And back with an EARLY update this time! I'm off to Aki Con (one of my cosplay's being Robin, and I'm so excited. It looks amazing and he's going to be so fun) for the weekend, so that's no wifi until Monday.
As a heads up, I believe these next few chapters are going to be pretty short. I try to avoid switching character POV's in the middle of chapters as much as possible, so that makes for some pretty short and some pretty long updates. I hope you enjoy anyway~
A baby's face reminded Wally of a chipmunk.
No, really. It would not be hard at all to fit a few hundred acorns in there. Not that Wally would ever feed acorns to a baby.
He would have been an awful father.
If the redhead were honest with himself, he had never thought much about babies before. Children in general were always first priority when he was at a site of disaster, but that was as far as his experience stretched. They were like little alien...things. But wow, when babies were the only people that knew he existed, it was shocking how fast he got attached.
He had spent the last few days - okay, maybe a bit more than a few days, but who was there to judge? - sitting out in the park, watching them. It sounded a bit creepy, even in his own head, but that was the gist of it. Wally would watch them and wave and smile and, when no one was looking at them, walk up and make funny faces. He made it his personal job to put a smile on their chubby cheeks and puffy lips. There was even the occasional child who would hold coherent conversation with him, and it wasn't suspicious because their parents would blow it off as another imaginary friend.
Wally had many ideas as to what he'd have amounted to, but an imaginary friend had never been one of them.
One thing he figured out early on was that children above three years old couldn't see him. That fact felt familiar, as if he'd heard it before, and the redhead sorely regretted not paying attention to the crazy superstitions that had circled his late grandmother's head. Sadly, he didn't know the flexibility of that unwritten rule - could underdeveloped, older children see him? What about fast-growing younger children? If he put a little thought into it, Wally could make his bored park endeavours into a personal experiment. An experiment that no one would ever know the results to, but an experiment nonetheless. Maybe he would tell them to Dick.
After Dick stopped being so pissed at him.
Because Wally had royally screwed up. Again.
Which caused another life to go up in flames.
But he wasn't going to think about that. Happy thoughts. Happy children. Happy thoughts and happy children.
"Aren't you a little old to play here?" a pouty-faced blonde girl suddenly accused while Wally sat with his legs crossed beneath a pine tree. Dragged from his thoughts, the redhead blinked up at her in surprise. The needles were prickly and difficult to see through, so Wally hadn't expected any children to happen upon him while he was so deep in thought. Apparently, though, little girls were the exception.
"Aren't you a little young? You're going to get poked by a bunch of needles if you stay here," Wally warned warmly. The girl paid him no mind.
"You will, too," the girl said as she sat back on her knees.
"I don't mind," shrugged Wally.
"Yeah? Me neither," she insisted bravely, proving her point by shifting to a cross legged position. "See? Criss-cross applesauce."
Wally couldn't help it. He laughed. The girl looked a bit offended by that, but her phrase made him so abruptly remember daycare that it was both parts excruciatingly painful and oddly uplifting. "I see that. I'm Wally," he greeted.
"I'm Marie! My friends left," she answered in turn.
"They left the park?" asked the redhead.
Marie nodded. "They had to go to soccer. Did you see them? It was a girl and her brother. We were playing over there"-she pointedly excitedly across the field-"but they never let me kick the ball because I'm too little." The girl looked so downright appalled by her age that Wally felt his pain slowly seep away.
"How old are you?" The best part about experimenting with what ages of children could see him was that children usually remembered the exact age that they were, and displayed it proudly.
Marie smiled widely. "Four!" she exclaimed, holding out four fingers. "Are you a teenager? Mama doesn't like teenagers."
Wally quickly made sure that he didn't look so shocked at her age for fear of scaring her off. He swallowed and gave a quick smile. "I am. I'm 16. But I'm a good teenager, don't worry."
Four. She was four? She was pretty intelligent. Very intelligent, actually. But how come Wally had seen so many four year olds walk right through him? It didn't make any sense. Maybe there were more factors involved than he had been aware of.
As the time passed, Marie transitioned from trying, and failing, to climb the pine tree, to wanting Wally to push her on the swing, to making ant prisons on the sidewalk. Though Wally couldn't help her with any of those things, he did his best to make it so that she wouldn't notice. He wasn't strong enough to catch her if she fell, he was too tired to push her on the swing, he was afraid of bugs. But crouching as close as he did to her on the grass, taking care not to touch the manmade sidewalk that he'd float straight through, he should have seen the inevitable coming. Marie picked a handful of flowers and stuck them into Wally's face before letting them go, amusing herself with the way they drifted with the wind. However, instead of falling into his lap, the flowers fell through his lap. Marie stared.
