Age of Heroes

Part thirteen of a fanfiction by Velkyn Karma

Warnings: Some zombies at the end; mostly nothing bad though.

Disclaimer: I do not own, or pretend to own, Young Justice or any of its subsequent characters, plots or other ideas. That right belongs to DC, Warner Brothers, and associated parties.

"I took a walk around the world to ease my troubled mind,
I left my body lying somewhere in the sands of time.
But I watched the world float to the dark side of the moon—
I feel there's nothing I can do..."
~Kryptonite, 3 Doors Down

It didn't matter how long Superboy lived in this new variation of the world, and it didn't matter how much he learned about it. Every day he spent living through the apocalypse was just another reminder of how fundamentally out of place he was, and how he ultimately did not belong here or fit in here at all. And while he was learning to adjust, he couldn't help but wonder if his predecessor, his...father...had ever felt the same way, trying to fit into a world that was not even really his.

Still, he was trying, and as confusing and frustrating and horrifying as this new world and its new rules could occasionally be, Superboy found he was gradually coming to understand it better. This wasn't the world he had been made for, but that didn't mean he couldn't be a part of it. He learned the laws of survival. He learned to appreciate and hold on to the little moments of happiness. Most importantly he learned to cherish the relationships he'd collected with his human friends, respect them for their strengths and experiences and emotions, and learned to put just as much value on his human side as his Kryptonian one.

But there were still days, and moments, and little things, that reminded him of that disconnect. That no matter how close he grew to the people around him, how much better he got at understanding the world as it was now, he was still not completely a part of it all.

Wally's illness was one of those things.

At first he hadn't really understood what was going on. He knew vaguely of sickness, of course. But he'd never been sick himself, none of the databases force-fed into his mind included medical care beyond basic first aid, and as far as he knew his invulnerability made him immune to the majority of the things that caused illnesses to begin with. He'd seen people in less than perfect health at New Batcave, but had never bothered to visit the medical facility. And while eavesdropping (unintentionally or no) on Dick's meetings and reports regarding New Batcave's medical care had been both enlightening and disturbing, most of the things he'd overheard—discussions of zed-related post traumatic stress disorders, feral children, and adjusting shell-shocked survivors to colony life—had been more psychological than physical.

So Superboy wasn't exactly familiar with the well-known warning signs most people were familiar with. The week of rain had been a nuisance, making travel more difficult and destroying their visibility, but the worst it had done was get their clothes wet as far as he was concerned. He'd caught Wally's shivering, but Wally always did that when he was cold, and Superboy was so immune to temperature unless it was extreme that he didn't think much of it at first. And Wally had seemed a little more lethargic than usual, but rain always seemed to do that to Wally anyway, affecting his mood, quieting his chatter, smothering his cheerful optimism, so he didn't think that was unusual at first, either.

But he did notice other things, things that were not as common and stood out sharply. The coughing was first—Wally never did that, and Superboy didn't like the pained look on his face every time he finished a round of hacking. He asked if Wally was okay, but the teen shrugged it off and said it was nothing. Connor wasn't entirely sure he believed Wally at first, but Wally had never lied to him before, and he'd always been straightforward and often enthusiastic whenever he'd taught Connor anything in the past. In the rare instances in which he didn't want to talk about something, he usually became more subdued, and answered the questions shortly and unenthusiastically, indicating his discomfort. Connor learned to back off from those subjects quickly, like that time Wally had gotten withdrawn after they'd entered New Batcave and Superboy had asked about what happened to the infected people. But Wally didn't do that this time, and he'd never outright lied to Superboy before, so Connor grudgingly quieted and admitted that maybe he was just overreacting after all the bad days and nights they'd been having while traveling.

But he started having doubts again soon after, because the nightmares were a pretty good indication that something was very wrong.

Wally had nightmares a lot. Connor had learned that pretty quickly not long after he'd escaped Cadmus, when he took his guard shifts at night and his companion slept. He could sometimes even guess what parts of them were about, the way the teen whimpered in his sleep for his parents or his aunt or his uncle, cried out for his friends not to be hurt, and shied away from grasping, hungry monsters in his sleep. Some of them were less obvious, and Connor suspected those were memories, when Wally's mind decided to replay some of the sick, twisted, horrific things he'd seen during the apocalypse over and over.

