if i owned young justice, it would have ended very, very differently
rated t for mentions of abuse
he's six when he sees his father hit his mom for the first time.
he's six years old when he first looks at his dad with fear, when he first locks his door before he goes to sleep and has nightmares that can't be fixed with a glass of warm milk and a kiss.
(wally's six when he realizes the world is not as beautiful as it seems.)
when he's seven, he steps in front of the blow. that's when his father rounds on him instead, when he trudges up to his room bruised and bloody and defiant with a new understanding of the importance of keeping his mouth shut.
seven is also the age where he first learns about the flash, the hero that saves central city on a daily basis. he forgets saturday morning cartoons in favor of news broadcasts that feature the scarlet speedster and trades his favorite toys for action figures. he decorates his room with memoribilia and worships the man in red, because the flash is a hero, the flash is strong, and one day wally's gonna be just like him.
at nine, he becomes his father's favorite punching bag. he's glad for it, because if the hands are hitting him, they aren't hitting his mother, and he'll go to the ends of the earth to keep it that way. but he's nine when he determines that a bottle hurts more than a fist and that his father's sobered apologies in the morning aren't always enough.
wally's nine when he meets aunt iris, who bakes him cookies and ruffles his hair and laughs at his science jokes, and uncle barry, who gives the best hugs and takes him out to ice cream and listens and smiles when he raves about the flash. he's nine when he feels wanted for the first time in years.
he wakes up in the hospital when he's ten. at first, he's terrified it didn't work, that he painstakingly mixed chemicals and timed lightning strikes for nothing, but then he's running, oh god, he's running, and the wind is tearing at his cheeks and his hair and his sneakers are smoking and all the world's a blur and he's done it.
that's when he finds out that the man who saved him moonlights as his favorite hero, and he can't help but thinking that it's so fitting.
(he happens to be the same age when his father calls him a freak for the first time, throwing him out of the house and leaving him to sleep on the porch as the temperature drops lower and lower and his thin hoodie loses the ability to keep him warm.)
he's eleven years old when it's finally decided that he's trained enough to help, and he dons the cowl for the first time, helps flash lock up captain cold and acquires the label of sidekick (it doesn't bother him as much as he thought it would. he's a hero now, and that's all that matters).
he's also eleven when he meets him for the first time, an ebony-haired boy with a domino mask and a knack for saying exactly what's on his mind and trailing behind batman wherever he goes. they're thick as thieves within the hour, exchanging grins and promising to meet up soon.
they do, for video games at barry's or movies or walks in the park, with robin wearing dark shades the whole time and still refusing to say his real name. but wally doesn't mind, much. he trusts robin, whether the bird trusts him back or not.
(and, at eleven, he discovers that the concealer in his mom's bottom left drawer will cover almost any bruise on his body and keep the questions down to a minimum.)
at thirteen, he meets roy harper, who calls himself speedy (and wally wastes no time in pointing out the irony) and rolls his eyes and is defiant and brash in every aspect. he complains about having to babysit robin and wally at first, but by the end of the night, the three of them are curled up on the couch together, the ongoing movie forgotten in favor of the soft snores muffled by roy's chest and the sweet dreams that come with them.
when he's fourteen, he learns what a belt feels like against his bare back. he learns that he has the same claustrophobia that comes with being a speedster, and that being locked inside a closet for hours at a time makes his heart race and his breath quicken like nothing else.
but at fourteen, he also learns that robin's eyes are so very blue behind his mask and the fact that he's a billionare's son doesn't matter as much as the color of his blue, blue eyes or the way the name dick grayson feels around wally's tongue. he learns that the bird's trust means everything to him, and he'll do whatever it takes to keep it.
fifteen is when he finds the team (or rather, the team finds him), a miscellany of clashing personalities, thrown together by the sheer force of their inexhaustable need to launch themselves into the thick of danger. somehow, there's room for him here, among these outsiders who never seem to get along but love each other nonetheless. somehow, they fall into place as easily as puzzle pieces and he's part of a whole he never wanted in the first place but can't live without.
sixteen is the age at which he has his first kiss. the black-haired, blue-eyed boy tastes like alfred's cookies and pulls him close and tells him he loves him.
consequentially, sixteen is also the age when his father calls him a faggot for the first time, beats him until he can't breathe, and leaves him lying there at the bottom of the staircase, bleeding out onto the grey carpets as his heart slows and he loses the energy to do so much as scream.
and at sixteen, roy finds him there, and he's throwing punches at rudolph and cursing and scooping wally into his arms as the young speedster begs him not to tell. roy does anyway.
and dick looks at him with sadness in his perfect eyes and wally hates to be the cause of it the tears that glitter on the bird's cheeks and hates that the cops are hanging on every word he says and hates the way everyone's looking at him.
wally sees the inside of a courtroom for the first time, packs up the things in his room and moves in with uncle barry and aunt iris and has home-cooked dinners with joan and jay and uncle hal sometimes joining in and finally, finally learns what it feels like to have a family.
for a while, things are okay.
for a while, his life is normal (at least, by the standards of a teenage superhero), punctuated with crime-fighting and late-night kisses and occasional runs across the country.
he graduates at eighteen, gets accepted into college for a major in electrical engineering, spends long nights with dick in his apartment in blüdhaven and forgets, for a while, that fate has never been kind to him.
he's nineteen when the doctors at s.t.a.r. labs tell him he's dying.
the very thing that saved his life is what's killing him, and using his speed only runs down the clock so wally leaves, leaves everything he's ever wanted in the dust because what else can he do? he disappears, hangs up the canary-colored suit and tries, with all his might, to adjust to a life without acceleration and heroics and worst of all, without dick.
he's nineteen when he loses himself.
so at twenty, he jumps at the opportunity to slip back into his old shoes. it hurts, physically, but mentally it's like he's healing. the world is ending but he hasn't felt so alive in ages, and he wonders how he ever left this behind.
at twenty, he finds himself in the arctic, running harder than he's ever run before but still not fast enough (he's never been fast enough). and he's thrown the job aside to save his own skin before but not this time, he's not making the same mistake twice. he knows what'll happen if he keeps running. he does anyway.
because he knows, above anything else, that everything, everything he's ever worked for is right here, in this shining display of lights cutting open the cold as the world faces a conclusion it's not yet ready for.
and this? this was his fate all along.
he's wallace west, the canary speedster, the teen superhero heartthrob and the oddity, the tiny deviation in the world's rhythm. he's wallace west, the outlier that no one predicted, the victim of unfortunate circumstance and the product of unexpected afflictions. he's wallace west, kid flash, and he's destined to be a tragedy.
(instead, he'll die a legend.)