Work Text:
Ever since Linda had moved to Keystone, she feels as if there is something missing in her life.
It is a bothersome feeling that she could never tame, as it becomes a lot more prevalent when she is in the city itself.
The moment she broke up with Rick, there had been an idea in her head culminating to this moment— to move out of her apartment shared with her ex and into the state of Kansas. There was a whole lot more activity there than the mundanity of her home state.
She rents a home around the suburbs, filled with the strangest tint of nostalgia and to quell that same gap that is still festering her heart. This home is too big for her as well, but nothing can stop her impulsive buying. It was as if the building was waiting for her to come home with new people to fill its halls with song and mirth. Currently, it is filled with Linda swearing as she scrolls through her laptop.
Linda starts to believe there is a ghost in her house when she hears someone call for coffee at the ripe time of three in the morning. She looks around the kitchen area for a moment, panicking if an intruder has broken in, but there is no one there.
There is no one there, but she wished there was, in the back of her mind.
This ghost does not even do anything but remind her of how lonely she is— the voice it wears as a way to relieve her that it is human seems to be having a one-sided conversation.
Her work life is almost the same, except for the difference of superheroes flashing lightning and becoming faster than the wind.
She’s met the oldest, the perceived leader— a man with icy blue eyes, a passive smile on his face with his costume all red with golden highlights. He is more familiar with Iris, a reporter working in a rival office.
Linda dislikes the Flash, but she’s unsure why.
It must be the way he carries himself— as if he is not invincible, as if he will not be fast enough to dodge any of his adversaries’ attacks. He acts less than confident unlike his other heroes, gentler in ways he should not be.
But alas, for Linda, it is not that.
“You’re not the Flash,” Linda says, disappointed when she sees blue eyes instead of white lenses, and she stops herself. Did the Flash have white lenses over his eyes? Or was it simply a trick of light?
(In her mind, she expects emerald green eyes.)
The Flash did not feel right; as if he was not her Flash.
The hero blinks, confused, and who will not be? “I am the Flash, Miss… Park?” He says it like he needs to confirm it, unsure of where he stands with her; a stranger. Instead, a voice deep within her repeats the same sentence, but it carries a different tone; all confident, teasing, endearing.
Linda does not want to talk to the Flash any longer. She excuses herself and she lets Iris West take the spotlight. When she turns her head back she gets a piercing stare from an old woman that suspiciously looks like Iris, having seen the end and beginning of a world, but when she blinks, it is just the brown-haired reporter chatting happily with a now-exuberant Flash. Her mind plays tricks on her once more: she supplants herself in Iris’s place, talking animatedly to the Flash, except there is a different man behind the mask.
He is taller, his posture straighter and a lot more cocky and serious than the Flash she had interacted with, and, despite the mask separating her from learning his true identity, a whole lot more attractive.
When she arrives back at her home, the house screams as if it was in pain. She soothes it by making a snuff article about the Titans.
The house begins to fill itself with children, after the whole ordeal. Noises from a boy and a girl bickering with each other at breakfast, stubbornly refusing to sleep when it is nine in the evening, even running the halls.
It seems to have placed Linda under a spell; every time she goes for a run, she rides a bus, or even interviews children saved by the Flash, she is incurred by deep yearning. For what? She is so high in her career, what did she need children for?
Bright smiles of the children she’s interacted with reminds her of blurry lines of black, green and red.
(She dreams of holding two hands belonging to twins who alarmingly look like her. When she wakes, she wonders if it had been a dream, or something her memory is begging for her to remember.)
The yearning leaves her lonelier than ever, absentmindedly looking at her articles as if that was her only company to help consolidate with this… this unheard detachment. It doesn’t work, and she still hears their laughs, accompanied by a man warning them of accidents.
Linda wants to scream— angry at the world, angry at herself, angry at this damn house.
It does not want to be alone.
Neither does she, but she’s not complaining. If she complains, she’ll have to pack her bags and move back into her parents’ home.
So, she stays in this city. Even if it means having to see and hear ghosts of people she knows do not exist, and yet, her heart and mind stubbornly refuse to admit such things.
Months later, during a rainy morning, lightning flashes across the sidewalks of the suburbs she lives in.
Initially, Linda didn’t care much. She had more pressing things to do, such as arrive at work on time.
Unfortunately for her, the bus had left too early for her to climb on, and so, stubbornly and with an irate heart, she reluctantly sank herself onto the drenched seats of the bus stop. She was wet herself, from running in the rain and forgetting an umbrella, so this didn’t bother her.
What bothered her was how cold she was.
This time, however, she doesn’t seem to be alone.
“Horrible day for it to start raining, huh?” A man standing beside her asks, and Linda chokes at the sound of it.
It sounds like the voices in her house and in her dreams.
She doesn’t say anything about it, only agreeing. “Yeah. Apparently this is the Weather Wizard’s fault. He’s currently fighting the Flash in town square. I’m kicking him where it hurts if he makes me late.”
The man laughs, and her heart crumples a lot more. She bites her lip, as if the emotional pain is as hard to deal with as the emotional pain. “You’re still the same, even when the world got reset, huh Linda?”
She jolts as if she were electrocuted; when she turns around to interrogate how the man knew her, he is gone. Like a ghost, chasing the lightning.