Title: You'll Understand When You're Older
Fandom: Young Justice (TV)
Characters/Pairing: Dick/Wally.
Rating: PGish
Word Count: 2913
Summary: Sometimes he missed the time before the team, before feelings or girls, when it was just the two of them. When he felt like he was Wally's entire world, and neither of them needed anyone else.

Author's Note: This fandom has devoured me; there is no return. Hence my first finished fic in four years. Be gentle.

Richard Grayson was eleven, the top of his class, and the darling of the tabloids. He had everything a boy his age could want. Except...

Being the ward of a billionaire attracted the wrong kind of attention, and tended to keep other acquaintances at a safe, awed distance. Which was all right in the end, he supposed, because as Batman had told him (over and over again) getting close meant getting attached meant danger.

But it would have been nice to have a friend.

Robin was eleven, two years younger than Kid Flash, and since the day they met that hadn't mattered because Robin had been fighting crime with Batman for two years and Kid Flash had only just gotten his foot in the door, in superhero terms. They laughed at the same corny jokes, and they were both into science and cheesy movies and video games, and Robin hadn't felt this comfortable around anyone since –

Since before Robin.

Dick remembered how it felt to fly without having to hide. He remembered the lights, and the crowds, and the applause, and the warm, close embrace of his parents, who loved him completely.

("We're so proud of you, Dick.")

What he wanted, and what he would never admit to wanting, was not to have to pretend.

"I know your name," Robin admitted, voice tight. Kid Flash was silent. Robin couldn't bear to look him in the eyes. He'd blown it; he knew it. This would never be okay again. "I mean – I looked it up. Looked you up. Batman has files. It was wrong, I know, and if I could take it back I would, but I just – I wanted–"

And then KF – Wally – did something he didn't expect. He laughed. Robin looked up, eyes wide under his mask, into a bright grin and eyes that seemed almost impossibly green. "You could've just asked."

"But..."

"I mean, we're friends, right?"

Robin's chest was impossibly light, suddenly, a grin breaking across his face. "Best one I've got."

Dick wondered whether all friendships were like this. One minute you hardly knew someone, and the next you were trading text messages at all hours of the day, calling each other to talk about the most trivial things like they were monumental events, and even looking forward to national crime sprees so you'd get a chance to hang out face-to-face. (Okay, so maybe that part wasn't exactly par for the course.)

He didn't trust easily – not since it was trained out of him, anyway, not for years. But he did trust Wally. Trusted him so deeply, in fact, that the implications frightened him a little. He knew what it was to lose everything, and he knew that caring could be a weapon. But where Bruce could wrap himself in his solitude like a cloak, feeling the loss of his parents as deeply now as he ever did, Dick couldn't bear the thought of years with only that as company. Whether that was a sign of weakness, he didn't know, but Wally, with his easy smile and corny jokes, had managed to slip into the cracks in Dick's life and fill them almost completely.

If things stayed like this forever, he thought, it would be all right.

Dick was twelve, which was right around the age, according to popular wisdom and several formally-worded pamphlets he'd found placed casually in strategic locations in his bedroom (real subtle, Alfie), where he was supposed to start noticing girls. (Well, noticing girls romantically, to be clear. Robin noticed just about everything. It was part of the job description.)

He guessed they were nice. It wasn't like he didn't like looking at them. And talking to them. It was just... when he tried to imagine taking a girl to a movie, or dinner, or a dance, or even just holding hands... he didn't really feel much of anything.

Dick was twelve, but he was also trained (and trained well) by the world's greatest detective, and it wasn't terribly difficult to figure out what his general lack of interest in girls might mean. Forced to entertain the possibility that he might be into guys, he again went down the list of standard date procedures, finding himself equally uninterested.

Well, maybe it was a phase.

Wally, on the other hand, had definitely started noticing girls. Which, aside from making Dick vaguely jealous of the two years his best friend had on him (a handicap that Dick would never be able to overcome no matter how he tried), was beginning to wear on their ability to carry on a conversation.

It wasn't a sudden thing – just a sort of simmering, low-grade irritation that built a little more every time Wally went on about his lab partner in chemistry. Whose name was Stacey, and who had blonde hair, and who was on the debate team, and whose hair smelled like strawberries even though it was the colorof peaches, and whose favorite movie was The Fast and the Furious, which Wally thought was some kind of predestined Wally-logic sign that they were meant to be, but which Dick was fairly sure meant he had free reign to question Wally's taste in girls. A lot.

"You'll understand when you're older," Wally grinned, quick fingers ruffling Dick's hair. Dick elbowed him in the ribs.

They both laughed, but Dick couldn't shake the feeling that Wally was outrunning him.

