into tune and time
Sep. 17th, 2021 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
softpunkswally west/dick grayson // ~3k
> Despite being in a theatre club, there's a reason Wally's never been a performer: he's terrible at acting. He can't fool his friends, and he definitely can't fool Dick.
In Wally's humble opinion, the perk of having two documentation heads is that one of them is Kaldur (main head, inhumanly patient and all more terrifying for it) and the other is Artemis (technically the deputy, but everyone just calls her the co-head to not incite her wrath). Wally loves Kaldur, but in his entire life of being part of the documentation team under their high school’s local theatre club, he could never get away with doing anything but his work.
It’s not as if it’s a bad thing, but then a new year means new members, and new members means new things to take interest in, and Wally has begun the year interested in doing anything but actual work. Being responsible is a newbie thing anyway, and he’s already secured his spot in the club with ease, chances of being kicked out at zero. Technically, he can afford to slack off. He has the right to.
Kaldur wouldn’t get the memo though. By all accounts, Artemis wouldn’t either. But Artemis is also Wally’s best friend, so.
“This is friendship abuse,” she says. “I didn’t shadow Kaldur for a year and get this job just so you could get away with bumming around.”
“I’m not ‘bumming around’,” Wally air-quotes. “My job as a documentation member doesn’t just extend to filming the actual show; it’s to take pictures of rehearsals and behind the scenes content.” It’s not like Artemis doesn’t know this; she’s not the deputy for nothing. She’s clearly thinking the same thing too, but the unimpressed expression on her face is likely because of how rehearsed his words sound—incredibly valid, given that they are rehearsed; they aren’t even his to begin with. Maybe Wally shouldn’t have consulted M’gann beforehand on what to say; it just isn’t natural. “Can we just get this over with? Don’t you have five more folders to leaf through?”
It’s four in the afternoon. Everyone’s inside in the theatre halls, performers rehearsing for this year’s production as the backstage crew watches them from the audience area, halfheartedly going about their assigned tasks. There are probably some others in the dressing room too, filling up the cramped space, which is why Artemis is camping outside, trying to organize the files in the documentation team’s shared hard drive. Wally is here because Artemis is here, and because it’s customary for members to update and provide evidence of their progress to Kaldur and Artemis. Each member has to show their camera’s photo gallery to either head for them to update the tracker that keeps tabs on their productivity for the week. It’s how everyone knows who is doing their job or not, how people prove that they deserve to be part of this club. Retaining is much easier than attaining, so Wally can’t really complain. But he still wants his turn to be over and done with, which is why he went to Artemis, because Artemis is generally done with everything.
(It’s perfect timing too. Kaldur isn’t around because he’s with Tula, still trying to find the right timing to ask her on a date. It has to be perfect, Kaldur reasoned calmly, as if Tula would ever care about that kind of thing so long as it was with him.)
“Fine,” Artemis grumbles, letting Wally connect his camera to her laptop and pull up his gallery. Wally patiently waits for her to tell him to scram so they can both go on with their lives, but Artemis frowns instead. “Wally, what the hell have you been taking pictures of for the past seven days.”
“This is the part where you tell me to go away so you can go back to trying to burn holes into your screen while I return inside and enjoy the rest of the rehearsal because I filled my quota of photos. Go on. Tell me. I’m all ears, baby.”
“‘All ears’, my ass." Artemis scowls. "None of these photos are about the performers! Why are all of these Dick Grayson? He’s a freshman Props member!”
Wally came prepared for this. Partially. In all honesty, this defense was made in case he’d have to explain himself to Kaldur, but it is what it is. Wally clears his throat. This is even more rehearsed, but comes out a lot smoother than he expects it to. “Because our production props deserve just as much attention as our performers do. Why should they be the one to hog the spotlight all the time?”
“Stop pretending like you care—there’s next to no props in these pics. They’re only here if Grayson is holding them and they barely make it into the frame.”
Purposely, Wally pretends he doesn’t hear the last part. “Of course he’ll be holding them. He’s a Props member.”
