The Flash

Five Years Ago

Frances Kane sat on a couch in her apartment. Sunlight illuminated the room. The television was off. The windows were closed. She held a glass of iced tea in both hands. The ice rattled off the sides of the glass. She chewed slightly on her lower lip and glanced towards the door. He would come through it soon. She knew he would.

All she could do was wait.

Another minute passed, like the hours before it, in silence and without motion, save for the shaking of Fran’s hands. Finally the door creaked open, and a lean, red-headed man in his late teens stepped inside. Wally looked at Fran and closed the door. “Frankie?”

She stood at the sight of him, dropping her drink. Without thinking, she reached for it, expecting it to stop in mid-air and come back to her hand. Instead it fell to the floor with a thud, landing on its side. Tea spilled out onto the carpet.

She stood over it for a moment, looking down at it, her hand outstretched. “It’s…my…” She struggled for words. “It didn’t work.”

Wally stepped towards her. “Magnetic powers don’t work on glass, sweetie.”

She looked at the floor, then at Wally. “Oh God, Wally. Is it over?”

He took her hand, and they sat on the couch. “Yeah,” he said calmly. “It’s over.”

She blinked and took a deep breath before looking at him again. “It was…the red skies, and those black things were everywhere, and the news kept reporting deaths, I couldn’t watch it, Wally, I just kept waiting to hear your name and I couldn’t watch it.”

He lifted her hand in both of his and kissed it. “It’s okay, Frankie. I’m here. I came back.” She smiled, tears sliding down her face. He pulled her close to him, putting his arms around her. “It’s okay,” he whispered to her, rocking her back and forth.

“Don’t do this to me anymore. Please.” She spoke through the tears. “Tell me it’s over.”

Wally’s stomach tightened. “I can’t,” he said.

“You can’t what?”

He let go of her, looking at her face. Her eyes were puffy. “I can’t quit,” he said.

“What do you mean? You retired, you left the Titans. You’re not Kid Flash anymore. Right?”

Wally took a deep breath. “Frankie, Barry died,” he said quickly.

He turned away from her, closing his eyes. She stared at him, her mouth suddenly dry. They sat in silence for a long moment.

“Oh God,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at her again.

“It wasn’t on the-”

“Nobody really knows about it,” he interrupted. “Nobody was there. But we…we found his uniform and his ring. We don’t know how he died, but he’s…we know he’s dead. I can’t quit. I have to…” He took another breath. “For Barry.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Finally Fran pressed herself against him, and he held her. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Wally.”

“Me too,” he said.

Though her hair was in her face, Wally could tell she was angry. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. She stood a few feet from him. Her breathing was steady and controlled. She bore nearly no expression. Despite the situation, the thought struck him that this woman was the mother of his child, and he had to smile.

Linda slid her hand over her head, moving the wet brown hair away from her face, holding the towel around her body with her other hand. She looked at Wally and smirked a bit, and he knew just what she was thinking. He was sure it would come up later, once Fran had left.

Across the room from the couple, Frances Kane sat at their kitchen table. A moment ago, she had been teeming with a flame-like purple energy. She seemed to have calmed down, with the question she had asked of Wally hanging in the air like a cloud over the room. She sat back in her chair, her arms folded across her chest.

The room had been silent for almost a minute. In that time, Wally had run over the question nearly a thousand times in his mind. Every time he had done so, it had struck him as simply being a stupid question. In the face of his insane ex-girlfriend, however, he couldn’t just come out and say that.

Finally Fran looked at him, and Wally looked back, faking confusion. “What?”

“You heard me, Wally,” Fran replied. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you love me?’”

They stared at each other. After a few seconds, Linda cleared her throat and moved towards Fran. “Hey, can I maybe go put some clothes on here or something? Please? Maybe?” She waited. Fran did not look at her. “Fine,” she said, and moved to leave the room.

“Stop,” Fran said sharply.

“Y’know what?” Linda took another step towards the exit. “No. This is stupid. This is my house, okay? You get it? You’re not going to tell me what I can and can’t do in my house. Okay?”

Wally moved towards her. “Linda…”

“No, Wally, no, this is…you know how stupid this is, right?”

“I’m just saying,” he said calmly. “Ix-nay on the upid-stay.”

“You should listen to Wally, Linda,” Fran said.

“Fran, just let her put some clothes on,” Wally said.

