In his dreams, Wally runs.
Not all of his dreams. Not even most of them. Mostly he has the usual ones, where there were monsters under the bed or he showed up in class and realized he was naked or he was surrounded by girls that would never give him the time of day in real life.
The first time he dreams of running it wasn't really surprising. Part of him had always latched on to superheroes (Green Lantern was easily the best). Wally is twelve, chemistry is his life, and through science anything is possible. Dreaming of an explosion that make the world go so much slower is just an extension of that.
During the day his Aunt Iris listens to him, a contended smile on her face, as he explained with far too much energy about red and yellow costumes and huge boomerangs and how Central City had a real protector that fought robbers and super villains and Citizen Cold, who was so totally open about being a bad guy like he should have been in the real world. She always tenses up a little when he talks about that last part, glancing around even though they are usually alone in her house.
Then the world changes around him, and superheroes are slowly treated with more and more disdain. With good reason, actually; the Amazons and Atlanteans begin to tear the world apart while the people who had previously sworn to protect the weak do nothing. His dreams feel a little bit like a betrayal then, and even though they begin to grow in scale and frequency he never tells anyone about them anymore.
Even if the world seems so much more right with a pixie-like laugh that melted into the dark and burned cookies and a calm, mature composure and snarky blondes and an ever-brooding anger that hid something really good underneath-they aren't real. Not even if they were superheroes that fought the bad guys like they were supposed to. Not even if it seemed like there his parents were so much happier and yelled so much less, or if he had an uncle that liked science and could run even faster than Wally himself and then at the end of the day would take him out for ice cream.
He needs to stop it. None of that is real, and there's no point is getting wrapped up in a fantasy when reality is right here, waiting to be fixed.
(He does the calculations, just to make sure. His clothes would catch on fire and it would be impossible to breathe at those speeds, not to mention torn muscles and fragile bones not being able to take so much as a stumble. Superspeed doesn't deserve any more credibility than a magic show.)
Eventually Wally grows to hate it all; running so fast it feels like falling, a group of friends so close they'd die for each other, and seeing his childhood heroes every day. He hates how it feels like a huge loss every time he wakes up, and how sometimes his first thought in the morning is to go back to sleep so he can never leave that place. Escapism never helps anyone.
All of this is why, when Wally sees a flyer advertising a circus, he thinks he's going to die or go crazy on the spot. In the center of the advertisement, right next to the ringmaster himself, an ecstatic-looking family stands proudly in red costumes that were achingly reminiscent of something that never existed. A teenager, surrounded by people Wally instinctively knows are his parents and cousin and aunt and uncle, is posed with his arms outstretched as if receiving praise for a trick he's just performed. Somehow Dick looks younger without the mas-
One balled up and tossed away paper later, Wally continues on the way home. He can't start projecting his fantasies onto some random kid.
He only glances back out of an urge to kind a proper trash can. Something about his respect for his science teacher makes listening to the man's eco-friendly speeches almost compulsory, and now that voice is telling Wally not to litter. (And really, that's the only reason.) But by the time he's glanced again the paper is gone from the street. Something ripples out of the corner of his eye, and hair redder than his own along with the memory of chameleon-like powers immediately come to mind.
He shrugs his shoulders and adopts an expression that states that, were anyone nearby to hear it, he'd have made a distracting joke. No one is, so he just turns around and keeps walking.
The next day he ignores the Atlant- guy with a thick scarf casually standing on a street corner and looking at a flyer for Haley's Circus. No point in wondering why he has a scarf when it really isn't that cold. Pointing that out to anyone can easily cause a witch hunt, which is just stupid considering how far inland the aptly named Central City is.
There is no rippling outside his house.
Shadows flitting through the trees are just squirrels, dammit. Maybe it's a really big one. Or a bunch of them. Or the neighbor's unexpectedly agile kid.
Blue eyes outside his window can't be ignored. They stay present just long enough for Wally to assure himself they're really there.
They're still gone before he opens the window, though. Every single night.
One day his unc- some guy with blonde hair parks on the side of the road near Wally's house. He looks panicked but is gone before Wally can give the small car a second glance.
