Archive of Our Own

The boat is set to leave in exactly two minutes. 

“You’re late,” Wally says. At his desk, Kyle startles awake and smashes his knee on its underside. His chair tips backward and he falls into a pile of half-dried canvases that splatter paint across his cheeks. He sputters and spits. Wally ignores him and starts to pace back and forth the room. “I can’t believe this. I triple–checked your alarm yesterday. It worked then. So how are you still late?” 

“Wuh-huh?” Kyle says. He blinks dazedly at the midday sun. His entire face pulses and twists in a futile effort to block out its rays. He swipes a hand over his eyes. “Wh…what time is it?” 

“Two minutes till noon,” Wally says. He’s dressed in water-stained khakis and a pink polo shirt that has its collar unbuttoned down to the center of his chest. Hooked onto its front pocket are a pair of women’s sunglasses a size too small for him that he’s clearly just stolen from his girlfriend. His body flickers, blurs, then resolidifies in a rush of tepid wind. “I just checked your alarm—the batteries died, so it’s not completely your fault. Anyway, how much sleep did you get last night?” 

“...I think two hours?” Kyle says to himself. He counts the time on his fingers. He gets to the third digit, hesitates, then restarts from the pointer. “Yeah, two. I had a deadline.” 

Kyle stifles a yawn. His eyes flutter shut and when he next opens them, not even a second later, he’s been manhandled into the shower. Above him, the showerhead starts to gurgle, then drip, then pour. Cold water runs down his shirt and into his pants and all across his socks. Kyle sneezes and knocks himself into the bathroom wall. 

“You’re a mess,” Wally says to him, almost kindly. He’s chosen a green shirt with tropical flowers on its sleeves and brown chinos to place over top the toilet for him. There was, Kyle thought despairingly as he looked at the selection, a reason why Linda picked out all of Wally’s clothes for him, and it wasn’t misogyny. “You have a minute to wash yourself. Here’s some clothes when you’re done. Now, open your mouth.” 

“No,” Kyle says instinctively. He’s known Wally for too long and too intimately for this to be anything but the appropriate response. “No, no, no—”

Wally pries open his mouth and pours in a mouthful of coffee. Kyle chokes. His nose closes up and droplets of brown liquid snort themselves out of his nostrils and all over his basketball jersey. His mouth boils and coffee granules rub across the back of his throat. He’s forced to swallow. Deliriously, Kyle balls his hands into twin fists and decides that this is it. This’ll be the day he finally lands a punch on Wally fucking West. 

He takes one step forward and then slips on the bathroom floor. 

It should be pointed out that their first attempt at a vacation had ended up with all three of them in a courtroom. It took two months of depositions and an entire forest’s worth of paperwork, but at last they had been sat, stiff-backed, before a federal judge in their spandex costumes and all the solemnity of people before their own funerals. Even then, Connor, the lucky bastard, had nearly weasled out of the whole affair when, on the day of, one of his tenants had destroyed the wall of his own apartment from steroid-induced superpowers. Unfortunately, that little tidbit was deemed insufficient for them to reschedule. 

“It happens sometimes,” Wally had told them. Besides the three of them, their lawyer took hurried notes over his opponent’s introductory speech. “See, a lot of the time when a case like this is filed, it never actually ends up in court because the U.S. has really strong vigilante protection laws. Those’ll blow the wind right out of any sail.” Their lawyer started to look vaguely panicked. Connor shifted in place. Kyle thought longingly of the door behind him. “The problem is when a case can’t be settled or thrown out and we actually have to show up to court, because nine times out of ten it’s usually just a set-up.” 

“Is this a set-up?” Connor had asked. His tone was very pleasant. 

“Oh, yeah,” Wally had said. He’d leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head. “And for the record, if we get convicted for this, I’m going on the run without you people.”

“Thanks,” Kyle had said, dryly. The judge then proceeded to tell him off—and only him—for being a disruptive presence. 

