Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

            Ninety miles south of Denver, Colorado, cicadas clung to the trunks of ponderosa pines and rang their hum and whine far through the dry air of late summer. Most days, as today, the sound was broken only by the occasional low groan of a semi rumbling along the rural highway that wound through the forest. Above the road, vultures perched in low branches, spreading their umbrella-like wings to catch every angle of the sun.

            They waited. Here, inevitably, raccoons and deer would venture onto the highway, having nowhere else to cross and lulled into security by the long stretches of time between oncoming cars. Most would cross successfully. Some would be crushed—tragic for the animals, but splendid for the vultures. For their survival. So they waited, statue-still and watching. They could be patient.

            They watched as a dog approached the road, weaving in and out of pungent shrubs that were hidden in the shadows of the pines. Smaller than a fawn, the dog was, but bigger than a raccoon. They’d all get a bite or two. They watched. They waited.

            The dog didn’t hesitate, as wild animals did, to tremble at the edge of the foul-smelling asphalt. It knew roads; it was of a different world. Stupid—careless—but good for the vultures. They watched it walk right onto the road, straight ahead, like it belonged there. And the vultures didn’t move—didn’t even blink. They already felt the semi coming. It rumbled up over the steep grade far faster than the dog could run. It would die soon—now.

            And then a red blur, fast as lightning. The dog was gone. The truck passed over and out of sight again. The vultures watched.

            Hunger burned in all their stomachs. But this happened sometimes; it was to be accepted. This was the life of a scavenger. They were content to wait, with watching eyes, for whatever would be crushed under the wheel next.

            Bart Allen wove down a line of pine trees, clutching the dog in his arms.

It wasn’t a huge dog, but it was bigger than his, and awkward to carry. Dogs were all angles and elbows. Or knees. Sturdy. Not like cats—cats were slippery and smushy, and you could bundle lots of them together in your arms, if you had to. If you were carrying them from a burning building, for example. Before they noticed and got angry and started scratching.

            The dog’s face changed by degrees, slowly realizing it had been moved and was still moving. Dogs had funny, bewildered faces, but in a minute, it would start to squirm in his arms, and why was he still carrying this dog, anyway? He couldn’t really see where he was running, and even though the trees were pretty far apart, there were still shrubs whacking at his shins and ankles as he ran through them.

            He slowed to a jog, and then to a walk, before he stopped. People didn’t like it when you stopped all at once; it made them sick. He didn’t want to make the dog sick, either. He wasn’t sure if dogs got motion sickness, but cleaning dog barf off his uniform was so not how he wanted to spend the rest of his day.

He set the dog on the ground, and without the Speed Force thrumming so intensely through his veins the world tick-tocked forward, a little bit. Time didn’t crawl forward as slowly when he was standing still as it did when he ran. Still slower, though, than it was for everyone else. He knew this because everyone talked slowly, and because he’d lost his speed a couple times, and felt what it was like to be—everyone else. Everyone except the Flashes. And Max, and the Quicks…

            Plus, the VR he’d lived in as a—child? baby?—had been matched to his speed. Sped up for him.

            Once, when he was younger, Max had taken him out to a forest like this. Probably they were actually in Mongolia or Greece or something; his memory of it was fuzzy, like he hadn’t really been paying attention.  He just remembered that the trees were maybe about this tall, and that it had been hot. He remembered…

            “Look around,” Max had said. “No speed. Tell me what you see.”

            And Bart tried; he really did. He looked around and around at the trees, though they all just looked like trees to him. He knew there were lots of different types of trees, but he didn’t know what they were. Max probably did. He watched a bird leave its nest, which was more interesting than the trees, and he told Max so.

“What’s interesting about it?” Max said. “Tell me.” He looked at Bart the whole time, and not at the bird, which made Bart nervous. Max had a habit of asking questions like Bart should know the answers to them, except he usually didn’t.

            “It—it…I dunno,” Bart said. His feet itched; he wanted to zip up for a closer look, but Max had said no speed, so he stayed rooted. A bug crawled around his shoe.

            “The way its wings…move,” he said. The answer felt inadequate as he said it, and Max said nothing, only went hm. Bart looked at the bird again, which was now flying overhead.

            It was something about the musculature, the way the breast muscles stretched like hammocks through the bones of the wing. Something about that interested him. His fingers fluttered at his sides as he considered it, but he couldn’t find the words.

            “This is—”

            This is hard! he nearly snapped, but he bit it off. He didn’t want to fight with Max. For once, he didn’t.

            Max smiled, just a little bit. “I know,” he said.

            Now, in the present moment, Bart really did want to stop and look for a while. The cushiony forest floor was dappled with light, and the light was always shifting, moving around and highlighting different spots every second. And the trees moved. The movement was subtle at the base of the trunks, but if he craned his neck and looked to the top, they swayed slowly and wildly in the wind. All the leaves rustled together, silvery at the edges, like tinsel.

            He hadn’t thought about that day with Max in a long time. Like most of his memories with Max, it made him happy and sad all at once to think about. And confused. Looking back on those days, he often felt like there was something Max had been trying to tell him, just dangling in front of his face. But Bart had never grasped it, and Max had taken it with him to the Speed Force, locked away and out of reach.

            The dog sniffed at his shoes. The dog! He laid his hand on its head and scratched behind one ear, and the dog’s tongue flopped out of its mouth happy-like. The friendly dog.

            Something like a mutt with some golden retriever in it. Or yellow lab…? He couldn’t ever remember which was which. It did have a collar on—nice detective work to notice that, he thought—and he crouched to examine it.

            Ivan, was all it said. No address.

            “Hmm,” Bart said. “You’ve gotta belong to someone.”

            He scooped Ivan up off the carpet of pine needles and then his body was humming again, a purring engine ready to move. He zipped back to the road where he’d grabbed Ivan—or a similar road, at least—and crossed into the woods on the other side.

            A few zips up and down the forest and he found a smaller road, a gravel county road perpendicular to the highway. But he ran alongside it, not on it, because gravel kicked up at high velocity was bad news.

            He passed a few houses with long, tree-shaded driveways. None of them appeared to be dog owners—no fences, no dog doors—although he had a dog and he didn’t have a fence or a dog door, so maybe that didn’t mean much. Some houses already had dogs. But there wasn’t a limit on how many dogs you could have. Eventually he just started pausing in front of each house—even backtracking to a few—and pausing, waiting to see if Ivan would react. He assumed he would—bark, or something—when it saw his place. But Ivan didn’t do anything special, so Bart kept moving on.

            And then, with a driveway so overgrown it was nearly invisible, he found a small cabin—just a few rooms, it looked like from the outside, and pretty new-looking compared to some of the other run-down old houses on that road. The house sat on small parcel of land closed-in by wild trees and long grass. A chopping block out front, with a woodpile drying nearby, neatly stacked. And out back was a doghouse, perfect and square with a roof just like the ones in cartoons. Carved into the wood above the doghouse door: IVAN.

            Bart grinned. Simple victories were the best kind, he’d always thought.

            He carried Ivan up to the front door and balanced him awkwardly against one arm and one hip as he tried to knock with the other hand. But the dog squirmed and writhed, and his hard claws scrabbled against Bart’s side, so he set him down and then knocked.

            Silence, for a while. Bart reminded himself to be patient. Somewhere nearby, a woodpecker drummed against a tree. Then footsteps from inside the cabin moved toward the door. Bart grinned. He wanted to see how happy it made someone, that he’d found their dog.

            The door swung open on creaky hinges, and Bart saw his own face.

            It was like time stopped, or more like all the gears turning in Bart’s head got jammed up with chewing gum and froze in place. He stared, for a long time, at his face, his own light freckles and unusual, 30^th-century-yellow eyes. It was like looking in a mirror—except for the hair. Blond. Bart’s heart dropped down somewhere deep in his guts.

            His face—the other face—stared back. Then rapid-fire flickers of shock—disgust—panic—and the door slammed shut.

            And Bart stared at the door. Unsure of what to do. Unable to process—this.

            Ivan was apparently satisfied and wandered over to his house.

            Bart decided to do the same.

            Only he didn’t go home.

            He intended to; he angled at first in the direction of his Alabama apartment. But he was too restless; he needed to run this off. And he didn’t know what he’d say to Cissie, his roommate. Or benefactor, as she liked to call herself, since, to be honest, she paid most of the rent.

            Wally. He could talk to Wally, maybe, but something held him back from the idea. He ran west, flashing over California, tearing out over the Pacific Ocean where his footsteps made a little suction-y noise with each step.

            No, not Wally. Not Jay, either. They wouldn’t understand; they were too wrapped up in the legacy to…to what? Bart sped by a cruise ship and glanced his hand through the crest of the ship’s wake. All the resulting little droplets glittered in the sun. He really wanted to talk to Max, but…

            Helen, maybe? He slowed, a little, and his feet got wet, sinking down below the surface of the water. He picked up again. Helen always knew what to do—but even as he turned around and angled back toward his old home, as he crossed back over land, over the Rockies, over the Mississippi into Alabama, he changed course again, just slightly.

            Carol sat at the plain wooden desk in her dorm room, jotting notes from a pair of open chemistry textbooks in front of her. The little drugstore TV by her desk played some reality show on one of the handful of cable networks the university offered residents for free. She wasn’t really paying attention, she told herself; it was just background noise. But she kept her eyes steadfastly on the pages. If she looked up at the episode of Catfish or Teen Mom or whatever it was, she’d be hooked, no matter how stupid.

            A tap on her window. She got up, slipped on a robe from the back of her chair, and looked down through the darkness. Speaking of stupid….

            Bart stood three stories below, waving up at her. In costume.

            She sighed. He was lucky her roommate was gone, as usual.

            A few minutes later, she met him downstairs, in front of the building. It was late, so the entrance was quiet and dimly-lit, but she’d asked him before—multiple times—to change out of costume before showing up at her very public dorm.

            She nearly said so again. But there was something weird about his smile. Without a word, she hooked her arm around his shoulder, and he scooped his arms under her knees, and a second later they’d zipped up to the roof of the building.

            He was sat cross-legged on the ground. She followed suit, eyeing the way his hands fidgeted in his lap—at super-speed, a blur around the edges of his fingers. Something was up. She opened her mouth.

            “Whatareyoudoing?” he asked. The words flew out of his mouth in a jumble it took her a moment to process.

            “What…am I doing?” she repeated. “Just studying. I have an exam Wednesday.” He looked over the top of her head, which meant he was thinking, which meant he wasn’t paying attention. But then, to her surprise, he met her eyes with a look of obvious confusion.

            “Exam? But it’s August.”

            She tucked her knees into the bottom of her robe. “Exam,” she said, “but not a final.”  Bart only had a vague understanding of how college worked, having elected not to go.

            “Oh,” he said.

            “You forgot to change again,” she pointed out. Bart looked even more baffled by her saying this, until she reached out and tugged at his sleeve. It snapped against his skin when she let go.

            “Oh,” he said. “Yeahyeahyeah, secret identity, sorry.” His knee bobbed up and down.

            “What’s wrong?” she asked. The hum of the generator was loud behind them, and plumes of steam rose from the vents into the night sky.

            He puffed out his cheeks like he was chewing on something, or like he was ready to spit. She’d seen him try to spit before, jokingly emulating the boys at their high school who dipped tobacco and left water bottles full of black spit around the parking lot. Mostly he’d ended up with spit running down his chin.

            The blurring of his fingers stopped, and his knee slowed from a bob to a small jiggle.

            “I was running around,” he said. “I found a dog.”

            Carol waited for him to continue.

            “I think, uh,” he said. “I think I saw…Thad?”

            “Thad…?” she said. It took her a second to remember—not because she’d forgotten, but because it had been years. “Oh. Oh. Wait, really?”

            Bart nodded. In the darkness, it was hard to see through the yellow goggles that shielded his eyes.

            “How?” Carol asked. “Where? I thought you said he was lost in the Speed Force.”

            “I—we thought he was,” Bart said. “Max said…it’s almost impossible to make it out. Not unless you know what you’re doing. But I saw him in…Montana, I think. Or Colorado. He lives in a little cabin in the woods and he has a dog.”

            “What did Wally say?”

            “I didn’t…tell Wally,” Bart said. “Not yet.”

            “What did you do? I mean, are you sure it was him?”

            “I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted. “I just left. But, yeah. Unless—” He cocked his head. “Could it be someone else? Like another clone or a lost time scout or—”

            Carol laid a hand on his knee. Her mind was racing, but it was nothing, she was sure, compared to what was going on in Bart’s head. “Let’s work under the simplest explanation for now. But you should make sure.”

            Bart nodded—then stopped. “How?”

            “Well, Wally or Jay could—”

            “No!” Bart cut in. “They don’t—they can’t—” He made vague shapes in the air in front of him, as if trying to model a concept for Carol he couldn’t express in words.

            “I don’t think he wants to hurt anyone,” Bart said. “He’s just…living. He has a dog.”

            “He had a dog when he was posing as you,” Carol pointed out, gently. But Bart shook his head.

            “Wally wouldn’t understand. They’re all too caught up in the whole…” He made more vague shapes. “The whole Thawne thing.”

            Carol’s stomach curled a little at the name. She was more than a little bit caught up in the ‘Thawne thing’ herself, having seen the future, and President Thawne…

            But she kept her face neutral.

            “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Why don’t you…sneak in when he’s not there? Vibrate through the walls. See if there’s anything in his house that’s…I dunno…” She trailed off, unsure of where this plan was going. If Thad really was just living his life—but it seemed wrong not to check. To make absolutely sure.

            Bart nodded. But his lips twitched like he wanted to say something else. She waited.

            “Will you come, too?” He asked, quietly. Quiet was rare for Bart. Quiet, for Bart, usually meant serious.

            Carol thought of the books on her desk, the pile of flashcards. But she knew the material well enough, and her grade in the class was good already, and, really, none of that mattered more than her always-best-friend-sometimes-more.

            He watched her with a wide-open face—the kind of face that couldn’t hide anything even if it wanted to. Below the roof, from the front of the building, voices drifted up through the humid air. Other students, coming back from night classes or maybe leaving for parties. Silly, inconsequential conversations. She nodded.

            “Okay,” she said. “Let me change.”

Chapter Text

            It never ceased to amaze her how running west seemed to turn back time.

            The sunset lifted, night turning back to dusk, and Carol watched it happen because she’d long since learned to keep her eyes open despite the terrifying speed. Partially because she didn’t want to miss any of the casual magic of moving faster than sound, though she couldn’t really focus her eyes on anything other than the largest reference points, like the sky or mountains. Partially, too, because she got motion sick with her eyes closed.

            And then they were in a pine forest. She slid down from Bart’s arms and took off her cheap goggles. Dimly, through the trees, she could see a dark, hunched structure, and if she hadn’t known there was a cabin there, she might have assumed it was a fallen tree or a pile of rocks in the half-light. A dog barked somewhere in that direction, a thin sound that wisped through the dry air. And there was a thin clunk-clunking, a steady rhythm that stopped every few beats and then resumed.

            Carol raised a pair of binoculars to her eyes.

            God, she’d so badly wanted for Bart to be wrong. Not that she wanted anyone dead, but—Thad’s time in their lives, masquerading as Bart—it was like something out of a horror movie. Worse, a horror movie she hadn’t realized her part in until it was nearly too late. It had been too late—from Bart’s account of it, Thad had come chillingly close to success, and it was all a little hard to swallow.

            But all she saw now was a blond version of Bart splitting wood in front of his cabin. The ax came up, down with a practiced regularity. Swinging, wedging in the log, splitting. He looked…normal. It would be funny if it wasn’t so unsettling.

“He’s out front,” she said, lowering the binoculars. “We could go around the back?”

            Bart scooped her up again. They made a wide circle around the back of the house—not at full speed, but slower, more quiet—and then she felt a familiar whole-body tremor, like teeth rattling all over. Together, vibrating, they slipped through the back wall, and then he set her down and her body fell together again.

            An aluminum chair sat by a wooden table, neither matching each other in the slightest. Glass containers of sugar and flour, antique but clean, on the counter; a little wood-burning stove, topped with one copper pot and one pan, both badly dented and scratched; an old-fashioned coffeepot on the stove, a mug, a neatly-sealed bag of coffee grounds to the side. A few neatly-folded dishrags. A broom and dustpan leaning in the corner.

            “He’s so…neat,” Carol whispered. It all seemed—harmless. Hard to reconcile. Absently, she fingered her pocket, where she kept a little pink can of pepper spray. Bobby had bought it for her before her first day of college.

            Bart zipped over to the stove and jerked his thumb toward the heavy door. “Talk about primitive.”

            “Everything in this century seems primitive to you, future boy.” She crouched by a cabinet and pried it open. There wasn’t much inside—a large bag of rice and some big baking potatoes and onions. She shut the door.

            “Yeah, but—” Bart said. “Why doesn’t he have a regular stove?”

            Carol hummed. “He doesn’t have a fridge, either. I don’t think he has electricity.” She brushed her fingers over a spice rack on the wall. “Maybe he’s living off the grid.”

            Bart flung open and shut the rest of the cabinets; from his silence, she assumed he didn’t find anything interesting. The steady wooden thunk-thunk and barking continued from outside.

            Carol pointed at the living room beyond the kitchen, and the two of them moved without speaking.

            A small couch—old-looking, sagging in the middle like its frame had outlived its intended use—was draped with a folded throw blanket, colors worn and fabric pilling. A coffee table with a single book lying on top and a small, raggedy rug on the floor underneath. A pair of dog bowls in one corner, and in the opposite corner, a bookshelf, stuffed with books and organized, Carol noted, by both subject and author.

            “How did he stand pretending to be you?” she joked, running her finger over one of the shelves; it came away dust-free. “Your room must have driven him crazy.”

            “Carol, look,” Bart whispered. She turned; he was examining the book on the coffee table. She ducked below the window facing the front yard and peered over his shoulder, though she had to stand on tiptoes to do it.

            The Life Story of the Flash by Iris Allen.

            “What are you doing?”

            Before Carol could react—before she could even jump—Bart had spun them both around to face the front door, his body angled in front of hers.

            Thad stood in front of the door.

            Carol palmed her pepper spray. He snorted.

            “Oh, right,” he said. “Bucklen, if I wanted to kill you, I’d have done it already.”

            She bit down on the inside of her cheek. She wished she didn’t have the urge to inch closer to Bart, but the truth was, Thad scared her—and he knew it.

            “Hey,” Bart barked. Thad looked back at him, and his frown deepened.

            “You didn’t answer me,” Thad said. He leaned back against the wall, his arms crossed, but he looked—stiff. Flighty. Ready to run. The dog still barked outside. “What are you doing?”

            “I…” Bart glanced at Carol, and she shrugged in response. What did he expect her to do?

            Bart held the book up in front of him. “Why do you have this?” he asked.

            “Idiot,” Thad said, “I’ve always had that.”

            “Oh,” Bart said.

            Carol clenched her fists, willing her hands to stop shaking. Thad was dangerous, and unlike Bart, he knew how to manipulate people. It wasn’t that Bart was dumb—Bart was remarkably smart, actually—but there had always been a gap between what was happening in Bart’s head and what was happening in the real world. Less so now than when she first met him—when he was essentially a toddler—but he still lived a little bit in his own world. Bart could never pull off a months-long impersonation of someone else; he could barely keep his own secret identity a secret.

            That difference is what scared her. But she stepped forward.

            “Listen,” she said. “Bart was just surprised to see you. He wanted to check on you. Right, Bart?”

            “Uh—yeah!” Bart said. “I kinda thought you…uh…”

            Thad looked him up and down. “You wanted to check on me.”

            “Yep.” Bart stood ramrod-straight, the way he did when he was lying.

            “And who sent her along?”

            “Sent…?”

            “Nobody sent us,” Carol said. Her own voice reminded her of how she used to soothe her little sister when she was young and throwing tantrums. She modified. “We just wanted to make sure you were…”

            When she didn’t finish the end of the sentence—she couldn’t think of a way that wouldn’t offend—he scoffed.

            The room was growing dark around them; no lights were installed in the cabin, and the sun was setting—again. It was harder now to see Thad’s face, with the window behind him.

            Then there was a blur, a breeze, the electricity in the air—and she moved—she couldn’t tell what happened first, Thad moving or Bart hoisting Carol onto his back. But then Thad appeared back where he’d been standing moments ago.

            “Will you relax?” He sneered. A camping lantern blazed to light in his hands. “It’s getting dark.”

            Bart’s grip loosened on Carol, and she slid down from his back, giving him a little pat between the shoulders as her feet touched the ground.

            “Can you blame me?” Bart asked.

            “Can I blame you?” Thad said. “For a lot of things, yes.”

            The light from outside continued to vanish, and the lantern cast an unsettling stark shadow on everything in the room.

            “Okay,” Thad sighed. “Grife. You’re not leaving, are you?”

            “Nope.”

            Thad grumbled. It sounded like something in Interlac, but Carol didn’t remember enough of it to understand.

            “Fine,” he snapped. “Do you want some tea?”

            Bart and Carol exchanged a look. Tea? They found someone who was supposed to be dead, someone trained from birth to kill Bart, and did they want tea?

            “Uh—sure,” Bart said.

            Bart and Carol sat on the couch while Thad built a fire in the woodstove.

            Bart kept giving her looks that she was sure he meant to be full of meaning, but she couldn’t even begin to decipher them. Instead, she watched Thad through the doorway to the kitchen, because the sight was so bizarre that she couldn’t look away. He stacked wood into the stove, stuffed it with newspaper, and lit a match that briefly illuminated his face. For the moment she could see it, he didn’t look angry; he wasn’t sneering or frowning. He just looked…tired. In the darkness, where the color of his hair faded in the shadows, he looked just like Bart looked in a quiet moment.

            Carol grabbed Bart’s hand. She needed the solidity of it, something to anchor to.

            Once the fire had caught enough to pop and crackle in the stove, Thad disappeared for a moment, and returned with a kettle that Carol assumed was full of water. She briefly wondered whether he had a well. But anywhere within a hundred miles with a tap would be just as convenient.

            She didn’t like turning her back on him, but realistically—logically—it didn’t matter whether she kept an eye on him or not. He moved faster than she could blink.

            Should she be more frightened? She was unsettled; it was an unsettling situation. But the tension had—not passed, exactly, but taken a break. Gone down with the sun, maybe. She looked around the room, but she couldn’t see much detail in the lantern-light. Only shapes.

            She looked back at Thad. He was just—staring at the kettle. Waiting for it to boil. That was something Bart could never do. She relaxed.

            A few minutes later, Thad returned with two mugs. He handed one to Carol, kept one for himself, and resumed his place by the door, leaning against the wall.

            “Hey,” Bart protested.

            “You don’t like tea,” Thad said. He took a sip of his own. “And you,” he said to Carol, “like honey but no milk.”

            Carol’s stomach seized, but she took a sip anyway. Sweetened with honey. When she was a teenager, she drank tea before school, when Bobby had his coffee, before Bart—and Thad, in Bart’s place—walked with her to school…

            “The Speed Force spat me out,” Thad said. Each word was pinched off, like he didn't want to speak. “I don’t know why. But I ended up here. So I built a house.” He took a long sip. “That’s it.”

            Carol set her tea down. “Why didn’t you go home?”

            Thad snorted. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a transport to the 30^th century?”

            She bit the inside of her cheek. She knew exactly how hard it was. But she didn’t want to tell him that; she didn’t want him to know more about her than he already did.

            “I lost Cray—my Craydl interface,” Thad said. “I had no way to contact anyone. Besides…” He paused and took another long drink. “I’m supposed to kill you, Allen. I can’t go back if I don’t.”

            “So why don’t you?” Bart asked. “Kill me,” he clarified after a moment.

            “You are so stupid,” Thad said. He didn’t answer beyond that.

            Bart eyed Carol’s tea. She wondered if he was tempted to taste it. But Thad was right—he wouldn’t like it. He didn’t like anything bitter.

            She and Bart had gone to prom together.  By that point they had dated and broken up and dated and broken up—never dating for more than a couple months at a time—because neither of them ever quite knew how to label the feelings they had for each other, and because usually they decided that best-friendship was easier. But neither of them had prom dates. Not that it mattered to Bart, or her, but Preston convinced him that Carol needed someone to go with.

            It was fun enough, for a little while—she and Bart and a couple other friends left early to get McDonald’s, because none of them cared for the music or the way their classmates danced—but what Carol remembered most about that day was that Helen had helped her with her hair and makeup and dress shopping. It was like having a mom again, almost. And the feeling of Helen’s fingers working through her hair, weaving tight braids against her scalp while Bart flitted and chattered about—it was one of the deepest comforts she’d ever felt. She thought about it often.

            She thought about it now, though she didn’t know why.

            “So-o-o,” Bart said, looking back at Thad. “Aren’t you lonely?”

            Thad froze. Carol forced herself to keep drinking tea, even though it blistered across the back of her tongue and she didn’t really want it anymore.  

            “We won’t come back if you don’t want us to,” Bart said. “But I would be lonely.”

            Silence loomed over the room. Just three bodies, breathing in the dark.

            Carol had noticed long ago that Bart’s eyes seemed to glow, ever-so-slightly, in low light. She knew it was just a trick of the color, but it was one of many demonstrations of his difference and displacement in the 21^st century. Now two pairs of yellow eyes, highlighted by the lantern between them, mirrored each other. Four endless reflections. And Carol, apart from them, felt dull and dark. This wasn’t her moment. She wanted to blend back into the shadows of the couch cushions.

            Thad still didn’t respond. But he didn’t say no.

            “Okay.” Bart looked at Carol. “Ready?”

            She nodded. He scooped her up.

            In the second before they bolted, she thought she saw Thad’s mouth working, opening to speak—and then they were gone.

            “It’s all so…strange,” Carol said, sitting on the end of her bed. Bart sat in her desk chair, though ‘sat,’ she thought, would be a generous description of the upside-down way he’d arranged himself.

            “Yeah,” Bart agreed. His hair fell like a waterfall from his head, and he picked at something on the floor that Carol couldn’t see. “But it doesn’t really seem like he’s doing anything bad.”

            “Yes, but…” Carol searched for the right words. “He’s a very good liar, Bart.”

            Bart was quiet. He kept picking at whatever he had found on the floor, and she hoped he wasn’t prying up the edge of the linoleum.

            “Why did you bring me along?” Carol asked. The question had been nagging at her all evening. “Why not—Superboy, or Robin, or someone else?”

            He sat all the way up, his hair flopping over his eyes. “Did you not wanna?”

            “No, I did, it’s just—it’s not like I could do anything to him. If he—did anything.”

            Bart folded his arms over the back of the chair. Thinking. Carol wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, waiting for him to speak.

            “Because you’re…the only one who figured it out,” he said, quietly. “You were the only one. Young Justice didn’t, and Max and Helen didn’t…and I didn’t want…” His voice faded to a murmur.

            “Oh,” Carol said. She slid down from the bed, her feet hitting the cold floor with a plat. “Hey.” She widened her arms, and as soon as he glanced up at her, he zipped in for a tight hug.

            He was warm—always warm, bordering on feverish. It was a Flash thing, he’d told her. She wrapped the edges of her blanket around his back.

            Bart was a tactile person; he enjoyed hugs. She wondered, briefly, how many times either of them—Bart or Thad—had ever been touched as children, in the 30^th century. Not “touched” by VR, nor by AI, but by a real person who loved them.

            Bart more than Thad, she was sure. At least he’d had Iris.

            “What’s next?” she asked. She could feel his heart fluttering—not alarmingly fast, but faster than an athlete’s resting heart rate should be. Another Flash thing.

            “I…dunno.” The sound hummed in his chest, against her cheek. His breath was warm on the top of her head.

            “I think,” she said into his shoulder, “that you need to tell someone eventually. Just in case. But I trust your judgment, speedy.”

            A key slid into the lock of the front door. Bart slipped out of her grip, still in costume. The doorknob turned.

            “Later,” he whispered, and was gone.

            As her roommate, Jeanne, came in, Carol sat at her desk and absently shuffled piles of flashcards around. She really should go back to studying—but her mind was buzzing.

            “Hey.” Jeanne flopped onto her bed. “Were you talking to someone?”

            “Just the phone.” Carol gestured toward her phone. “Telemarketer.”

            They chatted for a while about their classes and weekend plans, but Carol’s mind wandered. She kept glancing to the window.

            It would have been easy for Thad to follow them—to learn where she lived. The darkness outside the window loomed opaque and uneasy; the glare of lights on the glass sent a creeping down her neck. But he’d said it himself, and he was right: if he wanted to do anything, including track her down, he could have done it a long time ago. He knew where her brother lived, back in Manchester, and it would have been easy to follow the trail from there.

            It wasn’t a reassuring thought.

            Jeanne wandered off and Carol put away her books with a sigh. There was no way she could study more tonight; instead she dragged out a sketchbook and pencils and drew absent shapes and loops to calm her worried mind.

            Part of her was irritated at Bart—not for coming to her, and not for putting her in danger, but for bringing all this complication into her life in the middle of the semester. It was stupid and small and she didn’t like feeling it. Her pencil made dark scribbles on the page. Jeanne didn’t understand why Carol studied so hard, but unlike Jeanne’s, Carol’s tuition was funded almost entirely on academic scholarships. Bobby wouldn’t let her get a job, and he sent her money every week for food and necessities, but there was no way he could afford tuition on his own. If she didn’t work hard, she’d lose her scholarships. Simple as that.

            Her sketches had coalesced from frantic scribbles into slow, vague figures. Jeanne returned in her pajamas.

            “Okay if I turn out the lights?” she asked.

            Carol flipped on her desk lamp. “Go ahead.”

            The room went dark, Carol’s desk and paper and hands bathed in soft yellow light. Jeanne’s bed creaked as she climbed in.

            Carol’s thoughts dissolved into the soft whistling of Jeanne’s breath and the scratching of lead on paper. She drew a series of straight, tall lines, shaded with stubbly bark. A scratchy carpet of needles underneath.

