Bisexual massive flirt Wally (with low standards) is canon for this story, because it's my own personal headcanon. It won't be a major part of the story by any means, but it's still there.

Trigger for mentions of child abuse in this chapter.

For all those wondering if this is a BM/WW story, it could really go either way. If you ship it, there's nothing to suggest that it's not happening, but if you don't, then there's nothing particularly detailed in terms of affection. They could be together, or they could not be. Personally, I like their relationship, but if you're opposed to it than that's okay too.

Also, if a character is swearing a lot, it's because I'm projecting onto them.

Chapter Four: Pushing These Blocks in the Heat of the Afternoon

Diana was going stir-crazy.

She was stuck in a reasonably small room with five relative strangers and one very close friend, with the remains of the ropes and chains that had once been binding them to the wall. There was a drain on the floor where they were supposed to… You know, but the only way to get any privacy whatsoever was to have Shayera stand with her back turned and her wings open as much as possible (the room was longer lengthwise than it was wide) to form a sort of feathery curtain. If it was Shayera herself, all of the boys had to turn their backs-especially Wally, who always seemed to be trying to peer around her wings to see whoever was behind them no matter the gender.

He was the second problem.

The kid (not really a kid, but according to him he had only just turned fifteen a few weeks ago, making him the youngest out of all seven of them) seemed to be constantly flirting with someone, whether it was for the purpose of making Clark feel extremely uncomfortable or actually trying to get a 'date' with one of them. He seemed to have his sights especially set on Diana herself and Clark, sometimes genuinely asking them out. Whenever they turned him down he would immediately start 'revenge flirting' (in his own words) with Shayera and Bruce.

The third problem was food and water.

While all of them-except for Clark, really-were used to going to bed with empty stomachs and waking up thirsty with no source of clean water, but that didn't make it any easier to live off of the moldy bread, overripe fruit, and scummy water that the goons occasionally dropped off. As it turned out, Diana and Clark didn't really need to eat as much as a normal human (although they still got hungry), and they usually ended up giving part of their food to Wally, who would literally die if he didn't eat on a regular basis. He did have several tricks that centered around keeping himself alive without eating all of their food.

There were quite a few other problems, but they formed a list too long to say.

J'onn's collar had been replaced a few hours after Clark removed it, and it was joined by a second one around the neck of the super-strong boy himself, effectively neutralizing that particular power, as well as a second one that Clark said was laser vision. Apparently, he had even more powers than J'onn, something that surprised pretty much all of them.

She didn't know how long it had been-seeing as how the passage of time was an illusion in the facilities-when they were returned to the white room. Four days? A week? Longer? Wally steadfastly refused to look at the treadmill, which was still in the place where it had been the first time. In fact, everything in the room was exactly the same as it had been before, and still immaculately clean on every surface.

The only difference was that it was full of scientists, goons, and other metahumans of all ages.

While the oldest ones (who couldn't have been older than twenty-five or twenty-six at the most) were certainly a painful sight to behold, emaciated enough to be skeletons with cuts and bruises marring their skin and dark bags underneath their dead eyes, it was the youngest ones who broke Diana's heart as they did just as much work as the adults and teenagers. The smallest child must have only been approaching her sixth birthday.

On first glance, most people wouldn't notice the cruelty of it all, aside from the age of a few of the subjects. But when you looked closer, it was easy to see that almost all of the metahumans were being worked until they dropped, struggling to stand up and continue. One of them, a teenage girl with skin that was only a slightly lighter shade then J'onn's, stumbled as collapsed on the ground. A scientist nodded to the hired muscle beside him and the large man advanced on her with what looked like a modified cattle prod.

Wally made a small sound of pity as the girl screamed, and Shayera rubbed her shoulder sympathetically as it twinged in reply to the teen's pain. She knew that cattle-prod-thing well.

Dr. Sivana stood in front of them, a bruise on his collarbone and a split lip, and Diana knew that there were many more that his clothing concealed. She was proud to say that she had been the one to put several of them there in the first place. Unfortunately, the fact that he was still standing even after some time had passed meant that she was rusty.

The doctor curled his lip. "You seven have been returned to my supervision due to the fact that, out of all of you, only two have had your skills properly tested." J'onn and Shayera looked at each other. They both knew that the other teenager was another half of the 'two.' "That means that today will be dedicated to discovering the limits of your different skills."

