Kid Flash
Jan 4th, 2018, 04:21:15 PM
So. Gotham City.
It was that awkward time between mid Octobeer and late October, where you weren't quite sure which of the two terms you were supposed to use. Did you go by thirds, treating early, mid, and late as equal segments of a month - ish, February and the knuckle months not withstanding - meaning that late October started on the 20th? Or was it the 21st, like the whole there's no zero so each section starts when there's a 1 thing people got pedantic about with centuries and millenniums and stuff? Or was there moer wiggle room than that, like with ages, where people described themselves in their mid-twenties for as long as possible so that they didn't have to admit to being nearly thirty and officially becoming an actual old person? Wally wasn't entirely sure, and despite extensive research he hadn't managed to find any consensus on the matter. In fact, all he'd managed to do was stumble across a video on Youtube with some YA author asking a similar question about when you got to start using the term turn of the century, and that had pretty much ruined the rest of his research session getting irate about the injustice of pennies and oddly invested in the exploits of an obscure soccer team from England.
Regardless, it was the 22nd, and that felt like it should be late October, but Wally couldn't be entirely sure. It also felt cold as balls, because the ugly canyons of Gotham's streets spent most of their day blocking sunlight from actually reaching the ground. It had been great during the summer, when the walls of architecture had helped keep the sidewalks tolerably cool, but now Gotham had reached that miserable point where it was too cool for summer jackets, but not cold enough to fully bundle up and get your scarf on. That especially sucked, because the Brentwood uniforms were just crying out for winter to roll around, so he could show a little 'puff pride and treat every day like some kind of Hogwarts cosplay flash mob scenario.
Heh, Wally thought to himself, as a pair of crimson-gloved hands pounded a quick staccato beat into the stomach of Mugger Number Three. Flash mob.
Not that Wally was in a position to be scarfed up right now, of course. Secret identities were of paramount importance when you were a vigilante metahuman intent on hiding your true nature for the benefit of those you cared about, and advertising your House affiliations could, to the right person, be too much of an insight into the man beneath the scarlet mask. Sure, the costume hid enough that he could be any of the probably thousands of young men of his height and build in Gotham City; but think about it. Red suit, constant heroics - probably Gryffindor, right? He was certainly rocking the colours for it, and that was an important decoy. No one ever suspected the Hufflepuff. At first Wally had been gutted when the internet insisted on that allocation for him, but now it was a point of pride. Just, loyal, patient, and true? That was some genuine hero shit right there; not to mention grade A boyfriend material.
Number One scored a lucky hit with a baseball bat, slamming across Wally's back and shoulder. He spun in an instant, one hand snaring the blunt instrument as it drew back for another strike, the other delivering a rapid speed-punch that shattered the bat at a perfect stress point to snap it effortlessly in two. "Come on," he grunted, a quick elbow to the bridge of Number One's nose - Mugger Number One, obviously; not Commander Riker, or Majel Barrett's character from TOS, or anything like that - and a blow to the knee sending the lowlife clattering to the ground almost in sync with the sundered half of the bat's own landing on the ground. "I don't have time for this."
He didn't have time for this, that was true. Partly, it was because the sky was threatening rain, and while things hadn't got truly torrential here in Gotham yet, even the lightest flutter of precipitation seemed to coat the ground with a greasy film that persisted for approximately seventy-three million years, making the city's streets both a trecherous and dismal place to speed around. The sheen had definitely started to come off this whole move to Gotham business, and while there were parts of it that were still pretty damn fantastic, there were other parts that were doing that whole... what even was the word? It was like disappointment, but not. An anticlimax. That feeling you got when you checked out a movie or a show you loved as a kid and realised that it was absolute crap, and then went into a downward spiral of wondering if this was what aging was all about, and if you'd spend the rest of your life with everything you once loved slowly disappointing you one by one.
