I've been having a crummy couple of days, so I decided to write something that was just pure candy for me. Maybe you guys will enjoy it too.

Although this isn't really a crossover, there's definitely a nod to Batman Beyond in this story, specifically the animal splicing episode.

There's some suggested Wally/Robin in here, but it's light, so you could pretend it's not there if you want. They're beginning to become my favorite ship for this fandom though.

Disclaimer: I don't own Young Justice. Don't sue me.

.

Spliced

The Splicing drug, a new sort of invention that fused animal biology with human DNA. Though the drug had come a long way in its development, it was still in its experimental stages and hadn't yet been approved by the government for public use. Despite this, more and more 'splicers' kept popping up, using their newfound animal abilities and features to commit various crimes, and so Batman sent them in to investigate the company that was producing the drug to see if there was someone on the inside who was illegally distributing it.

It was their usual sort of covert mission...

...or it had been until he and Robin had been shot up with a couple of needles full of the drug, and of course Robin cared more about the fact that Batman would be pissed at him for letting the bad guys get the drop on him than he cared about his new animal additions.

Honestly, out of all the possible scenarios that could have played out from being dosed with experimental drugs, things could have gone a lot worse. Wally didn't know why Robin kept grumbling about it. For one thing, the League was in the process of coming up with a cure, so it wasn't as if they'd be stuck as they were forever, and to be frank, Wally thought they looked kinda cool, himself especially.

Maybe that was why Robin didn't really see this as being even a little awesome; the fact that between the two of them, Wally believed he'd gotten the better deal. He had spent a good half-hour preening in front of his bedroom mirror – though he'd never admit this to anyone – just checking out his new look and confirming that, yeah, it was definitely a cool look.

(This had all been after his initial freak-out upon discovering his new animal features which had resulted in a frenzied super-speed-run around town, at which point he had also discovered that – hey – the tail actually helped out a lot when it came to changing direction, but that was beside the point)

Apparently the guy who had dosed them had kind of a dumb sense of humor because when the man had been grabbing syringes to drug them with, there was no way he had accidentally picked out cheetah DNA to fuse with Wally, and the same went for Robin getting spliced with bird DNA. There were other animals that they had been spliced with – the guy had been trying to get them to overdose, though thankfully hadn't gotten very far – but a cheetah and some sort of bird had been the primary animals.

So now Wally was sporting a cheetah tail, a pair of cheetah ears in place of his regular human ones, a set of feline fangs, and he even had the familiar spots pattern on some parts of his skin. Along with that, he had a set of horns that curved back against his head. He wasn't really sure what animal they were from, and if given a choice, he would have done without them simply because it had been annoying getting used to the extra weight and they weren't really built for speed, but oh well. At least they didn't stick straight up in the air.

Wally crept quietly through the halls of Mount Justice, for once being the first one up that morning. He stayed close to the ground, his feline ears perked up and listening for the sounds of any of his teammates. Eventually reaching the door to Robin's room, he just as quietly slipped inside and shut the door behind him, not needing any light-source to see in the dark room.

He paused for a moment near the door, listening carefully to the even breaths of the younger boy in the bed before him, trying to determine if Robin was faking or if he really was asleep. He never would have been able to tell before, but ever since they'd been spliced, Wally always somehow knew.

Once he was sure that Robin was sleeping, he crept towards the other boy's bed, crouching lower and lower to the ground until his fingers brushed against the stone floor, almost as if he were prowling on all-fours. He could feel his tail twitching behind him, and his ears folded back when he reached the side of the bed.

He ducked down and hid when he heard the slight shift of the blankets. He waited for half a minute after all went silent before carefully peering over the edge of the bed, taking in the sight of ruffled feathers and the fact that Robin was still asleep. His tail lashed back and forth and he was filled with an inexplicable need to spring forward and pounce, pounce now, but he held off for the moment.

Instead, he carefully reached forward, across the bed, his fingers stretching out towards one of the furry animal ears that had replaced Robin's own ears.

'Rabbit or llama?'

It was a question that had been bugging him for the past couple of days now since they had been spliced. Robin's ears were long and furry and for the most part flopped down like a floppy-eared rabbit, but sometimes they stood on end and when they did that, Wally was also reminded of a llama's ears. His curiosity demanded that he get a closer look at the rabbit/llama ears, but ever since he made that one little comment about maybe wanting to bite said ears – and don't ask him what that was about, he didn't even know himself, his mouth had moved before his brain could act as a filter – Robin was snippy about him getting too close to them.

'It's not like I would have bitten them that hard...'

His fingers brushed against one of the furry black and grey ears and he marveled over how soft they felt. That still didn't really answer his question about whether they were the ears of a rabbit or a llama though.

And then Robin was bolting upright and the 'pounce, pounce, pounce!' command was ringing through Wally's head and so he sprung forward, arms wrapping around Robin's smaller frame. With a startled yelp from Robin and a joyful laugh from Wally, he knocked them both over and off the other side of the bed.

