Chapter Text
Of course, it was never so easy as just simply “heading home.” Bart has been missing for almost three weeks, disappearing out of the blue from his own house. Out sick doesn’t really cover it when Bart hasn’t been able to respond to a single message or email or homework assignment the entire time he’s been held hostage.
Out sick doesn’t really cover it when Bart has already been reported as missing to the local authorities. Amber alert issued and everything.
Still, for tonight, Bart gets to sleep in the watchtower medbay. They can’t report to the police station when he’s covered in bruises and scrapes, only for said bruises to disappear far too quickly due to his powers. Dead giveaway to his identity, that.
He wants desperately to collapse into a bed the moment he arrives, but realistically he knows he’s wearing the same suit that he had started this mess in, and that said suit is carrying a miasma of sweat and blood and grime. He feels dirty, and the moment Jay sends him off to the shower with a set of pyjamas the desire to get clean overwhelms even his desire to sleep.
“You need any help?” Jay asks, tone quiet and steady, and Bart shakes his head mutely. The thought of other people’s hands on his skin makes him feel prickly.
Down the hallway and then to the left. It’s a short walk to the showers from the medbay, probably on purpose. There are also benches in each of the stalls, which Bart takes in with a pleased sort of numbness before turning to the controls. It takes a few minutes of finagling to get the water going, but once he figures it out the water feels so damn good on his skin, washing away weeks of grime and sweat and blood. He has to shampoo his hair twice to get the clumps out, and even though he’s forced to sit down and catch his breath halfway through- his ribs really don’t like him putting his arms up over his head- it’s well worth it.
When he gets back to the sterile medbay, he finds Jay already passed out in a nearby armchair. There are bags under his eyes, and the wrinkles on his face seem more prominent than before. Bart swallows, hard, taking his appearance in again. Hugs himself loosely around the middle and watches, for one minute, for two, as the old man breathes. Jay looks like he’s gone through the wringer, his worry stretching him thin in all directions. He looks like he’s been feeling every single one of his hundred and two years.
And it’s all his fault.
Slowly, in part not to wake Jay up and in part because everything aches, he rescues a spare blanket on a cot and throws it on top of Jay. Then he climbs into his own bed.
Then, finally, finally, he sleeps.
Bart wakes up at three in the morning, heart palpitating hard in his chest and eyes wide open, trying to see in the dark. There’s a distinctive scent of burning in his nose, something he assumes is a remnant from the nightmare until he glances at the edge of the bed and realises that he vibrated hard enough in his sleep that the sheets have caught on fire.
“Shit,” Bart breathes, and rolls over and away, landing with a solid thump on the ground. His body jostles roughly with the landing, but Bart just scrambles back and away from the flames. Sweat drenches his entire frame. He should- he needs to put the flames out before-
Fire alarm. Sudden and loud, and Bart clamps his hands around his ears and squeezes his eyes shut as the world becomes flashes of yellow and red. Every muscle tenses hard and his breath is going, again, going and going and gone and he doesn’t even know why, it’s just a little fire, just a spark and a burn, just some dumb sheets that are easily replaced. Why is his whole chest composed of panic?
Across the room, a man groans and then yelps. There’s the sound of a fire extinguisher, and rushing feet coming down the hall. Bart pushes against the floor until he can tuck himself under another cot entirely, back to the wall and out of sight.
He works on catching his breath. Listens to the voices, above and around him. Bart should pop up right now. He should crack a joke and pull up a smile and apologise, probably, for burning the bed. He should- there are things he should be doing. There are definitely things he should be doing.
Now if only he could get his damn lungs to get with the program.
A black figure crouches by the end of the bed. Bart flinches hard when a gloved hand brushes his shoulder and then freezes, staring, staring.
The hand retreats. He would sigh in relief if he could.
More voices, more long drawn out seconds, more air swallowed down that refuses to enter past his throat towards the places it needs to be. The alarms, loud and whirring, turn off. It still smells like smoke.
Like ash, his brain supplies, and Bart’s heart decides to really kick it up a notch.
Somebody talks, louder than the rest but not quite yelling, and then everyone leaves. One by one by one. Bart counts footsteps. He counts ineffective breaths.