“Don’t try and reason with her,” Linda said to her husband. “She’s crazy.”

“Linda, stop it!” Wally snapped.

“What did you say?” Fran asked.

“You heard me,” Linda said. “I said you’re crazy. Off your proverbial rocker. Nuttier than a fruitcake. Got a screw loose. Stupid. Crazy.” Linda glared at Fran, who sat there, looking at her intently. Linda continued. “And you’re sad. You must be the saddest person I’ve ever met. How long ago did you two break up? Five years ago? And you’re still obsessing? Y’know what normal people do? They get on with their lives!”

“You don’t understand!” Fran leapt up from her chair, and Linda began to float. A field of purple energy surrounded her. The same energy seemed to flare from Fran’s eyes. She screamed at Wally’s wife. “You can’t understand! He loves you! He never loved me! None of them did! And I just want to now why! Why can’t I be loved? And you don’t get it!”

Linda’s face tightened as the field of energy around her began to shrink. Magenta raised her hands, which were surrounded in the energy. She squeezed her fists, and Linda grunted in pain.

“Frankie, let her go,” Wally shouted at the blond woman.

“Answer my question and I’ll let her go,” Magenta demanded.

“Let her go and I’ll answer your question,” the fastest man alive countered. “You know I can make you let her go.”

Fran turned to him, her hands still raised, Linda still floating in the air. “I need to know,” she pleaded.

“Let her go,” Wally said plainly.

Without a word, Fran lowered her hands. The purple energy around them, and around Linda, seemed to disappear. Wally sped to his wife, steadying her as she regained her footing on the linoleum floor. “Linda, I swear,” he whispered to her.

“Guess I pushed the right button,” she whispered back to him.

“Go lay down,” he said. Linda left the room. Fran did not move to stop her.

Wally stepped to the table and sat down. “I want to tell you a story, Frankie.”

Fran sat across from him. She folded her hands in her lap. “Okay.”

Wally took a deep breath. His palms were sweating already. “Okay, here goes.”

I had won the lottery. My uncle had died, and I had just become The Flash, I’d been Flash for about a month, maybe. And I had come out into the open, revealed my identity to the world, so it was pretty much impossible for Wally West to have a job now because everyone now knew that Wally West was The Flash. So I was doing odd jobs for people, delivering body parts for hospitals, and I’d had a thing with the Justice League, but I wasn’t a member or anything. They still thought of me as Kid Flash. So I had…basically, I had no income. With food bills and everything, I was going broke and fast.

And then I won the lottery.

I bought a house. I bought a car. And I bought an engagement ring.

The ring was for my girlfriend at the time. I’d been with her for almost four years. She knew everything about me, even the Flash thing, even before everyone else did. She’d been with me when I left The Titans, when my uncle had died, and I knew, at that moment, that I wanted her to be with me for the rest of my life.

I asked her to move in with me, as sort of a precursor to the engagement thing. She agreed, but, looking back at it, I could tell there was something about it that wasn’t sitting right with her. It was the way she said yes. As if she had no other choice but to do it. But either way she said yes. I was twenty-one at the time, I’d just won the lottery, and my girlfriend was moving in with me. I was going to ask her to marry me. So I was feeling pretty good.

We spent the night in the house that night, me and her. I was having a hard time sleeping then. Kept having nightmares about my uncle. I never needed to sleep all that much, anyway, but the dreams made it harder. I woke up around 5:30, couldn’t get back to sleep. So I decided to go for a drive. I’d just bought this car, it was a Ferrari – I know, I know – and I wanted to take it out for a drive. Besides, the house was about an hour from New York City, and I needed to head into the city early anyway to pick up the engagement ring. I’d had to custom order it, and it had come in the day before, so I needed to pick it up. The store opened at eight in the morning, so I figured, I’d get there when they opened, pick the ring up, then get back and ask her to marry me. I was moving really fast, but that was what I did then.

All that aside, I just really wanted to drive the car. It had been so long since I’d driven anything anywhere – I pretty much stopped driving once I told my parents I was Kid Flash – that I just wanted to go out, put the windows down, feel the wind in my hair and on my face. When you’re running you don’t really have time to appreciate that stuff. So I wanted to go out, without the super-speed, and just enjoy myself.

