Chapter 1

He'd been electric, his blood bubbling and his skin a thin layer of charged ions. He was ice cold and boiling all at once, a frozen Hell on Earth except he wasn't sure he was on Earth anymore. Everything was liquid and white noise. The ground, the sky, his bones, all a thick pool of gelatinous nothingness and static electricity.

'So uncool,' he thought, as it all faded to black. "Artemis is gonna kill me."

The first sensation he could register as he came to was that his teeth hurt. Not his mouth, or his gums, but his teeth – the core and enamel and roots were aching. Then, slowly, as the sensation began to trickle its way back in, he realized numbly that it wasn't just his teeth. A dull throb pulsed through him, starting as a tingle in his finger tips but spreading deep into his chest. A groan escaped him as he tried to blink his eyes open. He was rewarded with blurry shapes and the pain of glaring lights.

"Woahhh, Space Man's coming back to Earth." Wally hissed at the words. It wasn't a voice he recognized. He tried to speak, to say something witty, but all he could get out was garbled nonsense. "Hey, cool it Space Man." The voice was feminine. "Your voice is shot. You've been asleep for three days, at least. Actually, I don't know if you were awake when you crash landed." He twisted his shoulder to the left, trying to focus his vision on the person in the chair beside him. She had dark hair and pale skin, that much he could tell. There was something red in her hands.

"Who're you…?" he managed to grit out.

The woman chuckled, and Wally could make out the sound of a pen clicking. "Linda Park, Central City News. And you are….?"

"No comment," Wally muttered off, repressing a sigh. Just his luck, a reporter. What'd happened? What had he gotten himself into now? Why did everything hurt?

"No dice, kid. You don't get to crash land in the middle of Central Park and tell me 'no comment.' You have any idea how much damage your little stunt caused?" Wally's vision swirled into focus, and he watched as the reporter tucked a red notepad under her arm. Linda's eyebrows furrowed. "Or how much work I've done to keep this off the radar?"

He let his shoulder fall back, collapsing onto what he now realized was a hospital bed. "Why?" he muttered softly, swallowing hard to push the pain in his throat back.

"Why? Why what?" He could hear in Linda's voice that she was mad. "Why'd you fall from the sky and cause thousands of damage to public property? Gee, I dunno. Maybe that's what I'm trying to find out."

"Why," Wally repeated slowly, "...off the... radar?"

"Because," Linda answered with a snort, "this is the story of the year. Mysterious man falls from sky during lightning storm and lives. No way I'm letting anyone steal this from me."

He tried to fight it. He really did. But the world was getting heavy and Wally's eyes were burning. As he fought to keep them open, he muttered, "Thank… you."

"Wha… hey!" He felt Linda's arm on his shoulder as his eyes closed. "Don't go back to sleep!" Wally heard a door open, and the sound of an irate nurse entering the room. Linda ignored her. "Talk to me! Hey!"

Wally tried to hide his chuckle as the nurse asked Linda to leave. Linda was giving her disgruntled reply as he faded back into sleep.

When he awoke again, Wally was actually able to think straight.

"What the hell happened?" It was the dead of night. Monitors blinked around him, faint LEDs reporting on his vital signs. He was completely alone.

It took milliseconds for him to disconnect from the hospital machinery and crawl out the window into the open air of night. A cool breeze fluttered his hospital gown, causing a shiver to run through his body. Oh. Right. Clothes. He should probably get some clothes. So, at top speed, Wally headed towards the nearest zeta tube. He kept an extra set of clothes at the Watchtower. Plus, when he got there, he could see if anyone could tell him what exactly was going on.

He skidded to a stop as the busted phone booth outside the Central City Library came into view. His whole body ached and his bare feet were raw from running on concrete, but it was almost done with. "Dick better have a good reason for not busting me out," he muttered under his breath. "For the son of Batman, you'd think he'd have managed to find me."

Wally pushed the door to the phone booth open and froze. Instead of the voice of the computer activating the zeta tube, he was met with a loud creak. "Hello?" He wiggled the door. "Anybody?" No response. "B03? Kid Flash?" Silence. Slamming the door shut, Wally huffed and headed towards Keystone. The Central City zeta must be busted.