A body appears again, sitting by the bedframe. His every muscle locks into place until he realises, distantly, that it’s just Jay.
Just Jay, who sighs old and tired, and reaches out a gnarled hand, placing it gently on the floor palm up. He’s got wrinkles all over his fingers, and his nails are thick and white. “I don’t suppose you feel like coming out from under there,” he says.
There’s no breath in him to respond, so Bart doesn’t. Just sits there and evaluates the hand. Without the alarm and the flashing lights, it’s dark and quiet under the bed. He’s still shuddering like he’s been electrocuted and he doesn’t know if it’s ever gonna stop.
“That’s just fine,” Jay continues. “Whatever makes you feel safe, kid. I got nowhere to be but with you.”
Bart stays under the cot. He stays there for an hour, and then two, and then straight on till morning. Jay talks for the first three hours, low and soothing, and falls asleep sitting up by the fourth, right in the middle of his dialogue about how the carrots are doing in their garden.
Bart listens. He evaluates the hand. At hour five, when his body starts to come down from the attack and it feels like skin-to-skin contact won’t prickle and burn, he reaches out and links his pinky with Jay’s.
Sleep doesn’t come again. But he is breathing, mostly. It probably counts for something.
Two days later, and the wounds spattered across his body have mostly healed; pale pink starbursts on his chest and thin ribboned lines on his hands, a set of tender ribs. When he had looked at the mirror earlier, all his new scars had fit right in with his old ones.
Barry is busy brushing him down, swiping at the grime that Batman had so painstakingly applied some two or so hours earlier. He’s got his cowl on, white lenses somehow still managing to convey his worry, the red of the Flash suit leaving afterimages behind Bart’s eyelids every time he blinks. “Are you sure you’re up for this, Bart?” he says, “this can wait a few more days if you need more time-”
“I wanna go home.”
Barry’s lips press thin. “Right. Off we go, then.”
It’s all plotted and planned, every step of the next few hours. Flash drops him off at the local PD of Central City, having ‘found’ him in a locked room of an abandoned warehouse. Bart stumbles through a memorised piece about how he had been grabbed during an evening walk about, how he hadn’t seen any faces. He’d been mostly left alone in the room, except to be fed or taken to the bathroom.
It’s all purposely vague and generic. Bart sticks to his role of scared teenager. He knows how to play a part.
An hour after being dropped off, Jay arrives in a rush of slamming doors and raised voices. Jay doesn’t use superspeed to rush across the room, but he certainly runs, and when he gets to Bart he cups his face in his hands and kisses all over his forehead and cheeks. A show for the officers, of course, and all a part of the plan, but it’s also nice, in a way. It feels warm.
They drive home. Jay plays country music on the radio, and Bart presses his face against the window. The world outside passes them by in strips of colour and sound and he just keeps on breathing. For some reason, a brief encounter with the outside world has exhaustion creeping into his bones. Like it’s found a home there, and doesn’t want to leave.
Bart closes his eyes. He doesn’t sleep.
It takes until three days later to realise that they’ve started up on his food thing, again. Familiar, hearty meals meant to catch him up on missing calories. He doesn’t think he realised it the first time around, back when any and all food was such a marvel that he didn’t care what he was shoving in his mouth, as long as it was edible and there was plenty of it.
But there was a pattern to it, now that he thinks about it. Protein shakes and nuts, rice and potatoes and whole grain bread. They’re basic staples to be found in any speedster household, because filling foods are friends to those with high metabolisms, but the directed focus that went into every meal was telling, something that Bart hadn’t seen since his first year or so in this time.
It doesn’t bother him, much. He knows that the numbers on the scale are concerning when he deigns to weigh himself. He knows that being able to feel his individual ribs under his skin probably isn’t a good thing. Teenagers are supposed to be knobbly and lanky, not gaunt. The meals are just a way of rectifying that.
What bothers him-
What bothers him is when he realises he’s stockpiling again.
He doesn’t even realise he’s doing it until the fifth day, when he throws three collected bags of chips that he had gotten from the store with Jay into his bedroom closet. He’s halfway down the stairs before he registers what he’s done and turns right back around to double check.
