Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and/or their otherwise respective owners.
Author's Notes: I was debating on if I was gonna go through with this storyline, because ngl, after all the Ezra Miller drama I'm really turned off on his version of Barry. Then I saw that the Flash in Justice League: Unlimited is Wally West and I was like...okay, cool. Vindicated!
This is mostly just a setup story, as we won't be seeing Wally for a while after this, although I did way too much research into Ohio for this story lmao. Also, I'm so tired of the "person finds out they have abilities because of their family then gets mad at family for not telling them" trope, because while it's realistic...yeah, it's overdone. So I mostly glossed over that at the end XD
Story title comes from Pump It by Black Eyed Peas.
Anyways, as always, I hope you enjoy,
~TGWSI/Selene Borealis
~the black and gold 'verse~
~pump it~
The morning started out as a typical one.
Wally woke up that morning at 6:15 that morning, as he did every morning, to his alarm clock blaring at him. Groaning lowly, he reached out and smacked his hand on top of it, relieved in no small amount when he was able to turn it off on the first try...or, at least turn on the snooze button.
After a few minutes of him urging on his body to get with the program, he opened his eyes and got up to make sure that his alarm clock wouldn't go off again. Once assured in that, he got out of bed, lumbered off to the bathroom connected to his room, and went through his morning routine of brushing his teeth, taking a ten-minute shower, toweling off, and making sure that his hair would be decent enough once it dried before he went back into his bedroom to change his clothes and make sure everything he needed for school was in his backpack.
He was downstairs by 6:40, the sun shining into the kitchen softly through the window as his aunt Iris sat at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, blueberry jam, and bacon – yeah, he knew that she was kind of weird with that, but he wasn't going to question it now after it had been her breakfast staple for so long – being her breakfast as she read through that morning's The Columbus Dispatch as if she wasn't one of its own writers. "Good morning, Wally," she said as he entered the room.
"'Morning, Aunt Iris," he replied, going over to one of the cabinets to get out a bowl before filling it up with the perfect amounts of cereal and milk.
It was as he was shoving a spoonful of his breakfast into his mouth that his uncle came downstairs. "'Morning, honey," Barry said to his wife, placing a kiss on her cheek, which caused her to smile and Wally to wrinkle his nose. Noticing this, Barry grinned over at him, waggling his eyebrows. "Don't mind the PDA, kid." Then he gave Iris another kiss, this time on the lips.
Wally rolled his eyes. "Gross," he muttered, but it was all in good fun. His aunt and uncle had one of the best relationships that he had ever seen...far better than the one his father and mother had had.
But, anyways.
"So, what are you doing today in school?" Barry asked him as he went through the motions of getting his own breakfast. "Got any tests? Projects or essays due?"
"No," Wally said. "I imagine that we're gonna be talking about that crazy shit – "
"Wally," Iris admonished him.
He cringed. "Sorry, Aunt Iris. That crazy stuff that happened yesterday in New York City with those guys in the metal suits in my Gov class, though."
"Oh, yeah," Barry hummed, like their family hadn't thoroughly talked about it last night after they'd all gotten home. Wally's aunt had had quite a few opinions on it, being the journalist that she was. "Well, you have a good day at school today, okay? And don't get into any trouble."
Wally grinned. "I will, and I'll try not to."
It was his aunt's turn to roll her eyes. "You two are more like each other than you'll ever know," she said. "I should've realized this would happen when I married into this family."
Barry winked at her. "Ah, but you love us anyways."
After he'd finished his breakfast and washed out his bowl and spoon, Wally was out the door. He shoved his earbuds into his ears and hit the play button on his iPhone. The album Monkey Business by Black Eyed Peas began to play.
"Ha, ha, ha, pump it! Ha, ha, ha..."
He began his walk to school, because he and his family lived close enough to the high school that he attended that he didn't qualify for the bus. But, that was fine with him. He liked walking to school in the mornings, especially when it was pleasantly cool like it was now, the morning breeze feeling good against his skin.