            A dark, distant little house and a wispy white plume of smoke.

Chapter Text

            Bart went looking for trouble to clear his head. Over an hour, he stopped three robberies and six muggings, extinguished a small fire, and pulled a cat out of a tree.

            Simple stuff, for the most part. People broke the law, you stopped them. People needed help, you helped them. Thinking about Thad gave him a headache.

            Probably most people would have something funny to say about that. He didn’t get a lot of the jokes Kon or other people told about him, but he didn’t really mind not getting it. They could make weird jokes if they wanted.

            Anyway, he thought, yanking a kid out of the street and onto the sidewalk, his head wasn’t any more clear than it had been before, and he was tired. He turned around and headed back to Alabama—home.

            When he phased through the door—it was faster than using the knob—Cissie was lounging on the couch, in the dark, illuminated by the flickering TV and bundled in about a million different blankets. A half-eaten bag of popcorn slumped on the floor by her feet.

            Bart collapsed on the couch next to her and grabbed the bag. “You gonna finish this?”

            She jumped, but only a little—she insisted she didn’t mind when he zipped around; she’d long since gotten used to it. She turned to him with sleepy eyes.

            “Nah, go ahead.”

            Bart tipped the bag back into his mouth. It was kettle corn, which he didn’t like, but he was too hungry to care. He hadn’t eaten since—well, dinner.

            “How was it?” she asked, sinking further into her blanket cocoon. She was watching some old black-and-white horror movie, something with a lot of guts and gore in it. Cissie liked weird movies.

            “How was…?” he asked through a mouthful of kettle corn. Did she know? How could she know?

            “Your day,” she said, grabbing a handful of popcorn. “How was your day?”

            “Oh,” Bart said. “Uh, okay. I mean—weird.”

            “Hmm,” Cissie said. Her attention had pulled back to the movie. “Weird how?”

            Bart’s legs bobbed up and down. On the screen, someone pulled a string of intestines out of someone else, which Bart knew was really just sausages and fake blood.

            “Do you remember when Inertia took my place so he could take Max into the Speed Force and kill him?”

            Cissie frowned, reached for the remote, and paused the movie. The freeze-frame on the old VCR stuttered in place, jittering up and down on a still image of those fake guts with two big muscular hands gripping them like ice cream cones.

            She turned to look at him.

            “I found him,” he said. He ripped up the popcorn bag into shreds and licked the extra seasoning off the sides.

            Cissie wrapped her hands around her knees. She had the same look on her face that she got when her mom was coming to visit—troubled. She and her mom got along better these days, but they had a complicated history that still hurt Cissie. A lot. After graduating high school, she’d moved away from home as soon as she had the money, which didn’t take long; she still pulled decent royalties from her Olympics merch, and she taught archery at rec centers and hunting supply stores to make up the difference.

            That she hadn’t gone to college had both surprised and not surprised Bart. Both of them were, in Cissie’s words, “bummin’ it,” though they both kept pretty busy. Bart heroed more or less full-time. Cissie didn’t. He’d known her longer now out of costume, he reflected, than in.

            And Cissie’s mom was kind to him, when she came over, but it was the kind of measured politeness that let him know that his presence wasn’t needed or desired. Max had once called this a “Southern thing.”

            Cissie had now blinked several times, and Bart reined his thoughts back. What had she asked? No, she hadn’t asked anything. It was just time for him to talk more.

            “In a cabin,” he said. “In Colorado.” Vaguely he wondered how many more times he would have to explain this. Maybe he should just get everyone in one room.

            “What’s he doing there?” she asked. After she first quit Young Justice, she was touchy about discussing superhero things; she always saw it as an attempt to bring her back into the game. But when everyone accepted that she really wasn’t coming back, she eased up.

            “I don’t know,” Bart said. “Nothing, I guess.”

            “Nothing?” Cissie frowned. “Bart, he’s a psycho. Who was created to kill you.”

            “Yeah, but…” Bart looked again at the fake guts, the tubes of sausage all the same size and shape. He’d seen people get hurt bad before. It hadn’t looked like that; not really.

            The words clicked together in his head, the nebulous thing that had been swirling in his thoughts all day. “Then why hasn’t he?”

            “Hm,” Cissie said. “I mean—fair enough, I guess. Have you told the Flash?”

            Bart felt himself making a face, and instantly got rid of it. “Why does everyone keep saying that? He’s not in charge of me.”

            “No, he’s not, but…” She rested her chin on her hand. “Who’s ‘everyone’?”

            “Carol. She came with me, and Thad caught us and made us tea,” Bart said.

            Cissie snorted. “Do you ever think about how weird your life is?”

            “No.”

            She reclined away from him and pressed play on the movie, then clicked the volume down a few times to a low hum. A woman screamed, faintly.

            “What are you gonna do?” Cissie asked.

            Bart considered chewing on some of the half-popped kernels in the bag, but he remembered the leftover chicken and broccoli in the fridge. Living with a speedster, Cissie had once said, was like prepping for the apocalypse; their cabinets overflowed with food.

            He remembered Inertia’s—Thad’s—house. How empty the cabinets were; no fridge, no microwave.

            “What does ‘off the grid’ mean?” he asked.

            Cissie’s face shifted; he tracked back to the last thing she said and realized what a conversational leap he’d made. 

            “It means—independent," she said. "Not using public utilities like electricity.”

            Bart frowned. In junior high, their class had once taken a trip to a living history museum, where men sat around polishing old guns and poking fires and women in long dresses churned butter. He’d tried churning butter, but doing it at normal speed was so boring that he gave up after a few minutes, which, at the time, seemed excruciatingly long.

            He imagined Thad churning butter. The image was so ridiculous he almost laughed.

            “Why would someone want to do that?” he asked.

            “I dunno,” she admitted. “For some people it’s probably about freedom. Not wanting to be tied into society.”

            Bart considered for a moment. “That’s dumb,” he decided.

            “Says the boy who grew up in a video game,” she said.  “I doubt you could go without electricity even if you wanted to.”

            Bart vaulted over the back of the couch and dug the chicken from the back of the fridge. He considered eating it cold, but popped it into the microwave and then ran into his room to change.

            His room was—it wasn’t dirty, or not as dirty as he kept it as a teenager--mostly because Cissie threatened to kick him out when it started to stink and he was never sure whether or not she was joking. There were some clothes on the floor, and a few dirty bowls on the bedside table, but otherwise it was fine. Or good enough, anyway.

            He dug a clean sweatshirt out of the dresser, shucked off his uniform, and tugged on a pair of old gym shorts from high school. There was one spider plant on his desk, which Carol gave him. He poked his finger into the soil—still damp. Under a small window, it had grown pretty big, sending out long stalks with baby plants onto the desk, which he seldom used anyway.

            He wandered back out into the kitchen. A minute thirty left on the microwave.

            In search of something to drink, he opened the fridge. There was a big jug of cold-brew coffee, which was Cissie’s, and a box of wine, which was also Cissie’s. He didn’t know where she got it, since she wasn’t 21. Once, she’d tried to get him to drink with her. She gave him some really sweet wine, which he liked the taste of, but anything he felt from it was gone about a second later. He’d meant to ask the Flash if that was a speedster metabolism thing, but forgot.

            He poured a glass of water from the sink and waited.

            “Are you going to tell anyone else?” Cissie called from the living room. He couldn’t see the TV anymore, but it sounded like a quiet part of the movie.

            “Maybe,” Bart said, but as soon as he did he didn’t like the idea of it. Kon wasn’t always the most trusting person--except of hot girls, anyway--and Tim—as much as he loved Tim, it was hard to imagine that everything in Tim’s life didn’t get back to Batman, and he was sure that this would then get back to the Flash. And he didn’t know how Wally would react to this. He had a history of not trusting Bart’s judgment.

            “Maybe later,” he said. The microwave dinged, and Bart removed the container and dumped the food onto a plate before it could burn his fingers.

            “Just be smart,” Cissie said, and from her tone he knew that she wasn’t being sarcastic.

            He glanced at her bow—one of her bows, the one she used in the Olympics—hanging proudly on the wall.  She rarely used that anymore, but kept it displayed like a trophy, one of the few bits of decoration in their apartment at all.

            “Can I ask you something?” Bart said. The leftover broccoli in the chicken had a weird smell, like pennies.

            “Shoot.”

            “After you quit being Arrowette…did you ever wanna quit archery?”

            Cissie looked at him over the back of the couch. Bart shoveled chicken into his mouth, though some bites were still cold at the center.

            “No,” she said. “Well—maybe for a while, I did. Mostly to spite mom. Being a hero never made me happy…but shooting always did. It seemed stupid to give that up.” She rested her head against the back of the couch. “I mean,” she continued, “you stopped being Impulse for a while. Did you ever want to stop running?”

            “No,” Bart said. “I don’t think I can stop running.”

            Cissie smiled a little. “I don’t think you could, either. Honestly—” She sighed. “I don’t think people can change. Not really. I think they just stop doing things that aren’t really them.”

            Bart considered this for a moment. “Is that a therapy thing?” he asked. Sometimes Cissie shared the things she learned in therapy. Sometimes Bart found them helpful.

            “No,” she said, “that’s a Cissie thing. It’s like—well, my mom. I think at heart she’s a person who wants the very best. For herself, for me, but—” She made a waffling motion with her hand. “It took her a long time to understand that what was best for me wasn’t the same thing as what was best for her. I don’t know if she still totally understands that, but she’s trying. Because she doesn’t like to fail.”

            “Or like Greta,” Bart pointed out. “She did bad things, but she’s still a good person.”

            “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think everyone out there would agree with you, but, yeah.”

            Bart washed his plate in the sink and set it in the drying rack. He hadn’t done too much today, but his head was spinning—more so than usual—and his body sagged with exhaustion.

            “I’m going to bed,” he called out, though the clock read just slightly past 9:30.

            “G’night,” Cissie answered absently. She had returned to her movie, though she watched with a yawn and snuggled deeper into the blankets.

            When he got in bed, though, he found himself unable to sleep. In the dark, with streetlights pouring in through the slats of the blinds and making big yellow stripes on the wall, he stared at the ceiling and tried to count sheep. Dox snuggled up next to him in the bed, his breathing quiet and steady, and Bart took to watching the slow rise and fall of his ribs. Watching it, he felt little muscles in his body relaxing—his shoulders, his neck, his knees.

            Cissie taught him something called body scan meditation once, which was a therapy thing, because she sometimes had panic attacks. Bart didn’t, but he’d tried it a few times, for fun. He rarely made it all the way through without getting bored. But he wanted to try it, again, now. He stared at the yellow slats of light and thought—top of his head, ears, eyes—eyebrows, he forgot those—cheeks. Lips. Chin. Back of head, neck, shoulders…

            Thad’s dog, the wood-burning stove, the bare cabinets. No; he was getting distracted. Where was he? Chest—back—arms. Biceps, triceps, brachioradialis…Max had taught him those muscle names. Important to know, he said, to work them equally, stretch them, keep them from getting strained. Wrists, palms, fingers...

            He rolled onto his side and grabbed his phone.

                        B: Do you think people can change?

            Tim had set him up with secure encryption on his texts, which Bart didn’t completely understand, but it kept him from getting yelled at when he wanted to text about superhero stuff.

            It felt like a long time before Carol replied.

                        C: Thinking about Thad?

            She sometimes sent two in a row, so he waited, drumming his fingers on the mattress.

                        C: I don’t know. I think maybe it’s less about change and more about growing up

                       B: ?

            Bart laid a hand on Dox’s side. He opened his eyes briefly, and yawned, and closed them again.

                        C: You’re so different from when we first met, for example

                        B: People say that a lot, but I don’t feel that different

            It took her nearly ten minutes to text back, and Bart had half-drifted off while waiting. When the phone buzzed, he woke and looked at it.

                        C: Sorry—falling asleep. Know you’re freaked out. Lunch tomorrow?

            Bart yawned, mashed the thumbs-up emoji, and rolled to his other side. The mirror that hung on the back of his door looked like a portal in the darkness, a flat hole leading to nothing. He thought about this until he fell asleep, which wasn’t long, but the image stayed behind his eyelids, a black hole, a break in the light, and he half-remembered a story from junior high, a girl climbing through a mirror...

            Cissie drifted on a haze of half-sleep until Dox nudged Bart’s bedroom door open with a squeak and jumped up on the couch to nuzzle under her arm.

            She blinked in the startling light of the living room. The last few seconds of the movie’s credits rolled into black, and then with a click and a whirr the VCR rewound the tape. The VCR was about a million years old, but it still worked.

            She scratched Dox behind the ear and stretched. A blanket slid off her lap and onto the floor. Bart snored softly from inside his room.

            What he’d told her, about Thad being back, was a little…disturbing. But disturbing things happened in that life, and it wasn’t really her business; others could handle it. Still, she thought about calling someone—Cassie, maybe, or Anita—but it was late. She’d feel better in the morning.

            She extricated herself from her pile of blankets and stared out the sliding glass door, into the dark. Dox sniffed around her ankles and stared balefully out. She slid open the door and Dox trotted out onto the tiny porch; she followed, glancing over the myriad of tiny potted plants in half-states of dying. Every time her mother came to visit, she brought a plant, because she said the apartment didn’t have enough green and she’d read something about the importance of using plants to purify indoor air. (Cissie had a theory that this was due to some misplaced guilt about exposing her to secondhand smoke; her mother never managed to quit smoking for more than three months, but she always took her cigarettes outside now.)

            Cissie couldn’t bring herself to keep the plants in her room, but she also couldn’t bear to throw them away. So they stayed out here, on the porch, on the periphery, where she often forgot to water them and then felt bad for forgetting.

            The street was visible from the porch, and she watched cars hum by in the quiet night. Dox’s sniffling was loud and funny. He sneezed. She smiled.

            She often felt alone at night. Aside from Bart, all her closest friends lived far away. When they were all younger—so young, it seemed to her, though it hadn’t been that long ago, and that thought carved a hollow in her chest—she and the rest of the girls, Cassie and Anita and Greta and sometimes Traya, if she was around to participate in the fantasy, talked about sharing an apartment together when they were older.

            Now they were older, and they didn’t. Cissie found that she wanted to live in Alabama, because it was familiar to her, and because nothing happened here. She liked that. The others didn’t share her sentiments. So, she talked to them all often but saw them rarely. Such was adulthood, she supposed.

            Dox wandered back into the living room. Cissie picked up her little plastic watering can and, one by one, watered all the little plants. The bromeliad. The hanging fern. The moon cactus, which was really made of two cacti grafted together, a bulging red top sewn onto a green stalk. The red part couldn’t survive on its own, having no chlorophyll; it relied on the green part to sustain it, but the whole assemblage could live only a few years. It was pretty, though. She sprinkled water on it. Then the aloe, the orchid, the mums, the lucky bamboo.

Chapter Text

            Thad woke in the dark.

            Most mornings, he rose with the sun; he had no electric lights, and therefore went to sleep not long after sunset. But he had no idea how late, or early, it was now. He’d slept fitfully all night and now stared up through the dark toward the ceiling, listening to the quiet huffing of Ivan’s breath.

            His skin buzzed. He ran his fingertips over the soft, clean sheets, hoping to ground his senses in this, this moment, this house. But the conversation with Bart and Carol played over and over in his head. It was the longest conversation he’d had in—a while. He wanted to preserve every detail, but it was like trying to hold water in his hands. He couldn’t tell whether he accurately remembered their expressions, their outfits; memories, he knew, could be corrupted.

            Carol, with whom he’d faked a friendship for weeks. Bart, the sight of whom had once filled him with the slippery, instinctive rage of an attack dog. Or maybe still did. He didn’t know. The tall trees outside swayed in the wind; he could hear their needles flapping like little flags.

            He shoved the covers aside and groped in the dark room for a sweatshirt. The wooden floor was cool under his feet, and slightly dusty; it always felt dusty, no matter how often he swept. With one hand lightly touching the iron bedposts, the wall, the doorjamb, he felt his way through the house and outside, where the waxing moon shone bright enough to cast shadows.

            Thick walls of forest, untouched by the moonlight, circled his little clearing, his doghouse, his woodpile. He sat down on the porch. No one else around for miles. Only squirrels and deer and the occasional cougar.

            It had surprised him how much older Bart looked. How much leaner, less baby-faced. Thad didn’t keep any mirrors in his house. Bart’s nose—their nose—reminded Thad of their—of President Thawne. He touched his own, wondering. And he wondered about other things—whether Bart’s yellow eyes came from Don or Meloni. To what extent Bart resembled Barry Allen. Whether Bart hated his nose, or his eyes, or anything else that might have come from the Thawne family tree.

            Ivan wandered out the open front door and settled against Thad’s leg. Thad scratched him behind the ear and watched the sky. Stars rolled like waves, horizon to horizon.

            Some of those stars, he figured, were just now producing light that would reach Earth in the 30^th century. He wondered if anyone was looking at them then, or if the light pollution of an overpopulated world made it impossible. Would make it impossible.

            He stayed outside, looking up, until the sun rose and lifted a soft-yellow dewy morning around him. When he finally got up, his legs were stiff and his feet numb.

            Before this—before yesterday—he had planned to get food today. Since he didn’t have a source of income, he rotated between different cities, different supermarkets, vibrating in to grab whatever he wanted before the employees arrived for the morning. Mostly this consisted of beans, rice, canned milk; eggs, sometimes, because they would stay good for a few days without refrigeration; meat, which he always cooked the same day; peanut butter, for protein.

            He herded Ivan back inside and shut the door.

            When the Speed Force spit him out, it had been in the middle of the woods very near what was now his cabin. He woke in a nest of pine needles, exhausted and hungry, with no conception of how long he’d been gone and nothing on him but a tattered Inertia costume.

            Something had kept him from running, some instinct or paranoia; either way, he stumbled through the woods without speed until he found an empty RV. Its door was locked, and too tired to force his way in, he drank what felt like gallons from a spigot outside and then crawled underneath. Sheltered from the sun, he slept deeper and longer than he ever had before.

            Now, Thad turned toward Denver and, when he arrived, zipped down a few empty alleys and backstreets until he found a corner store that looked yet-unopened. The inside was dingy, everything covered in a thin film of dust and grease. He vibrated inside and gathered a few cans of green beans and ravioli, close to expiration. Nothing that would be missed.

            He looked around the store. A camera in the corner of the ceiling; he’d be gone so quickly it would register nothing but a blur. Refrigerated cases of beer and bottled water. A shelf of poorly-made plastic toys. A sales counter guarded by thick glass, with a cash register—

            He paused, and his skin itched the way it had all night. He wanted—to talk—to someone—anyone.

            If he had some money…

            Before he could think twice, he replaced the cans, and vibrated through the counter and through the employees-only door behind it, to find the safe. He vibrated his hand in and fished out a wad of bills, then shoved them in the pocket of his sweatpants and then ran out onto the street.

            His heart stuttering in uneasy anticipation as he rounded a street corner into a 24-hour supermarket. The morning sun glared aggressively into his eyes.

            A few times, while posing as Bart, Thad had accompanied Helen on errands. (She’d commented, as if surprised, on how helpful Bart/Thad was with the groceries.) He remembered the way she complained, jokingly, about speedsters eating her out of house and home. He remembered how she asked him to count out exact change from her purse, and the feeling of her hands as he dropped carefully-counted coins into her palm.

            Thad pulled a cart from the corral; the blue plastic of the handle was slippery under his hands. At normal speed he wheeled the cart into the sterile-smelling store, the interior washed out by fluorescent light. He steered into the produce section: pyramids of shiny apples and lemons and papery garlic, freshly arranged, lined up for him to take. A fine mist sprayed over the lettuce and carrots and kale. He took his time selecting what he wanted, sharply aware of the few other shoppers wheeling around the store.

            When he was finished, he unloaded his cart on the conveyer belt. A woman rolled up behind him, a gurgling baby seated in her cart. It stared at him.

            “Find everything alright?” asked the cashier, a bored-looking man. The food beep-beep-beeped across the scanner and dropped into crinkly bags.

            “Yes,” Thad said, stiffly. The cashier said nothing else and kept scanning. One of the lights overhead flickered, just barely. He glanced backward: the woman behind him flashed funny faces at the baby, who laughed and banged its chubby hands on the cart.

            “$19.04,” the cashier said. Thad handed over a 20 and fiddled with the rest of the cash in his pocket, which he hadn’t counted. The cash register went click-ding, and the cashier held out a palmful of coins for Thad to take. Their hands brushed in the exchange. Thad bit the inside of his cheek.

            “Have a good one,” the cashier said.

            “You too,” Thad choked. The woman was already loading her apples on the conveyer belt.

            He rolled his cart outside, gathered his bags, and took off for home, change rattling loudly in his pocket the whole way.

            Bart woke late that morning, clammy from a bad dream he couldn’t remember.

            White light spilled over the room, the cream-colored carpet and off-white walls. He rolled over and looked at his alarm clock. 1:00. Beyond the bedroom, Dox paced around the kitchen, his claws tap-tapping on the linoleum floor.

            Groggy from oversleep, Bart laid in bed and let the lingering unease from his dream seep away. Dreams were like VR, he thought; they looked real, and felt real, and stretched time out in every direction. But you remembered VR, even if the memory was hazy. Dreams evaporated if you didn’t hold onto them. So maybe less real. Or less permanent.

            Cissie told him once that dreams were the brain’s method of processing information. Bart wondered if neurons fired faster in speedsters’ brains. When he asked Wally about things like that, Wally always replied with something vague about the Speed Force. Bart suspected this was because Wally didn’t really know that much about the Speed Force. Max would know the answer, he bet.

            He got up and stumbled into the kitchen. Lunch—he was meeting Carol for lunch. He checked his phone; she’d texted him several times already, wondering where he was.

            “Grife.”

            Carol waited in the café she’d chosen, nursing a cup of tea. The place had good food, but the outdated décor—dusty fabric flowers on every table, faux-wood paneling, fake bottles of wine—made it unpopular with students, which meant it wasn’t often busy, which meant that Bart could talk more or less uninterrupted and without much risk of eavesdropping.

            A breeze and a blur outside. She took a few sips and counted seconds in her head—she got to eight—before a disheveled Bart walked through the door and plopped down at her table.

            “What took you so long, speedy?” she asked. He looked about as tired as Carol felt.

            “I overslept,” he said. “You look tired.”

            “I didn’t sleep well,” she said. “It’s—well, knowing there’s someone out there who could find you in the blink of an eye is…unsettling.”

            Bart’s frowned. Carol fiddled with the tag of her teabag. It was slightly damp; she’d dropped it in the water on accident and had to fish it out with her fork.

            “Especially someone raised by President Thawne,” she continued, hushing her voice to as low as Bart would still be able to hear. “I still think about the future a lot. What he did—or didn’t do, I guess.”

            The server—an older, sleepy-looking woman—approached then with their plates. The conversation lapsed into silence as she put a stack of pancakes in front of Bart and a chicken salad wrap in front of Carol. Both of them watched the server walk away until she was too far again to hear them.

            “Max always said to think through the options,” Bart said. He took the bottle of maple syrup from the table and poured it over his pancakes, surprisingly slowly, making tight and controlled circles. “Option one is to tell Wally, which I don’t want to do.”

            Carol wondered if Wally had any idea that she knew the Flash’s name. Bart had long since abandoned any attempt to keep any secrets around her, which both frustrated and relieved her—it was a deep, scary, sweet kind of intimacy.

            “Option two?” she prompted.

            He capped the syrup and put it back down. “Leave him alone, I guess. But that seems wrong.”

            “Wrong because you feel bad for him?” Carol asked. “Or wrong because you’re afraid?”

            “Both,” Bart said. He shoved a too-big bite of pancake into his mouth and then didn’t elaborate.

            “I’m guessing option three,” Carol said, “is to keep talking to him.”

            Bart nodded.

            She swirled a fry in some ketchup, until the tip was soggy and unpleasant.

            “You asked me if I thought people could change.” She popped the fry in her mouth and considered what she wanted to say, and Bart watched her, waiting.

            “When I first met you, Bart, you were really different. I mean, before you learned how to live here in the past—before you started getting along with Max, and before you had Helen there, too—you didn’t really seem to care about anything.” Bart opened his mouth to respond. “Which I get,” she quickly continued. “I do. You were raised in VR. You didn’t know any better. But now…”

            “You think Thad is the same way?”

            “Honestly?” she said. “I don’t know. You were raised in VR, but Thad was actively programmed to…hate you. To be angry and destructive. But—he is still you, basically, on a genetic level, at least. So maybe it’s like, you know, he’s been damaged. And I don’t know what it takes to fix damage like that.”

            Bart looked unhappy, but instead of replying, he took another big bite of pancake.

            She tried to imagine if Bart had been raised that way. If he’d been sent back to Manchester as an agent of destruction, rather than smuggled out as a refugee of President Thawne’s oppression. Or if Thad had been the original, and Bart the clone—would her life, now, be any different?

            It was hard to imagine, but it also wasn’t.

            “I think he needs help,” Bart said. “I think he’s scared.”

             “Scared of what?”

            “I dunno. But why else would he be hiding out in a cabin in the woods like that?”

            Carol hummed. “He did try to kill Max. And you. Maybe he’s scared of the consequences?”

            “Yeah, maybe. But…” Bart trailed off. A little stream of syrup was about to overflow from his plate; she reached across the table and swiped it up with her finger.

            “I don’t think that’s it,” Bart continued. “Dr. Morlo used to be bad, but he helped out when Max was dying, and Max didn’t hate him or anything. White Lightning always stole stuff, but—”

            “There’s a difference between stealing things and what he tried to do to you,” Carol said, as gently as she could manage. “I just think you can be a little bit too forgiving sometimes, Bart. Attempted murder is still a crime.”

            “It’s not really his fault, though,” Bart argued. “Thawne brainwashed him. He was like a…a tool.” He took a bite, slightly faster than regular speed—not fast enough that anyone else would notice, but Carol knew he was getting agitated.

            “Like, future-you developed that tech,” he continued, “and Thawne wanted to use it to kill people. Would that make it your fault?”

            “Yes,” Carol replied, without hesitation.

            Bart frowned. “I think you’re wrong,” he said. “I think Thawne is an evil guy and he would have found some way to hurt people whether you were there or not. It just…happened to be you.” He sawed his knife through his last couple bites of pancake. “Thawne is just…a bad guy.”

            “You’re part Thawne,” Carol pointed out.

            Bart shrugged. “And Thad is half Allen. And my mom is a Thawne, and she’s a great person.” He swirled his last bit of pancake around in the syrup pooled on the plate, leaving little soggy crumbs stuck in the syrup. “I think that stuff doesn’t really matter as much as everyone else thinks it does. President Thawne doesn’t do bad things because he’s a Thawne. He does bad things because he’s bad.”

            Carol reached over and dipped a piece of chicken in his leftover syrup. He pushed his plate toward her. “Your sleeve,” he said. She looked down; her sleeve was nearly falling in the syrup. She rolled it up.

            “And Thad does bad things because…?” she asked.

            “Because he thought he was supposed to.”

            Carol popped the chicken into her mouth. She’d never had much of a sweet tooth before Bart, but then Bobby had never allowed a lot of sweets in the house. She’d teased him about that once, recently, and he’d told her that he was concerned about affording dental work for her and her sister. She hadn’t brought it up again.

            She swallowed. “You think intentions speak louder than actions,” Carol concluded. That tracked with what she knew about Bart—he often seemed to see things in terms of inherent goodness and badness. When they were younger, she’d chalked this up to his being raised in what was essentially a video game; his references to “good guys” and “bad guys” felt to her like a product of that world. But he’d seen and done so many things, and grown so much, that it felt deeper than that. This was a worldview he’d thought about and decided was correct and accurate.

            Carol couldn’t say she shared it. But she respected it.

            “Yeah,” he said. “Trying to do the right thing is important. You can’t control whether it turns out right or not, but you can try.”

            Carol rested her chin on her hands, elbows propped on the table. “You’re a pretty sweet guy. You know that?” she asked.

            Bart gave her a strange look. “Carol, you tell me that all the time.”

            She rolled her eyes. The server dropped the check on the table and slipped away without a word. Carol pulled some cash from her wallet and placed it on the check, then slid the check to the end of the table.

            “So you’re going to check on him again?” she asked. The front door chimed; a couple walked in holding hands.

            “Yeah,” Bart said. “I don’t think it’s healthy to be alone like that. And I want to know what he’s so afraid of.”

            The server retrieved the check and, a few moments later, returned with change. Carol counted out the exact tip.

            “Well,” she said, “keep me updated.” She thought for a moment. “We should come up with something—just in case he, you know, switches places again.”

            “Like a secret code?” Bart asked with a grin. “Or a secret handshake.”

            “Secret handshake, why not,” Carol decided.

            They left the restaurant and walked—normal speed—back to Carol’s dorm, playing with different—and increasingly silly—versions of a secret handshake. At some point, they ended up with their hands clasped together, and just never untangled them, but walked hand-in-hand, still chatting.

            It didn’t really phase her one way or the other, though she was conscious of the touch. Over the last couple of years they’d drifted apart and back together multiple times, and she understood why: because saving the world was a full-time commitment; because he’d moved away from Manchester; because she sometimes—briefly—dated people, or had other groups of friends, which was fun, for a little bit, but eventually she always came to see how boring everyone else was compared to Bart Allen. It was a wonder, she sometimes thought, that he didn’t find her boring. But in some version of their lives they’d been so in love that they’d moved to the future together, and seeing this as a teenager had both thrilled and terrified her. And she’d never had time to interrogate whatever it was that had wedged itself between those older versions of themselves, because so much else had been going on, or because—more honestly—she didn’t want to know.

            She squeezed his hand in hers. Everything that had happened to her—nobody knew, or would ever know, except Bart and his family. She needed him—and all of them—in that way.

            Which was a more than a little frightening.

            “I think you’re right,” she said, as they approached her dorm. Someone from Carol’s floor gave a half-wave, and Carol smiled back.

            “About what?”