Dick was thirteen, and Wally was fifteen, and what Dick noticed more than any girl was Wally's fixation on them. His flirting was deafening. M'gann was – she was charming, and cute, and the shapeshifting thing was pretty awesome, and Robin knew they were lucky to have her on the team, but –

Sometimes he missed the time before the team, before feelings or girls, when it was just the two of them. When he felt like he was Wally's entire world, and neither of them needed anyone else.

Look at me.

I'm your best friend.

I've told you everything.

Doesn't that mean anything?

Isn't that enough?

What else do I have to do?

The worst part was knowing he was being jealous and irrational and an awful best friend, but that voice just wouldn't. Shut. Up.

"You'll understand when you're older."

And suddenly Wally had had his first kiss, and his first date, and his first girlfriend. And being his best friend, Dick got to hear all about it. At great length. And being the best best friend he knew how to be, he listened patiently to Wally going on and on and on about it, silently thanking whoever was listening for Batman's excellent training in the art of the poker face. Be patient. Nod at all the right times. Tease him relentlessly. Don't let on how much this bothers you.

It wasn't until later, when Dick was alone with nothing but his thoughts, that he allowed himself to carefully take apart his emotions and examine them, piece by piece, just like he'd look over any other complex, broken thing.

The solution, once he was searching for it instead of trying to ignore the problem, came with painfully surprising ease.

Check your work.

He checked, again, and there it was.

One more time. There could be another reason.

There wasn't.

You're jealous. You want him all to yourself. You want –

...You want to be her .

If he'd been trying to read anyone else, it would have been obvious. But he'd been too close, and too reluctant to take a step back and objectively look at himself. And now it was too late.

For the first time, Wally really had outrun him.

Jealousy was a terrible thing. Dick had seen firsthand what vices like that could do to a person, if they let them fester. They took hold of you, sunk sharp hooks in your heart and tugged you down a path you'd never go down on your own. So he chose not to dwell on it – not the way it ached, at least. And mostly, it worked. He had enough to be thankful for that he felt impossibly short-sighted focusing on just one thing. After all, he was a public servant. He lived in a mansion, he had the coolest job any teenager could ask for, and a best friend who'd do pretty close to anything for him.

It was selfish to want more.

So Dick was trying to forget. The wanting, though, proved harder to stop than the hurting. Not that there hadn't been others that had caught his eye here and there – which was a relief, when it had happened. He'd grown and changed, and with it came the strange, giddy effect that a nice smile and a sharp sense of humor could have on him. He might have even loved one of them, in a different place, under different circumstances.

Except Wally was omnipresent. Anyone he'd date would eventually have to meet his best friend – and that was the problem. No one else measured up – he knew that as certainly as he'd ever known anything – and Dick couldn't help but feel immense guilt at the inherent unfairness of setting another person up for that. Or using them as a distraction.

He knew how it felt when you couldn't have all of someone.

Dick was fourteen, and Wally was sixteen, and Dick was still consistently wishing that he could go back to being blissfully ignorant of his stupid feelings for his stupid best friend, who was stupidly moping about being stupidly single on the stupid couch.

"Why can't you be a girl?" Wally moped, sprawled across the entirety of the sofa. He couldn't have looked more despondent if he tried.

Dick, perched casually on the arm of the couch, wasn't quite sure where to begin answering that question, so he settled for another question: "What?"

"Seriously, dude, if you were a girl? I would totally go out with you. I mean, you get me! Pizza and arcade games. Perfect date, right?"

Something uncomfortable crawled around the inside of Dick's stomach. He laughed. "Right. If I was a girl, you'd be too busy flirting to treat me like a normal person." Which is kind of the whole reason I actually like you.

"Yeah, you're the poster boy for normalcy," Wally said with a dramatic eyeroll. Dick wanted to kiss his stupid face. He settled for throwing a handful of popcorn, and Wally tackled him off the couch, laughing for the first time all day.

A year passed, and another, and Dick still felt ridiculous each time his best friend's laugh would send his heart doing cartwheels. Kicked himself, mentally, every time his eyes would linger on Wally's legs, or the way the muscles of his shoulders moved under skintight fabric. Fought off the urge to run fingers through his sweat-damp hair after a mission, or touch his cheeks flushed dark enough to hide his freckles. It never got easier.

So Dick held his fist out to Wally after each successful mission, and grinned as bright as ever at the tap of his knuckles. Let Wally sling an arm around his shoulders as they walked together. Leaned in close enough on movie nights that their shoulders touched, warm and solid.

This is enough, he thought, and sometimes it was almost true.

"One minute to detonation," the tinny intercom voice informed them.

"This is the stupidest thing we've done," said Wally in a voice that trembled – Dick tried not to wonder from what? – "in a really long history of really stupid things."

"Do you regret it?" Dick's throat was tight, his chest aching. "Any of it?"

