The Speed Force welcomes its own.
Barry stands in the vast Speed-landscape and feels a stirring in the tall dried-out grass. The jaguar rises and looks at him with golden eyes. Its mouth gapes, and blue clouds fan from its maw. You Seek Me Out, the jaguar rumbles, Why?
Sinking to a knee, Barry says, I'm here because you have called one of your own home. I'm here to replace Wally.
The jaguar sashays closer, brushing a broad, muscular shoulder against his side. Have I Not Been Kind To You? it asks. Have I Not Provided? Why Would You Reject My Gift?
You've been nothing but giving, Barry assures, ducking his head to avoid the piercing golden eyes. I'm here to give back.
The jaguar sinks teeth into his shoulder. Barry flinches but does not jerk away, and the pain never comes. You've Learned, the jaguar muses, releasing him and resuming its prowl. It paces away and says, Come.
Barry follows.
Across an endless Serengeti they wander, the jaguar emerging from the dense grasses periodically, signaling the way. When it lopes ahead, he jogs to catch up. When the Speed Force breaks into a run, Barry gives chase, running full-tilt after it.
They're running until his lungs burn and his eyes water, and then they reach the edge of the plain and Barry cannot slow down, and he trips into nothingness as the jaguar vanishes.
Within the darkness, he drifts for an indefinite time. It's worse than a vacuum, because even in a vacuum he possesses a sense of self. Here, he could lose everything, from the core of his being to the quarks he is made of, until the only thing left is the imperishable Speed with which he was gifted. Within that Speed, he senses a rhythm, a pulsating reminder to exist, and he clings to it. Don't let me die, he entreats it, even as time passes and nothing changes.
Then, all at once, his hands and knees hit a hardwood floor. He would recognize it even without the aroma of coffee, the idea of early-morning clientele impressed on spotless, unoccupied chairs. There's a fresh pot of cover brewing somewhere. A craving in his gut deepens into an ache. A song he recognizes plays in the background, faint enough to be forgettable, impossible to ignore once he hears it.
All the broken hearts in the world still beat, let's not make it harder than it has to be, oh-h-h-h it's all the same, girls-chase-boys-chase-girls.
There's a lump in his throat that has no basis in reality.
You Gave Me A Gift, the Speed Force tells him. Why Would You Take It Away From Me?
The woodwork fades until the walls are covered in flyers and notices, familiar mementos at the CCPD. The song is the last to disappear.
He would recognize the forensics' lab even without the attention to detail. Barry does a slow circle in the center of the room, taking it all in. Everything is immaculate, constructed from memory. Even the disorder is exact, the misplaced and miscellaneous items adding something to the scene. The big windows open out onto an ambiguous azure sky. A distant threat of rain drifts, light, cold air easing under the cracked margin near the sill. Papers flutter in the breeze. Chemicals chill in their containers.
Our Life, the Speed Force remarks, and then Barry hears footsteps and Eddie Thawne finishes out loud, "Was worth something."
Barry stares at him. He can't speak. He couldn't move if he caught fire.
"Hi, Barry," Eddie – the Speed Force – says. He smiles at Barry. There's a darkness in his eyes that isn't joyful, but sad, and forlorn, and funereal. "What are you doing here?"
Barry opens his mouth to speak and the only word he can say is, "Eddie."
"What did I die for, Barry?" Eddie asks bluntly.
It hurts. "To stop the Reverse Flash."
"Ostensibly, yes," Eddie concedes, taking a seat on the corner of a desk. "But do you honestly think that I shot myself because I wanted to be a hero?"
Barry frowns, and dares to step closer. "Why did you?"
"Because I cared about you, and Iris, and Joe, more than my own life," Eddie corrects simply. "I won't deny that heroism played a role – I did it for a conceptual world, not an actual world, one where Eobard couldn't hurt anyone – but the reason I was able to pull the trigger? Was you. You gave me a reason."
