Hello again, Flash fandom! I so enjoyed writing "Running Back to You"(and thank you for your lovely responses), and I wanted to dip my toes into this universe again. So, in honor of The Flash tonight, here's just a bit of light angst to get you through (because who doesn't love that?)!

This is inspired heavily by the Justice League episode "Only a Dream" and "The Ballad of Barry Allen" by Jim's Big Ego. Both the episode and the song are highly recommended, by the way!

Disclaimer: I don't own The Flash or The Justice League. Unfortunately.

Enjoy!

Ever since waking up from that coma, Barry's had nightmares.

Nothing earth-shattering at first, many times not enough to even wake him. In the early days, he dreamed mostly of half-formed metahumans, of monsters weaving their way through water and smoke, and, in a way, these nightmares almost make him feel like a kid again.

Not until he began learning more about his powers did the real terrors begin. He wakes frequently now with the same nightmare—

He's running through the crowd, with the wind caressing his cheeks, the chatter of hundreds of people like pieces of a beautiful, disjointed orchestra passing by indistinctly. The world bends around him, and he can see every detail so perfectly. Then the color seeps away like melting butter, and sensation goes silent.

He's alone now in a garden of statues; he's gone too fast, and this place is his home now, the split second between a hummingbird's wings. So fast, he is crystallized in time, and he knows that his life will pass before he ever sees his watch tick another second. The earth is his graveyard, time stretched. At the end of the elastic, his friends will blink, and in that fraction he will have lived out his whole life alone. One moment there, one moment dust.

Lately, a new, similar nightmare has taken its place. Time travel had always seemed implausible, irrational, even up to the point when it happened. Living a day over again was disorienting, to say the least, but it also made the paradoxes of his past all too real.

"One day soon," he would say to the team, "I'll be going back in time to save my mother."

It all seemed grand and heroic, and Caitlin and Cisco certainly treated it as such. He saw it in their eyes, their smiles, their off-color references to Back to the Future. Their awe and admiration, barely concealed beneath their scientific facades.

They couldn't see his nightmares.

His nightmares where he goes back fifteen years to the death of his mother. Maybe he saves her. Maybe he doesn't.

Either way, win or lose, he is still trapped there. Win or lose, he spends fifteen years reliving a past that moves too slowly. He is isolated from the world he knows, cut off by time, forced to live each agonizing day as it comes. He can't, after all, jump forward.

Somehow, this almost seems worse.

So when Cisco cheers in his ears after a particularly fast save ("Dude, I've never seen you hit those speeds before!"), Barry has to stop for a moment, kneel down in a dark corner, and try to catch his breath. There are voices in his comm on the other end of the line, and cool pavement beneath his feet, but the only way to get out of his own head is to focus on his heart. He closes his eyes, blocks out the sounds of his friends and the chill of the earth, and feels the thudding in his chest—waits as it slows, gradually, to normal speed.

Thank you so much for reading! If you have a second, please drop me a review to let me know your thoughts. I'm quite a busy bee, but I am also always open for requests, suggestions, or just some superhero talk!

Cheers,

Penn