I have to get rid of the body.
It's the first thought that breaks across Atlas's back, leaving numbness in its way. Barry backs away from the corpse, back against the wall, breathing quickly. He has to – he has to go. Get fresh air, get distance, get anything but acquainted with the dead man in front of him. Don't touch it. Don't even look at it. Don't move, don't breathe, don't think.
Easier said than done when he's in the sterile STAR Labs' environment, watching the simulation unfold from a distance. When there is a formerly-animate body less than two feet from him, he cannot escape the reality. He cannot pretend that it didn't happen, that it isn't real, that the air he's sharing isn't perverted by a cadaver. It will only take a few hours for the grotesque, the macabre to settle in, decomposing Rothstein into a bloated, rancid, blue-toned memory of his living self. Already, trapped in the mausoleum, Barry breathes shallowly in anticipation.
"Barry? Are you okay?" Cisco's voice is staticky in his ear, distant and unimportant. Mind reeling, Barry reaches up with shaking fingers and flicks the comms off. His heart pounds, but he cannot hear it over the ringing in his ears, cannot process his surroundings as his vision greys out.
Don't pass out.
He tries to force in a deep breath, but it doesn't want to come, the air is so thin here, and he knows he has to act because not acting is killing him, as surely as the radiation pouring into Rothstein killed him.
Standing by, Barry watched through the lead-protected glass as the man died. Died not only assuredly but in agony, writhing and screaming, clawing at the air in a futile attempt to escape the burning, eviscerating radiation. He only wanted to survive the attack – his animal instinct responded to the painful stimulus like any lab rat, tortured to death but still struggling every inch between it and its end – but he didn't stand a chance without a miracle.
Barry was that miracle. And he stood by.
He was a bad person, he thinks, but already the ghosts are breathing over his shoulders, whispering to him, are you sure, are you sure? He tries to force great evil upon Al Rothstein, to demonize the corpse in front of him, to make his nonexistence a gift to the world rather than a tragedy. It seems cruel and inhumane to assign greater blame than is due to the defenseless dead, and he finds his chest tightening with guilt as he catches himself in the act.
Rothstein murdered his twin – his doppelganger – and went after The Flash. He disrupted a very public ceremony, but he didn't hurt anyone else. Rothstein said it himself – he wasn't after anyone else, just him, just The Flash.
It was self-defense, Barry thinks, hands splayed across the walls, still stinging with residual heat. Recalling the face of the dying man, I am the last person Rothstein ever saw, Barry thinks about his own coolness, his own detached mask, and how truly inhuman he must have appeared, all dressed in red and demanding answers from Rothstein's last breaths. Maybe, he thinks, heart twisting, he needs to demonize Rothstein simply to justify his own demonic behavior.
Rothstein did terrible things – killed – but, Barry can admit, eyes closed and wretched, he didn't deserve to die.
You could have saved him.
It whispers in his ear as he crouches next to the corpse, hands trembling as he reaches forward. Rothstein is heavy, and he has to slow down before the Speed Force will come to him, and still the voice whispers in his ear. You could have saved him. You could have stopped this. This is all your fault. At superspeed, it's straightforward to pick up Rothstein's body, even if the weight on his shoulders makes him gag. Why did you do this?
He doesn't have answers. He drops Rothstein's body off in the morgue, intending to Flash back up to the land of the living, but he's arrested by the sight of black-and-blue death. It hits him hard, the fact that they have a morgue in their basement, like death is so predictable it deserves its own chair at the table, shaking hands with them, understanding the alliance: we'll kill for you, just let us live long enough to do it. He wants to vomit but fears the consequences, what spirits will come for him when he is hunched over and vulnerable. Swallowing hard, he retreats in a near panic to the other side of the door, slamming it shut behind him with a loud, echoing boom.
What're they gonna do?
It's perspiration under his suit, how are we gonna right this? because there is no way to right it. No person exists in a vacuum: even Rothstein must have had unfinished affairs, associates, friends. Thinking about the degree to which Rothstein's first impression may have cooled Barry's overall regard for him makes him want to sink into the earth and hide for a very long time. He would wait until a century or two passed over before crawling back to the surface, insulated by obscurity. No one would know him, here; he'd be able to start over, here.
But Rothstein will always be dead.
Rallying himself, he looks at the Reaper of his own mind, the Reaper of his own construction leaning down and breathing sanity into his ears, why would you do such a terrible thing, what possessed you, what made you think this permanent solution was the only answer? and steels himself against it. People die. He cannot save them all. He could not save Bette, Farooq, Tony, Hannibal, Danton, Clyde, Ronnie, Eddie —
But I caused this.
It's the primary difference, the fundamental, exhausting, world-changing difference. I caused this.
Death walks alongside him as he marches back to the upper levels, reconstructing a calmer demeanor. He cannot change it. He cannot alter it. It has happened. All he can do is live with it.
As guilt-free and contemptuously as he can, rooted in his certainty that Rothstein deserved to be put down, that he deserves to kill, to be a vigilante.
They're waiting for him in the Cortex, and he's almost sane when he slips into their midst, but he knows, he knows the skeletons in the closet will never stop whispering to him.
What kind of hero are you?
. o .
Entering the courtroom hounded by flashing cameras, Barry feels the weight of the ghosts on his shoulders and knows he cannot profess his own innocence.
I've killed, he thinks, surrounded by an audience of the naïve, the innocent, the ruthlessly inquisitive. I've killed accidentally, indirectly, in self-defense, and in cold blood. He glances over at his opponents, the prosecutor, the wolf-hunter, the man who has chosen to pursue justice in the just way, through the system, and knows that opposing him is denying himself. I am a wolf. And DeVoe set the right trap.
Wounded, bloody paw torn from the trap, he chose to stay at the scene of the crime, to be caught rather than flee.
I didn't kill him, Barry thinks, sizing up his audience, judge and jury, apart from the prying public eyes. But I have killed before.
When the judge announces the jury's verdict, he just closes his eyes and thinks, This is atonement.
. o .
One day, months later, after the conviction has been overturned and he is well and truly free, he will visit the graves of the dead and lie flowers for them.
It is a practice he vowed never to do on the job, knowing how heart-wrenching it would be to treat the objects of his fascination as human. It would destroy him, imagining every story, every life cut short by tragedy. He cannot think about the dead, their family, their friends, their place in the world. He can only regard the IDs and the crime scene itself, like life is behind a screen, and he does not have to engage with it if he just looks at the labels instead of the objects themselves.
But stepping up to each headstone, he regards the names, tracing each individual letter – Clyde A. Mardon, Bette San Souci, Danton E. Black, Ronald G. Raymond – before laying a single white rose for each of them. He lingers at each site, staring at the dates, at the graves themselves, absorbing the lack of ornamentation, the simple extravagance of epithets, the quiet apologies of nearly blank slates.
It takes a while to get to them all, refusing to Flash through it, looking over the graves of strangers and wondering what has become of their loved ones, their places in the universe.
Still, he feels cold, and detached, and a little bit broken.
. o .
Two years of grief counseling finally permit Barry to talk about the dead with the honor, the respect, the solemnity they deserve. There are still strings on him, some broken, some intact, but they no longer tie him to the world on his back, the everything pressing down on his shoulders. They are simply part of him, his history, his legacy, his justice and his mission.
It's part of him, just as loving his family and friends is part of him, the ritual of life and loss, but sitting with a cup of coffee in Jitters during a quiet summer lull, he finds himself at ease with the shadows. They're there, but they are not the totality of who he is, and the insidious whispers have changed.
Do better.
And even when he fails, he holds onto that motto for comfort, for strength, and for the ability to carry on.