In his closet are: three cans of tomato soup, four cans of beans, seven bags of chips, an entire package of Oreo cookies, and no fewer than a dozen fruit snack packets.
It’s not a lot. It’s not like when he first got here, when the closet had been stuffed more with food than clothes. That doesn’t stop it from being concerning, especially because his first instinct upon seeing it is thinking, panicked, it’s not enough.
Bart swallows, dry. Closes his closet and sits down on the bed, breathing purposely even. It doesn’t make sense. Sure, he’d gone a little hungry while under Lor-Zodd’s care, but not enough to justify this, not enough to twist his stomach inside out with hunger, the way it had been in the barren wastelands of his youth.
It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t, but Bart still can’t get rid of it, can’t even consider getting rid of it, without panic blooming under his ribs. He thought he was over this. He thought he was okay, now, or at least some semblance of it. He hasn’t had a food stash like this for years. He thought he was supposed to be okay.
Frustrated, he hurls a pillow across the room, and it unsatisfactorily bounces off the opposite wall.
Some hero, he thinks, and fists his fingers in his hair and tugs at it until it feels like he can breathe again without screaming or crying or both.
“I think something’s wrong with me,” he whispers to Jaime that night, curled under his bedframe with his back to the wall. The picture on his phone screen shows his friend mid wave, an awkward crooked grin making itself home on his face. He had purposely called using only the voice option, and Jaime hasn’t made any moves to request a change to video. The picture seems safer, somehow.
“There are many things wrong with you,” Jaime quips, his voice oddly tired for two in the morning and artificially quiet. Bart could probably get away with turning up the volume on his phone- Jay sleeps like the dead- but he doesn’t. There’s a trickling sense of paranoia that any excess noise will result in something, or someone, finding him. Not that it matters; he can hear Jaime just fine, anyway as he sighs and continues, a little more seriously, “But I think that being a little freaked about being kidnapped probably isn’t one of them.”
“Mm,” is Bart’s intelligent answer. It sounds vague and doubtful in one. His eyes are scratchy with lack of sleep, but his dreams are full of ash and blood. On the other end of the line, Jaime shifts loudly enough for the phone to pick it up.
“Seriously! I thought you were gonna go back to pretending you were perfectly fine all the time. I’m glad that you’re- processing. Or whatever Canary likes to say about this stuff. No se.”
Bart rolls his eyes. Says, deadpan, “Wow, you’re so helpful.”
“It’s a gift, hermano, it’s a gift.”
A week later, and he’s back in school.
It’s funny, in a way. The world feels like it’s ending for three weeks and then it doesn’t, it just keeps spinning. The sun shines and the rain falls and school days keep adding up, unread chapters and missing assignments, make-up tests and excused tardies. His backpack sits heavy on his shoulders, and Bart remembers how it feels to be muzzled and chained.
His teachers are all very gentle with him. They pull him aside, one by one and by one, and express condolences and offer reprieves. Bart smiles, all plastic, promises he’s fine, that nothing even happened, really, he wasn’t even hurt. Just a little scared and roughed up, that’s all. Really.
The teachers nod, dubious. He zones out during lectures and no one calls him out on it.
History, Maths, and English pass in a blur. Bart spends Snack crammed in the corner of the library, avoiding the hoard of curious teenagers who, of course, are all in the know about one Bart Allen’s mysterious kidnapping and rescue.
In Spanish, he’s cornered by his seat partner. They're supposed to be discussing in español using conjugated verbs, but all Asher wants to talk about are thugs and cages and what it felt like to meet the real actual Flash!
Bart ignores him, mostly. Laughs off inquiries and proddings and squeezes his shaking, useless fingers into his jeans. When that doesn’t work, he goes silent entirely, staring really hard at a poster across the room like he’s trying to read it.
Fingers flick gently at his shoulder, just a shade too close to his neck, and static electricity pinpricks against his skin. Bart’s blood freezes. “Hey, man,” Asher says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t push.”
His tongue is too big for his mouth. He glances down at his textbook, the list of brightly coloured conjugated words. His ribs are made of ice inside his chest, expanding slowly until there’s little to no room for his lungs. “It’s fine.”