            “I think Thad is lonely.” They stopped in front of the door. “But that kind of isolation—I bet it’s comfortable for him. It’s what he’s used to. So he might resist accepting help.”

            Bart nodded, wide-eyed, trusting.

            “Keep me updated,” she said again. “Really.”

            “Okay,” he said. “See you later.”

            Carol went up to her bedroom and, drowsy from the heat and the meal and everything else, kicked off her shoes and climbed between the sheets of her bed. She set an alarm—she had another class, in the evening—and drifted off, realizing just before she fell asleep that they’d never actually agreed on a real secret handshake.

            Bart wove a line down the states, through Mexico and Central America and into Brazil. Just some aimless running, to loosen up and get focused. He took a sharp turn east across the ocean, down around the west coast of Africa, and as he banked around the Cape of Good Hope he noticed two tall lines of seafoam speeding toward him like train tracks.

            For a brief moment, he considered speeding up—but that would just be making problems for himself later. He slowed his pace, and Wally ran up alongside him.

            “You don’t have to slow down, y’know,” Wally complained.

            “Hey, cuz,” Bart said, and gave a mock salute. “You gonna yell at me again?”

            Wally frowned. “Is that all you think I do?”

            Bart rolled his eyes. They ran over the crest of a tall wave, past an oil rig. He wondered if there were people on it.

            “Okay, well, believe it or not, I’m not here to argue,” Wally said. “I just wanted to ask if you’ve been to Denver lately.”

            Bart missed a step; his shoe splashed ocean water up over his legs.

            “Uhh,” he said. “No. Why?”

            Wally sighed. “Some local news station out there is all up in arms about a speedster stealing cash from a convenience store. I mean, there’s no proof of it being a speedster, but they found money missing from the safe and when they checked the security footage there was a blur, and…”

            Bart watched the horizon for a moment. There was rain ahead; the sky and the ocean melted into dark gray. He banked to one side as the gears clicked into place in his head.

            “You thought I stole from a convenience store?”

            “I was hoping you had, actually. It wouldn’t be the dumbest thing you’d ever done, and—if it is a speedster, we need to know who.”

            They rounded a sandbar, approaching the coast, though Bart had lost track of which coast exactly. Nurse sharks browsed lazily under their feet.

            “Did you ask anyone else?” Bart said. They crossed onto the sand, and then onto grass; running was easier on solid ground, each step sending little shocks of pressure up the bones of the legs.

            “You were my first hunch,” Wally admitted, “but I’ll go check on Jesse, too.”

            “And Irey and Jai,” Bart prompted.

            Wally frowned. “Bart, I think I would know—no, you know what, never mind. You’re right. No one gets a free pass.”

            Side-by-side they tore into a city, weaving between crowds and cars. The air was hot and tacky and Bart tried to recognize the language he saw on the street signs they passed, but he was too distracted by the conversation.

            “Hey—listen,” Wally said. He grabbed Bart by the shoulder and together they slowed to a stop in a wide field of soybeans whose leaves all fluttered in the light breeze.

            “How are you doing?” Wally asked. “Really.” There was a sincerity in his face that made Bart suspicious.

            “I’m not stealing money, if that’s what you mean.” He shrugged Wally’s hand away.

            “No, I’m not—” Wally pinched the bridge of his nose. “Come on. For real. How’s everything going?”

            Bart looked him in the eyes for a long time. But he couldn’t find the angle.

            “It’s…fine?” he finally said. “Same as always.”

            “Okay. Good.” Wally nodded for too long. A hairy caterpillar had crawled onto Bart’s shoe and was inching its way across.

            “Have you…given any thought to a day job?”

            “No,” Bart replied, instantly and honestly. He knew it wasn’t the answer Wally wanted to hear, which was maybe why he said it so fast. But it was true.

            “I don’t know,” he continued. “I don’t really see the point. Why can’t I just hero all the time?”

            “Because it’s…well, it’s exhausting, Bart.” Wally put his hands on his hips and looked off across the field. “I know you do a good job and you’ve come a long way, but you need some normalcy in your life.”

            Bart snorted. “What’s normal? I was born in the 30^th century and I have superspeed.”

            “Fair point.” Wally looked back at Bart. “Look—I’m not trying to get on your case. Why don’t you come for dinner on Sunday?  Linda wants to use the grill one more time before summer’s over. Jay and Joan will be there, and you can bring a friend.”

            The caterpillar left Bart’s shoe on the other side, blindly groping its way forward.

            “Alright,” he said. A family dinner wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Chapter Text

            Thad stood in the Wests’ backyard with a plate of potato chips in his hand.

            That morning, Bart had come to his cabin bearing a bag of jumbo marshmallows. When Thad cracked open the front door and asked what they were for, Bart explained that he could roast them over the wood stove; when further pressed, he explained that Helen had taught him never to visit someone’s house without bringing food.

            Thad let him in—he had a question to ask.

            “So…” He leaned as casually as he could manage against the wall, still clutching the bag of marshmallows in his fist. “Where’s Max?”

            Bart, halfway through arranging himself into a comfortable position on the couch, froze. Thad kept his face carefully neutral, though something in the region of his stomach threatened to plummet.

            “He’s…” Bart said, quietly. He clasped his hands between his knees. Ivan wandered over to sniff his shoe. “He’s in the Speed Force,” Bart said. “He has been for a while. I don’t know if he’s coming back.”

            The Speed Force. The corner of Thad’s mouth twitched; he bit his cheek and locked it down.

            “Oh,” he said. “That’s unfortunate.”

            Bart looked up, his wide eyes hurt. Thad fixed his gaze on the top of his head.

            “And, you know,” Bart said, “I bet if he’d known you were out here before he…left—”

            “Stop,” Thad said. His throat was tight. He cleared it. “Fine.”

            Max in the Speed Force. It was…a possibility he’d expected. But it certainly wasn’t what he’d hoped for.

            Ironic.

            Unsure of what else to say, Thad began opening the windows. The room felt—stuffy. Each little window swung open and cool, damp air swept in on a tide of morning birdsong. There were jays in the yard; their grating squawks drowned out everything else.

            Bart jumped up as he turned around.

            “Wally is having a cookout Sunday. You should come.”

            Thad blinked, started by his sudden change in demeanor. He looked excited; he was smiling, anyway. Weren’t they just talking about…?

            “What?” Thad said. “No. What?”

            “It’s a good idea!” Bart tucked his hands close to his chest—a defensive gesture.  It wasn’t a good idea. “Come on. You can’t hide here forever, and Wally’s gonna figure it out eventually. I mean, he’s dumb, but he’s been more hooked into the Speed Force lately and he’s gonna realize that one more person is tapping in than he thinks there is. Then he’ll probably assume you’re up to something, because he always does that. By the way, did you steal money in Denver?”

            “I—”

            “It’s fine—I mean it’s not fine, cause you shouldn’t steal, but it’s not a big deal. If you come to the cookout, everyone will see you’re not doing anything evil. Evil people don’t go to cookouts.” Bart paused for a moment. “I’m pretty sure,” he amended.

            Thad stared, his lips parted halfway between a no and silence. Ridiculous as the idea was—there was an itch, a craving at the back of his skull, for human contact, for normalcy, for—family, even. Not his family, of course, but someone’s.

            He hung to the edge of the yard, by the house. With stiff hands he held his plate and his chips that he hadn’t taken even a single bite of bite of yet.

            Bart had told them he was coming; he’d explained everything, he said, and made them promise to leave him alone—very alone, as it turned out.

            He watched: Wally stood at the grill, flipping burger patties and talking with Linda. Thad could hear them, just barely; they argued about the names of different clouds, occasionally pointing up at the sky. Wally was making up joke names, which Linda pretended not to find funny. Jay and Joan drank beer at the picnic table in the middle of the yard and watched Bart play cornhole with Irey and Jai.

            None of them wanted him here.

            Wally kept giving him sideways glances; Linda had to touch his arm to get him to look away. Jay and Joan’s conversations quieted when Thad was near. And he didn’t blame them. He knew how much suffering the Thawnes had pressed on this little family. The memory of Barry Allen lingered like an icon, a saint; Eobard Thawne hovered like the shadow of death, something ugly and inevitable that none of them wanted to discuss.

            He didn’t really want to be here either—but he did, too, even if it was immediately apparent that it was too much too soon. The shadow of a cloud passed over the yard, and faded again.

            Wally and Linda had stopped talking. Linda turned and began walking toward Thad and Wally watched with poorly-hidden apprehension, and Thad wished he didn’t notice when she crossed the halfway point between Wally and himself—the point after which he could get to her faster than Wally could stop him.

            “Can I get you something to drink, Thad?” she asked.

            Wally still watched. Thad knew why, but it pissed him off anyway.

            “No, thank you,” he said, knowing as he said it that it sounded more than a little sarcastic.

            From the nearby cooler, she grabbed a beer for herself and cracked it open. Thad realized that he was a little thirsty, but he didn’t say anything.

            She leaned up against the wall beside him. Together they surveyed the family: Jay and Joan, Wally, Bart, the twins. So many of the world’s speedsters gathered in the space of a quarter-acre. So much power. So concentrated. Any one of them, if they wanted to, could cause tidal waves, earthquakes, could rewrite history…

            And yet they didn’t.

            “So,” Linda said, still looking out at her children. “You know everything that’s going to happen to us, huh?”

            Thad looked at her; she took a sip of her beer, the sides of which ran dewy with condensation. She looked comfortable. If she had an angle, he wasn’t sure what it was.

            “Iris West-Allen has been to this time period. You met her. Surely you read her book.”

            She shook her head. “Nope. I’d rather it be a surprise.”

            Across the yard, Wally took a pair of burgers to Jay and Joan. He glanced again at Linda and Thad.

            “I only know the general…scope…of things,” Thad said. “I extensively studied Bart’s life up until the point at which I was due to arrive. Nothing after.”

            Linda nodded. “The future would have changed anyway, right? If you’d succeeded?”

            The cavalier tone of her voice shocked him. If he’d succeeded—what would have changed? Enough to destabilize the time loop—to prevent his being made in the first place? But no—Thawne had to have worked it out; otherwise he would have just killed Bart as an infant.

            “Never thought about it, huh?” Linda guessed.

            “I…” Thad looked at his chips. A fly had landed on the edge of the plate. “That information was never given to me.”

            “So you don’t know what the future holds,” she said. “Join the party.”

            Wally breezed over—looking right at Thad the whole time—and pressed a comically-loud kiss to Linda’s cheek. He snatched a swig of her beer before she could blink.

            “Hey,” she said, swatting him on the shoulder. He winked.

            The interaction made Thad uncomfortable.

            Wally turned to him.

            “Thad,” he said, carefully, over-politely. As if he were speaking to a child. “Do you want a hot dog or a hamburger?”

            When Thad posed as Bart, he’d gotten well-acquainted with 20^th century food. He’d even come to crave some of it, over time.

            “Hot dog.”

            Wally snatched Thad’s plate and ran to the grill and back. He returned with three hot dogs in buns.

            “Condiments are by the grill,” he said, slinging an arm around his wife’s shoulders.

            Thad swept a wide arc around Bart and the twins, who had abandoned their game to wrestle on the ground. After adding relish and mustard, he sat down at the picnic table—at the opposite end of Joan and Jay—at which point Bart emerged from the pile of skinny limbs and yelped, “Food’s ready?”

            An instant later Bart sat right next to him, his pile of hot dogs all dressed with mustard and relish.

            “Hey, same toppings,” he said. “Cool.”

            Thad didn’t reply. He took a bite, though suddenly he felt a little sick; swallowing felt like a lump of wet paper down his throat. The conversation with Linda stuck in his mind.

            “You’ve been to the future,” he said to Bart, whose cheeks distended with food.

            “Mhm.” Bart swallowed. “Couple times, yeah. My mom took me once, and then I went to get Carol when she kidnapped herself…” He ticked those instances off on his fingers.

            Thad frowned. “Bucklen’s been to the future?”

            “Yeah, well, me ‘n’ her lived there as grown-ups—like grandpa Barry and grandma Iris did—but old Carol made some kinda tech that President Thawne wanted to use, so old Carol had to kidnap Carol and then I—”

            Thad threw up a hand.

            “Just…hold on. Shut up,” he said. Bart took another bite and Thad rifled through everything Bart had just said.

            “Thawne was still president? Even when you were an adult?”

            Bart nodded, chewing. “Yep. Sucks, doesn’t it?”

            Thad wanted to hit something. Everyone sitting at the table, Jay and Joan and even the kids, and Wally making his way over—they seemed suddenly to loom over him. He pressed his fists against his thighs and switched to another question.

            “How did you get to the future?”

            “I just used my speed scouts to—”

            “Your what?”

            “Speed scouts. Y’know.”

            Thad stared. “I—no, I don’t, moron; what are you talking about?”

            Bart sighed. “Here. I’ll show you.”

            His edges blurred for a fraction of a second, and then a golden duplicate of Bart popped into existence beside him. It looked neither entirely solid nor entirely like a hologram; it shimmered in the light, catching the sun on its edges, but also seemed to possess a luminescence of its own. It reminded Thad of things he’d seen in the Speed Force storm—humanoid figures passing in and out of his vision like ghosts, watching him, judging him.

            It was hard to look at.

            “Get me a Coke,” Bart said to the duplicate.

            It snapped off a salute. “You got it, boss.”

            A moment later, Bart had his Coke, and the duplicate—the scout, Bart had called it—disappeared, little wisps of light or energy or speed streaming back into Bart’s body fast as little filaments of lightning.

            Thad looked around the table. The others chatted, unfazed by this—whatever it was. Even Wally had stopped his suspicious glances.

            “How did you do that?”

            “I dunno. It’s just like…” Bart spread his hands wide. “Poof. Max thought they might be discharges of Speed Force, like the lightning that comes off us when we run, but more directed. That’s why they can travel through time.”

            Thad shook his head. “You can send them anywhere? Past or future?” The possibilities were endless—time travel without a treadmill, or a transport, or any tech at all.

            Bart took a monstrous bite of his hot dog. “Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t do it very much.”

            “Why not?”

            He shrugged, frowning a little, defensive. “I just don’t. It’s for emergencies.”

            “But…” Thad gestured at the empty air. “You just used it to get you a soda.”

            “Yeah, well…” Bart trailed off, vaguely looking to the distance.

            Wally sat down next to his cousin; Thad leaned away a little, hunching over his plate. “Max gave you enough sense not to mess around with the timestream anyway, right?”

            It was obvious to Thad that Wally was teasing—he nudged Bart with his elbow—but Bart frowned a little, like he took the comment seriously. There was so much that set Bart apart from the rest of this family already, and this—as far as Thad knew, no other speedster could make those scouts. Not Wally. Not Barry. Not even Max.

            Did Bart realize any of that? Surely he must. Naïve as he was, he couldn’t be that oblivious.

            Thad kept eating; the food was warm and greasy and satisfying. If the scouts could go anywhere, he thought—and if they were tangible—well, they were at least tangible enough to hold a soda. He wondered how much of Bart’s consciousness traveled with them. Could they make decisions for themselves, or did they only do as they were told?

            The conversation around the table continued; bags of chips and sodas were passed around. Waves of invisible, shimmering heat radiated from the closed hood of the grill. Thad, having nothing else to say, was quiet, and noticed that Bart was also quiet, staring down at his plate as he chewed.

            “So, Thad,” Jay said. The tension returned to Thad’s shoulders like a snapping rubberband.

            “Bart tells us you built your own house,” Jay continued. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

            Thad hesitated. Were they trying to—get something out of him? But as he looked around the table, their open faces were nothing but interested and polite. In the case of the adults, he could tell it was a forced politeness; their backs were stiff and their hands folded mechanically in front of them, but even so…

            “I…went to the library,” he ventured. “In Denver. They had books about homesteading and construction.”

            Wally raised his eyebrows. Jay nodded.

            “Where did you find the lumber?”

            “I…” Thad was reticent, but if this was a trap, it was an absurdly banal one. “I found a few old cabins that had been abandoned, or condemned. I could salvage the lumber that wasn’t rotted by…vibrating it out of the joints…” He trailed off awkwardly. In truth, it had been a long and difficult and frustrating process, and at the time he had been terrified and angry and confronting the yawning abyss of his impending isolation, which at the time he assumed would be permanent.

            But it sounded so easy when he described it. He wasn’t sure whether he liked that.

            Jay and Joan asked him a few more questions, and he was neither uncomfortable nor comfortable with answering; it was just bizarre. Some deep part of him was still revolted by these people, but another part—deeper or shallower, he couldn’t tell—bathed in the comfort of their company.

            And his mind drifted back to the shimmering effigy Bart made of himself. Another way he and Bart were set apart; another way Bart was better. But that was the Thawne in him thinking. He refocused on the conversation; Jay was asking him how he liked using a wood stove. He replied that he found stoking it meditative.

            “But it’s so primitive,” Bart interjected.

            Jay laughed. “Max must have grown up with a wood stove, right?”

            “The way Max told it, he grew up eating dinosaur steaks and dodging the plague,” Bart groused. He scooped the crumbling mess that remained off the pecan pie onto his plate.

            “I think they’re cozy,” Joan said. She smiled politely at Thad.

            “There are plenty of places where people still use wood stoves,” Linda added.

            Bart narrowed his eyes—trying to decide if they were teasing him, Thad thought. “There are?”

            “You’ve never noticed? Bart, we can go anywhere in the world,” Jay said.

            Linda jabbed Wally with her fork, playfully. “Anywhere except Gotham.”

            “Yeah, well,” Wally said, “Gotham’s more about the tire fires than the wood stoves.”

            “Wally,” Joan chided him.

            Thad watched the conversation volley back and forth in front of him, feeling fascinated and more than a little bit shut out. But he watched them all, stitching together a web of relationships in his mind, a deeper understanding of how these people behaved.

            At some point, Linda brought out dessert. She laid out a few different storebought pies and doled out a large slice of apple for Thad, and he wondered why he had been so suspicious of her. Why he had been so suspicious of this. Everything was…fine. Peaceful, almost, through the haze of unease. He took a bite of the pie. It was gluey and overly sweet.

            Bart leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “They’re always like this.”

            Thad wondered if that was true, and felt a brief tremor of hope that he would get to find out for himself.

            Around sunset Thad hit a wave of exhaustion—the afternoon had been a lot to process, and now every little sound, every interaction, crumpled in his mind like tin foil. He wanted to go home.

            He was unsure how to excuse himself.

            If he were still—Bart—it would have been easy. He knew how Bart acted. He did not know how Thad acted when leaving a party, and the indecision paralyzed him so long that he ended up staying past the orange-purple sunset, another hour past dusk, when fireflies began winking over the yard. Finally he approached Wally and thrust his hand out.

            Wally regarded it for a brief second, then took his handshake. In the moment that they touched, all of Thad’s bravado deflated in the face of the knowledge that he was shaking hands with the Flash. He was—intimidated. Ridiculous, he thought, pulling his hand away so quickly that it almost felt like a yank. Wally either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

            “Thank you for having me,” Thad forced out. “I’m going home now.”

            Wally’s face gentled. “Thanks for coming. And for eating the apple pie. Nobody ever wants that one.”

            Thad didn’t know what to make of that joke, though he sensed it was in good humor, so he turned to leave—and as soon as his foot lifted, ready to run, Wally called another:

            “And don’t steal any more money!”

            Thad pressed his foot back to the earth. He turned around.

            “What?”

            Beyond and behind Wally, Bart’s face had become apprehensive, giant eyebrows arching together like tree branches. The atmosphere of the room had flipped; everyone was staring at either him or Wally, whose face was entirely loathsome in its levity. 

            “It was you, right?” Wally asked, his voice still high with joking. “Just don’t do it again.” He raised his beer high in a gesture of mock gravitas.

            An ugly shock ran from Thad’s scalp to his toes. He forced himself to smile. “It’s not like I have any choice, do I?”

            Wally’s beer lowered by inches; the sour feel of the room finally seemed to crack into him. “Uh…”

            “It’s not as if I have a source of income, right? It’s not as if I have a social security number or a driver’s license or a birth certificate, right?”

            Bart shook his head frantically at Thad.

            “Oh, uh…” Wally faded into awkwardness. “We can get you those things. It’s—it’s not a big deal.”

            “Isn’t it?” Thad pronounced each consonant carefully, spitting them out like pebbles. Pull back. He adjusted his tone—cooler, more neutral. He drifted closer to Wally and stared up from under his chin. “Then why did you just assume it was me?”

            Wally rolled his eyes. “Come on, man. I’m not stupid; obviously it was you.”

            And all Thad could think then was: What can I say that will hurt him the most?

            “You must be stupid to let someone like me hang around your kids,” Thad hissed in Wally’s face.

            Before anyone could speak, Wally popped him in the nose.

            Thad stumbled back. It felt like his mind slamming back into his body, like he already knew he’d done something monumentally stupid on instinct. Warm blood already welled and oozed down out of his nostrils and over his lips.

            He ran.

            Bart looked at Wally, shocked. Wally’s breathing slowed; he blinked, and groaned, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

            “Damn it.”

            Bart tore after Thad.

Chapter Text

            “Your powers,” Max had explained, “are not only yours.”

            This was the third or fourth time that Bart, seeing crackles and pops of light flash out from under the crack of a closed door, had phased through the wall to find his mentor in sharp and terrifying meditation. He always tried to be sneaky; he was always silent, but Max always caught him. He was never angry, but it frustrated Bart still to be so—transparent.

            “How do you always know I’m here?”

            “If you’d just opened the door—normal speed—I might not have,” Max said, laying his hands on his knees like two big maple leaves falling from a tree. “I was tapped into the Speed Force. You were using your speed.”

            The crackles of light faded, leaving the room gray and strange. Bart sat on the carpet.

            “Here,” Max said. “Hold out your hand.”

            Bart did. Max pushed his sleeve up to the elbow and pointed at a faint blue vein.

            “Where does your blood come from?”

            Bart blinked. Where does it come from?

            After a moment of silence, Max continued. “The heart. It comes from the heart, Bart.”

            “No it doesn’t,” Bart said. He couldn’t remember where blood was made—he swore he’d heard the right answer once—but he knew it wasn’t in the heart.

            “It’s a metaphor. Stay with me.” Max traced the vein down Bart’s wrist, to the tip of his middle finger. “The blood comes from the heart,” he said, pointing at each finger in turn, “and goes to all these different places, but they’re not separated. It’s a closed circuit.”

            Bart shifted his hand in the bare light, looking at all the tiny lines of blue veiled underneath the skin. He saw, or imagined, a little pulse. He thought about the metaphor.

            “The Speed Force is the heart,” he said.

            “The Speed Force is the heart,” Max agreed.

            “Bart, wait up.”

            Bart heard Wally calling out behind him—but more than that, he could feel him, a thin and flickering string of invisible energy tethering them together, just like he could feel Thad somewhere ahead, already far away.

            He sped up, though he didn’t push it, didn’t break the sound barrier—they were in a residential area, surrounded by street-parked cars and families strolling down bright sidewalks.

            Wally took a shortcut between two widely-spaced houses and came up just beside him.

            “Listen to me,” he said, shouting over the wind. “I shouldn’t have done that. But something’s not right with that kid!”

            “So what,” Bart shouted back. “You thought I was weird, too, right? Weird and stupid and dangerous? Isn’t that why you dumped me on Max?”

            “You were dangerous!” Wally’s fingers grazed the back of Bart’s arm, and he pressed forward, faster. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you, Bart, and I’m sorry that it hurt your feelings, but you were dangerous, and it sucks that you still don’t understand that.”

            Turning sharply back, Bart thrust his leg out in front of Wally; Wally jumped over, snatched Bart by the arm, and, squirming and elbowing, pressed him into a headlock. Together they skidded to a stop.

            “Let me go,” Bart choked out.

            “Only if you promise not to run off where I can’t talk to you.”

            Bart stopped squirming.

            “You’re right,” Wally said. “I shouldn’t have hit him. I got angry. Okay? But you know I had cause to be angry, right?”

            Bart went limp, petulantly, in Wally’s grip. “Fine,” he said.

            “Okay." Wally released him.

            They’d ended up somewhere in the middle of a forest. A fine mist of rain collected on Bart’s hair.

            “He stopped running, I think,” Wally said, hands on his hips. “Which way was he going? Northeast?”

            “I don’t know.”

            The drizzle was so faint it was barely audible, gently pattering against all the leaves. Wally and Bart sized each other up, and only then did it occur to Bart that Wally had suited up. He did that fast.

            “I know you believe he can be better,” Wally said. “Heck—I want to believe he can better, too. It’d make all our lives a lot easier. But the fact is, we just don’t know yet.” He sighed. Little drips of water fell from the tips of his lightning bolts. “The boy’s one huge variable, and that chip on his shoulder isn’t helping.”

            Shifting his feet on the ground, Bart thought of Cissie. When she freaked out and quit, they’d all pressed her and bothered her, and it had been the wrong thing to do. She’d needed space. It took them all a long time to understand that.

            But Greta—Greta had been sad and angry, maybe for a long time, and they’d all ignored it because it made them uncomfortable, and that had been the wrong thing to do, too. She drifted away and did bad things. She’d needed someone to chase after her.

            With a static pop, Bart conjured a scout. Rain fizzled weirdly on its edges.

            “Go back and follow Thad until he stops running,” Bart said. “Tell me where he went.”

            “From a distance,” Wally hurriedly amended. “Don’t do anything.”

            The scout zapped off, and a moment later returned, barreling straight back into Bart’s body. It was always disorienting, dizzying, to gain the new memories. He saw…

            “He went to Gotham,” Bart reported. Wally’s face scrunched up.

            “What’s he doing there?”

            Idiot.

            He’d forgotten his shoes. He was going to grab them on his way out, but he forgot, and now his bare feet slammed against pavement, forest floor, water, cycling through, and only the protective cushion of the Speed Force kept them from being shredded apart.

            He could feel them following him. The only thing he could think to do was turn toward Gotham, because Wally didn’t want to go there.

            Passing city limits, the skyline highlighted by the eerie orange glow of light pollution, he swerved into a gas station bathroom. As he stood there, catching his breath against the cool sink, he realized they weren’t following him anymore. They’d stopped. They really were leaving him alone.

            The bathroom was filthy, lit by a single bare lightbulb. Liquid—he couldn’t tell what in the dim light—puddled on the floor around the toilet. He turned around to face the mirror, clawing his fingers into the edge of the sink as if the porcelain could ground him.

            He wasn’t still bleeding, of course. But the wind had streamed the blood from his nose across his face, to his ears, and dried it there in dark flakes. Part of him—a strange part twisting deep in his gut—liked the way it looked. He smiled. But that made him feel twisted, so he stopped. He washed his face with the dingy, sulfur-stinking water from the sink.

            No paper towels. He wiped his face on his shirt.

            “Now what?”

            He really didn’t want to go back to his cabin. Surely Bart would look for him there, and he would want to talk, and that was just about the last thing in the world Thad felt like doing right now.

            He checked his pockets: he still had a little bit of cash. Maybe he could find a cheap motel, or—just vibrate into an empty room. It’s not like he’d make a mess.

            The bathroom floor was disgusting, gritty and damp under his bare feet. He walked out.

            The gas station was at the outskirts of the city, and a small line of cars waited at each pump—commuters, he assumed. Nobody paid him any mind. The bright lights of the convenience shore bathed the parking lot in a strange daylight. He wandered in.

            From a display near the back of the store, he selected a cheap pair of rubber flip-flops, and brought them to the counter. The cashier didn’t comment. The shoes cost $7.08. He slipped them on after paying, but he still felt the grime from the bathroom floor under his skin.

            Having no other business here—he wasn’t hungry—he left the store. The lines hadn’t moved. Cars honked in the distance. Downtown, looming and black-bright, to his right, and a backed-up freeway to his left.

            Gotham.

            Once, on one of his recordings, he’d watched Bart help Batman defeat the Joker. It was one of the few times he’d been even mildly impressed with Bart’s ability not to make a situation worse.

            Slowly, because it was awkward to do in flip-flops, he ran into the heart of downtown, then stopped in an empty alley and started walking. It wasn’t too late, yet; the sidewalks were still busy, but nobody spoke to him. They all walked with their heads down and their hands shoved in their pockets. No wonder nobody noticed Batman and his gaggle of maniacs swinging from the rooftops. Thad did the same, to blend in. He followed crowd after crowd aimlessly, walking just to walk.

            He walked for a while, until after night had really taken hold and all the streets buzzed with neon signs and blinking LED displays. He walked past bars, and run-down apartments, and restaurants ranging from gourmet to diner, and at one point he walked by the courthouse.

            The streets began to empty, siphoning off like a draining pool. Feeling exposed, alone on the bright sidewalk, he turned down another dark alley.

            A hand snatched him just behind the collar and yanked him up.

            He crashed hard on his ass, on the rattling grate of a fire escape.

            “You Thad?”

            Thad whipped around, scrambling to the far side of the floor, which wasn’t far.

            A man—not Wally and not Jay. Not Batman, unless Thad had severely misunderstood what Batman looked like. A bat on his chest, though; a red one. One of Batman’s cronies. A leather jacket. A red mask.

            He opened his mouth.

            “Yep,” the man interrupted. “You’re Thad. Right?”

            He could just run, Thad thought. He should just run. But baffled curiosity pressed too hard on his mind.

            “How do you know?”

            “Didn’t at first,” he said. “I’ve grabbed a bunch of other blonds tonight, but none of them had those freaky yellow eyes.” He gestured toward Thad’s face with a gloved hand.

            Thad shook his head. The metal bars were cold, and digging into his shoulder. “No, how did you know who I am?”

            “Right. My brother is a friend of your brother’s.” He was squatting, his arms rested casually on top of his thighs. Thad realized he’d lost one of his flip-flops when he yanked him up.

            “B—he—isn’t my brother,” Thad said, eying the man. Unsure of whether he knew Bart’s real name, and unsure of why he even cared whether or not he did.

