The Flash

“Wally?”

Kid Flash turned, startled at the sound of his name and the familiar voice that seemed to come out of nowhere from behind him. Before his eyes, an apparition, bathed in an eerie blue light and clad head to heel in crimson red. It was a costume that Kid Flash had worn himself when he was much younger.

A split-second later, the wraith was gone.

There were others around the young man – the Captains Marvel and Atom, Fury, Harbinger, many more – and they spoke to him and about him. But all Kid Flash could hear was the sound of his own name, in the voice of his mentor. It was The Flash’s voice that called his name, that replayed itself over and over in Kid Flash’s head.

Then he was running, without thought, without direction, following what he thought was the afterimage of the ghost of Barry Allen that had appeared to him so briefly. Wherever it led, he would go, wherever it led, if it would take him to his uncle, and he ran and ran and ran, faster and faster and faster and faster, seemingly endlessly, across unearthly terrain that crunched and slipped and slid like stone and marble and broken glass beneath every fall of his feet.

And the afterimage faded, and Kid Flash stopped running, and he saw a man clad in red and black, clutching at the costume of the apparition that the young man had been looking for, a costume all but covered in debris from what must have been a devastatingly strong explosion. The suit itself appeared empty, as if its wearer had simply vanished into thin air, and the man in red and black tugged at the trapped costume frantically, desperately, to the point of tearing its arm off. He was shouting something, rambling, and again Kid Flash did not hear what was said. A moment later he was on him, a hard left to the face and the red- and black-clad man was down, still rambling, crying, wailing, and Kid Flash himself began tugging at the costume of The Flash, to no avail. A helping hand from a man of steel later, and the young man in yellow and red held his uncle’s empty costume in his hands. “It’s not fair that he died alone,” he whispered to no one in particular, though he was still surrounded by sympathetic eyes. “It’s not fair…not fair…”

“Not fair!”

In the darkness, Linda Park’s eyes shot open, her whole body tensing, at the sound of her husband’s strained-yet-vehement exclamation. Her head left her pillow, and she struggled against a tangle of sheets and her nightshirt, angling to get a look at the red-haired man in the bed next to her. She couldn’t see him at first, though her eyes adjusted to the darkness fairly quickly. Beside her, a shirtless Wally shifted, his closed eyes twitching at incredible speeds, restlessly REM-sleeping. He muttered quietly to himself, the same two words over and over again, and Linda noticed a small tear forming in the corner of her husband’s eye. A deep breathe later and, with a mild frown, Linda nudged the sleeping man’s bare shoulder with her hand.

Wally’s eyes slowed their movement, back to normal REM speeds, then not at all, and he opened them carefully. His head shifted on his pillow, and he looked up at his wife, his expression nearly blank. He closed his eyes again. His speech was quiet, quieter than the two-word phrase that had awoken Linda from what had been quite a pleasant slumber. He didn’t really make a word, just a noise to acknowledge that he had heard her and that he was listening.

“Hey,” she said quietly.

Wally closed his eyes, tightening his eyelids and stretching his whole body. The stretch relaxed, and he looked up at her again, eyes mostly open, adjusting more quickly than Linda’s did to the lack of light. He felt the tear that had formed in his eye, had rolled down the side of his head and reached his ear before drying up. Bringing a hand to his face, he wiped the dried saline away. “Hey,” he replied.

“You okay?”

He coughed. “Yeah, I think.”

Again, she frowned, placing her hand on her husband’s. “You had the…you know.”

“Yeah.” Wally removed his hands from his wife’s. Aware of his surroundings and more awake now than he had been several seconds before, he shifted on the bed, sitting up and crossing his legs. Linda remained on her back, her belly high and, Wally thought, beautiful. She was five months pregnant now, and definitely showing. It excited him to no end that he would be a father in less than half a year. It was also part of what worried him now, though he was trying hard not to admit it.

“I’ve gotta get over this.”

“Wally…”

“I mean, is this, like, some weird post-traumatic stress disorder thing?”

“It’s a bad memory. You’ve never had a bad memory that you randomly thought of for no apparent reason?”

“Of course I have, but I don’t usually dream that same memory over and over again for the next month.”

He looked down at his wife, and Linda smiled half-heartedly. He lay down again, close to her, and folded his arms behind his head. She pressed herself against him and yawned. “What time is it?”