“You sure? You’re lookin’ a little pale-”
“I’m sure.” The words come out in a snap, too stiff and too formal. Asher blinks at him, slowly, and shrugs. Turns to his own textbook. Starts speaking Spanish.
Bart doesn’t hear a word. He says things back, but it’s all rote memory and instinct, reading words off the page. It’s like a switch has been flipped in his brain, and all the little things that he had been stubbornly unbothered by all day have burst out of hiding, screaming at him.
It’s too loud in the hallways, and people bustle past him without a care in the world, and the tag on his shirt keeps brushing against the base of his neck. There’s a tight clench of nausea in his stomach. The bright artificial lights leave him too exposed.
He’s hidden away in a bathroom cubicle by lunch. Massaging at his aching head, at his chest. Anxiety thrums at the base of his spine like a drum, something familiar and distant all at once. He wants to go home.
…there is nothing stopping him from going home.
It’s an odd thought, that, because for almost a month the reality had been the exact opposite. Captive on a moderated bioship, thrown out of space and time, with the collar heavy around his neck and so many lives to save, going home hadn’t been a possibility he could even consider. Now, now, all that stands in his way is a quick phone call.
If he asked, if he called Jay and explained, he has zero doubts that the man would come and pick him up, no question necessary.
But Bart has made it through days like these, before. He has breathed through them, and made it back home shaken but in one piece. Anxiety like this is an old friend, one that lingers dormant in his mind until it feels the need to lash out and strike.
It’s just a little more prominent this time. That’s all.
He groans, swiping a hand down his face and massaging at his temples. He just- he needs to relax, for a second. Just one second. Get his head on straight. He can make it through this. He can. He’ll ride out the worst of it in here, amongst the tile and the steady drip of leaky faucets, and then he’ll be okay for the rest of the day. He can make it through this alone.
Bart massages his sternum. He breathes.
The thing is-
The thing is, Bart doesn’t want to.
How much time did he spend in that ship silently pleading to the universe for Jay to come and pick him up? How much time did he spend in that ship hoping beyond what was reasonable or logical that he could just blink and be home?
A lot of time, is the answer. A lot.
And now he’s here, where literally the only thing stopping him is the idea that he has to ask for it, has to look at another human being and seek help from them, even if it’s as simple as signing him out from school so he won’t get even more unexcused absences, and-
It’s silly, is all. It’s making his heart beat at a mile per minute, but it’s still silly. It can be both.
Bart inhales hollow air. He thinks about quiet check-in and offered shoulders during long dark hours of captivity. He thinks about a half dozen Justice Leaguers reminding him, encouraging him, to let himself rest, to sit out a battle even though the war wasn’t done. He thinks about Jay, staying up half the night, quiet words insisting he’s got nowhere better to be. He thinks of Jaime, his strange, soft pride because Bart had admitted he maybe wasn’t perfectly okay.
He takes out his cellphone. It rests cold and smooth in his hands. He breathes and breathes and breathes.
He calls Jay.
His fingers don’t stop shaking while he’s doing it, and it’s pathetic because literally nothing happened, but he calls him and he places the phone to his ear and listens to the dial tone, the first and second ring. He listens to Jay pick up and slumps against the cheap plastic wall of the cubicle, just inhaling and exhaling and working his way through it.
“Hey,” he says, and his voice is too quiet and too strained and Jay’s going to know that somethings up. “Hey, would you mind picking me up?”
“On my way. Everything alright?”
Swallowing, Bart nods and hums affirmatively. Jay’s tone had been purposely casual and he’s feeling a disproportionate amount of relief for the fact. It’s not a big deal. It feels like a big deal, but it’s not. This is normal. This is normal.
Most people don’t spend their childhoods relying entirely on themselves for survival. Bart hasn’t had to rely entirely on himself in years, either; it’s just a hard habit to break.
(This is him, breaking it.)
“You’ll need to go to the front office,” Jay says, and it sounds like he’s moving. Bart can imagine him picking up his car keys, puttering around to find his hat. “You alright with that? I can stay on the line.”