            The man shrugged. “Robin isn’t mine, technically. Same dif. He asked me to check on you, and I’m trying to earn some brownie points.”

            Thad pushed himself up into a more dignified seat. “And who are you supposed to be, exactly? Discount Batman?”

            Discount Batman pressed a hand to his chest. “Ouch. Guess I’m more of a local celebrity.” He stood, and began climbing the ladder, which made the whole fire escape jerk and rattle. “Call me Red Hood. For…obvious reasons. Now come on.”

            “Why should I come with you?” Thad asked. Red Hood had already disappeared over the edge of the roof, but he stuck his head out to look at Thad again.

            “Because Robin doesn’t trust you, which means Batman doesn’t either. Trust me—you’d rather spend the night at my place than get tangled up with him.”

            Thad rolled his eyes—as if he couldn’t just run from Batman. But he could run from this idiot, too, and he was intrigued. Plus, wherever Red Hood was taking him had to be better than whatever roach motel he would have ended up in for the night.

            He grabbed hold of the ladder.

            When he made it to the top, stumbling slightly through the dark, Red Hood was standing on the other side of the roof.

            “See the police station?” he asked, pointing to a well-lit building a few blocks away. “I’m under it. Meet you there.”

            He vaulted off the roof and launched a line, and Thad had to admit to himself that it was an impressive display of athleticism. The Bat-lunatics, he supposed, must be rather talented to survive without any powers.

            As Red Hood disappeared into the black silhouettes of the street below, spinning away like a spider riding a filament of web, Thad peered out over the edge. Gotham spread out, dense and lively; it reminded him of the 30^th century in a way that cities here rarely did—so much life breathing in all directions at once. So many people.

            For a moment, he tried to see it as President Thawne did: swarming with people like vermin, an infestation to be eradicated.

            It was easier that he would have liked to admit.

            Bart’s foot tapped on his kitchen floor.

            “Red Hood’s in contact with him now,” Tim said over the phone. Bart stacked a sandwich high with turkey and cheese. He’d gone back to his apartment after Wally persuaded him to leave Thad alone, for the moment, and let someone else handle “the issue.”

            “Will that help?” he asked. He mixed mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup and slathered it all thickly on each slice of bread.

            Tim sighed. “Honestly? I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell with him.” He paused. “But I think it could help. They have a lot in common, actually.”

            Bart frowned. “Not more than I do.” He vibrated the condiment bottles one by one through the fridge door, which Cissie didn’t like because it sometimes made a mess, but which Bart claimed was “good practice” (though for what, he wasn’t sure).

            “I know that,” Tim said, “but I don’t think Thad wants to believe it. He was conditioned to hate you. That’s a powerful thing.”

            Bart fumbled with the jar of mayonnaise. Eventually he found the shelf inside the fridge and pulled his hand out. “But that’s why we’re the same. Earthgov conditioned me, too.”

            “Just give it time, Bart. But stay on standby—in case you need to get to Gotham, fast. I’ll patch you into the Oracle line, but don’t talk, please.”

            Bart dropped the bottle of mustard in the fridge. “Woah, really?” he said. “That spooky computer you’re always talking to?”

            “She’s not—okay, whatever. Sure.”

            There was a pause, a click, and then a little more background noise on the phone line. Bart forgot about the mustard.

            “Oracle,” Tim said, “I’m putting Impulse on the line. Field names, please.”

            A feminine voice: “Got it, Robin. Hi, Impulse.”

            Bart opened his mouth, then remembered Tim’s rule. He shut it.

            “…I asked him not to speak,” Tim said after a moment of silence. “Trust me on that.”

            “Roger,” Oracle said.

            Bart pulled his cold hand from the fridge. He was a little offended, but he also prided himself these days on an ability to follow orders. He wondered if Batman was listening, too. Or Nightwing. He opened his mouth again to ask—then remembered again.

            The line was silent, except for the light clacking of fingers on a keyboard.

            “Okay, Impulse,” Tim said. “Good job. I’ll text you later.”

            He hung up.

            Bart put the phone on speaker, setting it down on the counter. The keyboard clacking continued. He cut his sandwich into triangles and gobbled it down, then set the plate and knife in the sink.

            “Impulse?” Oracle’s voice was gentle. “I can still hear what you’re doing. If you’re not going to talk, would you mute the phone?”

            Bart jabbed the mute button with his finger. He washed the two dishes, dried them, put them away.

            “You can talk if you want to, you know,” Oracle said. “For now, at least. Everyone else is busy.”

            Bart shifted from foot to foot. He unmuted the phone.

            “I know Robin told you not to,” she said. “But he’s all bark and no bite.”

            “He barks?” Bart blurted. He clamped a hand over his mouth.

            Oracle laughed.

            “So what’s going on with this Thad person?” she asked. “Robin didn’t tell us much.”

            “Um,” Bart said. He scratched at a dried piece of food on another plate in the sink. “He’s a clone of me that President Thawne made to come back in time and attack me—from the future, I mean—I was born in the thirtieth century—and he tried it once but it didn’t work, and then he tried it again except he trapped me in VR like when I was a baby, and then he dyed his hair brown and pretended to be me while Max was getting really sick—”

            “Max Mercury?” Oracle said. Loud, rapid typing on the other end.

            “Yeah. Anyway he—” Bart lost track of where he’d been in the story; he mouthed his last few words to himself. “Oh. In the Speed Force. He tried to kill me ‘n’ Max but then he didn’t want to, I guess, because he ran off into the Speed Force storm and we kinda—assumed he was dead—but last week I found him living in a cabin in the woods. By himself for a few years, I guess. So. Yeah.”

            “Mm,” Oracle said. “And he’s a speedster. He has the same set of powers that you do?”

            “Yeah,” Bart said, “except he can’t make speed scouts.”

            “Speed scouts,” she mumbled. “Well. I assume from the way we’re handling this that he isn’t actively dangerous?”

            “Is that…okay?” Bart asked. He didn’t want more people butting in.

            “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “the world is full of meta-goons who could all turn on each other at any second. At some point, we have to trust each other. Oh—hold on, kiddo. Business calls.”

            Her end of the line went silent.

            Bart shoved his phone into his pocket. The piece of food he’d been scratching at, he realized, was a stain. It wasn’t coming off.

Chapter Text

            Bart tried to take it easy—he really did.

            But there was only so much waiting around he could stand to do, and Oracle never came back on the line after muting him, so a few hours later he found himself in what now passed for Young Justice’s unofficial headquarters—his spaceship, parked in some deserted field that had been arranged for their use by the Justice League.

            To his surprise, he found Tim there, in the rec room, hunched like a gargoyle over his laptop in the dim light. Sneaking up behind him, he opened his mouth to say “boo,” but—

            “Hi, Bart,” Tim said.

            Bart snapped his mouth shut. “You ruined it.”

            “I can see your reflection in the screen.” Tim turned around in his seat. He was in, Bart noticed, a t-shirt and sweatpants, which meant he’d either been here for a while or was planning to stay a while. “What’s up?”

            “Nothing.” Bart shrugged. “Why are you dressed like that?”

            “Just working on a case,” he said. “I needed a change of scenery. The Batcave can get depressing.” He jerked his thumb toward the kitchen. “Kon’s here too.”

            Kon poked his head out from the doorway. “Hey. Want coffee, Tim? I’m making some.”

            “Sure,” Tim said, absently. Bart picked up the remote and turned on the nearby TV; it cast a weird flickery light over the dim room. He nudged the volume down so Tim wouldn’t be distracted. Why did Tim always sit in the dark? Wasn’t it bad for your eyes? From the kitchen, the coffeemaker sputtered.

            “Hey,” Bart called toward the kitchen. “You didn’t offer me any.” He flipped past a show about elephants and landed on a Looney Tunes rerun.

            “Are you kidding?” Kon replied. “I watched you eat coffee ice cream once. You nearly vibrated through the floor.”

            “Did not.”

            “Besides,” Tim said, “you know caffeine doesn’t last for you. And you don’t like the taste.”

            That much was true. Bart wondered if Thad liked coffee. He wondered what Thad was doing. His feet itched to think about it. Even though he’d agreed to leave Thad alone, it felt wrong to not intervene—to stick his nose in, as Cissie liked to say.

            “Cissie keeps giving me wine,” Bart said. “She thinks I can build up a tolerance.”

            Kon carried two mugs into the room. The smell reminded Bart of the grocery store in Manchester—they used to have an aisle of dispensers that ground coffee into little wax-coated paper bags. When he went shopping with Helen, she bought a different kind of coffee every time, which irritated Max, but she didn’t care. She liked walking down the aisle to smell the different varieties in their containers. But the store got rid of the dispensers when Bart was in high school and they only sold pre-bagged coffee after that.

            “Cissie’s just trying to get you drunk,” Kon said. He set one of the mugs down in front of Tim.

            “You’re underage,” Tim said. “So is Cissie.”

            “So is Cissie,” Kon mocked. “Lighten up.”

            Tim looked at Bart and took a sip. “Can you?” he asked. “Get drunk?”

            Bart shook his head. On the TV, Bugs Bunny sharpened a razor on a leather strap. “No,” he said, “I only feel it for a second. I chugged a lot once, but it just made me sick and Cissie got mad at me for drinking all her good wine.”

            Kon laughed, a slightly mean-spirited cackle that Bart had grown used to over the years. Looney Tunes rolled into a commercial for a special kind of cake pans. Bart wondered if Thad had ever tried to get drunk. He wondered if Thad ever had the desire to drink, since he was never around anyone and therefore wouldn’t feel left out in a crowd of drunk friends. What was he doing in Gotham?

            Bart looked over Tim’s shoulder.

            “What are you working on?” he asked. He couldn’t make sense of the jumble of windows and inputs; the Batcomputer or whatever must run on some kind of custom OS, he figured, because it wasn’t like anything he’d seen in this or any other century. It looked—purposefully confusing. Different designs all mixed in together.

            “Nothing important. What happened with the Flash?” Tim asked. Translation: I can’t talk about it, so I’m changing the subject.

            “Something happened?” Kon asked, leaning against the doorjamb of the kitchen. Kon didn’t know about Thad yet, but he should know if Tim knew. The three of them didn’t keep secrets—well, except the time that Bart broke Tim’s expensive camera and Kon swore not to tell after he caught Bart trying to hot-glue the pieces back together—or the time that Young Justice threw Kon a “not a birthday” surprise party, which seemed to have bummed Kon out at first, but he eventually ended up having fun...they just couldn’t call it a birthday party because Kon didn’t really have a birthday because he wasn’t really born—

            “You’re a clone!” Bart blurted. Kon made a face like he had done something weird.

            “Yeah...?” Kon said. “And you have gigantic feet. Is that the game we’re playing now?”

            “Now, I mean—” Bart backtracked. “What happened with the Flash is that Thad riled him up and he punched him.” Noting the lack of comprehension on Kon’s face, he backtracked again. “Thad is back. My clone.”

            “Oy,” Kon said. “Start over. Your clone is back—the one that posed as you for months?”

            “Yeah,” Bart said. “He has a dog. And a house.”

            “And he punched the Flash?”

            What was so difficult about this? Bart glanced at the TV.

            “No, he punched Thad.”

            Still commercials—for fruit snacks, now. Bart looked back at Kon, who had his eyebrows raised, as if waiting.

            “And...?”

            “And what?” Bart asked. That was the end of the story. It wasn’t very exciting. Actually he felt a little bad, telling it.

            Tim sighed. “And Thad isn’t a villain anymore, supposedly. According to Bart, he’s sitting in the general area of reformed.”

            “Oh,” said Kon. He took a long sip of coffee. “Weird. You really gonna vouch for a nutcase like that?”

            Bart hesitated. He didn’t want to say that Thad was totally fine, because that felt like a lie.

            “He just needs some attention,” he finally said. Attention. That was Max’s phrase—saying that things needed attention when really they were problems. As in, The gutters need attention, which meant that he wanted Bart to go up and clean the gutters. Or, when some bad guy was trashing downtown Manchester and they saw it on the news while eating dinner: That looks like it needs our attention.

            And he said it about Bart, too, in the beginning. The boy needs attention. The boy needs a  lot of attention. Which Bart had, at first, taken to mean that Max would play games with him, or go to the movies, when what it really meant was more training, more education, pushing Bart so hard that he went to bed each night with aching knees and the bright colors of exhaustion swirling behind his eyelids.

            Kon was taking another drink, tilting the cup back further now like maybe it was half empty. What were they talking about? Thad—Wally—no, Thad. And Kon? Oh—clones.

            “You could talk to him,” Bart said.

            “Pass.”

            Tim turned back to his work, though he sat straighter now as he typed, not so hunched-over and weird-looking.

            “One of you is enough,” Kon said. “I think two Barts would give me an ulcer.”

            Bart squinted at Kon. “Ulcers are caused by bacteria.”

            “He’s right,” Tim said, clacking away at the keys. “H. pylori.”

            Kon rolled his eyes. “Great. The walking encyclopedias.” He looked at Bart, swirling the coffee around in its mug. “Your clone. He got a big stick up his ass about it?”

            Tim laughed, even though he tried to pretend it was a cough. Bart definitely knew that phrase: Kon used it all the time to describe Batman, and sometimes Superman or the Flash or, come to think of it, just sort of anyone older than him.

            Bart didn’t know how to answer the question, though, so he snatched a bag of popcorn from the kitchen and flopped down onto the couch. The commercial break had ended; another cartoon came on.

            “Be patient, Bart,” Tim said. “It’s handled right now.”

            The conversation moved on, but Bart quickly lost interest, a little prickly as he sank deeper into the couch cushions. Why did everyone else think they knew what was best for Thad? Shouldn’t he know? He fiddled with the buttons on the remote, flipping the audio from English to Spanish and back again, over and over, until he’d stopped feeling prickly and something new occurred to him.

            He peeked over the back of the couch. “You’re really different from Superman.”

            “I’m only half Superman,” Kon pointed out. He looked a little unhappy about it. Bart settled back into his seat.

            “Right.”

            Thad waited in a fortified bunker underneath the Gotham police department.

            Even with the Red Hood’s head start, Thad had beaten him here—duh—vibrating down through the ground before anyone upstairs had even noticed him. For a second, he’d thought to keep going, straight through to the other side; he could just slip away, invisible. He didn’t get the sense that this Red Hood person wanted him all that bad anyway; what had he called it? Earning some good graces? From whom?

            But he stayed and waited. The bunker, the hideout, whatever, was a fairly basic setup—as primitive as anything else in this era. Small, but not cramped. No windows, of course, but well-lit with gently flickering fluorescent lights. A bathroom, and an old cot shoved into one corner, and a desk with a computer. Guns and weaponry everywhere. He could take some if he wanted, but what on Earth did he need a gun for? He left them alone.

            A bulletin board hung above the desk, on which only a few things had been pinned. A ticket stub to a hockey game. A photo, torn at the edges, of Batman and Robin. A crayon drawing of Red Hood with what looked like an ugly blue Superman. Thad fingered the edge of the paper, tugging it away just slightly from its pushpin. The paper was new. Something crawled up his stomach. Even this Bat-nutcase had friends, apparently. He looked down.

            By the computer, more or less in plain sight, a small packet of papers had been laid out with a photo of him on top. No, not a photo—he lifted it up. A copy of a pencil drawing of him, signed “B Impulse.” Thad rolled his eyes. He set the picture aside, and looked at the document underneath.

            Name: Thaddeus “Thad” Thawne II

            Alias: Inertia

            DOB: ca. 2980s

            Occupation: Unknown

            Height: 5’1”

            He set the paper down. The desk, otherwise, was clean; no other papers were out of place. He was meant to see these. A message that their little super-community was watching him.

            And where was Red Hood, anyway?

            He glanced at the computer, its fan humming gently, turned on. It would probably be simple to hack in—simpler if he still had Craydl—and get to all their little files and. It could be simple, or it could get him in more trouble than it was worth; he didn’t know why he even wanted to. He looked at the bulletin board again. Aside from all the guns, he thought, this could pass for a normal office.

            He wandered over to the cot and sat down. It gave to his weight with a springy creak.

            Life had been simpler, he thought, a month ago, a week ago—before Bart showed his stupid face like some cruel joke the universe was playing on him. He could have gone on living like that forever—slowly aging and eventually dying, alone, normal. Just him and Ivan—stubbornly, spitefully normal. Wasn’t that the best possible revenge? Hadn’t he had time to think, thought, decided?

            The hum of the lights swelled in his head. Now that he’d noticed it, it was a deafening static, expanding in his lungs and his bones until there was no room for thought or feeling or anything else. He reclined and closed his eyes; he sank into the noise like a warm bath/

            He fell asleep.

            And woke some amount of time later to a paper bag dropped in the center of his chest and a masked man looming over him, smirking, a red helmet clutched in the crook of his elbow.

            He blinked. Right.

            The bottom of the bag was hot against him; even through his shirt it was nearly hot enough to burn. As he sat up and pulled it away, the smell of fried meat and ginger crumpled from the top of the bag.

            “Hungry?” Red Hood said. Without his helmet on, he looked—younger than Thad expected.

            Thad unrolled the top of the bag and found Chinese food containers stacked inside. The lack of windows in the room disoriented him. “What time is it?”

            “Dinnertime.” Red Hood set his helmet down on the desk, where another, smaller bag of food waited.

            Thad eyed a pistol as Red Hood unstrapped it from his thigh. “Do you use those?”

            “Yeah, but don’t tell anyone,” Red Hood said. “I’ve got a sparkling reputation to maintain.”

            The edge of sarcasm put Thad on edge. But even though it felt like the middle of the night, he was hungry. He pulled out a carton at random and unfolded the flaps—lo mein. Hot and fresh. Salty and delicious. He had the brief urge to say thank you, and swallowed it.

            Red Hood kicked his feet up on the desk, his boot sole landing right on Thad’s file.

            “So,” he said. “Young, dumb, and full of shit, huh?”

            Thad swallowed a thick clump of noodles. “What?”

            Red Hood shoved a dumpling in his cheek. “Listen, kid, I don’t really know you—and frankly, I don’t care all that much—but since my job is apparently to be the Patron Saint of Black Sheep—” he spread his arms wide, platter in one hand and chopsticks in the other—“take some advice from someone older and wiser.”

            “I’m older than you, technically.”

            “Whatever. Listen—” he pointed his chopsticks at Thad, brandishing them like a knife. “You’ve probably got a lot of rage in there, right? Just boiling out from your guts to your fingertips, right? Like everything that ever happened to you is unfair. Like everyone else is living a charmed little life and you’re shut out of it like a monkey trapped in the zoo.”

            Shivers crawled out from the base of Thad’s neck. No, he wanted to say, but his tongue wouldn’t shape the word.

            Red Hood poked around at his dumplings with the chopsticks. “I’m not gonna lie,” he continued. “That anger? That rage? It feels damn good. And it’ll get you pretty far. It will. But one day you’ll wake up and realize you have nothing left. Nothing and nobody.”

            He looked up, right at Thad, who was suddenly glad he couldn’t see Red Hood’s eyes through the mask.

            “The funny thing about being a sinking ship, kid,” he said, “is that eventually everyone stops trying to bail you out.”

            Thad swallowed. “You don’t know anything about me.”

            Red Hood smiled again, thinly. “Nobody does, right? Maybe that’s the problem.”

            Thad didn’t say anything. He felt—transparent. He didn’t like it. The carton of noodles burned his hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to move, not even to put them down.

            A low mumble, like chatter on a CB radio, issued from the computer’s speakers. The voice sounded like a woman’s, though Thad couldn’t make it out from the cot.

            Red Hood took a deep swig from a cup of egg drop soup and heaved himself up. “Alright,” he said, “I’ve paid my dues. Now I’ve got business.” Leaving the half-eaten food on the desk, he slipped his helmet back on; it fastened with a click. “Feel free to keep crashing here, or don’t,” he said. “No skin off my nose.”

            His voice, Thad noted, was hollower from inside.

Chapter Text

            Bart had nearly fallen asleep on the couch, lulled by the TV and the steady clacking of Tim’s keyboard, when the alarm went off, a shrill whining he’d come to find about as annoying as the alarm clock he used in high school. No—this was less annoying; it meant action, and that was so much better than cramming himself into a desk for seven hours a day, pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

            Sophomore year, he’d been tempted to drop out of school. It was around then that he realized he just wasn’t interested in any “normal” careers; he couldn’t be a mechanic, or a scientist, or work in an office. Preston had nearly talked him into going to film school with him, until Bart realized that film school was still school. So Preston had gone off to California, which made Bart sad to think about, but it was also a relief. It was hard for Bart to be around people he had to keep secrets from, and Impulse never stopped feeling like a secret too big to manage.

            But when he’d declared his intention to drop out of high school, Helen had descended on him with so much stern disappointment that it somehow became out of the question. She told him: Get your diploma in case you change your mind. Which, Bart knew, meant: You will probably change your mind. Which he guessed was fair. He’d quit being Impulse once, and he’d quit Young Justice once, and neither of those had stuck, so what did he know?

            Carol had been more understanding about the dropping-out thing. She thought it was a bad idea, too, but she knew how miserable the whole school thing made him, even though in high school they didn’t have many of the same classes together. She was in all honors classes, and while Bart understood the stuff she was learning, his grades weren’t high enough to be allowed in honors. So he got stuck in the standard classes, which were even more boring because they were easy, and so the rest of high school dragged on: no major crises, no huge developments. Just days in school and weekends with friends, fighting crime on the side, and if the rest of his life could be like that—minus the school—he would have been happy, he figured.

            Except that, no matter how steadfastly he kept on being himself, the world kept changing around him. Max gone. Helen married—not that he wasn’t happy for her, but her husband wasn’t in on the secret—Preston in California and Carol in college, and Young Justice “formally” disbanded though they continued to meet up (and if something happened while they were all together, who could blame them for responding as a group?).

            Kon snapped his fingers in front of Bart’s face. “Earth to Future Boy. Let’s go.”

            Right—the alarm.

            They loaded into the Super-Cycle. It occurred to Bart how long it had been since it was just the three of them, together. Despite everything—it was comforting. He propped his feet up against the back of Kon’s headrest, which earned him a stiff punch in the leg.

            The flight wasn’t long. They arrived above some suburban office complex, a line of buildings all identical and boring, where a ring of flashing police cars threw blue and red lights all over the stucco walls.

            Tim pointed down. “Armed men are holding the morning cleaning crew inside.” He steered the Super-Cycle down to the roof of a neighboring building.

            Bart blinked. Was it really morning? The sky above was deep and flush with stars, but there was, indeed, a thin line of light blue on one edge of the horizon. He’d been up all night—since the morning of the cookout. Oops. He stood to get out of the Cycle, except when he stepped out, one of his feet stuck to the floor and he tripped forward and clunked his shin against the side.

            “Kon,” Tim said. Kon snickered and released his hold on the Cycle.

            Tim slunk down off the roof, his cape weird and liquid in the darkness. Bart tumbled out and righted himself, slapping Kon on the arm. His head felt—sluggish. Relatively. He stifled a yawn. Kon didn’t notice.

            It wasn’t long before Tim rose back over the edge of the roof. “I talked to the police,” he said. “Three armed men, maybe more, on the fourth floor. Four or five hostages. There’s been one shot fired, but all the blinds are closed, so they’re not sure what’s going on.”

            “What happened to the fun villains we used to fight?” Kon asked.

            “I’m sorry this hostage situation isn’t quirky enough for you,” Tim said. “Bart—go take a look. Recon only. Come back and fill us in.”

            Bart was always recon. He saluted and ran off, down to the street, inside, and up the stairs. The lights in the building were off, desks and file cabinets unsettlingly shadowed and empty, but sometimes places like these had motion sensor lights, so he kept moving, too fast to register. He zipped into the fourth floor just an instant, sticking to the edges to avoid making a breeze; here, a couple lamps had been turned on, illuminating only the edges of faces and the glinting of guns.

            Two gunmen, six hostages, all of whom appeared to be unhurt. A bullet hole in the ceiling—from a warning shot, maybe. Bart repeated the numbers so he wouldn’t forget: two gunmen, six hostages. Two gunmen, six hostages. None of them had moved more than an inch since he’d come in. He phased down through the floor, and out again.

            “Just two gunmen,” he reported to Tim when he returned. “Six hostages along the far wall and they’re all fine.”

            “Are you sure? The police said at least three gunmen.”

            “I didn’t see anyone else.”

            Tim considered for a second. The sliver of light in the sky had widened, like a door pried open just an inch by the breeze.

            “Okay,” Tim said. “Bart, take Kon up there and drop him. Disarm the gunmen while Kon holds them in place.” He handed Bart two lightweight pairs of handcuffs. “Carry the hostages to the police. Gently. Clear?”

            “Crystal,” Kon said.

            Really, Bart thought, this was totally something he could do alone. Kon could probably do it alone, too. Or Tim. But their fearless leader didn’t take risks—especially not when innocent lives were in danger. Anyway, he figured, they were all here, so why not?

            Bart grabbed Kon by the hand and tugged him to the bottom of the office building. Pulling him was always a weird sensation—like pulling a really heavy balloon.

            “You’re like a really heavy balloon,” Bart whispered, because he thought it was kind of a neat simile. He shifted Kon higher and eyed the window that was close to the gunmen.

            “Your head’s a balloon.”

            Then they were up the wall and through it, back into the dim lamp-light, the soft hum of air conditioning, the air needlessly chilly and dry. Bart dropped Kon and, before the two gunmen could blink, snatched their guns and dumped them on the other side of the room. And then, for a second, he lingered in the quiet—it was always hilarious to watch people’s faces when they realized they were no longer holding what they had been.

            The moment passed. Their faces shifted like gears from shock to realization to anger, and they tried to move, to step forward, but Kon had his hands on the floor, and they were rooted in place. A couple of the hostages gasped and murmured amongst themselves, still afraid to make a sound.

            “Don’t worry, citizens,” Kon said in his faux-deep voice, which he liked to do as a joke, though Bart found it more weird than funny. He’d left the gunmen’s arms loose, which they currently flailed and thrashed, but it was easy enough for Bart to cuff their hands together while they seethed and spat and swore. The hostages were still oddly hushed. In shock, maybe. Bart considered what a bad day these people had had. Probably worse than his. That was weirdly comforting, too.

            Kon scooped up the gunmen and flew through the window to deposit them outside. Bart picked up the first woman in the row of kneeling hostages along the wall, threw her over his shoulder—gently—and carried her down, not quite fast enough to make her ill. He dropped her by a cop and zipped back up. Part of him thought maybe he should have asked if she was okay, but something about the whole situation unnerved him and a little bit of burnt-orange had joined the light blue on the horizon, and he knew if he didn’t get to bed soon he’d have to fall asleep in full daylight, which he’d never been good at.

            He grabbed the second hostage, a middle-aged man with rumpled-sweaty hair. Again, he hauled the man over his shoulder—

            A searing pain ripped through his leg, and then a boom, a little crack in the air like thunder.

            He dumped the man, the muzzle of the gun in his hand—where was that a second ago?—belching a thin wisp of smoke. Bart twisted to look over his shoulder. The man ad been hiding the gun—where?—so he wasn’t really a hostage—and the bullet—the bullet was still moving inside him, wedging deep into the muscle of his thigh, the flesh of the entry point still yawning wide.

            He vibrated. The bullet passed out of him without doing any more damage, landing bloody on the floor across the room. Grife, it hurt—the skin and muscle blown open in his leg were slamming back together again—before the man could react, Bart snatched his gun—still warm—and threw it across the room where it clattered on the floor.

            A deep ache spread from his leg. He pulled a ziptie from a pouch on his boot and tied the third gunman’s hands together. Helen had taught him how to truss a turkey one Thanksgiving—why was he thinking of that?—one of the remaining hostages had begun to cry. Bart bent to press his hand to the bleeding wound on the back of his calf. He wondered again if he should say something.

            Kon’s face reappeared in the window.

            “What happened?”

            “The third one was disguised as a hostage,” Bart said. He touched the bullet hole again. “Ow.”

            “Shit,” Kon said. He nudged the third gunman, who sneered up at him from the floor, with his foot. Bart eased his way into an office chair and stretched his leg out in front of him. The muscle around the wound ached; already it was starting to clot and heal.

            “You okay?” Kon asked. He picked up the gunman by the back of a shirt, like a scruffed cat.

            “Yeah,” Bart said. “Gimme a minute.” He sat on his hands so he wouldn’t rub at the wound. He’d learned from Max, and from Wally—really, a lot of people had beat him over the head with this lesson—that while speedsters were injured less frequently, the injuries they did get should be treated very seriously. They healed fast, so if they healed wrong, it could cause a lot of problems.

            Kon hauled the third gunman outside. One of the remaining hostages, a young-looking man, shook his head, looking balefully up at Bart.

            “I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry,” he blubbered. “I wanted to tell you—”

            “’S okay,” Bart said. He glanced at the gun on the floor, barely visible though he knew exactly where it was. The ache in his leg deepened, radiating up to his hip, and he wondered if it was supposed to feel like that.

            The room went weirdly quiet again. Dim red and blue light flashed in from the window Kon had opened, and vague voices floated in from below. Absently, Bart scratched at the bullet hole, because it itched; the skin had nearly closed, but the outside was still wet with blood that came away on his fingertips. He wiped them on the red part of his suit. Then he thought: well, I need a new one anyway. Blood all over his leg. Blood stains on white fabric were impossible to get out. He thought of the outfit his grown self had had in the future, which was mostly purple. He wondered if that was why it was purple. Then he moved away from that thought.

            Kon came back for the last of the hostages, and glanced at Bart, who gave him a thumbs-up. When Kon and the hostages left, the room suddenly seemed—mundane. Just a normal office building, like nothing scary had happened there. Kon returned and picked Bart up, and Bart bit down on the inside of his cheek as the motion jostled his leg—it felt like one gigantic bruise, creeping all over the inside of his leg.

