A/N: Many thanks to gaycloak for betareading this.
Warnings: for canonical character death(s) and grief/mourning.
Savitar is a monster in her mind for months before she knows he's Barry. But he isn't Barry, her Barry, not in the ways that count. That's what she tells herself, so easy to believe right up until he's standing in front of her. She sees the tenseness around his eyes suddenly softening as he looks at her properly for the first time since he entered the medbay.
She wants to believe then that he can be saved because he's every bit Barry in all the other ways that matter. He's more, years of pain piled on top of him, but he's under there somewhere still or he wouldn't be here contemplating their offer. He may be broken down, contorted by the pressure of his destiny into a Barry who is beyond true recognition - his life turned out so different without her - but he still looks to her with such care. Care that somehow now, like he says, can be love or hate. This version of Barry seems so foreign on the surface and yet she can feel the hint of his familiar presence behind his sharp edges. It doesn't feel like he's so different in the moment, with how he slows to a cautious speed under her attention, nor the way he leans into her touch against his cheek.
But he is a monster too. Always scheming, planting a bomb the moment after she made a solemn promise to help him, like her love is disposable, that he would turn away from it because he couldn't have it all. So little or so much, he lives in the extreme. He is the extreme - the other side to Barry that he balks at seeing. It's no easier for her after weeks of fearing him, of wanting to say screw destiny all over again but knowing that that didn't work out for her before. Being a hero has its price, that keeps manifesting its retribution in human lives. Those he saves and those he can't.
And she fears deep down this won't end without death. She isn't wrong; it just differs in the details. It's not her the fatal blow strikes. It's HR bleeding out on the plaza and Savitar's then doomed existence that breaks the loop they have been living. A redirect of the expected cost, a change none of them saw coming. Crisis averted.
Savitar goes down with her parting shot - Barry spared from the darkness of ending this - and destiny takes him away, erased from all but memory. He does stay with her though. She can't forget. Not the months of terror or how Savitar - with Barry's face so twisted in his anger- stole her breath in such shock when she saw who he was for herself.
Her breath still catches when she spies traces of his expression on Barry's face on rare occasions, the disturbing echo of a possibility she is nevertheless sure will never be. It's yet another moment Savitar steals from her and Barry, another moment that will forever be tainted. A passing doubt she rejects full force each time. The same doubt tells her worse things about herself - the cost of saving her too high, it says. Those things are burned into her brain, relived in feverish dreams of what could have been, what was elsewhere or elsewhen.
She's lucky, so lucky. She's lucky HR stayed on this Earth and she can't repay him for his sacrifice except by living well. She's lucky too that she's a good shot; Joe taught her well and she practiced, kept it up because she knew the day would come when she might need to be her own damn hero. She just never expected who she'd need saving from. Iris knows what she did was necessary, she's proud to protect her family - Barry included as her best friend and her love - but sometimes she mourns for Savitar because he was Barry as well.
A Barry never mourned by anyone, who gave up wishing for anyone to. He too disappeared into the Speedforce, with another kind of destiny. One darker and more consuming than her Barry will ever know. But when her Barry walks into the Speedforce to take the place left empty by Savitar, it doesn't feel any less a punishment for him, not to her. Was Savitar meant to be put back in his cage instead? Did they fail after all? There are no answers, just infuriatingly soft smiles from a woman who is not a woman, not a person, who is not his mother but he follows anyway, with his own matching smile that strikes new fear in her heart.
The Speedforce takes, over and over, as if it needs a sacrifice to sustain it. And Barry agrees, over and over, (almost) always the martyr. The only time he was not a martyr, he was Savitar – he made her the sacrifice instead, a demand diverted but still due in blood.
In the moments that come after he leaves, when she is alone, she feels the anger. That it happens, that he agrees, that he gives over to everything asked of him. How it is that there is more than one Barry Allen floating about across the timeline and yet she is left with no one?
What she has in the months that follow are hollow lies to repeat about where he is – unknown - and the promises of his return – also unknown - that are so flimsy she begins to despise them just as much. Every time she repeats the words she has to say, she feels wretched with yearning for how things should be. Like they are filling her up with a useless hope and she's drowning from the inside.
Barry's gone. She repeats that too, the unpleasant reminder she needs. Barry's gone. He was gone in June. In July. August. Barry's gone. It's never, Barry's dead, because he isn't, but gone isn't any better when there is no certainty of his return. Still, she never mourns Barry, because she won't let her hope die entirely. Instead, she mourns her old life and what she has given up for the greater good by being part of his, and so part of this cycle the Speedforce perpetuates.
Barry does come back and she hopes, somehow, he always will. No matter the odds. No matter how far he strays in time or dimensions, she's here and he's hers.
Sometimes she does mourn for the other Barry briefly, a feeling welling up within, of regret and anguish for what he became. But he is Savitar to her the rest of the time, a monster just the same. The world is better without him. She keeps telling herself that. She keeps calling him by his chosen name, the name of a wannabe God who failed to escape his pain. Only succeeding in inflicting it on others, an enforced burden shared. Most days, most moods, she can't let him be Barry any more than he could let himself be. Savitar is dead, buried in a Barry she hopes is at rest somewhere, sometime. Not hers.