Wally had lived with his uncle and aunt in Worthington, one of the richer suburbs of Columbus, which was called "Central City" by some since it was close to being smack-dab in the middle of the state, ever since he'd been seven years old, after his mom's death...yeah, he was going to leave it at that. He was seventeen now. His mom was Barry's younger sister, the Mary West née Allen, although it was a common question for people to ask if he was related to his aunt Iris instead since her maiden name and now the first part of her name was West, even though the two of them looked nothingalike. But their shared surname was just a coincidence. Perhaps a weird one, he would acknowledge, but there were weirder things that happened in life every single day. Like two men in metal suits, who had quickly been dubbed as "Iron Man" and "Iron Monger" by the news, duking it out on the highway in New York City, for instance.
Or what was about to happen to him, for another one.
But Wally, of course, wasn't aware of that as he finished his walk to his school, walking through its front doors and then going through its halls to his locker. He waved at some of his friends that he spotted as he did, although he didn't have a lot of them. Maybe in another life he would've been a jock, a player on the football or track teams, but the one thing his aunt and uncle had never allowed him to do for reasons that he didn't really know was play sports. And he wasn't really a nerd or a band kid either, ergo he existed in kind of his own bubble in the high school social groupings. But, that was alright with him. He didn't need a lot of friends or ones that were particularly close to him to be happy.
Once he put everything in his locker except for the things that he would need for his first four class periods of the day until lunch, he made his way to his first period and homeroom, Government. He was in his seat by the time the bell rang at 7:35, making a good – and once again, typical – start to his day.
As he had expected, they did talk about Iron Man and Iron Monger in his Government class. It was a very current event, and one with potential legal ramifications. The world had never seen anything like this before, after all. It was almost like something out of a comic book.
After his Government class, he went on to his second period, Algebra II. This class was one that he had to pay a little more attention to; math wasn't something that came the easiest to him, not like the various social studies and science classes he'd taken over the years. But, since science and math went hand in hand and he wanted to follow in his uncle's footsteps and become a forensic scientist one day, it was necessary for him to excel in it.
...And this was where his morning – his entire day – ceased to be like a typical one.
Because usually, due to what he had just said, Wally never had problems paying attention in his Algebra II class. But not today. Because within fifteen minutes of the class starting –
– Things just seemed to slow down.
Wally didn't know how else to describe it. It started out with a tingle on the back of his neck, sending the hairs there on end. He clamped a hand down on the skin there absentmindedly, frowning, not really sure why he was experiencing this, but trying to focus on his teacher's lecture nonetheless.
Then, the tingling suddenly became worse. It became a zap, like an electric shock, except much more powerful, like an arc of lightning had just gone down his spine. He jumped in his seat as his back became ramrod straight, almost falling out of his chair, which of course incurred the interest of both his teacher and all of the other students in the room. "...Wally, are you alright?" his teacher asked, but her voice was...strange, almost distorted, like she was speaking at a slower pace or he was hearing her from underwater.
Still, he understood what she was saying. He forced out a slow nod, albeit the pain that was rushing through his system made it hard for him to do that, and said at an equally slow pace through gritted teeth, "Yes...Ms. Borde."
If she thought that it was odd how he was speaking, she didn't comment on it...which was also strange, because Ms. Borde wasn't the type of teacher to just let a student be if she thought something was wrong with them, as she would send them to the nurse's office against their preferences if she thought that the situation was severe enough.
And honestly, though he would refuse to go himself based on principle...maybe he did need to go to the nurse's office. What he was experiencing was beginning to border on one of the worst pains of his entire life. It was quickly becoming almost as bad as when he'd gone into his presentation rut two years ago, when he'd become an alpha, although Barry and Iris had done their best to ensure him that just because he shared the same designation with his father in the loosest definitions of the word, it didn't mean that he was going to end up being like him.
But, Ms. Borde went back to her lecture, and so he went back to doing his best to listen to her, in spite of the pain. But soon, he was no longer able to focus on her, he was no longer even able to write down any notes, all he could do was just squeeze his eyes shut as the seconds and minutes seemed to become slower and slower, dragging on out for an eternity...
Eventually, though he didn't know how long nor did he know why Ms. Borde hadn't finally decided to send him on down to the nurse's office, the pain began to subside. It was still awful, but Wally was able to open his eyes and look around.
And this, this was when he realized that things hadn't just seemed to slow down:
They had slowed down.
