In the early days of Young Justice, Wally remembered feeling invincible. When you're sixteen years old and can run faster than the speed of sound, death just didn't seem like a real thing that happened to real people. It would turn up occasionally in headlines and on the news, but it never touched your own life in any meaningful way. He knew the others felt the same way, to some extent, otherwise they wouldn't approach their work with such giddy carelessness. Death was something that you would stare in the face and laugh at, but then you went home and played video games and forgot how close you got to never coming home. Death happened during Failsafe practices, never in real life. Death was bullets that came close but never quite hit their marks, sword strokes that were always parried, collapsed buildings that came down empty with no casualties.
Death was never real until it became a crowbar cracking down on a fifteen-year-old's skull and the manic cackle of a madman fleeing the site of a warehouse explosion. Then it was Batman's flat voice and Nightwing's pale face, the scent of burnt, abandoned cookies that nobody could bring themselves to care about, M'Gann's puffy eyes and Artemis's shaking hands, and a room whose air was unbreathable with the weight of disbelief and grief. It was the hologram in the lower levels of the mountain, watching people come and go, reminding them all that if Robin could die, anyone could.
The expression on holo-Jason's face was meant to be proud, heroic, but Wally thought it was more accusing. "You let me die," it seemed to say. "I was just a kid, and you let me go out there and get killed." Wally spent as little time in the memorial grotto as he could, and when he was down there, he avoided Jason's gaze.
Everything was different, then. Just like that, all carelessness was leeched from the Team's actions, any giddiness forced and stale. On missions, they were efficient and not much else. During downtime, they did the same things, told the same jokes, had the same conversations as before, but now it all felt like 2000's sitcom reruns. Jason's cleverness, his brash sarcasm and dry wit were glaringly absent, even as more young heroes joined their ranks.
Garfield Logan already knew most of the Team when he joined. He probably didn't notice many changes in their attitudes, having just come from his own tragedy. But after several weeks of coming to terms with his new life, Gar was once again the outgoing, painfully punny kid they'd met years ago. He brought a certain brand of determined sunniness to Mount Justice, and even managed to make Nightwing laugh for the first time since losing Jason.
Cassie Sandsmark was cheeky and outspoken, excruciatingly stubborn, prone to bouts of excitable recklessness, and got along peculiarly well with Batgirl. She was also unfailingly optimistic, brave almost to a fault, and strong as all get out. You couldn't help but be proud having her on the Team.
La'gaan was insufferably proud, but his heart was in the right place and his eagerness made him a mostly reliable ally. Plus, having a fourth Atlantean powerhouse on the Team could only be a good thing, right?
One thing the new recruits had in common was age, or rather, lack thereof. Wonder Girl, the oldest of the lot, was a whopping fourteen years old. Still painfully young. How on Earth could Batman approve these additions when he had a tattered Robin costume strung up in a glass case in the Batcave as a reminder?
That memorial case wasn't some big secret, but Wally didn't think it was the sort of thing you'd want people to know about. Dick had shown it to him the last time he was in Gotham. It was worse than the holo-Jason. The edges of the suit were blackened, almost crisp-looking, the fabric riddled with bloodstains. The cape, which was meant to be flame-resistant, was only half there, and one of the lenses in the mask was cracked. Wally felt sick looking at it, and he'd quickly fled the cave only to find himself in the graveyard behind Wayne Manor.
If Wally had to read any sort of sign into Jason's death, it would be that children shouldn't be soldiers. The League seemed to have instead taken it as a discipline warning for young heroes. Follow the rules, and do exactly as we say, or you'll end up like Robin.
"It's bullshit," Dick had said, and Wally had to agree. "Jason didn't do anything wrong. He was just looking for his mom. I would've done the same thing."
Wally took a second to consider this. He imagined standing in that same spot, staring at a fresh grave, but it was Jason standing beside him, and the headstone in front of them read Richard Grayson. For a wild moment, Wally felt irrationally, selfishly happy that his best friend's parents were already dead and couldn't sell him out.
There was silence for a minute before Dick spoke again. "I'm leaving Gotham. I can't stay here anymore. It's too empty. I've already got a place in Bludhaven."