Wally paused a moment before glancing to his right, to the nightstand next to the bed and the digital clock that rested upon it. The red numbers bled through the darkness of the room. “About quarter to five,” Wally replied. “Sorry.”

“S’okay. Are you okay?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m tired of this. It’s always bothered me.”

“What has?”

“The whole thing. I’ve told you what happened, right? About the Psycho-Pirate and finding the costume…”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know everything that I know, or that any of us knows. Barry died. I came to terms with that and moved on and out of his shadow long ago. I…” He collected himself for a moment, trying to figure out how to phrase it. “I know that he died doing something…I don’t know, heroic, or monumental, or…something important. I can just feel it. We all do, everyone that was there that day, we all got that same feeling. But no one actually knows. Y’know?”

“Do you trust that feeling?”

“I do, yeah, I really do. But I think the dreams…I don’t know. If I knew how he died, I mean actually knew, then maybe they would stop.”

Linda shifted on the bed, away from her husband, propping herself up on her elbow as best she could in her pregnant state. “Wally…” She paused. “I’m not criticizing you here, but…well, it was over five years ago…”

“I know! I know,” he said. “And I…no, I know. Sorry.”

“Something else is bothering you, isn’t it?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Linda knew that her venture was right, and she got the feeling that Wally knew she was right, too, at least on some level. She guessed that he probably wasn’t sure of what it was just yet.

“It shouldn’t bother me,” he said. “But it does. And I’ve always sort of thought about doing this…but I think I have to see him.”

“Who?” She asked, though she was pretty sure she already knew.

“The only one who was there when Barry died. Roger Hayden.” Wally sighed, and he looked up at his wife. “I have to talk to the Psycho-Pirate.”

Roger Hayden’s eyes were glazed over. Saliva oozed from the corner of his open mouth. Intently he stared forward at the blackness of the cell door. Hayden sat on the floor of his Arkham Asylum cell, cross-legged, his arms bound tightly by a straight jacket. The guards had found this necessary after he first tried to take out his own eyes.

The cell door opened, and two burly men in white entered the cell. Hayden blinked and looked up at them instantly, as if regaining his senses in that split second. He grinned mercilessly. “Is this it? Am I finally going back?”

“Up and at ‘em, Rodge,” one of the guards said as he and his coworker picked Hayden up by the shoulders. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“This is it,” Hayden exclaimed with a grin. “They’re putting me back! Lead the way, gentlemen, we mustn’t keep our readers waiting!”

The guards led Hayden down a long corridor, through a thick metal door, and into another hall. The hall was lined with glass windows. Each window looked in on a cell similar to the one Hayden lived in. “Oh this is all very Silence of the Lambs,” Hayden said with a snarl. “But then, what other reference does he have to work with? That movie forever shaped the way people think of psychiatric prisons…”

“Shut up and get in the cell,” the guard said, throwing the smaller man into one of the rooms. Hayden fell to the floor, and a large glass panel came down, barring the exit.

Hayden scrambled to his feet and pressed his face to the glass as the guards walked away. “You’ll never appear again,” he shouted at them. “You two don’t even have names! You’re just faceless guards! You’re clichés! The creation of a hack writer as a device to advance the plot! That’s all any of us are!”

Hayden heard several of the other inmates grumble their approval. He stepped back from the glass and sighed. “’Only I know the truth,’ he said quietly to himself,” he said quietly to himself.

“Hayden.”

The Psycho-Pirate turned slowly. Behind the glass, Wally West stood, peering into the cell intently. He wore a jacket and jeans.

Hayden’s eyebrows seemed to perk up. “Hello.”

“How’re you feeling today, Roger?” Wally feigned interest, and obviously so. His tone was cold.

“I feel fine. I have to. I’m being put back into the continuity, you know. They’re looking at me right now. I can feel it. If this is a good appearance, maybe they’ll start to use me more often.”

Wally smiled weakly. “I’m glad you’re feeling good.”

“Did he send you?”

“He who?”

“I know he sent you. This is an untold story, and he likes untold stories. This has never happened before. He likes that stuff, he thinks it’s fun.”

Wally sighed quietly to himself. “Roger, I need to ask you something. I need to ask you about my uncle.”

