Archive of Our Own

Dust hung in the air too long.

You watched one pale speck drift through the beam of a broken emergency light, turning slowly enough that you could follow every rotation. The light itself buzzed overhead, except the noise no longer blended into one continuous hum. You could distinguish each tiny electrical vibration, every flicker separated from the next by a stretch of time that shouldn’t have existed.

Then you realized you were lying on the floor.

You pushed yourself upright, and the room vanished. Your shoulder struck the opposite wall hard enough to crack the plaster before you understood that you’d moved. Pain bloomed a fraction of a second later, accompanied by the unsettling awareness that you could have crossed the room several times over in the space between impact and sensation.

“Jesus Christ.”

The voice coming out of your mouth wasn’t yours, and you stopped breathing.

Someone groaned near the overturned display plinth behind you. “Okay. Ow.”

That voice was yours.

You turned carefully this time.

Your own body lay curled on its side amid scattered pieces of broken glass and splintered wood. As you watched, it pushed itself upright, blinking hard before its attention settled on you.

Wally’s expression appeared on your face.

“Oh,” he said.

You stared at him. Wally stared back, and whatever confusion had been lingering in his expression disappeared all at once.

“Oh, no.”

You looked down.

Red hair fell into your field of vision. Your hands were larger than they should have been, your shoulders broader beneath the torn fabric of Wally’s suit, and when panic sent your pulse racing, the rhythm beneath your ribs was much too fast.

You looked back at him. “No.”

Wally started to sit up fully and planted one hand against the concrete for leverage. Frost bloomed beneath his palm in a white rush, spreading several inches before he jerked his hand away.

His gaze dropped to the ice.

Then rose slowly to you.

“Oh, no.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You’re me.”

“I noticed.”

“And I’m you.”

“I also noticed that.”

His eyes dropped toward the body he was currently occupying before snapping immediately toward the ceiling. You might have found the exaggerated refusal to look at anything below your own collarbone funny under almost any other circumstances.

Instead, you dragged both hands over Wally’s face and tried not to panic.

A faint metallic clatter drew your attention toward the center of the room. The artifact had fallen several feet from its shattered display case but appeared otherwise untouched: an oval of cloudy silver set into a dark metal frame, somewhere between a hand mirror and an oversized piece of ceremonial jewelry.

The inscription around its edge had started glowing when you and Wally grabbed it at the same time.

Right after you’d been arguing.

“You said I had no idea what it was like being you,” you said.

Wally lowered his gaze from the ceiling, although he was careful about where it landed. “You said the same thing.”

“And then the cursed mirror lit up.”

“It didn’t exactly—”

“Wally.”

He closed his mouth.

You pointed toward the artifact and meant to take one step closer.

The room blurred.

You stopped yourself a few feet beyond the mirror with one hand braced against the remains of the display plinth. A loose screw falling from the wreckage beside you seemed to hang in midair before finally striking the floor.

Wally stared.

You looked back at the place you’d been standing.

Then down at Wally’s borrowed legs.

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I have your speed.”

Wally’s expression pinched. “Technically, my body has my speed. You just happen to be driving it.”

A cold draft swept across the room.

He folded his arms around himself, and a narrow rim of ice formed beneath the soles of your boots.

You looked pointedly at the floor.

Wally followed your gaze. “And apparently your body still has your powers.”

“Which you’re going to stop using before Dick walks in and finds you attached to the floor.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose.”

“I know. Try relaxing.”

“That advice has never relaxed anyone in human history.”

Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside.

Both of you went still.

“Everything good in there?” Dick called.

“Fine!” you answered at exactly the same moment Wally did.

There was a pause beyond the door.

You looked at each other.

“Very convincing,” Wally murmured.

“You answered too.”

The footsteps resumed, closer this time.

You looked toward the artifact. “Pick that up.”

“Why me?”

“You’re closer, and I currently can’t trust myself to move six inches.”

Wally crouched and reached for the metal frame. Frost crawled immediately over the silver beneath his fingers.

He swore and released it.

You stared at the artifact now encased in a glittering shell of ice.

Wally grimaced. “I’m guessing that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Before you could answer, M’gann’s voice crackled over the comms, calling Dick back downstairs. His footsteps stopped outside the room, hesitated, then retreated down the corridor.

