A Vigilante Speedster Battle Royale (Not)
"So are we going to address the elephant in the room?" Artemis had asked as soon as Nightwing―Dick, Wally was still having trouble thinking of him as that―limped pathetically off to the bathroom.
"Yeah," Wally agreed, turning to M'gann and Conner. The super clone was holding M'gann against his chest, her legs stretched out in front of them as she lounged in his lap. "When're you two gonna tie the knot?"
Artemis rolled her eyes at him, but Wally had meant it genuinely (and to try and dispel the tension in the room, but no one needed to know that). "Wrong elephant," She muttered in his ear, a grin on her face like she knew exactly what he was trying to do for them.
"Tie the knot?" M'gann asked, raising a brow at Conner.
To his credit, Conner did a good job retaining his stoic expression. The pink flush at the tips of his ears, however, completely gave away his flustered state. "Nothing. Don't worry about it."
M'gann's eyes narrowed. "Now I'm curious. Artemis, pass me your phone?"
Their resident archer grinned, chaos incarnate. Wally had never felt more attracted to her in his entire life. "Here you go."
Mumbling to herself, M'gann accepted the device and opened it with a flick of her fingers, shooting Conner a reproachful look when he tried and failed to peep over her shoulder.
Kaldur sighed as he finished packing their first aid kit away, slipping the pack of floss in beside the recently used suturing needle. "What is it you truly wished to discuss, Artemis?"
Her gleeful smirk flattened, creasing into a frown as she remembered what'd started this whole conversation. "It's just—we can't seriously be considering not handing him over to the League. I know he's Detective Grayson and all, but can we really put that trust in him? What if he runs?"
She, unfortunately, had a point. "What do we do when the League comes looking for their vigilante?" Wally said. "We're all horrible liars, no offense."
Artemis scoffed. "Speak for yourself, I'm a fantastic lia—"
"I agree with Wally," Kaldur interrupted smoothly, shooting the speedster one of his rare smiles. "Which is why I ask you this, what is it that made us trust the detective in the first place?"
There was silence for a moment. Wally almost wished he had M'gann's power, just so he could know what the rest of the Team was thinking.
"His kindness." M'gann said eventually, Conner's arms tightening around her. "He's crabby at best, but he's also kind. That is why I found it so easy to trust his alter ego."
Her boyfriend nodded. "Same."
Wally resisted the urge to snort. They were very predictable that way.
"For me," Artemis spoke slowly, clearly weighing her words. "I'm still not sure if I trust him fully, to be honest. But I trust his expertise, and that is what we'll need if we're ever going to solve this stupid mystery."
The room was quiet again, the silence dragging between them until all eyes turned to Wally, waiting for his verdict.
He knew that if he said he wasn't comfortable helping Nigthwing, helping Dick, then they wouldn't. They were a team, and each of them valued Wally's input in their own way—though some (ie. Artemis) had a harder time showing that than others.
If he said no right now, they wouldn't question it.
Wally was tempted, for less than a second. Tempted to just hand the vigilante in and move on with their lives.
Artemis and he could go back to college, they could put this whole 'mystery solving' thing behind them. The League would get off their backs and the Team could pick up their much less complicated, regularly scheduled missions again.
Nightwing was a criminal. Wally didn't like criminals, or those that put themselves outside the law. Wally should say no.
Wally said yes.
"I trusted him, whether I meant to or not. He saved our butts on more than one occasion, and he's probably our one chance at solving all this." The speedster rubbed at his forehead, smoothing out the pressure headache he often got from his costume's built-in goggles. "I say we go for it."
"So do I," M'gann murmured.
"And so do I," Artemis said.
Conner just grunted.
Kaldur smiled his 'I'm so very proud of all of you' smile. It was patronizing, and annoying. Wally found himself smiling back.
"Then it's decided," The expression didn't fade from Kaldur's face as he spoke. "We keep his secret. For now, at least."
The atmosphere was far too heavy. "I'm going to eat," Wally grumbled, the tension popping like an overblown balloon. "Before our team leader can rope me into anymore bad, horrible decisions that will probably get us all fired."
"You're technically not even hired by the League," Artemis none-too-kindly pointed out. "You're just a jobless bum."
"Hey," He waved a spoonful of peanut butter at her before jabbing it into his mouth. M'gann pretended to gag, turning her face away so she didn't have to see his depravity. "This jobless bum is currently getting a college education. On an entirely full scholarship, I might add."
