"when the lights go down in the middle of the night, where will i run to?"

~ pentatonix, on my way home

"He's not dead, Babs."

Her hand was gentle as it rested on his shoulder, and he felt the urge to throw it off, to tell her that he didn't need her pity. "I know this is hard," she began. "I know, Wally was my friend too. But you have to-"

"He's alive! I know it. I can feel it. There was no body, and so there's no proof of anything. He's not dead, he's just missing. And I'm going to find him."

Dick could be as stubborn as his ex-mentor sometimes, and Barbara knew this. She lingered in the doorway, blue eyes flitting around the apartment that he and Wally had shared together as she let out a soft sigh. "Dick, listen," there was an undertone of pain mingling with her voice. "Just don't...don't lose yourself trying to find him." Then she was gone, and he was left alone in a home made for two.

She didn't understand. He already had.

A long time ago, when his skin still stung from the cold of the Arctic and his brain was still muddled with shock, Bruce had told him that time healed all wounds.

But Dick was not so naïve as to think that this was something that could be fixed.

And four months, six days, and thirteen hours later, as he watched the flame of the candle flicker in the darkness, the loss still kept him up at night, still, even on the best of days, left him wondering what might have been.

Wally would've turned twenty-one today. He imagined Hal and Barry taking them both out to a bar—never mind the fact that Dick was only eighteen and technically still underage; even heroes had to bend the rules on the occasion. Wally and Barry would've destroyed every brave soul in the building at any drinking game, thanks to their insanely high metabolisms, and Wally and Dick would've finally gotten to join in Hal's regular game of seeing how much it would take to get a speedster drunk.

Or maybe...

He'd found the ring only weeks after he had disappeared, in Wally's desk drawer in the room they used to share. Maybe, if the Reach had never invaded, if he hadn't...maybe they'd be planning their wedding right now, trying to decide which tablecloths looked the best or sampling cake flavors—

Dick pushed the thoughts out of his head. They would do all of that. He was going to get his boyfriend back, and they were going to have the best wedding in the world. No matter what it took.

His speedster would come back to him.

"Happy birthday, Wally," he said quietly, blowing out the candle, and wishing for the only thing in the entire world that mattered to him right now.

There was a knock at the door.

Dick opened it to see Artemis, tear tracks glinting on her cheeks. She looked up at him from under her lashes, and he knew exactly what she was feeling.

And so neither of them needed to say anything. She just sort of tumbled into his arms and they sunk onto the floor together, finding comfort in each others' grasp. They stayed like that for a little while, letting tears soak through their shirts and feeling his absence with so much clarity that it physically hurt.

"We'll get him back, Artemis," he mumbled into her hair, trying, as hard as he could, to keep his voice from breaking. "We'll find him."

Another dead end.

Another fucking dead end.

Another lead he'd spent sleepless nights chasing down, only to run him straight into another wall.

It was like the universe was taunting him. Six months of dangling inklings of possibilities in front of his nose only to have them pan out into nothing. And every time, he felt his hope chip away.

He hated playing this sick game.

Papers flew across the room and fluttered onto the floor as he shoved the contents of his desk aside. It did nothing to ease the pain in his chest, just like training and fighting crime and breaking everything he could get his hands on did nothing to fill the gaping hole his boyfriend had left inside of him. Dinah, Bruce, J'onn, they all kept telling him to channel his anger, use his grief like a tool, like a weapon.

"Maybe I'm just not as good at letting people go as you are," Dick had snapped at his ex-mentor. He knew in his heart this wasn't true. He'd seen, firsthand, what Jason's death had done to Bruce. And he knew that none of this was easy, for any of them, because Bruce had watched Wally grow up, had watched Wally coax his ward out of his shell and become a constant in their lives, had watched Wally spread light everywhere he went.

And he knew, in his heart, that Bruce felt his absence too.

It was hard not to.

He just...he wished that there would be some kind of sign. Something to tell him that this wasn't all for nothing, that Wally was still out there.

He needed to believe it.

But after everything, he wasn't sure how.

There was a hum of electricity in his empty room.

Dick heard it, like buzzing in his ears, his gaze lifting from the file of Red Hood on his desk and flitting around the room. There was nothing there.

He shook his head, screwing his eyes shut and rubbing his temple. He was imagining things. His brain was trying to trick him into thinking he could feel Wally, that his speedster was here when he knew...when he knew he was gone.

Frustrated with the despair of loss in his chest, with the feeling of utter hopelessness that had slowly become all-consuming, Dick bit his lip and curled his hands into fists, trying to remind himself how to move the hell on.