You waited until you couldn’t hear him anymore before closing your eyes. “We’re going to die like this.”

By the time you returned to Mount Justice, you and Wally had made one exceptionally bad decision and then committed yourselves to it.

Nobody needed to know.

The swap had happened while the two of you were temporarily separated from the others inside the warehouse, and the rest of the mission had wrapped before anyone got a close enough look to notice anything more unusual than the two of you being strangely quiet. You’d gotten the mirror into a thermal evidence case after talking Wally through enough of your cryokinesis to make him stop accidentally pulling heat from everything he touched.

You could research it yourselves. You could reverse the swap. Everyone else could remain blissfully unaware that Wally West was currently walking around with your face while you tried not to launch his body through every wall in the Cave.

It sounded almost reasonable when neither of you examined it too closely.

“You make this look way too easy,” Wally muttered as you made your way toward the team’s living quarters.

He stood beside you in your body with his arms folded tightly across his chest. It wasn’t your usual posture. Wally had always occupied space as though sitting still required active negotiation, and even without his speed, he couldn’t stop shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“My powers?”

“Existing in here.” He glanced down at his borrowed hands. “Do you think about not freezing things all day?”

“Not anymore.”

His eyebrows lifted.

“It becomes instinctive,” you amended. “You learn what it feels like right before the temperature starts dropping and correct before anything happens.”

“That’s somehow worse.”

You reached the corridor leading to the living quarters and continued with deliberate care, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other without allowing Wally’s body to turn the thought of movement into several dozen feet of actual movement.

Wally followed at an ordinary walking pace.

He made it approximately twelve feet before looking miserable.

You glanced over your shoulder. “What?”

He gestured toward the stretch of hallway behind him. “That took forever.”

“It took four seconds.”

“Exactly.”

You couldn’t help laughing, although hearing the sound in Wally’s voice still made something in your brain recoil.

The two of you reached your door. Wally stopped beside you, and the humor faded as both of you remembered the practical problem waiting on the other side.

“You’re going to need clothes,” you said.

“So are you.”

“You can use the top drawer of the dresser and the left side of the closet. Take whatever’s easiest, but don’t go digging through anything else.”

Wally nodded immediately. Whatever jokes he might have made under ordinary circumstances stayed noticeably absent. “Same for my room. Shirts are in the second drawer. Sweatpants are the bottom one. Anything else stays closed.”

“Phones are off-limits unless we need them for this. Bathrooms are private. We do the minimum necessary and don’t make any of it weird.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“I know.”

That quieted both of you.

You looked at your own face and found Wally watching you with an earnestness that was unmistakably his despite everything wrong about the reflection.

“I’ll be careful,” he said.

The tension in your shoulders loosened slightly. “I know you will.”

You left before the tenderness in your own expression could become any more unsettling.

Wally owned an unreasonable number of T-shirts.

You’d known that before opening his dresser. You’d seen most of them at some point, complained about the laundry he generated after missions, and stolen one yourself after someone spilled a drink down your front during a team movie night.

Knowing there were too many shirts was different from discovering that Wally apparently owned multiple nearly identical red options.

You stood holding two of them when someone knocked against the open doorframe.

Wally leaned into view wearing your jeans and one of your sweaters. The clothes were yours, but everything about the way he wore them belonged to him. He’d shoved the sleeves to his elbows within minutes, and your hair had been gathered back with considerably less care than you usually gave it. Even the way he stood was wrong for you, one knee bent and his fingers tapping an impatient rhythm against his thigh.

The familiarity of it struck harder than you expected.

Somehow, your body still looked like Wally.

He nodded toward the shirts. “Left one.”

“They’re identical.”

“They absolutely aren’t.”

You held them side by side. “They’re both red.”

“That one’s softer.”

“You can tell from over there?”

“I know my shirts.”

You dropped the rejected one onto the bed and pulled the other over your head. When you looked up again, Wally had braced one hand against the doorframe. A thin crust of frost had begun spreading beneath his palm.

He noticed a second after you did and snatched his hand away.

“You’re tense,” you said.

“I’m wearing somebody else’s body.”

“So am I.”

“Yeah, but mine’s easy.”

You gave him a look.