Watching and listening to Wally's unconscious distress always disturbed Superboy more than a little, but not nearly as much as when Wally woke up, because Wally never commented on them, ever. And Connor had eventually realized that it wasn't even because Wally was trying to avoid emotional confrontations or talking about the bad things he'd seen; he'd just gotten so used to bad dreams and worse memories that they were normal. It was like it wasn't even worth waking from them or talking about them anymore because it didn't change anything and they wouldn't go away, so a person just learned to deal with them—end of story. Superboy couldn't claim to be an expert on emotions or psychology, but he was pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen, and chalked it up to yet another way the apocalypse had twisted the world.

But although Wally'd had bad dreams pretty frequently, he didn't have them all the time. Even when he did Superboy could usually give him a gentle nudge and quiet him down a little, make them retreat. Not so now; Wally was starting to have nightmares far more often, was unresponsive to Connor's attempts to help, and woke from them the next day far less rested than usual. He still never said anything about them—Connor actually thought he remembered nothing at all—but he was starting to look all the worse for wear from it. Something about that didn't sit right in Superboy's stomach, and it felt ominous.

That was why he started keeping a sharper eye on Wally after that, which was how he noticed the other things. The way he'd appeared to have grown a little brighter when viewed through infrared vision. The way he'd gotten paler and shivered more often, even though the rain had gone away by then and it was bright and sunny out. The way his breathing didn't sound quite right, like there was a wet, minute crackling coming from his chest that Superboy couldn't recall ever having heard from Wally before. He'd tried calling Wally on these things, and had been deflected once again, but now he knew something was wrong and resolved to keep a close watch, just in case.

He was glad he had, because the next day Wally collapsed, and his friend had fallen downhill ever since. He'd been stunned at how fast a human body could degenerate from something like illness, once he'd begun to witness it firsthand. In the space of a little over a week Wally went from being a physically fit, strong, optimistic young man to a physically weak, exhausted kid that could barely retain any strength for more than a few hours and swam in and out of coherency with alarming regularity. His temperature rose (something Superboy had to watch with his infrared vision because he couldn't really feel the difference with his hand to Wally's forehead), but he shivered constantly. His coughing and breathing became harsher. And he barely even noticed when Superboy carried him anymore, even though he used to throw such a fit over being 'babied' and valued his own independence highly. Connor had been appalled at just how little Wally started weighing after a while, wished it was just because he was getting used to carrying his friend and knew that it wasn't the reason at all.

It scared Connor. A lot. He hated admitting to it, because he hated being scared of anything or too weak to fight anything, but in this case it was true. It scared him to watch his friend, his...brother, Wally had called them...turn from a vibrant example of a human being to this shell of a person that was almost as dead as the zeds they were constantly running from. And it scared him more to know that for all his powers, his heritage, and his knowledge, there really wasn't a damn thing he could do to help Wally fight this, other than to keep him alive long enough to find real help.

But since that was his only option he threw himself into it whole-heartedly with every shred of determination he owned. Wally was his friend, his family, and he was not letting his friend go down without a fight. If he did, he didn't have the right to call himself Superboy, or the right to that S-shield he'd worn at his awakening and the legacy that came with it.

So he did everything he could to keep them moving, and to keep Wally as healthy, safe and comfortable as possible while he did. He memorized the maps, poured over them by firelight when Wally slept on the safer nights, repeated the route and the destination over and over in his mind. He helped Wally keep moving in the mornings, and carried him when the teenager was too drained and exhausted to continue on his own. He scavenged for the both of them, and when he couldn't find enough for two, he made sure whatever he did find went to Wally first. He could ignore his own growling stomach for a day, but if Wally didn't get enough nutrition his sick body wouldn't have enough energy to stay in the fight until they made it to the base. And while it worried him to leave Wally behind so often in such a vulnerable state, he was careful to always ensure he left his friend behind in someplace safe, completely zed-proof, and repeatedly checked in on him with his super-hearing while out looking for supplies.

And much as he badly wanted to brawl with a few zeds, to get his own frustration, anger and worry out of his system, he avoided it when he could. If he got in over his head it would cost Wally, and even if he did win the fights, the noise was certain to attract more zombies, which his sick friend definitely didn't need. He kept his dead head killing to a bare minimum, only what was necessary for keeping their campsites safe, and did it as quickly and stealthily as possible to keep the monsters from moaning and drawing in other hunters. Sometimes it wasn't quite enough, and twice now Connor had grimly been forced to abandon his scavenging attempts to retreat, collect an exhausted, barely-conscious Wally, and beat it out of there before a large number of zeds swelled into an entire horde.

