4:14 AM. The first cup of coffee is poured.
4:15 AM. The veterans go to bed; the rookies emerge for the morning shift.
4:16 AM. First target acquired. Male, nineteen, armed convenience store robbery, 22nd and Mayberry.
4:17 AM. The horn is quiet: the rest of the team sleeps deeply.
4:18 AM. "It's okay. It's okay. You didn't shoot them. It's over now. Nobody's gonna die."
4:19 AM. It's always a lie.
4:20 AM. What benevolent God allows Its creations to die? Death is often loud, brash, torturous. Death is bleeding out from the lungs, gargling on copper and straining for breath that won't come anymore; death is clutching a deep wound that wasn't there before and now is and won't go away and I don't want to die today flashes through the mind of the deceased moments before the title is acquired. Barry takes another longer sip of the second cup of coffee. He leans an arm on the cool railing of the fire escape and wonders if the stars aren't far away to escape death.
4:21 AM. But sometimes death is quiet and dark, just like this. A final expiration. An unending regression into sleep. A mortal flicker of action, snuffing out a life so briskly that the living self has no chance to comprehend it. Death simply happens, and then the person is gone, and only the cadaver is left.
4:22 AM. Cadaver. It's a beautifully detached word. Like deep sleep and final resting place, it lends itself to a euphemistic glow, as though the cadaver is merely an object and not a person who strained with every fiber of their being to live before they became the deceased. Looking out into the darkness, Barry can picture the first time he saw a pair of white feet sticking out from under a medical sheet. He didn't throw up, but at times he wishes he had. Somehow the complacency at the sight was disgusting.
4:23 AM. Barry sets aside the empty coffee mug and exhales.
4:24 AM. A brisk shower.
4:25 AM. A long walk in the countryside.
4:26 AM. It's a walk, too, at the gamboling pace of three miles an hour. Barry enjoys it: the sedate pace allows him to hear the satisfyingly earthy murmur of sunbaked dirt pressing against his feet. The soles ache, but not abominably. Golden light flickers at his heels, fanning warmth from ankle to toe. Soon he doesn't notice the ache. Moving makes him feel better. It's how the Speed Force breathes.
4:27 AM. Although the deep indigo of nightfall begins to fade, the Sun still lounges deep below the horizon. Despite its pervasiveness in the collective consciousness, Sunrise is an illusion: the Earth spins, exposing and shielding itself from the burning glow of the Sun's light, creating the beautiful illusion of the Sun sweeping into view before vanishing, day after day. The misconception is an understandable crux: humanity has known that the Earth revolves around the Sun for less than half a millennium. Earthrise and Earthset have yet to catch on.
4:28 AM. One day they just might.
4:29 AM. One day. There have been so many days in the known history of the Universe that multitudes beyond human comprehension fade into scientific noise, invisible traces of times past forgotten in the significant figures. A single day is invisible to the far-sighted machines capable of distinguishing only millions of years with certainty. The Universe is more than thirteen billion years old; it is less than fourteen billion years old. Confidence places the exact number at around thirteen-point-seven billion years. The uncertainty is a few hundred million. Billions of days remain unaccounted for. The exact age of the Universe is unknown. Thus, it has no birthday. Within the two-million-year lifespan of Homo sapiens, it may never find it.
4:30 AM. The numbers tempt dark thoughts.
4:31 AM. Why should he expend energy sparing a few from dark fates, knowing that the inevitable will snatch them from life no matter how hard he tries to protect them?
4:32 AM. Why should he torture himself with dark thoughts, knowing that he is responsible for every life he could but did not save?
4:33 AM. Why be a hero?
4:34 AM. Unanswered, Barry walks on.
4:58 AM. Morning light purples the sky around him. Joseph William Mallord Turner painted landscapes like this one, broad sweeping canvases that would make even the idea of a questionably benevolent God pause to wonder at the captured moment in time. In each painting, there is an innate fuzziness, a deliberate chaos that gives them life. Turner himself is dead, a cadaver in a grave in a yard full of others, silenced by his deathly sleep, but his paintings carry life even hundreds of years later.