Wally grimaced. “That sounded terrible. I meant my powers. I know what superspeed feels like.”

“You think superspeed is easy?”

“I’ve had it for years.”

“And I’ve had my powers for years. Familiar isn’t the same thing as easy.”

His gaze dropped to the melting frost on the doorframe. “That’s my point.”

Before you could answer, Wally’s phone buzzed on the desk. The first notification was followed almost immediately by another.

You reached for it, and your hand closed around the phone before you registered crossing the space between.

Wally blinked.

You stared down at what you were holding. “I’m starting to understand why you’re so annoying.”

“Excuse me?”

“Everything is right there. The second I want something, I can already have it.”

“That sounds suspiciously like appreciation.”

“It isn’t.”

You unlocked the phone and found two messages from Dick. The first asked both of you to meet him in five minutes. The second removed the five-minute grace period.

Wally read them over your shoulder.

“He knows.”

“He suspects something.”

“With Dick, those are basically the same thing.”

You set the phone down and looked at him. “We act normal.”

Wally glanced down at the body he was borrowing, then back at the red shirt you were wearing. “I think we lost normal at the warehouse.”

Dick didn’t know.

Not yet.

He did, however, know enough to watch both of you far too closely.

M’gann sat beside Kaldur at the meeting-room table while Artemis occupied a chair across from them.

Without thinking, you dropped into your usual seat.

You realized the mistake when Artemis glanced at you, then toward the chair Wally normally took closer to the door. Before you could move, Wally came in behind you and sat there.

You looked at him. He looked at you.

Apparently neither of you had considered that pretending to be each other also meant remembering where the other person usually sat.

Artemis’s attention moved slowly between you. “What’s going on with you two?”

Wally leaned back in his chair, slouching the way he always did despite wearing your body. “That’s a broad accusation.”

It was your voice, but the delivery was entirely his.

Artemis narrowed her eyes.

You caught Dick watching both of you from farther down the table, his expression growing more suspicious by the second.

“Report,” Kaldur said.

You gave him the concise version you normally would: the smugglers were contained, the stolen items recovered, and the artifact responsible for the magical discharge had been secured for analysis.

Wally nodded along until you finished. “So, overall, successful mission. Weird mirror aside.”

M’gann looked at him.

Wally appeared to realize a beat too late that you would never have summarized anything that way.

Kaldur’s gaze shifted to you. “Anything unusual after contact with the artifact?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Wally said at the same time.

You slowly turned your head.

He winced. “I meant the discharge itself.”

Artemis’s eyebrows rose, but she didn’t comment.

A thin line of frost formed along the edge of Wally’s water glass.

You stared at it.

Wally curled both hands into his lap.

Dick noticed that too.

You could almost feel the meeting collapsing around you, so when an alarm sounded through the Cave a moment later, relief hit hard enough to make your knees weak.

Kaldur was already standing. “Training room.”

Everyone moved.

Wally caught your sleeve as the others reached the door. His fingers were cold through the fabric.

“This is worse,” he whispered.

You frowned.

“The alarm means powers.”

Right.

Your relief vanished.

The emergency turned out to be a malfunctioning training drone that had activated itself during maintenance.

Under normal circumstances, Wally would have disabled it before anyone else reached the training room. You would have frozen the damaged targeting assembly long enough for the system to shut down safely.

Those were still the correct powers.

They were simply attached to the wrong people.

The drone swerved toward the far wall, its targeting light flashing red.

Kaldur looked directly at you because, as far as he knew, you were Wally. “Get it.”

You moved.

The world nearly stopped.

M’gann’s hair hung in the air behind her shoulder. Artemis’s fingers rested against her bow without seeming to move. The damaged drone crept forward so slowly that you could follow each rotation of its propellers and watch the targeting light brighten one fraction at a time.

You’d seen Wally disappear in red streaks more times than you could count. You’d watched him steal food from your plate before you could slap his hand away and complained when he finished jobs before anyone else had properly started.

None of that had explained what speed felt like from the inside.

There was so much time.

You pushed off toward the drone and immediately understood the problem with having time your body knew how to use while your mind didn’t. You overcorrected halfway across the room, skidded sideways, and hit the padded wall shoulder-first.

The world snapped back into motion.

