It happens again.
(What did you expect?)
There's another death in the family.
Barry tells himself that it's okay because they only really knew Ralph for eight months, they never made it to the one-year friendship anniversary, but he can hear Ralph's voice in the STAR Labs' hallways, too-loud and too-close, like he wants to be louder and closer because he knows soon he'll be silent and unreachably far.
Ralph knew. He begged them to act, to prevent catastrophe, but they called him a heretic for diverging from the heroic pathway, chained the hand that would wield the gun to save his own life, and watched the man die in less time than it took to say, I'm sorry. They didn't want to change course, and Ralph slipped into the abyss exactly as foreordained. Another casualty. Another preventable death weighing on all their hearts.
Standing in civilian clothes in the center of the Cortex, Barry looks at the rest of his team and cannot find words.
Say something. Anything.
There are no words. There never have been words to describe this feeling that is empty and overfull, like the human body won't accept grief point-blank so it forces the sadness into something else. Confidence. Solemnity. His voice is steady. He tells them to go home. It doesn't matter that the world still needs saving. Nothing matters right now. Take the day off. Go home.
Don't think about it.
None of them leave, and the heavy, hurting feeling in his throat is stronger now. He orders them to go. Without a word, Harry walks out of the room, followed by Joe, and then Iris.
(I'm sorry I don't know how to talk about this.)
He doesn't even know what to say to her – I love you feels empty, like love is a promise that can't be kept, so why should it be made? – but he watches her leave and aches with every fiber of his being to keep her from walking away. Slowly, as expected, Cisco pushes off the chair that he's been leaning against and takes a few staggering steps towards the empty threshold. He pauses mid-step in the entryway and then turns back, tears in his eyes.
Caitlin looks at Cisco before turning to face Barry, expectant and hopeful. Her gaze approaches divine supplication: she beseeches Barry to fix this without words. He can't. A lump hardens in his throat.
Use your words, dammit.
"We lost," he says thinly, because he needs to say it out loud, needs to make it real. The fight slumps out of Cisco's shoulders. The room cools several degrees. "We lost."
Cisco looks at him, something like wonder and disgust in his gaze, a burning sensation prickling the back of Barry's neck. Cisco steps closer again, until they are mere feet apart, and then closer still, until he is near enough to strike out if he chooses. In a low voice, Cisco retaliates, "No."
"Cisco," Caitlin begins softly, interceding.
Barry commands, "Do it."
Cisco shakes in place, hands clenching into fists.
"Do it," Barry insists, needing the pain as badly as Cisco needs to dish it out, and a fist lands against his chest, not hard, not even a punch, just an impact that sets against his sternum, reminding him of the flesh-and-blood human across from him. It is a terrible thing, because the impact doesn't knock the breath out of Barry, leaving him numb instead. The impassivity brings the tears to his eyes, hot and irrepressible, and he has to walk – run – away.
He has to.
He's gone in a flash of yellow light, dissolving before their unblinking eyes, vanishing into the night with only the faint electric burn of lightning to signal his escape.
He finds a place far from the city in a place that truly qualifies as empty and begs to feel something other than empty. He begs the sky that doesn't care and the ground that doesn't know what he's (not) feeling. He walks away restlessly, seemingly endlessly, until the sun sets. Patrolling is far from his mind, even though Central City expects The Flash to make his nightly appearance.
It can wait.
Can it?
How many people will die if he doesn't act now? How many people need a hero that isn't coming, right now?
Too many to count. It makes his chest tight. It makes every breath hurt. Thinking about the people that he cannot save always makes him antsy, antagonistic, angry at the world. He wants to stop time and rescue every person in need, to set not only the dead and dying back from their eternal sleep but the heartbroken and sickly, the struggling and insecure. He wants to resolve not only the catastrophes but the little problems that plague every day life.
He doesn't just want to improve the lives of the people he sees on the streets: he wants to improve the lives of every human being, ever. He wants to raise the dead and prevent the children of the future from ever experiencing suffering. There are hours – countless hours, lost in the Speed Force – where he thinks about what he would give to become a god, to have the power to truly intercede in every affair, to not merely hope or attempt but to make the world a better place. Given the power, he could stop time and solve every problem the world has or has ever known – indeed, every problem the world will ever know.
But even with his powers, he has finite time, and there are things he cannot do.
