feel like is actually a pretty reasonable place for my confidence to be, given the circumstances, and I want partial credit for the self-awareness."

Dick did, in fact, almost laugh. He caught it before it reached his face, mostly, the way he caught most things before they reached his face, and moved the flashlight to Wally's temple, where a bruise was already starting to come up dark under the skin; close enough to the hairline that it would be an easy thing to miss if you weren't looking.

"It's Thursday," Dick said. "Sixty percent was generous. You get full credit."

"See, I knew I liked you," Wally said, like this had settled something important, and then, immediately, wincing again as Dick's fingers found the edge of the bruise, "ow, okay, that's — that's the spot, that's the spot right there, that's where the airbag and my face had a disagreement."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, you're being incredibly gentle about it, this is like the nicest anyone's ever touched my face, and I include in that comparison an ex-girlfriend who is an investigative journalist and decided my face needed to be investigated for pimples to pop every night."

Behind Dick, close enough that he didn't have to raise his voice to be heard, Roy said, to nobody in particular, in the tone of a man narrating a nature documentary, "He's not stopping."

"He's not going to stop," Donna agreed, arriving with the board and setting it down where Dick could reach it, and then, to Dick specifically, with the particular delight of a woman who had been waiting three years for exactly this scenario to happen to her partner, "Grayson. You're blushing."

"I'm not blushing. It's cold."

"It's fifty-eight degrees and you're wearing three layers."

"It's cold in the specific spot where I'm currently blushing, allegedly," Dick said, which was not a sentence that held up under any scrutiny at all. Donna's face did the thing it did when she was storing something away for later use against him, filed under a folder Dick knew for a fact existed and dreaded the eventual opening of.

"I'm just saying," Wally said, to Donna, apparently delighted to have an audience now, "objectively. As a data point. He is blushing. I'm not hallucinating that, right? Because if I'm hallucinating that, that seems like a symptom you'd want to know about."

"You're not hallucinating it," Donna said. "He does this."

"I do not do this," Dick said, which was a lie, and everyone in a forty-foot radius including the patient with the freshly rattled brain seemed to know it was a lie, which was its own kind of professional low point.

He got the collar on— Wally kept up a running commentary through the entire process, most of it about the collar being "very restrictive, in a way I feel like we should discuss, later, over dinner, hypothetically"— and started the rest of the exam with the specific efficiency of a man trying to outrun his own ears going red. Pupils, even and reactive. Grip strength, equal on both sides, which ruled out the scarier categories of bad news. No slurred speech, though there was an argument to be made that Wally's speech had never, in his life, not been slightly too fast for the average human ear to fully process, concussion or otherwise. Ribs bruised, not broken, best Dick could tell without imaging— the seatbelt had done exactly what it was supposed to do, which meant a week of Wally complaining every time he laughed too hard, which, given the last four minutes, was going to be often.

"Count backward from a hundred for me. By sevens."

"Is this a real test or are you just trying to get free math out of me while I'm compromised?" Wally said, but he did it— ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two— slow, careful, stumbling once around fifty-eight and correcting himself before Dick had to say anything. "See, this is what I mean about your bedside manner. Most people would just ask who the president is. That's the lazy version of this test. You're making me actually work for my competency rating, and I respect that."

"Who's the president?"

"Oh, come on, I just did math out loud on a public highway."

"Humor me."

Wally told him—correctly, promptly—and then added an unsolicited two-sentence opinion on federal transportation infrastructure funding that Dick let run exactly as long as it took to finish wrapping the blood pressure cuff before he redirected.

"Neurologically sound and politically opinionated," Dick said. "Noted."

"I contain multitudes. Also, I really do think the interstate system's a mess, that part wasn't the head talking, that's just, like, a professional opinion, cars fall apart faster on bad roads, I see the evidence of it every week."

"Any pain in your neck? Your back?"

"A little in my neck. Not bad. I've had worse from sleeping wrong, which, for context, I sleep extremely wrong, I fall asleep sitting up on the couch like four nights a week, my roommate's stopped commenting on it."

"Okay. We're going to move you slow, keep your neck steady, and I need you to tell me if anything sharpens up while we do it. Can you do that for me?"

"I can do anything for you," Wally said, immediate, sincere, the kind of sincere that made it worse than the jokes, "I want that clearly established before we go any further into this professional relationship."

"Noted," Dick said, and got a hand under his shoulder, and did not examine, at all, the way his own pulse had picked up a little at the word relationship, because that was a stupid thing to have a reaction to, from a man he'd known for six minutes, a man who was currently operating at maybe sixty percent Thursday.

The move to the board went clean— Wally hissed once, at the ribs, and Dick slowed immediately, and Wally said, through his teeth, "no, keep going, I trust you, your hands feel like you've caught people falling before. Is that a weird thing to say? That's probably a weird thing to say, I blame the head."

