Sideshow 02a: 'i have heard them say'
A/N: Here we are moving right along to the second story in what was intended to be a rapid series, and now you see why the main Cirque story is posted without regard for chronology; waiting until I've finished what I'm working on to start something else is not a good work style for me.
We commence in approximately 1987 in DC comics. The drinking age was recently raised to 21, Jason is Robin, Wally is Flash, Dick and Kori are an item again after a messy breakup that involved her political marriage followed by his needing to be rescued from brainwashing. The Crisis happened not that long ago; nobody remembers that the multiverse ever existed. ^^ Continuity is not strictly conserved in this fic, though, and I have used characters that never actually coexisted because blargh is why. Titans canon has too much dead. :P
Wally West, fastest man alive, now almost comfortable introducing himself as such without getting a little twinge at who isn't alive to make it so, leans back in his very comfortable chair and enjoys the party atmosphere. It's not often you see even the entire active roster of a hero team in one place for anything but a fight, so this is really one for the books.
"But," says the redheaded kid with no costume except a thick pair of glasses, who everybody seems to call just 'Danny,' "I still smell something fishy. I mean, a Veteran's Day party? We're the Titans, not the Daughters of the American Revolution."
"Well," says Nightwing, with a shrug that shows he's gotten used to dealing with this kid putting random concepts on trial, and was Wally ever that young? Jesus. "It's not really a family holiday. So we're not making anybody choose."
"And it's our day, too!" Wally enthuses, making a triumphant fist. He has drunk practically as much as everybody else at this party combined (although admittedly he's the only one with a high resistance who's trying to get drunk), and he's only slightly buzzed, and it's going to last about five more minutes. Metabolism. Downsides thereof. "No, really," he insists, when Danny the Bespectacled gives him a dubious look. "We're veterans. Don't we see active combat practically every day?"
"I gueeeeess," the kid draws the word out. Adjusts his glasses, squinty thinking-face.
"They do Veterans' Day stuff for cops sometimes," a girl Wally doesn't actually know volunteers, and he nods enthusiastically. He will take to his grave that a lot of the reason he's insisting on this is he got maudlin about his uncle on Memorial Day, and that only makes sense if heroes count as armed forces. If they can die in the line of duty, they count.
"Right! We're vets. Like Dickie here," he elaborates, waving at Nightwing. "You're, what, twenty-two now? Here's to fourteen years in the service, man and boy." He toasts, and isn't the only one to raise his cup, though Dick also isn't the only one pulling a slightly weird face.
"It sounds so dysfunctional when you put it like that," he grouses, and then lifts his own plastic cup in retaliation. "So here's to you, seven years under the mask. Boy and man." He smirks a little, and Wally throws back his head and groans.
"You've been doing this twice as long as me? I am undone. Or outdone. Something." It's been more than eight years since he first became Kid Flash, but there were all those endless crawling months of medical retirement in the middle that you have to subtract from his total. Seven years sounds about right.
Everybody toasts to Wally's outdone-ness, and there's a bit more back-and-forth before their knot of partiers break ups again to circulate.
He's having a surprising amount of fun, for how awkward he was worried this was going to be.
Wally hadn't been a Titan in a while even before he became the Flash, and the guys had called up sometimes inviting him to hang out, but he never took them up on it. One of them would have had to take a vehicle out to pick him up, or he'd have had to pay for a ticket and sit alone on a train or bus for the literal days it would take to get crosscountry to New York, or he'd have had to get Uncle Barry to carry him, and while now he would totally be carried anywhere, including to Apokolips or up and down the halls of his old high school or anywhere, seriously, if his uncle was just around to do it, at the time it felt like the maximum upper height of humiliation.
And once he was there, then what? Sure, they used to do plenty of things off-duty that didn't need superpowers, or super-ninja skills, but the next fight was always there. Waiting. He'd have been the useless lump in the middle of a pack of razor-sharp fighting machines, and maybe he could have dealt with that if he'd been used to being…normal, powerless, but he wasn't even that good at spending time with normal people on normal terms anymore. No way could he have spent time around his hero friends in his retired-on-pain-of-painful-death wallow. It would have been awful. It would have made it so much harder to stay retired.