Later, when the trial ended—in their favor, miracle of miracles—was when Kyle mentioned the entire ordeal in awkward small-talk with Superman and learned that Wally had once been subpoenaed to testify against the Flash in his murder trial. Thereupon, Barry Allen had been convicted, led to a temporary cell in the police station, and disappeared not even an hour later. Which had, admittedly, put that entire conversation with Wally in a slightly different perspective. 

“But I thought Barry, um…uh…followed the law?” Kyle had asked. At the end of his sentence, his voice had pitched up questionably. Superman’s eyes had glazed over. The corners of his mouth had twitched upward like he wanted to smile, or laugh, or maybe, horrifically: as if to cry. 

Kyle couldn’t have Superman’s tears on his conscience. He’d quickly changed the subject. 

Either way, their first vacation had been a disaster, and afterward had been a bit of a wreck, too. Wally had been recruited to outrace black holes in space, and yes, Kyle had spent that entire adventure with his heart in his throat and in firm denial over what would happen should that moron trip; and Kyle had been teleported into the future and then thrown back into the past where he’d spent a considerable amount of time hip-to-hip with a youthful and far less depressed Hal Jordan; and Connor had hitchhiked back to San Francisco with the help of several flirtatious young women who he’d then had to lamely reject. It was so hectic, in fact, that Kyle had only just finished healing from the beating Parallax had given him when Connor had called and left him a voice message. 

Hello, Kyle, Connor had said. There was a crash over the phone. Gunshots. Then a man screaming. It sounded vaguely like Eddie Fyers. It’s been a while. I’m going back to the Ashram soon. But, before I go, I was thinking that since we never actually got to see Alaska, we should try and visit it before we’re all too busy again. Let me know if you’re free next week. Have a nice day.

“That’s a terrible idea,” Kyle had said to himself with the phone still up to his ear. Graphic visions of Wally throwing him overboard the ship in a fit of a rage tore through his mind like a wild stampede. But there was a part of Kyle, unearthed after months and months of being paired with Wally on JLA missions, that lit up with glee at the sheer prospect. It was a type of sadomasochism that only one person had ever actually managed to inspire within him. 

He phoned back Connor. “I can make it next Sunday,” he’d said. Which was true, if he moved around a couple of meetings with his manager. It would probably be fine. Probably. “But you get to be the one to tell Wally we’re going to Alaska again.” He grinned stupidly into the open air. “Have fun with that!” 

“You’re late,” Connor says now. He’s on the bow of the ferry with a waterproof camera strapped across his chest and both his hands wrapped around the railing to peer down at them. He has on a crew neck that does wonders for his arms and a pair of sensible brown shorts that are tied to his hips with a loose cotton belt. His expression appears placid, unphased, but there’s a furrow at the center of his forehead that speaks of deep irritation. “I had to ask the captain to wait for you. We’re twenty minutes overdue to leave.” 

“Not my fault,” Wally grouses beside him. He balances on one foot to nose his shoe off and dump the pooled water within it all across the wooden pier. At that exact moment, the wind picks up and siphons its runoff directly onto Kyle’s ankle. “I left to pick up Kyle but he was still asleep so I had to wake him up, and then he fell asleep in the shower and hit his head, if you can believe it.” Wally puts his foot down. Kyle aches to hit him. “He doesn’t have a concussion, by the way. He’s just severely sleep-deprived.” 

“Oh, alright then,” Connor says with a nonplussed air. Kyle wants to hit him, too. It’ll be a two-for-one special. And when he’s done, he’ll dump the both of them on some nearby glacier and laugh so hard he’ll vomit. His head starts to throb and Kyle can’t even be sure if it’s because of the mild head injury or if it was because the coffee he’d been waterboarded with has finally kicked in. “Does he need any help getting up here?” 

“I’m good,” Kyle says. No one believes him.

Wally herds him up the stairs with a shepherd’s concentration and Connor helps him up the last step with his warm hand clasped tightly over his shoulder. This he does with such palpable and tender affection that it makes all of Kyle's own embarrassment and resentment disappear like smoke. The salt air makes him tear up. Kyle sniffles, and then he turns his head to see the look of fascinated disturbance on Wally’s face, and abruptly remembers that he’s a worse person than Connor ever was or will be. 

