Carthage

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone...

Barry doesn't want to sit. He can't sit but he can't run either, his legs useless, like cement filled with jagged glass, useless, heavy, slow. He kneels over the body, broken—oh god, this is how Cisco died, but that thought doesn't occur to him, not yet. Nothing occurs to him at all, a blank white fog where his thoughts should be.

There is no blood. There should be blood, there should be a wound, a stain, like there was for his mother. There should be a moment, where is his future-self racing in just in time to slow this, just in time for a true goodbye, a promise that the future will be ok?

Maybe there is no future.

It is wrong. Henry lying there, peaceful, his face slack. No pain lines his face, but Barry saw it, flicker-falter heartbeat, the last gasp, everything slowed down in Speedster vision but too quick to stop.

He couldn't save him. He couldn't save his mother, he couldn't save his father, is this what the Speed force meant? Tragedy and tragedy and tragedy, some things no one can outrun. There are some things beyond stopping, but this was no one of them. This was no changing the past, altering timelines, risking black holes, this was—

Barry wants to rage. He wants to scream loud enough to bring the house down around his ears like a tomb, he wants to run so fast that like Eliza he vanishes, because all of this is his fault, his fault, all of the death, the loss, because of him, because of his enemies. But the dark room in front of him, a heavy oil painting smudged by smoke, blurs into a watercolor, and he hunches, a runner's crouch with no startline. Everything is so still, he could almost believe—wants to believe—that he's just gone too fast, caught between the moments between exhale and inhale. There is no blood. He could be sleeping. He could be—

Barry knows, though, the image of blue lined black, a fist through his father's chest and then falling. His father is gone. His father is gone, lying across the same floor where he slid in fuzzy socks, where he chased escaping lizards, where only a year ago he pressed his forehead like baptism against the blood of his mother's heart.

It should have been him. It should have been him. How many would have lived if the Reverse Flash had arrived in time to slip upstairs instead? If he'd been faster been stronger been better? He'd give his own life in a breath for any of his loved ones, trade the world—what kind of Hero did that make him?

A lonely one.

His mother's voice, his father's voice, Iris and Joe, all one sound that both is and isn't, fills the blank, white coldness—how many would have died, without you to save them? The Speed Force's message. Had They known this was coming? Had that been why any of that had happened? To teach him to let go, let go, let go, to use his gifts to save others when he couldn't save the ones he loved? He doesn't want to care about those lives so far removed from his own heart, paralyzed in grief that sits heavy on his skin, yet to sink in.

From the edges of the room, in the shadow doorway, the family that remains watches, silent, unable or unwilling to intrude. Grief is sacrosanct, and the living room, site of so many tears, too holy a place, even profaned by Zoom.

Slowly, as the moment lapses, and the stillness breaks, sobs wracking Barry's frame slower now, visible as more than a blur, he feels a hand on his shoulder, and then the other. No one speaks. No one can.

And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole again.

Epigraph and endquote from Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"

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