Diana didn't like the sound of that. She looked around at the other metahumans, specifically the ones with similar powers to her or to her… Companions. That included a slim blond girl with powers that seemed to be almost the same as her own and a dark-haired young woman whose powers were akin to John's, only pink and seemed to mostly revolve around shields instead of any construct that the user could create. John himself seemed to be trying to send her some kind of message with his eyes, irises flashing green every time her face pointed near his direction. She paused in her work-she was doing the obstacle course along with a boy who was forming small golden ankhs in his hands as some sort of shield for the darts that were periodically firing out of the walls-for just long enough to wink at him conspiratorially before turning back to the course.

Maybe that was Carol.

"Get a move on," one of Dr. Sivana's goons growled as he shoved her, snapping Diana out of her thoughts. "We don't have all day."

Diana had to bite her tongue to keep from snapping at him as she was led away from the rest of the group, who were also being split up. Each of them were led to different places; John to the obstacle course with his friend along with Bruce, Wally back over to that awful treadmill, Shayera to several hoops that were suspended high in the air above the floor, and J'onn and Clark to the weights. Diana herself was being pushed towards an innocuous-looking space in between the obstacle course and the weights. It was riddled with holes, and she really didn't want to know what would come out of them.

But it looked like she was about to find out as bulletproof glass snapped down around her and the wall.

As one of the scientists pressed a button and something similar to bullets started to fire out of the holes at her, Diana sighed and started to dodge, using her wrists whenever a bullet got too close to her. Lovely.

Over at the obstacle course, John dove down underneath freezing dirty water that was probably cleaner than the stuff that they had been giving them to drink. He needed to talk to Carol-he needed to know if she and Hal were okay, if they had been hurt, if Hal had tried to escape yet. He needed to know.

As he watched, Bruce dodged blasts with ease that was almost superhuman, ducking and springing away from everything that came his way. The other teenager was only half-paying attention to the course. The rest of his attention was focused on the other five teens, seeing as how he knew where John was. He needed to make sure that what happened last time never happened again. He was not going to feel someone dying underneath his hands today.

Circling in the air, Shayera relished the feeling of air on her wings, even if it felt artificial. She had only flown once in the actual open sky, and she had been too preoccupied with trying to escape from the Hunters to be focused on the actual action. But from what she could recall, it was an exhilarating experience, second only to the one of punching a Hunter or a scientist in the balls/breasts, depending on the case. But that didn't mean that she had any time to enjoy the spread of her remaining dusky brown feathers, or the feeling of being higher, of being better, than the humans below her.

Folding her wings three quarters of the way down, she dove through one of the large hoops before pulling up and swooping through another two. If she wasn't being forced to do it, Shayera thought that she might enjoy doing something akin to this in the future, if she ever escaped. Honing your skills while also having fun was entirely different from human experimentation. Oh, that's right, metas weren't actually humans, even though it was literally in the name that they were.

She risked a glance over at Wally on the treadmill. They couldn't have him dying on them again.

Wally himself was terrified. Of course, he wasn't about to show it to the pair of scientists who were creepily watching him run, but anybody would be scared after being forced to return to the place where you literally died. But he could do this. He knew that he could do this. If Wally could live in the same house as his dad for almost all of his life, then he could do what he did best, even if it was in a place that he could hardly be in the same room as without wanting to get as far away as possible.

"Faster," one of the doctors watching him ordered.

Wally obediently picked up the pace, repeating over and over again in his head what would happen if he tried to slow down or stopped moving altogether. He wasn't going to day today. Not again. Damn, his life was fucked up if he had to remind himself not to die.

"Take a two minute break," the woman in charge of the obstacle course ordered. "Then repeat the course again."

John let out a small sigh of relief and stretched out on the floor. He wasn't going to move until every last second of those two minutes was up.

Someone poked his shoulder, and he cracked a green eye open. "What?"

"John," Carol said softly, "get up. If they see you here, they'll hurt you. I can't-" She cut herself off for a second. "I just don't want you to get hurt. Hal will kill me."

She helped him to his feet, eyes faintly gleaming pink-purple. As soon as he was upright, John grabbed her shoulders and looked her directly in the eyes. Something was wrong. "Is Hal okay?"

"He's alive," she said simply. "Not unharmed, but alive. He told me to look for you, make sure that you were okay."

"I'm fine," John replied. "Tell Hal… I'm okay."