His legs have somehow gone to sleep in the half hour he’s spent hiding in the bathroom. Lunch will be over soon, and he should probably get out before the hallways fill again. He thinks three years ago, if he had been brave enough to call Jay for assistance, he would have kept the man on the line for reassurance that he’d actually be on his way. Now he just murmurs, “I’ll be fine.”
“Fifteen minutes, kiddo,” comes the response, and then the old man hangs up.
The pickup goes smoothly. Bart walks through the long empty locker-lined passages to the front desk. The nurse on duty offers him some water while he waits, and Bart just sits with his little plastic cup of water and breathes slowly, eyes on the window. Nobody tries to talk with him or touch him, though the principal does send him a kind smile on the way over to her office.
Fifteen minutes, just like Jay said, and a familiar old truck pulls up in the parking lot. Bart stands up so quickly his head spins, still holding his undrinked water, and flounders as the man shuffles in and signs the necessary paperwork, charming grin firmly in place as he talks with the receptionist.
When they exit into the parking lot, Jay brushes their arms together. “You alright?” he murmurs, and Bart is kind enough and exhausted enough to not mention that it’s the second time he’s asked. Instead, he just shrugs. He’s still holding the little plastic cup, and he’s careful not to spill anything even as they step over uneven pavement
It’s quiet, on the drive home. Bart leans against the window and tries to get his heart in tempo, tries to count the beats. He is here and he is breathing and he is exhausted and he’s going home. This is the reality he gets to live in, even if it doesn’t feel entirely real.
He doesn’t drink the water. Jay doesn’t ask him to throw it out.
It’s about love. It’s about life. It’s about presses of grief and rage. Bart sits on the couch after coming home early from school and inhales the scent of cinnamon candles.Cinnamon was the only kind of candle Joan liked to buy, and even now Jay keeps up the tradition. Mourning and remembrance works so differently, in this world without the Reach.
In the kitchen, Jay is humming off tune as he makes dinner. Bart can hear the clangs of pots and pans, the openings and closings of cupboards. He had found a six-pack of closed waterbottles in his closet, the other day, and he knows it’s just another one of those little silent ways people are trying to tell him it’s okay if he doesn’t feel safe.
He cradles the thought of it close to his chest. Tries to look at it from all the angles. Tries to breathe, mostly, but the ability to think things through is also much appreciated.
The oven beeps, a two-toned ring indicating its preheated status. There’s the slide of metal against ceramic as Jay puts in three separate lasagnas, and Bart tries to cradle these little sounds of domesticity, too. You are here, they seem to say, you’re still here.
A seconds pause, and another, and then Jay comes strolling in. He’s stretching as he does it, arms over his head, and the yellow lamplight casts his face golden. “Scootch, kid,” he murmurs, and Bart complies, sliding over a couple of feet until they can both fit on the lumpy living room couch.
“You wanna talk about it?” Jay offers, even toned, and Bart shrugs. He doesn’t know what he wants. To sleep, mostly without waking up every other hour with night terrors he no longer remembers, maybe. To let go of the new experiences and the old aches that come with them, possibly. It’s all a jumbled mess in his head, and there’s no words that will fit.
Next to him, Jay sighs. “I suppose that’s fair enough.”
They sit for a while, on their old couch. At some point, and he can’t remember how for the life of him, he finds himself with his cheek cushioned by Jay’s thigh, an old cartoon re-run playing on the T.V. He blinks, blearily, and starts to shift, but Jay just hushes him without touching him, a sort of soft murmur composed solely of noise and air.
Bart feels half asleep. He feels like he weighs a million pounds. He feels wired, thoughts pacing dizzying circles in his mind. There’s still tension at the base of his spine, curled up tight and prickly. The bristle of hair against his neck is almost too much.
He opens his mouth and says, “I thought I was over this.” He’s not sure why.
“Over what?”
His legs curl towards his chest in order to fit on the couch. His heart curls up under his ribs and it doesn’t fit at all. Bart breathes and breathes and breathes and says, quietly, “I dunno. All this.”