Connor knew he was putting one hundred and ten percent of himself into his efforts to protect his friend, and he knew he was doing everything he possibly could for Wally already. So it angered him to realize it still wasn't enough. For all his efforts Wally was still deteriorating rapidly, losing weight, drifting in and out of fitful sleeps and bad dreams, and breathing worse than before. He wasn't even protesting against Connor handling everything by himself anymore, or complaining about having to be taken care of, and he was so out of it these days Connor was starting to wonder if he even noticed these things were going on around him. He was sinking farther, and it frustrated Superboy to his core, because he was Superman's clone, damn it—he was supposed to be invincible, strong and reliable, a natural protector with a shield over his heart to show what he was truly made for, so why couldn't he save one single human being?

When Wally started eating less, and then refusing to eat altogether, Connor was pretty sure they were in trouble. And when Wally admitted in that shuddering, hoarse voice that he was doing badly, and almost desperately insisted that Superboy really didn't owe him anything, when that wet crackling in his chest seemed the loudest since Superboy had first heard it...the chill that ran up Connor's spine told him in no uncertain terms that they were definitely in trouble.

He redoubled his efforts. There wasn't much else he could do, but Superboy had not liked that note of finality in Wally's voice, when he'd asked that simple question, and knew he had to push himself harder if Wally had any chance left at all. He tried to increase their speed during travel time, carrying Wally from the beginning instead of letting him waste his energy by trying to walk. Pushing for his own super-strength enhanced speed was also pretty exhausting on Wally, seemed to make the teenager feel worse and took its toll on his body, but at least Superboy was getting more milage out of it. They still had over a hundred miles left of travel, but if Superboy pushed himself, was careful about avoiding zeds, and made sure to let Wally rest and get food and kept him warm, he figured they could make it in about a week.

Then the rain hit, and Superboy felt like knocking a few buildings over in sheer anger when he realized that things were not going to go nearly so well for him. Because that would be far too easy.

He'd had no choice but to retreat far earlier than he'd wanted to for shelter with Wally. Connor was fairly sure by now that the illness—while not helped any by their extreme travel conditions and lack of food and medicine—had been sparked by the heavy week of rains they'd had, and was certain that Wally would deteriorate even more rapidly if caught out in another storm. So he'd found someplace safe, started a fire, wrapped Wally up as warmly and comfortably as possible in all the blankets they owned, and tried to wait out the storm.

Which resolutely did not go away, to Connor's intense frustration.

He wished weather control was one of his powers. He'd even settle for the ability to intimidate nature into doing what he wanted. He'd be okay with the world being outright terrified of him, as long as his friends, his family, were alright. But that wasn't going to happen, so he did the next best thing he could, which was make the place safer and use the extra time to scavenge for anything useful they might need for the trek. If he could find enough food to last more than a day, it meant he could travel for longer tomorrow, especially since Wally would have plenty of time to rest with their early break today.

Urgency clawed at the back of his mind as he searched for viable food, safe drinking water, and any medications that could possibly help his friend. He pushed it to the back of his mind. Connor knew they had to hurry—he knew Wally didn't have much time left—but there wasn't anything he could do about it right now other than prepare. He knew that, and yet that unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach refused to go away. In fact it got worse when he tried to check in on Wally with his super-hearing and realized the wind and the rain was causing too much interference, meaning he couldn't hear his friend's condition at all like he usually could.

But he'll be fine, Superboy told himself sharply. I made sure the place was completely safe. Unless the zeds start practicing Robin-level gymnastics they're not getting up where Wally is. The fire was contained, no risk of it spreading. And Wally's been so weak lately I doubt he'd try to help scavenge or anything. He stopped insisting on helping ages ago, anyway.

The worry in his chest didn't go away, but at least he was able to focus more completely on his goal. By the time night was truly falling, and the storm-cast darkness grew deeper and more defined, he'd found a surprisingly decent cache of dried goods in a collapsed shop that scavengers lacking super-strength could never get their hands on, and with the rain there was no shortage of water. It was a good haul; he should be able to squeeze out a few extra hours of running time tomorrow after all, now, without having to worry about finding things to eat.