Kyle flips him the bird. Wally’s eye twitches. 

This time around, they haven’t cashed out on a cruise ship. Mostly, this is because Wally is the only one of them with a bank account that doesn’t flounder at the prospect of having a couple hundred dollars withdrawn from it. For another, Wally had called him up on Wednesday to tell him that their vacation was the second time he’d ever been on a cruise ship and also, coincidentally, the second time that the cruise ship he’d been on had been hijacked by supervillains, so maybe, just maybe, they should pick a different mode of transportation so as to not bump that number up to three. Just a thought. 

So, Kyle had called up Connor, relayed the news, and two days later was informed that they would be boarding a small ferry instead. 

It’s a roundtrip, Connor had said over the phone. Intermixed with his voice, was the unmistakable sound of Eddie Fyers loudly arguing with a waitress about his order in Mandarin. The waiter was telling him, in English, to shut the fuck up and sit down before she called the cops. It takes up the entire afternoon and we’ll get a complimentary lunch. The pamphlet even says we might get to see some whales. 

In the aftermath, Kyle phoned up Wally. This was done with much trepidation and the barest hint of malicious anticipation. Hey, so like, what does Connor do for fun apart from fighting people? Wally had asked. Over the phone, there was the sound of Linda Park typing furiously at her computer. Somewhere into her and Wally’s cohabitation, she’d moved a couch into the study so that Wally could sit and stare at her whenever she worked from home, which was only a little pathetic to hear about. I know he’s lived in a monastery his whole life but surely he knows that he’s not actually sixty years old, right? Why is he so obsessed with going on a boat? 

Sorry about him, Linda had called back, not even a minute after Wally had dropped the call. Across the line, there was the sound of a door flying open as Wally ran around the house with superspeed. But, well, you know how he is. Anyway, he’s really looking forward to this trip of yours. He’s already packed a suitcase, which means that I’ll soon have to break the news to him that he really doesn’t need that much for a day-trip…

“He’s looking forward to it?” Kyle had asked, bewildered, into the open air. “Huh. I didn’t expect that.” 

So, here they are, and, strangely enough, Kyle’s the only one not having fun. No, right about now he’s huddled in the shade with a plastic bucket in his lap and three plastic water bottles near his elbow. Connor’s taking pictures of the horizon and has already tried to climb up the boat for a better perspective. Wally has struck up a conversation with an elderly couple because he attracts old people like Connor does unattached women. Both of them are unreasonably put-together for people who’ve never once had gainful employment. 

The boat rocks upon the waves. Kyle tries, very, very hard not to heave. 

It’s been two hours. Kyle wakes up from his restless nap to find a pill bottle for seasickness placed on the chair next to him and a note from the captain with well wishes for him to feel better soon. It’s nice of her, if unnecessary, because superheroism has beaten motion sickness out of him more effectively than any medicine he’s ever taken. This current drunkenness is the pure and simple result of sleep deprivation. Nonetheless, Kyle swallows one of the pills under the watchful eye of one of the crew members, retreats back into his seat, and is soon after carted off into the men’s bathroom in a whirl of superspeed. 

The nausea returns posthaste. Maybe it is seasickness, Kyle thinks despondently. 

“We have a problem,” Wally says. Connor steadies himself on the sink counter. Kyle breathes in deep and steady from his nose. Wally spins on his heels and locks the door behind him with a set of clearly stolen keys. Always a good sign. “We haven’t moved for the past…oh, I don’t know, fifteen minutes?” He starts to pace back and forth from one end of the room to the other. “We were moving on track for the first hour. We started slowing down at the hour and twenty mark. Now, we’ve completely stalled, but—and this is the weird part—the engines are still running.” 

“I think that’s just how boats work,” Kyle says, dryly. The ferry rocks beneath his feet and sends him careening towards the wall. Somehow, Connor doesn’t even stumble. Wally is similarly unmoved. “I don’t know about you, Connor, but I think we’re definitely still moving.” 