Wally ducked under a knife being aggressively swung by the second mugger, whose spur of the moment designation in Wally's mind - Number Two - was starting to make it a little tricky to take this whole mugging intervention seriously. Wally responded with a move Black Canary had taught him one time, grabbing and twisting the guy's arm in just the right way for his hand to spasm open and release the knife, Wally's reflexes snatching it from the air and hurling it - with a little Speed Force acceleration for good measure - into a not-Excalibur-because-that's-the-one-from-the-lake style resting place embedded in one of the bricks of the alley wall. A swift glancing blow to the soft and sensitives felled the second assailant, and dumped - heh - Number Two unceremoniously on the ground.
Number Three was still standing, and Wally didn't have time for him either. He had an appointment, sort of. Well, lunch date. Not a date date, obviously - the person it was with was married, old, and his Aunt - but still, it was important, y'know? It wasn't every day that Iris West-Allen showed up in Gotham and invited you out to lunch, and for Wally the novelty of being her favourite - and only - nephew still hadn't worn off; it refreshed even, every time she or Uncle Barry made that same lame but still heartwarming joke. He'd been on his way, dressed in the kind of outfit that walked the tightrope between smart and casual that the internet told him was probably appropriate for this kind of situation and the class of cafe where Aunt Iris had asked to meet - somewhere in one of the nicer, more businessy parts of Gotham, rather than the more grubby and down market venues Wally's allowance was able to stretch to - and he'd just been minding his own business, walking to save the environment and all that, when he'd heard sounds of a scuffle coming from one of Gotham's plethora of dubious alleys.
"An alley? Seriously?"
In the few seconds that it had taken Wally to dispatch - or at least, temporarily incapacitate - One and Two, Three had apparently taken the opportunity to collect himself, and was standing there in a ready stance, hands in that half way open version of fists that probably meant he was used to training in boxing gloves or something. He certainly looked as if he thought he was capable of holding his own, and so Wally let his mouth continue on, letting Three enjoy that misconception a few moments longer.
"Isn't that a little cliché?"
Three sneered. Sneered. Talk about cliché. His voice added to the ensemble, incapable of sounding any more New Jersey if he'd tried. "Cut the chat, Flash Boy, and let's -"
That was as far as Three managed to get. In the blink of an eye and a brief crackle of lighting, Wally was ten feet beyond Three, and the mugger was on the ground, head lolled to the side, knocked unconscious by the force of a high speed fist to the jaw.
'It's Kid Flash, jackass," Wally muttered, surveying the fallen criminals that scattered the alley floor. He didn't have time for this.
Something clattered, a sound of glass rolling against concrete, or whatever it was the floors of alleys were made of, underneath the thick layer of Gotham grime that coated them. Wally turned and stooped, catching the errant bottle before it escaped too far. A pair of slow steps brought him towards it's point of origin, and he dropped into a crouch, face adjusting into a warm and reassuring smile beneath his mask as he handed the bottle back to the mugger's victim. She was barely his age, out doing a Sunday afternoon run to the store as a favour to her parents, from the look of things. To her credit, or maybe thanks to the speed of Wally''s intervention, she'd managed to stay clutching white-knuckled onto her purse, but the groceries she'd been carrying were slowly beginning to escape from the toppled bags. Wally kept his voice gentle, as soothing as he could manage.
"You live close by?"
All she managed to do was nod. Wally didn't push for anything more than that. Carefully, he extracted one of the bags she'd still managed to cling to from her grip, and at normal speed - she'd dealt with more than enough suddenness and chaos for one day - rounded up the few items that had gone rogue. One of the muggers stirred, and received a kick to the side of the head for his troubles. Wally hadn't had time for this, for them, for the mugging, for Gotham being a wreched hive of scum and villainy, and all of that business; but as he returned to their victim, offering a hand to ease her gently back to her feet, he knew that this he did have time for - and if not, he'd make it.
Wally liberated her of the rest of her grocery bags. Arms freed of their cargo, she took advantage of the opportunity to cling on to Wally's super-suited arm: not gratitude, or affection, but fear; a desire to stay close to her sudden protector and stop him from escaping before she was safe. Wally didn't resist. "Come on," he said, beginning their slow journey in the direction he Sherlocked that she must have been walking before he arrived, "Lets get you home."
Sorry, Aunt Iris, Wally added to himself, as if somehow his thoughts would be converted into an SMS and beamed to his lunch date's cell phone. I'm going to be late again.