And then the lights flickered.

"Dick."

They say that the first thing you forget about a person is their voice. But almost ten years of being best friends and later boyfriends outmatched the year and a half they'd been apart, and Dick would know that voice anywhere.

He opened his eyes, and there he was, in all his red-haired, cheeky-grinned glory, lightning flickering around him.

Dick caught his breath, standing up so quickly that he knocked his chair over.

"You're not real," was the first thing he heard himself say.

The ends of Wally's smile dropped. "Dick, it's me-'m alive, I'm okay."

His voice was filled with static, as though it was coming from the other end of a radio with poor connection.

But it didn't matter. None of it mattered. Because suddenly, somehow, Dick knew...he knew that this was no figment of his imagination, no poor copy. This was Wally. He was alive. He was here.

It was Wally.

"Walls," he breathed, half choking on the sob that rose in his throat. "It's really...is it really you?"

Wally nodded, outstretching his arm, and then his form...literally flickered, blinked out of existence for a fraction of a second, as though he was a hologram. The speedster looked down at his hands. "I don't-much time. I'm trapped-I think-speed-ce. I've been running-thing's chasing me-I-get faster-trying to-back."

Dick swallowed a cry when Wally disappeared for a moment too long, relief swelling within him when the yellow and red came back into his vision. "I don't understand, where are you? What's chasing you?"

"-'s complicated. Really complicated. But lis-fine, okay? Don't gi-on me. I'm on my way home."

"Wally, please...just come back to me," he begged.

"You kn-always will. I love you, Dick Grayson." The final words were clear as day, and Dick felt something inside himself shatter and become whole again, all at the same time.

"Don't leave!" Dick started to shout, but the words died in his throat as Wally's body flickered out one last time, extinguished like a light bulb and leaving Dick in the darkness again.

But he was alive.

Hope renewed with fresh vigor, he picked his phone up in a frantic sort of desperation and clicked on the only person he thought might know what to do.

"Barry? No, it's important. It...it's about Wally."

The speed force. That was the explanation that Barry gave him. That was where Wally was.

In Roy's words, "What the hell does that mean?"

Even after everything, Barry was patient. "The speed force," he began, "is a sort of...extra-dimensional energy that gives us, that is, speedsters, our powers. Me, Wally, Bart, Jay, we all tap into it when we run."

"And Wally's, what, inside the energy?" Dick pried incredulously.

"It's more like...he's sort of, merged with it," Barry explained. Then he hesitated. "Did he ever tell you why he left the team?"

It was a sore subject for Dick. Not having Wally by his side on the field was a feeling he'd never quite gotten used to. "He said...he wanted a normal life," Dick said blankly.

Barry lifted an eyebrow. "The kid who almost killed himself trying to get superpowers? No, that's never what he wanted."

Some small part of Dick had always known there was another reason. In all the time he had known Wally, the speedster had never been one to walk away from anything, especially not the job. He'd tried confronting this, but Wally had dodged the subject like bullets and eventually, Dick had stopped pressing. But obviously, he'd missed part of the story.

"So why did he leave?" Roy asked, sounding as confused and conflicted as Dick felt.

The older speedster's expression clouded over for a moment as he sighed wearily. "Do you remember when Wally was eighteen, when he was in the STAR Labs hospital for a while?"

They both nodded. It had been after a mission, one where Wally had broken his record speed running a bomb out of the city. He had seemed fine, and they'd celebrated, but when they'd gotten back to the cave, Jason had found him collapsed outside of his room.

Barry had taken him to STAR Labs, and they'd said little about the incident, only that Wally had to be careful of how he used his speed after that.

Case closed.

But, apparently, not really.

"You see, he got his powers when he was a lot younger than Jay and I, and he did his best to recreate the experiment that gave me mine, but it wasn't perfect. So his connection to the speed force manifested differently. After that day, he started having trouble using his speed. It wasn't that he couldn't, it was more that whenever he ran too fast, this thing happened...he called it 'hitting the wall'."

"Hitting the wall," Roy repeated slowly. "What does that mean?"

"His powers were killing him, Roy," Barry said with a soft exhale.

Understanding rushed through Dick. "That's why he left. That's why he had to," he realized.

Barry nodded, and a crease formed between Roy's eyebrows. "So why didn't he go when he first found out about it?" the archer demanded.