All around him, everything appeared to be at a standstill. None of his classmates nor his teacher were moving – or, well, they were, but they were doing it so slowly, the movements were practically imperceptible. On the analog clock that was right next to the announcements speaker in the room, the only hand that was moving was the one that signified the seconds, and even then, it was as if every second was taking an entire minute to pass by, if not more than that.
Wally stared at that hand on the clock. He blinked.
Then, he whispered, "What the fuck?"
What the fuck was going on? Why was everything so slow? Was this some sort of cheesy "before-you-die" moments like out of the movies? Was he dying from a brain aneurysm or something? Was that why it felt like every single moment was lasting forever?
Before he could think too much about that, or the fact that he quite simply didn't want to die at only seventeen, Wally stood up – and in the process, disproved that entire theory. Because his body moved along with his soul, proving that he wasn't having an out-of-body experience, even as everything else continued to happen in a slower-than-slow motion. Nothing changed.
Wally's breaths began to come out in harsh, shallow pants. He didn't –
He didn't understand.
And just as a furtherance of his lack of understanding, all at once, everything became right again. Everything began operating at the speed it should've: the clock went back to running, the ticking noise along with all of the other ones he hadn't noticed in the silence of inaction resuming, his classmates went back to taking diligent notes, and Ms. Borde went back to her lecture. She did stop in the middle of her sentence, though, her eyes blinking from her glasses as she observed him. "Wally," she said. "Why are you standing up?"
He could tell that she wasn't just saying it as a question on if he was okay. She was also asking it because, the last she'd been aware of, he'd been sitting in his seat. She didn't understand the abrupt difference without her being aware of it, because he sat in one of the middle rows of seats, directly within her line of sight.
He still didn't understand it either, for what it was worth.
"I think I need to go to the nurse's office, Ms. Borde," he said, picking his bag up from off of the floor and slinging it along his shoulder. "Don't worry about a pass."
He was out the door before she could even begin to formulate her response.
Wally, naturally, didn't go to the nurse's office.
He left the school entirely, in fact. His walk back home seemed to take forever and yet flash by in the blink of an eye at the same time, as things slowed down once again and yet his scenery passed by him in a way that was too quickly to be feasible, and he had a feeling it wasn't just the effect of the panic attack that he was going through causing that.
Was time really slowing down on him? Based off of what he knew about the laws of physics because of his uncle's fascination with it, he didn't think that could be the case. Or had he just all of the sudden become really, really fast, as impossible as that also seemed?
When he got home and looked down at his feet while he was in the process of unlocking the front door to his and his family's house, it seemed like the latter had to be the case. His shoes and socks were gone, not even a trace of them left. They must've been torn to shreds while he'd been in the process of getting back home.
Shoving his key into the lock, he opened the front door and shut it behind him, letting his backpack fall from his shoulder onto the ground before he went upstairs to his room. Beneath his feet, he heard the carpet of his bedroom make a weird sound, like it was being burned by friction instead of the other way around, but he found himself incapable of caring about that much as he sat down on the floor of his room with his back pressed up against his bed, his breathing still stuck in hyperventilation mode, which made it kind of hard to think because of the lack of oxygen going to his brain.
But think he did, at least as best as he could. If he was fast – and God, that sounded like something out of a comic book, too – how...how could this have happened? He had superpowers. But even in the comics, superpowers just didn't develop for no reason...there had to be some sort of catalyst, some sort of explanation...
Whatever that explanation was, he did know one thing: he needed help. He needed his uncle Barry or his aunt Iris – better yet, both of them, but he would accept the presence of only one. As long as they told him that, regardless of how this apparent ability of his had come about, everything was going to be alright. Just like they had said back when he'd presented.
Taking his phone out of his jeans' right pocket, he went through the agonizingly slow motions of unlocking it – because it still felt like an eternity before the tap of his fingers would register – then going to his call app and pressing his uncle Barry's contact, then his number to call.
The ringing of his phone, as slow as it was, did help calm his nerves some, which had a semi-decent result. As he jolted at the sound, taking in a sharp breath through his nose, the ringing began to sped up, sounding more like it usually did.
His uncle picked up on the third ring. "Wally?" he asked. His voice sounded underwater, too, even a little bit worse than Ms. Borde's, but just hearing Barry's voice calmed him down more, which led to his uncle sounding better. "Aren't you supposed to be in class, buddy? What's – ?"