Connor hesitates. “...He’s right,” he says. His words sound hesitant even to himself. “The sun hasn’t moved for the past hour. I thought it was just because we were in Alaska, but…” 

“I’m a speedster,” Wally adds. “I can tell when time has stopped. It’s practically second-nature. And I’m telling you, now, that we’re in a localized time freeze. Someone on this ship either has a malfunctioning tachyon device or someone has deliberately set off of a tachyon device, and we’ve got to find it before it implodes and blows us all up into subatomic particles.”

“That seems like a jump,” Connor comments. 

“That can happen?” Kyle asks at the exact same time. 

They turn to look at each other. Connor lifts a hand. Kyle high-fives him. Wally pinches his nose. 

“Guys—” he starts. 

At that moment the stall furthest from them flushes. The three of them still like trapped rabbits. In the silence, Connor lifts his hand. Wally, not-so-silently, high-fives him back. A surly preteen in a black hoodie steps out of the stall and washes his hands with methodical precision. None of them say a word. Kyle unlocks the door behind them. Wally shoots him a glare. 

Are you serious? Kyle mouths to him. 

He wasn’t there a minute ago, Wally mouths back. Betcha anything he’s our guy. Lock the door again. 

Dude, he’s like, twelve.

Connor is still staring at the kid. His eyes are far too watchful. “Hello,” he says. He reaches behind his back, seemingly in search of his bow, then pauses when he finds nothing there. He lowers his hands down to his sides instead. “Sorry, were we being too loud?” 

The kid hunches his shoulders. He fiddles with something in his pocket. 

“Ah, shit,” Wally curses. “This is going to suck.” 

And then, time stops. 

Kyle comes back to himself when he’s been thrown off the ship and into the dark, tumultuous waters below. There’s a storm overhead, and his clothes are soaked from the rain—the droplets shove into his skin, bite across the dark hairs there and the force of them damn well hurts; he’s never felt rain like this before, not even when he’d visited Alex’s grave that first time and—and it’s cold. He has half a second to think, as he spots Connor sprint over to the side of the boat and move as if to jump in after him, that he’s never going on vacation with these people ever again. He's learned his lesson by now.

His heart pulses. Kyle thrusts his hand out and wills himself aloft. His costume wraps around him, and his ring finger warms as he shoots into the clouds in a burst of green light that nearly blinds him in its brightness. He breathes and his chest opens itself with the sensation: from the ease it takes to move, from the clarity of his own mind, from his willpower in its most perfect form all around him like a solid embrace. He flies down and Connor greets him with a winded nod of his head. He’s not wearing a mask. 

Wally arrives in a splash of rain. His face is blurred with the onset of superspeed, and between one blink of time to the next, his nose and cheeks and mouth materialize into his habitual frown. In his arms is what appears to be a haphazardly built bomb. “Here’s the good news,” he starts with. “I’ve nabbed the device from the kid and the two of you are no longer frozen in time. The bad news is that the device is partly remote controlled and the kid still has the remote.”

He points toward the other end of the ship. The kid in question has one arm wrapped over the railing and the other primed over a red button. The boat rises, perpendicular with the rising waves—and here, the world pauses on that precipice, taut and stretched with potential—before the stern tips over, crests over the burbled foam below it, and crashes back into the ocean in a loud and dreadful thunder. The kid doesn’t duck his head, doesn’t even flinch, as the wave looms over his head and batters across his hooded frame, but for a moment, his chest heaves as he sucks it inward and keeps himself unmoving from fear. 

“I still have no idea what his deal is,” Wally says with furrowed brows. The left side of his face has once more started to blur. “I have to constantly calibrate my internal vibrations to stay tuned into the correct time, but that is seriously hard to do when the kid will not stop fiddling around with that remote.” An expression that could almost be a scowl forms over his incorporeal lips. It twists and buckles with a blue, electric trail. “Hell, I had to stop for two microseconds to make sure we didn’t brush into another dimension and the little fucker tried to stab me with a kitchen knife.” 

“That’s…” Kyle falters. 