"He thought...he thought he could handle it. So did I, until it got worse. We were on a mission together in San Bernardino when he saved a civilian from a bullet...he was running so fast and then all of a sudden it was like his whole body was fritzing out. He almost disappeared, almost merged with the speed force right there. Even when he came back, his heart was going fast enough that it could've burst. That's why he left the job, because he was dying. Not because he wanted to."

Dick sucked in a shuddering breath, sinking into the nearest chair with his head in his hands. The thought that Wally had kept something as big as this from them, from him, the thought that after everything they'd been through together, there were still secrets between them...

He didn't realize how much his shoulders were shaking until Barry placed a gentle hand on them.

"At this rate, you'll phase through the floor," the speedster joked, with a sad half-smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Dick, he wanted to tell you."

"Then why didn't he?" he demanded, trying desperately to keep his voice from breaking.

Barry ran his fingers through his blonde hair with all the weariness of a man much older than he was. "He was afraid that you'd worry too much, and that if he needed to be in the field, he wouldn't be able to help," he said, voice soft.

Dick felt something snap inside of him, maybe something that had been threatening to break for a very long time or maybe something that already had. "Damn right he wouldn't! Because he could've died! And now he's been gone for over a year—how could you let him do this?" Dick yelled, very suddenly on his feet with his nose inches from Barry's. "How could you let him disappear?"

He watched the muscle in the speedster's jaw tighten, watched as lightning, and then tears filled blue eyes. "Don't," Barry said, his voice harsher than Dick had ever heard it before. "Don't you dare tell me that this is my fault. You don't get to do that. Wally was like my son, Dick! I know you loved him, but so did I! You don't even...did you ever stop to think that maybe you aren't the only person who lost him?"

Dick faltered. "Barry, I..."

"I loved him too. I lost him too." There was a noise like a broken sob and a flash of gold lightning, and then the speedster was gone.

Dick remembered this place, this soft meadow surrounded by trees. It was beautiful here, and quiet, and they'd come here so many times, spending hours weaving crowns out of daisies or climbing to the tallest branches of the trees or just talking forever about anything and everything.

Wally's eyes were as bright as the grass that the two of them stretched out in, his laugh as clear as the blue sky overhead.

Dick turned his head to look at his boyfriend, who gave him a toothy grin, his chest still shaking as he chuckled at some long-forgotten joke.

"I love you," Dick mumbled around his own smile, and Wally nudged his head into the dark-haired boy's shoulder.

"Love you more, Dickie bird."

Dick decided they could've stayed there forever, watching clouds drift by and letting the summer breeze brush their cheeks. They could've stayed their forever, together, with Wally next to him and their arms around each other, in love like the young hearts they were.

He laced his fingers through his speedsters', feeling the cold metal of their wedding rings touch each other.

He'd do anything to make this last.

But he woke up alone in their bed, tears staining the pillow and his heart longing for a hand he hadn't held in a long, long time.

"Barry," Dick said quietly, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket as he scuffed the toes of his sneakers against the floor. "Barry, I-I'm-"

But the older man shook his head. "I understand, Dick. It's alright." And then, in a voice so quiet that Dick barely caught it, "You were right, anyway."

Dick's gaze shifted up from the floor to rest at Barry. He noticed, not for the first time and likely not for the last, the red rims around his normally bright blue eyes, the weariness that had settled into his expression. "It wasn't your fault, Bar. It wasn't anyone's fault but the Reach."

"I shouldn't have let him go. I knew it was dangerous, I knew what could happen...and I let him come anyway." Barry dropped into a chair, running his hands through his blonde hair, looking for all the world like years of outrunning time had caught up to him. "If I had just told him to stay away, maybe...he'd be here right now."

Dick knelt down in front of the speedster. "And the world would've been destroyed. What you and Wally and Bart did saved humanity...and without him, you might not have been able to. Besides, you know Wally never would've forgiven you if you'd kept him from helping."

Barry's whole body trembled. "But how..." his voice broke. "How am I supposed to forgive myself?"

In the last year and a half, Dick had spent a lot of time crying on others' shoulders, but right now he just wrapped his arms around Barry, holding the shaking speedster as he crumbled.

"This better work."

Dick could hear the worry edging Roy's voice, poorly masked by a ruse of impatience. He knew the archer would go to the ends of the Earth for Wally, knew that not being able to do anything was killing him; years of Roy adopting the role of their pseudo-older brother had taught him that. Roy's affection and protective streak for them had very few boundaries.

