"Barry."
"Iris."
"What happened? I'm—"
"You're moving as fast as I am."
"What?"
"Like in the courtroom."
"Wh-why? Didn't you-oh my God. What?"
"I can't-I can't save us this time."
"What do you mean, you can't save us?"
"There's a bomb."
"What?"
"A nuke. It's already gone off. I can't stop it."
"Wait, wh- there's, there's gotta be something that you can—"
"No, there's—"
"—do, Bar—"
"We, we tried lightning, we tried cooling it down, breaching it to a dead Earth. Bu- there's nothing – work. I don't know what to do."
"Okay. Hey. Okay."
"As soon as I—"
"I know."
"—stop it's gonna—"
"I know. Hey, hey, it's okay."
"I don't know how much longer I can hold out. I'm so tired."
The cassette tape pauses.
Lying flat on his belly on his old bed with his chin resting on his folded arms, Barry asks Death, "Why'd you stop it?"
The Black Flash does not reply. Eyes shut, Barry hears the cassette player open, the tape pop out. A moment later, the tape lands on his back. Without opening his eyes, he hears a new tape slide into the slot. Death hits play.
Gasping breaths fill the space.
"I'm sorry. I'm so—sorry."
"Why?"
"It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It's over. It's over."
The tape ends. There's a lump in Barry's throat. He looks over at the Black Flash, seated with Its back to the wall, the din of distant thunder calling from the open window. It looks almost jaunty in Its unblemished black suit, one knee canted up, the other stretched out in front of it, decadent as a Greek god in repose. Death regards him with silent, familiar, golden eyes and a face like his own, aged several billion years and barely a day. It plucks the tape free and tosses it onto a pile beside Itself, Its nails scraping for another.
There are thousands to choose from. Barry closes his eyes.
Slowly, he hears it play.
"I can't save us."
"I know. Hey, hey – listen to me."
"I – "
Click. Another, louder crackle of thunder. Somewhat impatient – and somewhat edgy from the audios, he will never love the sound of his own death, magnified by Iris' – he opens his eyes and sits up. Death doesn't move, methodically removing and replacing the tapes. Barry slides off the bed and advances as It presses play again.
"Iris?"
"Barry? What—"
"I—I can't, I can't stop it, I can't—"
"What are you talking about?"
"There's a bomb."
"What?"
"A nuke. It's already detonated."
"Oh my God."
"And I – I tried, I tried to stop it, I tried lightning and cold and – Speed Force—"
Click. Crunch.
Barry looks at Death, holding the shattered cassette in Its claws, Its eyes burning ember-red. The thunder seems even more ominous, now, and yet Barry is called towards the window to be closer to the storm. In doing so, he puts his back to the demon seated near him. None of this is real, he comforts himself. This is not his bedroom, and those are not tapes from his world.
The hairs on the back of his neck still rise.
From the cassette player, his own voice rasps: "Forgive me."
Bile rises in his throat. Barry grips the sill hard. It's warm like summer, soothing like summer. The wood is reassuringly solid. I'm alive, he wants to snap at the Black Flash. Instead, he holds on, and doesn't interrupt It.
They've been at this for hours. Over and over, he hears his own last words. They terminate abruptly, mid-sentence. They carry on for minutes, so long it almost seems like they won't be cut short, and then violently, inexorably, they halt mid-speech. He says I love you and I'm sorry and Forgive me a lot. He says I hate this and It'll be over quick and Close your eyes a little less often. Still more infrequently, he rasps I'm ready and I'm okay and I'm scared. At last, only twice in the entire pile, has he uttered one phrase: I'll fix this.
Somehow, it's worse than I'm sorry and I love you, worse than I'm scared and I'm okay, because he knows the outcome. He knows that in less than a second, his entire world will fall apart, and that the Barry who promised, at least twice, to save the day failed. It's worse because he can almost picture himself in those worlds, surging with dying man confidence into the Cortex because he had to try, he had to try, he had to succeed—
And still he failed.
"I love you. I love you so much, Iris, I – I wish I could give you –so much more."
He pushes the window up a little more, until he can sit on the sill without hitting his head. Methodically, Death plays another tape.
"I didn't want it to be like this."
He swings a leg over the sill, halfway out of the room. Death selects another arbitrary tape and plays out another dying breath.
It is wordless but not silent, and somehow worse for it. Everything it could've been goes unspoken. Barry can no more tell if it is the devastated realism of there is no winning or the more anguished hopefulness of but I will try anyway. He doesn't look back. He slides carefully out of the window. In the multiverse, it's always been on the second story, but in the Speed Force, it's ground level. He can feel Death's red eyes boring into his back as he walks away from it, feet tamping down blue Speed-grass.
The tape plays again. He almost can't hear it.
"I—I need your help."
"What's going on?"
"I don't know what to—I don't know what t'do."