"Yeah, yeah. You're a genius." She rolled her eyes at him, but there was a proud smile twitching at the corner of her lips. "But also somehow the dumbest person I've ever met."
He almost choked on his peanut butter. What'd they put in this stuff anyway, rubber? "Oh yeah? How about I tell everyone about those two classes you failed, Ms. Genius-In-The-Making."
The archer let out an intelligible growl, one that was likely supposed to sound like a curse. "You promised we'd never talk about that."
Conner and M'gann had already gone back to murmuring sweet nothings into each others' ears, while Kaldur was utterly ignoring them all. It looked like he was trying—and failing—to figure out which setting on the stove would get a pot of water boiling.
"I promised a lot of things, sweetcheeks." Wally pressed a finger to his chin in mock contemplation, backpedaling out of the kitchen and towards the couches. "Which one are you referring to, exactly?"
He saw the pillow coming well before it hit him, super speed was nice that way, but let it hit him square in the chest anyway.
Artemis stalked towards him, seizing another pillow off the couch and beginning to beat him with it.
It didn't hurt. If anything, it felt like a light tickle.
He laughed, dodging as she aimed a particularly hard blow at his chest. "Is your aim this bad with a bow, too?"
Her composure broke just as Dick hobbled back into the room, pillow colliding repeatedly with Wally's face as the speedster laughed at her.
Kaldur and Dick were murmuring lowly to each other in the kitchenette's dim light. It looked serious, judging by their expressions. Then he lost all concentration as Artemis nearly knocked his brains out with a particularly nasty shot to the head.
"Oh you're going down, Arrow-Girl."
"Just try me, Flash-Boy."
He grinned, and pinned her down to the couch cushions, silently memorizing the way her husky laugh sounded. He thought he heard Dick fake gag from the kitchenette, but decided he didn't care in that moment.
As Conner and M'gann flirted, Artemis hissed beneath him like a cat, and Dick and Kaldur watched from afar, Wally couldn't help but smile.
For the first time in a long time, they felt like a complete team; a unified front.
No more missing links.
The clock in the apartment was far too loud for Wally's tastes.
After eating Kaldur and Dick's questionably cooked noodles (both were useless in the kitchen, almost as bad as M'gann when she'd first arrived on Earth), the Team had dragged their bedding into the apartment's tiny living room for an impromptu slumber party.
Or at least, as close as they could get to a slumber party with an assassin's daughter, repressed vigilante, fish-man, super clone, and a Martian.
Come to think of it, Wally was the most 'normal' member of their group, and he had superspeed and communed with the Speed Force on a regular basis.
He blinked. What a weird life he lived.
After they'd set up their makeshift beds, everyone'd nodded off almost immediately.
Dick had gotten the couch due to his injuries, although he'd tried to give it up to M'gann. Like a martyr.
Wally smiled fondly. What an idiot; everyone knew if you were given the couch at a slumber party, you took the couch at a slumber party.
M'gann was curled up against Conner's chest, her body almost inside of his sleeping bag, while Kaldur had his hands clasped over his chest with only a thin blanket beneath him.
It made him look like a corpse, honestly. Wally kept glancing at his chest just to make sure the Atlantean was still breathing.
Wally had settled on the floor close to Kaldur, Artemis within reach but still entirely too far away.
He'd angled his pillow so that he physically couldn't stare at her. Otherwise, he'd watch her all night like some creep.
The clock ticked again, the sound grating on Wally's nerves. He wasn't sure what was preventing him from sleeping. Adrenaline? The shock of Dick's identity getting revealed earlier?
The uneven apartment floorboards tattooing themselves to his spine?
Giving up on sleep, he slipped out of the living space where they were all sprawled, taking extra care not to wake Artemis as he stepped over her unconscious form.
A tired-and-grumpy Artemis was an Artemis he wanted to avoid at all costs.
On tiptoes, he crept towards the apartment door, throwing a jacket over his shoulder to ward off the damp Bludhaven night-air.
It always seemed damp and chilly in the city, like it was possessed by constant pathetic fallacy.
The same was true for Gotham, now that he thought about it.
What was it with the Bats and their musty climates?
He decided to swing by the kitchenette quickly, recalling the leftover noodles Kaldur and Dick had left out.
They would make a nice midnight snack, even if they'd tasted like something you'd find on the bottom of a New Yorker's shoe.
Food was food. Even mutant, Atlantean-vigilante food.