It was that awkward time between mid Octobeer and late October, where you weren't quite sure which of the two terms you were supposed to use. Did you go by thirds, treating early, mid, and late as equal segments of a month - ish, February and the knuckle months not withstanding - meaning that late October started on the 20th? Or was it the 21st, like the whole there's no zero so each section starts when there's a 1 thing people got pedantic about with centuries and millenniums and stuff? Or was there moer wiggle room than that, like with ages, where people described themselves in their mid-twenties for as long as possible so that they didn't have to admit to being nearly thirty and officially becoming an actual old person? Wally wasn't entirely sure, and despite extensive research he hadn't managed to find any consensus on the matter. In fact, all he'd managed to do was stumble across a video on Youtube with some YA author asking a similar question about when you got to start using the term turn of the century, and that had pretty much ruined the rest of his research session getting irate about the injustice of pennies and oddly invested in the exploits of an obscure soccer team from England.
Regardless, it was the 22nd, and that felt like it should be late October, but Wally couldn't be entirely sure. It also felt cold as balls, because the ugly canyons of Gotham's streets spent most of their day blocking sunlight from actually reaching the ground. It had been great during the summer, when the walls of architecture had helped keep the sidewalks tolerably cool, but now Gotham had reached that miserable point where it was too cool for summer jackets, but not cold enough to fully bundle up and get your scarf on. That especially sucked, because the Brentwood uniforms were just crying out for winter to roll around, so he could show a little 'puff pride and treat every day like some kind of Hogwarts cosplay flash mob scenario.
Heh, Wally thought to himself, as a pair of crimson-gloved hands pounded a quick staccato beat into the stomach of Mugger Number Three. Flash mob.
Not that Wally was in a position to be scarfed up right now, of course. Secret identities were of paramount importance when you were a vigilante metahuman intent on hiding your true nature for the benefit of those you cared about, and advertising your House affiliations could, to the right person, be too much of an insight into the man beneath the scarlet mask. Sure, the costume hid enough that he could be any of the probably thousands of young men of his height and build in Gotham City; but think about it. Red suit, constant heroics - probably Gryffindor, right? He was certainly rocking the colours for it, and that was an important decoy. No one ever suspected the Hufflepuff. At first Wally had been gutted when the internet insisted on that allocation for him, but now it was a point of pride. Just, loyal, patient, and true? That was some genuine hero shit right there; not to mention grade A boyfriend material.
Number One scored a lucky hit with a baseball bat, slamming across Wally's back and shoulder. He spun in an instant, one hand snaring the blunt instrument as it drew back for another strike, the other delivering a rapid speed-punch that shattered the bat at a perfect stress point to snap it effortlessly in two. "Come on," he grunted, a quick elbow to the bridge of Number One's nose - Mugger Number One, obviously; not Commander Riker, or Majel Barrett's character from TOS, or anything like that - and a blow to the knee sending the lowlife clattering to the ground almost in sync with the sundered half of the bat's own landing on the ground. "I don't have time for this."
He didn't have time for this, that was true. Partly, it was because the sky was threatening rain, and while things hadn't got truly torrential here in Gotham yet, even the lightest flutter of precipitation seemed to coat the ground with a greasy film that persisted for approximately seventy-three million years, making the city's streets both a trecherous and dismal place to speed around. The sheen had definitely started to come off this whole move to Gotham business, and while there were parts of it that were still pretty damn fantastic, there were other parts that were doing that whole... what even was the word? It was like disappointment, but not. An anticlimax. That feeling you got when you checked out a movie or a show you loved as a kid and realised that it was absolute crap, and then went into a downward spiral of wondering if this was what aging was all about, and if you'd spend the rest of your life with everything you once loved slowly disappointing you one by one.
Wally ducked under a knife being aggressively swung by the second mugger, whose spur of the moment designation in Wally's mind - Number Two - was starting to make it a little tricky to take this whole mugging intervention seriously. Wally responded with a move Black Canary had taught him one time, grabbing and twisting the guy's arm in just the right way for his hand to spasm open and release the knife, Wally's reflexes snatching it from the air and hurling it - with a little Speed Force acceleration for good measure - into a not-Excalibur-because-that's-the-one-from-the-lake style resting place embedded in one of the bricks of the alley wall. A swift glancing blow to the soft and sensitives felled the second assailant, and dumped - heh - Number Two unceremoniously on the ground.