It's been two years; it feels like last night. "I didn't want you to," Barry says thickly. "I didn't want you to get hurt, Eddie."
Eddie pushes off the desk and steps up to him, a hand on his shoulder. There's an earnestness in his expression that aches. "I know." Rubbing his thumb over Barry's aching, sore shoulder – will it ever heal? He half-thinks the pain is chronic, even though he couldn't bring himself to tell the others once the visible wound disappeared – Eddie says, "You have a good heart. Good-hearted people don't like it when their friends die."
"Iris was going to marry you," Barry says, and the tears come. "She said yes. She was going to—"
Eddie squeezes Barry's shoulder, silencing him. "Barry," he says, very firmly, "it's not your fault. It was my choice."
"I'm so sorry," Barry whispers, and Eddie sighs and pulls him into a hug.
"I know you proposed," he tells Barry, and Barry tries to pull away, to justify, but Eddie doesn't let him go, so he stays instead, rigid. "I know it didn't work out exactly the way you'd hoped it would. Neither of those things are set in stone. You can always change the future." Then, with a rueful smile, he qualifies, "You can if you're still alive. Once you're dead, there's not much you, personally, can do. But your legacy can. Mine resides with you, and Iris, and Joe."
Barry curls his hands tentatively into the back of Eddie's shirt. "Come home with me," he pleads, "Iris, Joe – we miss you. So much."
Eddie steps back and Barry wishes he could bring himself to hold on, but he lets Eddie go instead. "I'm sorry, Bar," he says sincerely. "I wish I could."
Thunder rumbles, and he smiles a little. "That's my cue."
"Stay," Barry pleads, reaching for his sleeve, but he turns and slips away, vanishing.
Tears track down Barry's face as the storm continues to build behind him, low, dissonant rumbles of thunder that prompt him to shut the window. He leaves it and shuts his eyes and opens them to a cold, familiar rounded chamber.
There's an engineer tinkering with the tube lining of the particle accelerator above him. "It's so much more temperamental when it rains," Ronnie muses, not looking at him. "It shouldn't be, but it is."
Barry takes a step forward, and Ronnie swivels. "I spent the better part of a year locked out of my own body. You, of all people, understand that."
Barry thinks, Nine months and has the disconcerting impression of lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors, a sheet up to his bare chest, a corpse-like air hanging around him, nine months, two-hundred-and-seventy-eight days of stillness in front of him. It's vast and unconquerable from this side, knowing it happened; but it's in his past, and he never knew a day had passed.
He fell asleep one night and woke up nine months later. Or, rather, he was struck by lightning, which almost killed him, and awoke nine months later able to run faster than the speed of sound. A far less gentle process for far more spectacular rewards. Ronnie can relate to that, too.
"I thought at times it would have been better if I'd died in the explosion," Ronnie says, returning to his tinkering, turning a wrench around a bolt. "Get it over quick, right? Instead I was stuck with another voice in my head telling me that I wasn't Ronnie Raymond. It was trippy."
Barry thinks about the voice that called to him in the dark, wake-up, a voice he can attribute once and only to the Speed Force, and he nods sympathetically. He gets trippy. We kind of invented that here, Speed Force Joe once told him.
Speed Force Ronnie finishes the first bolt and moves on to a second. "But a second chance was what I wanted. However imperfectly, however temporarily, a second chance to live was better than a quick death. So I held on. And eventually you and Caitlin and Cisco rescued me. You brought me home, for the first time in almost a year. I can't describe how powerful that feeling was. Like a paraplegic regaining the ability to walk."
Bolt number three submits to Ronnie's industrious hand without complaint. Barry steps closer, intrigued, and Ronnie says, "Pass me that?" And Barry reaches down for a bolt from the kit on the floor, passing it up without ever making direct contact. After Eddie, he doesn't think he can bear to. "Cait used to say she'd give up anything to spend another minute with me," Ronnie goes on, undeterred. "Trust me when I say the feeling is mutual. But I'm glad that we got to spend our imperfect and all-too-fleeting time together."
