Fandom: Young Justice
Characters: Dick Grayson/Wally West
Rated: K+
Word Count: 3199

Summary: Wally visits Dick on the anniversary of his parent's death and takes him on a picnic by the lake.

Notes: A little bit of angst given the day, but this is mostly cavity inducing fluff, fluff, fluff, some water-soaked hijinks and more fluff.

This has an element of our RP in it: Mar'i, an alternate-universe Dick Grayson's daughter is visiting our character's present dimension.

She's fully explained, though, so you don't need to read anything else! :)

Written with ninjawing

Little Bird or AO3

"You okay?" Dick asked, reaching out to cushion Wally's head in his palm, feeling for a bump. Oh, there definitely was one, but it wouldn't be very big. The grass broke a bit of the fall. Robin couldn't help but laugh a little. "Dude, your balance needs work."

Okay, so maybe he was laughing a lot.

Dick leaned forward for a final nip to Wally's bottom lip.

"Think that's a sign that we should head out now?"

"Haha, yeah," Wally said, cradling the back of his head. He sat up and tucked his head beneath his knees to shake away a lingering dizziness—not so much from the fall as from—

"My balance is fine," he mumbled. "Usually."

When you're not kissing me until I can't see straight.

The toga shed bright green blades of grass as he gathered the remaining tupperware into the bag. His damp clothes overflowed the top as he tried to zip them in snug enough to at least not fall out as they ran, even if it didn't quite close all the way. Luckily, his shoes had dried enough to make the trip.

He didn't feel an iota of guilt as he plopped the bulky, awkward bag into Dick's arms.

"And you're in charge of that, Mr. Dunkenstein," Wally frowned. "And you better hope for your sake that this toga doesn't fall apart on the way." To be fair, he wasn't totally sure if the consequences of that were a promise or a threat.

Dick's grin, already big from watching Wally's struggles with the zipper, widened.

"Dunkenstein?"

Wally muttered a 'shut up,' and Dick failed to stifle laughter, hoisting the backpack over his shoulders and slinging his arms over Wally's.

Wally spun around and crouched down, offering his back to Dick and grinning: "All aboard the Gotham Observatory Express!"

Dick's knees gripped the speedster's sides, and the moment Wally was sure nothing was going to drop and die, he was off.

Dick barely managed to tuck his face into Wally's neck to protect it from the wind.

Running with Wally was always awesome, but more in the 'I know we're moving but I don't really know what's happening around me' sort of way. It was exhilarating because if he fell, he would be dead before he knew what was happening. He wouldn't even have the split second he'd need to push off the ground and onto his feet. It was painful because he was so completely vulnerable.

But it was amazing because it was Wally.

Frankly, even though Barry could probably keep him safer, Dick would rather ride with Wally in any given situation.

The halt at the observatory felt sudden even though Dick knew that Wally tended to decelerate before stopping, and Dick hopped off nimbly, easily masking any disorientation by standing still a moment too long.

"It'll be a clear night," he commented, raising his head to look at the sky. "It was cloudy last year."

"Mmmhmm," Wally agreed, sidestepping one of the ornate concrete benches surrounding the observatory in favor of flopping on to the grass in front. They were on side of the mountain facing the city, but plenty of stars dotted the sky despite a fair amount of light pollution.

And Gotham was beautiful from afar. Brighter up here than it even seemed inside the city itself, Wally mused. Huh. Smog, maybe?

The grass was cool and a little damp—not that that would bother him after earlier today—but the picnic-blanket toga was still warm. There was just enough fabric for him to comfortably fold his legs Indian style; he reached up and grabbed Dick's hand, tugging him down.

"Come check out Orion. You can see up his greek skirt-thingy from down here."

"Of course the you'd want to look up his kilt," he let Wally pull him down, laughing even as his butt took a hard hit from the ground, turning his next word into an, "Oof!"

The first time Wally brought him here, Dick had been surprised. He'd expected to see the ocean from wherever his best friend took him to cheer him up, not Gotham, because even now, he was pretty sure that Wally didn't like Gotham, considering he made it his personal mission to whisk Dick away whenever he could.

But Robin loved his city, and he should have given his friend more credit. Wally made every aspect of this particular day about him, and the skyline was beautiful from where they sat, even Bludhaven not visible from the right side of the city.

Bludhaven had every potential to be like Gotham, someday. God knew that it needed its own protector.

The sky was darkening, and that only made the view brighter, twinkling with hundreds of lights that came on despite every Gothamite knowing that they should get home before it was fully dark. The lights at the other end of the city went out sooner; fewer cars on the streets and no one willing to brave the streetlights unless necessary.

"We're not going in?" Dick asked after a moment, hopping back to his feet and eyeing the observatory. There were only three guards per shift, rotating every eight hours, but they'd never been caught before. "C'mon, man. You'll get a better view up Orion's kilt through the telescope."

"Sure." Wally hopped back up to his feet and waited expectantly as Dick dug a tiny scrambling device out of wherever it was he was keeping his belt at the moment; Wally actually hadn't seen it on him that day.