Dick stared at you. “Did Wally just wipe out?”

“I didn’t wipe out.”

The drone fired before he could answer.

Wally threw both hands up on instinct.

Ice erupted from the floor.

The wall rose far higher and thicker than anything you would have made indoors, catching the blast against its center and redirecting the energy harmlessly upward. Wally stood behind it with your hands still raised, staring at what he’d done.

You knew exactly what had happened. He’d felt the first pull of cold and panicked, then reached for more power instead of less.

“Ease off,” you called. “Don’t keep feeding it. Let the cold settle before you release.”

Wally obeyed immediately.

Dick looked from him to you.

You realized what you’d just done.

The drone whirred back to life.

You forced yourself to focus on the problem in front of you. Instead of thinking about the far side of the room, you picked a point several feet ahead and moved only that far. Then another. By the third burst, you reached the drone without hitting anything and ripped out the damaged power cell.

It dropped harmlessly to the floor.

Silence settled across the room.

Dick walked toward the ice wall and pressed his fingertips against its surface. Then he looked at Wally in your body, at the frost creeping over the cuffs of your sweater, and finally at you standing in Wally’s body with both hands planted on your hips exactly the way you always stood when something had irritated you.

His eyes narrowed.

“You’re her.”

You closed your eyes.

Artemis frowned. “What?”

Dick pointed at you, then at Wally. “She’s in Wally’s body, and Wally’s in hers.”

Wally rubbed both hands over the face he was borrowing. “Yeah.”

Artemis stared at the two of you for several seconds before the corner of her mouth twitched.

M’gann covered her own smile.

Kaldur closed his eyes briefly. “Since when?”

“The warehouse,” you admitted.

“And you thought hiding this was a good idea?”

“We thought we could fix it before anyone noticed.”

Kaldur’s gaze moved to the twelve-foot wall of ice.

You followed his gaze. “In retrospect, that was optimistic.”

Three hours later, the artifact had been transferred from evidence storage into a shielded containment case in one of Mount Justice’s labs.

M’gann found the first useful reference buried inside a digitized occult collection. The object had accumulated several names over the centuries, none of which translated particularly cleanly, but one text described it as a mirror used to force understanding between people locked in conflict.

Dick leaned over M’gann’s shoulder while she continued scrolling through the archive.

You sat opposite Wally near the containment case, increasingly aware that you were hungry again despite having eaten less than an hour earlier. Wally had abandoned his third cup of tea after accidentally freezing the handle to his fingers.

M’gann eventually looked up from the screen. “The closest translation I can get is ‘symmetry of understanding.’ The exchange is supposed to end when both people recognize what they failed to understand about the other.”

Wally stared at her. “We got body-swapped to teach us a lesson?”

“Apparently.”

His expression suggested this offended him on a personal level.

Dick folded his arms. “You did activate it while telling each other you had no idea what being the other person was like.”

You turned toward him. “How do you know what we said?”

“Your comms picked up part of the argument before the energy spike.”

Wally sank deeper into his chair.

M’gann scrolled farther through the text. “There isn’t a ritual listed. The artifact should react once whatever condition triggered the exchange has genuinely changed. For now, keep it near both of you. We can track the energy signature if anything happens.”

That was how you and Wally ended up spending the rest of the afternoon together with a magical empathy mirror locked inside a portable containment case.

It was humiliating enough that neither of you discussed it.

Part of understanding Wally turned out to require an unreasonable amount of food.

By midafternoon, you had eaten two sandwiches, an entire bag of pretzels, three protein bars, leftover pasta, a plate of fries, and something from the back of the refrigerator that you suspected had once belonged to Conner.

You were still hungry.

Wally sat across from you at the kitchen island with both hands wrapped around another mug of tea.

“This is ridiculous,” you said.

“My metabolism is a finely tuned machine.”

“Your metabolism is a garbage disposal.”

Wally smiled into the mug.

You reached for another protein bar and tore through the wrapper before you realized how much force you’d used. The bar survived. The wrapper didn’t.

You stared at the shredded plastic in your hand.

“You’re getting better,” Wally said.

“At destroying snacks?”

“At stopping.”

You looked at him.

He was right.

