prompt by anisstaranise, inspired by an Altlivia/Lincoln scene on Fringe. title taken from Echoes of Time.
.
I'll Be There, I'll Be Waiting in the Echoes of Time
.
.
Rain pellets against one of the nursery windows, scaring away the sleep gently nipping at her peripheral vision. She's going on two hours of sleep every night for the past week, more her own fault than her newborn daughter's—she can't help but fuss over every little sound; the slightest cry, sneeze, or even cough has her by Nora's side for a decent half hour, before an equally exhausted speedster forces her to return to bed. Maternal instinct Patty and Iris had both called it, but she highly doubts most moms collected blood tests for extensive genetic screening. Initial tests hadn't shown a thing, no metahuman abilities, no mutations, but hers and Barry's blood did, and she couldn't figure out how neither of them passed that on. Maybe they were latent mutations. Maybe they got exceptionally lucky. Either way, she worried.
She turns the engagement ring around her finger three times—there was another one right there many years ago, and she's not quite used to this one, even though this one's meant to stay. This one's meant to last. Barry won't be taken, and he won't leave her. Closing her eyes she repeats it like a mantra; Nora's sound asleep in her cot, the new house primed to be filled with memories of a family she once dreamed up with another man. Barry made it all worthwhile, the pain and suffering, the losses along the way; they'd withstood all of that together, and there's nothing that could destroy the sense of home he'd become. Still, she worries, the mantra never quite sinking into the right neural pathways to become muscle memory, and so she's wide awake, in the baby's room, waiting for her fiancé to return home.
A few minutes later, as if he'd heard her calling across the distance, the front door opens downstairs, Barry's whisper inaudible, a faint creak in the floorboards betraying his ascent. It speaks to Barry's powers of observation that he looks for her in the nursery first.
"Hey, you," he whispers, before walking over to Nora's cot, tugging the soft blue blanket a little higher over her small shoulders. The stars in Barry's eyes were born the same minute the nurse put Nora in his arms, the second their eyes locked over this small miracle of life they created together—there's nothing in this world she could yet experience that will overpower that sense of belonging, of existing in the exact right moment in time and overflowing with love. Science explains it, so she should understand it. But it still takes her by surprise.
"Why aren't you asleep?" Barry looks up at her, one hand remaining near their daughter.
"Cisco called." She crosses her arms over her chest. "Said to keep an eye on you. Care to elaborate?"
If the sudden break in eye contact is anything to go on, Barry had decidedly not planned on telling her anything. Since her pregnancy he's been more protective than usual, and that hasn't changed in the weeks since the baby arrived. She might not be at the lab as often as she used to these days, but the Cortex is no place for a baby—she and Barry both agreed they'd keep Nora away from metahumans and S.T.A.R labs for as long as they possibly could, so she committed to making that sacrifice. So far it hasn't been a sacrifice at all, seeing that perfect little face day-in day-out lifts her spirit, it's taken some of the bite of the past. But she and Barry share a life. He can't keep her out of the loop.
Barry scratches the back of his head. "I think I time travelled."
"What?" She blinks, urging Barry out of the room so they won't wake the baby. "How?"
"I don't know." Barry shrugs, leaving the door ajar so they might hear Nora if she needs them. "I wasn't even using my speed. One second I was tracking a metahuman, the next I was in the same street staring at– my future self."
"The future?"
Barry grimaces, "The future says 'hi'."
In the grander scheme of things they'd seen over the past five years this wasn't the craziest thing—Barry had travelled to the past a few times, and they'd had visitors from the future more often than she cared for, but not even Rip Hunter had been willing to pull Barry forward into the timeline.
"Wh– what did Cisco say?" she asks. "What if you changed something? What if–"
What if they're in danger? She doubts Barry's future self would mean them any harm, but what about any of the future dangers? Reverse Flash looked for Barry's original timeline for centuries, what if this is the event that leads him right to them? Should they get Nora out of here?
"I wasn't there long enough to change anything," Barry hushes, drawing his hands soothingly down her arms, the last thing she hears, "Don't worry," before he fades into a white blur in front of her eyes.
Staggering a step back her vision clears as fast as it disappeared, but so has Barry, so have the boxes that lined the hallway moments ago—the carpet below her feet changed colors, the door to her right opened to a room she strains to recognize as the same she left behind. If she were to look she thinks the whole house must've changed, morphed around her like the hand of time spun a wheel—there's no doubt about it; somehow, inexplicably, she's made it to the past, or the future, too. No Speed Force, no Wave Rider, not even a tachyon canon.
But how?
She turns into the room, a bedroom with the same dimensions as Nora's nursery, except now there's a bed for a grown person, posters on the wall of people or bands she doesn't recognize, science books neatly alphabetized along several shelves in a bookcase she's only ever dared imagine.
"Hello, Caitlin," a voice scratches behind her, and she turns without panic or worry, because she can guess, she can make assumptions based on what information she's gotten—Barry travelled through time without the Speed Force and now so has she. Soft brown eyes greet her, a mirror image of herself with a few key differences. She won't pretend it's the first time seeing a different version of herself, but the streaks of grey along her temples betray the ripple in time, the lines set deeper around her eyes, but around her mouth all the same, and she's afraid to ask. She grows scared of assuming too much.