So I go for this drive, and it’s great. I get back to my new house. I’ve got the ring in my pocket, and I go upstairs to the bedroom. I figure my girlfriend’ll still be sleeping there, ‘cause she likes to sleep late. And the anticipation is physically hurting me, I can’t wait to do this. My life is better now than it has ever been and I just want it to keep going, keep getting better.

I walk into the bedroom and she’s not there. Her stuff is all gone. No sign of her.

Now this house is huge, gotta have thirty or forty rooms, so I figure, maybe she’s in one of the other rooms. I run through the whole house, I look in every room, I’m looking under things, even, and now I’m getting worried. The first thing that comes to mind is, ‘She’s been taken.’ I’m a superhero, this is what I expect. In my mind, the worst thing that could happen is always the thing that happens. And the worst thing that could happen, in my mind, was that some supervillain who hates me finds out who I am and he comes to my house and he kidnaps my girlfriend.

But it turns out that that’s not the worst thing that could’ve happened. Because that’s not what had happened.

Y’know how I found out what happened? A note. Left on the counter in the kitchen of my new house. I must’ve stood there and read it a hundred times. It was short and to the point.

Wally – I have to go. Things are just moving too fast. Don’t try and find me. Fran

I stood there for what felt like two hours with that note in my hand. I kept reading over it. I thought it was a trick. I thought it was a kidnapper’s note. I examined the handwriting. It was definitely hers, and it was written smoothly, there was no sign she’d been forced to do it. Maybe mind control? I thought anything if it would make me think it wasn’t really happening.

I thought about looking for her. I knew I could find her easily. All I had to do was look everywhere. And I could do it. I could have searched anywhere, the entire planet, in about a day. I could find her if I really tried.

But I didn’t. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t mind control. It was the ring box in my pocket.

I read the note again and I knew. I had lost her. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone and I had lost her.

Wally stared across the table at Fran. Her eyes were glassy, but she was not crying.

Wally sighed. “Why didn’t I love you? I did, Frankie. I loved you so much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. You left me. Remember?”

She looked away from him, her expression sinking slowly. “I…” She blinked. “Oh God…”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Wally watched her. He thought he could see the realization in her. He hoped it would be enough. Finally she stood slowly. Wally stood with her, stepping back in an attempt to block the exit. He wasn’t sure what she was going to do. He wondered if she even knew anymore.

Fran circled the table, moving towards Wally. She stepped up in front of him and looked up at him. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her composure crumbling.

He took her in his arms, as he had done so many times before. She cried hard, her face pressed against his chest. He rocked her gently. “Shhhhhhh,” he whispered to her. “It’s okay.”

Behind him, Wally heard a loud crunch. The front door of the house swung open, and a S.W.A.T. team poured into his house, weapons drawn. They circled around Wally and Fran, training their machine guns on the blonde-haired woman.

One of the officers behind Wally spoke quietly. “Mr. West, where’s your wife?”

“In the bedroom, she’s fine,” Wally replied. He released Fran and, stepping back, took her face in his hands, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry, Frankie. You have to-”

She nodded a reply before he could finish. “I know.” She smiled weakly at him. “I’m sorry, Wally.”

“I know,” he said. He kissed her forehead and stepped away from her. Fran raised her hands above her head, and the S.W.A.T. team converged on her.

Wally followed them as they led Fran out of the house. A fully-clothed Linda was outside already, talking to Detective Harris. They both stopped when Wally came out of the house.

Wally ran over to his wife and hugged her, lifting her off the ground. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Got any more ex-girlfriends we need to worry about?” Detective Harris smiled half-heartedly.

Wally looked at him for a moment, and he wondered if he was joking or not. “I’m sorry about this, Phil, really.”

Harris shook his head. “It’s not your fault, Flash. I just wish we’d gotten to her before she killed those other two.”

Linda looked at him. “What other two?”

“She killed two guys before she came here,” the detective explained. “Guy in Central City and another in Blue Valley, Nebraska. Still don’t know what the connection is.”

“Ex-boyfriends,” Wally said. “I grew up with Seth Williams in Blue Valley. I didn’t know the other guy, but I’d heard about him from her. She went out with them before we were together.”

“Helluva thing,” Harris said. “At least nobody got hurt here.”

Wally watched as Fran stepped into the S.W.A.T. wagon. The door slammed shut behind her. She looked out at him and then looked away.

Wally frowned. “Yeah. Nobody.”

The End...

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