When the Keystone zeta was down too, Wally cursed under his breathe. When the Chicago and Midway City zetas didn't work, his hands started to shake. With bloody soles and a hungry pit in his stomach, Wally did the only thing he could think to do and headed to Gotham.

Gotham was a mistake.

As the door to Wayne Manor slowly creaked open, Wally fought to keep himself talking at a normal pace. "Alfred, thank God. Is Dick home? The zetas-" When a face peered out through the crack in the door, Wally froze. "You're not Alfred."

An older man with greying black hair and heavyset eyes peered back at him, cautious though not unkind. He nodded slowly. "No I am not."

Realization dawned, drowning Wally slowly, and the speedster stumbled back a step. "Uh..."

The man lowered an eyebrow at him. "Who are you?" A scowl started to etch itself onto his face. "Do you know Alfred?"

Hands shaking and heart racing, Wally took another step back before he took off running, full speed. Though he'd never met the man before, he recognized him from the numerous portraits he'd seen hanging on the walls of the Manor.

Thomas Wayne.

"I'm... I'm not in Kansas anymore."

Feet bloody, stomach empty and out of options, Wally made his way to the nearest 24 hour super center.

The next day, the store would report a set of clothes, sneakers and five bags of Chicken Whizees missing from their inventory. However, when they checked the security footage, all they'd see was a bright streak. Interference on the feed, no doubt.

"This cannot be real." He told himself every night when he fell asleep, hiding out under bridges and in subway tunnels. But every morning, when he woke up, nothing changed. Wally checked the zetas, checked the news, checked the papers, but found nothing. No mention of him, or the Flash, or the League.

It took nearly a week for Wally to pull himself together enough to make a fake ID. He'd been stealing, mostly from dumpsters but that wasn't always true, and he hated to steal, he really did, but he needed to eat.

The team was going to come for him, wherever he was. He knew they were. But for now... he needed a job.

After two months of working at three different fast food joints and sleeping under park benches, he'd finally saved up enough money for the down-payment on a shoebox apartment. It wasn't much, but it was home. He didn't have any belongings, so he slept with a pillow on the floor. He settled down for bed that first night, and even though he closed his eyes, sleep would not come. Instead, something heavy clenched his chest.

To ease the pain, he told himself what he told himself every night. "Someone will come for me soon."

"Woah!" He watched in slow motion as Ms. Gyeon's bad leg twisted, shifting her weight unnaturally to the side. Wally was beside her in an instant. At a speed only he could reach, he shifted his grocery bags into his right hand so he could catch her arm with his left. "What's a lovely young lady like yourself doing unescorted on a fine day like this?"

Ms. Gyeon steadied herself with her cane, then playfully swatted Wally's hand away. Wally continued, "You ought to have one of your suitors walking you home."

The older woman chuckled, a grin pulling at the wrinkles of her face. "Who needs suitors when my tenants are as charming as you, dear?" She pushed herself forward, wobbling up the stairs of the building that her family had owned for many years.

Wally tsked, pushing the door open for her as they made their way inside. "Somewhere, a crowd of men's hearts just broke."

Ms. Gyeon laughed and patted his arm. As she pushed into her own apartment, she smiled softly at Wally and mouthed, "Thank you." Wally nodded in response.

With Ms. Gyeon home safe and sound, Wally made his way up the three flights of stairs to the one bedroom apartment that he called his own. The door creaked as he shut it behind him, and he set his grocery bags down on the chipped linoleum counter-top. The bags rustled as he moved to put his food away, but as he reached the end, he came abruptly to a stop. The apartment grew silent.

In the bottom of the bag was a small green box of Jasmine tea, embroidered with gold lettering and wrapped in a thin layer of plastic. He hadn't realized he'd bought it. He didn't even like tea.

It was Artemis's favorite brand.

With shaking hands, he put it on the top shelf of his far left cabinet and shut the door.