The Wrong Ones
by TwinEnigma
Warnings/AN: Alternate Universe, originally done as a fill for a prompt on YJ-Anon meme, in which no one on YJ is quite who they claim.
2 - Inertia
He runs.
He runs from the past, from the future, and he runs from the truth.
It's easier than stopping and facing who and what he is, the future that threatens to unfold and devour him and the friends he never knew he could have. It's easier than admitting his friends are legends of history, so ephemeral and distorted through the eons that he hadn't recognized them as the idols he'd so long admired when he'd first met them.
Sometimes, he thinks he'll stay, but then he remembers that there's already a Wally West in the past, a future Flash, and he wonders how long he'll be able to keep using this name before the child it's truly meant for appears.
When he appears.
If he appears.
In those brief moments he stops running, he thinks he already knows that he can't go back to being a boy torn between legacies, a weapon meant to supplant and destroy his twin, all to better hurt the man he has come to call Uncle. Something in him rebels against the blood of super villains in his veins and maybe it's that other half of himself his maternal grandfather tried so hard to suppress, the half that is Allen, the half that is impulsive and innocent. On the edge of sleep, when he's at his stillest and surrounded by signs of the West's affection for him, his mind whispers that maybe he was always supposed to be here, to let his hair get redder and redder, until he became the Wally West that his history books always talked about and Thaddeus disappears, a failed weapon swallowed by the timestream.
But when he wakes, all he wants to do is run.
Run as far as he can.
Because in his heart, he's not sure he can be the Wally history remembers.
And that fact terrifies him.
