Just Say No

A/N: I loved what they did with Bart Allen ins season two, and I have had this written for literally years. When I stumbled across it in my files and realized it was complete I said to myself well why not post the thing? So. Eheh. Is the Young Justice fandom still alive?

Looking both ways as fast as he could without noticeable use of superspeed, Bart fed the pocket money Grandpa had given him into the vending machine and hit the button. He danced anxiously from one foot to the other as the machine processed his order with agonizing slowness, and slowly chunked out a heavy bottle.

Bart grabbed it, looked all around one more time to make sure he wasn't observed, and vanished before the change could jingle into its cup.

Safely ensconced in an alley a few miles away, he slumped against a wall, cracked the seal with a hand that shook, and chugged the whole drink down faster than was healthy even for a speedster, swallowing frantically, probably making pretty gross noises. He almost choked himself and couldn't care, because it didn't happen, and there was no point wasting emotion on things that hadn't happened.

Somehow, the bottle was already empty, and he ran his tongue around his lips and then mopped his sleeve across his mouth, stomach roiling for a dozen reasons, and sighed. He ground his shoulderblades further into the brick and looked at the bottle in his hand.

Reach for the Reach! it proclaimed happily, and he hurled it across the alley and watched it bounce off the opposite wall with a dent in its side as a really pathetic substitute for doing anything to the space bugs who'd made it.

He should probably pick that up. People worried about things like littering in this time period.

…there was enough money left for another one.

He was in a city without its own superhero, nowhere near where anyone who knew him patrolled, and he hadn't gotten caught in the act the first time. He could have another one.

Bart bumped his head irritably against the wall behind him, tipped his head up to the sullen clouds that were too bright and temporary to really remind him of home, and grinned at his own ridiculous self. Addiction really wasn't a pretty thing.

He wasn't ashamed, exactly. In his time, everybody was hooked on the Reach stuff because it was in all the food. That existed. More or less. The resistance grew some of their own, but supplies of that were pretty limited and no one was going to waste it on a speedster metabolism, at least until they'd started trying to wean him off for this mission. That was okay. It was supposed to weaken your will and make you suggestible and all, but nobody in Bart's generation, or even in his parents', ever seemed to notice that much difference, besides withdrawal symptoms. Either growing up on the stuff gave you a resistance, or they'd all reached a critical dosage already and weren't going to get any more or less easy to oppress no matter what they ate, or they were all just really good at working through it because practice, or something, but the point was Bart wasn't afraid of eating Reach-treated food.

He just hated what it stood for.

In his world, the Reach owned everything. They thought they owned everyone, too, but really the only thing you could always control (unless you got moded and lost even that) was yourself. Bart could live with a world that went crazy around him, with everything falling apart, because that was pretty much just life; find the good and crash the bad and keep running. He hated anything that took away his self-control.

But he had controlled himself. Hadn't rushed out and bought a bottle of Reach-drink the minute they went on the shelves, even though the withdrawal twitchiness had been mounting up enough that he was really glad he'd made twitchiness a part of his Impulse character from the beginning, or somebody might have noticed something was up.

He'd controlled himself but then the greenhouse, and it had been a delicious piece of fruit with a cool name just being offered to him, and he wasn't built to turn down food, at all, ever, it was hard even when he knew it was literally poisoned, and it wasn't like he didn't know this particular poison wouldn't hurt him. And. It was pretty funny, watching the rest of the Team's reactions, but it hadn't good for their cover as normal interested kids. And he was the only one it wouldn't make any difference to, to eat the Reach stuff. There was no good reason to say no. So he'd eaten it, and it had been really good, even for fresh fruit which he ate practically every day here in the past, and he'd known why.

'Hey,' he'd shrugged, keeping up the mask and throwing out a hint at the same time, because he couldn't resist, it made things feel more fair, and they were looking at him like he was crazy, 'we don't have pluots in the future.'

So here he was, a few days later, hiding in an alley, pouring the enemy's weapon down his throat. If anyone found out…having to tell the truth about his future would be the least of it. They might never trust him again. And they had to trust him, or he couldn't save them.

Everyone in the future had trusted him with this mission. Everybody who'd known about it had given up their existences, their lives, on the faith that he, Bart Allen, could crash the mode and make a better world. Defeat the Reach.

It was a good plan. He believed in it. He'd already saved Grandpa and Nathaniel, he'd pulled off his infiltration of the Team smooth as butter. (Which, by the way, had turned out to be delicious.) Nobody liked him all that much, but nobody hated him, and nobody thought he was a spy. Things were working. Plan save Blue Beetle, save the world was on track.

And yet…

He felt dirty. Lying to the awesome defenders of the world? Not crash. Fun, sometimes, and necessary, but not good. He was sitting on information that they were putting their lives in danger to gain, and he wasn't sharing, even though they were supposed to be teammates. And the way they'd look at him, if they saw him break down the way he just had… Well. Kind of like if they thought he was moded.

Bart wasn't the type who worried about being respected. His parents, when he'd had them, and his grandmother later, had made sure to teach him to blend in before anything because he'd been born with a target on his back, and people underestimating him had saved his life so many times it felt like a warm coat in gale-force winds.

Still, though.

"What's that retro saying?" he asked the clouded sky. "'Just Say No.'" He chuckled, and walked over to the rejected bottle. "But sometimes they make you an 'offer you can't refuse.'"

Bart might be a product of his times, but he was going to make sure that this time, Earth said no.

He grabbed the empty bottle, zipped out of the alley. Blue Beetle wouldn't become the Reach Infiltrator, because the Team was already well and truly infiltrated. Impulse was on the case. And even if he couldn't always control himself…

An empty bottle of Reach! drink slammed into a streetcorner trashcan as a sudden wind sent scattered litter sailing into the air. Unseen, already rocketing out of town toward the greater Keystone area, Bart Allen smiled.

His future hadn't happened yet. It wasn't going to. And there was no point wasting emotions on something that hadn't happened.

He was strong enough for this.