He remembered one particular incident, when Wally had been fourteen and placed in an advanced science class full of mostly upperclassmen. He'd been pushed around a lot; he was a seemingly easy target, with his freckles and his flaming hair and his understanding of everything short of rocket science. When Roy found out, he'd made a personal visit to Keystone High—Dick remembered Wally telling him that the bullies never laid a finger on him after that.

As the three original sidekicks, Wally, Dick, and Roy's bond ran a lot deeper than best friends, and Dick could tell by the tension in Roy's shoulders, by the soft clench of his jaw, that he was scared.

Hell, they all were.

Dick had kept his hope for so long. It had been lost, briefly, but like always, Wally had reminded him of everything he was searching for.

And now they were here, in STAR Labs, waiting to activate a beacon into the speed force, to give Wally a signal of where to go. With no notion of whether it would work, but with their hope and their longing and their faith in their speedster.

Slim fingers laced themselves through his, and Artemis was looking at him, her dark grey eyes filled with a desperate need for belief. "What if..." her voice was quiet, full of fear like he hadn't heard since that day in the Arctic. "What if we get him back and...it's not him?"

It was something Dick had considered before; they didn't know what had happened to him in the past two years and they didn't know how it may have affected him. They had to consider all the possibilities, but this was one that Dick hated with a passion. Wally had to come back okay. If he didn't, if every hope he had, every minute he'd spent trying to find him, to get him back, if it was all for nothing...well, Dick wasn't sure how many times he could break before he'd shatter.

"It'll work," Conner muttered, more to himself than anyone else. His hand was tight around M'gann's; it likely would've crushed any human's with ease. "It's got to."

Dick wanted to say that it had never been tested, that the speed force was a concept beyond their knowledge and they had an agonizingly limited amount of information based around it, that there were about a million things that could go wrong and the chances of it working were slim—

But he had to believe this. He needed to believe that Wally was on his way home. He couldn't lose faith, not now.

"Ready?" Barry asked him, his whole body vibrating ever so slightly.

Dick swallowed hard. "I've been ready for a long time, Barry. Bring him home."

For the first few weeks, there was nothing.

Dick hated it, hated waiting so long. He'd been doing this for almost two years now and so a few weeks should've been nothing, but he would've sworn up and down that those few weeks were the longest of his life.

By the end of the second week, he was tempted to march back to STAR Labs himself, demand that they dosomething instead of relying on their freaking lighthouse.

That was, until the electronics started going haywire.

"What the hell?" Barbara demanded when the computer she sat in front of fritzed into static.

Tim moved to help her but paused as the lights began to flicker, sparks flying from the bulbs. "That's weird."

"Static!" Dick called accusingly.

Virgil's reply came as a yell from the hall; "Wasn't me!"

And then, abruptly, every monitor screen in the room filled with gray crackling, and then the lights burned out, leaving only the smell of smoke and the buzzing of electricity in the room.

Dick caught his breath. No.

Barbara was already tapping her comm set. "All team members to the control room, stat. This is not a drill."

"We're not under attack," Dick said quietly, his voice hitching in his throat.

"Then how do you explain—" she started to protest.

And then the air ripped open.

There was a crackle of lightning and a blur of red and yellow, and Dick watched in utter shock as Wally West appeared on the other side of the room, his chest heaving.

No.

His canary-colored suit was torn in about a million places, his hair matted down by—was that blood?—and there were dark circles under his eyes and he looked like he hadn't had a decent meal in weeks but then he smiled, god, he smiled and suddenly everything was right with the world.

Dick felt something in his chest seize up.

He looked up slowly. "Dick," he said, green eyes bright, voice soft and shaky and he was real. "I'm home."

And that was all either of them needed.

Their arms were around each other in seconds, and Dick was vaguely aware of the fact that the rest of the team had gathered in the room and that he was crying—they both were, but he didn't care, he had Wally and nothing else was important, not even the mission alert that was pinging on the monitor. Someone else would handle it. The world could fall apart for all he'd care; he had his speedster back and that was the only thing in the entire universe that mattered.

"You came back," he sobbed into Wally's suit, his voice breaking.

Wally's hands were in his hair—and, Dick suddenly realized, his usual heat lamp of a boyfriend was freezing, but then, they'd deal with all of that later—"I promised you I would," the redhead said, a grin flickering across his freckled face and lighting up his eyes. "The universe is gonna have to try a lot harder than that to keep us apart."

Dick made a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob as he pressed his lips against Wally's, his whole body buzzing with warmth and reminding himself of a feeling he hadn't experienced in far, far too long.

Wally was back.