            When they touched down on the ground, where the hostages were being given blankets—Bart was sure those blankets had a name, though he didn’t know it—and the police pressed the gunmen into a truck, Tim practically marched over to where they stood, Bart’s arm around Kon’s shoulders so he could stand.

            “Are you okay?”

            Bart flexed his leg experimentally.

            “Don’t move it,” Tim said. He crouched and pulled a pen-sized flashlight from his belt.

            “I’ve never been shot before,” Bart realized. “That’s kinda cool, right?”

            “Yeah, super cool,” Kon said. Bart assumed this was sarcastic.

            Tim held his flashlight between his teeth and gently examined the wound, pulling shredded bits of fabric away from wet skin, wiping at the skin—fully closed by now—with a cold, damp cloth that smelled like alcohol.

            “Ow,” Bart complained.

            “You’re lucky it didn’t hit the bone,” Tim said. “That would have been a mess.”

            “Aren’t there EMTs for this?” Bart asked. He looked at an ambulance parked nearby. Its side gleamed in the orange light of the rising sun.

            “Yes, but I doubt they have experience with Flash-speed healing.”

            “And you do?” Kon said.

            “You do if you’re trained by Batman.” Tim stood. “You should go rest. Take an antibiotic. Keep it clean. Kon and I will stay and make sure everything is cool.”

            Resting—he was sure he couldn’t sleep now; his head buzzed with weird excitement. He was too tired to sleep. But it would be nice to be home, maybe. He took a step forward.

            Kon held tight to his arm.

            “Slow your roll, dumbass,” he said. “You can’t run on that.”

            “How am I supposed to get home?”

            Tim pressed his fingers to his ear. “Oracle,” he said. “See if you can reach the Flash. Impulse was injured; he’s fine, but he needs to rest at home.”

            Bart scrambled for his phone and jabbed unmute. “Hi, Oracle!”

            “Hi, Bart.”

            He grinned, and wondered what she looked like. Maybe she was Batman’s daughter? He wondered if he should ask about Thad, but then she was talking again.

            “The Flash is busy. I’ll try—"

            A blur and a breeze, and then Thad stood in front of Bart, dressed in the same drab clothes he’d been wearing when he ran from the picnic. Whatever Oracle was saying slipped right out of Bart’s ear. He wondered if this was how Thad felt when he showed up at his door—utterly shocked. But pleasantly?

            Probably not.

            Thad regarded him for a moment, arms crossed, his face plain in its disdain. Kon tightened his arm around Bart’s shoulder.

            Then Thad huffed. “You got shot?”

            Bart was silent.

            “You know we can move much faster than a bullet.” There was a cruel little smile forming on Thad’s mouth, the same kind of smile he’d given Wally just before he got popped. It made Bart—angry. He didn’t want Thad to be doing that. It wasn’t just that Bart didn’t want to be mocked; he wanted Thad to know better, and apparently he didn’t.

            “Max got shot once,” Bart said. The smile dropped from Thad’s face, curling down into a grim line.

            “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m taking you to your apartment.”

            Bart nodded at Kon, who released him, and hopped unsteadily toward Thad. “How did you know? Is this a twin thing?”

            “We’re not twins,” Thad said. He reached forward and hoisted Bart up onto his shoulders, which jostled his leg pretty bad.

            “Your little Oracle feed,” Thad said to Tim, “plays constantly in Red Hood’s little cave.”

            “Enough with the littles.” Kon rolled his eyes.

            Bart tried to adjust himself, not-so-accidentally jabbing his elbow into Thad’s shoulder. “See you guys—” he started, and then Thad was running toward Alabama.

            “That was rude.”

            “Just be grateful I’m hauling you anywhere.”

            “Super grateful,” Bart muttered.

            They hit the general area of Tennessee, somewhere up in the mountains, when Thad slowed. The air was dewy here and already light; they’d chased the sunrise east.

            “Where am I going?” Thad finally called over the wind.

            “Oh,” Bart said. ”Start from Manchester and head northeast. I’ll tell you from there.”

            Thad said nothing, but kicked up his speed again, following Bart’s directions. The mountains around them melted into hills, and they flashed past Manchester and away again.

            “Isn’t it funny that I know where you live and you don’t know where I live?”

            “Hilarious.”

            They went the rest of the way—a few seconds, maybe—in silence, aside from Bart saying ”left” or ”right” until they had reached Bart and Cissie’s apartment and Thad was dumping Bart on the couch.

            Bart settled back into the cushions, which were overstuffed and vaguely suede. His leg still ached up-and-down, and he wanted to change out of his suit, but he didn’t think Thad would agree to bring him some clothes from the other room. He’d feel better soon, anyway. He slung his leg up on the couch, nestling his shoe into some throw pillows that didn’t match each other or anything else.

            Thad was turning to leave.

            ”Why did you help me?” Bart blurted. The ceiling fan rocked back and forth as it spun, a little breeze settling on Bart’s clammy face. He shivered.

            Thad didn’t turn all the way back to face Bart, but he hesitated. It was a long pause—long for them, at least—before he spoke.

            ”I don’t want to be a...an attack dog,” he said. ”I’m trying not to be.”

            Bart thought it was the quietest thing he’d ever heard him say. He rubbed his leg, lightly, absently, to give his hands something to do.

            ”You don’t have to go, you know,” he said. ”You could...hang out.”

            Thad turned a little more to face him. The light from the windows was dusky and yellow. Bart couldn’t remember the last time he was up this early.

            ”And do what?”

            ”I dunno,” Bart said. ”Play video games?” He didn’t really know what Thad would enjoy, to be honest—maybe that was the problem. Did he like games? Did he like anything? It was an excruciatingly long moment before he spoke again.

            ”...Okay,” he said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and, hunching like it might make him disappear, he sat down stiffly in the armchair cattycorner to the couch.

            Bart grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. Thad looked around the apartment, slowly, as if examining a crime scene.

            ”You live with Arrowette?” he asked. Bart followed his eyes to the bow displayed on the wall.

            ”Oh, yeah.” Bart snatched a game controller from the coffee table and turned on the console. ”I think she’s asleep.”

            Thad said nothing.

            Bart flipped through the console’s menu. ”What do you want to play?” he asked, a little tentatively. He thought of Max’s advice, good for both animals and people: no sudden movements. This was on a hunting trip, which, Max had explained, was what fathers and sons did, especially in Alabama.

            Aren’t sudden movements our whole thing? he’d replied, to which Max had sighed.

            ”I—I don’t know,” Thad said. ”It doesn’t matter.”

            Bart tossed him the second controller. He picked an old game, thinking maybe Thad had played it before; either way, neither said anything as they began the co-op mode, and they played in silence for a few minutes, the volume turned down uncomfortably low.

            The quiet stretched on, and the living room lightened with morning. The music of the game was faint, a buzzing chiptune with a slow beat. There was a weird precariousness to the air, and so Bart was afraid to say anything, or do much of anything at all. He wished Cissie was in the room, to help make conversation. She usually knew what to say. Even if it was rude. He tried his best, without speaking, to pretend to be surprised when Thad found a bonus level. He wasn’t sure Thad noticed.

            They cleared a few levels together, working easily, though Thad liked to hang around and push down around the borders of the screen for collectables that Bart had long ago collected. Bart forced himself to be patient; to let Thad take as much time as he wanted. No sudden movements. They hadn’t shot anything on that hunting trip. In retrospect, he was surprised Max gave him a gun.

            What he wanted was for Thad to do something, to say something—to push them into the realm of normalcy. It felt like they were on borrowed time right now, like they’d slipped the train track of how things were supposed to be, and Bart didn’t know how to make it okay.

            So he just kept playing.

Chapter Text

            “I didn’t mean it,” Thad said, quietly. “What I said to Wally.”

            Bart’s response came fast, as if the question had been straining in his throat for hours: “Then why’d you say it?” He looked at Thad and away again, quick. Everything about him was fragile and nervous. For the briefest of moments, Thad was washed through with anger.

            He held it back, though. His character jumped ahead of Bart’s, completing the level. The screen faded to black. In the glass’s muddy reflection, Thad saw the two of them, sitting—their nearly-identical faces; his wrinkled clothe; Bart’s bloody uniform.

            The next level started. With it rose soft music, peppy and polka-like.

             “I don’t know,“ Thad said. He was so aware, then, of the texture of the controller in his hands, the plastic speckled with tiny bumps. He ran his thumb over the hard, round edges and wondered who had assembled this thing. “I just—wanted to—“

            Wanted to what? The words were there, but they got stuck behind his teeth. He thought of the Red Hood. Strange and abrasive as the man had been, his hideout still showed evidence of other people. Mementos and trinkets and photographs of—who? Friends? Family?

            Family. The meaning of it—

            They kept playing. The level’s boss dropped down onto the screen.

            “Wanted to what?“ Bart finally prompted.

            Thad considered the question, rolled it around in his mouth. “Wanted to—prove something. That I’m not what he thinks I am.”

            There it is, he thought. The honest truth. Something shifted in the room—like the whisper-soft cracking of ice all over the world on a cold spring morning.

            “But didn’t you act exactly like what he thinks you are?“

            Thad snorted. He hit the boss a few times, and Bart’s character hovered back and let him have it, this simulated violence, which felt neither good nor bad—just easy.

            “It wasn’t my brightest moment,“ he admitted. “It’s just—watching their little family—doesn’t it make you angry?“

            “Does my family make me angry...?”

            “Come on,“ Thad said. “You have to think about it.“

            Bart frowned.

            “No...?”

            Thad looked over at him—his stupid pitiful big eyes—did he ever look like that? He threw his controller to the carpet, and the sound it made was disappointingly soft.

            “Come on,“ he said. Distantly, he was aware that their characters were dying. “All the things that were taken from you—from us—” He swallowed. “We were raised in isolation. Out of touch with reality. We can’t even live in the time that we’re from.“

            Bart fiddled with the rotating sticks on his controller.

            “I dunno,“ he said. “It makes me said, I guess. It doesn’t make me angry.”

            Thad’s anger deflated, a bullet robbed of momentum. The boss fight reloaded, and Bart moved his character again, defending Thad’s from the boss’ blows.

            “Grife.” Thad plucked his controller from the ground. Bart let out a slow breath.

            They beat the boss easily, and started the next level, and Thad felt both uneasy and relaxed at once. He thought of the time he found an injured fox in the woods outside his home, and how it had trembled at his touch but was powerless to run. Its fur, when he touched it, was matted with blood.

            Nothing to do but kill it, of course, but it shocked him how often he thought about it.

            The doorknob behind the couch turned, and Thad tensed as, from her bedroom, a sleepy-eyed Cissie emerged. In the moment before she registered what she saw, Thad gave Bart a frantic and questioning look, and Bart shrugged and kept playing, so Thad did, too.

            “Morning,” she said to Bart. When she noticed Thad an instant later, she composed a decent straight face, but there was no masking the flash of surprise in her eyes.

            “Hey,” was all she said.

            “Hello,” he replied.

            She lingered for a moment, and then went to the kitchen, from where clattered the opening and closing of cabinets and the rattle of dry cereal in a bowl. Thad thought about how different she looked now—less skinny, with the fat of adulthood having settled around her face and arms. Time had passed since—since he was Bart. A deep discomfort clouded in his gut.

            Cissie returned with her breakfast and leaned over the back of the couch.

            “What happened to your leg?” she asked.

            “Got shot,” Bart said. He didn’t take his eyes from the screen.

            Cissie tsked, and plunged her fingers into his mess of hair to ruffle it. “Slower than a speeding bullet, huh? Does it hurt?”

            “Kinda.” Bart shifted in his seat, as if the question had made him more aware of the pain. The blood in his costume had dried by now, but was still clearly visible, bright as snow. It made an uncomfortable presence in the room.

            “Want some painkillers?”

            Bart shrugged. “Nah,” he said. “Thanks.”

            Cissie shoved a spoonful of cereal into her mouth and came around the front of the couch. Perching on its arm, she watched them play.

            Thad looked at her again, unsure of what, exactly, he was looking for.

            “So,” she said. “Thad. That’s your name, right? Can I call you that?”

            “What else would you call me?”

            Bart frowned, a little.

            Cissie shrugged. “Thaddeus. Inertia. Jim-Bob. Julia.”

            Was she joking? She was—casual. But serious? Thad struggled to keep up with the game and her inscrutable face, and his character dropped off a ledge, but he eventually said, politely, “’Thad’ is fine.”

            “I’m Cissie.” She raised her hand, still holding a spoon, in a half-wave. “Bart’s roommate.”

            “I know who you are,” he snipped, irritated because she was laying down a line of conversation he couldn’t see the end of.

            “You don’t, though, do you?” she asked, with a humorless smile.

            Thad kept his eyes on the screen. “Cissie King-Jones,” he recited. “Arrowette. Your mother is Bonnie King, the former Arrowette. You’re from Alabama, which is where you met Impulse and Max Mercury. You joined Young Justice and quit, then won a gold medal in archery at the Sydney Olympics.”

            “Okay,” she said. “You know me the way I know Julia Roberts—which is not really, except that I’ve read her Wikipedia page and saw her at a party once, though I couldn’t really talk to her because I was only ever a D-list celebrity at best.”

            Bart rubbed at his wound, glanced worriedly back at the kitchen, and opened his mouth, but was cut off by Cissie, who brandished her spoon like a baton.

            “How many times did we interact when you were posing as Bart? Twice? Once?”

            “Three...times.”

            She nodded, as if she had just won some argument Thad wasn’t even aware of. He ground his teeth into the side of his tongue as one of the game’s enemies landed a hit.

            “Bart,” Cissie asked, “what’s my favorite color?”

            “Blue,” Bart said. “Cissie, I’m—”

            “See,” she said. “Bart knows me, and I know Bart. We’re friends.  We’ve been friends for a long time.” She took a measured bite of cereal and looked at Thad, and Thad looked back, and suddenly felt like he was staring down the barrel of a gun.

            “I don’t know you, Thad. I know about you, but I don’t know you. And you don’t know me.”

            Thad gripped his controller tight. She was right—and why should it matter—but why did it annoy him that she was right?

            She watched them play as she finished her bowl of cereal, and eventually Thad relaxed into the game again, the mindless rhythm of it. He wondered how long Bart expected him to stay here. He wondered how long he wanted to stay here.

            “Alright,” Cissie said, walking back to the kitchen to rinse her bowl. “I got work. See you later, Bart.” She paused by the front door as she pulled a thick ring of keys from a hook. “It was nice meeting you, Thad.”

            Thad glanced outside through the back door, out to where a squirrel ran up a tree to a bird feeder and pilfered bird seed like its life depended on it. Which—maybe it did. Some weird thing inside him urged him to be polite, now, and so he turned back to Cissie and said with someone else’s voice, “You too.”

            The door opened and shut. Quiet in its wake.

            Outside, faint birdsong—Thad recognized the sound, but didn’t know the bird--and inside, nothing but the clack of fingers on buttons. At some point, the air conditioner kicked on, a comforting low hum from somewhere in the direction of the kitchen.

            They played in silence for a while longer. Bart was getting sleepy—the colorful lines fainting and wiggled into each other—and the drowsy haze was comfortable, he thought, his eyes fluttering shut—it was hard to keep them open, to keep his head up—comfortable. The pain. In his legs. His leg. Which one? Bridging from one to the other. Lightning rod. Like a dark red thumping, like. A beat. On a tight drumskin—his heartbeat—punching all the way up. Into his head. A dull headache.

            He fell asleep.

            And as he slept, he dreamed.

            He dreamed of a house in Manchester where every room connected to every other room, and every door was wide open to the outside world, and outside was orange and pink and the sun was a huge disk erasing half of the sky. Bart stepped out into a neighborhood he didn’t recognize and some of the houses were upside down, their eaves like the gaping underbites of waiting mouths, but somehow they weren’t frightening. Everything was the same as everything else. He turned back toward the house and found the ocean there instead, and when he stepped out onto that boiling sea, steam wrapped around his ankles, but his feet glazed over the surface it as if it were marble.

            He heard a voice, from somewhere, but he couldn’t understand it.

            When Bart’s character stopped moving, lifelessly dragged along the back edge of the screen, Thad looked up to find that his head had lolled down over his chest. Asleep. Thad rolled his eyes.

            Bart’s character eventually died, and Thad set his controller aside and leaned his head against the chair’s soft back. He had no reason to stay, now; he should go home. He needed to go home. He needed to feed Ivan. But his legs felt like air, empty of muscle and lightning, and his eyelids sank.

            Ivan. He remembered—waking up under that RV, his first night out of the Speed Force, to the alarming feeling of breath in his face. A dog, its long muzzle prodding beneath the undercarriage to investigate him. If the dog was aggressive—but he was only curious, and when the initial spike of fear passed, Thad crawled out on his forearms, only now noticing the gravel and mulch that pressed painfully into his skin.

            He emerged into a night slathered with edgy, comfortable dark. There wasn’t darkness in the Speed Force, not really. Even the shadows there were somehow alive; it was a twitching, breathing organism living in rejection of the physics of this other world.

            But his eyes were quick to adjust.

            The RV was still unlit inside, and when he peered around the corner everything looked the same, from his fuzzy recollections, as it had when he fell asleep. Except the dog. It followed closely behind him, tail wagging cautiously, as slow as the faintest breeze. When Thad paused, the dog pressed its black nose to his leg and sniffed all over, and with each shallow breath its plank-like ribs popped out in the relief of the dim moonlight.

            And seeing that hungry dog made Thad realize he was hungry, too—for the first time in a long, long time.

            Then Bart moaned, a low and grieving animal sound that tugged Thad out of his memory. The music of the game still tinkled faintly, but Bart’s breath now came in shallow and barely-audible fits as his chest fluttered up and down. His lips were parted, trembling, and the skin below his nose dewed with sweat.

            Thad’s nerves fired up, scalp to toe, dread and weird elation flooding him in equal measure. He stood. Even under the blood and the costume he could see that Bart’s wound had ballooned. When he laid a fingertip on the still-exposed skin, the feverish heat of infection pulsed under his touch.

            Sepsis, he first thought, followed by: Maybe minutes from death. And how many seconds ticked by while he just stood there, looming as an obelisk, unable to think or feel a single thing more?

            The room was so—quiet. And filled with light.

             I could let it happen, he thought, vaguely, after a long time. It wouldn’t be my fault.

            Bart’s hand twitched, and he murmured something indistinguishable. From another room, the unmistakable sound of a dog’s yawn and teeth clicking together—Bart’s dog. Bart’s dumb, little dog.

            A cold wave sloshed over Thad and he was moving again, grabbing for Bart’s phone where it lay on the floor. It woke at his touch to a call from an unlisted number that had been running for hours and hours and hours, and he pressed unmute.

            In his dream, Bart ran.

            He didn’t run toward or away from anything or anywhere, but he ran. The sun swallowed more and more of the sky, until nothing remained but empty white. It felt good to be in the sun, but it hurt. The light wormed its way into his leg, and it sat and it burned there, dense as a star.

            He ran but he was still, in a great dry field, under a live oak whose crooked branches reached over everything, and the light of the sun was in all the branches. A bird flew over the tree, gray and white and black. Bart understood, without seeing, the way its wings rowed forward to grab air and heave it behind. There was something between them, an invisible string, and the string was air, and for a moment he was the bird and the bird was Bart, because they both touched the air, because the air was the same.

            With sudden clarity, he knew that he was dreaming. If he had learned something just then, it slipped away from him, and everything turned colorful, and the sun in his leg was a brand, a tether made of burning to the earth. He was dreaming. But he didn’t know a way out, or want one. So he ran. He ran because he wanted to. He ran because he knew how.

            He ran because it felt like flying.

            He—

Chapter Text

            Max did not enjoy people.

            On a grassy bluff overlooking the ocean, he sat and watched an approaching thunderstorm shake itself out over a dark plane of water. At night, storm clouds were deep and invisible, but he knew they were there—a wet and restless wind stirred the sawgrass all around him; the dizzying smell of ozone was stuffed into every crack in the wind; and flashes of lightning, far over the water, stamped and flexed like a horse ready to run, illuminating the black pits of the clouds and the white crashing tops of waves.

            No, Max thought miserably, he did not enjoy people.

            He loved them, maybe, but that love was like the wind: invisible, and impossible to hold. How long now had he been doing this? Years, maybe, but it felt like lifetimes: the white settlers with their greed and their cruelty; the tribes of the continent striking out in defense; and Max, in the middle, trying only to stay the tide of blood, though this felt most days like swimming upstream because despite his speed, he could not be everywhere at once.

            And oh, he’d tried—he’d run top to bottom on this continent and the one below, through wildernesses that made him stand dead still with awe and through farmsteads thriving and crumbling and settlements in all stages in-between. But wherever there were people, blood followed. Always. It was an undeniable law of nature, real and oppressive as gravity.

            Of course some people were kind. Many people were kind. But it didn’t change the ache of dread that ran all the way down to his core, deeper than any physical agony. Maybe it was grief.

            The ocean swallowed the horizon with crashing, an incessant sound full of oblivion, and he liked how small he felt in its face. How helpless. Here was something—something far more powerful than himself. Something to surrender to. He’d been everywhere here—but he’d never crossed the ocean.

            Low thunder pulsed over the waves, only a murmur by the time it reached him.

            He had no doubt that he could cross it. He ran over lakes and rivers with ease, every day. But who was he to hold this mystery, this enormity, and conquer it? How could one man swallow the whole Earth under his feet?

            The wind stirred, more lively now than it had been before, and tiny grains of sand bit into his face. He wondered—if he sat still long enough, how long would it take the wind to erode him away?

            A palm tree, tall above him, rustled in the wind; its bladelike fronds practically sang as they danced. And then—from within the tangled mass of green—a loud, fragile song. He looked up.

            Illuminated by flares of lightning was a little mockingbird, its black and white wings like fans, piping furiously a reveille of songs it had learned from other birds. The sound stilled Max’s heart. He felt suspended in the electrified air, while sawgrass tickled his elbows and stray, fat raindrops fell on his knee, his ear, his nose. The mockingbird never stopped. The edges of Max’s vision fell away. In its swooping litany of birdsong he could almost swear he heard a voice, just beyond the veil of his comprehension.

            A bright crack of lightning, closer than any that had come before, drew his attention away. The storm was a wild thing now, bright and rapid and loud, though the wind and the waves were oddly still. Lightning bolts whipped through the clouds so often that he could barely follow them all, the way they forked and lashed out in a hundred tiny directions before fizzling away.

            He’d been afraid of lightning, once. The world, it had seemed to him as a young boy, was brimming with things to fear—tornadoes, bullets, mountain lions stalking the edges of civilization. Now, he could outrun any threat—except, maybe, lightning.

            He wondered—if, while sitting here, the hair on his arms and his neck stood up and he prickled with the certainty of someone about to be struck—what would happen, then, if he ran?

            But nothing ever touched him, and the mockingbird was gone.

            He stared out over the ocean, out to the storm, until nothing registered to him but those white flashes, until they began beating out a steady rhythm, a music beyond words or replication. They licked down from the sky like wicked tongues, like the fingers of God probing for something hidden beneath the thick cover of cloud.

            Searching for something to reckon.

            Searching for—

            Possessed by new and sudden vitality, he stood. The sand on his clothes and his hands and his legs drifted away in the soft breeze, and he neither noticed nor cared, because familiar electricity jumped all the way out to his fingers and back again in perfect circuit. An electricity he had both loved and hated in equal measure—his liberator and captor, both, which he suddenly understood in a flash of comprehension were just two words for the same thing. The same force.

            He walked down to the edge of the water.

            The lightning began to whisper his name.

            He ran.

Chapter Text

            He woke up.

            But he wasn’t sure he wasn’t still dreaming. A bright room, cold and white—his tongue felt like wet plaster. He dully registered that his head was turned to the left side, though he didn’t want to move it; he could see, to his left, a plant whose leaves gently stirred. It was moving. It had life. It was trying to tell him something, he was certain, but in a language he couldn’t understand.

            Then the mist in his head cleared away, and he understood that the plant was plastic. The movement was just the air conditioning, pushing the leaves around.

            He was awake.

            “Impulse.”

            He turned and saw a woman in a lab coat, whose dark hair comforted like a soft blanket in the startlement of that white, bright room.

            “Helen...?”

            But the fog in his head shifted again, and of course it wasn’t Helen; she barely even looked like the woman. Her name tag—the letters plunked around, dead, in Bart’s mind before they formed into words: Meghan Campos.

            “I’m Dr. Campos,” she said. Her voice was even and stern. With a latex-gloved hand, she pried open Bart’s left eyelid and shined a pinprick light—all the way into the back of his skull, it felt like. He blinked his other eye. Her fingers through the glove were surprisingly warm.

            “Do you know where you are?” she asked.

            He shook his head.

            “STAR Labs.“ She switched to his right eye, and red light swam in the left. He tried to blink it away. “Do you remember what happened?”

            Again, he shook his head—then flexed his leg. There was a distant echo of pain. “I got shot,” he said, remembering.

            “You had an infection,” she said, releasing her touch. Leaning back, she shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. “Accelerated healing means an accelerated autoimmune response—in this case, an aggressive one. You were close to shock when that boy brought you in.”

            Bart blinked. Other details of the room wormed their way to life: the scratchy sheets on the bed underneath him; the icy liquid filtering from an IV up the crook of his elbow; a new-looking office chair and an older computer in the corner. The last thing he remembered was—Cissie, digging her fingers into his hair—he remembered being thirsty. And hot. And—

            When who brought me in?

            “Who?” he asked.

             “I don’t know his name. The blonde boy. He brought you here.”

            Bart sat up and didn’t say Thad’s name, understanding now—remembering—that he was still in costume. The tight fabric felt like a vice around him, gluey with sweat. He swallowed.

            “Can I have some water?” he croaked.

            Dr. Campos looked him up and down, her face stiff as a cast—then the hard corners of her mouth softened, and she poured some water from the sink into a little paper cup.

            “Here,” she said.

            Bart took the cup and swished the cold water around his teeth, up and down his cheeks and tongue. It tasted like well water. Preston’s house had had a well. The water always smelled funny there. Rotten. Carol described it as sulfurous. But it didn’t taste so bad.

            “This was a close call,” Dr. Campos said, fiddling around with something in her right coat pocket. “You can leave when you feel alright, but...”

            Bart rolled the empty paper cup around in his hand.

            “Is Th—is he still here?”

            She shook her head. For a moment she looked off at the blank wall, almost angrily, the corners of her mouth drawing tight like curtains. Then she looked at Bart.

             “Does he—” she gestured at his costume— “do this, too?”

            Bart hesitated. He sensed that she wanted the answer to be no, and he didn’t want her to be angry with him, and anyway the answer was complicated and he was too tired to explain. He shook his head.

            “Good. I can’t—I’m so tired of this.“ She sighed, and turned to enter something into the computer. Her fingers hammered loudly on the keys. The sound reminded him of rain.

            Bart leaned his head back and listened. He felt ill, and shaken; he’d almost died. Of course it wasn’t the first time, but it was never a pleasant thing, and it unsettled him that his only salvation had been—Thad, happening to stay.

            He rolled his head to the side to look at the fake plant. Once, a few weeks after Max had almost—after everything in the Speed Force—when Max had regained most of his weight and his strength, the two of them sat together on the roof late one night and watched a meteor shower, or what little could be seen through the hazy light of the suburbs.

            Max groused about the light pollution and the perils of modernity, though he had been the one who insisted on staying in Manchester to watch. He told Bart that, even just a century ago, the spot where they sat would have been dark, lively forest. Bart watched the faint trace of a shooting star trickle across the sky and considered how long Max had been alive. He thumped his heel against the shingles of the roof.

            "Max," he said. "Did it scare you? Almost—dying?"

            Bart counted two more shooting stars before Max answered. His voice was hard but watery, like river rocks.

            "Dying didn’t scare me nearly as much as what it would do to..." He trailed off. Bart fiddled with the sandpaper surface of the shingles.

            "To what?" he pressed.

            "I saw you back there, in the Speed Force," Max said. "You really do love me, don’t you?" He took a deep breath, and sighed, and cleared his throat.

            "Thank you, Bart," he said.

            Dr. Campos wheeled back from her computer; the noise startled Bart from his memory. “You’re free to go whenever you feel alright,“ she said, her back still turned. “I would take it easy for a few days, though,“ she said. “I know that’s hard for you folks, but please.“

            In a field up the mountain from his house, Thad laid back in the long, dry grass and let tiny, unidentifiable bugs scatter and scuttle on his skin. Here was a kind of loud quiet, isolated from humanity while the wind tore through the grass and the fat dragonflies buzzed. Gnats swarmed in clouds in the air. He could almost see his cabin down the mountain, if he looked.

            He watched ugly, strange clouds. They were big and gray and formless, lumps without shape or shadow floating around startling cracks of blue sky. Beside him, Ivan lounged with restless sighs and slowly, repetitively, licked his hand. Thad could tell from his impatient snuffles and twitching ears that the dog wanted to get up and move, but stayed by his owner’s side, nonetheless. Thad was touched by the loyalty—or the care, maybe?

            What was the difference?

            What was the difference to a dog?

            Thad sat up. He looked over the whole wide vista before him, over the unevenly rippling grasses and, farther down, over the tops of trees as they strained against their roots in the wind. Down below the canopy of that wood were smaller trees, saplings and shrubs, buffeted from the wind by the tallest and widest branches above.

            But once, when the forest was new—there had been no canopy, long ago, once upon a time. Once there had been only bare rock, and then there had been lichens and stubborn grasses chipping the rocks into soil, and then, somehow, the first trees stretched into the naked air, unprotected, to grow.

            Thad wondered at this. He looked at his hands, and the web of blue veins under his skin. Unbidden, a memory came to him—of Helen sitting him down in a hard chair in the kitchen and trimming his hair with a pair of metal scissors. How the sensation had both disgusted and delighted him. He cut his own hair, now, and he was suddenly sure it looked awful. Why not just let it grow? If he had no one, never saw anyone but strangers and dogs—

            He stood, looking frantically around the vista; he had no idea of what he was looking for. Then, guided by some strange impulse, he sat back down, straightened his spine and crossed his legs, as he had seen Max do, once upon a time. He supposed it was meant to bring ease and tranquility, which he needed now, lost for the last few days in a nauseating swirl of self-doubt and second guesses. He had saved a life. He had saved Bart’s life.