You hadn’t hit a wall in several hours. The world still moved too slowly whenever Wally’s body slipped into accelerated perception, but you were beginning to understand that the instinct to use every available fraction of a second didn’t have to control you. You could let someone finish reaching for something instead of handing it to them before they knew they wanted it. You could walk from one room to another even though every nerve insisted the destination was already available to you.

It took more conscious restraint than you’d ever imagined.

Across the counter, Wally shifted closer to his tea. He’d stopped moving as much as the day wore on, not because your body suited stillness better than his, but because he was tired.

You knew the signs.

“You’re cold.”

“I noticed.”

“I mean you’re getting too cold.”

His attention sharpened.

You leaned closer and laid two fingers against the inside of his wrist. Your own skin felt unnaturally chilled beneath your fingertips.

“That happens when I overuse my powers,” you explained. “You’ve been pulling heat all day without realizing it.”

“I made one ice wall.”

“You’ve also frosted half the Cave.”

“That seems exaggerated.”

“You froze a spoon to your hand at lunch.”

Wally looked down at his tea. “I thought you were basically immune to cold.”

“Resistant. I still feel it, and using too much power drops my temperature.”

“You never say anything.”

“It usually isn’t worth mentioning.”

Wally was quiet for a moment. Steam drifted in front of your own features, but the expression behind it belonged completely to him.

Then his gaze shifted toward the arm you’d left resting on the counter.

Your borrowed body radiated heat.

Wally leaned slightly closer before apparently realizing what he was doing.

His eyes lifted to yours.

“Oh.”

You knew that tone. “Don’t.”

“Is this why you always sit next to me?”

Your borrowed face warmed, and you looked away before Wally could notice.

“Wally.”

“Movie nights. The jet. Every briefing where you somehow end up on my side of the table.”

“You run warm.”

He looked delighted.

“You use me as a space heater.”

“I’m going to start sitting next to M’gann.”

“You steal my blankets too.”

“Because they’re warm.”

Wally’s smile softened. “I never knew you were actually cold.”

The teasing disappeared so quickly that you didn’t have time to defend yourself.

You shrugged, slower and more controlled than you would have managed that morning. “You weren’t supposed to. I know how to manage it.”

He looked down at your body as though it had become unfamiliar all over again.

For the first time, you understood that the day wasn’t only forcing you to discover things about Wally.

He was discovering you too.

By evening, you and Wally had retreated to one of the quieter common areas near the edge of the Cave, taking the containment case with you. M’gann had insisted the artifact remain close enough to register any change before tactfully finding reasons for everyone else to leave.

Wally stood near the entrance to the balcony, looking out over the dark water toward Happy Harbor.

You approached at a normal pace. This time you didn’t have to consciously count the steps.

Wally saw your reflection in the glass and turned. Your face looked tired on him, but the small smile that appeared belonged to Wally so completely that the sight no longer startled you.

“You’re getting good at walking,” he said.

“You’re getting good at not freezing furniture.”

“Growth.”

You stopped beside him and rested your forearms against the railing.

Lights from Happy Harbor glimmered in the distance beyond the water. From inside Wally’s body, you could let your perception stretch until the waves beyond the island seemed almost motionless, then relax until the world approached something closer to normal again.

“How do you stand it?” you asked.

Wally glanced toward you.

“The waiting.”

He understood without needing more.

For once, he didn’t answer immediately.

You watched the lights across the water. “I thought you were just impatient. I knew you experienced things faster, obviously, but I didn’t understand what that actually meant.”

Wally looked back toward the water. “You get used to slowing down.”

“I don’t think that’s the same as it becoming easy.”

His mouth curved faintly. “No. Probably not.”

You thought about the meeting that morning, about every conversation stretching open around you with enough time to construct a dozen possible responses before anyone finished speaking. You thought about walking beside someone when you could cross the entire building before their next step hit the floor.

“It takes effort all the time, doesn’t it? Letting everybody finish. Moving at our pace when yours is right there. Knowing you could already be wherever you’re going and choosing to stay beside everyone else anyway.”

Wally’s expression went still.

“You make it look effortless,” you continued. “The speed, the jokes, showing up before anybody needs to ask. I didn’t realize how much of that involves you deliberately slowing yourself down.”

