Chapter Text
Bart found himself reminiscing the past a lot. His past, the future, a divergent alternate timeline set 40 years in the future that would never occur again in his lifetime. It was bizarre how many gaps there were in his memory. Some scenes came back crystal clear, white ash peppering the sky, Nathaniel’s face, a stockpile of food rations. The heavy metallic weight of an inhibitor collar, the wires and innards of the Time Machine he constructed.
Other memories were muddy. His parents, for example. Their faces seemed to get fuzzier day by day. When he tried to draw them from memory a paper with two strangers sat in front of him.
Memory loss, Canary told him, was a common side effect of all the trauma he had experienced. He wasn’t sure if that was supposed to make him feel better. Holding onto the things he had seen and experienced felt like holding onto a fistful of sand. Seeping through his fingers and leaving nothing but a small pile of dust in his palm.
He tried not to dwell on it.
The past was so awesome. There was always food, and the seasons were electrifying. Every time spring came he felt on top of the world. There were so many plants and animals that had been extinct back where he came from. He often found himself collecting flowers, twigs, deeply fascinated in the life that existed all around him. It seemed like every day he discovered a new species.
Joan loved the flowers. He tried not to be insulted when she told him there was no more room on her dining table for more vases.
Watching them die was the hardest part.
The local library in Central City was a treasure trove of books on horticulture. Within a few days, he was sure he had read them all. It started with one plant, a bushy little thing and before he knew it he had filled his windowsill (and many others) with many different species. Some of them flowered, some had colours and variegations in their foliage. It didn’t really matter the type, he became a collector of some sort.
On his birthday that year Jay Garrick surprised him with something fantastic. A greenhouse in the backyard. It was shiny, new, and it held humidity just right for some of his more finicky pets.
Not long after he got his greenhouse he learned about propagation. Each leaf, he read, was called a node. Each node could become a new plant genetically identical to the first. He thought that was pretty crash. Only the tiniest containers would do, because the plants produced growth hormones to create roots. Some plants would just rot. Those ones he had to let dry first. After a day, pop it in some water, especially with another plant that put off excess growth hormones, and his new specimen would begin to sprout tendrils where it had been cut. Cool.
He asked Beast Boy once what he would do if it was possible to cut off your finger and have it grow a copy of yourself.
How would it feel if he transformed into a worm and was cut in half? Would the other half grow into a second Gar?
A lot of laughs were had that day. His friend didn’t try to test the theory.
Plants were cool because they didn’t really change. It took ages for them to grow, much too long most would think a speedster the likes of him could tolerate. Barry didn’t understand his fascination, but Bart didn’t really pay much mind to what other people thought. Planting things took no time at all but the waiting game was where the satisfaction really hit. Seeing a new leaf sprout or a flower bud bloom made him feel proud.
Living with the Garricks was another new experience he relished. And real beds? So soft, so comfy, it almost made him want to cry. He’d spent so long feeling cold. Central heating wasn’t something he anticipated. When he first stepped out of his time machine the fuzzy warmth in the air felt like summer had sprung inside of a cave. Even with the mission at hand to prevent his grandfathers death the smile it gave him seeing the mountain intact and being so cozy was blinding. That made it so much easier to make an impression as being joyful and carefree. Being joyful was so easy in the past. A lot of things were. The only exception was when he was asleep. He dreamed of his past, sure, but mostly of things he had never seen before that felt so familiar it left a sickening sense of déjà vu.
Bart dreamed about cloning pods a lot, similar to the ones from the Cadmus lab that birthed Superboy. When he tried to draw them he could label every single part. It made him sick to his stomach that he could remember something he didn’t remember seeing better than the faces of his own late parents. That was yet another thing he tried not to dwell on.
Hospital dreams were a regularity, too. White sheets and disinfectant, the smell of blood, the monitors, and the tools. When he woke from those dreams it was nearly impossible to get back to sleep.
A few weeks after his arrival, he noticed a rash appearing on his shoulder. Red spider veins connected in a pattern. It started small but quickly spread around the back of his neck. The internet told him it was a stress rash. Not concerning, but annoying to deal with.
Bart hid the rash the best he could.
Lately his missions with Flash had been centred around a drug ring. A new drug that made normal humans as fast as him.
It was surprisingly fun battling those nearly as fast as him. They were unused to the speed, they couldn’t maneuver properly. It was always a challenge but it made better entertainment than fighting run of the mill villains.