"I'm at home," Wally was able to bite out. "I...need help."
"Wait, you're skipping school? Why – ?"
"I'm fast!" Wally exclaimed. His voice went an entire octave higher, and he knew that since what he said next was fast even to him, it probably wasn't even intelligible to his uncle: "I'm fast and I don't know what to do!"
...But, strangely, his uncle did understand. "I'm on my way," he said. "I'll be right there."
The line clicked.
Wally blinked.
Then, as impossible as this also was, when he opened his eyes, Barry was standing right in front of him. A gentle smile was resting on his uncle's face. "I guess Iris was right with what she said earlier," he sighed lightly. "We really are alike in more ways than I knew. Although, I probably should have expected this."
Wally, too stunned to say anything at all, stared at him for five seconds exactly. Or, well, what felt like five seconds.
That was all that it took for his brain to come back online from the shock of it all.
"What?" he spluttered, crying out. "How – Uncle Barrry – I don't – !"
His uncle sat down on the floor in front of him, grabbing Wally's left hand like he was still a little kid and squeezing it comfortingly. "Hey, I get it. Believe me, I do," he said. "But we're going to get through this together, okay? Right now, though, I need you to – "
"But you're – you're fast! I'm fast!" Wally exclaimed. "And this shouldn't be – "
"Wally, listen to me. Do what I say," Barry ordered. "Breathe in."
His uncle took a breath in himself to prove his point. Wally shuddered in a breath.
"Good. Now, breathe out."
He did as instructed.
"Breathe in."
Once again, he did as told.
"Breathe out."
They did it a few more times, just to be on the safe side. It reminded him a lot of the times that Barry and Iris had calmed him down from his panic attacks back when he'd been seven, terrified that his own father was going to kill him just like he had his mother.
(May Rudy West continue to rot in the Belmont Correctional Institution, where he was living out his life sentence.)
When Wally at last felt calm enough to breathe properly, his uncle smiled at him. "Still feel like the world's falling apart on you?"
"No," he said tentatively. But: "Uncle Barry, I don't understand. Since when have you had powers?"
He wasn't as concerned about where his powers had come from now. If his uncle had them, then they had to be some genetic sort of thing, so while the cause of them was still important, it wasn't at the forefront of his mind.
But his uncle Barry had never, never showed signs of having powers before. Yeah, sure, maybe he had a tendency to talk really fast and he did move faster than most people sometimes, but he'd never acted like he had super speed.
Barry clasped his hands together on top of his lap, which was spread out due to the crisscrossed position he was sitting in. "Since I presented when I was fourteen," the beta man said.
Wally's eyes felt like they just about dropped out of his head. "What?"
"I didn't tell you this before because when you didn't show signs of becoming a speedster – " he said the term "speedster" so naturally, it hardly even shocked Wally, though he was beginning to settle into a state of numbness, so maybe that had something to do with it " – when you presented, I thought that meant that you wouldn't be one and I...didn't want to put the burden of keeping this a secret on your shoulders when it didn't seem like you'd inherited the abilities, nor did I want to make you feel disappointed in not having them."
"Disappoint me?" Wally paraphrased, incredulous.
Barry winced. "Yes, that was my mistake, I realize that now. I apologize for it, and I understand if you're mad at me because of it. I should've told you about this potentially happening regardless if it actually did or not," he said. He unclasped his hands, letting them rest open, the palms facing up. "Listen, there's not really an easy way to tell you this now, but...our family is special, Wally. Have been ever since sometime in the late 1700's when one of our ancestors, William Allen, was struck by lightning. I'm only theorizing as to this, but I suspect that it must've activated a dormant gene in his DNA, which led to him becoming a speedster as well as some of his male descendants – but only the male ones, and only if they were alphas or betas, although I think it would happen with a female alpha too, there's just never been one in our family. Anyways, my grandfather, your great-grandfather, Jay Garrick, was a speedster. He used his powers for good during WW2, and it's been kept under the wraps by the government to this day. But his daughter, my mother and your grandmother, Judy Garrick Allen, wasn't."