Dick's hands did not so much as pause. His face gave nothing away. Internally, something in his chest did a small, private, entirely unprofessional flip, because it was not, actually, a weird thing to say, it was an extremely specific thing to say, and nobody had ever said it to him before, not in this context, not from a stranger strapped to a backboard with a head injury he'd inflicted on himself swerving for a dog.

"Almost there," Dick said, instead of any of that.

They got him strapped, got him level, got the gurney under him and locked, and the whole time Wally kept talking — about the dog, mostly, a golden retriever mix that had bolted out from between two parked cars with no warning and no leash and no apparent understanding of the concept of oncoming traffic, and Wally's voice went soft and a little wrecked when he talked about it, in a way none of the flirting had. I couldn't just hit it, man, it was somebody's dog, it had a collar, and Dick filed that too, in a different folder than the one Donna was building, the one that had started, against his better judgment.

"You did the right thing," Dick said. "The dog's fine. Officer confirmed it ran off toward the shopping center, looked unhurt."

"Yeah?" Something in Wally's face eased, real relief, the kind that didn't perform for anybody. "Okay. Okay, good. That's — okay. Worth the car, then. Worth the ribs."

"Not worth the concussion," Dick said. "You've got one. Mild, probably— you're tracking fine, pupils are even, but you're going to want imaging to rule out anything worse, and someone's going to need to watch you tonight."

"That an offer?"

"It's a medical recommendation."

"Doesn't have to be mutually exclusive," Wally said, and grinned up at him, gauze already taped over the cut at his hairline, road dust and airbag powder still ghosted pale across one cheekbone, and Dick — who had spent four years developing an immunity to exactly this kind of thing, who had a professional distance he maintained the way other people maintained a credit score— felt the immunity do something structurally unsound.

"Hold still," Dick said, checking the straps a final time, "or I'm leaving you here for Roy's guys to deal with, and Roy's guys don't have my bedside manner."

"That true, Roy?" Wally called, craning as much as the collar allowed, toward Roy, who was coiling a hose line with the specific disinterest of a man who had checked out of this conversation four minutes ago.

"We'd leave you on the guardrail," Roy said, without looking up. "As a warning to other drivers."

"See, this is why I like him better," Wally said, meaning Dick, tipping his head back down, and then, catching Dick's eye, going for broke in a way that suggested he'd been building to it the entire time, saving it, "hey — if I don't make it —"

"You're going to make it. You have a mild concussion and bruised ribs."

"— if I don't make it," Wally said, undeterred, "I want you to know that you better pray to whatever god you believe in, because I'm coming back to haunt you specifically, and I'm going to be an extremely charming ghost. It's going to be very annoying for you."

"You're not dying, West."

"You say that now," Wally said, and then, quieter, the fast patter of it slowing down for just a second, something almost soft under the joke, "but if I did — if I thought there was a god, any god, I'd think you were the closest thing to an angel I've ever met. So. Just. On the record. In case the imaging says otherwise."

Donna, three feet away, made a sound like a woman biting down on a laugh so hard it came out through her nose. Roy said, to the hose line, "oh my God," with the exhausted despair of a man watching a car crash happen in slow motion for a second time that morning, this one social instead of vehicular.

"I'm just saying what's true," Wally said, unbothered, entirely earnest, the earnestness somehow worse than if he'd been performing it. "You can be annoyed about it, doesn't make it not true."

"I'm not annoyed. I'm tired. There's a difference. I've watched you flirt with this man for eleven straight minutes with a head wound and I have gained several new gray hairs in real time."

"Grief does that," Wally said, sagely, "to bystanders. It's a whole process. You'll get through it."

"I'm calling this in as a second casualty," Roy told Donna. "Put me down for one guardrail, one wrecked Trans Am, and one firefighter's will to live."

Dick did not say anything for a second, because there was nothing in his professional vocabulary built for this. No line in the protocol for a stranger just called you an angel while strapped to a backboard and you have to now put him in an ambulance and drive him to a hospital and never see him again, and the silence went on a beat too long, long enough that Wally's grin faltered, just slightly, like he thought he'd overplayed it.

"Too much?" Wally said. "I do that. Overplay things. It's a documented pattern."

"No," Dick said, and it came out more honest than he meant it to, low enough that it probably only carried to Wally, and he covered it fast by reaching for the gurney rail. "Let's get you to the truck."

They loaded him— Roy helping with the ramp, wordless, still shaking his head slightly— and Dick did the final check of the straps before he climbed in after him, and it was in that window, the three or four seconds where Dick was leaning over him to confirm the shoulder strap was seated right, that Wally moved. Not fast— nothing about him right now was fast, not with the ribs and the collar— but deliberate, his hand coming up from where it had been resting on his own chest, something small and white pinched between two fingers, and before Dick fully registered what was happening, Wally had tucked it into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket, patting it once, flat, like he was closing a filing cabinet.

