Marry The Speed

All he could do was watch.

Surging muscles, pumping legs. Poetry in motion to see those muscular bodies moving, and then the staggering violence of them crashing together. The superhuman force that they’d trained and worked so hard for, with nowhere to go but into another living body. It was enough to make Wally wince. Especially as his guys were losing.

Being beaten back, battered, bruised, bloodied—their enemy taking from them their every defense, squashing their every counterattack, breaking them by slow degrees. If the bone-cracking impacts of their collision could be said to be at all slow.

Wally wished he could do something, prayed that his formidable will could have an impact on what he had to view. That his desperately hoping it would not be so might be enough to avert catastrophe. But there was no snatching victory from the jaws of this defeat.

Before Wally’s half-shut eyes, the Metropolis Meteors blitzed into the endzone and scored another touchdown on the Central City Cougars.

“This cannot be happening. A professional football team cannot be performing this way,” he muttered. “Did the real Cougars call in sick? Was there a mix-up and a bunch of pro fishermen had to play instead? Ref, check to see if any of them were poisoned! They’re playing like they were poisoned!”

Of course, the ref couldn’t hear him. None of them could hear him. He was in the Watchtower, a space station 22,300 miles above the Earth, and not far enough away from the stink of the Cougars’ performance, as far as Wally was concerned.

He was watching the game on the Tower’s 200-inch main monitor, the coffee table before his couch loaded with snacks. He picked up a chip and bulldozed some queso with it, though the taste of defeat was too bitter to enjoy the game day treat any.

“Why did I even make all these snacks?” Wally moaned. “I can’t even enjoy them. I could be watching Tombstone. It’s never a bad time to be watching Tombstone. I’m a masochist, that’s what it is. I’d watch a colonoscopy being performed if the doctor was wearing a Cougars jersey. I need to watch Tombstone more often, I need to watch more Bond movies. There are Jackie Chan movies, Godzilla movies that I haven’t even seen yet…”

Then he shut up as the game returned from commercial. He ate another chip and tried to enjoy how much melted cheese and jalapeno he was able to carry to his mouth with a thin flake of fried corn tortilla.

Wally wasn’t the glutton that some might take him for, seeing the all-you-can-eat buffet that’d been rehomed onto the coffee table.

First off, there was his metabolism. Wally was a speedster. All the calories that powered his body as it ran from coast to coast in minutes had to come from somewhere. And so, despite having the body of an Olympic athlete, Wally had an appetite worthy of a dozen mukbang videos.

Secondly, Wally hadn’t intended to eat every slice of pizza, every deep-fried slider, every minidonut and bottle of orange soda and Cheeto and chicken wing and fajita (and so on and so forth). He’d intended to feed the entire League, or at least everyone who wanted to enjoy a rousing game of football. But there’d been an emergency and they’d all had to give him a rain check. Everyone of them was needed to fight off the giant monster attack.

All but Wally.

It was no wonder the nachos didn’t taste particularly nacho-y.

Wally still tried to give the chips and dip another chance, just as he did his beloved Cougars, but even as he balanced a precarious pool of molten liquid cheese upon the surface of his chip—the teleporter came on.

Energy crackled and coruscated. Reality found itself challenged, the laws of physics bent, and the universe tried to reassert itself against this wild flight of fancy before being forced to admit once more that it was okay. Matter that had been 23,000 miles (and change) below now came apart into their constituent particles, moved through the intervening space in a matter of seconds, and was reassembled. The lightshow—something like fireworks if they turned to liquid instead of exploding—resolved into seven bodies.

Physical perfection that would make the athletes Wally was watching weep with envy. Colorful costumes that sent shockwaves through the fashion world at the slightest update. Capes. Masks. Gloves. Wings.

“Hey guys,” Wally said, raising a lazy hand to wave at them without taking his eyes off the screen. “How was the fight?”

His nonchalance was both warranted and unwarranted.

Warranted because he knew that, even without him, there was nothing the Justice League couldn’t handle. It wasn’t a matter of whether they would succeed, but how dominating of a victory it would be.

And unwarranted because he didn’t really want to look at his former colleagues. Battle-damaged from action he wasn’t able to participate in. Sweaty and sore from work he couldn’t do. Flush with excitement that was part of his past, not his present, and certainly not his future.

It was one thing to live vicariously through pro athletes. Everyone did that. But to pretend to be what he once had been?

Wally popped another cold one. “Pull up a seat. The game’s in overtime, we still have plenty of snacks.” He glanced at them. “Hawkgirl’s not even covered in alien blood, great, get in here!”

The Justice League exchanged glances.

There were two competing instincts when a human being gained superpowers.

A certain type of person put on a costume, thought up a cool name, and started robbing banks, getting back at old business partners they blamed for professional failures, trying to force their crushes to love them—that sort of thing. They were known as supervillains and they tended to spend more time in group showers than anyone who didn’t work at a gym should.

Then there was the type of person who got superpowers, put on a costume, thought up a cool name, then fought crime, saved people… dated pretty far out of their weight class too. That kind of person—the superhero—had another instinct they usually followed.

If enough of them met up, they realized they could get a lot more done as a unit than as a bunch of loners. So they thought up a cool team name, sometimes put on matching costumes, then fought crime and saved people even better than they had before.

Such was the case with the Justice League and such was the case with Wally West.

At least, it had been.

Now… sweaty, sore, and bedraggled the League was not of a mind to see a supposed teammate relaxing on the couch with half their pantry arrayed in front of him.

“I’ll talk to him,” Batman said. He was the closest to being a lone wolf while still technically part of the wolf pack and trusted himself to do hard things like put people out of their misery instead of letting them linger on like a TV show after most of the original cast had left.

“No,” Superman said. He was the least like a lone wolf, to the point that it was a bit surprising that he was the first superhero and hadn’t started to be one so he could hang out with all the others. “I’ll talk to him—I’ll be nice about it.”

“You’ll be too nice about it. Which has been the problem.”

“You’d throw him out an airlock. Which would be a whole new problem.”

“I wouldn’t throw him out an airlock.”

Superman looked at Bruce.

“I wouldn’t throw him out of an airlock without a spacesuit.”

Wonder Woman let them talk about who would talk to Wally while she went to talk to Wally. As she figured it, Batman and Superman weren’t happy unless they got to argue once a day. There was probably some parallel universe where Superman was evil and they got to fight all day and they were much happier there. Here, though, they both had to be friends.

Such was the price of heroism.