The look Artemis gives him is murderous. Her reaction is a bit of an overkill, in Wally’s opinion, unlike how she’d usually respond to all the other hijinks their friends (Wally included, naturally) would occasionally start around her. She’d be peeved, but also a lot more forgiving about them. Wally can’t help but think that this is concerning, like something happened to her that he should be aware of as her friend. There aren’t many things that cause Artemis’ temper to run short, despite how she always seems like she’s on edge about things, but Wally has a feeling this has nothing to do with her complicated, strained relationship with Roy.
“Ah,” Wally says, finally getting it. “Did you and Zatanna fight again?”
“No,” Artemis says, in that tone that tells Wally that yes, they did, in that weird passive-aggressive way that’s specific to their relationship, where they say they’re not angry at each other but they’re clearly upset about something one of them did, and the only reason they’re not addressing it is because they’re independent, mature women who think they can deal with their issues on their own when it usually has to do with the both of them.
Wally thinks it’s funny. What makes it even funnier is that their issues are usually petty. In fact, Wally is pretty confident that he even knows what this is about. “Man, must be hard dating the main star. Is she still refusing all the ‘fan gifts’?”
Even more air-quotes. But instead of telling him off, Artemis suddenly deflates, which means Wally’s nailed it. “Ugh,” she groans. “Don’t tell her that. Trying to make her more receptive to receiving presents from admirers is a pain in the ass.”
“You do realize she’d say yes if she knew they were from you, right?”
“You’re not listening.” Artemis rolls her eyes. “That’s the point. It shouldn’t be from me. She has to learn and accept that when people give him gifts, it’s not because they’re there on behalf of her hovering father who wants to spoil her excessively, but because they like her. Even if she doesn’t know them that well. It’s because they think she’s cool, or talented, or pretty, or something. Do you get where I’m going with this? I’m trying to ease her trust issues and make her stop thinking that she can only be liked by the people who she knows love her, because she’s generally a likable person and anyone can see it.”
Wally didn’t ask for an explanation, but it’s fine. “So just tell her all that?”
“No.”
“Or,” he says. “You can just go acknowledge that you’re not doing it because you don’t want her to know how much you care in a way that’s too forward, so just let me do it instead.”
“No,” Artemis repeats, this time a little more firmly. But Wally just stares at her, trying to telepathically communicate the message that he’s not above doing this in order to—no, not necessarily be a good, meddling friend, because that’s just a bonus; what he’s really after is Artemis sighing and finally saying: “I’ll forget this picture thing with Grayson ever happened if you forget anything I just said about Z.”
“Z, who’s that?” Wally asks. Artemis flips him off, but ultimately lets him turn on his heel and go.
“Are you sure you’re allowed to be doing this?” Dick asks.
“Positive,” Wally draws out the word before snapping another photo. “Artemis let me off the hook.”
“For the week,” Dick points out. Wally shrugs, because Artemis did let him off the hook for the week, but it’s Friday, which means the week is coming to an end soon. Artemis will probably let him get away with it again because she still hasn’t resolved her issue with Zatanna. (And if she doesn’t, Walla can just make a flimsy promise to prove himself to be worthy of his position as a vital member of the documentation team by taking something so good that even Kaldur will let the entire debacle slide. It doesn’t really matter that Wally doesn’t know what exactly that is yet, but maybe it’d have something to do with a nice shot of Tula singing under some nice lighting Wally can get Raquel to shine at a precise moment during rehearsals; a little bit of ass-kissing has never hurt anyone anyway.)
Despite Dick’s supposed disapproval though, he’s practically posing as he runs a hand through his hair and pausing midway, pretending to make it a candid gesture as Wally clicks the shutter. It’s funny how good Dick is at this, a freshman only in title and without any of that token awkwardness when it comes to interacting with peers older than him. He could’ve been a model in his previous life, Wally muses.
He chooses to say nothing. Being too suggestive isn’t his style—at least not lately, and definitely not with Dick, who is new but cool and almost Wally’s best friends ever but also not quite fit for that title—and he’s been blunt in every way except the one that really matters. Dick seems to notice that too, but he’s so far content to just let Wally snap photos of him.