"There," Wally said, satisfied, settling back against the board. "Now it's official."

"What did you just do?"

"Gave you my number. Card's from the shop, I write my cell on the back of a stack of them, keep 'em in my jacket for referrals, very professional, very normal thing to carry around— and before you say anything, I know this looks like I planned it, and I want to be clear that I did plan it, the second you said your name was Dick, I thought, that man's getting my number before this ambulance ride is over, concussion or no concussion. Priorities."

"You could've just asked."

"You'd have said no to my face. Politely. Very kindly. In a way that would've made it worse, honestly, the kindness, I can take a regular no, I cannot take a nice no." Wally's eyes were already starting to lose the fight with whatever the adrenaline was doing on its way out, blinking slower, the words coming a little further apart. "This way you don't have to say anything. You just — have it. And you can do whatever you want with it. No pressure. I just wanted you to have the option."

Dick reached up, automatic, and felt the small stiff rectangle sitting against his chest through the fabric, and did not take it out, not then, with Wally watching him with the open, unguarded, slightly concussed hope of a man who'd just done something he clearly considered very brave.

"Get some rest," Dick said instead, which was not an answer, and pulled the doors shut behind him.

The ride to Blüdhaven General took eleven minutes, and Wally spent most of them narrating — the dog again, a second pass, more detail this time, the specific shade of gold its coat had been in the headlights, the way it had looked back once before it kept running, like it knew — and then, somewhere around the halfway mark, the adrenaline finally started losing its grip on him in earnest, his sentences slowing, the gaps between them stretching, until he trailed off mid-thought about whether golden retrievers had a natural sense of gratitude and didn't finish it.

"Hey," Dick said, watching the monitor, watching him. "Stay with me. Eyes open."

"'M awake," Wally said, eyes opening halfway, finding him. "Just— resting 'em. Not the same as sleeping. I know the difference. Tested me on it already."

"I know you're awake. I need you to stay that way for four more minutes."

"You could talk to me. Keep me interested. I respond well to a good voice." A ghost of the grin came back, fainter than before, worn thin at the edges by however many minutes it had been since the impact. "Tell me something. Anything. Don't care what."

Dick, against every instinct that had kept him professionally silent through four years of transports, found himself talking— nothing that mattered, the weather forecast for the weekend, a bridge closure on the west side that was about to make everyone's commute worse, the fact that Donna had a dog of her own, a mutt named Comet who'd once eaten an entire birthday cake off a counter and lived to regret it— and Wally listened with his eyes half shut and a small, satisfied, half-conscious smile, like Dick's voice was doing exactly the job he'd asked it to do.

They pulled into the bay at Blüdhaven General with four minutes to spare on Dick's own count, and the doors opened onto the fast, practiced chaos of a handoff— a nurse and a resident already moving to meet the gurney, taking the numbers Dick called out in the same flat shorthand he'd used all morning, the story of Wally West compressed down into vitals and a mechanism of injury and a Glasgow score, everything that had happened in the ambulance folded away into the parts of it that mattered for the chart.

"Hey," Wally said, as they wheeled him through the doors, catching Dick's sleeve for half a second before a nurse's hand replaced Dick's at the rail, "you're not coming?"

"Not my department past this point," Dick said. "You're in good hands. Better hands, probably."

"Doubt that," Wally said, already being pulled down the hall, already smaller in the distance, and then, raising his voice enough to carry over the noise of the ward, "hey — thank you. For real. Not the flirting version. The real version."

"You're welcome," Dick called back, and meant it, and stood there a second too long after the doors swung shut behind the gurney, before Donna's hand landed on his shoulder and steered him back toward the rig.

—

The card stayed in the pocket the entire drive back to the station. It stayed there through the walk to the rig, where Donna was already leaning against the door with her arms crossed and an expression Dick had learned, over three years of partnership, to actively dread.

"So," she said.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say a full paragraph. I could see it building. Like a system."

"I was going to ask," Donna said, entirely too pleased with herself, "whether you're planning on calling the very nice, very concussed man who is currently, somewhere in that building, telling every nurse on shift about your eyes."

"He does not know my eyes well enough to be discussing them with strangers."

"He told me your eyes were, quote, 'the specific blue of a swimming pool at the good kind of resort,' before we even got him loaded," Donna said. "I have never once, in three years, seen you get flustered on a call. I watched you talk a man off an overpass without your voice changing pitch. I watched you set your own dislocated finger without a sound. And this one gets you blushing over a joke."