During his next session with Dinah he leaned more about repressed memories. He wanted so badly to remember his parent’s faces, he said, blinking back tears. It was all he had to remember where he came from.
That’s how he found himself in a small room watching a dot move back and forth across the screen. It moved painfully slowly. Eye Moment Desentization Reprocessing Therapy, she said, would help him get what he wanted. Every Wednesday at 5pm sharp he sat in the same grey chair. His eyes flicked back and forth following the dot as he reminisced out loud on the memories he had with his Dad. The good ones were easy to talk about but Canary pushed further. It wasn’t the nice memories that she wanted him to talk about. No, it couldn’t be that easy. She wanted the bad ones. That would help unlock what he sought, she said, no matter how hard he tried to protest.
Rehashing the moments where he watched his father get tortured and beat did a number on him mentally. Each session they would speak about the same stories. Sometimes Dinah pushed him to recount new ones.
Bart frustratedly recounted the scene of his Father’s death with as much detail as he could stomach. Blue Beetle (not his friend, he reminded himself, it was Bad Beetle) speared Don right in front of him. The azure teeth of the blade ripped through tendons and bone with a horrific sound he really would have like to forget. Bart watched the life drain from his father’s eyes in slow motion. The man’s arms went slack and he crumbled to the ground as Beetle ripped the saw blade from him and shoved the body down.
Dinah didn’t mind. She went easier on him during their next session.
Three weeks later he felt brave enough to tell her about his mom, Meloni. The only family he had left. She wasn’t murdered.
It was the middle of winter and warm clothes were in short supply. This season was colder than any he’d experienced. The pollution in the sky blocked the sun more each year. Temperatures dropped below freezing, much further than they had ever dropped before.
Meloni gave everything she had to him. Under 6 layers of worn sweaters, t-shirts, holey gloves, 3 pairs of socks, and topped off with a stringy quilt, still his fingers felt like ice. When they breathed out the vapor hung infront of them like smoke. His mom mimed smoking a cigar. Humor was always a nice way to make light of a difficult situation, even now.
That night they shared a dinner of canned tuna and green beans together. Pocket beans, she called them, because she had to defrost them all day in her pockets before the rations were even remotely edible. The two ate under candlelight in the back of their hideaway. When he tried to remember her smile in the glow of the light, Meloni’s face showed up blank. Not a person, not his mother. When she said goodnight, glimmering crystals of frost decorated her eyelashes, blue lips pressing against his forehead.
She froze to death that night.
After 8 weeks, 8 sessions, and more than enough pain, Bart had enough. He told Canary as much and she didn’t push it.
They’d stick to regular talk therapy from then on. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT for short, even though he found those sessions did a whole lot of nothing. He was far too self aware to benefit from that brand of psychotherapy. Talking about what his feelings were and why he felt them felt pointless, but it was easier than watching a dot move back and forth while he recapped the moments that cut deepest. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t started to remember things after those sessions. He had, just not anything he genuinely WANTED to remember. His parents faces still felt fuzzier day by day and slowly got more and more unrecognizable.
What he did remember was a boy that looked just like him, only a little different.
The night after his last session Bart dreamed of the clone’s death.
The boy had attacked him fiercely. All nerves and lethal energy, Bart grappled with him for a long time. The outline of the cloning pod shone in the background.
A crowd in the shadows egged them on, changed. He felt like a rooster forced to fight. When the clone gained the upper hand he felt small fingers close around his throat. Black dots swam in his vision.
Bart pulled out a pocket knife.
The fingers gripping his throat loosened. His assailant breathed heavily, and began to cough. Blood sprayed his face.
Bart watched the boy’s eyes go glassy. He shoved the body off him.
That’s when he woke up.
Cold sweat covered his face. He buried himself in the blankets and held back tears. The funny thing was, he didn’t care why they had cloned him. He had been experimented on plenty in the future. Metas were in short supply and it only made sense that cloning was a smart way to get more valuable meat. He would have liked to think he wasn’t in control that day, that he only hurt the kid because he was forced to. Was it purely self defence, or something more? Survival of the fittest? He didn’t think so.
After that he knew why certain memories had been pushed back. He regretted asking for help to remember them, but it was too late for that now.
He never told Dinah about those dreams.