He’d been more subtle in the start, using the props Dick was working on as an excuse, but enough time has passed for Wally to give up any sort of pretense. Besides, Dick noticed early on that Wally was only paying attention to whatever he was holding instead of all the other set pieces the production was going to use, no matter how much better or finished it looked. Instead of being weirded out, Dick just let Wally do whatever he wanted, so long as he didn’t distract Dick from doing his job.
Of course, what makes Wally good at his job is that he’s good at going unnoticed. And that was the plan, really, during this entire mood he’d gotten into where he only had one subject in mind that he wanted to glance at through his lens. But his subject was Dick Grayson, who turned out to be more than what the eye could admire from a distance, because then they started making small talk, and then really talked, and so Wally began taking footage too, on top of the pictures, though he had enough dignity to not show any of those to Artemis.
Whenever Wally got home, he’d scroll through his gallery and rewatch the videos, recordings of their conversations with terrible angles (absolutely on purpose—he couldn’t afford to be too obvious, and he likes to think that it adds to the realness and authenticity of it all; that Wally, at the time, wanted to listen to Dick ramble about prefixes and suffixes without anything between them) but high quality audio.
Gifted with spotty memory, Wally was horrible at remembering little conversation nuances or details about a person’s life that they’d mention offhandedly, so having a way to rewind and recall helped. One day, they talked about classes, and Wally discovered that Dick was good at math. In another footage, documented the day after, Dick told him that he used to do gymnastics. The camera’s focus would fall to Dick’s hands, stained with paint and pencil marks. His amused laughter at the commentary Wally made about Conner as they watched him argue with their supervisor Dinah about positioning was caught, filled Wally’s ears.
They made jokes about being able to do better than the cast memes onstage during rehearsals whenever someone screwed up, decided on waging a bet as to whether M’gann would be the first to accidentally break the locker door prop, or if it would be Zatanna (it was Barbara). Roy found out that they were half-assing their work at some point, but left them alone after a warning to not get caught. Wally took another picture of Dick. Dick finally got fed up with Wally having so many photos of him that he drew little crude faces of him on the back of some of their promotional posters in petty revenge. Wally snapped a photo of that too.
“Won’t you run out of memory if you keep doing that?” Dick asks him now.
“No.” Wally raises his camera to take another shot; there’s a streak of gold on Dick’s cheek from painting one of their paper mache stars that looks absolutely badass, like the ones they usually put up during pep rallies and sports season to cheer on football teams. Before he can though, Dick’s hand hovers above the camera, right where Wally’s fingers rest on the shutter, almost as if he wants to lower the camera. It doesn’t happen, and Dick catches himself before actually doing anything, but when he pulls his hand back, their fingers brush one another lightly.
It’s a moment that makes Wally’s eyes flash and his heart thump with the sudden desire and frustration of wanting to have captured something like that and being unable to. A camera can catch many things, but touch has never been one of them. “What?”
“You gotta stop taking pictures of me."
“Why?” Wally raises an eyebrow. “Worried I’ll get bored soon?”
Dick scoops up a small dollop of paint instead of answering. Then, without warning, he swipes it across Wally’s nose. Wally yelps. “That’s what you get.”
Wally cranes his neck to nose at his own shoulder, but the paint is still there, and some of it even sticks to his clothes. He frowns. “For what?”
“For flirting with me for a whole week but still not asking me out on a date,” Dick says. Wally freezes, but all Dick does is tap the camera between them. “You can’t keep on hiding behind this thing and building fan fodder of me forever.”
As much as he wants to be indignant about this, Wally mostly feels embarrassed at being caught so easily, even if he knows he never really made any effort to be subtle. Still, it’s different when he actually has to confront it. Making it obvious that he has a crush is another thing from having said crush point it out. And pictures have always been simple in ways people and crushes and relationships aren’t.
