People tell you to listen for The Thunder like you'll hear them before you see them, but you won't. They say that it smells like burning iron just before fiery heels skate into view, but that's a mythos created in a futile attempt to encapsulate the hair-raising sensation into words. Being in the presence of that lightning is heady like your heartbeat and real as your breath, but there is something volatile and uncertain about it as well. As if every speedster is only half-real, drifting between reality and nonexistence, tethered tenuously to your world.

You hold onto the idea that you can hold onto them, like they aren't always ready to drop everything to respond to the Speed Force's whim. You hold onto them as they were, as they are. Yet inexorably you let go of their smiles and way of filling a space. The color of their lightning is the last thing you forget, like an afterimage, fading so, so slowly. It's ironic to you that lightning is the slowest force to yield to extinction. It's glacial, a memory you do not even want when the nights are longest and the cold of their absence hurts. But it will stay with you until the very last day of your life.

Or theirs.

You stand out in the rain on the edge of city limits and think you should have grabbed an umbrella. Your shoes are soaked. Your skin is, too. With routine optimism you look across the streets for any sign of yellow, red, or blue. They're primary colors, elemental, important; the foundation of the universe to one small degree. One cannot find language sufficient to describe the lightning, so in wanting expectation you say its companion is a blur.

The blur affect is a color, too, one you have never been able to define: it's a color like music, prosodic. It's a sensation that resonates with you across seas of golden grass and purple midnight skies. Blind people have told you that they have seen the speedster who rescued them: when asked to what detail, they offered no description beyond clearly.

That's how it feels. Clear. Sharp. Like a fresh sheet of ice on a black street of asphalt, grading into something beyond description when cold and stillness accompany it. No words properly encapsulate the way the streak cuts across perception, revealing a glimpse into an ulterior world. Describing a song in a single note is futile; confining speedster magic to the same restrictions results in the misconception that they are gods among humans and nothing more.

They are human. That's what makes you love them.

But they're also something more. And that's what you wait for.

You shift your weight onto your opposite leg and close your eyes, conscious of your own breathing. You wait to taste copper. You wait alone in the rain for the impossible.

And then you feel it. Eyes closed, you feel the grass accept the weight of a halting form, susurrating underfoot with practiced ease. You feel each deep, slow breath crest and fall, leather-like shield throwing off heat you can almost touch.

You open your eyes and feel his hesitation, too, as a head bows and low shielded eyes forgo speech.

Then you step forward and wrap your arms around him, and you feel him relax as he mirrors the gesture. A fast pulse fortissimos under your ear when you rest it against his chest.

But it doesn't matter that it's fast. In the end, people don't remember The Flash because of his appearance in a moment of pain.

They remember him as human: kind when they needed it, forgiving and thoughtful and gracious, a presence in a dark, cold universe.

With effortless strength, strong arms sweep underneath you, lifting you up. You wrap your own arms around his neck, holding on.

And then he takes off, taking you with him.

Speed Force surrounds you both, neither overtaking nor underscoring the earth, but simply part of it. Part of it like the ground that meets your feet moments later, too soon. Part of it like the way he accompanies you to your dad's door, one arm around your back, almost shy but never scared. Speed Force is part of the ritual when Dad opens the door and immediately says his name, hauling him into a crushing hug that only Speed Force could withstand.

He is only partly theirs, but he is theirs, and you are neither fully his nor Speed Force's, but you are part of them.

Speed Force eludes you; sometimes he does as well. But when they come home to you, you know they are there.

You will always know when lightning strikes.