The small black boxes came with tiny suction cups so that Wally could affix them to the security cameras outside the building. It was a college observatory, and security was relatively lax, but there were still a couple of hoops to jump through. He and Dick paced carefully around to the other side of the building, staying just beyond the range of the cameras before Wally blurred in and nabbed the three cameras. They'd loop the last three minutes of uneventful footage until they were removed.

Dick, meanwhile, hoisted himself up the observatory wall, headed to the small windows around the dome beneath the major skylight that opened above the telescope. It was closed firmly, but they'd handle that inside.

Meanwhile, the tiny windows were just small enough to be not carefully secured, and just big enough for them to squeeze through on their backs once they'd jimmied them open.

Wally tossed a little gravel at the foot of the wall as Dick tight roped by to let him know he was coming before dashing straight up it.

He hissed as he almost skittered over and off the other side of the narrow ledge at the top, but Dick's firm grasp kept him from needing a couple weeks of healing from a broken arm.

He playfully crowded against Dick, hurrying him ahead to the dome.

"Would you—Wally—" Robin barely managed to keep his voice down, scowling over his shoulder, "Quit jostling me!"

It wasn't going to get the job done any faster.

Breaking into the observatory was something they did pretty much every year, so they knew that the lone guard inside wouldn't come by the dome anytime soon. He preferred to watch the security videos from his office, and once they were in, the footage would be looped until they were out again.

"Ready?" Dick waited for Wally's nod, then activated the remote scrambler. "Thirty seconds. Go."

Thirty seconds to jimmy open the window, dash inside, and attach the loopers onto the cameras before the footage was restored, and Kid Flash managed it as successfully as ever. It helped that the dome, despite being large, only had two cameras within range. Not enough to pull attention to their screens if they were scrambled for only a few seconds, and not enough for Wally to need more time to get all of them.

Deactivating the scrambler, Robin carefully climbed down to the window as well, folding his body neatly through the opening and landing quietly on the floor. Plugging his holocomp into the computer inside and hacking the rest of the CCTV system was easy.

If he did end up going to Gotham U, Dick was going to have to do something about their security. It was absolutely atrocious.

"You can go turn on the power," he told Wally once he was sure the cameras wouldn't pick up anything, and Kid Flash was gone in a blur. Dick quickly checked the camera feeds to ensure that every switch was off, so that nothing unexpected would suddenly come to life when the main power came back on.

Wally was back, but Robin couldn't hear the security guard coming in to check anything, so they were safe for now.

Grinning, Dick eased open the skylight with a few taps of his fingers and memorized the current direction of the telescope.

"You want me to point it up Orion's kilt, then?"

Wally ambled up behind his boyfriend in the dark, his features only illuminated by the dim flicker of buttons and lights and doodads on the electric panels controlling the large telescope.

"Yeah," he agreed, wrapping his arms around Dick from behind, whispering in a husky voice in his ear: "If we stick it up far enough to see his sword, we can spot the Orion Nebula on it."

Dick rolled his eyes but pulled up his holocomp and Googled the coordinates for the nebula, and the telescope whirred as it wandered over to the proper spot in the sky. Without letting go of Dick, Wally bent around him to look into the tiny eyepiece.

His eyes adjusted to find a round, whitish, wispy object, third "star" down in Orion's sword. It was beautiful.

"There she is," he murmured, backing away to let Dick take a look without unwrapping around him. "You know, I'm probably gonna take an Astronomy class in the fall? The professor's a huge Big Bang guy. It should be really awesome; he's big into physics changing across the universe, bubble universes, you know, pocket dimensions."

Wally grinned and slipped his hands forward into Dick's jean pockets.

"Oop, found two," he stage-whispered. "Where's my Nobel prize?"

"I found one before you," Dick said before he could stop and think about it, and then his mouth just kept going without his permission. "I think I should get that Nobel prize."

Wally pulled back just enough to give him a quizzical look, but Dick was floored himself. He hadn't thought about her all day. He'd considered telling Wally, sure, but not today and certainly not now. It was just a random thought, something he figured he should talk to someone about, but Mar'i had stepped into and become somewhat of a constant in his life over the past month, and…

Dick supposed he'd subconsciously just been looking for an opening, and took the first one that came by.

Even if it was kinda stupid and didn't make a whole lot of sense.

"I've… been in one, actually," he continued awkwardly, Wally's chest warm against his back and his hands warmer in his front pockets. "A while ago. It was kinda cool."

And weird.

And his daughter was a scientist.

She loved chemistry and biology, like Wally.

She could fly.

No, really.

Like Superman.

Dick stared straight ahead, suddenly realizing that he was a lot better with numbers than he was at storytelling.

"I met someone," he started quietly, feeling Wally lean closer to catch his words. "From an alternate universe. She just dropped in on me in Gotham one day." Robin shook his head, remembering quizzing her to make sure she wasn't an enemy. "Apparently in another world, I… had a daughter. With a Tamaranean princess. That's an alien species we haven't encountered in this dimension yet. Anyway, that entire dimension got destroyed somehow, but Mar'i… the daughter of Dick Grayson and Koriand'r? She survived."

