Here we are, at the last chapter of Scales of Magnitude! It's been a wild ride, and, as nervous as I am to share this final chapter, I honestly have had such a blast on this journey. I've never written anything quite like this before, and I hope you had as much fun as I did.
More notes at the end; for now, enjoy the final chapter!
The beach might have had no end, for all Iris could tell. As her boots crunched in the sand, she remembered those hours, just days earlier, where she'd traced and retraced her steps along the water. By now, much of the debris had been cleared—in the aftermath of the storm and the ensuing clear skies, cleanup teams had begun making progress—and the continual sirens from the city had become less frequent. The way the waves lapped quietly against the shore almost convinced her of normalcy.
"Are you sure this is going work?" she said, tugging at the sleeves of her jacket.
"No reason why it shouldn't," Cisco said, heaving down the disc that Wells had used to open up the time breach. "I mean, besides the possibility of being caught in the time portal. Or being crushed by wormhole compression. Or being stuck in one of Barry's time comas." He quieted quickly when Iris, Caitlin, and Barry shot him a look. "Yeah, no reason."
"It'll work," Barry said firmly. "I know it will."
Two hours in the medical bay had done all of them good—though Cisco would need more time to recover from what looked like a hefty concussion—but none more than Barry. His skin still retained some of the paleness that had come over him from the speed serum, but with the madness gone from his eyes, he might have been the same Barry she watched speed away that day one week ago.
"Barry?" she said suddenly. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"
The tiniest hint of a frown crossed his face. "Yeah, sure."
Cisco and Caitlin moved together as he jogged toward her. She'd already begun walking, taking slow, deliberate steps away from the time breach.
"What's up?"
"This sounds dangerous," she said.
"Of course it is," Barry said lightly. "When has anything I've done not been dangerous?"
"Right," Iris said, although her stomach twisted at the recentness of her discovery of Barry as the Flash, the fact that she actually didn't know what dangerous antics he had been up to for six months. "I'm just wondering if…if the risk is worth it."
Barry opened his mouth, closed it. The realization spread like a stain across his face, Iris' words visibly sinking in. She launched back in quickly before he could say a word.
"I'm not saying you shouldn't," she said. "I know that you've had weeks in that other timeline—a new life—and that you're close to achieving everything you've ever wanted." You're not helping your case, West.
"So what are you saying?" Barry teased, though the attempted lightness fell flat.
Heat flooded Iris' eyes. "I don't know. I just—I lost you once already. And I just got you back, and now I'm losing you again."
"Hey." Barry grabbed Iris' hands and encased them in his own. "I'm alive. I will be alive. You know that now."
"You being alive in another timeline doesn't negate the fact that you're dead in this one," Iris said. "It doesn't negate the fact that I'll never see you again. You may as well be dead."
"Come here." She was grateful, then, for Barry's enveloping hug, because it hid her face from him. "The last thing I want is to hurt you. But I—I have to go."
His hand gripped the back of her jacket, and she understood. She understood so completely. So painfully
With a sniff, she gave him one last squeeze and pulled away. This time she took over, cradling his face in her hands. The gesture was familiar, comforting.
"No, you need to go," she said, nodding. "I know that." And she tried to convince herself of that with a smile. "I'll be fine here."
"You will?"
"Eventually." She let out a watery laugh. "I have Caitlin, and Eddie. We'll manage. And I know that somewhere there's an Iris West who has her Barry Allen. That's at least something to hold onto."
"But it's not you."
"No," Iris said. Gently, she tipped Barry's head and placed a kiss on his forehead. "But you're not the only one who has to be brave, are you?"
She smiled tearily and they broke apart, though still walking close on their way back to Cisco and Caitlin. The other two had obviously just engaged in a deep discussion themselves, and Iris caught Cisco surreptitiously rubbing at his eye with a sleeve.
"Are you sure you two will be alright?" Caitlin asked once Barry had taken his place beside Cisco. "You don't think you'll be affected by the jump?"
"If not, we'll have you on the other side to patch us up, right?" Barry quipped uncertainly.
"One of the devices will stay on this side," Cisco said. "Maybe you and old Wellsobard can think up a way to use it to get him home."
Iris thought back to Wells, currently locked up in his very own pipeline cell. At the lingering pain in her abdomen, she decided that Cisco's plan might require a bit more effort than the speedster was worth.
Caitlin coughed past an obviously poorly-disguised sob and looked down quickly. "We still have a serious metahuman problem here, even disregarding Wells. How are we supposed to deal with that without both of you?"
"I'm sure you'll find a way," Barry said.
Caitlin looked back up sharply. "If you're talking about my…my powers…"
"I wasn't, actually," said Barry. "You're brilliant. Both of you are brilliant. Look at how you took down Mardon. And stopped Wells. Stopped me." He paused, and a flicker of amusement passed over his face. "Though I suppose powers won't hurt."
"We'll manage," Iris said confidently, moving sideways to place a hand on Caitlin's arm. "Don't worry about us."
"Will you remember us?" Caitlin asked suddenly. "Crossing timelines, resetting events…we're ghosts to you already, aren't we?"
Cisco jerked as if struck by uncertainty, or struck by a violent memory, but Barry was firm.