His satisfaction turned to dread when he returned to the abandoned factory and found it precisely that: abandoned. Wally was gone.

He never, ever should have ignored his instincts.

Worried, Connor tossed the supplies aside and did a quick sweep of the room with his infrared vision. There was always the possibility that Wally had dragged himself up to relieve himself somewhere, or had gotten too hot by the fire, or something. But there were no warm bodies in the room; the only source of heat came from the fire itself. Now frantic, he did a more thorough search of the area with regular vision, casting about for some sort of hint as to what had happened. There were no signs of a struggle, thank goodness, and no zombies laying about either, so probably no attack (because sick or no Connor was sure Wally would refuse to go down without taking at least one dead head with him). But it didn't make sense. Wally was just...gone.

Frustrated, Connor cast about again as he paced, trying to figure out what had happened. His eyes fell on the pile of supplies next to his pack, and he realized with a start Wally's was gone. Not just gone, but emptied of most of the things it had initially carried.

Cold dread seeped into Connor's gut. Wally hadn't just vanished, or run for his life—he'd left. Willingly and intentionally.

At first all Connor felt was shock. He just couldn't comprehend why Wally would want to leave—much less without even the the most basic of supplies. He hadn't even taken any of the food with him; Connor had been keeping track of that for the past two weeks now with Wally's illness, and none of their meager food supplies had been touched. And he couldn't figure out how Wally had managed it either, weak as he was. He could barely walk under his own power anymore, lift any substantial weight, or even force himself to eat—it was simply unfathomable that he'd be able to simply leave.

Worst of all, Wally had abandoned him. And that hurt more than any physical pain he could possibly try to imagine.

That was ultimately what helped him shift to his next response: anger. Why, after all of Wally's numerous lectures and reprimands, would he make such a bold, rash, idiotic decision like this? Why would he run and leave Superboy behind, especially when he was so sick? Did he not trust Connor for some reason? Did he think he was proving a point, trying to handle this on his own? Idiot! Stupid! Careless! And he thought Connor was bad!

And then straight back to worry, because Connor didn't want to admit it, but the answers to most of his questions were boiling just below the surface, and had been for days. Wally was sick. Badly. Connor knew it, and Wally knew it, and they were both perfectly aware that Wally wouldn't survive long on his own without Superboy's care, not in his current condition. He'd admitted as much just the other night. Which meant he shouldn't run, but...but Superboy remembered, with a chill running down his spine that had nothing at all to do with the cold he couldn't feel, that tired, fatalistic tone in Wally's voice when he had admitted he wasn't doing well, when he'd insisted that Connor owed him nothing.

God. He'd gone off to die on his own.

There wasn't any other explanation for it. Wally wasn't getting anywhere on his own and they both knew it. The only thing leaving on his own would accomplish was his death. He hadn't run away to return to his solo travels without having to deal with a partner. He'd hauled himself away because he knew he was dying and, for whatever reason, didn't want Superboy to have to deal with it.

You know you don't owe me anything, for getting you out of that pod, right?

"As if that matters," Superboy snarled angrily. His voice echoed in the gloomy, wide-open second floor of the factory around him, and there was no answer, no that he expected one. It didn't matter to him—he wasn't doing this because he felt obligated to, even if he was grateful to Wally for finding him in Cadmus. But obviously it had been immensely important to Wally, enough to prompt him to do something as stupid and infuriating and terrifying as this.

He should have paid better attention. He shouldn't have brushed that question off as easily as he did. But he'd thought Wally was just out of it again, and he'd been breathing so badly, he'd needed the rest, there was no way for Superboy to know it would prompt him to do something like this...but he should have. He'd been trying so hard to protect Wally from the outside world he hadn't seen the danger right in front of his own face.

What had made him think this was the solution?

"Doesn't matter," Superboy growled decisively. Thinking about this was getting him nowhere. All he was doing was running in circles, and every second he wasted wrestling with his own worries and frustrations and mistakes was another second Wally was out there on his own, in danger from everything from zeds to the weather. He had to find Wally—that was all that mattered for now. When he was safe once more Connor could drag the answers out of him. He wouldn't get those answers if Wally was dead.

Eyes narrowed dangerously, teeth bared as though going into battle, Connor turned his back on their campsite and all their possessions and vanished into the storm once again.