His gaze dropped to his borrowed hands. “You figured that out in one day?”

“I noticed pieces before. I just didn’t understand what they cost.”

A thin layer of frost began forming beneath Wally’s fingertips where they rested against the railing.

You touched his wrist.

He noticed and pulled the power back before the ice spread.

“I was unfair to you,” you said.

“So was I.”

You looked at him.

Wally turned his hand beneath yours until your fingers rested together. Seeing your own hand intertwined with Wally’s should have felt strange. Instead, you recognized the way his thumb moved once across your knuckles.

“I thought your powers were easy because you always made them look like they were,” he said. “Then I spent today realizing your body is constantly waiting for some emotion to leak through. Every time I got startled, the temperature dropped. Every time I got frustrated, something frosted over.”

“It gets easier with practice.”

“That doesn’t mean you stopped doing it.”

You fell quiet.

Wally’s grip tightened slightly. “You’re always regulating. Handshakes, crowded rooms, somebody grabbing you unexpectedly. You learned how to make it automatic, but that’s not the same thing as the effort disappearing.”

Your throat tightened. “I never thought about it that way.”

“I didn’t either.”

Something clicked behind you.

Both of you turned.

The artifact had begun glowing inside the containment case. Soft silver light pulsed beneath the glass.

Wally stared at it. “That feels judgmental.”

You laughed. “Don’t ruin this.”

“I’m not ruining anything. Apparently the haunted mirror approves of our emotional growth.”

The light brightened.

Neither of you moved toward it.

Wally looked back at you instead.

There was something different in his expression, an uncertainty you rarely saw from him. He could leap into impossible situations without hesitation, but standing there in your body with your hand held between his seemed to require more courage than anything you’d done all day.

“What?” you asked.

He exhaled slowly. “There’s something else I figured out.”

You waited.

“I know you really well.”

You blinked. “I would hope so.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

The humor in your voice faded.

Wally glanced down at your joined hands. “I picked that sweater because I knew it was the one you wear whenever the Cave gets cold. I know how you take your tea, which takeout order you’re going to pick before you look at the menu, and that you flex your left hand right before you do anything complicated with your powers.”

Your borrowed pulse quickened. You hoped he couldn’t tell.

That somehow made the moment feel even more exposed.

“I know where you sit because it’s usually beside me,” he continued. “I know when you’re tired because you stop pretending my bad jokes are worth laughing at. I know which blanket you steal during movie night and which side of the jet you sleep on. I thought that was just what happens when you’ve been friends with somebody this long.”

You swallowed.

“And now?”

Wally finally looked at you.

“Now I think there’s a reason I’ve been paying attention.”

The artifact brightened behind you.

You barely noticed.

“You have terrible timing.”

“I know.”

“We’re still in each other’s bodies.”

“I’m painfully aware.”

“You decided this was the moment to confess?”

“I didn’t exactly decide.”

You stared at him for another second before his expression began to collapse.

Then you squeezed his hand.

“I’m complaining about the timing, Wally. Not the confession.”

He stopped.

Your own face stared back at you.

Slowly, hope replaced the dread in his expression.

“There are plenty of things I know about you too,” you said. “Probably more than I ever needed to.”

“That sounds promising.”

“You’re ruining it again.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not.”

His smile returned.

The containment case flashed bright enough to throw silver across the room.

You looked toward it reluctantly.

“I think our chaperone wants attention.”

Wally followed your gaze. “Do you think this actually means it’ll switch us back?”

“Only one way to find out.”

You approached the table together without letting go.

The case unlocked when you entered the code M’gann had given you. The artifact lay in the center, its cloudy surface now glowing steadily.

You looked at Wally.

He looked back.

For the first time all day, neither of you had anything left to argue about.

You reached for the mirror together.

The world disappeared.

You woke on the floor.

Your body felt heavy and slow, familiar cold settling beneath your skin for the first time all day. It was perfect.

You stayed there for several seconds, almost afraid to test it. Then you lifted one hand and watched a thin ribbon of frost curl obediently over your fingertips. Your hand, your power, exactly where they belonged.

Relief hit so hard that your eyes burned.

Across the room, Wally sucked in a breath.

You pushed yourself upright.

He was himself again.

