Author's Notes: I watched the most incredible Flash fanvid earlier. Title of this fic used a line from the song in the video, "Paralyzed" by NF. It's a truly gorgeous, heartbreaking work. "barry allen | paralyzed," by TheIron GhostGirl.
Go back inside, a quiet, rational corner of his brain entreats. Be with your family.
Barry hunches over on the porch and digs his hands into his hair. He can't feel anything, except the cold, which is world-consuming, and the silence, which is ringing in his ears. His breath hitches in his chest as a shivering, mortal panic creeps over him, but he doesn't feel that like he should, either. There's a wall between him and the world he knows, between cooperative senses and incoherent thoughts. Written across the black canvas of his thoughts is a message: Dad's not dead.
Thunder crackles deep in his soul. He doesn't have to say the words out loud for a knife to sink into his chest. Dad's not dead, he repeats, but he cannot make himself say it out loud. His jaw cracks with the force of trying not to speak. Don't say a word, a childish corner of his brain chimes in, or else you won't be able to fix it.
Right or wrong, don't say a word.
Until this moment he had a mission driving him: stop Zoom. Without it, he flounders. The mission is over; Zoom is dead. Not removed or subdued or de-powered. Dead. Zoom is no longer a target on the wall he can throw knives at, a fury he can chase until both of their feet are on fire. He can't pin Zoom down and scream until his lungs ache. There's no more unflinching expression to egg him on and God he just wants to break, and break, and break—
Barry gasps. Joe told him to ease off, but honestly, Joe, would you have? How could Joe have stood there and said he wouldn't have smashed that easiness from Zoom's shoulders? How could he have pretended that he wouldn't have raged so ferociously they'd weave myths warning about his wrath five hundred years from now? How could he have let his own father die in front of him because he was helpless to stop it, he could never stop it, couldn't—
He's shaking, and he knows he's making broken animal noises, but he can't make himself stop. Dad's not dead, he insists, because he won't let the fight end until it's true. Dad's not dead.
They put a casket on the ground and Barry tried but all his voice would do was produce a thin, aching howl.
Dad's not dead.
Joe said a few words about how hard life was.
Dad's not dead.
Barry put a rose on the casket.
He presses his face against his knees.
It's unbearable. Unbearable in the truest sense of the word, noun, something-that-cannot-be-withstood, something-that-cannot-exist, something-that-can-and-will-kill-you.
He does the only thing he can and Flashes, carving tracks across his city, across his empty streets, his shadow-seeking sidewalks. He ghosts past places he knows and once knew, houses he's never been to, all filled with people he's only ever seen in passing. He storms and sees a world that does not slow or stand still or fall. And the rage builds within him because no one looks up from their lives to see that Achilles has fallen to his knees.
There's nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere else to run.
He collapses at city limits and howls at the moon.
. o .
When he is kneeling at city limits in a world that is not his own, he does not know how he feels.
The same, he thinks, and he aches because it's true.
He can't feel a thing.
. o .
Three months pass and he starts to understand that maybe just maybe he can live with this numbness, this sinking awful certainty that he will lose everything, and everyone, and even more if he stays here.
God, wasn't it supposed to make him happy?
Why doesn't he feel that joy?
. o .
He resets the timeline and finds home isn't there anymore.
It's not there, and there's a point of contact that has been severed between rational emotions and panicking animal, because he let Eobard kill his mother and the unreality persists.
Take me home, he entreats the Speed Force.
It takes him forward instead.
. o .