Through the lens, life becomes interesting, and these things can be kept safe and remembered for a long time. In contrast, Wally is clumsy without the steadiness of needing to snap a shot, and most things are fleeting for him, his senses dulled with boredom at most things in life that even the few things he wants to cling onto, he has a hard time knowing how. It’s why he fixates easily, almost to a worrying point: because he knows that something—someone, either him or the other—will eventually lose patience to stay and indulge him.
And Dick—he’s making it clear now that he’s lost his for this charade they’ve been doing. But then: he’d been patient for everything else, this past almost-two-weeks of a push or pull—longer than any “relationship” Wally’s been in, actually. It’s a record breaker, so Wally can’t help but wonder if there could be more of those, more of this—these record breakers, time spent together, a game wherein one waits for when the other will drop the pin and either end it or continue.
Which is exactly what Dick’s been hinting from the beginning, Wally realizes. He’s not over them, he’s waiting for them to become an actual them, two people, put together—theatre kids who have been spending more time flirting with one another through photos and paint: dating. Wally’s already going the extra mile of trying to remember Dick’s little quirks through reviewing the footage, his sort-of-secret recordings, and Dick—well, he’s put up with Wally for this long. Nearly two weeks. A long time, in Wally’s opinion.
There’s definitely a thought there. It might just be worth the shot. Wally can’t help but grin.
“What’s with that look?” Dick asks.
“The dating thing,” Wally explains. “I guess you could say it’s worth the shot. Get it?”
In response, Dick drags another streak of paint on him. Photos can’t immortalize touch, but it can immortalize the face he makes when he laughs because he appreciates humor when it’s there and Wally swears he’s got a funny side to him that only people like Dick can really get, and there’s probably no one like Dick but Dick.
Later, Wally finds a way to get something Artemis should appreciate, something that makes him worthy of his position as a part of the documentation team: no longer photos of Dick during rehearsals, but the two of them posing together on their first date, hours later after they end. Then Wally convinces Dick to tell Zatanna a helpful tip about realizing what a great person she is, worthy of receiving good things no matter who it’s from, before sending a text to Tula about a nice aquarium she should take Kaldur to after an exhausting day of practice to give themselves a break (a perfect date for people like them, in Wally's opinion). There’s nothing wrong with a little ass-kissing, after all.
> Despite being in a theatre club, there's a reason Wally's never been a performer: he's terrible at acting. He can't fool his friends, and he definitely can't fool Dick.
In Wally's humble opinion, the perk of having two documentation heads is that one of them is Kaldur (main head, inhumanly patient and all more terrifying for it) and the other is Artemis (technically the deputy, but everyone just calls her the co-head to not incite her wrath). Wally loves Kaldur, but in his entire life of being part of the documentation team under their high school’s local theatre club, he could never get away with doing anything but his work.
It’s not as if it’s a bad thing, but then a new year means new members, and new members means new things to take interest in, and Wally has begun the year interested in doing anything but actual work. Being responsible is a newbie thing anyway, and he’s already secured his spot in the club with ease, chances of being kicked out at zero. Technically, he can afford to slack off. He has the right to.
Kaldur wouldn’t get the memo though. By all accounts, Artemis wouldn’t either. But Artemis is also Wally’s best friend, so.
“This is friendship abuse,” she says. “I didn’t shadow Kaldur for a year and get this job just so you could get away with bumming around.”
“I’m not ‘bumming around’,” Wally air-quotes. “My job as a documentation member doesn’t just extend to filming the actual show; it’s to take pictures of rehearsals and behind the scenes content.” It’s not like Artemis doesn’t know this; she’s not the deputy for nothing. She’s clearly thinking the same thing too, but the unimpressed expression on her face is likely because of how rehearsed his words sound—incredibly valid, given that they are rehearsed; they aren’t even his to begin with. Maybe Wally shouldn’t have consulted M’gann beforehand on what to say; it just isn’t natural. “Can we just get this over with? Don’t you have five more folders to leaf through?”
