0. The End of Inevitability

Barry sunk to his knees, panting. Beside him, Barry was also on his knees, groaning as well from the various pieces of shrapnel that had embedded themselves inside of him over time. To any onlooker, this would have been a confusing hodgepodge of visuals—two different, yet essentially similar Barry Allens were on the ground beside each other. But there was no onlooker because the Barrys were in their "chronobowl," as Barry the Younger had put it at one point, and the only people there were themselves.

Running through time, futilely and forever.

"Barry, please," Barry the Elder—the first Barry Allen, he may have thought about it deep in his own heart, the one who had started this chaos in the first place with his hubris and desire—pleaded. "It's not possible."

"Shut up," Barry the Younger snarled in return, grunting as he gingerly touched the metal pole that now protruded through the center of his left hand. "Don't give up on them now."

But Barry did want to give up. How many times had he seen Bruce die, crashing heroically and uselessly against the Kryptonian gunship or falling in combat against the hulking Kryptonian brute that made Superman look tiny? How many more times did he have to watch Kara get stabbed by Zod, to have her blood drained away for the destruction of his world? He didn't think he could go on – not like this.

"Barry," he whispered, grabbing Barry the Younger by the shoulder, "it's over. We need to accept that. This is what Bruce meant when he sai–"

"Bruce!" Barry the Younger whipped around to face Barry. His scar, which ran across his left cheek from his mouth, gave him an almost-unhinged look of a perpetual grin. "Bruce. Is. Dead." He stepped forward with every word, feeling far more imposing than Barry himself despite them being physically identical. "And if you don't help me, he and Kara will stay that way forever!"

As quickly as he had turned on Barry, Barry the Younger flipped around again, staring out into the depths of the chronobowl where their collective history in this timeline stretched out before them.

"If you won't help me, then just stay here," Barry the Younger whispered, his back still turned to Barry. "I'll save them myself."

"Barry, no!" Barry yelled, but it was too late. Barry the Younger sped off in a burst of blue lightning, almost flying through the chronobowl as he played a part in the fracturing continuity of his world. With every Batman that fell, another tear opened up. With every brutal blow that Kara took from Zod, the gashes of reality grew wider. Still, Barry could see the telltale blue streak of Barry the Younger weave through time and space, trying to put things in the chronobowl back the way he wanted them to be.

And with every failure, Barry the Younger grew—and became less. His increasing speed, which was turning almost purple, was only matched by his wounds. A stray Kryptonian laser here, an unanticipated explosion there. Barry watched as Barry the Younger's suit, which had been handcrafted just that morning—if time even existed outside of time—became more charred from the fires of battle and how every gash closed around every additional piece of metal carnage like a new bone.

Barry lost track of how many times Barry the Younger had run around the hamster wheel of time, but at some point, after seeing Kara be drained of her lifeforce too many times, he came to a startling realization. That dark speedster, the one who had caused this all to begin with, was the same speedster he watched. Barry the Younger hardly looked human anymore, and now he resembled the beast that had pushed Barry out of the Speed Force to begin with and into Barry the Younger's timeline. A shiver ran through Barry's spine, and he was pretty certain that it wasn't the Speed Force. And as much as he felt like he should do something, all he could do was watch as Barry the Younger failed over and over. And wait for him to return to the center of the chronobowl.

Eventually, Barry the Younger must have run out of steam, because he burst into the chronobowl where Barry stood with a boom and collapsed onto the sand-like surface of the ground. There was little of him that resembled the Barry the Younger that had ran with him into the chronobowl to begin with.

"Why didn't you help me?" Barry the Younger moaned, his voice hoarse and raspy from scarred vocal cords. "We could have saved them and everyone else together if you had just worked with me."

"It was inevitable," Barry whispered, sinking to his knees, tears welling in his eyes. "It was always inevitable. We could've done it a million times, and we would've still failed at the end."

The charred crust of Barry the Younger's mask turned to face Barry, and the only thing Barry could see was the flickering purple lightning in his eyes. "That's only what you believe," Barry the Younger growled. "Because you're unwilling to do what you have to do. Because you're weak, and pathetic, despite all of your powers."

Barry narrowed his eyes, feeling at least marginally hurt by hearing himself say those kinds of things to himself. "I'm pathetic? You're the one running around trying to do the impossible, all the while ignoring," he gestured wildly to the chronoball, "the fact that you're ripping space-time apart!"

Indeed, the chronoball was looking less like a ball and more like the patchwork quilt of a fading reality. The spheres of other realities—their own heroes peering through the gaps—were intruding on Barry's, and the firmament, in an oddly literal way, was coming undone.

"I am everything you're not!" Barry the Younger yelled. "If you're what the 'Flash' is supposed to be, then I don't want to be that. I don't want to be the Flash! I'll save Batman, and Kara, and my mom—everything that you couldn't do!"

"You're an actual idiot," Barry replied, getting back up. "You've run across all of this time, and you still don't get it at all. There's only one way to fix this." He lowered himself into his own personal running stance. "I've known it all along, but I didn't want to admit it."

The Anti-Flash tensed. "What are you doing?"

"Goodbye, Barry," Barry said, flipping his mask back on with the flick of a button on his wrist. "I hope we never meet again." And then he began to run, faster than light, with the chronobowl whirling around them even as it disintegrated.

