Chapter Text
For the fastest man alive, Wally sure does recover slow. Shayera’s only seen him sparingly, but he’s been up in the watchtower med bay for a week now, slowly coming back to himself. She’s glad for it, she’s been finding. On occasion, she can hear his laugh echoing through the ceiling pipes as he talks with John or Diana or Superman. It baffles her that she ever thought any other sound was more important.
Despite the damage done to her head, Shayera’s memories after Wally escaped are crystal clear. She remembers waking up in the dark cold, where the only warmth was the slick spot of blood on her forehead. She remembers the desperate, halting way she looked around the room for Wally, the way she took her shredded comm in her hands as the pain in her brain hit its peak, the way she realized, right then and there, that it wasn’t anything she could ever, ever fix. She remembers the sounds of harsh footsteps outside. The small breath she took in before the door smashed down. The punched-out figures of Diana and Superman in the doorway. In the end, she hadn’t even tried to run.
Shayera rubs the aching point on her jaw. She’s pretty sure that if Superman hadn’t stopped it, Diana would’ve punched her down to nothing but mealworms. A fine food for the earth she tried to destroy.
From her cell window, Shayera can see the bright curve of it. Blue, green, and mottled brown, with dancing stripes of cloud all across its skies. She’d never noticed it before, but the earth glows when the sun strikes it. It’s like warmth breeds warmth; like the sun is not generous to kiss the earth, but rather blessed by the opportunity to see her smile. Shayera spends every day watching it spin. She names each land mass as it comes into view with the words she’s only now learning instead of the ones Thanagar gave her. There are a lot more than she used to think. Hundreds of words to describe the same, singular space, hundreds of different ways to care for it, to live upon it, to love it with everything in you.
Shayera doesn’t mind being locked up here. They give her three square meals a day, more if she asks, and all the books she could ever want to read. It’s far better than she ever treated Wally. The notion stings her gut with sharp, sour guilt, but she’s learning not to despise that either. At least guilt means she’s learned something.
Shayera snaps her head from the window as the door slides open behind her. She sits up properly in bed, breath stilling in her lungs as a familiar face slips in and up to the glass that separates Shayera’s cell from the entrance.
“Hey, Wally,” she says quietly. She doesn’t know if she can call him a familiar face anymore, given how different he looks. He’s gained a glow in his skin since the last time she saw him. His hair is brushed out soft, and he wears clothes he’s chosen for himself– a silly 80’s bomber jacket and t-shirt with his own Flash logo on the front. His arm has escaped from its sling now that nobody’s stealing his healing factor away, hanging loose and free by his side. Just as well, the brightness has returned to his eyes. It’s right at home in their brown depths. It feels wrong to her still, for a person to stand so tall without a pair of wings behind their back, but she’s learning to forget that too. Wally looks good. He looks better. Shayera aches that she ever gave him something he’d have to recover from.
“Hey,” Wally says, bouncing on his heels in front of the glass. His eyes still have a nervous skit to them, like it's a struggle to look at her directly, but Shayera supposes that’s more than fair. She moves to settle cross-legged on the floor a few feet from the glass.
“I brought you a book,” Wally says. He reaches down to pop open a small hatch and slide it through to her. Shayera picks it up gently. The Planet in a Pebble.
“Thank you,” she murmurs. “Is it yours?”
“Mine? Hah, no, it’s from the library. But I think you’ll like it.”
“Yeah, I bet I will.” Shayera sets the book down gently behind her and clears her throat. “How are you?”
Wally’s fidgeting stops for a moment. “Me? I’m okay. Went on a walk. Talked to my mom. GL brought me chocolate from some fancy place in Detroit.”
“That sounds nice,” Shayera tries. She struggles to reach for her next words, but finds she has nothing more to say. A thick knot of apologies sits under her trachea, but it feels useless to voice any of them. A simple sorry doesn’t seem like enough anymore.
Wally nods and gracelessly looks off at the far wall. The light plays on his face, painting him a calm, somber blue, washing the red in his hair to russet gray. He scratches his cheek and rocks back on his heels. Shayera watches as he moves to scratch his neck too, then jolts to an awkward stop and drops his hand in his pocket. The reminder of what used to sit there raises slippery dismay in Shayera’s throat.