"He's a patient," Dick said, which was true, and also, somehow, the least relevant fact in the entire conversation, and he knew it as he said it, from the way Donna's eyebrows did something slow and unimpressed.

"Was a patient. Present tense, he's a guy with a business card—"

"His card. In my pocket."

"—his card, in your pocket, which he put there specifically so that stopped being your excuse," Donna said, climbing up into the cab, calling the last of it back over her shoulder with the easy cheer of a woman who knew she'd already won. "You're going to sit on that thing for six weeks and think of eleven reasons not to use it, and then you're going to complain to me about how nothing good ever happens to you, and I am telling you right now, Grayson, I will have zero sympathy."

"Six weeks is oddly specific."

"I've known you three years. I know your timelines." Donna started the engine, checked the mirror, pulled them out onto the road with the easy competence of a woman who'd had this exact argument with herself, once, about someone else, a long time ago, and lost. "You did this with the gym membership. You did this with the apartment upstairs when it opened up and you wanted the better light. You sit on good things until they stop being options, and then you tell yourself the sitting was a choice."

"That's not fair."

"It's extremely fair, that's why you're mad about it."

She wasn't wrong. That was the worst part. Dick pulled the card out of his pocket somewhere around the second red light, and looked at it — a plain shop card, ALLEN & WEST AUTO REPAIR printed across the top in a font that had probably been chosen in the two thousands and never revisited, an address on Kane Street, and on the back, in handwriting that slanted hard to the right and got progressively less steady toward the end of the digits, a phone number and, underneath it, in smaller letters, ask for wally (there's only one).

"He's got nice handwriting," Donna observed, glancing over at the light. 

"You're not helping your own case by making him sound more charming."

"I'm not trying to help my case. I'm trying to help yours. There's a difference, and the difference is you're the one who's going to be sad about this in a month if you don't do anything."

He put it back in the pocket. He did not call.

He told himself it was the ethics of it— you didn't date patients, or you shouldn't, there was a whole conversation to be had about power dynamics and vulnerability and a man meeting you at the single worst, most disoriented moment of his week, and Dick believed every word of that argument, mostly, in the parts of his brain that weren't currently replaying your hands feel like you've caught people falling before on a loop he couldn't seem to shut off.

He told himself it was probably just the head injury talking. People said things on concussions they'd never say sober— Dick had years of evidence for that, a whole informal, now-banned tally to prove it— and there was no way to know, watching a man laugh through bruised ribs at his own jokes about ghosts, whether any of it would have survived contact with a normal day and a clear head. Maybe Wally West woke up tomorrow, imaging clear, head steady, and looked back on the whole ambulance ride with the horror of a man remembering, in detail, everything he'd said to a stranger while not entirely in command of his own mouth.

The card sat in the jacket pocket for six weeks, exactly as Donna had predicted, through more evenings than Dick wanted to count where he took his phone out and set it down again, through a shift change where he transferred the jacket to a different hook and, without deciding to, moved the card with it. Roy, who had seen the whole handoff happen from six feet away, made a point of asking after it every third shift or so— still not called the ghost guy? Bold strategy— with the relentlessness of a man who considered himself, against all evidence, subtle. Dick weathered it the way he weathered most things, with a flat look and a change of subject, and the card stayed exactly where it was, unmoved by any of them, a small stiff rectangle in a pocket he checked more often than he would have admitted under oath.

He did not call. He told himself all the reasons why, in order, on a rotating basis, and none of them were the real one, and the real one— small, stupid, entirely un-Dick-Grayson— was that some private, guarded part of him had liked being called an angel by a stranger who meant it, and was afraid of what it would mean to find out he hadn't.

—

Wally had a working theory that the universe kept a ledger, and that most of what looked like bad luck was actually the universe front-loading a debt it planned to collect on later, with interest, at a moment specifically designed to be maximally humiliating.

He'd been thinking about the EMT for six weeks. Not constantly— he had a job, he had a life, he had a roommate who'd started charging him a dollar every time he brought up "the ambulance guy" unprompted, and Wally owed him, at last count, upward of forty dollars— but often enough that it counted as a pattern, often enough that Linda at the parts counter had started calling him "Angel Boy" as a greeting, which he deeply regretted ever explaining.

He'd told Linda the whole thing the second week back, mostly because she'd asked why he kept staring at his phone like it had personally wronged him, and he'd figured the short version would take thirty seconds and get her off his back. The short version had taken eleven minutes, by Linda's own count, and had included a full physical reenactment of the card-plant using a torque wrench as a stand-in prop, and Linda had listened to the entire thing with her arms crossed and her eyebrows climbing steadily higher until, at the end, she'd said, flatly, "You told a paramedic he had angel eyes while he was trying to check if you had a brain bleed.” 