            He closed his eyes.

            And listened. To the whispering of the grass, to the keen of the insects and the distant, light chirping of birds he knew the calls of but couldn’t name. He listened to the rolling of the faraway trees and the deep, invisible humming of the earth below and the places where it met his legs, pressure and pressing...the hairs on his arms moving...the striking warmth of sunlight on the back of his neck...

            And then a crackling behind his eyelids, a sickeningly familiar chaos that he couldn’t bear to look away from. He didn’t want to be inside it—he didn’t want anything—but he had to explore. He pressed into it, and was pulled in too, all at once. Then he felt himself, his body, in two places—simultaneously in the grassy field with the hovering flies and the cautiously frolicking birds and also there, looking in as if through a thick, liquid membrane, into what he registered from some faraway place was the surging energy of the Speed Force.

            Partially he was aware of how difficult it was to walk this line, the border between the two places, as slippery as trying to reclaim a dream after waking. He felt as though—

            Then he felt it, more than saw it—suddenly felt his presence, pulling toward him like a magnet—someone he hadn’t seen in years, since that person had been withered and frail and ready to die, and the shock of it was enough to wake Thad away from that other place, back into the real, the grassy field, the bugs and birds and tree.

            He opened his eyes, half-expecting the world to have lapsed into night without him. But no more than an hour had passed, he noted, unsettled; it was still not yet noon. The world did feel different, though, he thought. He rolled some stiffness out of his neck. This world now sharp and ugly, as if rejecting his presence. He looked at Ivan, who had begun rolling in the dirt and the sun, softly panting.

            “That was Max,” Thad said. Ivan looked up at the sound of his master’s voice, but otherwise did not react.

            Thad unwound his legs and stood, noticing with absurd displeasure that one foot had fallen asleep.

            “Let’s go home,” he said. Ivan sprung to his feet and followed.

            Bart, holding a crumpled brown bag in his hands, was already standing outside his cabin when he arrived.

            Thad slowed, slightly, at the sight of him, but forced himself to keep moving. Ivan ran for Bart, his tail whirling nearly in circles behind him. The tiny sting of betrayal Thad felt from this was immediately washed over by embarrassment—how pathetic was he? It was just a stupid dog.

            “Hey,” Bart said. He stooped, still holding the crushed bag, to give Ivan a friendly scratch. Satisfied, the dog leapt off into the tall grasses lining the walls of house.

            “Hello,” Thad said. Part of him was glad to see Bart; it put an end to this irritating period of waiting and wondering what would happen next. But he was still shaken by his vision, and he wanted to sit down and think. For a moment he thought about confessing—that he’d sensed Max, out there in the Speed Force; that he’d at least made some kind of tenuous contact.

            “What’s that?” he instead asked, indicating the bag. Bart shifted.

            “I brought bagels,” he said. “To thank you. And I brought—something else.”

            When Bart did not elaborate, Thad passed him and opened the door. By his own standards, the cabin was a little dusty, cluttered; a few raggedy towels hung loose on various corners and a half-eaten can of beans congealed on the coffee table. His mind had been too busy the last few days to tidy. Maybe he had even been worried.

            “Bagels?” Thad asked. He thought: Is that the value of your worthless life? But he didn’t say it. He imagined it was some kind of peace offering. Bart set the bag on the table between them and Thad pried open the crumpled top. A yeasty, warm smell floated out, and Thad realized he actually was quite hungry. He saw about six or seven different bagels, all different flavors—sesame seed, blueberry—and a large tub of cream cheese. And something else—round and glinting at the bottom.

            Thad lifted the Flash ring from the bag like it was a snake.

            “Why?” Thad asked.

            “I had a spare and I thought you might want to—well, I don’t know if you want to do the hero thing or not—but Wally and I both have one and Grandpa Barry, and, well—" Bart shrugged, self-consciously, fiddling with the ring on his own finger. “It’s a family thing, and you...”

            Thad pursed his lips. Curiously, or out of old habit, he ran his finger around the seam until he found the catch, and released it; the top swung open to reveal nothing inside.

            “Um, its empty,” Bart said. “I took my costume out...”

            Thad was relieved. Still, he set it down on the table with a small clunk.

            “I’m eating,” he said then, pulling a bagel at random from the sack—sesame. He sat down and took a bite; it was still a little warm, and pleasantly salty.

            Bart fished through the bag for a blueberry bagel, and the cream cheese.

            “Do you have a knife...?”

            Thad gestured at the kitchen. Bart left and returned with a butter knife. Then the two of them sat and ate in silence, the Flash ring looming between them.

            Thad said, “Do you remember the first time you ate?”

            Bart swallowed.

            “I ate all the time in my—in the VR,” he said. “Nothing ever really had a taste, but I could smell it. And I could hold it. The first time Grandma Iris came to visit me...she brought me a sandwich. A turkey sandwich. But the guys in charge wouldn’t let me eat it. I guess they were giving me nutrients somehow...but anyway, the first time I really ate anything was at Wally’s house. After Iris brought me back, and all this other stuff happened....Grandma raided Wally’s fridge and made me another sandwich. Then I ate five more.”

            Thad nodded, still chewing the same now-tasteless wad of bread. He had wanted to pursue this line of conversation, but now he didn’t—didn’t want to tell his own story, of bland and nutritious meals delivered through a slot in the wall.

            “Listen,” Thad said, when he was done. “I almost left you there.”

            Bart took another bite, perhaps unsure of what to say. Then he said: “So why didn’t you?”

            “Back—in the future—I was always told that Thawnes are despised by Flashes. That you persecute us—hound us at every turn. In the Speed Force—I thought one of us would kill the other. That felt right to me. But Max didn’t want it that way. And somehow, I cared about what he thought.”

            “But Max isn’t here,” Bart said. He looked almost—irritated, twitching his foot like a rabbit. “He wouldn’t know. Why did you save me?”

            “Because the extent to which I was deceived is obvious to me now,” Thad said. “President Thawne was never kind to me. Max was kind. You’ve been—kind.” He cut his eyes to the door, still open to let in the fresh morning breeze, dewy and scented with pine.

            “I want you to fight me,” Thad said.

            Bart’s face fell.

            “I want to spar,” Thad corrected, “with you.”

             “Why?”

            “Either you trust me,” Thad said, “or you don’t. And if you don’t, then you’re wasting your time.”

            Bart’s face flickered through a few expressions—confusion, doubt—he bit his lip and nodded.

            “Outside,” Thad said. He left the ring on the table.

            The air outside was stuffy and quiet, with the thick muffled quality of an approaching storm.

            Thad surged forward and knocked Bart back across the chest.

            Bart staggered, then swept forward—grabbed him—the two grappled and Thad kicked him in the back of the leg. They fell apart for a moment.

            Bart recovered. He grabbed Thad by the arm and wrenched backwards, sending Thad toward the ground. A little puff of dusty topsoil went up into the air.

            Thad sprung back up and regarded Bart, who had lurched back to a safe distance.

            “You’re not really trying,” Thad said. The sun, high overhead and peeking through the trees, prickled uncomfortably hot on the skin of his arms and the back of his neck.

            Bart rubbed his leg, his face sore. “How do you know?”

            “Because I’m not really trying.”

            They stood about three yards apart, each picking apart the space and the silence in their own heads. Neither made another move. A breeze came trickling through the forest, whispering and cooling.

            “Okay,” Thad said, the word feeling nauseatingly like a mistake. He walked back inside, back into the cool and comforting and terrible shadow of the cabin, and picked up the ring from the table. Bart followed him in, silently.

            Thad said, “I guess I’ll try it your way.”

Chapter Text

            Cissie chewed on a sugary milk-and-cereal flavored breakfast bar, sitting atop a round hay bale with prickly stems sticking into her leggings. White vapor clouded around her nose as she exhaled, and the moisture of her breath gathered coolly in the space between her collar and her throat.  

            Bart and Thad stood in front of her, in gray sweatpants and hoodies that almost matched, except that Bart’s was worn around the knees and elbows and frayed at the ankles, and Thad’s looked brand-new, still creased where it had been folded on a store shelf.

            She swallowed. “So,” she said. “What are we doing out in the middle of...?”

            “Arkansas,” Bart said. “We’re going to race.”

            Cissie took another bite. “Because...?”

            Bart ran his hand through his hair, flipping it out of his face. It was getting shaggy; he looked like a pony with a fluffy winter coat.

            “It’s good practice,” he said, as if this should have been obvious.

            Cissie wanted to ask practice for what, but she could feel a Bart logic loop incoming. That morning, he’d sped into their apartment, where Cissie had just finished dressing for the day and was absently scrubbing the sink, and asked her if he could do her an unspecified favor. It had been two weeks since he’d been shot, and aside from the fact that he hadn’t yet cleaned his bloody suit, he otherwise seemed to be fine, zipping about like normal.

            “So why am I here?” she asked.

            “We need a judge.”

            Cissie smoothed out the empty wrapper of her bar and set it next to her on the hay.

            “But I won’t be able to tell who won,” she said. “Not unless you’re really far apart.”

            Bart’s brow furrowed. Thad rolled his eyes.

            A little scrap of twine, frayed at the ends, appeared in Cissie’s right hand. The cereal bar wrapper fluttered to the ground in the breeze.

            “Hold that up,” Bart says, “and the first person to take it out of your hand is the winner.”

            Cissie twirled the little string between her fingers. “So you could have just stuck a flag in the ground and circumvented any need for me to be here.”

            Bart’s face fell. Cissie sighed good-naturedly.

            “It’s fine, Bart. Honestly, I could use the fresh air.” She stretched her neck to one side, rubbing out a little knot at the intersection of her neck and shoulder blade. She was about due for a massage—maybe she’d schedule one later.

            Bart smiled.

            Cissie leaned back, stretching her spine over the broad hump of the hay bale. Upside-down, she could see the tiny, fuzzy crystals of frost gathering on the stubbly remains of the field of hay that had been cut. In the distance she saw the big, gently sloping arches of a farm’s irrigation system, rising and falling from one end of the horizon to the other like the bounding path of an enormous rabbit. The air smelled vaguely like old apples.

            She remembered once, in the old days, Young Justice went head-to-head against some misguided ecoterrorist with a Johnny Appleseed schtick—which had been sort of silly, until it came to light that his “apple bombs” released aerosolized cyanide, revealed only when Cissie shot one of the apple bombs out of the air and rained dusty poison all over her teammates. Not her brightest moment—but not too bright on the part of the apple bomber, either, whose amateurish understanding of chemistry had lead him to create such a weak poison that everyone was pretty much fine, aside from a pounding headache. What she remembered the most, though, was Bart holding his breath and taking the man out with ease and without any help.

            Thad shoved his hands into his pockets.

            “Are we going, or what?” he asked. 

            Cissie, still lying upside-down, wiggled her neck a little, letting her long hair tumble until its ends touched the ground.

            “Three,” she said. “Two. One. Go.”

            There was wind, and then they were gone.

            In the back pocket of her jeans, her phone began to buzz. She reached back and declined the call, without looking.

            She twirled the piece of straw between her fingers, holding it carefully away from her body. Something brown and small caught her eye: a field mouse, perhaps encouraged by the sudden lack of voices, or maybe actually startled by the silence. It skittered and dodged through a maze of dead grass, moving like a liquid blur, and then burrowed back into some hidden place.

            Did she trust Thad? Not even a little. Was she afraid of him? She ran her thumb over the sharp tip of the straw in her fingers. Yes, sure, she was. She trusted Bart—she knew he was capable of just about anything he set his mind to—but she didn’t, maybe, trust his judgement, not all the time. They’d been friends a long time, and their friendship ran deep with some of the weirdest shared experiences imaginable, but he still lived in about eight dimensions at once, and none of them had a whole lot to do with forethought.

            She remembered, with sudden clarity, a random day of high school. It was either spring or late fall, because in her memory the windows were open, and she was picking at her cuticles, bored. Her cuticles were often ragged and torn back then. It was English class and they were talking about Greek myth.

            Prometheus—the name meant forethought, in contrast with his brother, Epimetheus, afterthought. She thought about turning this into a joke, but she couldn’t quite formulate it, and before she could slot it together in her mind into something funny and clever there was another strong wind that whipped her hair around her face and the straw was snatched from her fingertips.

            Please be Bart, she thought.

            She sat up.

            Thad stood in front of her, panting lightly. He held the straw away from him, as if in disbelief, and a single, surprised laugh bubbled out of him. Cissie looked back in the direction he’d come from, over a wide and quiet expanse of land.

            “Where’s Bart?” Cissie asked.

            His eyes darted up, and his face immediately twisted into a scowl.

            “How should I know?” he said. The hand holding the straw fell limply by his side.

            “Wasn’t he right behind you?” she asked. “Or ahead of you?”

            He flicked the straw away from him. “What are you implying?”

            “Nothing,” she groaned. “Just...”

            She reclined slightly, one elbow pressing firmly down into the stippled hay, her feet braced against its broad side. She kept her eyes on him, and he was watching her with the hungry suspicion of a stray dog.

            “Do you always just assume the worst about people?” she asked.

            He eyed her, cautiously.

            “I’m not making fun of you,” she quickly assured him. “I’m just trying to understand you.” She paused. “Like I said—I don’t know you. You’re different from Bart.”

            “How?” he demanded.

            “I don’t know,” Cissie huffed. “You tell me.”

            “He—I—” Thad faltered. “He doesn’t think,” he said. “He just...”

            She slid down from the hay bale, her phone slipping out of her pocket and landed on the ground. She leaned back.

            A quiet moment passed. She slid down farther, down so she was sitting on the ground, her back shielded by the thick hay.

            Again, her phone began to buzz, muffled in the grass, and the screen lit up. Thad peered at it.

            “You call your mother ‘Bonnie’?”

            Cissie shrugged. She slid one foot out and flipped the phone over with her toe, so the screen was hidden and the buzzing muffled in the dirt.

            “Aren’t you going to pick up?” Thad asked.

            “She can leave a message,” Cissie said.

            The words felt unnecessarily venomous, even as she said them, but Thad only hummed in response. The phone stopped buzzing.

            Cissie looked up at the flat white sky.

            “Bart saved my life once,” she said. “A long time ago. Back when we first met.”

            Thad opened his mouth and closed it again.

            “Well, that’s what he’s supposed to do.”

            “According to who?”

            Thad looked perplexed by the question.

            “What’s your point, anyway?” he said.

            “Just making small talk.”

            A rush of wind tumbled forward, skidding to a violent stop that that cut deep, damp furrows in the soil and rocked the hay bale forward an inch, bracing against Cissie’s spine. She coughed and fanned away the dirt that flew into her face.

            Bart had his hands on his knees, panting. He had a thick slosh of white paint sprayed across his shirt.

            “No—fair.” He glared up at Thad. “I got—distracted—there was a—car accident.”

            Thad scoffed.

            Bart’s glare deepened. He caught his breath, swallowed one last long cold inhale, and straightened up.

            “You could have helped, you know.”

            The muscles of Thad’s jaw twitched. “You wanted to race, so I raced. You didn’t say anything about stopping for random car accidents.”

            “I shouldn’t have to say—” Bart cut himself off with a frustrated groan.

            Cissie pushed up from the ground, brushing the dirt from her pants.

            “Bart,” she interrupted. “What’s with the paint?”

            Bart waved her off.

            “The point of the race is to train,” Bart said, frowning.

            “Is it?” Thad countered. “Train for what—running fast?”

            “Okay, okay,” Cissie said, more insistently. “Bart, what else did you do while you were training with Max?”

            Bart’s mouth was still open for a moment, but eventually her closed it, and looked off to the side, thinking.

            “He threw things at me,” Bart said. “To dodge. Oh!”

            Bart zipped off, and returned a few moments later holding Cissie’s bow, a quiver full of arrows slung over his shoulder.

            She hissed through her teeth. “Please be careful with that, Bart..!”

            “I know, I know,” he said, gingerly placing the quiver down on the ground at her feet. He held the bow forward with both hands. “I unstrung it, see?”

            He had, indeed, unstrung it; the waxy bowstring hung limp and crooked from the bow’s limbs. She took it in her hands.

            “So I’m guessing you want me to shoot at you,” she said.

            Bart nodded, a little too enthusiastically. She sighed and ran her hand over the bow’s limbs, delicately checking it for any hairline cracks. The fiberglass was smooth under her fingertips, and cool. She sighed.

            “Where’s the stringer?”

            Bart fished a length of nylon rope out of his pocket, topped at each end with a hard plastic cap. She slid the caps over the tips of the bow’s limbs, laid her foot on the limp rope draped on the ground, and pulled the bow upward, bending the limbs enough to slide the bow’s string into place.

            She looked up and found Thad watching her, warily. She examined the bow again, taking her time, and even longer than that, just because. Bart practically radiated impatience. Which was why she never let him shoot; weapons shouldn’t be held be impatient hands. She brought the bow up and flexed the string a few times, gently, stretching it back and forth.

            “Glove?” she said, holding out her hand.

            Bart dropped a supple old glove and an arm guard into her outstretched hand. She slipped them on and flexed her fingers.

            “Alright,” she finally said. “So...what? Just start shooting?”

            Bart hesitated before speaking. “Uh—I guess so. Or we could run around...”

            “I can’t even aim at you if you’re moving that fast,” Cissie pointed out. The beginning of a dull tension headache began to spread between her eyebrows.

            “Oh yeah,” he said. He looked around.

            “Fire in random directions,” he suggested. “Whoever collects the most arrows wins.”

            Thad glanced at Bart, looking mildly interested. Cissie slid an arrow from her quiver.

            “I thought I was supposed to be shooting at you.”

            “Ready,” Bart said. “Set—go!”

            Cissie nocked the arrow, pulled back, and shot far off over Bart’s head. Then another, and another—she pulled them quickly and fired without much care to where and how far, and the two boys whipped up tendrils of dirt and grass debris as they flitted back and forth, collecting arrows.

            When she’d exhausted her last arrow, she let her bow arm lower, and Thad and Bart appeared in front of her again. Bart had seven arrows bundled in his fists; Thad had three. Their bullet-shaped tips gleamed in the sunlight that broke through the lazy cloud cover.

            Thad looked between his arrows and Bart’s.

            “Again,” he demanded. He shoved his arrows out toward Cissie, who took them delicately and slid them back into their quiver.

            “Okay,” Bart said. A little smile played at the edges of his mouth as he handed his arrows over.

            They repeated the process a dozen times over the next twenty minutes. Thad narrowed the gap a little, eventually—his best was tying Bart, 5 to 5—but he wasn’t able to win, and the frustration grew more and more apparent in his stiff shoulders.

            “This is pointless,” he eventually snapped, dropping his bundle of arrows hard on the ground. They made a thin, clattery, fiberglass noise.

            Cissie rolled her neck. Her arms and her back were beginning to ache.

            “Shoot at us,” he said. “That’s practical, at least.”

            Cissie sighed, nocked another arrow, and pulled back with her sore arm, the thick muscles of her shoulder blade sliding across her back. She looked down the shaft of the arrow, past the point, through the air, to a fleshy spot tucked right between Thad’s armpit and chest. Right where it wouldn’t be lethal, but it would hurt—maybe even cause some irreparable nerve damage to his arm.

            A wave of goosebumps rolled over her. She jerked the bow up and fired far over his shoulder. The arm that held the bow, which felt as light as a feather in her hand, dropped slowly to rest next to her thigh.

            For a long moment, she kept her gaze on the distant horizon. A few sparrows chattered back and forth, their calls as rapid as machine guns.

            “Bart,” she said. “Can I go home? I’m tired.”

            Bart blinked, looking between Cissie and Thad.

            “Okay,” he said.

            Cissie picked up her phone from the ground and unstrung her bow and tucked the arrows back into the quiver, avoiding Thad’s gaze, and when she was finished, Bart scooped her from the ground, his arms tucked under her knees.. Thad held the arrow, plucked from the air, and watched with plain disgust as they left.

            Back in their shared kitchen, the light was dim; for a good chunk of the day, their north-facing kitchen was drenched in shadow. Bart let her down from his arms and she walked into her room, set down her things on her unmade bed, and after a second of hesitation, emerged into the living room again.

            Bart was still there, restlessly picking at a pill of fabric on the couch. Cissie filled a glass of water from the tap and drank the whole thing. Cool water slid through her throat and spread a soothing chill in her stomach. She set the glass in the sink.

            “Bart...why did you take me out there?”

            He looked up with his wide, goofy, golden eyes. Their sincerity was piercing.

            “I wanted to spend time with you.”

            Cissie let out a shaky laugh.

            “We live together, Bart. We’re together all the time.”

            Bart frowned. The bit of fabric he was fidgeting with tore away from the couch cushion and he flicked it onto the carpet.

            “That’s not the same,” he said.

            Cissie glanced at the clock—half past nine, nearly.

            “I have to go to work,” she said.

            Bart’s face fell. Cissie smoothed her hair down, combing her fingers through a few rough knots, and picked up her keys from the counter. She glanced back.

            “Have fun, alright?” She reached for the doorknob. “Maybe you should take him out to try helping actual people.”

            She closed the door behind her, chewed on the tip of her tongue, and turned the corner to the parking lot.

            In the car, she tossed her purse down on the passenger seat next to a few crumpled-up fast food receipts and a water bottle she’d forgotten to refill. She turned the keys in the ignition and turned the radio’s volume down to a low, reassuring hum of pop hits she’d heard a million times before.

            Her phone buzzed, and the screen lit up.

            Cissie groaned. A little spitting drizzle of rain began to fall on the windshield, and she cranked the wipers on, which squealed as they dragged across the mostly-dry glass. The drive to work was a short one—so she’d have a good excuse to end the call after a few minutes, at least.

            She picked up the phone and wedged it between her ear and shoulder and backed out of her parking space.

            “Hello?”

            “It’s mom. Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

            Cissie ground the gearshift forward and started down the road, newly-slick with shining rain.

            “I was in the tub, mother,” she lied. “I’m on my way to work. What do you need?”

            “What, a woman can’t talk to her own daughter?”

            She turned her wipers up as the rain became heavier, blurring the windshield, and the car in from of her screeched to a wobbly stop at a yellow light. Slamming on the brakes, she swerved into the thankfully-empty lane on the left and glared through the light as it turned red at the nervous-looking teenager in the car she’d almost rear-ended.

            “Can you please just find some friends your own age?” Cissie snapped into the phone.

            Silence on the other end of the line.

            Cissie slid to a slow stop at the next light.

            “Fine,” her mom said. “I see how it is. After everything...”

            Cissie turned down a side street, a shortcut to avoid the morning traffic. Little ranch-style houses with pristine flowerbeds rumbled by outside. She tuned her mother’s words out and waited for the sound of her voice to stop. She took a deep breath.

            “I understand you’re upset,” she said slowly, “but it makes me feel...stressed...when my phone is ringing all day and I’m in the middle of doing something.”

            On the other end, her mom mumbled something bitter, and Cissie could imagine her taking a long drag from a cigarette.

            “So, what, I can’t call you?” her mom said.

            Cissie pulled into the parking lot at work and let the car idle, leaning her forehead against the top of the steering wheel. It was hard, and bumpy, and gave a little to her weight. She ran her thumb over the silver plastic logo at the center of the wheel, feeling its crisp edges. The thrum of the rain distinguished itself into a thousand little patters.

            “Cissie?”

            Cissie lifted her head and rubbed her eyes.

            “I would prefer if you texted me, mom,” she said. “I know you want to talk to me, but I can’t just drop everything I’m doing all the time to pick up the phone.”

            There was a heavy, longsuffering sigh at the other end of the line.

            “Fine,” her mom said. “If that’s what you want.”

            “I’m at work,” Cissie said, turning off the engine. “I’ll talk to you later.”

            “Alright,” her mom said. Then, after a pause: “Have a good day at work.”

            Cissie nodded a little, though she knew her mom couldn’t see her.

            “Thanks,” she said. “Bye.”

            She hung up the call before her mom could say anything else and tucked the phone into her purse.

Chapter Text

            Max stared up at the ceiling, statue-still, his face frozen in a look of pointed displeasure that made Bart, creeping past him to the kitchen, wonder if he’d done something wrong.

            But no—following Max’s gaze up he found the source of the annoyance, a ring of dampness blooming across the plaster above. As Bart watched Max and Max watched the leak, a single drip of water plopped down to the carpet. Rain hummed thickly outside.

            Bart, now forgetting about his popcorn in the microwave, wandered to Max’s side.

            “What’s wrong with the ceiling?”

            Max didn’t move.

            “Roof’s leaking,” he replied.

            “Oh,” Bart said.

            Another drop plunked down to the carpet. Thunder cracked outside, shaking the windows.

            “How do you fix it?” Bart asked.

            Finally, Max seemed to thaw out. He ambled to the utility closet and pulled out a towel and a mop bucket, which he positioned under the leak. A third drop plunked into the bucket, making a hollow plastic sound.

            “I’ll have to go up on the roof. Take a look. Maybe install some new flashing...”

            Max folded the towel and slid it under the bucket. Then, apparently satisfied, he sat down on the couch and picked up the remote.

            Bart frowned. He looked down into the bucket.

            “Aren’t you gonna do it?”

            Max pressed the power button.

            “Not right now, no.”

            “Why not?”

            “Bart,” he grumbled. “It’s pouring rain outside, and thundering. Lightning is dangerous, even for us.”

            “But...” Bart looked back up at the stain discoloring the ceiling. “The roof is getting messed up. And who knows how long it’s going to rain!”

            “The weather channel might,” Max replied, dryly, flipping the channel to a weather radar. “And not getting electrocuted is a little more important than a moldy roof.”

            The green-and-red radar image chugged slowly across the screen. Plunk, plunk, went the slow drip of water in the bucket.

            Bart returned to the field where Thad still stood, just a few minutes after he’d left.

            “Sorry,” Bart said. “She...had to go to work.”

            Thad gave him an appraising look. “Right.”
            They stood in silence. The wind shifted, and a small break in the gray field of cloud cover revealed a patch of sunny blue.

            “Maybe we should...go help someone,” Bart suggested, hesitantly.

            “Such as?”

            “I don’t know.” Bart pulled his phone from his pocket and tabbed over to a real-time stream of breaking news. Headlines flashed by overwhelmingly quickly, even for him: shootings, drug busts, deaths, dog maulings, landslides...

            “There’s a tornado not too far from here,” he said, hesitating over a headline. It was about a hundred miles off, and developing quickly into a wide, severe storm.

            “What are we going to do about a tornado?” Thad jeered.

            Bart bit down on his tongue and tucked his phone back into his pocket. “We can make sure there are no people in its way. Let’s go.”

            It didn’t take long to reach the place, a small farm town that, by a massive stroke of misfortune, happened to be directly in the path of a quarter-mile wide tornado.

            The land was so flat that Thad could see the storm from miles off, and the air was so strangely depressurized he felt like his ears might pop. The town, just a few miles away, was indeed tiny, little more than a smattering of mobile homes, churches, and fast food restaurants surrounded by the neat rows of soybean fields and a few larger, more ornate, older houses. The sky was a sickly shade of green, dimpled with dark mounds of clay and the air was filled with a low, lazy, loud rumble.

            The tornado, wedge-shaped and massive, chugged across the countryside.

            Brisk rain pelted Thad’s face and arms as they approached. Slowing down to a jog, he glanced at Bart, whose unruly hair whipped this way and that in the wind, wild and strong even far away from the cyclone.

            “Shouldn’t they be in shelters?” Thad asked, raising his voice over the rain.

            Bart pushed a thick twist of hair out of his face and shrugged. “They might be,” he said. “Let’s check, though.”

            Bart sprinted off down toward the town. Thad hesitated, feeling awkward in his sweatpants, feeling almost as if he were in a dream. He’d never seen anything like this, the slow and unfeeling way the enormous tornado chewed up the earth, whipped it around, and spat it out. He tugged at a thin gaiter around his neck, pulling it up over his nose and mouth, and fished a pair of swim goggles out of his pocket to snap on over his eyes, tinting everything a murky blue. The rubber strap dug into the back of his skull.

            The tornado crossed a lonely string of power lines hovering over distant, waving soybeans, and the lines cracked and flashed with blue electricity as they snapped.

            Finally he took a step forward, preparing to follow Bart—when something red caught his eye. A single car—a little red coupe speeding toward the town, toward the path of the tornado. Goosebumps prickled up Thad’s neck, and he pivoted on his heel and raced down to the car.

            A woman was driving it, crouched forward down to the wheel, her forehead and the space between her eyebrows wrinkled deeply with fear. She gave furtive glances to the tornado every couple of seconds, and leaves and clods of dirt pelted her windshield and were flung aside by the rapidly tick-tocking wipers. She didn’t seem to notice Thad, running alongside.

            “Stop the car!” he shouted. His voice, muffled by the gaiter, barely rose over the roar of the storm.

            “Stop!” he tried again. “Pull over!”

            Still, she sped on. Frustrated, Thad reached out and pounded the side of his fist on the window. She jumped, and the wheel jerked in her hands; the car jolted to the side and wobbled on the edge of the poorly-paved road. Her brake light lits up, and the wheels tossed back thick furrows of mud as they got locked down and entrenched in the wet roadside dirt.

            She let go of the wheel with deeply trembling hands and quickly cranked the window down.

            “Please!” she shouted. “My kids are home alone, I need to get to them.”

            Thad blinked. Cold rain ran down the back of his neck, under his collar, soaking his sweatshirt.

            “Why aren’t you with them?”

            “I work out of town,” she choked out. She fumbled with her seatbelt, struggling to push the release. “Please, can you help me push my car out of the mud?”

            She pushed the door open, a fraction, and Thad pressed it back forcefully.

            “What’s your address?” he snapped.