Live with it, the Speed Force insists in the form of Jay Garrick hauling him bodily out of the time stream.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists when it pins him down and warns him that if he breaks this universe, he cannot undo it, a teacup that has shattered.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists when Cisco jabs a grieving hand into his chest because he wasn't there when Dante was buried, or in the weeks after, or At All, really, he wasn't there, some doppelganger will fill the gap and his head hurts, Cisco, please.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists on the nights he wakes up screaming and Iris no longer asks what's wrong. It's too broad. One cannot introduce with the question "Who are you?" Instead, he picks a name – just like Barry, or The Flash, or Savitar – and uses that instead. It does nothing for the heartbreak.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists when Caitlin freezes him and his throat bleeds for hours.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists with a pointed shove when Savitar demands his presence, and tosses him to the pavement, because he is not and never will be strong enough to beat these speedsters because he has anguish but no desperation, all the right moves and all the wrong motives.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists when his skin hurts and his bones ache and he'd rather be anyone but himself and his all-too-human-heart.
Live with it, the Speed Force insists as Iris brushes her fingers across the back of his before silently walking away.
Live with it, live with it, live with it.
When it takes Wally, too, he decides he can't anymore.
. o .
What are you doing? the Speed Force asks.
What you told me to, Barry replies, swimming upstream, it seems, kicking against a current, reaching, reaching, reaching. Moving forward.
He plunges onward and does not drown.
. o .
When it is done and Wally and he are home, and gasping for breath, and their friends and family crowd around, Barry hunches over his knees without hope, aware that his new reality is not meant to be painless but simply to be.
Fall, Achilles, the Speed Force tells him as he hungers for life. You were never Atlas.
. o .
He tells Joe first, because Joe is safest.
"I can't sleep."
It's two-forty-five in the morning. He's twelve-years-old again, holding a blanket over his shoulder because it's colder and scarier at night.
Joe turns on his side and looks up at him and sighs, reaching over to turn on a light and patting the bed. Barry sits and Joe sits up, and when he repeats in a dead, unbroken voice, "I can't sleep" the tears come.
Joe slings an arm around him and hugs him.
. o .
He tells Caitlin next, because she knows what it's like to break the team's trust.
"I feel awful," he says, standing in an otherwise empty cortex. He does not qualify it, because there is no one point of heartache where the soul derives its greatest pleasure or pain. It is all-consuming, total, and it cannot be captured in something as flat as my chest hurts.My lungs ache.My head throbs.
My heart is breaking.
She steps closer. In a soft, I-don't-want-to-hurt-you way, she says, "I am so proud of you."
When she hugs him, he rests his head on her shoulder and holds on, because she knows what it's like to survive the unimaginable and voice that pain.
. o .
He catches Cisco later because later will never be late enough.
My grief is not yours, he thinks, but he sits back-to-back with Cisco in his apartment while Cisco works, and toils, and pours his pain into his devices.
They do not ask each other questions they don't want answers to. Barry's back is so sore he can barely stand by the time Cisco sets the last device down.
When he closes his eyes that night on Cisco's couch, he sleeps.
. o .
Wally doesn't ask why his Speed feels sick because Wally doesn't know a time when his lightning was brighter and his soul was lighter.
Instead, Wally asks with inexhaustible compassion, "You okay?"
When they're out in the field Barry nods even when he's hurting. He nods even when his jaw is broken and he cannot speak. He nods even when the latest scar that will never show sears agonizingly into his skin. He nods even when he has no strength to stand, or fight back, or stop himself from bleeding out.
But when they hang up the suits, Wally hugs him, and Wally's lightning is so full it's almost overwhelming.
Like a mantra, he says, "You're okay," and won't walk away until he is able to snag that hug, even if it means waiting nine hours for Barry's body to heal.
Wally can't, but somehow, he knows.
. o .
Jesse is like Wally, but she knew him when he was with Zoom, and she has an idea of what his alter ego on Earth-2 is like, and she knows that his flame burns brighter in calmer winds.
Sometimes they run together and he forgets what it's like to feel alone for a while, caught up in her joy like it is his own, caught up in this racing intangible unforgivably alive feeling that is being enveloped in Speed Force.
. o .
Why are you doing this to me?
We're not doing anything to you, sweetheart.You're just so tired.
. o .
HR figures it out and drums his drum sticks on Barry's back and calls him BA and watches the world turn with an aggressively optimistic outlook that feels like a time before.