Bypassing the light switch by the entrance, he crept into the kitchen relying on memory alone, not noticing the dark figure by the sink until he nearly bowled them over.
As soon as he made contact, he was slammed up against the counter, an arm to his throat and three fingers digging uncomfortably into his solar plexus.
"Mrgh—iss'me, Walfry," he choked out, trying to get some leverage on his attacker.
"Wally?" Dick's rough, post-strangulation voice asked incredulously, the arm keeping him in place immediately dropping as the figure took a step back "Jeez. I thought you were—I don't know who I thought you were." He ran a hand over his face in the darkness. "I think I'm still a little jittery, from earlier."
Wally's throat throbbed. No kidding.
Getting attacked and strangled and stabbed would do that to a person.
…Wally wisely decided not to voice that thought out loud.
The speedster coughed, bracing his hands against his knees to keep from keeling over. "You clearly thought I was someone dangerous." He massaged his throat carefully, glaring up at where he guessed Dick's head to be in the semi-darkness. "Not sure whether I should be insulted or complimented by that, honestly."
The vague impression of Dick's head seemed to flop consideringly in the darkness, "Complimented. I thought you were Bruce. He would do that, sometimes, when I was younger."
Wally blinked. It made no difference to his vision in the low-light. "He would get jumped by you near the Wayne Manor kitchen sink?"
Dick snorted. "No, he'd sneak up on me in weird places when I was out of it for training. Sometimes by the kitchen sink, but there was more than one kitchen sink in the manor, so."
"Sounds like a good time," Wally said for a lack of anything else to say.
The vigilante said it so casually, like a guardian creeping up on their ward in the dark was normal.
Then again, maybe that was normal. Wally didn't exactly have a poster child-parent relationship dynamic growing up.
The closest thing he had to parental figures were Barry and Iris, and they were actually his aunt and uncle.
"It was," Dick murmured. "Sometimes."
Silence, then Wally's mouth got ahead of him. "Couldn't've been all that hard, growing up in a mansion. What was it like having a silver spoon in your mouth?"
He'd meant it to sound like a joke, but it came out bitter. Borderline venomous.
Wally winced.
The thing about being a speedster is that, sometimes, his words spilled out from before he had a chance to consider them himself.
Artemis would have elbowed him in the side if she'd been awake. He almost felt the phantom nudge of it.
It was difficult to gauge Dick's reaction in the darkness, but the man seemed to be cocking his head at Wally again.
The motion was oddly bird-like.
"Do you have a problem with me?" His voice was almost too soft to be heard over the obnoxious buzzing of the apartment freezer.
Wally wished he could swallow his own tongue. Maybe then it would stop getting him into horribly awkward situations.
Resisting the weary sigh that nearly slipped out from between his teeth, he cast a glance at the sleeping forms of the Team sprawled out in the living room. "Let's take this outside, yeah?"
From the little he could see of Dick's face in the darkness, it looked like the man's eyes widened, his mouth popping into a faint 'o' shape.
"Not like that!" Wally whispered hurriedly, understanding the other's confusion. "That was not an invitation to a fight." He ran a hand over his face. "I meant we should go outside and talk."
"Oh." Dick ducked his head, a futile attempt to hide his growing grin. "I thought we were about to get an epic, speedster versus vigilante battle royale."
Wally snorted. "You wish. 'Sides, we both know who'd win that."
"Yeah." There was a no other way to describe Dick's expression than mischievous. "I think we do."
Wally got the distinct feeling that they were, in fact, not thinking the same thing at all.
He smiled as he slipped his coat on, stuffing his bare toes into Conner's black boots that were designed solely for the purpose of stomping around edgily. "I think I'd put up a good fight at least," he muttered as he followed Dick out the door.
The other man had snatched Kaldur's long pea-coat and wrapped Artemis' olive-green scarf around his neck. He'd probably be small enough to fit into M'gann's gloves, if he really wanted to complete his stolen look, but the man just stuffed his hands into Kaldur's coat pockets and grinned toothily at Wally. "Ready?"
He couldn't help but return the expression. "Ready."
Together, they headed up to the roof.
(A/N): *cricket noises*
...hello there...missed you guys... *awkwardly laughs*
So sorry for my disappearing act. again. My first uni semester while working almost killed me ngl, I had zero time for fun-writing
like im alive but am i ALIVE idk it's been wild o_O
See you soon! The reviews last chapter were so sweet, I really really appreciate you all 💕
~ASL