            “1402 Cherry Lane.”

            He ran down the road, loose gravel slipping around under his feet, toward the town, his eyes locked on the enormous wedge tornado as it plodded along the horizon. He passed a tiny church on the border of town, with a handful of old graves behind and a flag whipping hopelessly against the wind. Down the road farther—all the streets seemed to be named after trees, Magnolia, Maple, Linden, Chestnut...there was Cherry. A ramshackle house stood at the address, its paint peeling and mailbox hinged open; the dark, roaring sky loomed behind.

            He phased through the door, not bothering to try the knob. The inside was, surprisingly, cleaner than the outside, with just a few stray magazines and worn-out toys out of place. And in the living room, huddled together on an old blue couch, were four children of various ages. They all jumped when Thad appeared in front of them; two screamed; they all flinched away. For just a moment, that stunned him.

            “Your mother sent me,” he said, as soon as the screams had lost their initial volume. “I’m going to take you to her.”

            The kids exchanged glances with each other. Their eyes were all wide, and the youngest, maybe five years old, had a face streaked with fresh tears.

            Thad opened his mouth to say something, then instead surged forward, grabbed two of the kids, and had them standing in front of their mother’s car before they had a chance to scream again. As she jumped up out of her seat to embrace them, Thad ran back again, and in two more trips collected the two oldest and deposited them with their family.

            The woman, clutching four little heads close to her chest, began to sob. The wind whipped her hair wildly around, and the kids’ too, so that they all got tangled up together and Thad couldn’t tell who was crying and who wasn’t, although he didn’t know why it should matter.

            He turned back to look at the tornado—so close to the town, now. It only looked slow because it was large; it moved at devastating speed.

            Bart checked the usual places: high school gym, church basements. Many people seemed to have tornado shelters in their backyards, which was a good sign. Probably most everyone was safe--probably. In a restaurant kitchen he found a few employees huddled together in the walk-in freezer; these he easily shuttled down to the church basement where most of the town, sans those with their own shelters, seemed to be hunkered down.

            Once he’d dropped off the last employee, he stood for a moment in the basement, surveying the strange scene. A constant stream of news narration babbled from a battery-powered radio, which had a handle the man holding it had to periodically crank. A few very young children, babies almost, played with plastic farm animals in the corner, and around an old-looking ping pong table some adults milled about, uneasy, many—the men especially—trying to hide their nervous energy, shoving their hands into their jeans pockets and pretending to examine some aspect of the basement’s construction. A low murmur of voices hung over the room like fog.

            Bart cleared his throat, and most of the room’s eyes turned to look at him.

            “Is there anyone you know that needs help?” he called.

            A wiry, 30-something man in a collared shirt pushed his way to the front of the crowd.

            “My daddy,” he said. “He’s in his house, the one at the end of Magnolia. He can’t get his wheelchair into the shelters.”

            Bart nodded.

            “Mrs. Benson,” someone else called. “She don’t leave her house. Next to the Burger King, the pink house.”

            Bart nodded again. End of Magnolia, Burger King pink house. End of Magnolia, Burger King pink house. No one else said anything. He left the basement.

            For a moment he stood at the top of the stairs, his bottom half shielded by the stairwell while cold raindrops stung his cheeks. The leaves of a nearby ash tree shivered in the wind, and dirt swept up in dusty tendrils from the road.

            He turned to look up a hill, where he spotted Thad jogging down. Even from a distance he could see that his sweatsuit was soaked. He ran up to meet him.

            “Go check on Mrs. Benson in the pink house by Burger King.”

            Thad looked surprised for a moment, then nodded and ran off. So that was one thing covered, Bart thought, nervously. He swallowed his apprehension and trailed quickly down Magnolia Drive.

            The “pink house,” as Bart had described it, was indeed pink—a pink-painted midcentury house with a pink driveway, and even an assortment of pink flowers clumped artfully in the yard, which Thad didn’t know how to identify.

            He phased in through the door, which was hung with a wreath of plastic pink foliage. The house inside was dark; the power must have gone out. He looked quickly around: a foyer with a dusty, closed piano and a grandfather clock; a dining room with a shower of crystals for a chandelier. A high-pitched bark sparked somewhere in the back of the house. He followed the sound.

            In a bedroom at the back of the house, a deeply-wrinkled old woman with long white hair sat in a long white nightgown on a made-up bed, clutching a wriggling, shaking shih tzu to her chest. She jumped when Thad entered, a tiny sneeze-like scream erupting from her throat.

            “Mrs. Benson?” he asked, sweeping wet hair out of his eyes. Water puddled down from his clothes and onto the carpet, and her eyes went right to that, indignant.

            “I’m here to take you to the shelter,” he said, stepping forward.

            She shrunk back. The shih tzu growled and yipped twice.

            “I’m not going,” she said, a stubborn set locking in her bottom jaw. “I’ve seen tornadoes all my life. No need for all that.”

            “I’m not arguing with you,” he said, stepping forward again. His shoe squelched into the wet carpet. The wind outside was moaning, whining against the sides of the house.

            The dog wriggled free of her grip and surged forward, sinking its tiny teeth into the cuff of Thad’s sweatpants. He shook the dog loose and jumped back, and the old woman had a smug look on her face when he looked up again.

            “Fine,” he snapped. “Stay here and die.”

            “I ain’t afraid to die,” she said quickly—but there was a tremor in her voice that stopped Thad just before he ran. The dog, still growling, raised its hackles, but stayed midway between them. The rain changed direction outside, now spitting loudly against the bedroom window.

            “Why don’t you want to go?” he asked.

            She didn’t answer.

            Thad’s eyes roamed around the room. The decorations were eclectic—dusty fake plants and a basket of ceramic Easter eggs. On the mantle of an old, bricked-up fireplace stood an urn.

            “Fine,” he said, and didn’t leave.

            Bart found the house at the end of Magnolia easily and went right inside.

            “Hello?” he called out. “My name is Impulse, I’m here to help.”

            There was a moment of silence before a trembling voice called out, “In here.”

            Bart turned the corner into the bathroom. A few lit candles flickered in the dim light, and a nearly-bald man in a wheelchair sat next to the sink, worrying a worn rope bracelet between his hands. His face cracked open with relief when he saw Bart.

            “Oh, thank God,” he said. “Please—I can’t get down into any of those damn shelters.”

            Bart nodded, absently toweling off his wet arms on a green hand towel hanging next to the door.

            “I can take you down there,” he said. The wind howled louder, and Bart saw how the man’s hands were trembling. He stepped closer.

            “Are you okay with leaving the wheelchair?”

            The man looked doubtful, but he nodded. “I can stand for a minute or two, but...”

            “I’ll come back for it right after,” Bart promised. “I’m gonna carry you over now, okay?”

            The man nodded again.

            “Don’t worry,” Bart said, as he hefted the man up. “I can outrun any tornado.”

            He heard a shaky laugh from over his shoulder. Then he sped back down to the church basement, scanning the streets for Thad as he went—he hoped he’d found Mrs. Benson—and stopped in front of the man he recognized as the man’s son.

            After a brief moment of comprehension, the son’s face lit up. “Dad! Thank God.”

            Bart lowered him to the ground, and his son offered an arm for support.

            “I’ll be right back,” he said.

            It took him only a moment to retrieve the wheelchair and bring it down, but still Thad was nowhere to be seen. Should he go check on the pink house...?

            He lingered, doubtfully, at an intersection, rain streaming over his goggles. It was a simple task, right? It should have taken no more than a minute.

            A movement caught his eye from down the road. A few cars, weaving down the distant county road, lights on—storm chasers, he guessed. But just to be sure he ran up beside each car, peering in to find wide-eyed, excited people holding cameras. Fair enough. He peeled off, away from their direction, back toward the town; he guessed, or assumed, that they knew what they were doing. Still, he’d keep an eye on them, just in case.

            What was left? The edge of the tornado’s violent winds were just beginning to sip at the outer edge of town. A few tiny pebbles of hail cracked against the asphalt, and then larger ones, nickel-sized ice projectiles being lobbed down from the sky. The town turned into the sound of applause as ice and rain drummed across all the roofs.

            He looked over his shoulder. He could go through and check individual houses, just to make sure everyone was sheltered...but then, where to start? The ones closest to the tornado—the most urgent place to check, but also the most dangerous...or away from the tornado, which was safer, but would leave out those most in need of help—hypothetically.

            He pushed a wet sponge of hair out of his face and, fishing a hair clip from his pocket, pinched it up behind his face. Water ran down his neck, skating down over the water-resistant fabric of his costume. A pebble of hail chipped into his foot.

            The closest houses. He’d have to be quick. Taking a bracing breath, he ran off toward the center of the storm.

            Lightning cracked violently outside the old woman’s house. Thad leaned against the wall, spitefully, his wet clothes bleeding into the old, yellowed wallpaper.

            The grandfather clock’s minute hand ticked over the quarter-till mark and let out a four-note melody that repeated three times. From her place on the bed, Mrs. Benson glanced up, then stood. The dog stayed close to her ankles as she shuffled to the clock, opened the glass front, and with a hand wrapped in a handkerchief pulled down on the bronze weights to wind it. When she was finished, she closed it again, and then just stood, staring at the clock’s face.

            The wind roared outside, belching wind and debris. Leaves and twigs smacked the window.

            “You’re insane,” Thad finally said. “It’s just a house.”

            She didn’t reply. Instead she made her way back to the bed and sat down again, angling her eyes pointedly away from Thad.

            “You’re willing to die over a stupid house?” he pressed.

            “Don’t patronize me,” she said, softly, her lips pressing together in a thin, hard line.

            He scoffed, pushing away from the wall. The hard patter of hail showered over the roof, turning the air in the room to a dark hum. He walked over to the clock to inspect it. The glass was a little dirty—smudged—but the long, cylindrical weights inside, dangling by lengths of thin brass chain, were pristine. The clock...he studied it for a moment, then understood. The force of the weights, slowly falling, powered the clock. Completely mechanical—and elegant.

            “Why didn’t you touch the metal with your bare hand?” he asked.

            She was quiet for a moment. Then she cleared her throat, and raised her voice over the screaming wind. “If you touch it, it’ll tarnish.”

            “Hm.” Thad ran a finger down the edge of the clock’s wooden body, then  turned to look at a series of framed photographs on the wall. She was in most of them, at various ages—unrecognizable, almost, when young enough—along with a man who, beside her, over the years also aged and then vanished.

            “How long have you lived here, anyway?” Thad sneered.

            “Sixty years, just about.”

            “You live alone?”

            “Yep.”

            Past the photos, a small bookcase drew his attention. He ambled over.

            None of the titles were particularly surprising: The Red Badge of Courage, Great Expectations. Only a few were dusty; they all looked worn and well-read.

            “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked, scorn creeping into her voice to match his.

            He tensed for a moment. Pretending to examine an old copy of Anna Karenina, he angled his eyes away from her.

            “No,” he said. “I’m...from Alabama.”

            “You don’t sound like you’re from Alabama,” she said, almost accusatory. Thad left a wet thumbprint on a page and replaced the book on the shelf.

            “Well, I am. I—”

            With no warning the window exploded.

            Blocky, glimmering fragments of glass filled the air, and a detached car mirror hurdled in behind them, the impromptu grenade that had broken it. Before she had time to react, Thad yanked her hard by the arm, throwing her over his back, and ran.

Chapter Text

            Carol sipped at a burnt, sugary cup of coffee from the Student Union while she stared out her window at the clear blue sky beyond. The TV droned indistinctly, tuned to some never-ending cycle of national news; she wasn’t paying attention. She tapped the eraser of her pencil against the tip of her nose. She picked up her phone and set it down again.

            Focus. She had a ten-page paper due and a final in two weeks, and she couldn’t seem to wrap her head around the material. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand it—it wasn’t even that she didn’t care about it—but it somehow felt unimportant, in the grand scheme of things. A ten-page paper for her English elective.

            She picked up the book she was writing about, Charlotte Temple, and thumbed through it, scanning over the passages she’d highlighted and underlined and tagged with page flags. The introduction had stated that the author’s grave, nearly 200 years old, was in New York—maybe she’d ask Bart to take her there. She wondered if she could get extra credit for that, somehow—if she wrote something about the grave site...?

            She pulled her laptop closer to her and copied a passage from the book: The very basis of true peace of mind is a benevolent wish to see all the world as happy as one’s self; and from my soul do I pity the selfish churl who, remembering the little bickerings of anger, envy, and fifty other disagreeables to which frail mortality is subject, would wish to revenge the affront which pride whispers him he has received.

            Carol hummed, leaned back, leaned forward, corrected a typo. She took a sip of rapidly-cooling coffee. She thought, inexplicably, about a long-gone nightmare, a future now erased—a thousand years in the future. She turned to the front page of the book and checked the copyright date—1794. Not even three hundred years ago. Still, everyone alive at that time was now long-dead.

            She etched a lopsided timeline into the margins of her notebooks: 1762, the author’s birthday. 1794. 1824, the author’s death date. A little down the line, Carol’s own birthday. Her brother and sister’s birthdays, too, surrounding hers on either side. Her parents’ death date. The present date. Then, far in the future, teetering on the long edge of the line as if it were a seesaw, Bart’s birthday. And the date Carol had gone to the future.

            A long, empty section dominated the middle of the timeline, a blank stretch between present and future. She looked at it for a while, softly frowning, tugging at her lower lip with her pencil.

            Focus.

            She put her pencil to paper again and added another date, a hairsbreadth away from her birthday: “Essay due.” With a sigh, she pushed the notebook across the desk, away from her. Outside the window, a parade of geese trumpeted as they sailed for the horizon.

            The TV droned on: “...an EF4 tornado on the ground in central Nebraska today...”

            Carol reached up with an absent hand and turned it off.

            Thad carried Mrs. Benson far out, beyond the edge of town, to a low depression in a field. When the house exploded into splinters around them and he’d bolted, it had been difficult to keep his feet on the ground against the powerful lurch and pull of the tornado’s outer winds. And he was startled and confused—so he ran very far and then let her go, roughly, where she stumbled and fell forward onto her knees in the sloshy mud.

            She barely caught herself on her hands, blank-faced as she stared at the ground and processed what had just happened. Raindrops streamed down her face and her nightgown, growing drenched, shrunk to her skin. She was much thinner and bonier than she’d appeared.

            “Why did you do that?” she screamed up at Thad.

            He took a step back.

            “You’re—I just saved your life!”

            “My—” She coughed, struggling to her feet. Her hand slipped as she propped herself up, covering her arm in wet tufts of grass, and Thad felt vaguely embarrassed watching her get up.

            “My house—that was my house!” she shouted. “My—”

            A hand flew to her mouth, covering it thinly, like crepe paper.

            “My dog—oh...” Her voice trailed off into a whimper.

            Cold rain splattered down Thad’s neck. His fingers tapped against the outside of his thigh. In the mud overturned by Mrs. Benson’s struggling, several thread-thin worms wriggled their heads, peacefully confused in the open air.

            “You would have died,” he finally said.

            She looked up, past his shoulder, and he turned around to follow her gaze. A shell of debris slowly spiraled around the core of the tornado and piece by piece was flung out over the countryside. The Burger King sign was gone, leaving only a long and crooked pole like a giant black cornstalk jutting from the ground.

            He looked back at her. Her face had grown pale. Her lips moved infinitesimally, trembling, groping at speech.

            “All my money was in that house,” she murmured. “In the freezer.”

            She started to cry.

            Thad turned back around to look at the storm again. His eyes flicked from one indistinct piece of debris to another as they sailed out like scraps of paper to the horizon.

            No, she wasn’t crying, Thad decided; she wept. She was just like a weeping willow, thin, drooping, waving at the slightest wind, but somehow even in her ragged state and her soaked-through nightclothes there was a kind of dignity to her. She shed tears elegantly, as if she were just as much a part of the landscape as the rain and the mud, and Thad felt very out of place now, almost out of touch with his own displaced body.

            She looked up at him.

            “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said.

            The tornado slowly clawed its way through and out of town, back into the unoccupied farmland it had been born from.

            Down in the basement shelter, Bart waited with everyone else for the storm to pass, listening for the incremental changes in the pounding of the wind and rain above.

            In his hand he held a spread of Uno cards, and he say around a folding card table with a mix of children and adults—probably the children’s parents. Someone had kindly placed a fresh water bottle next to him, which was not cold. His leg bobbed up and down under the table.

            The roaring of the wind outside dimmed and dimmed. Everyone in the room began to stir and murmur, anxious to go outside and see what the storm had done.

            Bart laid down a card, barely paying attention.

            “Say ‘uno,’” the child next to him, a little girl with thick, curly hair, reminded him.

            “Oh.” Bart looked at his hands, where he held a single remaining card. “Uno.”

            “That’s cheating!” a little boy from across the table exploded. “Don’t tell him!”

            “It’s okay,” Bart said, folding his remaining card to the table in front of him. “I give up. I have to go, anyway.”

            He stood from the table, aware of an uncomfortable dampness from where his hair had dripped its water down into the seat. Several eyes in the room swiveled to him as he stood, and one person—the son of the man he’d rescued—swiftly walked over to him.

            “Thank you so much,” he said, his voice winded, as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time. “For bringing my dad—I really don’t know how to thank you. Honestly.”

            Bart shifted from one foot to the other.

            “Maybe you should get him next time,” he said. He didn’t mean for the words to be accusatory, but he was aware of how bluntly they fell from his mouth.

            The man’s mouth fell open a tiny bit.

            “Don’t worry about it,” Bart murmured, trying to be a little kinder. He shuffled closer to the stairwell, then raced up to the street outside.

            The tornado now was barely a gray smear on the horizon, and the rain had lightened to an even, gentle drizzle. It could have been a nice, rainy day, except that even from where he stood, Bart could see the straight line of a scar the tornado had ripped through town. The street was covered in shattered branches and green leaves and pebbles of hail covered the ground everywhere. Even some of the intact buildings were missing large chunks of shingles; the wind had sheared them off like scabs.

            He thought again about the man. Probably he felt embarrassed about not helping his dad himself. Probably he should feel that way.

            But he also knew that scared people did dumb things, sometimes. Or usually, actually. Max had told him that a lot—not in the same words, granted, but still.

            And where was Thad?

            He ran toward the way the old woman’s house had been, stepping deftly over the debris in the streets. It was immediately obvious that it had been leveled; nearly the whole street was destroyed. Where a house had stood before was now a mound of indistinguishable rubble, with just a few mangled bits of architecture still standing at an angle, pushed by the wind.

            A spark of movement caught his eye, something gray among all the other gray. He paused—it was Thad! He was soaked to the bone, hands shoved in his sweatpants pockets, kicking bits of plaster aside as he examined the rubble.

            Bart frowned, and approached him.

            “Did you—”

            “She’s fine,” Thad interrupted. He extended a finger to the far side of town.

            Bart followed his pointing, but he couldn’t see what Thad was pointing at. He looked back at Thad.

            “What are you doing?”

            Thad squatted to the ground, pushing aside the shell of an old, boxy CRT TV. Shards of broken glass crackled as it moved, but there was nothing underneath.

            “She asked me to look around,” Thad said, not looking at Bart. “To see if there was anything left.”

            His eyes swept the ground around him, and he picked up a single playing card, a five of clubs, and slipped it into his pocket.

            “Oh,” Bart said. He looked from one side of the street to the other. No townspeople had yet emerged, it seemed like.

            “Can I help?” Bart continued.

            Thad shrugged.

            Bart wandered to the other side of the house’s foundation and began his own slow process of picking through the rubble. Squatting until his knees began to ache, he found a 1919 Buffalo nickel; a copy of Wuthering Heights splayed open with its pages dunked in a dirty puddle; a postcard from Roanoke, Virginia; the cracked bottom half of a bottle of Dr. Pepper; a guitar pick; a dining chair tipped sideways, with only one leg snapped off; a twisted length of chicken wire; and, under the chicken wire, a ceramic figurine of a black bird with red shoulders, which was, amazingly, completely intact.

            He cradled it in his hands. Where the ceramic touched the tips of his fingers, it was cool. The bird had a beady black eye and a small beak, and sat on a ceramic cattail, which bent sideways under its weight.

            Bart walked over to Thad, who was stooped over, examining a deeply-dented metal tea kettle. He pushed the bird figurine out toward him.

            “Look,” Bart said.

            Thad glanced up, looked briefly at the bird, then returned to his work without saying a word.

            Bart’s shoulders sagged a little. He held the bird closer in toward his chest.

            “It’s not broken at all,” Bart prompted. “Isn’t that amazing?”

            Thad didn’t reply. He ran his fingers over the dent in the tea kettle.

            “I bet this belongs to that old lady,” Bart said. “I bet she’ll be happy if you give it to her.”

            “It’s just a stupid bird,” Thad grumbled.

            Bart scooched around Thad’s side, angling so that Thad would have to look at the figurine, at least out of the corner of his eye.

            “Yeah, but...maybe it’s important to her. And it’s something nice, and it didn’t break.”

            “I’m sure that’ll be a comfort,” Thad snapped. For just a second, he looked at Bart, unexpectedly angry. Then he returned to what he was doing.

            Bart stifled a sigh. He pressed his fingertip into the sharp beak of the bird figurine. The first few bundles of people, almost all in bright, cheery t-shirts and washed-out jeans, were beginning to emerge from their shelters and walk down the streets and sidewalks, pushing larger tree branches aside, taking stock of everything that had been lost.

            Bart set the bird down next to Thad’s foot.

            “Try it,” Bart said, straightening to stand again.

            Before Thad had a chance to say anything else, he ran off.

            On his way out of the town, he breezed through a small throng of people, for a moment able to see in slow-motion their faces, dazed and lost, as they moved through their home. Most of their houses, by random luck, had been spared. Parents lingered at the edge of their crowd, hesitant, holding their children. Bart frowned and kept running.

            He ran south, to the Gulf of Mexico. He ran through crowds of playful beachgoers tossing frisbees and beach balls and sipping lukewarm, sand-crusted beers. He ran out into the middle of the Gulf, far enough that he couldn’t see any land, and then he slowed down, gradually, until he was just above normal speed and his feet sank down into the cool water, followed by the rest of him.

            He flipped in the water and came to rest on his back, floating, staring at the blue sky. A pelican crossed overhead, flying with such little effort that it looked fake, like some background element that had been placed there. It didn’t flap its wings once in all the time Bart watched it. Then it went away.

            Water lapped gently over his sides and his ears. The waves rocked him up and down, side to side, and he bobbed just slightly as he breathed in and out. He imagined himself as a buoy, quietly floating. He wondered if there were any animals in the water with him, and how deep the seafloor was below. He reached up and peeled his mask away from his head, so the sea breeze could flow over his face and his throat.

            He heard something whistling, a tingling whine just lower in pitch than a mosquito. He tilted his head back, dipping his forehead in the salty water, but there were no planes or anything in the sky, not even the long white trails of planes. With one hand he scrubbed at his right ear, where the noise was loudest, tilting his head to flush out any water.

            After a few seconds, the sound receded. He relaxed into the cradling motion of the water.

A few tiny puffs of clouds, as small as Q-tips, drifted by.

            Nearly a minute after Bart ran off—long enough to ensure he was really gone—Thad picked up the bird figurine and turned it around in his hands. With his thumb he smeared away some mud that had caught in the spaces beneath its sculpted wings. Thad had seen these birds, many times, near his house, and he knew their odd, trilling, almost digitized call—but he didn’t know what they were called.

            He got to his feet. Other people—people from the town—had come closer, holding umbrellas, some beginning to pick through the rubble as well. Holding the figurine close to his body, he ran back to where Mrs. Benson stood, a little wavy on her feet, looking across the fields.

            “Is this yours?” Thad demanded, pushing it forward toward her.

            She turned, giving him a quick and sharp look—then her face softened as she saw the bird. She reached out and took it from his hands. Her fingernails were long and rounded.

            “It is,” she said, looking it over for damage, gently brushing it as if a beloved pet. “A dear friend gave it to me before she passed. It was her favorite kind of bird.”

            Thad shifted, feeling his shoes squelch around in the mud.

            “Not your favorite kind?” he asked.

            She laughed, just a little, and shook her head. “No,” she said, smiling sadly. “I don’t much care for birds.”

            Thad thought that didn’t seem like much of a gift. But she held it so tenderly.

            “What...kind of bird is it?” he asked.

            “Red-winged blackbird,” she said, tapping one of her nails against the bird’s blood-orange shoulders. “Complete pests. They used to eat up my garden.”

            She sighed.

            “Take me back down there,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of town.

            Thad hesitated—but if that was what she wanted, what could he say about it? He hoisted her up, much more gently this time, and was surprised—he hadn’t had time to notice, before—at how light she was.

            Bart entered his apartment just after sunset. It was filled with the smell of sizzling onions and bell peppers. Cissie stood in the kitchen, prodding at a frying pan with a plastic spatula, one hand resting on the counter next to the stove.

            “Hey, Cis,” he said, tiredly. She gave him a backwards glance.

            “What happened to you?” she asked, shaking salt over her pan and stirring it again.

            “What do you mean?”

            “You’re soaked.”

            “Oh.” Bart touched a hand to his wet, salt-sticky hair. “Yeah. Hey, listen...” He leaned forward, against the divider that separated the kitchen and front entrance.

            She didn’t turn around, but he could tell she was listening.

            “I’m sorry for dragging you out this morning,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you upset...”

            “It’s fine,” she replied, lightly.

            “Oh,” Bart said. “Okay.”

            He pulled up a chair where he could watch her cook, and retrieving a bag of cheese crackers from the cabinet, ate them about as fast as he could. The same ringing sound from before wound up in his ears again. He mashed the heel of his hand against the cartilage, like he was trying to reach a deep itch.

            Cissie dumped her dinner, a mishmash of sauteed vegetables, onto a bed of rice.

            “Do you hear that?” Bart asked.

            Cissie set the dirty pan in the sink and became still, listening.

            “Hear what?” she said.

            “Nevermind.” Bart stood, tousling a hand through his sticky hair. “I think I have water in my ear.”

            “There’s some rubbing alcohol in the closet. Try putting some in your ear.”

            Bart wandered to the closet with a mouthful of chips while the whining sound flared and receded, over and over, in his ear, progressively louder each time. He pulled out the bottle, tilted his head to the side, and let the cold alcohol fill his ear, muffling the sound of the room and the T Cissie had just turned on. But the ringing was just as loud and clear as before.

            Head cocked to the side, he reached out to put the bottle back on the shelf, but a twitch rippled through his arm and it clunked to the floor. Alcohol gushed from the little spout, spilling all over the carpet.

            “Grife,” Bart said, though the word was almost inaudible to him over the ringing. Without moving his head he ran to the kitchen, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and stooped down to try and sop up the alcohol that had soaked a fist-sized spot into the carpet.

            “Everything okay?” Cissie called from around the corner.

            “Fine,” Bart said. He bunched up a wad of paper towels in his fist. The ringing was louder than it had been so far; it felt like someone was poking his brain with a toothpick. He reached down—and when his hand was just an inch from the floor a large spark cracked out from his knuckle to the wet carpet, and the wet spot flickered up in wispy blue flame.

Chapter Text

Thad’s foot thrummed against the ground, hummingbird-rapid.

Esther—he had learned the old woman’s name—stood in front of his house, raking critical eyes down over its front. Thad suddenly felt like he could see every little imperfection, every splinter in the wood and crooked joint, and the way the door frame had cracked over time, and how the roof, imperfectly-shingled, had started to sag. How had he never seen these things before?

Ivan sniffled and huffed at Esther’s feet, and Thad felt the urge to shoo him away, but Esther didn’t seem to mind. She held a small, ancient-looking suitcase by her side, and a purse, and a small orange bottle of pills in one hand.

“It’ll do,” she said. “At least until the insurance tells me what my house is worth destroyed.”

Thad cleared his throat. “There’s no internet. Or electricity.”

She almost smiled.

“I can manage. I hiked the AT when I was younger.”

Thad didn’t know what ‘the AT’ was, but he felt like he should know, so he didn’t want to ask; he filed it away in his brain to research later. Esther turned her head and looked around the property—"property" wasn’t strictly true, or at least it wasn’t Thad’s property, not legally—and she seemed mollified by what she saw. Then she looked at him again.

“Is there running water, at least?”

“There’s a well.”

She laughed, once, dryly.

“What kind of person lives like this these days? You don’t strike me as the Unabomber type.”

Another thing he didn’t know, and he didn’t know how to respond. Unabomber seemed like a bad thing—so she was trying to compliment him.

“Thanks,” he said, trying to be polite. But apparently that was a strange response, because she said nothing else, and started walking toward the door.

Ivan, excitedly, followed her. Thad wondered if he got tired of only having his master for company.

Esther, struggling to juggle her belongings, opened the door.

“Do you always keep your door unlocked when you leave?”

“There’s no lock,” Thad said. Anyone he was interested in keeping out wouldn’t find a lock to be a substantial obstacle. But Esther hummed critically.

“That’s not safe. You should at least keep a gun or something.”

Now Thad wanted to laugh. Anything he would need a gun for he could do perfectly well on his own.

“For wild animals, at least,” she continued. “I guess you’re not worried too much about home intruders, all the way out here. I didn’t know houses this isolated still existed.”

Thad closed the door behind them as they entered. The room felt suddenly dark and cramped.

“Do you always talk this much?” he asked.

“Just about,” she said. She hefted her suitcase onto the couch, where it sagged heavily into the cushions, and set her purse and her pills on the table.

Thad set to work lighting a fire in the stove. He was running low on firewood, he noted. Usually he kept a good supply up—he must have been distracted lately.

She sat on the couch and looked around while Thad stacked logs in the stove and stuffed them with dry pine needles.

“Boy, you don’t have much in the way of decoration, do you?”

Thad didn’t answer. He held a match to the tinder and waited for it to catch.

“What do you do for fun?”

“Um...” Satisfied with the fire after a few minutes, he closed the door to the stove and stood by it, feeling the warmth seep into his legs. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Well,” she said. “That’s a little sad. What am I going to do for fun?”

