by Barry Lyga
Still, he ran. Faster than he’d ever run before.
And then
And then
57
Light!
No sound. There was not yet anything remotely like an atmosphere to carry sound, so the Big Bang happened in absolute silence. Barry whispered a “Yes!” to himself as the Multiverse erupted into existence all around him, universes spinning out of one another.
He was running in the so-called Planck era, the earliest time in all of reality, the first 10-43 seconds in the universe, a time so small and so quick that even he could barely perceive it.
And then: cosmic inflation! The creation of the quark-gluon plasma, a “soup” made of the particles that would give rise to neutrons and protons, the very foundation of all matter and energy.
Barry kept running. He had to outrun the universe itself, the rapidly expanding, redshifting plasma flung out from the center of reality. The Time Sphere could withstand the rigors of time travel, but not the incredible heat birth of the universe.
He ran thousands of years in the blink of an eye. The universe cooled around him. Atoms coalesced; nuclei formed. Electrons whirred and spun. Reality was coming into view.
He dared not peer over his shoulder to check on his friends. He could feel the mass of the Time Sphere tugging at him, but he had no way of knowing if they were okay. Turning to look would slow him down, and he could not slow down. Not one instant.
He ran, each stride a millennium, pulling the Earth 27–generated wave with him, hyper-accelerating beyond his own top speeds.
The heat enveloped him. He outran it, but he felt it tugging at him nonetheless, wicking along his costume. The Flash uniform was designed to handle the heat of superspeed, but this was beyond superspeed. Pieces of the uniform smoldered, caught fire, peeled off, and drifted into the incipient vacuum of aborning space.
Stay strong, Barry. Don’t stop. You can’t stop!
You can do this. You have to do this! This is what you were born to do. To save them all. To make the world safe for the ones you love.
Thousands more years. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.
Tears collected in his eyes, then whipped away into the Speed Force. He would never see them again. He would never hold Iris again. Never feel Joe’s arm around his shoulders.
It’s OK, though. It’s OK. The world—the Multiverse—is safe. Two timelines, protected. That’s what matters. You set it right.
Lights flickered around him. The universe, coming into being as he ran, solidifying around him. He wavered in and out of the Speed Force, stumbling occasionally. His vibrational pattern locked in on home and guided him there, pulling him along even as his strength flagged.
Almost there. I can feel it. Almost there.
His body was on fire from within. He could feel his muscles dissolving, using up their lactic acid, feeding on themselves. He’d run billions of years, passed through the fire of Creation itself.
You couldn’t do such things without consequences.
Something hovered into view before him. Walls faded into existence. It was dark and he saw her, saw Iris.
It had to be a hallucination. It couldn’t be real.
She was in one of the bedrooms at S.T.A.R. Labs. She sat up and turned to him, shock written across her face.
“Barry? What happened?”
He reached out to her but could not close the gap between them. The tips of his fingers fell short of her by inches. A low-pitched crackle hissed around him as she jagged in and out of sight.
“I love you so much,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “It’ll all be OK. I promise. I will never stop loving you.”
And then she was gone.
He was seeing things. That was it. He was losing his mind. He’d run so hard. His body was cannibalizing itself now. Translating from matter into pure energy. The first physics formula he’d ever learned: E=mc2.
Meaning mass converts to energy at a ratio equal to the speed of light squared.
The speed of light was nothing to him. He was faster than light. Faster than any single thing had ever been.
Something new came into his view. Another hallucination? Random sparking in his brain, summoning images to distract him from his fate?
A dirty city street. A man, distracted. Familiar.
“Joe?” Barry said.
Yes. Yes, it was Joe.
Joe snapped his head up and said, “Barry?”
Barry wept at the sight of his adoptive father. He should have been there to help Joe, too. But he had to tell him. He had to let him know . . .
“Joe, I’m sorry. I’m going to make it all work out.”
“What?” Joe put his hand out to touch him, but in that same instant, he vanished.
Barry howled, the flesh around his mouth gone thin and taut. It was happening. It was all happening around him. The world turning in its rhythms. The universe expanding, redshifting, moving on.
He was in the Cortex at S.T.A.R. Labs. Madame Xanadu before him. And holding a knife to her throat . . .
“Owlman?” Barry said, his voice tremulous and thready. “But that must mean . . .”
That must mean I’m almost there. I’m almost to the present.
His body had converted partly to energy, flaming and radioactive. If he stopped in the present, he would combust and kill everyone around him.
He had no choice—he cut loose the cables, letting the Time Sphere drop out of the temporal zone and into the present.
And he kept running.
58
Sara yelped as the Time Sphere jerked and tumbled around her, jostling everyone inside. Mick’s elbow ended up in her gut, and Wally’s hand swatted her in the head.
They had been at the End of All Time. Barry had begun running and then everything was a blur. And when she said everything, she meant everything. She’d eventually shut her eyes against the mad, chaotic smear presented to them, ground her teeth together, and thought of Ava.
Now the Time Sphere felt as though it had collided with something hard. Something real. She risked opening her eyes but saw only Mick’s armpit, which wasn’t much of an improvement over time travel.