When they finally pulled apart, Artemis was there, crying as she threw her arms around Wally. "Two years, Baywatch," she said. "Two damn years. Don't you ever scare us like that again."

"I take it you missed me," he laughed through his own tears.

And then there was a flash of gold lightning, and Barry was there, the top two buttons of his shirt undone and his hair still wet, but his eyes wide and full of overwhelming joy and relief.

The crowd simply parted for him, stepping away from Wally to let his uncle through. Everyone except Dick, who never wanted to leave Wally's side; he stayed close enough that his hair was blown into his eyes in a gust of Barry's wind.

Neither of them said anything—neither of them had to; they just clung to each other for a long, long time. When they finally pulled apart, Barry ran his fingers through his nephew's fiery red hair and looked at him although he was the world.

Which, Dick supposed, to Barry and himself, he really was.

And of course, the others got their turn, Roy and M'gann and Kal'dur and Conner, and Bart, who hugged Wally with so much gusto that it was like they'd been best friends their whole lives.

Needless to say, there were a lot of tears—Dick swore Roy's eyes were watering, something the archer would deny vehemently later, but by the end of it, Wally seemed overwhelmed.

"You disappear for two years and suddenly you're everyone's favorite speedster, huh?" he joked, still grinning, but there was a sort of weariness in his voice.

Barry seemed to pick up on this as well, clapping a hand on Wally's shoulder. "C'mon, kid. Let's go surprise your parents and get you home."

It was a while before STAR Labs let him go.

There were a lot of tests. The first such of these yielded unpredicted results—Wally was fast. Faster than Bart, than Barry, even, and somehow, the speed force had cured him. He could run again.

"Wally West is back, and better than ever!" he had laughed.

He'd still have to come in weekly, the doctors told them, at least until they were positive that all of his body functions were perfectly normal—at least, normal for a speedster.

But for the time being, they could go home.

Finally.

That wasn't to say that everything was perfect.

After two years, there was a lot of adjusting to do, for both of them. They talked for hours—about life, about love, about not telling each other about really, really important things.

Most of all, they talked about the ring.

"It's not exactly how I imagined proposing to you," Wally said, his green eyes carefully sweeping over Dick's face. "But the offer still stands, if you want it."

Dick paused for a moment. "Of all the idiotic things you've done," he said with a soft laugh, "thinking that I would ever say no would have to take the cake." And he kissed him like he never had before.

Wally still had to re-apply to college; seemingly dying and coming back to life meant he had a lot of explaining to do. But they were superheroes, and they were used to explaining the impossible away, and he got his place back quickly enough.

"I guess I'm lucky you're such a sentimentalist that you didn't sell all my stuff," Wally joked one day, when they were unpacking the boxes that his clothes had been tucked away inside. "I hate shopping."

There were nights when things were difficult, nights when Wally woke up screaming or in cold sweat. He didn't say much about what he'd seen in the speed force, but whatever had happened had affected him in ways Dick didn't quite want to confront.

Wally said he'd tell them eventually, and Dick was willing to wait until he was ready. For right now, he just wanted to be with him.

There was also the matter of Wally coming back to the job. With his newfound speed, and the fact that his body was perfectly healthy now, he was eager to rejoin the team and start the gig up again.

His suit was wrecked, and the ones he had left didn't quite fit anymore, but as Barry put it, he was, "due for an upgrade anyway".

The new suit was scarlet, like his mentor's, but the emblem and embellishments were silver instead of gold, and the cowl exposed his flaming red hair.

"Looks badass," Roy commented, stretched out over their couch. "What are you gonna call yourself? Kid's taken."

"I think I've outgrown that, anyway," Wally said as he examined himself in the mirror. Lightning flickered in his eyes, and Dick thought about how much he loved his thunderstorm of a speedster. "I'm not really Kid Flash anymore, but I'm not Flash either. I think...right now, I'm the one and only Wally West."

The one and only Wally West, that Dick finally had back, and with whom he could share the life he'd always dreamed of having.

Dick grinned, pressing a kiss against his fiancé's lips, and two years apart were trumped by the warmth in his heart and the sparks in front of his eyes. He swore he would never, ever get used to that. "That," he said, brain fuzzy with affection and heart fluttering in his chest, "you certainly are."

hello my wonderful readers! i hope you enjoyed that extremely long fic. and a very happy birthday to my favorite speedster! i wrote this mostly for that purpose, and also because i just had to get all of this off of my chest. anyway, it was a lot of fun to write, and i hope it was as fun to read. if you liked it, drop me a comment below. thanks for reading everyone!

~umana