Wally had said, "when you say it like that it sounds bad."

She’d responded with, "There's no way to say it that doesn't sound like that, Wally, that's just what happened," and that had been the birth of Angel Boy, a nickname Wally had tried and failed to retire at least four separate times since.

The thing was, he'd done everything right. He'd been smooth. As smooth as a man could be strapped to a spinal board with airbag dust on his face— which admittedly set a low bar, but within that bar, he'd been smooth. He'd gotten the card in the pocket clean, no fumbling, a good plant, the kind of move he'd have been proud of even stone sober. He'd said the angel thing and meant every word of it, and the guy— Dick, Dick, a name Wally had turned over in his head roughly four thousand times since, in a way that was probably unhealthy— hadn't laughed it off or looked uncomfortable. He'd gone quiet. He'd gone quiet the way a man goes quiet when something has actually landed, and then he'd said let's get you to the truck like a man buying himself time, and Wally had let himself believe, for the whole ambulance ride and most of the ER visit after, that the silence meant something good.

Nobody called.

Six weeks. Wally had counted, not because he was keeping score exactly, but because Dick's card had a matching twin in Wally's own memory now — the number he'd written down, the way he'd started half-reaching for his phone on slow nights at the shop before catching himself, the small stupid hope that flared every time an unfamiliar number came through and died every time it turned out to be a warranty scam or Linda's sister asking about a quote.

"You're doing the face again," Linda said, from behind the parts counter, not looking up from the invoice she was stapling. "The staring-at-the-bay-door face. It's very sad. It's affecting shop morale."

"I don't have a face."

"You have several faces, and that one's the worst one. Worse than the face you make when someone brings in a car they clearly haven't changed the oil in since you were born."

"That face is justified. That's a professional face. I'm allowed that face." Wally wiped his hands on the rag hanging off his belt and went back to the sedan on the lift, mostly to have somewhere to point his eyes that wasn't the parking lot, where he had, in fact, been watching the road with the low-grade, humiliating hope that a specific kind of person might drive down it. "The bay door face is different. The bay door face is just— normal thinking. About normal things."

"You've had the same normal thought for a month and a half."

"It's a good thought. It's allowed to recur."

The Trans Am — his, the one that had started this whole thing — sat in the back corner of the lot, tarped, still not roadworthy, still waiting for parts Wally hadn't ordered because ordering them felt like admitting the whole incident was over; filed, done, no follow-up coming. He'd towed it here himself the day after the hospital released him, imaging clear, a headache that lingered for four days and a bruise across his ribs that turned three different colors before it settled on a sickly yellow-green, and every time he walked past the tarp he thought about a hand on his shoulder and a voice saying hold still like it meant something more than the words on their own.

He'd told himself all the reasons Dick hadn't called, in rotation, on slow nights. Maybe there was a rule. Cops had rules about that kind of thing— dating people they'd pulled over— and it stood to reason EMTs had something similar, some ethics course about not hitting on people at their most vulnerable, which, fair, Wally could respect a rule like that even while resenting it personally. Maybe the eyes thing had been a bridge too far, maybe nobody wanted to be complimented by a man who couldn't confidently name the day of the week. Maybe— and this was the one Wally circled back to most, the one that actually kept him up some nights— maybe none of it had landed the way Wally remembered it landing, because Wally had a head injury and an unreliable memory of exactly how charming he'd actually been versus how charming he'd felt, and it was entirely possible the whole ride had looked, from the outside, less like a meet-cute and more like a man rambling at his own rescuer out of concussed desperation.

He was elbow-deep in a stubborn oil filter, cursing it in the specific low mutter he reserved for filters that had clearly been installed by someone with a personal vendetta against future mechanics, when the bell over the shop door rang and Linda called back, "customer, tire change, says he's got an appointment," and Wally straightened up, wiped his hands, and came around the sedan already halfway into his customer-service voice— the one that was warmer than his regular voice, less profanity, more eye contact— and lost about half his higher brain function on the spot.

Dick Grayson was standing at the parts counter in jeans and a plain gray Henley; out of uniform, out of context, out of every mental file Wally had built around him in six weeks of low-grade obsessive reconstruction, and he looked — Wally's brain, notoriously fast, went completely and totally still for a second — he looked better, somehow, off duty, without the radio clipped to his collar and the flashlight and the professional flatness he'd worn like armor at the scene. He looked like a person instead of a competency. He had a coffee in one hand and car keys in the other and an expression that suggested he hadn't clocked Wally yet, was just standing there reading a wall of tire brand posters with the patient, faintly bored look of a man waiting for someone to help him.

"Oh my God," Wally said, out loud, to the shop at large, before he'd fully decided to say anything.

