Notes: This was written as part of a fic exchange between myself and Brella over on tumblr. She requested a fic based on the idea that Bart hugs everyone so freely, but has trouble hugging/accepting hugs from Bart. I was a bit free with my interpretation and then also greatly influenced by Runaways and thus produced this. :)
Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Also, the title comes from The Killer's Show You How.
Touch Me Till I Follow in Love
The best thing, Bart knows with absolute certainty, is that a speedster can manipulate time. A moment can pass without notice, fast and blurred and lost to the world in a whirlwind of memories too slow to catch up to him.
But he can also make the moment last. He can move faster than the world, so that each movement around him is orchestrated into a millennium of time.
So he stands there in the middle of a living room with his entire future now barreling through the past, hugging his dead grandfather and thrilling at the sound of a heartbeat.
This is his first hug in years and he counts the seconds long in his head.
"Can you fix this?"
Nathaniel affixes his hands to Bart's shoulders, pleading and desperate. Bart's a little uncomfortable with the fierce look in Nathaniel's eyes and the fact that his warm palms are so close to his neck.
He shrugs the trembling hands away and faces the overwhelming hunk of metal before him. He twists the wrench, half-time to the beat of his heart.
Iris is humming in the kitchen, off-key in a way that tells Bart she's not even aware of what she's doing.
"That's my favorite song," he tells her, and he thinks it's the quietest he's ever been with her.
And when she smiles at him, he runs out the door to pick flowers from the garden.
Like most little boys, Bart grew up thinking he was special.
And he is. He just always thought it was because he was fast.
But then he finds the ragged pieces of a machine in the wreckage of what used to be a heroes' home and he understands why he's special.
He lays a hand on the cold metal and it is the warmest thing he's known in so long.
The day Bart is introduced to the team is not the day that he is introduced to Blue Beetle. Instead, he meets Jaime Reyes.
Jaime flinches in silence, a backward glance over his shoulder with a mutter of Spanish. And that, more than anything else, is the only proof Bart needs. But when he smiles, Bart doesn't feel the familiar shiver of fear down the length of his spine.
Jaime is nothing like he expected. He thinks he likes that.
He hasn't seen the stars in years. As far as he knows, the stars died the day he was taken away from his parents.
Red died in his father's hair. Warmth died in his mother's hug. Spring died in his grandmother's garden, bare though it might have been.
Now, his world is made of ash and clouds, the color gray and the scent of smoke, the steady rumble of far away thunder and the constant roar of "meat."
Bart fits in these strange places in Jaime's life. In the pixilated text on his cell phone. On the small step of his front porch. In the space between his side and his elbow, Jaime's arm looped over his shoulder. In the roll of his eyes and the corner of his smiles. In the pauses of his conversation. In the moments between a laugh and an intake of breath.
A hand pressed to the shoulder, a finger pointed onto the chest, an arm slung around the neck, a soft punch to the arm, a brush of a sleeve.
And sometimes, when it's all too much, he sits on his hands and doesn't touch him at all.
Rings of power pulse around him, bringing shocks to his system. He can feel lightning around his neck and through his veins. All pain is brought to him from a distance, carried through the air on electrical static and vicious laughter.
Blue Beetle never touches him except for the steady glare of his hated gaze.
The world is at a standstill and the edges are blurred. He runs room to room, feeling only after he's gone the press of walls around him as he phases through.
And then there's Jaime.
He's in a pod, red and orange lights like fire around him. He's shirtless and bare, naked to the Reach's studies, all their prodding and planning. He's in a forced sleep with his mouth agape, an empty cavern Bart has only begun to explore in his dreams.
Bart opens the pod and Jaime falls in a graceless arch. And when he catches Jaime, he thinks, this is what it feels like to hold up the world.
"I love you, I love you, I love you."
His mother had whispered it into his hair and for a moment he had been reminded of his grandmother. But it hadn't been a song, it hadn't been a prayer. That was something he had not learned yet, but he had known the feel of it in his skin as she pressed him closer and closer to her. He could feel her imprint on his bones, could feel her fingerprints against his back.
Men in suits come three days later and take his parents in the middle of the night.
And as he's snatched away, torn from his home and his parents and the echoes of love, he knows he will never see them again.
Jaime lays under the harsh glow of the hospital lights and under the thin cotton of the hospital gown. Bart is glad for the mask over his face because he doesn't know how else to hide the tight line of his mouth as he watches his friend writher on the slab of cold metal.
He thinks maybe he should hold his hand, but he can't bring himself to that level of shared intimacy. Instead, his fingers twist into the stubborn cowls of Jaime's sweat-soaked hair, his hand rubs at the tension of his shoulders, his palm rests at the base of his skull. His hands never leave Jaime for longer than a moment.
The seconds between touching are sped up, and the moments of contact are held like lifetimes, each millisecond its own entity.
When his grandmother dies, there is no more music.