"Okay. Barry, what—"
Standing in the grass ten feet from the house, he closes his eyes, swaying with the breeze. He wants to sleep, to curl up under the nice-sized maple tree and sink into a slumber so deep he won't need to sleep again after it. He'll have the strength to save the world. He'll be that person again, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, capable of protecting all of them. He'll succeed. He'll prevail. If only he can rest, just a moment, just an instant, just one eternity—
"Just like this. Hold onto me. It's gonna be okay."
Turning, he confronts the specter of Death, black-suited and taller than he, not by much but enough, looming. Authoritative. He doesn't ask how It got there, so instantaneously. There is absolutely no point. Death can appear in an instant.
It holds out the cassette player to him and a single black tape. He is afraid for a moment to take it. He is afraid because he can only picture the pile full of dead tapes, broken tapes. He can only imagine the worst outcome.
Then he draws in a steeling breath before reaching out and taking the tape. After a moment, he takes the cassette player, too. The Black Flash disappears. The scene around him dissolves. It is dark and quiet once again. There is but one tape, one cassette player left. He holds them, tightly out of fear, but not so tightly that he shatters them.
Shaking, he slides in the last tape and presses play.
. o .
Barry startles violently, almost tipping out of the bed. It's a medical gurney, he realizes, heart pounding, thoughts fuzzy. Iris is already speaking, hey-whoa-it's-okay, her hands preventing him from falling. She sits up; he shakily rights himself on the mattress, breathing shallowly. There's sweat on his face, and for a delirious moment he thinks, We are about to die.
There are a thousand things he wants to say, a thousand more meaningful last words he wants to give voice to, but he has no breath, and nothing seems adequate. So he gathers her into his trembling arms instead, holding her until he can breathe again, until he can look around and realize that they survived. It's over.
"You're okay," Iris promises. There's a lump in his throat. She said it in the messages, too: you're okay, we're okay, it's okay. It never was. "Hey, hey. I've got you."
He slides down the bed and buries his face in her shoulder, relieved and anxious and so, so grateful that she is still there. That they are alive. "We're okay," he says aloud. His voice is sandpaper thin.
"We're okay," Iris echoes. She scratches the back of his neck. His pounding heart begins to slow. "You saved us."
He thinks about that last tape – that unheard tape, full of soft erratic speech, tripping over each other and still finding equilibrium together, embracing one last moment before he confronted the machine and the Speed Force together. "With you," he rasps in reply, breathing her in, jasmine and dandelions, summer-sweet and familiar.
He understands why the Speed Force drifted back to that time. It's so comforting to revisit that place, before tragedy, after tragedy. His mother was dead and his father wouldn't live long outside prison, but he was still surrounded by love, and life was a little less complicated, back then. Life was ordinary. He was hopeful but not impatient, expectant but not eager. Life would keep coming. He was ready to live it.
His breath evens out. She strokes the nape of his neck and his eyelids slide shut. Emotion swells up in his chest, and he cannot speak, overcome with how much he loves this life he gets to keep living.
"Thank you," he tells her, the fabric of her shirt, her shoulder, just above her heart.
She draws him just a little closer and kisses the top of his head. "I love you," is all she says, one leg settling protectively over both of his.
He inhales deeply, relieved and fatigued and every flavor of emotion in between, and surrenders to the soft, rhythmic sweep of her thumb against his skin, chasing sleep.
. o .
Uninterrupted, he finds the Black Flash sitting beneath a tree, knees pulled up to Its chest, expectantly gazing towards the world beyond, the world unseen. Slowly, Barry steps closer, rain dappling the grass. Death doesn't look at him. Barry stands in front of It, looking down at the fiercest entity the multiverse has ever known. There's a shine in those burning red eyes that has nothing to do with fire or hate. When rain drips down Its face, Barry can almost see the anguish.
Crouching, Barry reaches out and rests a hand on Death's knee. With a clawed hand, the Black Flash curves Its own around Barry's, claws digging into his skin. Barry doesn't retract his support – can't, really, not with Death's grip so firm around him – but he does say softly, "She's okay."
The Black Flash doesn't speak. It can't. It's a lesson Barry learned long ago. But in some silent approximation of speech, only audible in the Speed Force, It replies, In the end, everything is okay.
It releases Barry's hand. Barry can still feel the imprint of Its claws, but there is no malice there. He draws in a fortifying breath and rises again. The Black Flash mirrors him exactly. They regard each other for a long moment, and he can see too much of his own face in that visage of Death. The Speed Force's approximation of Death.
At last, the Black Flash turns away and walks on, a slow, steady pace that can cover eternities. Barry watches It disappear, accompanied by the storm. He thinks about those tapes, and aches, suddenly, to tear the mantle off those heavy shoulders.
But someday, that will be him.
Someday.
For now, he walks in the opposite direction, and lives.