Number Three was still standing, and Wally didn't have time for him either. He had an appointment, sort of. Well, lunch date. Not a date date, obviously - the person it was with was married, old, and his Aunt - but still, it was important, y'know? It wasn't every day that Iris West-Allen showed up in Gotham and invited you out to lunch, and for Wally the novelty of being her favourite - and only - nephew still hadn't worn off; it refreshed even, every time she or Uncle Barry made that same lame but still heartwarming joke. He'd been on his way, dressed in the kind of outfit that walked the tightrope between smart and casual that the internet told him was probably appropriate for this kind of situation and the class of cafe where Aunt Iris had asked to meet - somewhere in one of the nicer, more businessy parts of Gotham, rather than the more grubby and down market venues Wally's allowance was able to stretch to - and he'd just been minding his own business, walking to save the environment and all that, when he'd heard sounds of a scuffle coming from one of Gotham's plethora of dubious alleys.
"An alley? Seriously?"
In the few seconds that it had taken Wally to dispatch - or at least, temporarily incapacitate - One and Two, Three had apparently taken the opportunity to collect himself, and was standing there in a ready stance, hands in that half way open version of fists that probably meant he was used to training in boxing gloves or something. He certainly looked as if he thought he was capable of holding his own, and so Wally let his mouth continue on, letting Three enjoy that misconception a few moments longer.
"Isn't that a little cliché?"
Three sneered. Sneered. Talk about cliché. His voice added to the ensemble, incapable of sounding any more New Jersey if he'd tried. "Cut the chat, Flash Boy, and let's -"
That was as far as Three managed to get. In the blink of an eye and a brief crackle of lighting, Wally was ten feet beyond Three, and the mugger was on the ground, head lolled to the side, knocked unconscious by the force of a high speed fist to the jaw.
'It's Kid Flash, jackass," Wally muttered, surveying the fallen criminals that scattered the alley floor. He didn't have time for this.
Something clattered, a sound of glass rolling against concrete, or whatever it was the floors of alleys were made of, underneath the thick layer of Gotham grime that coated them. Wally turned and stooped, catching the errant bottle before it escaped too far. A pair of slow steps brought him towards it's point of origin, and he dropped into a crouch, face adjusting into a warm and reassuring smile beneath his mask as he handed the bottle back to the mugger's victim. She was barely his age, out doing a Sunday afternoon run to the store as a favour to her parents, from the look of things. To her credit, or maybe thanks to the speed of Wally''s intervention, she'd managed to stay clutching white-knuckled onto her purse, but the groceries she'd been carrying were slowly beginning to escape from the toppled bags. Wally kept his voice gentle, as soothing as he could manage.
"You live close by?"
All she managed to do was nod. Wally didn't push for anything more than that. Carefully, he extracted one of the bags she'd still managed to cling to from her grip, and at normal speed - she'd dealt with more than enough suddenness and chaos for one day - rounded up the few items that had gone rogue. One of the muggers stirred, and received a kick to the side of the head for his troubles. Wally hadn't had time for this, for them, for the mugging, for Gotham being a wreched hive of scum and villainy, and all of that business; but as he returned to their victim, offering a hand to ease her gently back to her feet, he knew that this he did have time for - and if not, he'd make it.
Wally liberated her of the rest of her grocery bags. Arms freed of their cargo, she took advantage of the opportunity to cling on to Wally's super-suited arm: not gratitude, or affection, but fear; a desire to stay close to her sudden protector and stop him from escaping before she was safe. Wally didn't resist. "Come on," he said, beginning their slow journey in the direction he Sherlocked that she must have been walking before he arrived, "Lets get you home."
Sorry, Aunt Iris, Wally added to himself, as if somehow his thoughts would be converted into an SMS and beamed to his lunch date's cell phone. I'm going to be late again.