"Time's up!"

It had been the fastest two minutes of John's life, but he wasn't going to complain and get punished. At least now he knew that Hal and Carol, the only two people who he trusted to have his back when the world eventually ended, were alive. Maybe Hal was hurt badly, but he could heal. As long as they were alive.

They could get through this. They could get out of there.

Now he just had to do this obstacle course five-fucking-hundred more times until the stupid fucking scientists who were watching him was satisfied. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Dr. Sivana marched down one of the many, many long corridors that led from room to room inside of the Meta-Max facility, heading towards one of his fellow scientists. In fact, he was heading towards his rival-they may have both had the same common goals, but they were far from friends. Dr. Sivana disliked him even more than he disliked T.O Morrow, and that was saying something considering how many of his nerves the robot-building scientist always seemed to get on.

He knocked on the door before letting himself in. There was a limit to his patience, after all.

"Thaddeus," Hugo Strange greeted. "To what do I owe this surprise visit?"

Dr. Sivana held out a file. "The simulations are running as planned, although we have come up against some… Unforeseen difficulties."

"What kind of difficulties?" Strange asked, narrowing his eyes and raising his eyebrows.

"Subjects #1192, 1003, 1555, 1556, 1557, 1558, and 1559 are all… Uncooperative, to say the very least. I'm sure that you saw the security tape from their cell?" The question was mostly rhetorical-almost every scientist in the entire place had seen the security footage of their five new subjects and two old ones. "We should separate them. There is no advantage to keeping them together."

"The advantage is that they will stay alive for longer if they believe that they will be able to escape at the end of it all," Strange said, opening the files. "A living subject is better for study and far more valuable than a dead one. Which is one of the reasons why you've been demoted."

Dr. Sivana scowled but kept his voice even. "Yes, I know."

Strange shut the files and set them down on his desk to look at them later. "And what about Subject #1333?"

"Still nothing new," Dr. Sivana said, passing the last file, the thickest out of all of them, even the thickest of the seven previous ones, which was the one marked as #1003. "But Kadabra"-his mouth twisted in disgust at the mention of the name-"thinks that we're making actual progress with it."

"Hmm," Strange murmured, flipping through the most recently added papers. They held information that most people would find useless; eating habits, the exact times that the subject moved and what they were doing while they moved, and even the exact words that the spoke-when they spoke at all, seeing as how it was mostly to themself and and never to anything actually sentient. "Does he, now? Send our friend Kadabra over to see me."

"Now?"

"Yes, now, Thaddeus."

Dr. Sivana nodded and started to back out of the office before he was stopped by Strange, who handed him a paper. "Here. I don't know if you knew, but we're going to start the toxin trials on them today after they fall asleep."

For the first time that day, Dr. Sivana let a small, slow smile spread across his features. "Of course. I will notify Crane immediately."

Wally slumped down on the wall, exhausted. Across from him, John and Clark flopped down on the ground. J'onn sat cross-legged on the not-cement. Diana and Shayera leaned against each other, while Bruce sat by himself in the corner.

"All those in favor of not talking about anything and just falling asleep, say 'aye'," John mumbled.

He got six "ayes" and one grunt from Bruce, which was good enough for him.

All seven of them were asleep within minutes, although it took Bruce slightly longer. He couldn't shake the foreboding feeling that something was going to happen that night. And that it was going to be bad.

They woke up with the lights off, leaving them in pitch darkness, and a sickly sweet smell invading their nostrils.

Clark immediately started gagging, and Shayera, still dazed from sleep, began to flap her wings as hard as she could (and to the best of her ability in such a small space) to try to get the mysterious gas away from her face. Diana and Bruce pulled their shirts up over their mouths and noses with J'onn following their lead, and John formed a small green bubble of clean oxygen around his mouth. Wally, however, while fast at pretty much everything else, had always been slow to wake up, even while living on metahuman-unfriendly streets where doing that would get you killed pretty quickly. This meant that he got several lungfuls of the gas before anybody else.

He started coughing as his heart began to pound, brain going into overdrive. Scooting backwards until he was pressed against the wall, he closed his eyes and gripped his red hair against the familiar shadowy figures advancing on him from all sides.