So the only rational thing that comes to mind is, "Time displacement. It was the meta, not Barry."
Her future self smiles, the act so effortless she thinks she must do it all the time, laugh and cheer and overflow with happiness. Somewhere in the future there'll still be reasons to smile. "Time displacement as a defense mechanism," the future Caitlin Snow says, folding her hands together. Two rings. Faded over time.
"You shouldn't tell me that."
Knowing the future is too dangerous, changing the future even more so, and her future self should know better—they shouldn't both exist in the same moment in time, but they do, now, the future and the present, the present and the past.
"I'm only telling you what I heard myself twenty-three years ago."
"Twenty-three?" The room spins, the posters and the books and the bed, the two pairs of heels at the door, the dress hung behind it—it's still a girl's room, a young woman's room; a young woman away at college? at work? moved out and living on her own? She staggers towards the dresser by the bed, a single picture frame atop it. Her and Barry and two young adults. A girl and a boy.
"Nora," she breathes, while her eyes fill with tears; a twenty-three year old Nora, long brown hair worn straight down, Barry's eyes, her smile. Nora's health has been a constant worry, coating her veins throughout her pregnancy, leaving her not a moment's rest because she had to know what kind of damage Eobard Thawne had yet done—this man who'd hunted Barry through time itself, a mentor until the day he betrayed them all.
"Our perfectly healthy baby girl," her future self says, teary-eyed herself. "She'll be a handful once she discovers her speed, but no side effects of what Eobard did to us."
The words prove her salvation, her release, her unconditional surrender. She's been so worried she hasn't been sleeping, she hasn't even thought about going back to work, she's fussed and shouted at the gentlest man she's ever known and subjected her newborn little supernova to blood tests. What kind of mother does that? Twenty-three years from now Nora will have a normal life, or whatever passes as normal in the Allen-Snow household by then; she'll have both her parents looking after her, and maybe an uncle Cisco and aunt Iris to teach her the occasional mischief. She'll be a speedster, just like Barry. Just like her daddy.
Touching her fingers to the glass she wishes she could tear this picture with her through the time continuum—but Barry doesn't need proof, he doesn't worry about the same things she does. "She's beautiful," she whispers.
"Just like her mom."
This time she's greeted by watery green eyes and a smile she'd recognize everywhere, at any time, in any universe. The best man she knows. The best daddy she could've hoped to give her daughter. "Barry."
"Hey, you," the phrase echoes through time and space, the arm he folds around her future self, the ring gleaming around his finger too—they make it. They will make it. Twenty-three years. A grown daughter, and—a son? Maybe? The boy in the picture shares Barry's smile, her brown eyes. Will he be a speedster, too?
It's all so much to take in, and she turns to face the window overlooking the backyard, where she can make out the red swing set she and Barry had thought about buying for when Nora got older—this house has been lived in and tears run down her cheeks at the thought that she and Barry will make that happen, that they'll nail picture frames along the hallway walls and leave scuff marks on their immaculate hardwood floors, that there'll be voices echoing through every room, happy and sad all the same, but that life will breathe this all into perspective.
"You can stop checking out my young ass," her future self scolds her husband, but before she can show the shock on her face, before she can turn around again and scold her future self in return for that kind of language, the room blurs again—she's pulled from the future as fast as she got there, and finds herself in the nursery again, next to a tiny sleeping Nora.
"Cait!" Barry storms through the door. "What the hell just happened?"
Nora stirs, but doesn't wake, so she cries, "The future says 'hi'," and falls into Barry's arms. It's all too much to hold it in, the promise the future holds, the potential now vibrant in her present and she cries for all the years to come, all twenty-three of them that will live inside her, every moment, every new star, every memory carved out along the way. Somewhere in her mind's eye she sees the echo of them across time, across a space yet to be transformed. Twenty-three years. And they'll make it.
.
Twenty-three years later she watches her younger self fade back to her proper time, right after playfully elbowing her husband in the ribs. She'd been waiting a long time for this day, and when Barry told her earlier he came face to face with a younger self, a distant and fleeting memory for him, she knew where to wait. Because that memory proved her salvation, a weight lifted after months of worry, and she knew that one day she would be able to grant her past self that relief. Barry saved her in so many ways, for so long, but that night she saved herself.
Barry rubs at his side, but pulls her closer, still needing her there after all these years—it'd seemed daunting at the time, the thought of the past two decades, like a faraway dream that might still get stolen, but here she is, travelled the long way round. Here they are, for better or worse, a daughter working at Mercury Labs and a son recently off at college. If she thinks about it too long it hurts her brain, no matter how much she knows about quantum physics—but that tiny time loop holds together so much of her life it deserves credit.
"You never told me about this," Barry says, kissing her hair.
She lovingly pats at Barry's chest. "I like to think I still have some secrets left."
Her worries were never Barry's; he feared he wouldn't be a good enough dad, that having a family would be them in harm's way, that loving anyone like they were the sun and the moon and the stars combined would make them a target. But time had discounted those worries too; and the world had more than one speedster looking after it now.
"I love you, Dr Snow."
"I love you too, Professor Allen."
.
.
fin
.