Mar'i. Marie.

"She lives in a pocket dimension now. Travels from universe to universe trying to find a way to… restore her own universe?" Why did he start telling Wally this again?

"She found me." I like the kid. "I think she's going to be sticking around for a while." Hopefully for a long time. "Thought you should know, is all."

Wally's mouth hung open for a second. This wasn't a conversation he'd expected that night—or any, really—Dick casually mentioning he'd been in a pocket dimension with an alternate-universe daughter he'd had with alien royalty.

It was almost off-hand the way he talked about it.

He brushed away the twinge of irrational jealousy that struck him initially with the phrase "I met someone" (geeze, Dick be careful with that phrase) to let the enormity of the situation settle over him.

A daughter. Named Mar'i.

It was all he could do to keep from trembling.

Wow.

Questions overwhelmed him—When was this? How *old* is she? What's she like? How long has she been here? Why didn't you mention this to me when it happened?—followed by strange pangs of sadness, perhaps residual from the tragedy that was Marie, with a strange giddy excitement, not only from the fact he might meet someone who controlled their navigation through alternate universes, but Dick's daughter who did it. The things he could learn from her alone … well, it was probably better than that Stanford class.

He barely knew where to start.

He unwound halfway from Dick, looking at him excitedly in his bight blue eyes: "W-what? Did you just say daughter? A-a trans-dimensional daughter? Dude, w-when?" He tactfully left out the selfish How could you not tell me sooner? "That's amazing. Like is she older than you? How does she do it? She lives in a pocket dimension? Aren't there other people? What's she like?"

Dick blinked, waiting for the barrage of questions to be over before pulling Wally's hands out of his pockets so he could turn around in his arms.

"You sound excited," he snickered, looping his own arms around Wally's shoulders and leaning back against the giant telescope. Sobering enough to narrow his eyes in a glare, he curled his fingers a little tighter than strictly necessary into the short red strands at the nape of Wally's neck. "If you even think about flirting with her—and believe me, KF, I'll know—I'm gonna tie you up so fast that speedster or not, you won't even see it coming—" Wally opened his mouth, looking like he didn't exactly mind the idea, so Robin clamped a hand over his lips because he wasn't done yet. "—and leave you at the Scarecrow's doorstep as a really belated Christmas present."

His boyfriend muffled something against his hand; Dick's eyes narrowed further. "That better have been a promise not to so much as look at her weird, or I might just do it right now instead of waiting for you to meet her."

Wally might have tried to laugh, but Robin was having none of that. His palm remained pressed against his mouth to avoid another ramble before he could finish explaining. "As for your questions, yes, I did say 'daughter'. Doesn't seem like the universe is very bent on me having a son, which I'm perfectly okay with. I met her a little over two weeks ago, when you were in China. Hence the reason you didn't find out about her from your usual late night check-in. No, she is not older than me, she's actually younger. Fifteen, I think. She has a…" Here Dick has to pause, flailing a little. "This device. It opens a portal to different dimensions and points in time? She said she can navigate through time and space as she chooses, and I didn't press her on how it works since, well, I kinda had other things on my mind at that point. Yes, she lives in a pocket dimension. And… no."

That was the not-okay part.

"There's no one else there."

What was she like? The only word Dick could think of was 'amazing', and even he could see that that wasn't much of a description.

"She has glowing green eyes," he blurted instead.

Wally finally wiggled out from underneath Dick's hand, grin stretched wide across his face.

"Dick, that's incredible. And green eyes, huh? She must be a looker," he teased. "I dunno about that flirting thing now, dude."

He quickly placed a finger over Dick's lips before he could bite out a reply, and wrapped his free arm tighter around his boyfriend's waist. "Guess you'll just have to make sure I'm properly … distracted."

The finger wound its way around the back of Dick's ear, gently pushing a strand of soft black hair behind it, and Wally's palm followed to cradle his cheek as he leaned in to capture Dick's lower lip lightly between his own.

There was just something about the way Dick was talking about her, about family, he had a … lightness that Wally almost never saw on April 1st. Like … like …

Hope.

And it made Wally want to kiss him stupid.

A soft moonlight poured into the skylight as a stray cloud passed beyond it. Crisp shadows cut from the giant telescope over their forms, bleached blue under the night sky. Wally smiled into the kiss before running his tongue between Dick's lips, deepening it.

He held Dick against him like he couldn't hold him close enough, like he hadn't seen him in forever, and he kissed him, languidly, relishing his taste and the way he sent tingles down his arms and warmed away the chill of the open room.

He slipped his hands into Dick's back pockets this time, giving him a quick squeeze:

"So when"

Kiss.

"do I get"

Kiss.

"to meet"

Kissie.

"your princess alien daughter?"

Smooch … wait.

Alien.

"Did you say glowing green eyes?"