Author's Notes: Bonjour! My love for The Flash remains strong because of my Speed Force fics. I hope you can forgive their cerebral nature; I find they are among the most thrilling pieces to write.
Soon, my Flash fics will be a thing of the past. I have begun to exhaust my ability to write good stories for this 'verse, and I know that I will soon run out of material altogether. I've had original stories on my mind a lot recently. I intend to pursue that route, and try my hand at it!
Fear not, enjoyers of my works: I will leave my Flash fic archive in place. I will also finish HOK and attempt to finish some of the other fics I have started. I do intend to write a few more one-shots as well, so this isn't the last solo Flash fic.
As always, I sincerely hope you enjoy this piece. Savor it! We are nearing the end of my Flash fic career, and I could not be happier with how far we have gone together, and still the little bit of it left to us. We will have a good time together, and when it is time to move on, I will make a similar note.
For now: read on!
"Hello, Iris."
The sound of the Speed Force's voice is indistinguishable from Barry's. Standing still in the darkness, Iris acknowledges, "Hello, Flash."
She hears him – it – them step closer, almost arm's reach if she turns. She does not face them. It's a familiar place to be, hovering between acceptance and denial, real and not-real. "We are more than that," the Speed Force says. "Less, too. Everything you see …" It trails off, and she finally turns to find empty space. Aloud and to her left, just out of view behind her, the Speed Force finishes, "We are the totality of nothing."
"How poetic."
The Speed Force exhales audibly. She turns to face it at last. With golden eyes, luminescent in the dark, Barry – not-Barry – Barry-and-the-Speed-Force smile at her. "You are an infinity to us. We didn't know love until we met you," it says, and there is something devastating and beautiful about the confession. "We still don't know love," it adds, rocking on its feet a little, side-to-side. "It is … grounded. We are not."
Iris dares to take a single slow step towards it. Then she pauses, hovering out of reach. "What do you mean?"
The Speed Force sways a little more deeply. "When you dream," it says at last, "you are not experiencing the world as you know it. Your sense of reality disappears. You are part of the dream, but the dream is not grounded in some tangible thing. This…" with a grand, sweeping gesture, it indicates the darkness around itself and proclaims, "is a dream, by your definition. There is nothing real here. We are not real."
Closing its eyes, the Speed Force Barry vanishes again.
"We are a projection," it intones from a great distance. She turns, trying to hone in on it, but it moves too quickly for her to keep up. Instead, she pauses, and listens. "An interpretation, an inclination, a conception, a reflection, a mimicry, a mockery, an excitable shadow of particles pretending to exist in your pretend universe."
It blinks back into existence near her, fully formed and as tangible as she is. She reaches out and rests a hand on its arm. It feels warm and cold, solid and intangible, there and nonexistent, rippling and still. "Marvel at how unreal your own reality is, and you will begin to know this one," it tells her, turning its palm over and allowing her to slide her hand into it. She clasps it.
Watching her, the Speed Force's golden eyes dim to a low ember red, affectionate and warm. The sight is still thrilling to her. It would be daunting if she hadn't seen it before, Barry's sleepy draconian eyes occasionally catching her when she entered a room, brilliant red but unthreatening. She never told him, and he didn't seem to know. She couldn't bear the thought that he might draw the connection between himself and the Reverse Flash.
Alighting her hand on the Speed Force's – Barry's – waist, she sways with it, dancing slowly. It purrs familiarly, a faint vibration that she can feel more than hear at this level, this low, heady decibel. "You can stay with us," it tells her, and she feels the shift as it gently but inexorably takes command, leading. "Your life will be perfect. Everything you could want is yours."
She rests her cheek against its shoulder, contemplative and quiet. Her husband is far away in another realm she can barely reach from here. This void, this ether, this nothingness is grand, and apart. Even the most adventurous souls could not hope to find it through sheer brute imagination alone. It takes a connection to infinity.
"The world is so cold," the Speed Force muses, rocking her. It dances like Barry, but it also moves more fluidly, more controlled than any human could hope to be, trailing golden stardust. "Wouldn't you like to be warm, forever?"
Slowly, inexorably, it passes control back to her, until she is the one leading, guiding the tempo. "Why do you want me to stay?" she asks instead.
The Speed Force withdraws a little, and then fully, until at last she releases its hand. Looking at her with those soft red eyes, it says simply, "Because we are alone in the dark."
Her heart splinters in her chest. She has to refrain from reaching out, afraid she might never let go again. The Speed Force transforms, from Barry in his red suit to Barry in a black suit. There is a backbreaking heaviness on Its shoulders that further splits her soul at the seams. She steps forward. She cannot make herself touch It.
Here is a story, It says without opening Its mouth, looking right at her. We exist at all time. All time – that is, Existence – persists in the manner you see before you. The beginning and end of your multiverses are chapters of a book without beginning or end. We exist at every moment there ever is, or was, or will be. We should be at both the beginning – before the book, and therefore nonexistent – and the end – after the book, and therefore nonexistent. Yet we are neither. We are present even now, even unto the end. What does this mean?
She stares at It, taken aback. Kneeling, the Black Flash looks at her in supplication and begs in a voice like anguish, Tell us what it means.
She stares at It and Its infinity, a life without a single breath, a life without mortality or meaning, a life that carries on literally forever – and shudders in fear. The Black Flash, still on Its knees, looks up at her with white eyes, wide eyes, and she sees Barry in them. He looks young, maybe twenty-three, and exhausted. She aches in a different way, kneeling across from It, changing their perspectives once again, putting It above her. It looks at her, and still she feels level.
Reaching out, she cups Its cheek, black cowl covering Its jawline, immovably present. She strokes Its face with her thumb. She can almost feel the tears that don't spill down it, the quiet fear, the quiet hurt. Leaning forward, she tangles her arms around Its lean shoulders and embraces Death. Chin over Its shoulder, cheek against Its neck, she assures, "It's okay."