“I’m not too sure about what’s happening right now,” Connor confesses. He lowers his bow—when’d he get that?—and pulls out his fabric mask from one of his pant pockets. He ties it over his head as he speaks. “None of this was on the weather forecast for today.” 

Wally pats him consolidatingly over the shoulder. “Blame the kid,” he says. “It’s what I’m doing.” 

Of course.

Kyle turns back to the kid. “Hey!” he shouts across the boat. He holds up his hands in the universal symbol for peace. Wally kicks him in the shin. Kyle kicks him back. Connor pinches both of them in the side. Wally yowls. Kyle shoves him into Connor. “Hey, kid! We don’t want any trouble, okay? Can you throw over that remote before this bomb you’ve built explodes and kills us all?”

“That was horrible,” Connor says. “He’s not going to want to do that now.” 

“Thanks,” Kyle says. 

“That’s not even how the device works,” Wally lectures. “It’s built from tachyons.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Kyle says. 

“It means that it’ll implode, not explode,” Wally says. “The timeline won’t be ruptured, which is a small mercy, but it will form a wormhole and eat into itself, which is, arguably, worse. Soon, everyone here will be stretched out like taffy and suffocate from the lack of air. That is, if they don’t die from blood loss first.” 

“Oh, great,” Kyle says. “Because I needed those grisly details.” 

The kid hasn’t so much as moved. “I won’t give it up!” he screeches. He shakes his head, and that one moment of inattention makes his feet slip over the deck, before he catches himself firmly with the arm he has still wrapped around the railing. “You can’t make me! I won’t do it! I won’t!”

“God, even his voice is annoying,” Wally says. “Connor, can you please just shoot him already?” 

“Is there a single person you’ve met and been able to get along with?” Connor asks in return. 

“Yeah, Candace,” Wally says, matter-of-fact. “I met her on this trip. She’s seventy-three years old and is the world’s principal collector of sixteenth century pen nibs. Also, she hates the same baseball teams that I do. She’s great, unlike some other people I can name.” For emphasis, he points at Kyle. Connor sighs. 

The boat tilts up. Wally loses his footing and flies back into a wall. Connor, miraculously, manages to stay upright, though not without an audible grunt of effort. 

Kyle flies toward the stern. “Kid!” he yells. His voice is drowned out by the cackle of the storm. “Hand over the remote! Before you get yourself and everyone on this boat seriously hurt!”

“I don’t believe you!” the kid yells back. “The Flash already told me to kill myself!” 

Of course. 

“I did not!” Wally shouts in a very blatant lie. “But if I did, could anyone really blame me?”

“Yes,” Connor says, blandly. “He’s a preteen, Wally.” 

Kyle can’t help himself. He twists around and points his ring finger in the air. “You’ve never been around a preteen before,” he deduces correctly. Connor presses his mouth into a thin white line. “You don’t know what it’s like. Honestly, I think Wally’s justified here.” 

“Have you met Impulse?” Wally asks. “You should meet Impulse. That’ll change your mind real quick.” 

“Wave incoming,” Connor says instead. Kyle twists back around. 

The kid ducks his head and screams. 

Hal Jordan, from when he was Green Lantern and not Parallax, had been transported into the future with no applause or celebration, but rather, a lame acceptance that seemed then to settle over him like a second skin and morph him into a sadder, slower creature than before. In the month he’d lived in Kyle's time, Hal had done his utmost best to avoid Kyle except for when he didn’t and stuck to him like a burr instead. He alternated between sleeping on Kyle’s couch—and didn’t even leave when Jennie came over—and his room on the Watchtower. Carol Ferris had offered to host him, but she was married now, and Hal hadn’t even lasted an hour before he’d flown off and never returned. 

“I’m used to it,” Hal had once confided to him, sat on opposite end of the couch with a takeout carton over his lap and an old episode of M*A*S*H on the TV, before he clammed up and didn’t utter another word for the rest of the show’s runtime. Still, there was this sense about him, even in this more youthful, optimistic version of himself, that there weren’t a lot of places or people he truly felt comfortable with, even when the choice was there and never rescinded. Maybe especially when the choice was there. 

