He couldn't believe he was doing this.
"Dude, what are you doing here?"
Dick couldn't bring himself to look the red-head in the eye. He stood there for an awkward moment before the speedster relented.
"C'mon, get in."
Wally leaned on the wall as he watched his old friend sit ─ slump down on the couch. He hadn't seen him look like that in years.
"What happened?"
Dick looked up, blue eyes awake but despondent. He quirked his lips and looked pained but said nothing.
"C'mon. Talk to me. I haven't seen you look like that since the training accident six years ago."
"…Zemirah hates me."
"…I can't say I'm surprised."
"I'm not either… I didn't want anyone to get hurt. Not like this."
"The way this plan goes, that's inevitable. You know it; I know it. I still don't understand why you didn't let her in on it in the first place."
"She'd have had to close herself from the others; I didn't want her to do that."
"And forcing her to believe that the one person she loved more than anything else in this world was a better idea?" Wally said. "We went to visit her a few days after Kal 'went rogue'. She looked like a zombie. All the life had been taken from her and she refused to talk. We tried everything to try to get her out of her funk, even for just a minute. Nothing helped."
"What did you try?"
Wally didn't really want to answer. He knew that his answers would only serve to make him beat himself up more. But he would only prolong Dick's suffering if he withheld an answer.
"Movies, stuffed animals, music, we even tried singing."
Zemirah loved to hear them sing.
"I messed up. I messed up big time."
"Well, they're getting closer. With any luck, it'll be over soon, right?"
"Right."
He still felt like a failure.