The Black Flash, a newly minted Black Flash, a terrified and ungrounded Black Flash, shivers. "You're right," she says, and the tremble builds. "If you're still here – and at every time, including the end, where you shouldn't be, which must not have passed – then you're right. It doesn't end. This is forever."
She leans back, cupping Its face, look into those young eyes, such young eyes, God why did you die so young? eyes. "But how can you know what comes after?" she asks softly. "You always told me that we're limited to our own experiences. We can't understand what we've never experienced. We can't know what comes next until it's arrived. And maybe there is no time, after time ends. Maybe it's an infinity beyond our grasp. Maybe we can't even call it an infinity."
Quietly, a barely-there sound, the Black Flash asks, Will you join us at the end of infinity?
She brings Its face close to hers and presses her forehead against Its. "Yes."
The Reaper rises. Without divulging Its own tragedy, It extends a hand to her, lets her grasp it. It pulls her upright effortlessly. The dead weigh nothing. Only the living are heavy. I meant what I said, It carries on into the darkness. If you stay, you will know an eternity of peace with us. With me. With the Speed Force. Both of us. It extends both hands, curling black clawed hands around hers. Together. All of us. Forever. Isn't it beautiful?
With playful, almost childlike care, she sways Its arms gently, dancing to a different tune. It soon becomes its own dance, shuffling fluidly, effortlessly, conversation forgotten, heart aching with affection for this monster who kills and devours, this monster who comes for all creatures, this monster who ends all, and still dances with her. She wonders if it is dangerous to be so close to Death, but she senses that in this space beyond-living where nothing is real, that even Death Itself can persist alongside her, two beings of the same make.
Existing. Inextricably, the Living dance on until Death takes their hands.
Slowly, with dandelion gentleness, she releases Its hands.
The second her hands lose Its touch completely, she returns.
. o .
At first, she thinks it only a dream, lying on her back, head pillowed on Barry's thigh, his back to a maple tree. He has a propped-open book on plutonium in one hand, his free arm captured in her embrace, hugged to her chest. With great concentration, he reads the dog-eared book on plutonium, a single idle element with great power. The pages shuffle in a breeze comprised of no plutonium at all, but his rapture does not break.
Their reality is so divorced from itself that she wonders how any of them exist, how even the hand she grasps is real. She squeezes it lightly, and Barry makes a soft affirmative sound, tilting away the book on plutonium so he can look at her instead with golden hazel eyes. Summer ruffles his hair affectionately. She releases his arm and sits up slowly, resting a hand where her head was and setting her back against the tree beside him, nearly perpendicular, occupying the second of four faces.
There are things she could be doing, things she should be doing – because doing is what makes something alive, and she is resolutely, resoundingly alive – but she asks instead, "Do you think there is something after everything?"
He rests his hand on top of hers, setting the plutonium book aside entirely. "Hm?"
"After … all of this. Life."
He hums. "An afterlife?"
"Something like that."
She feels him shrug a little. "I have no idea," he admits, and she doesn't look at him, half-convinced she'll see the black suit appear. "Do you?"
Summoning her courage, she turns her head and sees only her Barry, looking at her patiently, clueless to the underlying conversation. She aches with relief that he is twenty-nine years old. She doesn't want to think about what her life would be like if she lost him six years ago. "I want to," she admits. I promised I wouldn't leave you alone in the dark.
What if the darkness is all there is? the Black Flash asked without asking, begging her to refute It, to assure It that there was a fatal flaw in Its logic. She couldn't. It was right.
All she could hope for was an infinity so great it exceeded even the Speed Force. An infinity outside of, beyond, existence. An infinity that was something-like-an-afterlife.
"What brought this on?" Barry asks, the heavy question, the baited question, innocently curious.
"I had a dream," she says, but it sounds wrong. She can still feel the Black Flash's hand in her own and rejects the implicit dismissal of the statement. It was real. "I met the Speed Force."
Barry is still and silent for a long time. His anxiety is palpable. "What did it say?" he asks with too little curiosity. There is only a bracing-for-impact heaviness in his tone. He already knows the answer, somehow.
She wonders how many times he has visited, dreamed of, conferred with the Speed Force. If he ever stops visiting it, dreaming of it, conferring with it. It's hard to retrieve the words from her real/not-real conversation. At last, she settles on a peaceful truth: "It said that you taught it how to love. By loving me."
He exhales, and she senses a great weight lifting from his chest. She wonders what atrocities he has borne witness to, if he has ever himself donned the black suit. As soon as the thought occurs, she knows that he has, that like the Speed Force he does not occupy a single time but an uncountable number of times. It makes her head spin to think about. It makes her grateful that she is no longer in line for that mantle, that she has surrendered her Speed entirely. She cannot imagine bearing that burden forever.
"I will never be worth it," he says softly, almost idly, looking up at the overcast sky. There's rain in the forecast, rain dappling the grass. Neither of them moves. She squeezes his leg gently. He explains quietly, "I will never be worth the Speed Force, but … I have to believe that I can be good enough for it." Looking at her, smiling a little, he says, "You make me believe that I'm good enough."
Shuffling closer, hip-to-hip, no longer at a perfect finite angle of a circle, she rests her cheek on his shoulder. "You'll always be good enough, Barry," she promises.
He rests his cheek on her hair. Rain dapples them lightly, just a drop here or there, but they let it be. It is part of life. Everything is part of life. Even those parts that are barely real, that occupy a space between life and death, that lack finite form. Like love.
Resting with him, at peace and at stillness with the dancing rain, she closes her eyes again, and dreams softly at his side, and believes that she will be there with him again at the end of infinity.