Kyle tried not to overthink it. It had all confused him, and in equal part it had exhilarated him, to be so near and close to a man he had previously only known from brief asides and bar stories, but most of all, it had made him so envious over the other’s ease and confidence in himself that more than once, he’d broken awake from mindless dreams still furious with that leftover emotion. It was unfair to the both of them, but Kyle didn’t know what else to do but to live with it, and so on and on and on this process went. 

It was exhausting. Kyle never wanted it to end. 

“You’re friends with Wally, right?” Hal had asked him once. 

“Um, sure,” Kyle had said back. 

“I used to be friends with his Uncle Barry,” Hal recounted. “It’s so weird to see him as an adult.” 

“If you say so,” Kyle had said, dubiously. He could imagine a younger Wally quite clearly: as a kid somehow even more hot-headed, ill-tempered, and plain out more tiresome than he was as an adult, having not yet tempered with maturity. He couldn’t be that different as an adult. 

“Ollie has a kid, too, now,” Hal had continued on. “Carol’s married. Pie—Tom—he has wrinkles now. Last week, Superman told me I used to be friends with Batman. This future…I can never be sure what I feel about it.” He turns to face him. There in the folds of his face is a vulnerability that he appears thankfully unaware of, and it makes Kyle’s own throat work and close around that second-hand sorrow, unsure of what to say in response. “Do you like it here?” Hal asks. 

What does he say to that? Yes. Of course. Selfishly, it is this mantle, his responsibility to Green Lantern, that he loves most in this world, and he never would’ve had it without a hundred thousand misfortunes and unearned deaths behind it, and so Kyle has to live with that, with that terrible mixture of euphoria and culpability, for the rest of his life. And so what can he truly say to make up for that? Sorry that everyone you knew died so horrifically. Thank you for the opportunity. I want to live up to the man you once were. To the man you are now. Maybe there’s a world out there where we could’ve been partners instead of just…this. 

Strangers. 

“Well, I have to live in it, so I guess I like it,” Kyle says. Hal chuckles. 

That night, he sleeps over at the Watchtower instead of the couch. 

It soon comes to be that Hal is forced to leave. He and Parallax hold hands—both with twin curdled expressions on their faces that had made Kyle feel much, much better about his own overly emotional response—and disappear into their respective timelines. In the aftermath, all that’s left behind is a ring. Hal’s ring. It’s strangely light for such a weighty thing. 

He offers it to the previous Lanterns. None of them take him up on it. “I suppose I could see if Connor wants it. Or Wally,” Kyle says. John meets his eyes with a smile. Alan takes a sip of his drink. Guy shrugs his shoulders. None of them comment on those choices. Neither does Kyle. It makes sense, out of all the people in the world who'd never worn a ring before, to hand this power to either one of them. But even as he thinks that, he knows that Connor would never accept it, far too similar to his father in this regard, and that Wally would never want to take up another legacy besides the one he already has. 

It’s his. Hal's ring. It’s always, somehow, been Kyle’s, and he can be proud of that. Is proud of that. 

And so, the future turns on. 

The boat returns back to the pier with no further incident. The three of them—well, four, should one include the little fucker in the corner—are the only ones to have retained memory of the entire event. Everyone else on the boat had implanted memories of stopping to watch a school of friendly whales, which includes the illustrious Missus Candance, who had written down her landline number on a torn piece of paper and handed it over to Wally before she’d disboarded. Wally had been happy. Connor had been quietly devastated over not getting to see the whales. 

Kyle’s headache had returned with full force. 

In the midst of the storm, Kyle had plucked the kid from the stern of the ship and over to the bow, where he'd then sat huddled into the wall with the remote control still clenched in his white-knuckled, child-shaped hands. “It’s my Dad’s,” the kid had recounted. He'd shivered and his teeth clattered. Connor fished out a jacket from his backpack and placed it over his shoulders. The kid threw it back at him. “He’s dead now. It killed him. But I had to…I had to…I don’t know. I had to live up to it.” 

“Um,” Kyle says, awkwardly. 

“Oh,” Connor says, sympathetically. 