Under normal circumstances, finding Wally would have been easy. Connor's enhanced hearing would have let him track his friend for a great distance, no matter how stealthy Wally tried to be, and his infrared vision would let him scan for warm bodies and very recent heat trails, even in the dark. Unfortunately for Connor, the storm interfered with all of that—which was probably what Wally had intended. He doubted his friend wanted to be found, at this point.

Too bad for him. Connor was going to track him down anyway, and when he was better Connor was going to ream him out big time for ever thinking about pulling a stunt like this.

His most useful tools were diminished severely, but that didn't mean Connor was helpless. He could still hear pretty decently at short distances, and the occasional distant lightning flash lit up the area enough for him to see where he was going. If he was close enough to a building he could listen for signs of life within, and he could make pretty decent guesses at which buildings weren't even worth checking due to being locked, collapsed, or just impossible to get into without super-strength. He also figured that Wally had probably gone in the opposite direction of where Superboy had been scavenging, just to avoid being seen or heard and hauled back to their safe zone. And of course, unlike a normal human being, Connor wasn't hindered by the cold or the wet of the storm itself, meaning he could keep searching long after even a physically fit human being would have had to retreat for safety.

Still, for all his advantages, two hours later he was still searching and growing more frantic by the second. The storm had started to abate by now, but it was nearly nine at night, and his survival instincts were screaming that he needed to be indoors and out of sight of the all too real monsters that roamed the land. And as if in answer to his all too valid concerns, that was when Connor heard the first hunting moan far ahead of him, riding on the end of a distant roll of thunder.

For one second, on pure instinct, he froze. He'd gained a wary respect for zombies by now, and as much as he loved smashing their heads in when he was feeling particularly frustrated or broody over his purpose in the apocalypse, weeks of lectures from Wally cautioned him against running headlong towards the monsters. But Wally was still out there. And he wasn't going to abandon his friend because he'd been taught to avoid the walking dead at all costs. Wally hadn't abandoned him like that outside of Cadmus, after all, disregarding his own survival rules in the process.

Besides—zombies didn't moan like that unless they had sight or scent of prey. And although it was possible that there was another traveler or travelers out here trying to escape a few dead-heads, it seemed far more likely that Wally was the target. Especially when the number of moans increased, but did not appear to be coming closer. So although it was dangerous, Connor tuned in on the noise, and threw himself down the nearly pitch-black streets towards monsters he should, by all rights, but running as fast as he could away from.

The storm clouds were just beginning to move on above, letting a little weak moonlight illuminate the area, when Connor reached the origin of the moans. It was just enough light to let his sharper-than-normal vision make out the most important parts of the scene before him, like the forty-or-so zombies groaning and trying to smash their way into a little storefront on the corner of the small intersection they were all standing in. Based on the thick cracks in the door and the shattered glass window the zeds were reaching through, they were succeeding pretty well. There was something inside that they wanted, and the only reason they weren't already in was because they weren't coordinated enough to figure out how to climb through the window, but once the door was busted it wouldn't be too much longer.

It wasn't hard to figure out what they were after inside. Connor didn't have to hear the weak, ragged coughing coming from the interior of the building to know Wally had holed up in there. Connor was honestly shocked that Wally had even made it this far; they were almost on the opposite side of the industrial area of this very large town, quite a hike from their shelter even when one was perfectly healthy. And now the zombies were going to undermine all that effort by mindlessly, uncaringly, hungrily ripping his best friend, his brother, to bits.

Superboy saw red.

He'd often been angry, in the past. Wally had told him more than once he was a little too overaggressive for somebody with his level of strength, and he frequently found himself getting snarly and snappish over incidents or comments or misfortunes ever since he'd started traveling through the world and seen how broken and messed up it was. He hated messing up at anything, he hated when people acted wary and distrustful around him, and he hated being weak enough that swarms of dead humans were a threat he couldn't do anything about, and when he hated something he showed it. But all of those times put together paled in comparison to the raw fury he felt at seeing those things surrounding his friend, at knowing Wally was at their mercy from his own stupid decisions and too close to dead himself to protect himself from the walking variety.

Superboy had never fought this many zeds before. Much less at night, when they had the advantage. Much less with the need to protect someone completely helpless while doing so. Any way a person looked at it logically, it was suicide to engage.

Superboy was far past logic. With a primal howl, eyes blazing with fury and the promise of a very permanent death, he charged.

Do you know how long I've wanted to use Kryptonite as an opener quote? Let me tell you. A really long time.