The strange, geometrically structured hallways of the Reach's central Earth base tended to twist in on themselves and loop around until you were right back where you started when you first entered the building if you weren't paying very close attention to your surroundings.
Bart had been paying very close attention for the past thirty minutes, but it was pretty clear to him that if he hadn't had Helena's voice calmly chattering in his ear, he would have been lost five minutes into his trek.
"I think I finally found the elevator that should have been on the east side," he whispered quietly into his comm, cautiously using one hand to phase through and break the activation panel beside the only door in the hallway that didn't line up perfectly with a corresponding one on the opposite wall. Sure enough, as it slid open, he could very clearly see an open, empty shaft that went far off into darkness both above and below him. The abyss yawned below him, the occasional flicker of light from a wall circuit doing nothing to stop the unease pooling in his gut.
He'd found it, but it had taken an extra twenty minutes the Outlaws didn't technically have. Things would have been a lot simpler if the Reach could design their bases less like giant hives and more like actual buildings.
But there would be time for complaining about mazes later.
"Good work. Doctor Light and Nightwing are in position along with Red Hood and Red Arrow," Helena told him, sounding far calmer than Bart himself felt. His pseudo-sister's training as Robin still served her well, nearly a decade after she'd been forced to leave the name behind. Bart heard her type a few keys on a holographic keyboard, and the display in his goggles zoomed in on the not-very-accurate minimap he'd been following since he'd arrived. The small, flickering signal he'd been searching for briefly lit a point on the map green instead of red. "Flash's signal seems to be coming from about thirteen floors below you. You'll have to be extremely careful; if that was the floor where they've been holding him, then it's likely they have traps specifically designed for speedsters down there. Go slow, and keep an eye out for anything."
Bart grimaced at the thought of going even slower than he already was, but didn't try to protest. He'd seen what the Reach was capable of when they wanted to restrain a metahuman, and he wasn't exactly eager to experience that himself. "Sure thing, boss. Anything else?"
He readied the small grappling hook stashed in one of his hidden cupboards as Helena sighed quietly. "You'll be going pretty deep underground, so it's very likely our comms won't reach each other until you come back up. If you do need help, hit your emergency signal and get as high up as you can. Don't worry; I'll be heading to the main cellblock with Arsenal, so it shouldn't take me long to get there."
Bart couldn't quite help a smile, even as he prepared to descend directly into the belly of the beast. "I know you've always got my back, so why would I be worried?"
The surprised chuckle he heard just made his smile grow wider. "Just try not to die before I get there, okay?" Helena's voice took on a softer tone. "Good luck, Bart."
"I'll certainly try to find some," Bart said with false cheer. Some good luck would be really nice right about now; he hadn't had nearly enough of it, lately. "You be careful too."
With that final farewell, Bart deployed the grapple and jumped into the void, rappelling down into the darkness of the Reach base.
This is not the first time he's ever seen the deeper parts of an alien hive.
Many of the human labor force captured and used by the Reach to collect scrap and haphazardly throw together some semblance of working technology that could be useful to the Empire had been forced to carry their meager offerings from the camps all the way into the nearest mining colony, sometimes miles away from where they lived and often so quickly they collapsed on emaciated legs before they could even get there and back to where they were relatively safe.
Bart has been in and out of colonies and camps since he was nine years old, but the sheer size and complexity of this base is almost overwhelming. He's never been on one of the science floors before, never seen the terrifying instruments of torture and dissection he's catching glimpses of through broken doors and cracked windows, and the shapes of them in the gloom are making the hair on his neck stand on end.
His comm signal had fizzled out like Helena said it might, but his goggles' HUD is still working, pinging helpfully off of disabled cameras and giving the already darker, dimly lit corridors some nice, eerie lighting to go along with the shattered security droids and debris littered throughout.
Not a cozy place, by any stretch of the imagination.
It looked as if some sort of hurricane had swept through.
It looked, Bart noted grimly, like a rather angry speedster had ripped through here. He's never met Wally or his children before, but Bart knows Jai is capable of super-strength when he diverts his speedforce connection into growing the muscles in his arms rather than distributing it throughout his entire body. Bart doesn't know if Wally or Irey are capable of the same thing, but as he watches the remains of one drone spark and fizzle spastically, he starts to think that might just be the case.
"Aw, geez. Helena's family is scary. Maybe that's where she gets it from?" He can't quite keep from running his mouth, even down here in a potentially life-threatening situation. Damian would probably scold him for that if he could hear him.
The sharp crash of glass hitting the ground makes Bart zoom to one side of the hall, ducking into an empty doorframe. It's incredibly thin, not proper cover at all, but it's all he has at the moment.
He peeks around it, tense like spring, ready for anything to appear out of the darkness, but nothing comes charging out into the open, no new security bots start flooding the corridor.
The sound of glass sliding across metal, and a weak, muffled voice; cursing in English, not the strange, inhuman clicking of the Reach.
Wally, or Jai or Irey? Another Reach prisoner, also used for experimentation? Or a trap?
The haunted atmosphere of this lab is already making Bart paranoid, but his training with Damian is giving him even more of an edge than normal. His stomach churns in protest, but he heads forward anyway. Waiting around in enemy territory never tended to end well, in Bart's experience.
He tiptoes carefully up toward the door the voice seems to be echoing out of and freezes at the corner, staring into the room.
His eyes slowly trail their way across the ruined walls and filthy ground before he spins around and promptly empties his stomach onto the ground.
It's a damn massacre.
Remains of Reach droids and scientists alike are scattered across the metal floor in a macabre amalgamation of bluish gore and gears, bits of heads and legs suggesting that something had blown straight through their torsos too fast for them to react. The bizarre alien blood was making several of the droids spark weakly in the low light, casting odd shadows across the horrific display.