Finishing the final bolt, he sets down the wrench and seizes Barry's shoulder with unexpected force, startling a gasp from him. It hurts, and he knows the Speed Force is sending a message, loud and clear, by allowing it to. "Feel that? That's alive, Barry. That's the kind of aching," he squeezes hard enough it drives tears to Barry's eyes, "twisting, gnawing pain that drives us to exist. Without it..." He lets go, and Barry's eyes almost roll back when heat sears the throbbing wound. "We stop existing."
Then the pain is gone and Ronnie is too, and Barry is left gasping in the middle of a field, knees in the grass, hand clutching his right shoulder. Why did you do that? he asks the Speed Force.
"You were getting soft," Leonard Snart replies, and Barry's lip curls in a slight snarl in spite of himself. He forces himself back to his feet to regard Snart, approaching from the opposite side of the meadow. It's strange to see him outside of his signature outfit, wearing far more subdued street clothes. Like Eddie, like Ronnie, he presents himself simply. Unapologetically.
When Barry tenses, Snart rolls his eyes. "Relax, kid. I'm not here to freeze you." He holds out his hands in an I-come-in-peace gesture Barry doesn't buy for a second. "You don't exactly listen to the nice people in your life, so we thought you might pay closer attention to the ones who brought you pain." He smiles crookedly. "Lucky you."
"Why do you care if I listen?" Barry asks.
Snart ignores him and crouches in front of him. "You really wanna die that bad?" he asks bluntly.
Barry shudders. He shakes his head slowly. "I want to save Wally," he rasps. "Whatever it takes."
Snart huffs and straightens. "C'mon. I want to show you something."
Without waiting for Barry to respond, Snart turns, and they're facing the city, and it's different, colder, quieter. More hostile. "This is what Central City is like without its beloved Scarlet Speedster," Snart explains, initiating a walking tour Barry cannot refuse. "The crime rate spikes fourteen percent in the first week. Six-hundred-and-ninety-two casualties in the first year alone. The metahumans got busy."
Barry feels sick. Snart doesn't stop walking, and he doesn't, either.
"They'll hold a very nice public funeral for you in about six months," Snart prophecies chillingly. "You'll be deeply missed. Even after ten years, people still show up at your grave to ask for comfort you can no longer give in person. It's strange because the grave they think contains your body is just an empty lot. You get to die Barry Allen, buried in a far more discreet corner of the universe, with only the most dearly beloved to gather."
"I don't want to hear this," Barry tells Snart forcefully, interjecting as much sternness as he can into his voice.
"Tough shit," Snart replies, leading him down an alley. There's a big yellow lightning bolt on the wall. "A lot of people look for you. People are desperate to believe their hero is still out there, somewhere. They think you just went away for a while. I suppose, all things considered, they wouldn't be entirely incorrect."
Pausing, Snart turns to look right at him. There's something truly cold in his eyes when he says, "It destroys Joe. And Iris. And Cisco, and Caitlin. They stop fighting crime. They stop hanging out together. It's too painful. Any reminders of the team they once were are reminders of the Flash they no longer have." He steps closer. "Tell me, Scarlet, what part of 'you will be missed' didn't sink in the first time? Or do you simply not care?"
Barry finds his mouth is improbably dry. "Of course I care," he says.
"Then prove it."
Barry smiles humorlessly. "I'd love to, but see, that's the thing." And he looks right at Snart, until Snart dissolves, and it's an orangutan folding back on its haunches, looking at him with those familiar golden eyes. "You demand a sacrifice. I refuse to let it be Wally."
I Demand Recompense, the Speed Force corrects, lifting a hand to wave nonchalantly. I Demand What I Am Owed, And Nothing More, And Nothing Less.
Barry shakes his head, and puts himself right in the path of those lethally-powerful arms. "You can't have Wally."