Now he's Flash, and he's worked with the team a few times but it's awkward in a different way, like trying to pull on your favorite middle-school underpants. Even if they're clean and they were really comfortable at the time, they just don't fit anymore.
But they invited him to the party, as a former Titan, and frankly being 'the kid' in the League, who he still kind of thinks of as his uncle's peers, not his, is…not the most socially rewarding experience, all the time. So he's been zipping around, getting caught up with people he hasn't seen in a while, and wow, he kind of missed most of these people (the ones who aren't strangers) a whole lot and hadn't really noticed.
And because it's a hero party he can just zip in and out of conversations when they get too slow for him, and it's okay because he's Flash, everybody deals.
Rather than get into an actual argument with Roy half an hour later, Wally zips off yet again, and decides his contact high is getting out of hand and he needs a minute alone, so he zooms into the darkened control room to take a few cleansing breaths. Hey, he can do yoga-y healthful things. Okay. Alone time. Is good. Even at fun parties. He feels calmer now.
Except, he hadn't noticed, the room's actually occupied. Guy, grey hoodie—oh, hey, it's Dick. Standing alone in the dark. Okay.
He squints. Dick's changed into civvies, so maybe he's going out on a beer run—he's been trying with endearing solemnity to keep the remaining underage team members from indulging, which means that if there's an emergency the Titans call-up is very possibly going to be all teenagers for the first time in years, but he's still throwing a hero party with alcohol, which is living large for a Bat. But he doesn't look like he's living large; his face is all flat and drawn.
Shit, did something happen? Did Wally miss it? See, sometimes he really wishes he got super-senses with this gig so he wouldn't miss stuff, except that way lies the path to wishing he was Superman and he is too damn proud of being the Flash to ever wish that, so.
Dick gives him a stiff kind of nod and turns toward the door.
"Shit," he says out loud, because his mouth moves even faster than his brain. Something is definitely wrong. Dick tenses, though he doesn't stop, and Wally adds, "Wait up. Hey."
He zips up beside his friend, who he's maybe given the cold shoulder to enough times over the years they spent periodically at each other's throats, being hormonal teenage boys with authority issues, but Dick's never ignored him quite like this, and also when he has Wally's usually known what he did wrong, and whether he should be sorry. He grabs Dick just above the elbow, which might just make him madder, but at least if he gets mad in Wally's actual direction he'll probably say something revealing.
Dick's shoulders sag out of their tight line, like human contact made him completely relax, and Wally can't help feeling awesome about that even if he doesn't know what the problem is. "Blaze," Dick says, turning toward him a little, like he's raising a familiar subject and they both know what 'Blaze' is, or possibly who Blaise is, and Wally doesn't even know whether Blaise is a boy or a girl—
And then Dick has punched him in the face.
He goes down hard. Sure, he could have dodged it, and he sort of saw it coming although god is Dick fast for a normal, except he didn't see it coming because there was no telegraph and he didn't seem mad and what the hell?
He'd be on his feet again in an instant, except he's already being kicked before he finishes falling, sending him spinning through the air with nothing to brace himself against, and then again, and again, and those sharp Nightwing punches are coming down at the same time, and by the time he hits the ground pretty much all his ribs are broken and his collarbone and something in his hip, and he can work through pain but this is a little much, especially with the fight adrenaline only just kicking in, and it's Dick.
Dick bending over him with his face perfectly blank, punching again, and Wally manages to get his superspeed butt in gear and roll out of the way of that one. The compression on his ruined ribs leaves him a hair from blacking out, and rolling is clearly not going to be a winning strategy, but there is also no way in hell he can sit up right now. His arms are mostly okay, but without working pecs or right trapezius he can't really lift them…he manages a sort of powerful-only-through-the-kinetic-energy-of-speed left-handed bat at Dick's side to throw the next punch off, but the one after that he can't do anything about, too much pain, wrong angle, so he's getting punched in the throat with a crunch.
His vision's still online, more or less, as the next one comes in, and somewhere in all the shock and affront and mortification and desperate not wanting to die, he sees Dick's perfectly expressionless expression behind the deadly jab and thinks god, this is going to kill you when you wake up.
Part of him realizes that he's spending one of his last thoughts on somebody else's feelings, and he wonders whether that makes him a good person. Or at least a good friend.