"No, he said. "Never."
Iris set her jaw against a gust of wind, the chill of memory. "You should go," she said. "It's hard to say how long this will stay active."
"Good call." Cisco nudged the black disc with his shoe. "I'm guessing that between Barry and me, this breach is pretty unstable. It should collapse soon." He paused. "Hopefully after we make it through."
The pause lengthened, the four of them stagnated on the sand. The waves lapped to their right, a sound too gentle for what Iris felt. The storm clouds and fierce tides might almost be preferable.
Finally Caitlin broke the silence. "Well, good luck. To…all of you there. You have your hands full as well."
Iris drew back as Barry reached for Caitlin. Caitlin buried her face in his shoulder and his hands found her hair, as if this was a final goodbye for him as it was for her. In a way, she supposed it was; but at least he had familiar faces to go back to.
They separated after what felt like an eternity, and Cisco stepped forward to take Barry's place. As he and Caitlin embraced, both of them visibly shaking with emotion, Iris thought invariably of the future—of her and Caitlin alone on the beach, of both of them pretending none of this had ever happened for the sake of her dad and Barry's, of being forced to move Cisco's body eventually from where it lay in STAR. It was surreal now to consider that, watching a very real and alive Cisco hugging Caitlin now. Caitlin had confessed her fears about her and Iris being ghosts, but now Iris wondered if it was the other way around.
"Be strong," Cisco said to Caitlin once they had pulled apart. "Even without your powers you're badass, but I think you can do some sweet stuff with them now. Good stuff."
Caitlin sniffed. "Any ideas for a nickname?"
"Well, Killer Frost is pretty dope," Cisco said. At Caitlin's look, he raised his eyebrows. "But, just for this once, I'm going to leave it up to your good judgment."
He squeezed her shoulder and moved to the breach with Barry. He and Iris made eye contact once and he nodded a wordless thank you, which she reciprocated. Then he bent to the black device, fiddled with one of the knobs, and stepped back to allow the breach to bloom into existence. Its intensity once again stunned Iris, who instinctively drew closer to Caitlin as if to find protection from the fierce blue glow. The air exploded with color and grew almost solid, a depthless vortex of flickering black and blue clouds.
Cisco went first, his body swept away in a flash of light. Iris sucked in a breath and watched the breach ripple. Barry was next, she knew, and for one more agonizing second she felt time compressing and couldn't help her thoughts crying why this, please, don't make me go through this again.
Then Barry made eye contact with her, and she remembered the way time had stopped one week ago as he kissed her, and she still felt the heat of his forehead on her lips as she bid him goodbye minutes earlier, and years of history settled around her shoulders like a patchwork quilt. In spite of the swirling breach in the air, she felt the peculiar calm that comes with an ending.
There were no words, just one last transference of a wordless love that Iris would never be able to explain. Then Barry turned, and the void swallowed him up for good.
Caitlin was the one to move forward and switch off the device keeping the breach open. The breach flickered uncertainly for a few seconds, like a lightbulb burning out, then collapsed. All that remained was the faint shimmer that Iris had seen on the beach before.
"This should go away completely soon," Caitlin explained. "Maybe in a few hours. It can't support its own weight much longer."
"Then this will all seem like a bad dream," Iris said. The absence of activity, the absence of Barry, shocked her into a numbness. Caitlin rose.
"Not a bad dream," she said. "Not how I see it."
Iris stepped backward and sat on the piece of driftwood that she'd rested on before. "But definitely a dream, right?"
Caitlin joined her on the log, clearing her throat. Iris studied her face, noting the lines there, the redness under her eyes. Both women were raw. She knew that. There would be a time to heal.
They sat there in quiet for a long time, watching the sun plunge toward the horizon and clutching each other's hands like lifelines. It was just the two of them now, the last survivors of a great secret. Eddie waited unawares at home. Her dad recovered in a hospital bed. Eobard Thawne drew out his day in the confines of a cell. Countless more metahumans roved the streets of the city—of her city—waiting for some kind of sign to strike. With the Flash dead, there was no telling when they might crawl out of their holes to wreak havoc.
After all, Iris reasoned, natural disasters and grief brought out remarkable things from people.
A light breeze brushed past them, and Caitlin said, "What do we do now?"
The future was not an endpoint, Iris knew now. It was a line that stretched out endlessly, to a place somewhere past that horizon they now stared at, and, indeed, further yet.
She tightened her fingers around Caitlin's and smiled. "Now we go be spectacular."
I can't end without thanking each and every one of you who have taken the time to read and respond to this work. I realize it's not a conventionally-appealing fanfic, but you guys have given it so much love and attention. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I, of course, welcome feedback on this chapter, and the fic as a whole, no matter how far in the future you may be reading it!
New projects! I am currently working on a new longfic, which should be completed and ready to post by the end of the hiatus (I realize I unfortunately timed Scales of Magnitude to both start and end in hiatuses!). In the meantime, I hope to post a few one-shot stories that have been brewing, but if you have any requests or prompts, I am always more than happy to take them! I have particularly taken to writing short prompts on my Tumblr, pennflinn, so hit me up there if you have any suggestions.
Once again, thanks for sticking with me. Lady power, always.
Much love, and till next time,
Penn