Wally thought this was a spectacularly bad idea. Dick was seventeen, not even out of high school, and probably needed Bruce more than either would willingly admit. But Wally couldn't pretend to know what Dick was going through, and thought that steadfast support was probably better than any misguided advice. The last thing he wanted to do was drive a wedge in their friendship.
"Need any help moving in?" he asked.
"I don't have much stuff to move," Dick said. "I'll call you if I need a speedster."
He didn't call, and Wally didn't see him for several weeks.
It was around this time that the League called off the search for the original Roy Harper. The trail had gone cold, and the general consensus was that he died long ago. The clone of Roy hadn't been seen in months, and Oliver Queen was now more interested in finding him than the original.
Between Roy's disappearance and Dick's leave of absence, Wally had never felt more alone. Which was strange, considering he was starting his second year of college and had an apartment with Artemis, so even when he wasn't with the Team he was rarely technically alone. But he always kind of figured that he, Roy, and Dick would always be a trio. Inseparable. Like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
Then Wally remembered The Wrath of Khan and vaguely wondered which of them would end up being Spock.
Wally started spending less time with the Team, and more focusing on his classes (which was entirely justifiable. A double major in chemical and mechanical engineering wasn't exactly easy, even for him). Immersing himself in academia was the simplest way to forget about who wasn't there.
When Wally was sixteen, he felt invincible. Now he was nineteen, nearly twenty, and he felt tired. In just three and a half years, the world had grown darker, colder, scarier. And somewhere along the way, Wally West, the starry-eyed kid who'd blow himself up for the glimmer of a chance of gaining superpowers, forgot just what it was he was fighting for. At sixteen, he had used his superhero life as a reprieve from school, and now he used classes as a reprieve from being a superhero. Sometimes he'd entertain thoughts of leaving the Team entirely for a safer, saner, normal existence. He voiced these thoughts to Artemis one night as he held her close after a particularly bullet-ridden mission.
"It's not the same anymore," she'd said in response, laying her head on his chest. They'd drifted off to sleep like that, and Wally's dreams were filled with the red drip of blood through thick blonde hair.
Two months later, Wally hit his breaking point. He left, declaring to the world that he was done, that he couldn't play at being "hero" when that word seemed to belong only to people all too eager to send child soldiers to the front line to die. If he was entirely honest, the nearly identical expressions of shock that followed him to the zeta tube were immensely satisfying. Maybe somebody on the Team would take his words to heart.
That seemed unlikely, considering the day Wally walked out was the day Nightwing had arrived with a protective hand on twelve-year-old Tim Drake's shoulder. And maybe Wally could've accepted another young recruit if Tim hadn't been clad in a familiar black and yellow cape, complete with red tunic and ubiquitous utility belt. This child wasn't a hero; he was a ghost. Could be the stylized "R" on his breast stood for "Replacement."
After four weeks had passed and the Team realized Wally was serious about quitting, Artemis joined him, assuring him that she wouldn't be going back, and that Donna Troy had made the same choice, though Troia would still be a hero.
"It's not the same anymore," she said again, this time as explanation.
When Aquagirl died not long after, Wally and Artemis agreed that they were right to leave, though the words did little to assuage the inexplicable guilt they both pretended not to feel. They attended her service on land and stood by Kaldur as he grieved. Garth was not there, and they learned later that he'd gone back to Atlantis as Tempest, and would not be rejoining the Team.
Then it was Blue Beetle, a member of the actual Justice League, gone in an explosion and even as a teenaged boy stepped forward to take his place, Wally couldn't help but wonder who would be next.
A year later, Wally was just starting to think that things would maybe be okay when Dick finally called. There was a new (very young, to nobody's surprise) speedster that the Flash needed help with. And then Nightwing needed Artemis.
Wally wasn't blind. He knew Artemis longed to be a hero again. She wasn't made for the civilian life, and he couldn't blame her for that, no matter how much he wished she would stay by his side.
So she left, and when the world needed him, so did Wally. One last mission, he told himself. We'll save the world one last time, and then we're done. For good.
He died during that mission.
Five years later, Wally stood in the Watchtower conference room, wearing a costume that once belonged to his uncle, and he thought, somehow, the world had grown infinitely darker.