Though he'd deny it, Wally purred, he actually purred, hugging a ruffled and indignant Robin close and he wasn't even aware that he was lightly tugging at one of the other boy's floppy rabbit/llama ears with his teeth until Robin swatted him on the nose.

"What the hell, Wally?" Robin grumbled sleepily, grabbing his sunglasses off the nightstand and shoving them on his face before Wally could really get a good look at the other boy's eyes. Typical.

"Sorry, man, couldn't resist," Wally said, grinning a fanged grin, even as Robin pushed him away.

Sighing, Robin shook out his arms, although at this point, a more accurate description would be wings. Granted, they were still like normal human arms and he still had his hands... for the most part, because extending out from the outer edge of his arms were a mass of black feathers – a pair of bird wings – and the bones in each pinky finger had grown and changed shape to better support the wing. Along with the wings, Robin also had tail feathers, which Wally found absolutely hilarious. The tail feathers were long and black with a grey pattern and two feathers in particular that were even longer and extended out past all the rest.

"Stupid feathers," Robin muttered, trying and failing to smooth out their ruffled appearance.

Wally didn't think they were stupid, he thought they were fun, fun to tug on, fun to run his fingers through.

"Lemme help," Wally said, already reaching out to the wings before Robin could protest.

He combed his fingers through the many feathers, smoothing them down and straightening them out, and Robin grumbled the whole time but made no move to stop him. When he was done, Robin stretched out his arms, his wings, the feathers fanning out, and he flapped them once, sending a gust of air throughout the room before he seemed to come back to the present and pulled his arms back to his sides.

And then he kicked Wally out of the room so that he could get dressed.

Wally stared at the closed door, his ears pulled back indignantly, before the scent of breakfast cooking caught his nose and he zipped off to the kitchen.

.

.

They were all seated at the kitchen table, enjoying their individual meals of the morning, but there was just something Wally had trouble looking past.

"Doesn't it weird you out to eat eggs?" Wally asked, eying the ketchup-slathered scrambled eggs on Robin's plate. The speedster was well aware that birds in the wild would sometimes eat unhatched eggs and that eggs were a good source of nutrition for birds in general, but there was still something kind of wrong about the whole thing.

"I'm not actually a bird, Wally," Robin remarked, scooping a fork-full of the scrambled eggs into his mouth.

"You're part bird," Wally pointed out in his defense, poking at his steak with his own fork. "It'd be like if Kaldur ate fish."

The Atlantean raised an eyebrow at him, but made no comment.

"Not that I'd judge you if you did eat fish, AL," Wally was quick to add, all the while thinking about, but not saying out-loud, how a meal of fish actually sound pretty good at the moment.

To prevent any more foot-in-mouth situations, Wally shoved a bite of steak into his mouth.

'Mmm, So good.'

Pleasant small-talk flitted about the table in between bites of food as they all enjoyed their breakfast. It wasn't very long before Wally finished up his steak and made himself a protein shake to satisfy his rapid metabolism. It was near the end of breakfast, when everyone else was just about done with their meals, when Wally glanced over and noticed a smudge of ketchup smeared out from the corner of Robin's mouth.

"Robin, dude, you got a little ketchup on your face," Wally said.

Normally this would be the part where he'd toss the other boy a napkin, but instead he found himself leaning over, one hand grabbing onto Robin's shoulder to tug the boy closer, and with one quick swipe of his tongue, he licked the smear of ketchup off of Robin's face.

And froze.

And noticed that everyone else froze, staring at him with wide-eyed, surprised looks.

"Did I... really just do that?" he asked hesitantly, hardly even believing it himself.

"Unfortunately," Robin said with a grimace, briefly muttering about sand-paper tongues. "You can let go of me now."

"Right, sorry," Wally said, quickly pulling his hand away and backing up a bit. Despite his embarrassment though, he couldn't help but feel a little delighted that Robin's llama/rabbit ears were now standing straight up in the air.

Really though, why had he done that?

"Some might consider that a sign of affection," M'gann offered with a small smile, but if anything, that made the situation seem even more awkward.

"Or maybe you were tasting him," Superboy said rather bluntly, his surprise over the situation having been the first to fade. "Cats eat birds."

"Let's go with 'sign of affection'," Robin quickly said, it being the better of two evils. Lips pursed, he looked over at Wally and said, "Next time just give me a manly punch in the arm or something, okay?"

Wally chuckled weakly.

"Yeah, sure..."

Somehow Wally had a feeling that the 'cat' in him couldn't be reasoned with any more than you could reason with a cat in real life. He'd try and keep the licking – a'hem – grooming to a minimum though.

But he'd make no promises about the pouncing.

.

End of oneshot. For now, I'll say that this is complete, but if I ever come up with another oneshot idea for this particular mini-universe, I'll be posting it here.

If anyone couldn't quite visualize my description of Robin's wings, a good example would be how Talon's arms are, the bird-girl character in the cartoon Static Shock.

Anyway, any reviews would be greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone has any prompts to suggest for this particular story, I'd be happy to hear them. :)