Barry heard a roar from behind him, and he turned his head slightly to see Anti-Flash streak toward him, purple lightning flaring behind like an angry thunderstorm.

"I won't let you!" Anti-Flash yelled. His right hand reached out and clasped onto Barry's shoulder. "I'll kill you first!"

A wild punch went past Barry's head courtesy of a small shift to his left side, and he whirled around to try and trip Anti-Flash. However, his opponent had anticipated the move, and the Anti-Flash leapt up to grab Barry by his shoulders and push him to the ground. Barry, pinned under the weight of himself, struggled as he saw the Speed Force flicker around them. A lifetime of events—none of them being any that Barry could recognize—flickered past.

"You're still trying?" Anti-Flash shouted, gripping Barry's shoulders and keeping him to the ground even as they still slid backward through time. "You couldn't save your mom, and now you're trying to kill mine?" He suddenly groaned as he fell off Barry, clutching his crotch that had just gotten kneed.

"She's my mom, too," Barry mumbled, standing up to run again. The chronobowl sped up in its reverse once more. "But this was never supposed to happen."

"Screw you!" Anti-Flash shrieked, thrusting his right arm—which had a piece of shrapnel embedded in his forearm like a dagger—toward Barry.

Barry sidestepped, pulled Anti-Flash with him out of the Chronobowl, and let fate take its course.

"Ah!" Nora Allen screamed. The two Barrys, the Flash and the Anti-Flash, burst into the reality of their childhood home's kitchen, right where Nora Allen had been standing to prepare a meal, right below where their childhood self was on the ground of his bedroom.

And right where Anti-Flash's impromptu dagger plunged its way into Nora Allen's heart.

Barry fell backwards, colliding into the wooden dinner table that promptly cracked in half with the impact of a man that had just been moving at an unfathomable speed.

The Anti-Flash howled in pain and anguish as he ripped his dagger out of his mother. He turned to Barry, cradling his dying mother on the ground.

"What have you done?" he moaned.

Barry stood there, tears falling from his eyes. His heart had stopped with his mom's, as if Anti-Flash had stabbed him instead.

"What I needed to."

A kaleidoscope of colors erupted. Anti-Flash fizzled out of reality, and Barry felt himself being flung back out into the Speed Force as reality fell onto itself. Events sped by, this time forwards. Outside of his bubble, he could see the chronobowl of the old world he had jumped into—the Anti-Flash's world—crumple under the weight of other realities.

So Barry ran, faster than fast, faster than he ever had before. He had to if he wanted to fix everything.

He couldn't save the other Bruce, he couldn't save Kara, he couldn't save his mother, and he couldn't even save himself, but he could try to save the multiverse.

One foot in front of the other, pushing forward, past all of the inconsistencies in the continuity and forcing them to straighten out in the grander scheme of space-time.

Bootstrapping existence, Barry idly thought to himself as he pushed forward. The scenes flashing past him in the chronobowl that was coming together was not like what he had seen before—some scenes he could vaguely remember, and others were entirely new. An amalgam of worlds, the combination of which created something new and unlike that which had come before.

He felt a wall in front of him, as impassable as it was unseeable, and without warning, felt himself flung out of the Speed Force screaming headfirst into reality.

Which turned out to be his very soft and fluffy pillow.

For a few moments, Barry did nothing but lie, belly-first, on the bed, not daring to move. Gathering his courage, he leapt off the bed, taking in the surroundings of the dorm he had lived in since his time at Central City University. It was how he, not the Anti-Flash, had decorated it—plain, bare, and utilitarian were it not for the incredible mess. His memories were a jumble between things he remembered and things he didn't remember remembering.

"Phone," Barry breathed out loud to himself. He spied one on the bedside table and grabbed it. The lock screen flickered to the date. September 27th. He unlocked it and flicked through his emails. All good—mostly final grades from his most recent semester of college, and the classes more or less seemed to be related to criminology. Which meant that he chose to study criminology. Which meant that…

Barry collapsed back onto his bed, staring at the ceiling of his apartment.

His mother was dead again. His father was in prison again.

It hurt to think about it, to understand what could've been and then to have to destroy it for the greater good. Worthy of a supervillain origin story, almost. But still, it was necessary, and now he was here. He could get his degree, graduate, get that job as a forensic scientist, and get his dad out of prison. And he could get the Justice League back together—

"Wait, what?" Barry said out loud again, sitting up in his bed. He fumbled with his phone for a moment, unlocking it and then flicking to the calendar app. Indeed, right there, the date shone brightly and proudly.

September 27th, 2013.

"TWENTY THIRTEEN?" Barry yelled, to the chagrin of his downstairs neighbor who promptly yelled back, "Shut up!"

"Sorry!" Barry yelled again before looking back at his phone. He flicked through the calendar. August 2013. September 2013. October 2013. September 2013. Try as he might, the phone kept on chugging along under the belief that the current date was in the month of September 2013.

That meant that he was going, at least originally, to get struck by lightning in a mere two days, right when the calendar indicated that he had an intern lab shift at the Central City Crime Lab for that Sunday evening, the 29th. And that meant that…

"What the fuck," he breathed to himself. "I have two fucking days to find Superman?"

Barry collapsed back onto the bed, exhaustion finally setting in and kicking him back out of this reality.

For now.

The End (of Inevitability)

Or, perhaps,

The Beginning (of Uncertainty)