“Who’s your uncle? The Man from U.N.C.L.E.? I’ve read every issue, ask me anything.”

“My uncle was The Flash.”

“The Flash of which earth? Which Earth Earth-Which Earth-Witch oh wonderful! An Earth of witches! Can I have a sandwitch?”

“Barry Allen,” Wally said with a grimace. It was hard to focus here, particularly with his interviewee rambling as he did. Hayden’s power was essentially forced empathy, though, and Wally wondered if, perhaps, he was having trouble thinking because the Psycho-Pirate was making the speedster feel what he himself felt.

Wally cleared his throat and continued. “Barry Allen saved your life. During the Crisis. Remember?” Wally reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small gold ring. Holding it between his thumb and forefinger, he pressed a small button on the side. A small compartment opened up on the ring, and a bright red and yellow costume came bursting forth, expanding upon contact with the air. Wally caught the costume and held it in one hand. It was his uncle’s costume. The suit he had worn when he died.

Wally pressed the costume against the glass. “Do you recognize this?”

Hayden’s eyes widened. “Yes! Yes! He said he would save me! He promised me!”

“He did, Roger,” Wally said calmly. “But I need to know how he did it.”

“I was so scared, but he promised me, and then he ran away and he was gone and I never saw him again and I was sad.”

“I know, but Roger, please.” Wally stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. “Tell me, how did The Flash die?”

Hayden stepped towards the window. “You look sad,” he said, a smile forming on his face. “Don’t be sad. Be happy.” He looked Wally in the eyes and grinned. “Be happy.”

For a moment, Wally made eye contact with the straight-jacketed man, and a feeling of happiness began to wash over him. He immediately blinked and looked away. “Please,” he said. “Tell me how The Flash died. Please.”

“I’m trying to make you happy,” Hayden shouted at the red-haired man. “You have to look at me! It doesn’t work if you don’t look at me!”

Hayden’s shouting reverberated for a moment, and Wally again took a deep breath. He spoke calmly. “How did The Flash die?”

Hayden stepped right up to the glass. “I can’t tell you,” he whispered. “This is only the second act. You have to wait for the third to find out.”

Wally stepped back from the window. He looked at The Psycho-Pirate for a second before turning. His stride was slow and quiet as he moved down the hall, past the other glassed-in cells, towards the exit. Behind him, he could hear Hayden shouting about denouement and dramatic irony.

Linda watched Wally slowly sip his coffee, and in the back of her mind, she felt a pang of jealousy. The glass of orange juice in front of her just didn’t seem to cut it.

“I got as much from him as I figured I would,” Wally said flatly. He looked at his wife and smiled weakly. “I don’t really know what I hoped to accomplish. The guy’s a lunatic. Did I really think he’d just tell me what I wanted to know?”

“You had to try,” Linda said, the sympathy evident in her voice. “I mean, you can’t even be sure that he knows how Barry died, right?”

“Right,” her husband replied with a sigh. He paused for a moment before going on. “He said something about different Earths, and that Barry promised to save him before running off. And he talked like nothing was real. Like it was all…I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking about this too much.”

“Honestly, I think you are,” she said. “You said it yourself – the guy’s a lunatic.”

“Yeah.” He took another sip of coffee. “I’m sorry, Linda.”

“For what?”

“For all of this. For the nightmares and the whining. I feel like I’m whining and that’s all I’m doing. And nothing at all is ever solved by whining.”

“I don’t think you’re whining,” Linda said. Wally just looked at her incredulously for a moment, and she smiled. “I mean it. If it’s on your mind, it might seem like you’re whining, but I don’t think you are. There does, though, there does come a point at which you sort of…”

“It gets old,” Wally said. “It’s been five years and I just need to get over it. Right?”

“Something like that. It can still bother you, but you can’t let it control you. I think you are over it, for the most part. It’s just…I don’t know, residual effects now. Like an old habit. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. That’s true, I guess.”

There was a long silence. He was looking near her, but not at her directly.

Linda moved her head so that she was in his line of sight, and smiled. “Hey.”

He smiled weakly back to her. “Hey.”

“You’re not here, are you?”

“Not really, no.”

“What’s really bothering you, Wally?”

He shook his head and smiled nervously. “I hate that sometimes, do you know that?”

“What do you hate?”

“That I can’t hide from you. Why can’t I just once hide from you?”