He cannot raise the dead – they will remain in their mortal beds forever. He might visit divergent universes where the exception plays out, but even the prevention of one tragedy cannot avert another. If he tries to spare a single person through time travel, another catastrophe will unfold. He will merely have changed the name and the body in the grave, but not the existence of the grave – nor, indeed, the grave of the world he left, the grave of the person he wanted to save in the first place.
The thought haunts him at night – at night, under this brilliant, devastating indigo sky where the stars reside silently and the long echoes of black space stretch emptily in every direction. He could save ten thousand versions of his mother, and he would never again meet the living version of his own mother. They would be nearly indistinguishable clones in countless cases, and he would be tempted to call them his own, but his own mother died that night, and she has never returned to him.
It is a game that the multiverses like to play with the Speed Force. Into the abyss, they sign their names.
(Here are our stories for your perusal. We know you will find them haunting. Let it all sink in.)
It takes ten thousand years just to get started understanding the complexity of the multiverses, how many there are, how inextricably intertwined they are. The notion of time travel perplexes on even an allegorical level: it escapes definition on a more concrete, mathematical basis. There are paradoxes deeper than the nature of time itself to confound the issue, and even Barry cannot circumvent or understand them.
The Speed Force understands, and it enforces the rules with religious zeal, sending out its emissaries to simultaneously experience and entrain the multiverses. Time wraiths kill time traveling heretics. The Black Flash Itself appears to claim the dead. It is a ritualistic cycle that keeps a sense of underlying order ingrained in the multiverses. It is not perfect – indeed, speedsters exploit and thwart its attempts to keep the ledgers perfectly balanced, and so paradoxes exist – but it is far from the entropic catastrophe that would exist in the absence of the Speed Force.
Barry reaches up to rub the back of his throbbing head, yearning for deep, unyielding sleep. He wants to sleep for a long time, to seal himself in his own earthly tomb for a few thousand years and emerge emotionally renewed and physically restored. Every step reminds him that there are aches that may never recede, aches he does not mention to the others.
He takes a breath, and then sits in the grass with his back to a tree on the edge of a long, sprawling field. His lower back is a tangle of thorns with a deep, irremovable spike driven into his spine; his feet are in constant battle with the Earth, sore after every hard run; he still can't feel a patch of skin on his left hip the size of an outstretched hand, and his cheekbones are far less sensitive to touch, too, nearly impervious to it; contrarily, the scar tissue on his left leg is exquisitely sensitive, like a chronic bruise, and itches frequently; a hand settles unconsciously on his right hip, right where he will break his pelvis.
It hasn't even happened in this universe, but he has experienced it in other universes via the Speed Force and knows how inescapable the injury is. He doesn't want to escape it. He fears the pain and the permanent limp after, but the unknown frightens him more. He would rather suffer according to plan than have it sprung upon him at an hour untold, at a magnitude undisclosed. Let him brace for impact: it will hurt less when he hits the ground.
Will it?
He didn't see Ralph's death coming. A far-sighted oracle, he couldn't predict what would happen even tomorrow within his own universe. Leaning his head back against the tree, he closes his eyes and pictures the universe where a smiling, crow-footed Ralph toasted Barry and Iris' fiftieth wedding anniversary, proclaiming to a room full of family and friends, "To my dearest friends and my favorite drinking buddies, I wish you nothing but happiness. Yours is a love that the world sorely needs."
He wonders if his kids will ever miss the Uncle they never had, if the world will remember Ralph Dibny five years from now. Time moves so quickly in the land of the living that it seems depressingly improbable. Tragedies are forgotten in days; in months, it takes digging to find the bodies, scrupulous searching to find the path of the catastrophe. Inside a year, it will be hard to evoke a visceral memory, to hear Ralph's drawling voice or to feel his heavy hand on Barry's shoulder.
It will all fade, as preordained. The mind must clear the mental clutter or it can never move forward, can never learn to live again dwelling in the shadows of ghosts.
Hunching inward, Barry tries to shove the thoughts aside, to retreat to his corner of apathy, but now that the monster is loose it wants attention, and it won't allow him to compartmentalize the grief so easily. Hot tears track down his face, dripping into the grass even as he scrubs at them. Deep, gutting sobs swell in his chest, like waves crashing into the side of a small ship. Desperate not to drown, he sucks in his breath and holds it, trying to get himself back under control.