Even after the 8 sessions had ended new memories still kept popping up. In these ones, he wasn’t a speedster. He was just a normal human. He spent a lot of time in a pod just like the one on the Reach ship. Electric shocks heavy enough to scramble his brain. There were different ways they tried to activate his metagene too. Sometimes the technicians would dunk him in a tub of water until he was just about to drown. At the last second he was always pulled out, gasping for air, and met with steely glances of disappointment from the onlookers.
“Subject is defective.” They always said. After the shocks, the water, the machine that just about pulled his limbs apart, the hot metal that burned him - each try failed, each time labeled defective.
What troubled him was that he couldn’t seem to remember when his metagene became active. Whenever he had a dream of the hospital, it wasn’t really a hospital - more of a medical dungeon, but he digressed. The medical room scenes came first and after that, suddenly he could run faster than ever before.
Running for the first time felt fantastic. The wind swishing past his ears, the pavement beneath his feet, the release of energy, it was like being on top of the world. Having speed felt like his entire life he had been living in black and white and now suddenly everything was in colour.
Even in the cold winters his fingers never froze. The hunger was something entirely different. He remembered the pain in his stomach, the dizziness. Running wasn’t quite worth it when it had such a cost.
The first time a technician snapped a collar around his neck, he didn’t mind. It kept the hunger at bay and made it easier to think. Being slow wasn’t so bad.
Each time Flash and him captured another member of the drug ring, a man going too fast for his own good, Bart secretly hoped they felt the same relief he remembered in his past.
He knew in his heart it wasn’t true.
Making friends was awesome. The team got up to a lot of fun together. Beach days, hiking, even team missions were a blast (save for the ones where he managed to get himself captured). It seemed like every time he thought he had experienced his best day, another even better one came. He had a lot to look forward to, Jay said. A future so bright he needed sunglasses to see it.
The more therapy sessions he attended the more he realized it felt better to talk about all the positives in his life. Bart had a few favourite people, mainly Eduardo, Garfield, and Jaime, but each member of the team had a special place in his heart. Getting to know people in the past was different in a good way. There was nothing to hide from and nothing to stress about. The only thing that bugged him was that every so often a noise (Beetle armour), a smell (disinfectant), or a feeling (the dead of winter) triggered memories. Sometimes it happened while he was awake but most often the scenes played out while dreaming.
He had good dreams too, though. Dreams of running, going on outings with his friends, eating delicious food. The problem was that each good dream meant a distressing one was coming.
Wakefulness was like that too. Some days it was easy to put his trauma in the past but other days his heart raced for no reason. Dinah said it was normal. That didn’t make him feel any better about it.
Working with the team and with Flash was a welcome distraction. A lot of the time he was able to throw himself into tasks and escape the shadows that chased him into the night. All good things eventually came to an end. Whenever he was finally alone again and left to his own decides the dark thoughts returned.
Being a future boy came with all sorts of pros and cons. He talked about the stress with the people he loved on occasion. Each of his friends had a different perspective on the experience of past trials and tribulations, each person had different unique ways to deal with them. A common theme was distraction. Bart picked up a lot of hobbies from them over the years. Joan at first glance seemed like a woman who had everything together but he quickly came to learn she had her own shadows, too. She taught him to knit, and crochet, but the hardest hobby she got him involved with was the quilting.
Yarn work was easy with superspeed. He could whip up a blanket or a sweater like it was nothing. The process of building a pattern, selecting the different fabrics, cutting the pieces, that was one thing. The actual act of sewing them together - that was something he never got the hang of. He loved to watch Joan work, though. To receive a quilt from her, she said, was a great honour. He didn’t get what she meant at first. After a few days under her tutelage and seeing how much work actually went into the things he finally understood the honour part.
In the future he had a quilt. It was raggedy and worn down, practically splitting apart by its seams, but it was still a quilt nonetheless. He wondered if Meloni had made it. The last time he saw that quilt it was blasted in the same explosion that destroyed his home.
Joan gifted him the quilt they had worked on together. It had many different shades of green, like the plants he so loved, a myriad of textures and patterns put together to create an artful landscape.
When the dreams came, and they always did, the quilt kept him warm and reminded him of all the good things.
Over time it got easier. He came to terms with the loss of his past memories, and even the return of new ones he couldn’t explain. The warmth of a home and the light of his friends was more than enough to keep his head up. There was a big wide world just for him to explore and so many people to meet. “The world’s your oyster, kid.” Jay said once.
It took a while to understand the metaphor. Once Bart did, he held onto that sentiment like his life depended on it.