“You… you don’t have to do this, you know,” Shayera says quietly. “If you never spoke to me again, I think I would understand.”
For a while, Wally says nothing. He looks to the ground. Still avoiding her eyes, which Shayera will continue to pretend doesn’t sting.
“You’re right,” Wally concedes eventually. “I don’t. There’s no reason for me to be here. I don’t owe you this.”
He rubs his jaw with nervous knuckles, sweeping at the spots of blue. After a moment’s hesitation, he sits down cross-legged, a good four feet from the glass. “I guess I just miss the old Shayera, you know? The one who probably would’ve killed the real Shayera, I think. You remember her?”
“I do,” Shayera says with quiet shame. “She wasn’t real.”
Wally sighs. “Yeah, I figured that one out pretty quick.” He leans forwards with his elbows to his knees and drops his eyes until his hair hides them from Shayera’s view. Opens his mouth like he wants to say more, but just closes it right up again with bitter resignation. Shayera’s own hands tighten around her elbows. The pressure in her throat builds with every second he refuses to look at her.
“Wally,” she blurts quietly, wrongly. “I’m… you were right about me. I am a monster. What I did to you was wrong. What I thought about you was wrong. I’m sorry.”
Wally goes still. For a moment, the only motion in the room comes from Shayera’s own fidgeting and the anxious pull of her breath through her teeth. Then Wally exhales. It's small, awkward and discomforted all around its sheet-glass edges. He looks up, right at Shayera, furrowing his brow.
“Cool,” Wally puffs. “Uh, yeah. It was. what’re you gonna do about that?”
Shayera blinks. “What?”
“Well, we both know I’m never gonna forgive you. So now what? The way I see it, you can get really good at wallowing, or, y’know… find something better to do with your new moral compass.” Wally shrugs and leans back on his hands. Shayera stares. Somewhere between her ribs, harsh, angry static hums. It yells, over and over, that that’s not fair, that’s not fair, he can’t say that to me– but that biting instinct is wrong, and Shayera swallows to silence it. She looks out to the stars instead. Earth swirls below, deserving of the kind of protection she wasn’t kind enough to understand. Past it, way off in some distant solar system, Thanagar sits, twinkling like a woman’s angry eye. Shayera was never their only soldier. Only one of many, all with their own little pearls in their ears and their own Wallys they’re bound to hurt.
“I should go back,” Shayera murmurs eventually. On the outside of her vision, Wally looks up. “To Thangar. They’ll still try to invade Earth, I think. Five months from now. Someone needs to stop it.”
Wally studies Shayera’s face carefully. Slowly, the stressed pinch of his eyebrows softens out, and he leans forwards with his chin in his palm. “You’re a someone.”
“Yes,” Shayera agrees. She finally breaks her gaze away from the Earth and back to the blue shadow it throws on Wally’s face. “I… I think that’s what I’ll do. Thank you.”
A quick smile flits over Wally’s face. He stands and stretches himself out with a groan. “Yep, yeah, no problem. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a chocolate bar to go finish.”
“And I have an invasion to stop,” Shayera murmurs.
Wally gives her a brisk thumbs-up. “That’s the spirit.” He shoves his hands safely back in his pockets and moves to leave, back to the earth and the league and his mother and his chocolate, and Shayera’s chest jolts.
“Wait,” she blurts. Wally stills in the slid-open doorway.
“I, just, um,” Shayera flounders. “I’m sorry, Wally. I really am. That’s all.”
The words settle in the room, halted but with a closing, satisfied dissolution. Wally turns around just enough to toss Shayera a sad smile over his shoulder.
“Hey, we had this discussion, like, a week ago,” he says, polite but firm. “You remember.”
Shayera laughs a little. She does. “Yeah. Okay. You’re right.”
“See you around, Shayera.”
And then with a little wave, Wally is gone. Shayera sighs in the newfound quiet of her room. She has a lot of work to do. Just as soon as she’s finished reading The Planet in a Pebble.