There is no one to see him fall apart, but he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to grieve anymore, doesn't want to pick up a shovel and bury another body (we can't; there's no body). He doesn't want to attend another funeral or make another epithetical speech. He wants to crawl into an earthy bed and sleep for a while. He wants to feel nothing like this pain, this sick, intolerable pain.
I don't want anyone else to die.
He can't even talk about Dad, gets a lump in his throat if he thinks about it for too long. Every time he tries to speak, he loses his breath, lapsing instead into silence. Fortuitously, his remaining family members don't ask about it anymore. They trust him to talk about it if he needs to. He just hopes he can hold his own silence indefinitely.
Even Mom's death, now fifteen years old, is hard to talk about. He hasn't gotten over the fact that his own life contained foreordained tragedy. It seems like a cosmic joke that he was born into a universe destined to witness a catastrophe invoked by two participants from strange and divergent worlds. Neither Thawne nor his older self hailed from the same universe. Indeed, Barry is not sure he would even understand that other, older Barry, so different have their lives become. They were all strangers to each other, and they left wreckage in their wake.
Barry is living collateral damage.
Ralph is dead collateral damage.
Breathing shallowly, short, quick breaths to pull in receding air, Barry fists a hand in the grass, holding onto it tightly. He needs the grounding feeling to keep himself from spiraling off into a place of grief so dark there is only an all-consuming rage, an urge to scream until his lungs give out, and then a terrible, unbearable aftermath of realizing that he has to keep living even though he is so empty.
Given enough time, even the frantic response dies down.
With unsteady movements, Barry hauls himself to his feet. Cold air anesthetizes every step. He feels numb to it, mercifully unconfined to his surroundings, and lets himself drift home, like a floater lost at sea. Eventually, he arrives at the door to the apartment – a new, smaller apartment, as different from the loft as they could find on short notice – and hunches inside, slouching underneath the threshold. Most of their belongings have already been moved in – perks of being a speedster; he can fit five days into a single midafternoon's work – but there is still a small pile near the door, signs that this home is still new.
Unfamiliar, too.
He likes it, though, even though it is different. It takes time to find everything, every cabinet, every light, even the path to the bathroom (a necessity when it's late at night and everything is dark), but it gives him a chance to focus on something different, something other than his more urgent and overbearing tasks. He toes off his shoes at the door. He still can't feel anything – even the tears on his cheek have dried – but he wanders cautiously into the space, like he doesn't own it.
It's late enough that most of the lights are off – a single vigil remains in the kitchen for him to navigate the main room by – but he doesn't need more, navigating quietly, peacefully around the space. He removes the remains of his armor and drinks a voluptuous quantity of water right from the tap, trying to ease back the now-pounding headache. Taking a seat at the table, he eats an entire box of crackers with a small block of cheese and completes four Sudoku puzzles, easing back from the world. At last, he yawns into the shower, stepping into a curtain of still rain to slough off the worst of the day's events. It takes just four real-time seconds, and then he's crawling into bed, pounding headache now centered around his forehead but quasi-bearable.
He burrows under the sheets, aching for reprieve, and startles when he feels a hand settle on his shoulder, flinching involuntarily. Touch is a mixed bag these days; he's come to associate nearly every contact with pain, and with the thorns of Ralph's death embedded too deeply in his sleep-deprived mind, it takes longer than it should to appreciate the relaxing nature of the thumb stroking softly against his bare shoulder.
Exhaling, he shuffles closer to her, draping an arm around her waist and hiding his face in her shoulder, afraid to look at her, afraid to speak. He doesn't know what he will not be able to do in this quiet and heartsore hour: to speak kindly, generously is beyond him. He knows only that he cannot stand the pain, but it is becoming a distant thing again, driven away by the physical presence. She is so soft and warm that he becomes almost lost in it, amazed that she shares this space with him.
It takes an even longer time to pick up on the barely audible hum resonating in her chest, a melody from childhood, something to fill the aching quiet. His eyelids, already heavy, slip shut. His breath evens out. He finds sleep tugging at his ankles, and pain retreating behind the mountains, ready to be faced another day.
Another day.
It's such a relieving thought, that he can let go and not deal with it all right now, that he feels tears slide down his cheeks, easing past his guard. They don't hurt this time, and he doesn't sob with rib-breaking intensity. He just lies curled up beside her, silently releasing the tension of the past twenty-four hours. Her hand drifts to his hair and smooths it down gently, understanding and steady.
At last, he finds peace to sleep, and she stays with him, and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he'll be okay this time.
We'll find a way to be okay again.