A sound. A voice.
“. . . on fire! Put it out! Put it out!”
59
Supergirl held a cold pack to her forehead, where a large bruise was already forming. “Good thing I took most of the wall with my thick skull,” she joked.
Caitlin stood nearby, examining Supergirl’s head X-ray. “I don’t think you have a concussion. There are some weird brain anomalies, but I guess that’s just what Kryptonian brains are supposed to look like.”
Iris clucked her tongue, irritated. “I don’t know which one of you I’m more annoyed with,” she said. “You both took crazy risks that—”
“Wait!” Supergirl jumped up. “Do you hear that? It’s like . . . like a clock . . . ticking . . . too fast . . .”
With a harrumph, Iris said, “Don’t try to distract me.”
“No!” Supergirl said. “Seriously!” She grabbed Iris and Caitlin by the wrists and tugged hard. Once upon a time that would have ripped their arms out of their sockets, but right now all it did was propel them toward the door that led out into the corridor.
At the same time, she shouted, “Everyone get down!”
The Time Sphere materialized in the center of the S.T.A.R. Labs Cortex out of nowhere, steaming and burning upon reentry into the physical world. If Supergirl hadn’t flung Iris and Caitlin out of the room, the Sphere would have collided with them and incinerated them in an eyeblink. Felicity, wearing earbuds and typing on her keyboard, didn’t notice it at first, then yelped as the heat and light exploded nearby, and she dived under her own desk.
The room lit up instantly, shadows chased into the corners. Smoke rolled out from the Time Sphere, and flames crackled. Reflexively, Supergirl ran to it.
“Kara!” Iris yelled from the doorway. “Get back!”
Rolling, the Time Sphere shuddered
along the floor, heading for Felicity. Supergirl threw herself in its path. Fire sizzled around her. The ends of her hair burned.
When she touched the metal skin of the Time Sphere, pain seared her flesh. A touch of her invulnerability and superstrength had returned—just enough to keep her from passing out from the pain. Grunting and straining, she dug her feet in and held the Time Sphere in place so that it couldn’t destroy the Cortex or hurt her friends.
“Hurry!” she yelled.
“It’s on fire!” Iris cried. “Put it out! Put it out!”
She wasn’t asking someone else to do it—s he was telling them to help her do it. She was already on her way to the emergency fire extinguishers.
Mr. Terrific dashed through the door and sent a T-sphere to the wreckage; it pumped a foam out from above, helping Iris, Felicity, and Caitlin as they hit the Time Sphere with the fire extinguishers from different angles. Soon, it was out.
Supergirl stumbled away from the steaming hulk of metal. Her hands were burned and her face was covered in soot, but she waved away Caitlin when the doctor approached her with a worried expression and a medical gleam in her eye.
“They might need help,” Supergirl said, panting slightly. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about them.”
As she spoke, the door creaked open, then fell off entirely. Iris screamed in surprised joy when Wally stepped out. She ran to her brother and threw her arms around him.
Cisco, the Atom, White Canary, Heat Wave, Green Arrow, and Superman emerged next. Every single one of them looked wrecked, even the Man of Steel.
Iris clutched Wally and planted kisses on his forehead. “Where’s Barry?” she asked.
Wally said nothing. He looked at the floor.
Iris thought of Madame Xanadu’s words. No. “Is he hurt? Still in the Time Sphere? Wally . . .”
“Kal . . . ?” Supergirl said, her tone acknowledging what she already knew.
Superman came to her. “Mrs. West-Allen . . . Iris . . . I’m so sorry . . .”
Iris howled and swung her fist at him. He rocked with the blow, accepted it, then folded her in his arms and held her as she wept.
60
Barry ran through the thirtieth century, wondering briefly and wryly if the Tornado Twins, Dawn and Don, would be aware of his passing.
He ran to the Legion, blew through the thirty-first century on a wind of tachyons and bosons. Chased the history of the future down its pathways, the only sounds his own breath and the sizzle-crack of his atoms shifting into energy.
In the sixty-fourth century, he phased back into reality for just an instant, spying a familiar face.
“” she exclaimed, forgetting in her shock to revert to ancient English.
“Hefa!” he cried out to her. And then more. Hoping she could hear him. Knowing she probably couldn’t.
The sixty-fourth century was history now, so distant in the past that it might as well have been the Jurassic.
He ran and ran. He ran, missing them all. He ran, loving them all. He ran, knowing that he would hit the Iron Curtain of Time and be destroyed.
He ran and ran and ran.
And then . . .
And then he stopped.
61
There was sunlight and a breeze and cool green grass under his feet.
Barry peered around. The sky, blue, offered a single white cloud, a puffy and cheerful promise on the horizon.
It had to be morning, because the grass was wet with dew. It grew almost waist-high in some spots. With gentle curiosity, he stepped to the tall grass. Watched as it bent in the breeze.
He was not tired. He was not on fire. He was whole and intact. His breath came easy. His heart beat normally.
“Barry, you did it.”
It was the voice of his mother.
“Son, we’re so proud.”
His father.
Dead all these years. Speaking to him now.
He had run faster than light. And then he’d run faster than life itself.