There’s a frown on Jay’s face. He can hear it in the old man’s voice, the way the words clip like steel. “Bart, you’ve been through something real traumatic, you can’t beat yourself up over-”
“I know that! I know that.” His lungs fill and deflate and Bart clamps his knees tight to his sternum so he can measure each careful breath. He can’t bring himself to look Jay in the eye. “But I’m- I’m not falling apart over Zod, or freaking out about my new scars or the mind games. It’s just- it’s the old stuff. Again. And I thought I was over it.”
He clasps his lips shut into a thin hard line before he can say anything else pathetic, staring hard at the T.V. On the screen, a bald kid with arrow tattoos rides a giant fish. Above him, Jay lets loose a long slow sigh.
“These sorts of things don’t always make sense, kid,” he says, words stumbling slowly out of his mouth. “I’d love to tell ya it’s so simple as getting over it once and being done with it, but it’s not. God knows I’ve got my own demons.” An itching moment of silence passes, and then Jay lets loose another huge sigh. There’s a monster in the water, chasing the giant fish, chasing the boy, and Bart’s eyes are stubbornly dry as he watches on.
“Just take your time, Bart. If we can make it through once we can make it through a hundred times.”
Bart snorts. He doesn’t lift his head off of Jay’s lap. “Did you get that from a Hallmark movie?” he asks, and Jay groans, laughing and nudging him on the arm in turn. It’s a nice sort of moment.
They stay on the couch, and time ticks on slow and fast and slow again. Jay doesn’t touch his head, keeping his long arms on the back of the couch, but he does hum a little bit, and his leg is warm under Bart’s cheek. The cartoon plays on, flashes of colour and sound. There’s a fire, and then there’s rain, and something that happens in the middle. He thinks he’s losing time, dropping off and coming back to in spits and spurts and starts. He thinks he doesn’t mind.
He remembers, vaguely, thinking about how gentleness can wait until he’s done. He reflects on the fact that nothing feels over. He thinks about how he’s caught in this gentle moment anyway.
Funny thing, that.
The world does not stop, is the truth. It falls apart, maybe, but it does not stop. It’s kept on spinning after the attempted Kryptonian invasion and, in a future that no longer exists, it kept spinning, too. Bart has learned how to ache in more ways than one.
But he’s learning this, too. This healing in increments, these gentle hands reaching out to steady his shaking ones. He thinks he will spend the rest of his life falling in and out of healing. He thinks it will still be a life worth living, anyway. It’s not something he has to go through alone.
For now, sleep creeps over him slowly, right there on that old couch in a house that smells of cinnamon. It’s quiet and restful for an hour, until suddenly the distinct odour of burning lasagna fills the room and Jay bursts to his feet, cursing and yelling.
Bart rolls off onto the floor, heart in his throat, appraising the situation. Jay is already in the kitchen, making liberal use of his superspeed to try and save their blackened dinner. The old man’s face is still painted warm and golden, and there are crease marks on Bart’s own cheek.
One second, two, and Bart can’t help it. He cracks up right there on the floor, hands pressed against his eyes and breath staccato in his chest. Jay orders him to get up, to come help me ya hooligan, but Bart ignores him. Just laughs.
In the kitchen, Jay starts chuckling, too.
The lasagna is burnt beyond recognition. They order take-out and make a series of ever more ridiculous toasts using their chopsticks. Jay lights every single candle they have in the house and it still smells of smoke. They’ll get more tomorrow. Nothing is broken so permanently that it can’t be addressed and handled given time.
Outside the window, the world keeps spinning on and on and on. Bart rests his tired head against the dining room table and cracks a yawn. Jay mimics him, jaw splitting wide, and then lets out a tired old groan of exasperation. Slides a container of chow mein closer to Bart’s plate.
On and on and on: Bart serves himself another portion of noodles. He inhales and exhales and traces each breath as it fills up his lungs. The world does not stop, so he won’t either. He can learn to live with this imperfect healing. He can learn to live within the crevices of his own self, to hold all parts of him, good and bad, gently.
He can learn and relearn and relearn again that it’s not something he has to do on his own.
Across the table, Jay laughs. Bart sits back, smiles, and learns to breathe it in.