Dick's head turned. Recognition happened on his face in real time, a fast sequence— confusion, then something clicking, then his whole expression rearranging itself around it, eyebrows up, mouth opening slightly, and for one shining second Wally got to watch Dick Grayson be exactly as thrown as Wally currently was, which felt, honestly, like the first fair thing that had happened to either of them since the guardrail.

"You," Dick said.

"Me," Wally agreed. "Hi. Hello. This is— okay, I need a second, because six weeks of thinking about this exact scenario did not prepare me for it actually happening, I had a whole— I want it on the record that I had contingency plans for this, several, ranked by likelihood, and none of them accounted for you owning a car that needs tires from my specific shop, which, statistically, out of every tire shop in Blüdhaven—"

"It's the closest one to my apartment," Dick said. "I didn't — I wasn't tracking you down. I want that clear. This is a genuine coincidence. I didn’t even look at the sign."

"Are you sure? Because the universe has a ledger, and I feel like this might be a payout."

"A ledger?"

"It's a whole theory, I'll walk you through it over the tire change, we've got time, four tires is a solid forty-five minutes even with me going fast, which I do, I go fast, it's kind of my whole thing." Wally became abruptly, painfully aware that he was talking exactly the way he'd talked in the ambulance, the unfiltered fire-hose version of himself, and there was no concussion this time to hide behind — no excuse, no the head injury made me do it, just Wally West, fully conscious, still doing this. "Sorry. I do that. Talk. A lot. Usually there's a medical reason and this time there isn't, so, you're just getting the raw version, unfiltered, I apologize in advance."

"I remember," Dick said, and something in the corner of his mouth was fighting a losing battle against a smile. "You didn't stop talking for the entire ride to the hospital."

"Did I embarrass myself? Be honest. I've had six weeks to wonder and nobody who was there will give me a straight answer. Linda's sister works with your partner's cousin or something insane like that, small city, and all I got secondhand was 'he made an impression,' which could mean anything. That's not information, that's a threat."

Dick considered this, visibly, turning the coffee cup a quarter turn in his hand, and Wally watched him decide something, watched the decision land somewhere around the set of his shoulders.

"You called me an angel," Dick said. "And then told me to pray to whatever god I believed in, in the same conversation, in that order, which even for a concussion is a fairly aggressive theological pivot."

"Okay, in my defense—"

"I'm not finished. You also complimented my eyes four separate times, using four different comparisons, one of which involved a swimming pool, and you told a firefighter I was better than him to his face while strapped to a backboard, and then, on your way into the ambulance, you planted a business card in my uniform pocket like a — I don't even have a comparison for what that was. A magician. A pickpocket working in reverse."

"That's fair, actually. I workshopped that move. I'm proud of that move."

"I know you're proud of it. You told me you were proud of it. In the moment."

"Did it work, though? That's the real question. Did the move work?" Wally leaned a hip against the counter, arms crossed, going for casual and landing somewhere closer to a man bracing for impact. "I ask because you never called, and I've spent six weeks constructing an entire mythology around why, and I would genuinely love to know if any of my theories were correct— purely for intellectual satisfaction, purely academic."

Dick was quiet for a second, and it was the same quiet from the ambulance— Wally recognized it now, could name it now that he wasn't watching it through a haze of adrenaline and Thursday-based uncertainty— the quiet of a man deciding whether to say the true thing or the safe thing.

"I kept the card," Dick said. "I want that on the record, since we're apparently doing a record today. It's still in my jacket. I moved it to a different jacket at one point, on purpose, which is more effort than I put into most things I've decided not to do."

"That's not nothing."

"It's not nothing," Dick agreed. "I told myself it wasn't a good idea. Professionally. You'd had a head injury, you met me at— statistically, probably the worst hour of your month, and there's an argument that anything you said in that ambulance doesn't count, that it wasn't really you talking, it was the adrenaline and the swelling and the general chaos of having just hit a guardrail."

"And now?"

"Now you've said basically the same things to me completely sober, in a tire shop, with full recall of an event you clearly remember in more detail than I expected," Dick said, and the corner of his mouth finally lost the fight, tipped up into something real, "which suggests it probably was you talking, the whole time. Which is — " he stopped, shook his head slightly, like he was recalibrating something. "Which changes the math."

"See, I like this version of you. Ambulance you was very committed to the bit where you weren't affected by anything I said. This version's cracking."

"I'm not cracking."

"You're cracking a little. I can see it. I have a very good read on faces, it's a professional skill, you develop it working with customers who lie about how their car's been running." Wally pushed off the counter, gesturing toward the bay behind him, toward the lift and the tire rack and the sedan he'd abandoned mid-filter. "C'mon. Pull it around. I'll get you sorted, we'll keep talking, and you can watch me not have a head injury this time, which I think you'll find is a real upgrade, personality-wise. I'm charming even when I'm not concussed. It's actually the same amount of charming, arguably more, because now I have full control of the delivery."