4:59 AM. A powerful urge to capture the present moment, with his still-beating heart and warm steady breath, sweeps over Barry. He aches to draw stories like Turner, to capture the likeness of the cosmic scene before him with the panoramic complexity of Gregory Crewdson. There is something magical about it, something desperate and tragic and beautiful about the pursuit of permanence in a world of constant change. All at once, the desire to capture the scene abates. The impulse passes.
5:00 AM. Peace reigns.
5:01 AM. Barry walks on.
5:02 AM. Art is the language of life. It is the only language that the Universe itself recognizes innately and provides endlessly. It makes even the mundane beautiful.
5:03 AM. The ache in Barry's feet becomes welcome, a proof-of-life contract between himself and the Earth, the generous providing Earth with its blanket of electromagnetic warmth protecting it from the godless wrath of the uninhabitable Sun.
5:04 AM. In distant trees, the birds sing.
5:05 AM. Cerulean light saturates the sky.
5:51 AM. The Earth rises again.
6:29 AM. Stepping inside the apartment complex, Barry recognizes immediately that he smells like the Earth, like the fire endowed to his soles as he eases the door to his abode open.
6:30 AM. Iris sleeps on.
6:31 AM. He doesn't wake her, brewing a fresh pot of coffee.
6:32 AM. It would be easy to shower and wash away the dirt and lightning suffusing his skin, to pretend that he is a creature aside from the Earth, a man, noun, an animal ascended to a plane of cosmic existence so divorced from the Universe it has forgotten the Universe's original language and is instead forced to construct its own reinterpretation of that language.
6:33 AM. Humanity is nonsensical.
6:34 AM. Barry basks in the morning light.
6:35 AM. He has bacon and eggs on the stove as well as half-a-dozen other food forays in motion within seconds, moving with deliberate intention from task to task, syncing the Speed Force with the Universe so breakfast can cook. He could live in the stillness forever, but there is something irresistible about bacon, and he must be patient to get it. So he slows down.
6:36 AM. He takes a seat at the island and works on a crossword puzzle.
6:37 AM. The problem with super speed – the problem, singular as if there are not a hundred errors in the programming designed to transfer demigodly power upon a fragile and uncooperative body – the singular and unequivocal problem with super speed is that it is subtle, and without the pacemaker of other humans to gauge time, it is easy to slip away, to delve into that realm of stillness and concentration where things don't move forward. Food doesn't cook; breath doesn't come; the Universe waits with cadaverous stillness.
6:38 AM. The crossword puzzle is done. Barry blinks, glances at the clock on the stove, and tries to reel in the dizzying sense of nearly half an hour crushed into less than sixty seconds of time.
6:39 AM. Iris yawns into the kitchen. Her alarm won't go off until 7 AM.
6:40 AM. She doesn't wake up for her alarm anymore. She wakes up for him, even when he tries to be quiet. She says she doesn't mind. Her arms are sleep-warm around his waist, and her cheek rests softly against his shoulder.
6:41 AM. They chat inanely over things that won't be remembered beyond this moment. If asked tomorrow, he couldn't recall what transpires in those sleepy early morning seconds. An inquiry about the food. How'd you sleep?
6:42 AM. He slept fine, for two hours. Then he awoke, like always, an entire night condensed into a quarter of the time. He doesn't know if it is a blessing or a curse to have so much time to descend into his own thoughts.
6:43 AM. At least it gives him plenty of time to finish crossword puzzles.
6:44 AM. He has more time than any other human being, living a life prolonged to ten thousand years when he runs at great speed – mimicking for him nearly perfect stillness. That is the paradox of speed: the faster he moves, the slower the rest of the world appears. He doesn't accomplish herculean feats in the blink of an eye. He toils with Sisyphian intent up the hill, straining against the weight of his own ambitions. Atlas carried the world upon his shoulders, and Barry understands his fate, respects the difficulty of it, because no other god would dare to attempt such a mean, unforgiving task.