It’s four in the afternoon. Everyone’s inside in the theatre halls, performers rehearsing for this year’s production as the backstage crew watches them from the audience area, halfheartedly going about their assigned tasks. There are probably some others in the dressing room too, filling up the cramped space, which is why Artemis is camping outside, trying to organize the files in the documentation team’s shared hard drive. Wally is here because Artemis is here, and because it’s customary for members to update and provide evidence of their progress to Kaldur and Artemis. Each member has to show their camera’s photo gallery to either head for them to update the tracker that keeps tabs on their productivity for the week. It’s how everyone knows who is doing their job or not, how people prove that they deserve to be part of this club. Retaining is much easier than attaining, so Wally can’t really complain. But he still wants his turn to be over and done with, which is why he went to Artemis, because Artemis is generally done with everything.
(It’s perfect timing too. Kaldur isn’t around because he’s with Tula, still trying to find the right timing to ask her on a date. It has to be perfect, Kaldur reasoned calmly, as if Tula would ever care about that kind of thing so long as it was with him.)
“Fine,” Artemis grumbles, letting Wally connect his camera to her laptop and pull up his gallery. Wally patiently waits for her to tell him to scram so they can both go on with their lives, but Artemis frowns instead. “Wally, what the hell have you been taking pictures of for the past seven days.”
“This is the part where you tell me to go away so you can go back to trying to burn holes into your screen while I return inside and enjoy the rest of the rehearsal because I filled my quota of photos. Go on. Tell me. I’m all ears, baby.”
“‘All ears’, my ass." Artemis scowls. "None of these photos are about the performers! Why are all of these Dick Grayson? He’s a freshman Props member!”
Wally came prepared for this. Partially. In all honesty, this defense was made in case he’d have to explain himself to Kaldur, but it is what it is. Wally clears his throat. This is even more rehearsed, but comes out a lot smoother than he expects it to. “Because our production props deserve just as much attention as our performers do. Why should they be the one to hog the spotlight all the time?”
“Stop pretending like you care—there’s next to no props in these pics. They’re only here if Grayson is holding them and they barely make it into the frame.”
Purposely, Wally pretends he doesn’t hear the last part. “Of course he’ll be holding them. He’s a Props member.”
The look Artemis gives him is murderous. Her reaction is a bit of an overkill, in Wally’s opinion, unlike how she’d usually respond to all the other hijinks their friends (Wally included, naturally) would occasionally start around her. She’d be peeved, but also a lot more forgiving about them. Wally can’t help but think that this is concerning, like something happened to her that he should be aware of as her friend. There aren’t many things that cause Artemis’ temper to run short, despite how she always seems like she’s on edge about things, but Wally has a feeling this has nothing to do with her complicated, strained relationship with Roy.
“Ah,” Wally says, finally getting it. “Did you and Zatanna fight again?”
“No,” Artemis says, in that tone that tells Wally that yes, they did, in that weird passive-aggressive way that’s specific to their relationship, where they say they’re not angry at each other but they’re clearly upset about something one of them did, and the only reason they’re not addressing it is because they’re independent, mature women who think they can deal with their issues on their own when it usually has to do with the both of them.
Wally thinks it’s funny. What makes it even funnier is that their issues are usually petty. In fact, Wally is pretty confident that he even knows what this is about. “Man, must be hard dating the main star. Is she still refusing all the ‘fan gifts’?”
Even more air-quotes. But instead of telling him off, Artemis suddenly deflates, which means Wally’s nailed it. “Ugh,” she groans. “Don’t tell her that. Trying to make her more receptive to receiving presents from admirers is a pain in the ass.”
“You do realize she’d say yes if she knew they were from you, right?”
“You’re not listening.” Artemis rolls her eyes. “That’s the point. It shouldn’t be from me. She has to learn and accept that when people give him gifts, it’s not because they’re there on behalf of her hovering father who wants to spoil her excessively, but because they like her. Even if she doesn’t know them that well. It’s because they think she’s cool, or talented, or pretty, or something. Do you get where I’m going with this? I’m trying to ease her trust issues and make her stop thinking that she can only be liked by the people who she knows love her, because she’s generally a likable person and anyone can see it.”
Wally didn’t ask for an explanation, but it’s fine. “So just tell her all that?”
“No.”
“Or,” he says. “You can just go acknowledge that you’re not doing it because you don’t want her to know how much you care in a way that’s too forward, so just let me do it instead.”