—

Dick's car was a mid-size sedan, unremarkable, kept in the kind of order that came from a man who did his oil changes on schedule and never let a dashboard light sit unaddressed for more than a day, which tracked, given everything else Wally now knew about him. Wally pulled it into the bay, got it up on the lift, and started working the front tires while Dick hovered at the edge of the service area with his coffee, close enough to talk, far enough to stay technically out of the way, which was its own kind of information— a man who respected a workspace, who understood without being told that you didn't crowd somebody mid-job.

"So talk me through the ledger theory," Dick said, watching Wally work the lug nuts loose with the fast, unthinking competence of ten thousand repetitions.

"Okay, so, the basic premise is that the universe doesn't do coincidences, it does balancing," Wally said, warming to it immediately, because there were very few things he loved more than a captive audience for a theory he'd been developing alone, at 2 a.m., for years. "Like, I crash my car swerving for a dog, which is bad, but then the guy who shows up is objectively the best-looking human being I have ever personally witnessed with my own two eyes, which is the universe going, ‘okay, that one's rough, here's a consolation prize’. And then the consolation prize doesn't call, which feels like the universe reneging, except—" he pulled the tire free, set it against the rack, reached for the new one, "—except then, six weeks later, that exact same guy walks into my exact shop needing four new tires, no explanation, pure coincidence by his own admission, and I think that's the universe going, ‘okay, my bad, here's the actual payout, I was just running a little behind’."

"That's a lot of faith to put in tire wear patterns."

"It's not about the tires. The tires are incidental. It's about the timing." Wally torqued the new tire down, checked the pressure, moved to the next. "Think about it. Any other week, I've got somebody else on shift, or you've got somebody else's shop closer to your apartment, or your tires wear out three months from now instead of today. There's a version of this where we never see each other again. This is the version where we do. That's not nothing. That's the ledger balancing."

"Fine. Turnabout, then." Dick shifted his weight against the workbench, and there was something careful in how he said it, like he'd been holding the question for a while and was only now deciding it was safe to ask. "Did you think about it? The six weeks. Or was that just me?"

Wally straightened up from the tire, wrench still in hand, and looked at him properly for a second, weighing whether to deflect it into a joke or just answer it. "I thought about it every day," he said, finally, plain. "Not, like, in a normal amount. In a concerning amount. I towed my own car here the day I got discharged, and I still haven't ordered the parts for it because ordering the parts felt like admitting the whole thing was over. That's — I'm aware that's a strange metric. That's not a normal way to track a crush."

"It's not the strangest thing I've heard today."

"High bar, given the day you've had." Wally went back to the tire, mostly to have somewhere to put his hands that wasn't gesturing at Dick like an idiot. "But yeah. I thought about it. A lot. More than the situation probably warranted, considering we'd known each other for forty minutes and half of that was me not knowing what day it was."

"For what it's worth," Dick said, "you knew the day. You underestimated yourself."

"See, that's exactly the kind of thing you'd say that makes it worse. Now I'm going to think about that for six weeks."

Dick was quiet for a second, watching him work, and when Wally glanced up he found an expression on Dick's face that he hadn't catalogued yet in six weeks of cataloguing: something a little softer than the professional warmth from the ambulance, a little more unguarded than the amused deflection from ten minutes ago at the counter.

"For what it's worth," Dick said, "I don't actually believe in a ledger."

"Noted. Duly noted. It's a working theory, not a religion, I'm not asking you to convert."

"But I take your point about the timing."

"Do you?"

"I've replayed the ambulance ride more times than I'd like to admit," Dick said, and there it was again, the same fast-decided quality from before, a man choosing the true thing on purpose, in real time, in front of Wally. "I told myself I wasn't going to call because it wasn't fair to you — that a man with a head injury doesn't get to consent to being flirted with the same way a man without one does, and I still think there's something to that, generally, as a rule. But you've been standing in a tire shop for the last ten minutes saying the exact same things you said strapped to a board, with a completely clear head, and you clearly remember every word of it, which means the rule doesn't actually apply here anymore. There's no head injury left to hide behind. You'd have to want to say it."

"I do want to say it," Wally said, immediate, no hesitation, the kind of honesty that only came easy to him when the stakes were somehow simultaneously enormous and completely obvious. "I've wanted to say it for six weeks. I've been saying it to Linda, to my roommate, to a guy at the DMV who did not ask and did not care. I want it extremely on the record that none of that was the concussion. That was just me."

"Okay," Dick said.

"Okay?"

"That's useful information," Dick said, and Wally watched him fight, visibly, the same smile from before, losing again, worse this time. "I appreciate the clarity."