Wally spends a lot of time watching the news. Europe has been completely torn apart by Amazons and Atlanteans. There's a war between the two races over England. Thomas Wayne abandons his company completely. Citizen Cold sponsors a charity banquet full of guests everyone knows are dirty. He buries himself in facts, so naturally when he falls asleep he can only dream of going faster than anyone ever has. Upon waking up he pulls out a notebook and fills in holes from past experiments.
No combination of those chemicals could ever induce super speed, and there's absolutely no reason at all he can't get the whole thing out of his head.
When his Aunt Iris tells the family she's planning on going to England soon to help Lois Lane and the other freedom fighters there... Wally just kind of snaps.
Some people may argue that he snapped back when he started seeing his dreams walking around in real life, but no, yelling out of his window at nothing is definitely the most definitive moment when it comes to his declining sanity.
"Would you JUST STOP HIDING?" Nothing answers (naturally, because nothing's out there but the tree next to his bedroom that's perfect for sneaking out) but Wally leaves the window open the rest of the night anyway. He's too nervous to sleep after that, so he lays on his side and stares at the door, expecting his dad to storm in and demand to know what all the noise was about. Three people not so quietly dropping in through his open window sounds more like a parade to his tense nerves.
When he rolls over to greet the newcomers with an annoyed look, Megan is green like she should be and Kaldur isn't even trying to cover the gills on his neck. Robin's uncovered blue eyes look out of place next to those two things, but overall? It feels right.
For the first time Wally doesn't even bother to correct himself with a Which is stupid.
"So, uh, guys. What was with the stalking me thing?"
They tell him they couldn't have been sure he remembered like they did, and that if not they couldn't risk letting Kaldur's presence being known. Megan's too, Kaldur amends. Humans lately have been nothing if not paranoid of anyone different.
Wally tells his team about his dreams. Robi- Dick explains that those were what drew Megan to Earth and Kaldur out of the sea and propelled Dick to push his own circus to Central City.
The rest of the night they (quietly, you guys so totally don't want to meet my parents when they're mad) share in what they remember, or maybe imagine. Trying to pieces together a whole a coherent story is soothing, and for the first time in human history people speak about their dreams without boring everyone else in the room.
Wally's been saving up for a long time. Chemicals to experiment with don't come cheaply and it isn't as if his parents will pay for anything that isn't strictly required for life. Sometimes not even then. Global tensions somehow manage to reach new heights every day, and with the world ending no one really wants to travel. In other words, he thinks he has enough money to get them all to Happy Harbor.
Then Megan introduces him to her bioship and he feels kind of stupid.
Happy Harbor is exactly how they all remember it, except the mountain near the sea was never hollowed out. Nothing even resembling the Justice League ever formed, but they still refer to it as Mt. Justice. Dick, Megan, Kaldur and Wally just stand and stare at it for an amount of time none of them could begin to guess at. When they turn around a blonde teenaged girl is smirking at them with crossed arms.
Artemis looks relieved when she finds out she doesn't have to pay the money to get all the way back from Rhode Island to Gotham.
Mrs. Crock does her best to hide her surprise when her daughter shows up at their apartment with four other teenagers in tow. Per Artemis' instructions they all politely decline snacks, including Wally. Instead they crowd into the living room around the tiny TV. Megan instinctively leaves a spot next to her empty on the end of the couch. Wally and Kaldur end up on the floor, but no one protests.
They miss Connor too.
Literally nothing is on TV but one news story. The entire world is focused on the battle over England, and it looks like Hal Jordan's last ditch effort to pilot in a missile failed. If the Atlanteans manage to sink the island it could destabilize the entire planet, but did they really want the Amazons to win that fight?
Every news development is a bad one, and the whole world is doom and gloom. The five friends (six, spiritually) press against each other for comfort they'd never admit out loud they needed. Despite the gut-wrenching clips that never seem to end of leveled cities and dead reporters and superheroes that just won't show up, they drop off to sleep one by one.
Each member of the nonexistent team dreams of things the way they were always supposed to be.
A/N The original prompt was this: Wally West was an ordinary science geek living in Central City. An ordinary geek who has really weird dreams of being able to run really fast with a group of other super powered/skilled teenagers. Teenagers who stalk him during the day and one tiny blue eyed teen who sometimes sits in the tree outside his window.
It didn't fit in the description box, so I made the description shorter and more this-fic specific.