What Love We Know


"You who do not know what will happen tomorrow, what will your life will be like? For you are a smoky vapor, visible for only an instant, before dissolving into thin air, disappearing."

– James 4:14


It was a bright November day, and though the sun was shining brightly overhead it was still abnormally cold from the snow-machines that had blanketed the North American continent with ice and snow. It would take a couple of days to melt away, even if the temperatures remained above freezing.

The impact of the sudden widespread and premature cold would be hard to evaluate in modern environmental terms, but was easy in the parlance of the early settlers of the continent: it was going to be a hard winter. Yet the rolling hills of South Dakota provided a picturesque scene counter to these facts.

'Snow…' Kid Flash thought to himself in lazy, disorganized thoughts. He knew something was wrong, possibly very wrong, and still felt content to stay where he was. 'The sky… why, why am I here?'

'Right.' Kid Flash thought as he remembered what had happened. 'I had to run cross-country because the Zeta-tubes were down… still down.'

There was a flash of yellow in his memory, and a sense of flying… or falling. At the speeds he had been running there wasn't much of a practical difference once your feet left the ground. But he remembered tumbling through the air, bouncing off the ground more than once… 'And then what?'

'And then I saw…' Kid Flash recalled only a brief instant of seeing a black circle pierced by a red lightning-bolt before waking up here.

Now Kid Flash knew something was wrong. It didn't matter though, he was oddly content and if he'd cared to he would have gotten up; it was just this blackness was catching up with him… it was one thing that he, Wally West, couldn't outrun.

The next thing Kid Flash saw was a rabbit poking its nose at him – likely just looking for food. Wally mentally smiled and thought 'Hello bunny.'

It was also the last thing he saw as the blackness closed in on him for the final time.


Author's Notes: I wanted to keep the intro short and sweet, so to speak. In fact, with a little tweaking I could make it into a 500-word short-story, and was inspired by a picture on diviantart I saw of KF laying in the snow, bleeding, and looking at a bunny.

The picture is "YJ: Hello Bunny" by MoritaTsubaki if you want to look at the full thing; and a cropped down version is the picture for this story. I got her permission to use it, so you guys get to see it too.

Comments and criticisms are welcome.