Wally finished the last tire in a silence that felt less like an ending and more like a held breath, torqued the final lug nut, wiped his hands on the rag at his belt, and lowered the lift with the practiced motion of a man who could do this part of his job with his eyes shut, which was good, because his eyes were mostly on Dick. On the way Dick had shifted his weight, on the coffee cup he'd stopped drinking from ten minutes ago and was just holding now, like a prop he'd forgotten the purpose of.

"So here's the thing," Wally said, once the car was back on four wheels and there was no more mechanical work standing between them and whatever came next. "I already tried the smooth version. The card, the angel line, the whole bit. And I stand by it, honestly, I think it was a great bit, I think about it fondly. But I was concussed, and you had a professional reason to not fully engage with it, and I get that, I respect that."

"Where's this going, Wally?"

"This time you’re not saving my life. I’m not strapped to a board. I've got full command of my faculties, ribs are healed, I know exactly what day it is without having to do math about it, and I am, as established, not concussed enough to fully embarrass myself, which is a real upgrade from six weeks ago, when I frankly did not have that going for me." Wally set the rag down, made himself hold still, made himself say it plain, no bit, no fast-talk cover, just the actual sentence. "Dick. Will you get dinner with me? For real this time. I'd like to take you somewhere that isn't a car accident."

The quiet that followed was shorter than the ambulance quiet had been, shorter than the quiet at the counter ten minutes ago, and Dick's face did the thing Wally had been chasing for six weeks without knowing it— went soft, unguarded, the professional flatness gone entirely, replaced by something that looked, against every instinct Wally had for reading a room, genuinely happy.

"Yes," Dick said. "I'd like that."

"Yeah?"

"You've asked me twice, in two different states of consciousness, and meant it both times," Dick said. "I think that's enough of a data point for even my ledger."

"I thought you didn't believe in the ledger."

"I'm coming around on it," Dick said, and reached into his jacket — a different jacket, Wally noticed, not the uniform one, a plain dark one he'd worn in off duty — and came out with the card. Wally's own handwriting, a little faded at the crease where it had lived for six weeks, folded once, unfolded, held between two fingers the way Wally had held it going in the other direction. "I kept meaning to use this. I think I was waiting for a reason that felt less like a decision and more like fate. You'll have to settle for a tire shop."

"I've got no complaints about the venue," Wally said, taking the card back, turning it over once, and then, instead of pocketing it, reaching for a pen off the counter and writing something new on the back, under the old number, under ask for wally (there's only one)— a date, a time, the name of a diner two blocks over that did the best burger in Blüdhaven and stayed open past midnight, and held it back out. "There. Now it's a real invitation. Very official. You can keep this one too, if you want. Start a collection."

Dick took it, read it, and this time when he tucked it into his pocket, he did it slow, deliberate, patted it flat against his chest the exact way Wally had done it six weeks ago in the back of an ambulance— the same gesture, thrown back, a joke that had turned, somewhere in the last ten minutes, into something that wasn't a joke at all.

"Friday," Dick said. "I'll be there."

"You better be. I already told Linda I was taking a slightly early day. She's going to want details."

"Tell her," Dick said, already turning for the door, already smiling in a way that looked like it had gotten loose from wherever he usually kept it, "that the angel said yes."

The door hadn't even swung shut behind him before Linda materialized at Wally's elbow, arms crossed, chin jerked toward the departing sedan. "That was him."

"That was him."

"The angel."

"The angel," Wally confirmed, and found, when he checked, that he was still holding the wrench, and had been holding it for a solid minute after there was any reason to, and set it down on the bench with a clatter that did nothing to hide how he was grinning. "Friday. Dinner. I have a date, Linda. I have a real, non-hypothetical date with a man who has, on two separate occasions, agreed that I am correct about something."

"You're going to text your roommate."

"I'm going to text my roommate."

"You're going to owe him another dollar for bringing up the ambulance guy, and then immediately un-owe him forty, because the bit's over, the bit is officially retired."

"The bit is retired," Wally agreed, already reaching for his phone, already composing the message in his head and it wasn't until he was three words into typing it that he thought that he was going to have to call Barry too, and explain the whole thing from the beginning, guardrail and all, and that his uncle was going to enjoy every second of the retelling far more than the situation strictly warranted.

Somewhere across town, in a firehouse kitchen that smelled permanently of burnt coffee, Donna's phone buzzed on the counter. She read the message— a single line from Dick, no context, no punctuation to spare— he asked again, I said yes, don't say anything— and looked up at Roy, who was elbow-deep in the dishwasher and hadn't noticed yet, and decided, with the settled satisfaction of a woman who had called this from the first minute of the first call six weeks ago, that she was absolutely going to say something.

"Roy," she said. "Pay up."