He sat on the floor with both hands pressed against his chest before dragging them over his face and into his red hair, apparently taking inventory. His gaze found yours.

You looked at him.

Wally looked at you.

Recognition settled between you.

Then he disappeared.

A red streak tore across the common area, loose papers lifting from the nearby table before the doors opened and shut behind him.

You stared at the empty space where Wally had been.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

Dick appeared in the doorway several seconds later, followed closely by M’gann.

“What happened?”

“We switched back.”

M’gann’s attention swept the room. “Where’s Wally?”

You folded your arms. “Apparently celebrating.”

The annoyance in your voice was sharper than you intended.

It was ridiculous to be hurt. You understood better than anyone why he’d run. Wally had spent the entire day trapped at ordinary speed, forced to walk every hallway and wait through every second after living most of his life with the world opened wide around him.

Of course the first thing he wanted was to move.

You understood it now.

That didn’t stop the uncomfortable twist beneath your ribs when you remembered what the two of you had admitted less than a minute earlier.

Dick seemed to notice.

Whatever he was about to say never came.

Several minutes later, the air shifted.

A gust tore through the room, scattering the papers that had barely finished settling from Wally’s departure.

Then he was standing in front of you again.

His hair had been blown into complete disarray, his cheeks were pink with exertion, and a white takeout bag was tucked carefully against his chest.

Wally grinned.

“I missed that.”

You stared at him. “You disappeared.”

“I came back.”

Your attention dropped to the bag.

Steam escaped through the folded top.

Wally held it toward you.

You didn’t take it immediately. “What is that?”

His grin softened. “Soup dumplings.”

There was only one place he could mean.

Your mouth fell open.

“The place in Shanghai?”

“The one with six tables and the woman who threatened me with a spoon because I reached for the chili oil too early.”

“She didn’t threaten you.”

“She absolutely did.”

You finally took the bag.

Warmth seeped through the paper into your palms.

You’d brought Wally to that restaurant once, two years earlier. It was hidden down a narrow side street with a handwritten menu taped crookedly beside the register, the kind of place you would never find by accident and never stop thinking about once someone took you there.

Of course Wally remembered.

“You got your speed back,” you said slowly, “and the first thing you did was go to China.”

He nodded. “Zeta Tube to Shanghai. Ran the rest of the way.”

“To get me soup dumplings.”

“They’re still hot.”

There was unmistakable pride in his voice.

Behind him, M’gann caught Dick by the sleeve and quietly pulled him toward the door. You barely noticed them leaving.

Wally stepped closer once you were alone. “I spent all day thinking about what I’d do when I got my speed back.”

You held the bag carefully between you. “Apparently the answer was international takeout.”

“I wanted to run.”

Something in his expression softened.

“So I did.”

“And then?”

His eyes met yours.

“Then I wanted to come back to you.”

Something inside you gave way.

You put the bag down carefully before grabbing the front of his shirt and kissing him.

Wally froze.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he was completely motionless.

Then his hands settled around your waist, and he kissed you back.

There was nothing borrowed between you now. The hands touching you belonged to Wally, the mouth moving against yours was his, and the warmth beneath your palms was the same warmth you’d spent years gravitating toward without ever examining why.

Now you understood what had been pulling you toward his warmth all along.

When you finally pulled back, Wally followed for the smallest distance before catching himself. His eyes opened slowly.

“You went quiet,” you murmured.

“I’m processing.”

“You process faster than anyone alive.”

“Usually.”

You laughed, and Wally’s answering smile was wide enough that you had to kiss him again.

The second kiss was slower. There was no magical artifact forcing either of you into someone else’s perspective, no team waiting for an explanation, and no unfamiliar power threatening to send one of you through a wall or freeze the furniture. 

For the first time all day, it was simply the two of you.

When you separated, he rested his forehead against yours.

Wally’s gaze drifted toward the takeout bag on the table.

You narrowed your eyes. “Don’t you dare.”

“I crossed half the planet for those.”

“For me.”

“Exactly.”

His hand tightened around your waist. Before he could lift it, you closed your fingers around his wrist.

He stared at you.

“You may have your speed back, but I still know you.”

Wally’s expression softened.

“Yeah,” he said, leaning in again. “I know.”

The dumplings could wait another minute.