“Is that really what you’re worried about?” Thad hovered in the doorway to the kitchen, watching Esther comb through her suitcase. “Your house was destroyed. You have no money. Why did you keep your money in a freezer, anyway?”

“I don’t trust banks,” she said simply, her voice clipped. “I’m sure you understand that. From the looks of this place, it wasn’t professionally made—you made it, right? Probably didn’t get any kind of loan, did you?”

“No,” he said. “No...loan.”

She took her bird figurine, delicately wrapped in newspaper, and unwrapped it. In the house’s dim light it nearly looked alive, or like a taxidermy, at least. She set it on the table.

It annoyed Thad, how she was just making herself at home.

After dropping her off in town, he had bolted, but found himself unable to stop thinking about her. Maybe it was pity—he wasn't used to feeling pity, and it squirmed uncomfortably around his heart. Maybe something about her slight frame and her watery eyes reminded him of Max, when he was dying. Maybe her homelessness reminded him of himself. Regardless, he ran a few laps around the town and, pulled back by some emotional gravity, returned to the community center where he had dropped her. When he returned, he saw how a few people spoke vaguely to her, but they all seemed to be keeping a distance; none of them seemed very friendly with her; no one hugged her or took her hand.

So he stayed a little longer, sipping the terrible coffee someone had made to serve to everyone as they processed what had happened to their town. He learned her name—Esther—and also learned that she had no family in town; her husband had died years ago of heart disease, and her son—for reasons she would not reveal—no longer spoke to her, and hadn’t in years.

And Thad had offered his house as a temporary refuge, which surprised even him, in the moment. It was like something had puppeted him for a moment, made him act—different. But when she agreed—after only a few minutes of hesitation—he had felt...warm.

He eyed the bird again and retreated into the kitchen.

“I don’t have very much to eat,” he said.

“I don’t eat much in the first place,” she said. “My appetite’s been low since I got old. I’m happy with a meal a day these days.”

“That’s ridiculous. You can’t be meeting your caloric needs.”

She waved him off. “Hush. Don’t tell me you’re one of those mother hen types; I can’t stand that.”

Thad barked a laugh.

“No. No, I’m not.” He eyed her, sitting on the couch; the cushions were old and sagged, and always smelled vaguely damp; she seemed to be sinking between them even now.

“Do you mind—sleeping on the couch?”

“No, no,” she said. “No, I don’t mind. I’m grateful to have a roof over my head.”

Thad nodded.

She leaned back with a long, wispy sigh and closed her eyes. For a few moments she went so still that Thad began to worry, ticking the seconds away in his mind; just as he’d made his mind up to say something, she opened her eyes again.

“Come sit and talk to me, then,” she said. “It’s so quiet out here I think I might go bonkers.”

Thad snorted and moved back into the living room. He didn’t sit.

“Talk about...what?” he asked.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. She pulled a canary-colored cardigan from her suitcase and slipped it on, rubbing her hands together when she was done. “You said you’re from Alabama. Whereabouts?”

“M...ontgomery,” he lied.

“Born there?”

“No,” he said, then glanced away. “I don’t know where I was born. I was...adopted.”

She nodded.

“That’s a special thing,” she said. “Choosing a child. Wanting them. My husband was adopted.”

Thad didn’t know what to say to that. Instead he asked: “What was your husband’s name?”

“Everett,” she said. “Esther and Everett. People used to call us E&E.”

She pulled the sides of her cardigan closer in to her. It seemed to swallow up her light frame.

“Why don’t people in town like you?” he blurted.

“You noticed?” she said. Idly, she picked up the book on the table and thumbed through the pages. “I...had...some troubles, after Everett died. I didn’t handle it well. Everett had always been there, before, to put me back together when I broke.” She took a deep breath and slowly whistled it out. “I did some things I’m not proud of. I guess people don’t know how to treat me now.”

Thad leaned against the wall. “Do you miss him?”

She nodded. “Yes. I guess I always will.” She wilted a little more into the couch. “It’s not every day. But sometimes, something reminds me of him, and it’s like he just left. The pain is so fresh.”

The fire in the kitchen was burning strongly; Thad could smell pine resin, and hear it bubbling as it seethed out of the not-quite-seasoned wood.

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve been lonely, actually.”

She reached down and gently stroked Ivan on the forehead. He leaned into her touch.

“It’s nice to have company,” she said.

The fire alarm chirped to life, and Cissie jumped. The smell of burning plastic curled up in the air. She followed the sticky smell down the hall, where she saw Bart, standing and swaying slightly, and a patch of carpet smoldering next to him.

“Bart, what happened?” Cissie pulled a fire blanket from the closet and tossed it down on the burning carpet. She stomped on it and Bart didn’t respond; he kept staring into space, swaying slightly like a tree in the breeze.

“Bart?”

“Bart.”

Bart, blinking to life, looked around. He was—somewhere. Where was he? Everything felt warped, like trying to look at a movie screen that was rippling in the wind.

There was a wooshing, a—roaring. There was no smell in the air, but there was a wind stirring in every direction. It coated his skin with the sticky feeling of salt. His mouth tasted of salt, too. And grains of sand, whipped by the wind, stung his face and hands.

Tall palm trees with crooked trunks swayed back and forth over him. A bright plane spilled out to the horizon in front of him, white and radiant, like a sea made of mirror.

“Bart.”

He looked around again. It sounded like—

But he couldn’t find the source of the voice. He turned around and around, and the landscape kept changing; he could never find something familiar-looking again, once he had turned away from it; the world was a circle that never stopped expanding.

He was getting motion sick. He crouched low to the vague, shifting ground.

I don’t know—who’s calling?

“Bart. Hey.”

“Hey—Bart?”

Something tan wiggled in front of his eyes.

He focused. All the spinning stopped, the world halting into place, and Bart felt like he’d just climbed off the tilt-o-whirl at the county fair. Cissie’s fingers were wiggling in front of his face. He looked at her face.

“Bart! Hello?” She gestured at a blanket on the carpet. “Earth to Bart?”

The room smelled like burnt plastic. He didn’t remember what he’d been doing...water in his ears? He was going to the closet...

“It smells like burnt plastic,” he said.

Cissie’s annoyed expression slowly faded to a genuine look of concern.

“Bart? You good?”

“Um...” Bart rubbed at his jaw, struggling to remember the last few minutes. “Guess I zoned out.”

“I’ll say.” She knelt and pulled up the corner of the blanket, carefully peering under. “Bart, the carpet was on fire. What happened?”

“I don’t...uh...” He watched her, helplessly, as she peeled away the rest of the blanket, revealing the singed patch of carpet underneath. “I don’t remember. What was I doing...?”

“You just got back—you said you got water in your ear. I told you to go put alcohol in it.” She glanced aside at the half-empty alcohol bottle, tipped on its side. Her face closed off into understanding.

“You spilled the alcohol. You don’t remember how it caught fire, Bart...?”

“Nuh uh.” He rubbed at his ear.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, and handed him the half-empty alcohol bottle.

“What were you even thinking about?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice getting a tense edge. “I just said that.”

“Well—” Cissie threw her hands up. “All I’m saying is that our apartment almost burned down. Bart, are you sure you’re okay? You didn’t hit your head?”

“No, I didn’t hit my head, okay? I’ll fix the carpet.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Bart.” She frowned. “You got really messed up the other day. I was worried about you. You’re, like, my closest friend.”

He sighed. “Alright. Okay.” He tilted his head to the side and dripped another capful of alcohol in. “I’m fine, Cis. I think I’m just tired.”

She nodded, but looked skeptical.

“Well—let me know if you start feeling sick, okay?”

Bart nodded vaguely and wandered into the bathroom.

Cissie sighed, swept her hair back into a loose ponytail, and tied it off with a scrunchie from her wrist. She picked up a roll of paper towels from the kitchen and filled a bowl with soap and water.

Bart poked his head out from the bathroom door, his hair sliding down over his face.

“I’m gonna go to Frank’s,” he said. “You want anything?”

“Uh, yeah,” she said, making an effort at an encouraging smile. “Get me the spaghetti plate. And garlic bread. And...a large Coke.”

Bart nodded, kicking his shoes back on. “Be right back,” he said, and disappeared.

With her fingertips, she swished the water around until little bubbles formed, then carried the bowl and the paper towels into the hallway, where she knelt at the patch of burned carpet.

A knock on the door.

“Did you forget your wallet?” she called, hauling herself up to her feet. She glanced at the door. “And your keys?”

A moment of silence passed. If Bart wanted to get in, he wouldn't wait for her to unlock the door. Sometimes the landlord came by, unprompted, to change the air filter or tighten the u-bend under the sink, because it sprung a leak every six weeks, like clockwork.

Cissie opened the door, nervous as she remembered the smell of burnt carpet hanging in the air. But it wasn’t the landlord; it was—

“Thad?”

He regarded her without feeling.

“Is Bart here?” he said, stiffly.

For a moment, Cissie hesitated between truth and lie.

“No," she said. “He should be back in a minute, though.”

“That’s alright; this shouldn’t take a minute.” He straightened up. “Do you own an air mattress? Or a spare quilt?”

“Um...” Cissie’s brow furrowed. “Yeah—I have an air mattress. Are you trying to borrow it?”

“Yes.” He stared at her.

“Why...?”

“None of your business.” He pushed his way past her, into the apartment. “Where is it?”

“In the linen closet. Down the hall.”

He stomped around the corner, and Cissie heard the bathroom door open and close, and then the sound of the closet door opened.

“Where is it?”

“It should be on the top shelf.”

There was a sound like something sliding, then Thad emerged back into view, carrying the large box with the air mattress inside.

Then, without a word, he ran off.

Carol had just slid into bed, getting ready to curl up with her headphones and some music, when Bart rapid-fire tapped on her door.

Her eyes, sticky with sleepiness, opened. Her roommate’s bed, across from her, was empty. Bart tapped again.

“I’m coming,” she said. The rapid knocking dropped off.

She stumbled out of bed, the linoleum cold beneath her toes. When she opened the door, Bart stood there, clutching a large, greasy paper bag in front of him.

“I’m back,” he said. “What are we watching?”

She blinked.

“What are you talking about?”

He frowned. “I thought we were gonna watch something.”

Carol’s mouth flapped open and closed a few times; she shook her head.

“We haven’t even talked all day. When did we make plans?”

Bart blinked. He looked slowly down at the bag he held, brought it up to his face, and sniffed. He frowned, eyebrows drawing together.

“Uh...” He pried the bag open. “I thought this was...Burrito Shack...?”

Carol tilted her head. She gently pulled Bart into the room, and when the door closed behind him they were both surrounded by darkness. A light shone through the window from a streetlight outside, illuminating a bright, stark square on Bart’s face, making one eye shine.

She took the bag from his hand and set it on the desk nearby. “Where do you think we are, Bart?”

“We...” He looked around. “Um...”

Carol pulled out a desk chair, and Bart sat in it, as if automatically. His eyes were unfocused.

“Bart? Burrito Shack closed three years ago. And that was in Manchester.”

He looked at the bag again, his face so intent it was like he was trying to read another language. “We’re...” Slowly his voice churned to life. “We’re in your dorm. Right. I knew that.”

Carol laid her hand gently on Bart’s cheek.

“Are you okay?”

“Um...” He hesitated. “I guess...maybe not.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I think I need to go to sleep.”

“You should go home,” Carol said. “Just...text me when you get there. I’m worried you might need a doctor. Again.”

“I’m...I’m fine.” He got unsteadily to his feet.

He took a few steps toward the window, then turned around.

“Carol?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever feel...” The light from the window was behind him now, giving him a halo of frizzy hair and a face that was swallowed up by the dark.

“Do you ever feel like...things aren’t real?”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “All the time.”

He took hold of the bag of food, thin brown paper crumbling under his light touch.

Then he was off.

Thad stood out in the yard, ax hefted over his shoulder, log on the block below.

The ax was a familiar weight over his shoulder, and the rhythmic swing and slice soothed him, smoothing weight and thoughts from his mind. He swung the ax down, and sound seemed to fade away from around him, leaving him in a peaceful bubble of quiet.

The ax thunked into the block.

“Bart?”

Thad blinked, looking around the backyard. It was a quiet night, crickets humming softly, a bright and waning moon overhead gently washed with clouds.

He looked down. In front of him was a small woodpile, tucked away against a corner of picket fence.

“Bart, hurry up with that wood!”

He scooped up a few split logs and tucked them away under his armpits. They clattered dryly together. And then he turned around.

Sitting around a fire pit on Helen’s patio, shivering against the cold, were the members of Young Justice. Cissie and Cassie huddled next to each other, blankets around their shoulders, clutching Styrofoam cups of hot cocoa. Robin arranged twigs and crumbles of newspaper in the fire pit, and Kon leaned back on the grass, reclining and watching the hazy stars above.

Thad, holding the firewood, made his way over. Without a word, he stacked logs on top of Robin’s pile of kindling, arranging them in a careful pile.

“Bart, they’re not gonna burn like that,” Cissie said, her accent syrupy and smooth. “You’re gonna choke it out. There has to be airflow.”

She knelt down and rearranged the logs, stacking them in alternating rows, until they formed a box around the kindling.

“Hasn’t Max taught you how to build a fire?” she teased, picking up a box of matches and striking one. “You’ve only been camping about a hundred times, I thought.”

Thad redirected: “Do you go camping a lot?”

“No, but my mom gives me a crash-course in survival skills about once a week.” She rolled her eyes. “I could start a fire in the driving snow, I bet. That’s what my mom thinks, anyway.”

“They’re good skills to know,” Robin said, evenly.

“Sure, sure,” Cissie said. “For you and me. Not for these weirdos.” She gestured around her at Kon, Cassie, and Thad with a smirk on her face. Kon chuckled, sitting up. Cissie held her match carefully to a pinecone, and slowly a hot, yellow fire climbed up the lattice of twigs and leaves.

"Alright,” Kon said, “who’s got the marshmallows?”

Cassie produced a bag of jumbo marshmallows, and Kon eagerly strung a few onto a metal stick. Thad did the same, following his lead, holding the marshmallows a few inches above the fire. When Kon dipped his down into the flames, Thad did too, letting it catch fire before bringing it up a few seconds alter and blowing it out.

Kon blew gingerly on his burnt marshmallow. Cissie cocked her head at Bart.

“I thought you didn’t like them burnt,” she said. “You gave your burnt ones to me last time.”

Thad hesitated, then shrugged, peeling off the burnt shell as he saw Kon doing. “Tastes change.”

He slipped the crumbly, bitter exterior into this mouth. It felt and tasted like ash. Dox came out from the doggy door and shuffled hesitantly over to the fire pit.

Cassie nodded. “That’s true. I used to hate ranch dressing, but lately it’s, like, all I want.”

“Mhm.” Cissie shoved a marshmallow into her cheek. “I loved olives when I was little, but one time I got food poisoning from olive pizza and barfed, like, everywhere, and now I can’t eat—” She swallowed her marshmallow, clearing the wet mush from her voice. “Olives. But other kinds of pizza are fine, which is weird.”

“You’re weird,” Cassie said.

Thad quickly slipped the rest of the soft marshmallow off his stick and held it down, by his side, toward Dox. Dox sniffed the air between them a few times, then padded closer, his nails clicking on the concrete of the patio, and licked the marshmallow from Thad’s fingers, his stubby front teeth grazing the tip of Thad’s fingers. Thad shuddered and tried not to recoil.

Cassie stuck a marshmallow over the fire, and Robin and Cissie struck up a distant conversation about some—TV show, or game, Thad didn’t know. He didn’t want to get roped into that conversation; pop culture knowledge was nearly impossible to fake. He turned to Kon.

“Thad?”

He stood, wobbling in the front entrance. His arms were sore, stiff from holding the wood, three large split logs and a bundle of branches pinned under each arm. He peered into the dark interior of the house, where someone was watching him—his heart skipped a beat until he recognized—until he remembered who it was: Esther, the old woman from the tornado town.

He took a shaky step inside.

“Um...sorry. What was I...?”

She took a deep breath and sat up.

“Well, you scared the hell out of me, kiddo. I woke up and you were standing in the doorway like that, just—” She smoothed the blanket she’d been sleeping on. “Looming like a vulture. You didn’t hear me calling your name.”

Thad took another step backwards, outside, and deposited the wet wood on the woodpile under the roof’s eaves. He tried to think what he’d been doing—wasn’t he just at Bart’s house? He was...in his house.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “No. I don’t think so. I must have been...” He hesitated, unsure how to explain the feeling. “...lost in thought.”

“Hrn.” Esther sounded almost disdainful as she stood up. “Do you get ‘lost in thought’ a lot?”

“...yeah,” Thad admitted, skulking past her to the kitchen. “Sometimes.”

Bart woke up the next morning feeling refreshed, and reflected on this as he sat on the roof of the apartment building, slowly making his way through most of a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts.

He really must have been tired yesterday, because he felt all clear now, fully present. He remembered getting confused and going to Carol’s, but he had no idea why, now, or what had confused him. And he didn't remember much after that. He remembered climbing into bed. He sighed and rubbed out a knot in his shoulder.

He pulled his hand back, and noticed that his fingertips were blue. What...?

He left a half-eaten pastry on the roof and zipped into the bathroom to wash his hands, finding, clustered in the bottom of the sink, a box of blue hair dye, a half-stained hairbrush, and several long strands of his own hair. A blue rim had formed around the edge of the sink, at some water level that had since been drained away.

He looked up at the mirror.

It wasn’t as bad as he was dreading, but—only half of his hair had taken any color, a dark blue sheen overlaid on his brunette hair. The other half looked normal, with only a few blue streaks, which looked as if they could only have been unintentional.

A knock on the door.

“Bart?”

His heart jump-started. He gathered the box and everything else from out of the sink and dumped them in in the bathroom trash, and before Cissie could knock again, he pulled a bottle of cleaner and a rag out from under the sink and scrubbed so hard at the stained sink that he thought he was going to polish his fingers right down to the joint. But eventually the color came off, and Bart wrung out the rag under the tap, watching light blue water swirl around the drain.

“Just a sec,” he called.

He reached for the door—then hesitated. His hair looked terrible, and he didn’t want Cissie or anyone else to see it; besides, he couldn’t even remember buying a box of hair dye, much less actually trying to dye his hair.

He reached up and touched a strand of his hair. It was tacky with half-washed-out shampoo. Cissie knocked one more time, insistently, and Bart yelled “it’s free!” before phasing through the wall and running out the door.

It was a short run to Manchester, where Bart made a beeline to Helen’s house.

It stood in the morning light in its quiet suburban neighborhood, easy and relaxed. It had already been decked out with Halloween decorations: fake spiderwebs draped across the trees; ghost-shaped string lights strung across the hedges and the eaves of the roof; fake graves sticking up out of the grass. A few other houses in the neighborhood were decorated, too, but Helen always got on it early; she loved things like that.

Across the street was the other house, the one Bart and Max had lived in before moving in with Helen. It always looked a little strange to Bart—he felt like he should have more attachment to it than he did. Another family had long since moved in there, and they had cut down the maple tree in the front yard and repainted the outside, and it just sort of didn’t look like the same place at all. They were nice people, though, a middle-aged couple and a small gaggle of kids ranging from young to college-aged.

Helen’s car wasn’t in the driveway, nor was her husband’s; they both worked during the week. He circled the house a couple times, taking a peek at the backyard, the fire pit on the patio and a few nice Adirondack chairs, and a baseball glove lying nearby. Then he vibrated in through the back door and—recalling times where he had scared “the living daylights” out of Helen by appearing in her house uninvited—scribbled the words “Bart here” on a post-it note from the fridge and slapped it on the outside of the front door.

Satisfied now and settling down, he slowed, looking around the living room. It was fairly clean, as always, and a couple fresh pumpkins sat by the back door; Bart guessed Helen planned to carve them. He felt a little jealous, though he had never enjoyed carving pumpkins, nor had he really understood the ritual.

“It actually started with carving turnips,” Carol had told him, once, when she’d insisted they try carving pumpkins together. It had been in Carol’s kitchen, and Carol’s brother had spread out large swaths of newspaper for them and had even purchased a little pumpkin-carving kit from the drugstore, with a poker and a tiny saw and some patterns.

Bart rolled his pumpkin over and examined it from different angles. “What’s a turnip?”

“It’s—oh—it’s a root vegetable.” She sketched a picture on a corner of newspaper and showed it to him, an oblong circle kind of shape with a point, and leaves on top. It reminded him of something he’d seen in a video game before.

“Why were people putting faces on turnips?” Bart asked.

“I’m not sure,” Carol mused. “But I think it had something to do with a harvest ritual. Pumpkins, turnips—you harvest them in cold weather.”

“But it’s not cold out,” Bart said.

She had the look on her face she often got when Bart didn’t ask the right questions. He chewed on his tongue and flipped through the paper patterns that had come with the pumpkin-carving kit. There were a couple of goofy-looking faces, a cat with an arched back, the word “BOO” with eyes for the o’s.

“Well, no,” she said. “Not in Alabama. But these are old European traditions. It’s colder there this time of year.”

“Hm,” Bart said. He picked out the picture of the cat and crinkled it onto the broadest side of the pumpkin. “How does this work? It’s not flat.”

“Here,” she said, showing him the poker tool. “Use this and poke holes all along the lines. Then you’ll have a guide for cutting the pumpkin.”

Bart, in the present, gently nudged one of the pumpkins with his toe; it rolled slightly away from him and then back toward him again. It was heavier than he expected. He shed his shoes by the back door, realizing now that he’d probably already tracked dirt through the house, but Helen had one of those vacuum robots anyway, so he pushed the button to turn it on. It booped to life and started humming around the room.

Bart walked back to his old bathroom, which was now essentially a guest bathroom. It was cleaner than it had ever been when he lived there, and the hand towels were neatly folded and uncomfortable to touch. He sloughed off his clothes and rooted through the cabinet to find a full bottle of shampoo.

He turned the water on.

And he tried for a long time, but could not get the blue dye out of his hair. He shampooed over and over, scrubbing his scalp until it was raw and dry, but after a few, falsely encouraging streaks of blue came away in the first wash, it stubbornly adhered, and after the sixth round of shampooing he gave up and towel-dried his hair. He took the towel away from his hair, half-hoping that he had just ruined Helen’s nice guest towels, but they looked pristine—if wet. He pulled his clothes back on and dropped the towel in the washing machine in the hall.

The house was pleasantly quiet, aside from the vacuum. It was late morning by now. He gave himself another brief moment to look around, taking in the room, before he yanked the post-it note off the front door, crumbled it up, threw it away, and left.

A few moments after leaving—just on the border of Manchester—he hesitated, and turned around again. He went back into Helen’s kitchen and left another note on the table: Used your shower and towel, thanks for it, love Bart.

Thad was frying eggs when the knock sounded on the door.

He liked frying eggs. He liked all kinds of cooking, actually, though without a refrigerator he couldn't do anything complex. But no matter how fast he moved, he couldn't increase the speed at which eggs cooked. He liked that. He liked the smell and shimmer of hot oil and the violent popping of the eggs as they were poured into a hot pan.

And, as an unusual addition, he found that he liked the idea that he was cooking for a guest.

The knock came again, faster and louder. Thad sighed and moved the pan to a trivet.

Bart was at the door; of course he was. He had a baseball cap on, and all his hair seemed to be tucked up into it, and Thad was about to comment on this when Bart looked over his shoulder and asked: "Who's that?"

“Oh,” Thad said. “That’s...Esther. From the tornado.”

“You’re letting her stay with you?” Bart smiled.

Thad's fingers twitched by his side. He angled his body to block Bart's sight of the living room, and Bart stood up on his tiptoes, and Thad gave up and closed the door behind him.

“She doesn’t have a house. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.” Bart shrugged. “It’s just...nice of you.”

"Nice," Thad mimicked in a high voice, aware as he did it that it was an asinine thing to do, because their voices—their voices were the same.

"Why are you here?" Thad demanded, bristling now at Bart and himself and Esther and everything else.

Bart bounced on the balls of his feet, looking around, as if he suddenly didn't know his reason for being here. The morning air was cool and dry, and Thad wished for a jacket, but really he hoped Bart would be gone soon enough for the cold to not be a real problem.

"So..." Bart finally said, as if making small talk. "Have weird things been happening to you?"

The ground was even cool under Thad's bare feet. Birds were flying high overhead in lazy circles. He eyed Bart.

"What do you mean 'weird'?"

"Like ringing in your ears, or—" Bart gestured wildly, exploding into movement like a grasshopper startled out of the grass. "Or settings fires or forgetting that you're not in Manchester and that spaghetti isn't burritos and—and—"

He hesitated a fraction of a second and tore the hat off his head.

Thad was laughing even before the hair finished falling to his shoulders. "Nice look," he snickered.

"It's not funny," Bart whined. "I don't remember doing this. I don't even know why I would want to."

"Because you're stupid?" Thad offered.

Bart glared at him.

"And impulsive," Thad continued. "Obviously."

"Come on, Thad, this is weird." Bart ran a hand through his hair, and his fingers seemed to catch on a tangle that he yanked at fruitlessly.

"I'll say."

"You're not even listening—"

"If I weren't, that would be the best idea I've had all morning—"

"You really are such a jerk sometimes—"

"Shut up," Thad said, "wait. Shut up."

There was something—a low buzzing, deep in his ear. It rose and fell erratically, like static on a poorly-tuned radio, and with it came a strange, throbbing pressure. He rubbed at his ear.

"You said you were hearing things?" Thad asked. Bart nodded, still looking irritated.

A whine pitched up over the buzz. Thad looked around—the house, the doghouse, the trees—the trees. A halo of light around a pine trunk at the edge of the clearing, barely visible against the milky yellow light of dawn.

"Hey," Bart said, waving his hand in front of Thad's face. "Whatcha lookin' at?"

Thad swatted his hand away and pointed.

The glow pulsed and crackled, growing stronger, silhouetting the tree it shimmered behind. The sounds were making Thad's teeth itch. He pulled on the doorknob behind him, making sure the door was closed, and wished, absurdly, for a lock.

"What is that?" Bart wondered, cocking his head back and forth like a dog.

"I have no idea, but I don't trust it," Thad said. He barked out: "Hey!"

The light wobbled for a few long moments, and it looked almost light it might shake itself apart and dissolve back into the dawn. Thad tried to think of reasonable explanations—ball lightning, maybe, or a small fire—and then it shifted out from behind the tree.

It was ovaloid in shape, slowly shifting and globbing around the edges. Thad took a step back and his back was against the door. Looking at it made him dizzy; he glanced at Bart, and saw a nauseous set at the edges of his mouth.

The bright shape let out a low, garbled noise. It sounded again like radio static, and the air between them seemed to buck and roll like a wave.

"What do you want?" Thad called.

The shape made the same noise again, then wobbled, flaring up almost to the height of a small tree before settling back down.

“Do you know what that is?” Bart asked Thad, quietly. Thad gave a minuscule shake of his head.

Once more the shape made a noise—but at the end of the noise, there was a strange, sharp uptick in pitch, and then a brief hissing sound, like the lightest suggestion of a “t” noise. Bart and Thad glanced at each other.

The noise came again, slowly morphing into something clear now at its end: “...rrrrt.”

Bart stood helplessly next to Thad. Thad glanced up and saw that the birds were gone.

“Are you—do you need help?” Bart suggested. When no answering sound came, he cleared his throat and tried again, louder: “Do you need help?”

“...y...s…”

The ringing in Thad’s head swelled to a peak—then gradually began to die back. He quickly scrubbed the heel of his hands across his eyes. Bright colors popped behind his eyelids.

When he opened his eyes again, was that—a face, on the light?

“I need...help…” The words leaked out of the incomprehensible noise, and Thad and Bart looked at each other. Thad's heart was hammering. Bart took a gentle, decisive step forward.

“Okay. Um...are you hurt?”

The light flickered, and seemed to shrink away from Bart, wobbling until it had almost evaporated. Bart stepped back again, and the light consolidated.

It made more noise. It definitely had a face, now, slowly yawning open and shut; two glowing white eyes blinked and became more clear, looking spacily at the point between Bart and Thad.

"Th...d...B...rt..."

The voice that came through the air, crackling and solid, sounded different now. It almost sounded like…

“Max…?” Bart whispered.

The light wobbled again and vanished.

The air seemed to settle, the way dust settles slowly over furniture. Thad realized suddenly how tense he felt—sweat pooled under his armpits and around his lower back. He felt queasy. He tasted, inexplicably and faintly, blood.

He turned to Bart.

“What did you say?”

Bart gave him a wide-eyed stare.

“Did you say ‘Max’?”

“I…” Bart trailed off into a mumble. “I kinda...I don’t know. It looked like him, for a second.”

Thad looked back at the trees and shook his head.

“It didn’t look like Max,” he shot back.

“Yeah, well…” Bart frowned—almost pouting.

Thad shook his head again, the nausea slowly settling down.

"Go away," Thad snapped, his head clearing—clearing enough, at least, to realize he didn't want Bart there. "I'm in the middle of breakfast."

Bart hesitated. He looked back toward where the light had been. “Well...wait,” he said. “What about what we just saw?”

“What about it?” Thad snapped. “It’s gone. What are we supposed to do about it? Sit around and wait for it to come back?”

Bart shrugged, and, as if suddenly realizing he still held his cap, shoved it back onto his head.

"Can I at least come in for breakfast?"

"No."

"But—"

Thad opened the front door, stepped inside, and slammed it behind him.

He was aware of Esther, on the couch, staring at him; he was aware of Bart on the other side of the door, seething, as clearly as if he could see him. He didn't notice Ivan's approach until the dog was shoving its muzzle into his hand, his nose wet and cool. Thad scratched him absently behind the ear. He heard—or felt somehow, or maybe both—Bart leaving. He felt the tension in his shoulders unwinding, just barely.

He hadn't seen Max's face in the strange, bright figure.

He'd seen his own.