“No,” Artemis repeats, this time a little more firmly. But Wally just stares at her, trying to telepathically communicate the message that he’s not above doing this in order to—no, not necessarily be a good, meddling friend, because that’s just a bonus; what he’s really after is Artemis sighing and finally saying: “I’ll forget this picture thing with Grayson ever happened if you forget anything I just said about Z.”
“Z, who’s that?” Wally asks. Artemis flips him off, but ultimately lets him turn on his heel and go.
==
“Are you sure you’re allowed to be doing this?” Dick asks.
“Positive,” Wally draws out the word before snapping another photo. “Artemis let me off the hook.”
“For the week,” Dick points out. Wally shrugs, because Artemis did let him off the hook for the week, but it’s Friday, which means the week is coming to an end soon. Artemis will probably let him get away with it again because she still hasn’t resolved her issue with Zatanna. (And if she doesn’t, Walla can just make a flimsy promise to prove himself to be worthy of his position as a vital member of the documentation team by taking something so good that even Kaldur will let the entire debacle slide. It doesn’t really matter that Wally doesn’t know what exactly that is yet, but maybe it’d have something to do with a nice shot of Tula singing under some nice lighting Wally can get Raquel to shine at a precise moment during rehearsals; a little bit of ass-kissing has never hurt anyone anyway.)
Despite Dick’s supposed disapproval though, he’s practically posing as he runs a hand through his hair and pausing midway, pretending to make it a candid gesture as Wally clicks the shutter. It’s funny how good Dick is at this, a freshman only in title and without any of that token awkwardness when it comes to interacting with peers older than him. He could’ve been a model in his previous life, Wally muses.
He chooses to say nothing. Being too suggestive isn’t his style—at least not lately, and definitely not with Dick, who is new but cool and almost Wally’s best friends ever but also not quite fit for that title—and he’s been blunt in every way except the one that really matters. Dick seems to notice that too, but he’s so far content to just let Wally snap photos of him.
He’d been more subtle in the start, using the props Dick was working on as an excuse, but enough time has passed for Wally to give up any sort of pretense. Besides, Dick noticed early on that Wally was only paying attention to whatever he was holding instead of all the other set pieces the production was going to use, no matter how much better or finished it looked. Instead of being weirded out, Dick just let Wally do whatever he wanted, so long as he didn’t distract Dick from doing his job.
Of course, what makes Wally good at his job is that he’s good at going unnoticed. And that was the plan, really, during this entire mood he’d gotten into where he only had one subject in mind that he wanted to glance at through his lens. But his subject was Dick Grayson, who turned out to be more than what the eye could admire from a distance, because then they started making small talk, and then really talked, and so Wally began taking footage too, on top of the pictures, though he had enough dignity to not show any of those to Artemis.
Whenever Wally got home, he’d scroll through his gallery and rewatch the videos, recordings of their conversations with terrible angles (absolutely on purpose—he couldn’t afford to be too obvious, and he likes to think that it adds to the realness and authenticity of it all; that Wally, at the time, wanted to listen to Dick ramble about prefixes and suffixes without anything between them) but high quality audio.
Gifted with spotty memory, Wally was horrible at remembering little conversation nuances or details about a person’s life that they’d mention offhandedly, so having a way to rewind and recall helped. One day, they talked about classes, and Wally discovered that Dick was good at math. In another footage, documented the day after, Dick told him that he used to do gymnastics. The camera’s focus would fall to Dick’s hands, stained with paint and pencil marks. His amused laughter at the commentary Wally made about Conner as they watched him argue with their supervisor Dinah about positioning was caught, filled Wally’s ears.
They made jokes about being able to do better than the cast memes onstage during rehearsals whenever someone screwed up, decided on waging a bet as to whether M’gann would be the first to accidentally break the locker door prop, or if it would be Zatanna (it was Barbara). Roy found out that they were half-assing their work at some point, but left them alone after a warning to not get caught. Wally took another picture of Dick. Dick finally got fed up with Wally having so many photos of him that he drew little crude faces of him on the back of some of their promotional posters in petty revenge. Wally snapped a photo of that too.
