Disclaimer: I do not own Young Justice or any of it's characters.
Title: Dear Agony
Characters/pairings: Wally West (Spitfire if you squint)
Genre: Angst/Tragedy
Rating: K+
Notes: I don't even know where this came from. I decided I wanted to write a fic solely for Wally, since I've had The Assassin, An Unlucky Arrow, and Her Own Hero for Artemis. This is the first of hopefully a few more Wally-centric fics. I hate that this first one is so…sad, but I just got the idea and couldn't let it go.
o.o.o.o
Dear Agony
Just let go of me
Suffer slowly
Is this the way it's got to be?
~Dear Agony, Breaking Benjamin
He remembers receiving a blow to the head.
Remembers blood dripping down into his eyes, obscuring his vision.
But then there was only hard, cold concrete, his aching cheek resting against it, his body completely drained of energy.
His hands are bound behind his back. He can't imagine why, because he can't even will himself to do anything anyway.
There's a pounding in his skull like no other, one of his eyes is caked shut with dried blood, and he can't feel one of his legs.
He doesn't even know where he's at, doesn't recall how he got here or why he's being...held captive.
Yes.
That's one thing he knows for certain. He's being held captive, and he's pretty sure he also remembers something about...Sportsmaster?
He groans, shifts lightly against the floor until something wet is all over his face. He doesn't care about what it might be. He's more concerned with the gnawing hunger in his belly. One of the many drawbacks of being himself, being a speedster, is that insatiable appetite. He knows it can't have been more than a few hours, yet he feels as though he's been starved for days.
A sharp pain in the leg he couldn't feel moments ago stirs him enough to cry out hoarsely. It hurts, hurts worse than his head, but he's still too tired, too weak and sore to bend himself far enough to see the damage. Even if he weren't so hungry and low on energy, he's pretty sure his speedy healing wouldn't be much use to these particular wounds.
Hair tickles his forehead and panic strikes through his heart. His identity has surely been jeopardized. He's not sure what a nutcase like Sportsmaster would do with such information, but it can't be much worse than the position he's already in, which is little comfort.
Wally fades in and out of consciousness several times, at some point hears a kind of ruckus a few levels above his cell or...where ever the hell he's being kept at. He blacks out again, but the next time he awakens he's graced with the wonderful sight of his teammates.
He's pretty sure he smiles dopely at them, says something about them finally getting their asses in gear to save him as Robin hacks away at his bonds with a birdarang. He fails to notice the somber looks on The Boy Wonder and Superboy's faces as they hoist him between them, or the stiff line of Kaldur's mouth, or the tear stains on M'gann's cheeks, or the broken green bow she's clutching in her fragile looking fists.
It takes him a few moments to even register the absence of the archer.
He asks them. His brain is still so very muddled, but he's pretty positive that he asks them where Artemis is. Pretty sure he asks them again and again and again, his voice slurred beyond all recognition as his feet drag across the floor between them.
They never answer.
So he simply gives up, because he's tired, and he hurts, and he just can't be asked to focus anymore. He slips off into the sweet abyss of unconsciousness, and when he next wakes he's in the Mount Justice infirmary.
Wally's alert now, and he's so excruciatingly aware that he still can't feel his right leg, that his forehead is swathed in bandages and that his stomach is surely digesting itself.
But the first thing he does is turn to Robin, who is sitting calmly in a chair next to the sickbed, and ask about Artemis, because he remembers that no one answered his question. The pained look on Robin's face makes his heart ache with dread, and that dread turns into shear agony when he removes his sunglasses and looks Wally straight in the eye, and tells him.
Tells him...tells him...
Wally's anguished cries are heard echoing throughout the Mount without end, until finally the pain meds kick in and he has no choice but to surrender to sleep.
She's gone, Wally...