"Wait," Wally protested. "Why didn't anybody before Great-Grandpa Jay do stuff with their...with their speed? And why is the government keeping what he did a secret but they publicly acknowledge Captain America?"
"Because there are some things that the general public has not been ready to know, and I imagine they won't be for quite some time yet," his uncle said simply. He winked, too, though what he said next was nothing but serious in nature. "Think about it. There's already so much hate in the world, buddy. What do you think people would do if they found out you had these powers because they were genetic? That you were much, much faster than them naturally, and not just because somebody had done that to you or it had accidentally happened?"
Wally didn't need to think about it for long. He could only imagine what they would do, the persecution that he and his family would suffer.
He wetted his lips nervously. "Are there any more out there than us?" Their family was small, after all; ever since he was seven, it'd just been the three of them. Great-Grandpa Jay had died the same year that Wally had been born; there was only one picture in existence that contained the two of them. And, speaking of his aunt: "Does Aunt Iris know?"
Barry smiled again and shook his head. "No, it's just the two of us. When you didn't show signs of becoming a speedster, I thought I was going to be the last one, since you know Iris and I can't have kids...but I'm happy that I'm not. I would've been happy if I'd really been the last one, too. You're my nephew, Wally; I love you just the way you are, no matter what. But, yes, Iris does know. She found out when we were in college."
...Well, that made sense. Wally couldn't ever imagine his aunt and uncle keeping secrets from each other, even little ones.
"Come on," Barry said then, getting to his feet and slapping his palms against each other. "Let's go downstairs and get something to eat. You're about to find out the cost of running through so many calories in such a short period of time, literally."
As if on cue, Wally's stomach gave a loud rumble. His face burning just as red as his hair, he got to his feet, too.
Barry helped him go downstairs without speeding, as well as telling him advice on how to just exist without speeding. It was weird; unless he was actively speeding, time didn't seem to pass by slowly, like he imagined one would have expected if they were in his or his uncle's shoes...metaphorically-speaking, since he still wasn't wearing any. It seemed like that was further proof of the whole "time is relative" theory, although he didn't know enough about the laws of physics to say that for certain.
In the kitchen, the beta man got to work on making pancakes, taking out a pan, a mixing bowl, and a spatula, before moving on to amass the ingredients. Soon, he was flipping pancakes as he regaled Wally with stories about after he'd just presented and his grandpa Jay helping him out with his abilities, and stories that Jay had told him about the war or his own father's and grandfather's experiences in turn.
And Wally was angry at his uncle for not telling him about all of this until now (after all, what if he hadn't manifested the powers himself but one of his kids had one day, what would he have done then? Freak out, that's what), but...it was nice to know where these newfound powers of his had come from, that he wasn't and wouldn't be alone in dealing with them. Plus, it made sense now why Barry and Iris hadn't let him do sports before, because of their concern that he'd become a speedster. Barry did tell him that he might have to miss out on the rest of the school year so that he could learn how to get a proper handle on his powers, but considering there were only two and a half weeks left of school and again he didn't have any sports or extracurriculars like that to worry about, it wasn't a total loss. They'd probably just tell the school that he had mono or something.
After a breakfast in which Wally ate enough food to rival his uncle (it'd never made sense to him before, how Barry could eat more than a teenaged boy but not gain any weight, but hey now it did), Barry sent a text to Iris telling her to take the afternoon off if she could for "family business" and to make sure that she brought three large pizzas with their family's typical preferred toppings with her.
When she came home a couple hours later, carrying the pizzas, she took one look at them sitting together on the couch, watching one of Wally's comfort shows, raised an eyebrow, and said, "It happened, didn't it? Wally became a speedster."
Barry grinned, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly. "Yeah..."
"I told you. I was right," the beta woman singsonged. Going into the kitchen to put the pizzas down on the island counter, she came back out and stood behind the couch so that she could wrap her arms around Wally and place a kiss into his hair. "I know it probably seems like a lot right now, honey, and I'm sorry we didn't tell you sooner, but I promise you, we're going to get through this together as a family, just as we have before."
He smiled up at her. "I know, Aunt Iris."
"Alright, let's go eat some pizzas," Barry announced. "Because after this, we're gonna go outside and get straight to work on getting you to be able to control your powers."
Word Count: 4,650