Prompt:
Any character that is a parent (or has a ward) / ...in a story that begins, 'The pictures were faded...'
I don't own D.C. Comics or Bart Allen, and I appologise for any canon mess-ups. I don't really have much ability to get comics so I'm going from Wikipedia and what I have read.
The pictures were faded, and in a lot of them you could hardly tell who the picture was of, it was so blurry. It got better when he became kid flash, and the blur was nonexistent after he aged, but you'd be hard pressed to find a picture of his impulse days where he was actually clear. I remembered Bart saying once that Max never bothered taking pictured of him for that reason.
Bart passed almost a year ago, but my eyes still water whenever I look at these pictures, even the most faded and blurry ones. Even the ones that ended up as scenery shots, because he left before the camera clicked.
Especially those ones. They show his spirit, how it was. The youthful exuberance he was famous for, the childish innocence. One of my biggest regrets was trying so hard to make him grow up, make him take life seriously.
Maybe if he never grew up, he wouldn't be dead.
But I have to stop that train of thought, it doesn't achieve anything. The past is the past, and can't be changed, except when it can be. This isn't one of those times, and I'm far to old to run that fast.
There's this one picture. Robin sent me a copy of it, it's of their Young Justice days. Robin's sitting with a laptop on his knees, glaring at the camera with that patented bat-glare. It's easy to see he's been interrupted. Superboy's wearing a mischievous grin on his face, and he's flying through the open window, holding one end of the laptop. Bart's not in this, except as a red and white streak going around the couch Robin is sitting on. They're trying to make him abandon his work and hang out. It's no wonder that poor boy's so depressed, he doesn't have his friends to stop him from overworking himself anymore.
One picture was taken just after Bart joined my family, and it's probably the only one of all his time as impulse that you can see his face. Joan took it one day when he fell asleep on the couch, video game controller still in his hands. He looks so still, but still incredibly lively, like he's dreaming about a carnival. Part of me hates it, because his eyes are closed and even as lively as he is, when he's asleep it isn't hard to imagine him dead. Also, it doesn't show his eyes, and to me those reveal the most about him.
They've been referred to as puppy dog eyes, and that isn't that far off. In them you can see his innocence, but also his mischievous nature, and the restlessness he got whenever he had to stand still for any length of time. As long as I've been alive, I've never seen a pair quite his shade of gold, and I doubt I ever will. It's almost as if they were coloured by his happiness.
If you look at the pictures of him in the gap of time after he ages but before he became the flash you'll see something in them. A pain. His eyes were always so open that I'm sure even a stranger could have seen it, that something was missing. Try as he did to make us believe he didn't want the speed, his eyes revealed the truth.
And how could it be any different? Bart was born with the speed, even lived at it. He knew it as good as he knew normal time, better even. To him, for most of his life, super speed was normal speed. It was everyone else that was weird.
The pictures were getting blurry. I ran the back of my hand over my eyes to clear away the tears, then resumed looking at them. My pictures of Bart.
Bart was dead, very much so. These pictures were the closest thing I'd get to the closest thing I've ever had to a grandson. I flipped the page.