Wally really had no explanation. "Uh," he started, before collecting himself and remembering what he told the children before. He tried to smile warmly. "Shh, don't tell your parents. Only kids can see me. Parents are all grown up. I'm like Peter Pan."
Marie examined him with big, round eyes, and carefully reached out to touch him. He let her, and watched as her fingers curled uselessly through his shoulder. "You…," she murmured, growing excited. She suddenly jumped up, ecstatic, as Wally leaned back in surprise. "You're an angel!"
"'An angel'?" Wally echoed, dumbfounded.
"Yeah, mama tells me about angels all the time! Are you my guardian angel?" Marie pressed, growing closer to his face with a tooth filled grin.
Wally gave a breathy chuckle. "Yeah. Something like that."
"Where are your wings?"
"My wings? Uh," Wally had to think about that for a moment. He was normally an awful liar, but seeing the girl's happy eyes, he thought that he had finally discovered the one type of lying he was good at. "They're hidden, just like everyone else's. I don't need wings to fly."
"You don't?" Marie asked in awe.
"Nope. See? Look around you, at everyone here. I look just like them, don't I? You didn't know that I was an angel until now. So how do you know who else is really an angel?" Marie followed Wally's gesture to look around the park, at all the children screeching in joy and the parents loitering about in clumps.
"What about God. What's he like?"
Non-existent, Wally wanted to say. He settled with something a bit different. "He talks about your mama a lot."
"He does?"
"Of course. Can you show me which one is your mama?" He hoped that angels weren't expected to know everyone's family trees.
Marie pointed to a long-haired brunette sitting with her legs crossed on a bench, bouncing a baby in her grip. She was smiling and nodding her head to whatever an Asian woman seated beside her was saying. "That's my brother, too," Marie explained, referring to the baby in the brunette's hold.
"God says that you're very lucky to have your mama, and you should help her out with whatever she needs. Especially with your brother. Can you do that?" It felt awkward talking about something that he had zero belief in, but the fascinated look in the girl's eyes made it all worth the while.
"Like cleaning my room?" she asked.
"And drawing pictures. You draw pictures for your mama, right?" Wally asked, and Marie frantically nodded. "Keep doing that. She loves them." She had to. Seeing the various drawings that Wally used to draw of Flash taped all around Barry's lab was the first thing that Wally had noticed when he first went to work with him, and the thing that he remembered the most.
Wally still looked at them when he joined Barry there. Especially when Barry would stare at them himself for hours on end.
The next hour passed quickly. Too quickly, in Wally's opinion. He faintly recalled always having been just the slightest bit annoyed when he was incessantly interrogated by children with questions that he couldn't answer, but he found that being an angel wasn't so bad.
The sun was setting when Marie was finally called over by her mother, who was reaching to place Marie's baby brother into a stroller. "It's time to go," the woman said.
"Already? Can I play a little more?" Marie begged.
"It's getting dark," the woman sighed, looking suspiciously at the empty park. "And there's no one here anymore. Your friends are gone."
"No, they're not," Marie insisted. "Wally's still here."
"'Wally'?" repeated Marie's mother, stilling where she had been moving to adjust her youngest child's blankets.
"My guardian angel!" exclaimed the girl.
The woman visibly relaxed with a laugh. "Well, tell your angel that he'll hear from you in your prayers tonight."
Marie bounced gleefully and quickly turned around. "I have to go now, Wally!" she said, facing the redheaded boy.
"I know. Be good," he answered, but it was over Marie's own words, which had continued after he thought she had stopped talking.
"Wally?" she asked, and Wally held the breath that he didn't need as a sudden tightness squeezed his lungs.
She was looking straight at him.
"Marie?" her mother called, already having gotten up and ready to push the stroller down the sidewalk. "Are you done?"
Marie pouted for a moment, before shrugging and smiling widely at her mother. "Yeah, I think he went home. Will I see him again?"
And, with angry fists and a denial of the tears in his eyes, Wally answered, "No."
As he watched Marie and her mother walk away, Wally could just catch the tail end of their conversation.
"Do you want to walk all the way home?"
"Yeah, I'm four! I can walk!"
"Almost. Your birthday isn't until tomorrow, remember?"