“Doesn’t work that way, red. I’m here whether you like it or not.”

“This is what I get for marrying you, I guess.”

“You really didn’t think that one through, did you?”

Linda smiled at him, and Wally grinned back. “No, I guess not.”

Linda slid her chair around the table, scooting next to her husband. “C’mon,” she said, half-nudging him in the side. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re having a baby.”

“That’s a problem? I thought that was a good thing.”

“Of course it is, it’s a great thing. It’s just that…I guess I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, with the Captain Cold thing. And I still miss him. Barry, I mean. Every time I suit up I think about him. It seems like I need to put it to rest. And, and sometimes it seems like things from my past just keep coming back, doesn’t it? With Barry’s death, and Frankie, at least, and now the Cold thing doesn’t seem to want to go away. And if this stuff dogs me this way…”

Linda frowned. “‘The sins of the father shall be borne upon the son a thousand times.’”

“Yeah. Just because I’m retiring, it doesn’t change the past.”

“Wally, the past is the past. And that’s the most obvious thing I’ve ever said to you other than ‘I love you,’ but it’s true. You can’t change what’s happened, and you can’t worry about it now. You are a good man…Wally West,” she added with a smile.

“Good grief,” he smiled back to her.

“I’m serious, though,” she continued. “You have committed no sins, and you are going to be an amazing father. You had a good teacher.”

A tear trickled down Wally’s cheek, and he wiped it away quickly. “I never got to say goodbye to him, Linda,” he said, looking his wife in the eye and taking her hand. “And it bothers the hell out of me. I loved him and he was taken from me and I never got to say goodbye. And I’m sorry that I can’t just get over it, Lord knows I have tried, and it hurts. It hurts awfully. I know Barry didn’t do it on purpose, but it still hurts. And I never want to cause that kind of pain for anyone.”

Linda sighed. “Okay. Now it’s time for me to kick your ass.”

Her husband laughed, almost despite himself, and smiled. “Okay then.”

“You are a professional worrier, Wally, and that has to stop. It’s one thing to worry about the past coming back to get you, but it’s another to stress about things that haven’t happened yet. You’re taking responsibility for pain that, as of right now, has not been inflicted upon anyone, and that is ridiculous.”

He paused for a moment. “Wow, when you put it like that, it really kind of is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it really is,” she said with a smile. “And I love you, and I know you care about your family more than anything else, and for that I have Barry and Iris to thank because between the two of them they made you an amazing man, but you have got to let yourself off the hook. Especially for things you haven’t even done yet, and that you don’t even have any control over should they happen. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Linda slid from her chair into Wally’s lap, and the couple wrapped their arms around each other. Wally squeezed her tightly.

“And I may by five months pregnant,” Linda said, “but I can still kick your ass, West.”

Her husband laughed sharply. “No doubt in my mind about that,” he said with a smile.

They released their embrace and kissed each other. “I love you,” Wally stated matter-of-factly.

“I love you, too,” Linda said. “And Barry loved you, too. And just because you didn’t get to say goodbye to him in person doesn’t mean he didn’t know how much you loved him.”

“I know.” Wally smiled. “I really do hate how right you are all the time. I wish I could be right half as often as you are.”

“It’s a gift. I can’t help it. You run fast, I’m right all the time.”

“You wanna trade?”

“Not even a little.”

Wally kissed his wife again, longer this time. From across the room, the phone rang, interrupting the moment with a shrill sound.
Linda released the kiss and stood, crossing the room. She picked up the cordless receiver and pressed a button. “Hello?...Sure, just a second.” She crossed back towards her husband, the receiver outstretched. “It’s Detective Harris.”

Wally took the phone from her and held it to his ear. “What’s up, Phil?...What?...Okay. Yeah, no, I’ll get right down there.”

He pressed a button on the phone and placed it on the table. Looking up at his wife, he smirked. “There are hundreds of little pink elephants loose downtown. I’m going to go help round them up. Do you believe this?”

Linda’s eyes were wide with surprise. “Little pink elephants?”

Wally stood and put his hands on his wife’s shoulders. Linda blinked, and Wally was in costume. He kissed her again. “I’ll be back before dinner. I love you.” And with that, he was gone.

Linda blinked again. “Little pink elephants?”

Next: Little pink elephants.

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