The orangutan exhales red into his face. Return To Me What I Am Owed, the Speed Force says at last. Bring Me Savitar.
"I'm not leaving without Wally," Barry says seriously, and his world goes utterly dark, that drifting, endless place again, and he repeats it, as loudly as he can, no voice at all. I'm not leaving without Wally. I'm not leaving without Wally. I'm not leaving without Wally.
Suddenly, he can see Wally, but there's a strong, deadly current sweeping him away, and the Speed Force doesn't say anything but he knows, he knows he can drown in this, and there is a shore to either side, and he may swim to either of them. Be safe and dead – or at risk and alive.
Leave And Go Home, the Speed Force ultimates, Or Stand Your Ground And Die.
Barry takes a deep breath and plunges relentlessly on.
He is aware of an endless time, his lungs filling with water, his strength waning as he fights the current, needing to get to Wally, having to get to Wally, and finally lunging out of the water onto shore once he's in reach. You can't have him, he tells the Speed Force, dizzy and sedated, running out of time but refusing to let go, refusing to let Wally dissolve like the others.
He's part of my life. He's coming home with me.
Then his vision goes dark and he disappears, swept under an inescapable tide.
. o .
Barry heaves for breath, twisting onto his stomach so he can cough up water, and Wally is shaking beside him, but he's shaking beside him, and Barry has never been so relieved.
"You're okay," he tells Wally, forcing himself onto his knees, a hand on Wally's back. "Hey, hey, hey, you're okay."
"Barry?" Wally asks.
"Yes," Barry says seriously, reaching out, snagging his sleeve, reinforcing it. "I'm getting you home, Wally."
I'm getting us home.
He looks out across the Speed-savannah he knows and says, Let us go.
The Speed Force materializes as an elephant this time, a low rumbling preceding it. Why Should I? it challenges.
Because you want to live, Barry retorts, and he knows it in his bones, knows that the reason Speed Force presents him with these worlds at all is because they are all it knows, and all it knows of worlds derives from him and his experiences. Let me help you live.
It happens in a blink, one moment stranded, the next crashing into the cortex.
There is too much noise for Barry to process and he Flashes reflexively out of reach, leaving Wally, I'm-sorry-Wally, at their mercy. Skating to a halt outside the city, he feels his heart pound, his hands shake, each breath in his lungs richer than it's ever been. He can still feel the Speed Force, under his skin, a pulse he cannot escape, a rhythm he sways to, dancing and basking and emoting in a field of existence it cannot master without him.
Bring Me My Recompense, the Speed Force commands. Bring Me Savitar.
Barry reaches up and tugs the cowl off his face, but he can still feel the lightning in his eyes, a tangible reminder of how inseparable it is from him, and he ducks his head.
Inhale. Exhale.
Alive tastes better than he remembered.
"I will," he rasps, his voice old and unused, deep into a cold. "I will."
At STAR Labs, Iris all but tackles him in a relieved hug, Cisco and Caitlin fuss, and HR and Julian chime in with remarks about how they can't believe it actually worked and how the hell did you do that, Allen?
Barry smiles slightly. "I asked nicely," is all he says.
He hugs them all, and drinks a cup of coffee uninterrupted for three whole minutes, savoring its tang, aware that Speed Force which cannot taste understands the idea through him, that Speed Force which cannot smell can mimic the pleasure through his comprehension.
To be anything other than the void, he realizes, it needs him and his experiences. It needs help. It aches for living.
I'll live, he promises it.
I'll live, he promises his team, his family, his friends. Nothing will stop me from what I can do.
If he only gets one more day, one more hour, one more minute, he will make it count. Wherever he ends, he will end, without warning, without grace, interrupted in the middle of a sentence but living a full life. And whatever he does, he will uphold the mantle he has assumed, the commitment he has agreed to.
My name is Barry Allen.
And I am The Flash.