Nothing exists outside the strength of his father's hold on his hand. His fingers hurt, but he doesn't say a word.
Running is, and always has been, Bart's greatest escape. More so than one-way time machines, than forced smiles, than crafted lies and cover-ups.
Because when he runs, he only sees the line of the world ahead of him as he trips over the horizon. He only smells the wind hitting the angular planes of his skinny frame, whipping over the stretch of his limps and collecting coolly in the contours of his build. He only thinks of the roar in his ears that goes suddenly and oddly dim as he allows himself to break the sound-barrier with each collective bound.
He doesn't think about the scent of farm and hay still strong in the tightly woven thread of his Kevlar, he doesn't think about Jaime's eyes as he thanked him for staying with him in the medical bay. He doesn't think of the way he's so free with hugs to Barry and Joan and Wally and how his arms had fallen so stilted and unsure as Jaime had lifted his own as though to embrace him. He doesn't think of Jaime's chapped hand cupping over the thin skin around his elbow or the way he had landed a single punch to the exact center of Jaime's chest, letting his knuckles brush unnecessarily at the soft knit of his sweatshirt.
He simply runs home, runs and run and runs, the whole time resolutely ignoring his choice to stay in stealth mode, preferring to stay in a costume stained a single touch.
His mother kisses the red ring around his father's neck, but it remains vivid and scarlet and painful. Bart pretends he can't hear his mother crying.
The deserts of El Paso remind him of his past in such a way that it hurts more than he thought. Here is emptiness as created by nature, not destroyed with weapons.
But he pushes the hurt away, into the small cracks between his ribs and in the corners of his elbows, and reaches up to brush his fingers against Jaime's low hanging ankles.
"Tag! You're it!"
He screams it out into the night air and bolts. Unimpeded speed awaits him, clouds of dust thick and constant behind him as he dashes away. But Jaime has the advantage of height to his advantage of speed, and suddenly like a hawk after prey, Jaime falls out of the sky.
Jaime catches him around the middle, bringing them both down in a flurry of limbs and breathlessness.
"Caught you, ese."
Yes you did, Bart thinks.
What might feel like a second to Jaime is a lifetime of hesitation to Bart, but he pushes the mix of cold armor and warm skin away from him and runs like it's the only thing he knows how to do.
"You're the fastest man in the world, Daddy," he says, running circles around his father until he trips over his own feet. But his father speeds to catch him before he hits the ground.
"Why can't you just run away from the bad guys?" he asks, feet itching to be back on solid floor where they can carry him away from the sad look his father gives him.
His father opens his mouth and closes it again, smiling as he puts Bart back on the ground.
"Run for me, Bart. Show me how you'd run away from bad guys."
Bart takes off like a bullet, laughter peeling behind him like a banner. He runs through the house, a streak of a boy, because he's eight and can still run away from his problems.
His fingers dart lithe and quick over Jaime's back, scripting his name over and over in invisible ink across the smooth expanse of coppery skin.
"Carino," he says in a voice like honey, "what are you doing?"
Bart remains mostly silent, save for the stretch of his skin as he smiles wide and fake at the glorious boy beside him.
He writes his name again, the B looping over a single hitched shoulder blade and the protruding scarab over the raised notches of Jaime's spine. The cross of the T leaves his hands wavering for a single, breathless second before he repeats his motions, this time his invisible lettering cramped and hovering at the columns of Jaime's neck.
If disturbing the past like he has doesn't help, then maybe sense memory will save him. He writes his name countless times, ingraining himself into the very form of Jaime.
Outside the house, the world is crumbling around. But he's six and has not yet learned to notice these things. He only knows the world inside the warmth of his grandmother's arms, as she holds him close and sweet and sings into the tousled hair on his head.
"It never sits right," she had said that morning, trying to brush it flat on his head.
He had giggled and ran away, leaving her a blur behind him until he ran back with a handful of grass in his hands. She told him she loved them more than flowers. He didn't know what flowers are, but he loved the smile on her face.
But now, the grass sits in a tidy pile near his socked feet, sticking out over her bony knees as she tucks him into her hold. The words of her song wash over him, and he slips into a dream where this is enough.
Jaime doesn't say a word, but there is something laced in the length of his eyelashes and in the vortexes made up by the freckles on his nose that tells Bart everything he needs to know.
And for a fleeting second, Bart knows he could end this right now. He could just phase his hand through Jaime's armor, through flesh and rib cage until he pulls back a ravaged heart, scarlet and wet in the palm of his hand. He wonders if the weight on his shoulders would disappear, replaced with the weight of a gushing muscle in his grasp.
But the thoughts run away, reason chased away by want and warmth. Bart holds him, whispering into hair that smells like spices and blood, "We can fix this."
He doesn't know who hears him, but he can feel arms wrap about him, the beat of Jaime's pounding heart a slow staccato against the flutter of his own.
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