As Shayera swiveled to see what was wrong, she too inhaled the gas. In an instant, one of the doctors seemed to advance from the whitish fog, wielding a scalpel and what looked almost like a butcher knife. As she struggled to get away, hundreds of invisible hands grabbed one of her wings and opened it. The metahuman girl realized what was about to happen moments before the knife's blade sank into the feathery base of her wing.

Tiny, unseen vents at the top of the room opened up, clearing the room of the gas in seconds. Leaving behind two screaming teenagers and five confused young metahumans.

"I've got Shayera, you take Wally," John called to Bruce, who nodded after tentatively taking a breath of clean air. Diana crawled along beside him, keeping her body low to the ground in case Wally perceived her as a threat. After looking at each other, J'onn and Clark joined John with Shayera.

Neither of them would stop screaming.

John started gently stroking Shayera's wings, trying to calm her down. J'onn looked on helplessly, wanting nothing more than to reach into her mind and make the hurt go away. Clark grabbed her wrists to stop her from clawing at her own skin, and J'onn decided that he could help with that. He wasn't completely useless without his powers.

Bruce tried to rest his hand on one of Wally's shoulders, but the younger teen flinched away with a small cry. He clearly wasn't lucid, at least not on this plane of existence. But whatever he was seeing, he believed that it was real. And that was one of the reasons why Wally's next words made his blood boil.

"I'm sorry!" He cried, curling against the wall in anticipation of a blow. "I won't do it again, Dad, I swear! Please, I promise that I won't do it again! I didn't mean to-!"

Diana reeled back with wide eyes, falling back onto her heels. "Is he…?"

Bruce didn't give her any time to finish her sentence before he punched the wall, rubbing his fist. "Ow. Don't do that," he added, just in case Diana was thinking of following his lead. "But… Yes. I think that he is."

Across the room, John yelped and dodged a punch as Shayera threw one at his head the minute that she managed to rip her arm free from Clark's grip. J'onn waved a hand, causing the arm to press itself back against the wall. That just made Shayera freak out even more, and the winged girl kicked Clark in the stomach (hard) trying to break away from the telekinetic grasp.

"I cannot hold her for much longer," J'onn warned.

John nodded. "I've got it. Let her go… Now!"

As soon as the female metahuman had been freed, she immediately tried to rip Clark's head off. It didn't really work considering his nigh-indestructible skin, but Shayera was immensely strong, and anybody would find it painful to have fingers wrapped around their neck. But before he could gasp for air for any longer than a few seconds, something bright green and translucent encased Shayera's arms and legs, pulling her against the wall using chains made out of light.

None of the five teenagers who had been unaffected by the gas knew how long it was before Shayera stopped trying to kill anybody who came near her and Wally stopped pleading with the invisible people that stalked his nightmares, most notably his father but occasionally screaming about going too fast and being unable to slow down. Shayera snapped out of it first, albeit gradually. Bruce decided that she must have inhaled less than the redheaded boy who was still covering away from his and Diana's hands.

Currently, Shayera was sitting in the corner as John kept her calm, running her hands over her feathered wings as if she were trying to make sure that she was still there. The teenage boy was trying to keep her distracted as well, forming light constructs in the shape of humans, animals, everyday objects, and fantastical beasts from fairy tales. Every few seconds he would sneak a worried glance over at Wally, Bruce, and Diana, clearly just as upset about the things that the speedster was saying as the others.

By the time that Wally was lucid enough to be at the very least vaguely aware that what he was seeing wasn't real (at least not at that time, seeing as how everyone except for J'onn (and only because he wasn't entirely sure about the concept of whatever it was that Wally was screaming about) knew that the teenage metahuman was reliving something from their past), Bruce and Diana had calmed down enough to actually ask him what he was seeing. That didn't keep the anger out of Bruce's voice.

Wally cringed away. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"We heard you," Diana said gently. "We want to understand what exactly it was that you were seeing."

The redhead's bright green eyes flicked over their shoulders as if there were someone looming behind them and clenched his teeth. "It's not important," he muttered. "'Specially because it wasn't real."

"You were asking your father not to hurt you," Bruce growled. "That is not nothing."

In the corner, Shayera carefully crept away from the wall with John hovering (not literally) over her shoulder. Clark and J'onn followed, sandwiching Wally in between them, although while Clark was actually touching the redheaded speedster (at least for a moment, because he scooted away quickly until he wasn't touching anybody) J'onn kept his distance.

They sat in silence for a long, long time.

Wally didn't even notice when he fell asleep.