6:45 AM. But it is not unrewarding.
6:46 AM. He sees the people he saves day-to-day: Kenneth sits down for coffee at Jitters at the table near him - Kenneth was on the streets heading to work when he was nearly hit by an overeager motorist barreling down the road; Ava acknowledges him with a courteous smile and "Hey, Allen" as she gears up and heads out with Edwin to investigate an older police case – Ava was on the subway that Domino hijacked and would have been crushed between careening cars had it not been for The Flash's timely intervention; Jeremy Boon continues to run for office despite being paralyzed from the waist down by a heavy structural beam – Jeremy still openly regards The Flash as his hero for digging him out of the rubble of the collapsed bank, even though the effort was a-little-too-late.
6:47 AM. There are anonymous stories online of encounters with The Flash, too.
6:48 AM. Barry crunches down on a tender slice of bacon. It's nirvanic.
6:49 AM. Saving strangers who become like friends to him is a task that makes him feel less heroic and more human. In the inimitable words of Spock, humanity longs to live long and prosper. There is a bone-deep desire to carry on, despite the rigors of the unspeaking Universe which offers neither guidance nor consolation for the random suffering it inflicts. They have to keep going, no matter how hard it gets.
6:50 AM. Because the beauty remains, even in the darkness. The hope of Earthrise persists, even in a world full of uncertainty. The very notion that crime will resume should rouse despair, a task that can never be finished, but it almost energizes Barry. He has a task, and he has the capacity to execute it. He is beyond capable.
6:51 AM. He is, until his dying breath, unstoppable.
6:52 AM. Iris showers.
6:53 AM. Barry pours his third cup of coffee.
6:54 AM. The world is soft and quiet around him.
6:55 AM. One day, the world will be quiet in a different way. Humanity will be gone. Earthrise will continue, but the Sun, whose benevolence remains questionable even now, will become wrathful once again, and mercilessly scourge the surface of any survivors. The Earth, once so fertile, will fall into the Martian despair of scorched land and wispy air. It will become its own graveyard. It will cease to resemble this peaceful time, this magnificent time.
6:56 AM. Barry looks out the window, at the bustling city, shielded by steel and stone. It seems immovable today, but he knows that it will fall. Sooner than it may think, but inevitably, at some unfathomably distant point. And the Universe itself will end, driven by forces still barely understood.
6:57 AM. Barry polishes off his breakfast, strangely untroubled.
6:58 AM. Being a forensic scientist entails a level of comfort with finality that few people experience. He knows the smell of formaldehyde with the same intuitive familiarity that most people associate with the ubiquitous siren of gasoline; he has seen more bodies than he could easily count. He does not know all their names. He doesn't want to know all their names. Sometimes, he must act only on the case, and not on the person.
6:59 AM. But looking around himself at his own little pocket of life, even its soreness, even its stresses, he finds peace knowing that he has it.
7:00 AM. And he finds peace knowing that someday, it will end.
7:01 AM. Having it now, however briefly, is a beautiful thing.
7:02 AM. He watches the procession of the Earthrise, aware that there are a hundred billion unaccounted for days, and aware that these tiny moments occupied by himself will fade into the noise of totality, but still untroubled by it all. It is all dust, but it is stardust, and it is precious for it.
7:03 AM. He stands, stretches, exhales.
7:04 AM. Inhaling, he ambles off to lose himself in his routine, to step back into the daily actions that are so normal for him they become automatic, departing from cosmic thoughts to focus on earthier realities.
7:05 PM. With each stiff-legged step, he feels the hardships of the day wearing on him, but even the pain cannot burn off the satisfaction at a job well done as he slouches onto the couch, still in uniform, and finds a very peaceful rest.
7:38 PM. He rises again, and keeps living, and persists in being the hero that Central City needs.
7:39 PM. Sun-up to sun-down.
8:05 PM. The sixth cup of coffee is poured.
8:06 PM. The day goes on.