“You can rest now, Barry. Everyone is safe. You saved the world. Again.”
He ran the tips of his fingers along the grass, picking up the dew. Dew was the product of water vapor condensing overnight on flat surfaces, usually when the air was calm. Determining whether or not dew would form was a simple matter of calculating the dew point, using the Magnus formula.
Everything was calm now. There was no wind.
Their arms around him. The familiar brush of her lips on his forehead, wishing him sweet dreams.
He turned his face to the sun. He smelled the air and the grass and the clean soil.
Dew was just condensation, he knew, but it had different meanings across cultures. For some, it was a symbol of reincarnation, a promise of new life with each morning.
He smiled.
Flash Fact.
62
The Legends and Superman used the Time Courier to travel to the thirty-first century for emergency medical aid. Iris shook off Felicity and Curtis. She needed to be alone. Her father was headed home from Star City, but she didn’t want to see him, either. Not right now.
Instead, she went to the Time Vault. She called up the newspaper that predicted Barry’s disappearance during some sort of “crisis.” This had been a crisis, all right, but the timing had been all wrong. He was supposed to vanish years from now.
She stared at the newspaper. Everything about it was the same.
Almost everything.
The byline was the same. The date. The masthead.
The headline, though, had changed.
Iris didn’t know what it meant, but it made her smile through her tears.
63
“Hey, pretty lady. Can I borrow a cup of sugar?”
Ava jolted upright at her desk. Since Sara had disappeared, she’d been spending every waking moment at her desk at the Time Bureau. Compartmentalizing. Keeping herself too busy to mourn.
“Am I seeing things?” she said softly.
Sara, leaning against the doorjamb, shook her head, grinning that self-satisfied grin she always flashed when she’d just pulled off the impossible. “Nah. You’re seeing exactly one thing: the woman who loves you.”
Ava launched herself over the desk and threw herself into Sara’s arms.
Mick moved slowly as he chose a seat in the commissary at the Time Bureau. He didn’t trust fancy-pants thirty-first-century medical technology, so unlike the others, he’d just let the Legion’s docs put some bandages on him and that was that. He would heal on his own, the way it was supposed to be. His body hurt, but eventually it would hurt less.
In the meantime, he had a plate piled high with french fries, a nice lean corned beef sandwich with mustard hot enough to burn out his nose hairs, and a beer. Good medicine.
Ray came in, bearing a tray with a plate of broccoli and a fruit cup. Mick wrinkled his nose. “Rabbit food, Haircut?”
Ray beamed as he sat down. “Healthy body, healthy mind, Mick!”
“Meh.” Mick waffled his hand back and forth.
“How are you feeling?”
Mouth stuffed with corned beef, Mick managed another “Meh.”
Leaning in conspiratorially, Ray asked, “What’s it like being without the ring?”
Mick chased his sandwich with a hearty glug of brew. “Just like being with the ring. Only, without it.”
Ray snorted. “C’mon, man! You can tell me! You had the most powerful weapon in the universe. That had to have changed you.”
Mick regarded Ray quietly and seriously for a moment. Then, without warning, he belched—loud, long. Powerful enough to muss Ray’s hair.
“Kinda . . . like that?” Ray asked, combing his hair back into place.
“Kinda like that,” Mick agreed, and drank again.
64
After Felicity and Oliver returned to Star City, after her father came home, Iris sat with Caitlin and Cisco in her apartment. They held hands and said very little.
Until Superman appeared throug
h a Time Courier with White Canary and Heat Wave. Iris glared at them, then relented and sighed, sinking into Caitlin.
“I’m sorry,” Iris said. “Whatever you need, we can’t help. I’m closing S.T.A.R. Labs while we mourn.”
Superman smiled gently. “We’re not here to ask for help. We’re here to offer it.”
“What do you mean?” Cisco said.
Superman exchanged a look with Mick and Sara, then unconsciously brushed a finger along his hairline. He had told the Legion’s medical robots not to use healing radiation on this cut, so it had healed into a pale scar there as his powers returned and the broken flesh became invulnerable to medical lasers. He wanted it. Wanted it as a reminder of what he’d seen and what he’d lost.
With his hair brushed forward, it wasn’t visible. Only when he swept it back, as Clark.
“There’s still work to be done,” Sara said. “We need to track down the people who’ve been shifted from universe to universe and get them back to their homes.”
“And we need to find our missing crew members,” Mick said.
“I don’t see how this is helping Iris,” Caitlin said somewhat defensively. Her friend had been through enough. She didn’t need to be worrying about jumping through time and the Multiverse right now.
“I’m going with them,” Superman said. “Supergirl’s powers are back and she’s taking care of Earth 38. But I need to finish the job we started. I’ll be joining the Legends, in Barry’s memory. To help.”
Cisco whistled. “You’re gonna be a Legend of Tomorrow?”
Sara shook her head. “Rip Hunter named us the Legends when he first gathered us together. He told us we were hailed throughout history. Turned out to be a lie. So then he told us we had a chance to become legends. But the thing is, we have to do our work in secret. It’s become a sort of self-deprecating in-joke.