We can change the world, it insists, day-after-day. We're heroes.
Maybe they can be.
Maybe just maybe.
. o .
There is no porch this time. Barry doesn't want to mimic. He doesn't want to infringe, or replace, or restore, or revive.
He simply wants to experience.
When Iris shows up at his door he lets her in.
Bringing home Wally was the first step, he thinks, balancing carefully on the edge of not-talking, not-forcing. They waltz softly in reverse, her pressing forward, he stepping back.
The backs of his knees touch the couch and he pauses. She steps up and puts her arms around his neck and holds him there.
She is the one person who makes being anchored feel safe, he thinks, his own arms sliding around her waist. Who takes the chain around his neck, safe-the-city, and turns it into a badge of honor.
You are an end in yourself.
She leans up on tiptoe to kiss him. He meets her halfway.
This, he never needed to relearn.
. o .
When they're lying in bed, her hand on his chest where his beating heart still somehow resides, he tells her.
"I've spent so long trying to change the past. I forgot I had a future." Kissing the top of her head, he says softly, "I have a future."
And it's not Zoom, or – he can say it, now, it's not Dad, it's not Mom – but it is this, his family, his broken little family that still loves him, in spite of and because of everything that's happened.
"You always will, Barry Allen," Iris replies, and it sinks into his bones.
. o .
Barry stands before Savitar, disbelieving and broken, please, please, he wasn't supposed to let this happen, they were supposed to change the timeline, they were –
Savitar extends that long, lethal claw and it arcs towards Iris in less than a second.
And Barry, with a breath that is soul-deep, runs.
. o .
In some timeline, he can't reach her. He is too slow. And Iris dies.
In another timeline, he makes it. But Savitar's claw sinks deep into his own chest, and even he, humble human he, cannot recover. And his world goes down.
He doesn't know until the very last Speed-second which outcome he rushes towards. All he knows is that he must.
. o .
Wally meets him halfway, and Barry charges Savitar, and breaks that claw clean off, throwing them backward.
Iris and Wally are gone and he doesn't look, fight, fight for your future, fight for them—
He grabs Savitar and Flashes them away.
. o .
In the Speed Force, the playing field is level, and neither floor nor roof to the world exists, and he knows he made a mistake, but he doesn't care.
If you insist, he tells the Speed Force, strangling Savitar in a grip he can barely feel, and he can feel his own life force bleeding out of him.
Barry Allen, you great and terrible fool.
He crushes harder and closes his eyes and thinks, Kill him kill him kill him.
He lets Savitar go and a clawed hand plunges towards him.
Then it's gone, and Barry stares, because there's a tall, head-to-heel black-clad speedster with a grip on the back of Savitar's neck. Barry rises slowly, to his knees only, and the Black Flash bends towards him.
If you insist, he tells the Speed Force, because he will not run from this and them and what he is.
He will not run.
The Black Flash rests a hand on his shoulder and it burns, but Barry doesn't flinch. He rises, instead, and The Black Flash bows its head, ever so slightly.
Then it and Savitar are gone, and Barry blinks and he's gasping for breath in the grass, reaching for his shoulder and feeling dazed with the strength of his relief.
. o .
He feels it this time, the way his shoulder burns, the ache in his muscles, the heart-pounding all-surrounding relief when he sees Wally and Iris unharmed.
He runs towards them on legs that don't seem to exist and hugs them both, saying over and over, "You're okay you're okay you're okay."
It's all that matters.
. o .
On the black wall in his mind, he picks up the chalk, contemplating those three words transcribed a year ago.
Dad's not dead.
He gently crosses out the not. And then he adds below: I'm still here.
. o .
And so is my family, and my Speed, and my city.
He sits on the edge of the rooftop and looks out, out at his future, at his life, at what he's become, and for the first time in a long time, he smiles without reserve and tips onto his back on the gravel, gazing star-ward and letting go.
Iris finds him and joins him and he's got the mask on, but they've never understood each other better than in that singular moment.
We're still here.