Several tables, filled with what once had likely been human bodies, now held nothing more than what could only be described as actual organs, some of them pulsating grotesquely where they were attached to some huge, otherworldly medical instruments.
And a single remaining intact humanoid body, slumped next to a table, breathing heavily and covered in a lot of blood.
Bart heaves once, twice, then clamps his mouth shut and swallows the bile down, tears pricking his eyes and body shaking.
He has a job to do, and he's running out of time to do it.
God, he hates this. He wants to go home.
He shoves the childish thought aside and straightens back up again.
Bart enters the room quickly, forces himself to walk carefully over broken remains of alien bones and metal casings, tries not to think of what could be squishing underneath his feet, definitely does not let himself look at the lazily pulsing sacks on the tables as he approached the figure that isn't as familiar as it should be.
Wally West is even paler than he was in all of Linda's pictures, hair cropped much shorter and shot through with more gray than red. Worry lines have been etched into his face, scars just barely visible beneath the Reach clothing he'd apparently found trailing all the way down his throat and across the left half of his face, burns and incision marks that made him nearly unrecognizable and his left eye cloudy white rather than green. Shoulders that had once been broad were now bent inward by some invisible weight, a body that had once been lithe and agile now thin and emaciated far beyond healthy for a speedster with an accelerated metabolism.
He's slumped half over on his side, shoulders heaving with breath and one arm pressed hard to his waist, where Bart can see a deep red stain spreading lazily across the jumpsuit he's wearing, slowly overtaking the blue blood of the Reach scientists, and Bart swallows hard.
This is a man about five minutes after an incredibly violent episode, injured and seemingly unaware of his presence to boot. He's only seen a small handful of people brought back from the Reach's science division, and none of them had been anything close to this level of powerful and dangerous.
He couldn't afford to fuck this up.
Deep breath in, out. Once more, and again, the way Helena taught him.
Bart spots a sizable piece of glass on the floor and takes a heavy, deliberate step onto it.
The crunch that announced his arrival made Wally snap to attention, head coming up to glare straight at Bart from his hunched position, and Bart froze completely, hands open at his sides, trying not to let his terror show.
It's been a while since Wally was back home with the rest of the Outlaws, and the light in the room is flickering and near useless; will the man even recognize the modified Kid Flash uniform in the gloom?
But he apparently didn't need to worry; Wally blinks his eyes hard several times, scanning Bart from head to toe, evidently recognizing him as a nonthreat and slumping a little more to the side with a long, pained sigh.
"Wassup, Kid?" Wally asks, daring a bloody little grin, and Bart is so surprised he can't answer for a second. He wasn't quite sure if the man would lucid or coherent in the state he's in, but apparently the older speedster's accelerated healing is doing at least something to help his addled brain.
Bart still approached slowly, watching for any sudden movements, but he needn't have bothered. Wally's arm stays fixed firmly around his bleeding middle, and he doesn't move to sit up until Bart is already beside him, hissing quietly in pain as his wound moves with him.
"Nice to meet you, too," Bart says in as steady a voice as he can manage, and he means it, because as strung out and crazy as this man is right now, he's been an inspiration to Bart since he was little and he doesn't know what else he can say to a guy who singlehandedly ripped through an entire Reach lab. "Why weren't you in the main cellblock? That's where we were supposed to meet, right?"
Wally shakes his head too fast, listing a bit awkwardly to the side again when he apparently gave up on sitting straight. "Thought I could find Jai," he slurred slowly, shakes his head again.
Bart feels something cold sink into his stomach. He doesn't dare take a glance at the human remains displayed on the table above Wally's head, and his hands don't start shaking again when he reaches helplessly to press against the wound in his abdomen.
"Here." A hand, slick with red red red, rises slowly so Bart can see what it's holding in trembling fingers. A data card, like one of the fancy ones Roy had been looking for recently, some sort of super-secret Reach project that was going to change the tide of the war or something.
Bart barely spares it a glance, too focused on trying to stem the flow of blood because hell, what else can he do, but Wally practically shoves it under his nose with an impatient sound. "You gotta take this and go, Kid. Someone's… probably noticed the cameras by now," Wally's voice is thready and breathless, but still holds as much authority as Damian's does when giving Bart a direct order.
And that's stupid, what the hell?
"I'm not leaving you here, dude! Helena would kick my ass if I let her grandpa kick the bucket in a place like this!" He tries to sound as convincing as he can, but he can tell by the old man's face it's not working. "Come on, we can still make it to the rendezvous point if we hurry-!"
"I can't… can't walk, Kid," Wally interrupts, and Bart's limbs feel numb when the data card is clumsily slipped into one hand. He clutches onto it reflexively and looks down at the blood coating it, ears buzzing. "You gotta go."
He should argue. He should tell him to hell with that, tell him Linda and Helena were waiting for him, tell him Damian had the schematics for the Reach warship hovering over Earth, tell him they finally had a chance in this war, tell him there's finally something to fight for again.
There's a lot of things he should say, but Wally's eyes blink shut a little too long before the right one opens again, glazed over and unseeing, and he shakes his head one more time. "Run, kid," Wally murmurs, before leaning back against the table holding what's left of his son.
Bart turns and flees, because what the hell else can he do?
A/N: This, I feel, definitely warrants a bit of an explanation. This scene is actually something I've been thinking about for a fic I've had in my head for about four years now, and when I saw today's prompt I couldn't resist. This is a highly abridged version of the scene, but I think it's good enough to post. Let me know what you think!
~Persephone