Wally grinned wide past a bleeding lip, goggles pulled down over his face. "Not for a second. You?"

Dick thought about all the things they'd done together, all the years he'd known his best friend, and could only come up with one thing he could honestly call a regret.

"I won't."

He grabbed a fistful of the front of Wally's costume, and pulled him in. The angle was bad – poor planning. Their mouths crashed together; Wally's teeth hit his lip, and he tasted blood; he swallowed a sound that one of them made, and slid gloved fingers roughly into Wally's hair. It was very possibly the least graceful thing he'd ever done, which included falling off a three story building, and his heart was racing even faster than it had then.

This isn't such a bad way to go, he thought.

And naturally, that was the moment when Superman burst through the wall.

Wally was rushed to medical, and Dick to debriefing. He was perfectly Robin, all steely nerves and business as he went over the details of their mission. Wally was fine, they informed Dick (though he hadn't asked aloud), and would be good to go in half an hour.

Dick was gone long before then.

It was overcast and miserable when Wally finally tracked him down on the roof of a Gotham skyscraper. He heard his blurring footsteps in the puddles from behind him, but didn't turn. He'd nearly died a thousand times, but this was the first time since he'd become Robin that he was truly, honestly terrified of losing everything. "Kind of on a stakeout here," Dick lied, watching the street below.

"No you're not," Wally retorted. "You're sulking."

This was stupid. So, so stupid. "I'm not sulking."

"You are. You don't kiss and run, dude. Not cool." Suddenly, a warm hand on his shoulder. Dick's gut flipped, and he felt heat rise in his cheeks despite the chill. Then he turned.

Wally looked worried, more than anything, which was somehow not at all what he'd expected. "Look," Wally said, running a hand through his hair, his discomfort evident, "if it was bad, or whatever..."

And then Dick laughed, because what could he even say to that?

Wally frowned, his mouth forming a tight line. "It's not that funny."

"No," Dick replied, shaking his head. "It kinda is."

The exasperation was beginning to show on Wally's face. "Look, I'm not fluent in Bat, so if you wanna enlighten me..."

Dick sighed; pinched the bridge of his nose. He was cornered, and it was his own fault. A litany of explanations ran through his head, none terribly convincing, but all acceptable enough that they'd end this here. He could even just blame it on the adrenaline. But that would mean lying to Wally. Really lying to him, about something important. Not an option.

Well then.

Time to face the music.

"You said no regrets." Dick forced himself to look Wally in the eye as he said it. He owed him that much, at least. "Well... there you go."

And it sounded so simple, put that way. It was almost a relief to actually address it, except for how it felt like his heart was about to jackhammer right out of his chest.

Wally glanced at the ground, then back up to Dick. "So... do you? Regret it, I mean."

"I don't know," he replied, honestly. And he'd meant to leave it there, but somewhere, a dam had burst, and five years of words were spilling from him. "I've wanted to for a while, but – the time wasn't right, and you've always liked girls so much, and... so I ran. 'Cause I needed time, and I wanted to clear my head, and... I guess because I was terrified." He laughed once, quietly.

Wally's brows knit. "Of what?"

"Of messing up the last five years. Of chasing you off. Of ruining this – just 'cause I couldn't deal with my feelings." He shook his head, grinning ruefully. "But I promise, Wally, it was the complete opposite of bad." And there it was, out in the open. Not everything, but a crack – a window into years' worth of things unsaid. Dick felt thirteen all over again, small in the shadow of this thing between them. How did anyone do this?

"Oh," Wally said at last, uncharacteristically soft. "So... you like me."

Of course he would be that blunt about it. And it was so perfectly Wally that he couldn't help but smile. "That," Dick said, "would be an understatement."

Wally nodded, taking in this new piece of information. "Okay," he said with finality, and added: "Then, is it cool if I kiss you?"

Dick had had a lot of fantasies over the last three years. Somehow, this one was new.

"Uh. Yeah," Dick replied, after what felt like far too long. "Yeah, it's cool."

"Cool," said Wally, lips quirking into a kind of awed smile, and then Dick didn't care that the word was rapidly losing all real meaning, because suddenly Wally's hand was warm against his cheek and Wally's lips were pressed against his, soft and perfect even though they were chapped, and no one was dying, and Wally wasn't running, and they had all the time in the world. He lifted his hand to the nape of Wally's neck, and realized for the first time how close it was. Dick had gotten taller. He'd never noticed before.

"How long?" Wally asked, the words a hum against his own lips, like Wally didn't want to pull away even to speak, like he'd read Dick's thoughts – and god, how long had it been? When had he first let Wally take up this much room in his life? Was there really a time when he hadn't loved him, at least a little?

"A while," Dick laughed, and kissed Wally again.