“Won’t you run out of memory if you keep doing that?” Dick asks him now.
“No.” Wally raises his camera to take another shot; there’s a streak of gold on Dick’s cheek from painting one of their paper mache stars that looks absolutely badass, like the ones they usually put up during pep rallies and sports season to cheer on football teams. Before he can though, Dick’s hand hovers above the camera, right where Wally’s fingers rest on the shutter, almost as if he wants to lower the camera. It doesn’t happen, and Dick catches himself before actually doing anything, but when he pulls his hand back, their fingers brush one another lightly.
It’s a moment that makes Wally’s eyes flash and his heart thump with the sudden desire and frustration of wanting to have captured something like that and being unable to. A camera can catch many things, but touch has never been one of them. “What?”
“You gotta stop taking pictures of me."
“Why?” Wally raises an eyebrow. “Worried I’ll get bored soon?”
Dick scoops up a small dollop of paint instead of answering. Then, without warning, he swipes it across Wally’s nose. Wally yelps. “That’s what you get.”
Wally cranes his neck to nose at his own shoulder, but the paint is still there, and some of it even sticks to his clothes. He frowns. “For what?”
“For flirting with me for a whole week but still not asking me out on a date,” Dick says. Wally freezes, but all Dick does is tap the camera between them. “You can’t keep on hiding behind this thing and building fan fodder of me forever.”
As much as he wants to be indignant about this, Wally mostly feels embarrassed at being caught so easily, even if he knows he never really made any effort to be subtle. Still, it’s different when he actually has to confront it. Making it obvious that he has a crush is another thing from having said crush point it out. And pictures have always been simple in ways people and crushes and relationships aren’t.
Through the lens, life becomes interesting, and these things can be kept safe and remembered for a long time. In contrast, Wally is clumsy without the steadiness of needing to snap a shot, and most things are fleeting for him, his senses dulled with boredom at most things in life that even the few things he wants to cling onto, he has a hard time knowing how. It’s why he fixates easily, almost to a worrying point: because he knows that something—someone, either him or the other—will eventually lose patience to stay and indulge him.
And Dick—he’s making it clear now that he’s lost his for this charade they’ve been doing. But then: he’d been patient for everything else, this past almost-two-weeks of a push or pull—longer than any “relationship” Wally’s been in, actually. It’s a record breaker, so Wally can’t help but wonder if there could be more of those, more of this—these record breakers, time spent together, a game wherein one waits for when the other will drop the pin and either end it or continue.
Which is exactly what Dick’s been hinting from the beginning, Wally realizes. He’s not over them, he’s waiting for them to become an actual them, two people, put together—theatre kids who have been spending more time flirting with one another through photos and paint: dating. Wally’s already going the extra mile of trying to remember Dick’s little quirks through reviewing the footage, his sort-of-secret recordings, and Dick—well, he’s put up with Wally for this long. Nearly two weeks. A long time, in Wally’s opinion.
There’s definitely a thought there. It might just be worth the shot. Wally can’t help but grin.
“What’s with that look?” Dick asks.
“The dating thing,” Wally explains. “I guess you could say it’s worth the shot. Get it?”
In response, Dick drags another streak of paint on him. Photos can’t immortalize touch, but it can immortalize the face he makes when he laughs because he appreciates humor when it’s there and Wally swears he’s got a funny side to him that only people like Dick can really get, and there’s probably no one like Dick but Dick.
Later, Wally finds a way to get something Artemis should appreciate, something that makes him worthy of his position as a part of the documentation team: no longer photos of Dick during rehearsals, but the two of them posing together on their first date, hours later after they end. Then Wally convinces Dick to tell Zatanna a helpful tip about realizing what a great person she is, worthy of receiving good things no matter who it’s from, before sending a text to Tula about a nice aquarium she should take Kaldur to after an exhausting day of practice to give themselves a break (a perfect date for people like them, in Wally's opinion). There’s nothing wrong with a little ass-kissing, after all.