“You have no idea how that thing works and it’s going to kill us all,” Wally says, dryly. The kid flinched. Connor opened his mouth to start on a furious tirade. Kyle elbowed him in the ribs and shot him a look to tell him to leave it be, for once in his life. “Now, hand over that remote before I throw you overboard.” 

The kid had handed over the remote. Without pause, Wally had pressed a series of random buttons and the storm had whisked itself away with nary a sign it was ever there to begin with. The kid had sniffled, lifted his arm to hide his face in its crook, and started to cry in great, big, heaving sobs that wracked his entire body back and forth like the lift of the ship across the waves. Wally’s face had softened, bellied with a half-remembered but familiar grief, and pulled him gently to his side, where he then wrapped himself across the kid’s shoulders and spoke to him in a soft and quiet tone. 

Connor had sat beside them and watched. Kyle had stood to his feet and went to the side of the ship so as to throw up coffee and seasickness pills. Two minutes later, Wally had thrown back his head and laughed, deep and honest and clear, as the little kid stifled his own giggles in his hands. Connor stood up and walked to where Kyle was. 

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Connor had said. “But he’s really good at comforting people.” 

“No, duh,” Kyle had said. Connor turned his head to stare. “I’ve never met anyone more petty, childish, and surly than Wally in his worst moments, but he’s a hero. He lives for this kind of stuff.” 

“Hm.” Connor turned his head toward the ocean. “I wish I had that same confidence in myself as a hero.” 

“What?” Kyle had asked. 

“I think I’ve lost my purpose, somewhere along the line,” Connor explained. He’d rubbed his thumb across the cotton mask in his palm. “I wanted—I still want—my father’s approval most of all. I’ve built myself around his standards, as far as I understand them, but at some point, and sometime soon, I will have to take that final step forward away from his memory.” He’d tilted his head back. The wind burrowed across his hair and formed whirlpools in the blonde strands. “So, I have decided to take back the Ashram. I want to do it because that’s what my father would’ve done, but also…because it’s my home. I love it there.” 

“That’s…” Kyle had said. He’d felt, all the sudden, the same kind of awe he’d felt at the start of this whole thing: when he’d had his ring for all but a week and suddenly Superman was swooping in to shake his hand and call him worthy of it. That had been a rush. “Wow.” 

“It’s life,” Connor had said with a small smile. “I think I’m looking forward to it.” 

And so, back to the mainland they had eventually gone. The kid, all smiles now that his device had been retrofitted to conform with industry safety standards, waves at Wally from the passenger’s seat of his mom’s car. “Bye, Flash!” he yells. He looks over to the two schmucks standing beside the man. “And the rest of you, I guess.” 

The mom thanks them. Wally shakes her hand. They waste another ten minutes with small-talk. 

“He’s a good kid,” Wally tells them fondly as the car finally drives off into the sunset. Between each other, Connor and Kyle trade exhausted looks. Not for the first time, Kyle wonders how the hell Linda deals with Wally everyday without excessive amounts of domestic violence on her part. 

Further into the lot is a polished white Woodie. Eddie Fyers sits in the driver’s seat with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He rolls down the window to blow smoke out into the air. “What took you so long, Connor?” he bellows. “C’mon, we don’t have all day! There’s still the Canadian border to scoot past, and trust me, those people are bigger stiffs than you’d think!”

Wally snickers. Connor shakes his head. “I hope we’ll see each other soon,” he says to the both of them, then bends down to enter the car. Kyle waves at him. Eddie rifles in the cupholder for a packet of smokes and starts up the car. They, too, drive off, and then the two of them that are left stand there on the wooden pier and brood upon the abrupt heaviness between them; as if the universe itself had somehow reordered itself and they had, somehow, felt it bend in twain betweeen them.

“Goodbye,” Kyle says to himself. His chest feels heavy. Wally knocks their shoulders together. 

“Your head okay?” he asks. It’s uncharacteristically kind of him. 

“Yeah,” Kyle says. There’s a comfortable pause. “...Please don’t ever wake me up again.” 

Wally shoves him off the pier. Now that’s more like it.