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Things that didn’t exist during the Reach Apocalypse:
Bandaids, because there were no longer factories except the Reach ones, and they used a sort of strange goop that dried hard on their skin for minor injuries. They didn’t bother making anything for humans, because it wasn’t worth the effort of keeping their blood inside where it belonged. Not for the rabble of the enslaved population.
Schools, because there was no one to learn, and no one to teach. Most kids were in pods or in labour camps. Most teachers were in the same boat, if they weren’t dead. They were some of the first to be targeted, if Bart remembers his history right. Knowledge was power or something, and power was dangerous.
Money, because supplies were scavenged or traded. There just wasn’t anything to buy, really, and the survival tools available were far more valuable than green slips of paper. Bart’s dad had carried around coins, though, for the longest time. A little brown pouch with circular pieces of copper and silver and gold. Not to use, but to hold, sometimes. To place in his pudgy little palms and talk about a world he didn’t remember, passing on stories of a kinder time.
Apples and grapes and bananas. Most produce had gone extinct in this world of ash and soaring temperatures. Dandelions still crept through the cracks of old rubble, sometimes, and Bart was particularly nifty at grabbing handfuls of them, shoving them down his throat and sharing sticky petalled remains with his travelling band, and then his aunt and dad, and then just his dad, and then, well.
Well.
Most things. That’s the point. Most things didn’t exist anymore in the apocalypse, and sure Bart had heard stories, had seen clips of magazines and read hand-written history books. Dump sites were filled with plastic containers labelled and wrappered with foods that were no longer made, and occasionally giant creaking billboards stood still advertising toys, or vacations, or jewellery, or one of a million other things. Sometimes his guardians knew what they were. Sometimes not.
His family had stumbled upon another small group of free survivors, once, and they had shared the night. There had been an old lady who had been a Shakespearen actor in her youth, and in her head were dozens of old sonnets and monologues. Bart remembers sitting by the dying light of the campfire, head on his father’s shoulder, getting a glimpse at a strangely familiar world that no longer existed, that hadn’t existed for centuries even when the Reach had first come, and feeling somehow big and small at once. Moved outside of himself in the process of looking in.
What strange, old magic. Bart visits libraries in the present and slowly traces words on a page. The title of the book says Shakespeare, but none of it feels familiar. Bart wonders if this is one of those things that only holds merit when whispered aloud by someone who already knows their secrets. He wonders if the Reach took something out of him, in his youth, some kind of light that keeps you able to imagine something better than what’s actually there before you.
Bart sometimes feels too broken to exist here and now, in this world not ravaged by the ever hungry pull of survival, in this world with its delicacies and its trust and its soft hearted faith that things will turn out alright.
Not that that matters, or anything.
Bart Allen is just fine.
Funny little things, living in a body that is not supposed to exist:
Bart knows facts that aren’t yet true, the names of kids that aren’t even a concept. He cites a quote from the last U.S. president- something he memorised from a half burnt newspaper to fit in-and learns that she won’t be elected for another three months. He asks about playing a videogame that the old man who occasionally worked next to him in the labour camps used to mention, but it’s not to be released until the following summer, and only in Japan.
In a few years, all his knowledge will be capoot, because everything had already been Reach and now that’s not happening. Even now, he can spot little changes from his actions here, the ripples outlying through the timestream like the aftermath of dropped pebbles in a pond. He scans newspapers- and then online articles, once he figures out how to work the internet- every day for hints of some terrible, impossible damage he can’t reverse, for signs of the Reach’s return, for anything that could end everything all over again-
Nothing.
But time is fickle, so he keeps looking.
It’s not enough. If Bart really wanted to protect the timestream, he knows he should just remove himself from the equation entirely. His very existence is a jagged anomaly. This world was never meant to be his own.
But Bart is selfish. He wants. He wants to eat chicken whizzies and laugh over videogames and figure out Shakespeare. He wants to take baths, and he wants to sleep in a bed, and he wants to read books that he’s only ever heard recounts of.
He wants Joan and Jay to give him hugs, their wrinkled fingers ruffling through his hair. He wants to laugh alongside Barry, to bake cookies with Iris, to see the twins grow up. He wants to lean against Jaime’s side and crack a joke and watch the older boy laugh. He likes it, mostly, these little soft touches, the reassurances that people are still here. That he’s still here, too.
Even though he shouldn’t be.
Selfish, selfish, selfish-
Dick gently knocks the inside of his ankle with his foot, widening Bart’s stance. It’s a familiar motion on an unfamiliar face. The Dick Grayson Bart had known, however briefly, had been far more lined and far more sad. He had only the clothes on his back and scavenged goods, same as all of them, but he had apparently rocked Bart to sleep more than once as a baby.
He had apparently been the first to come up with the time travel idea, too. None of the remaining speedsters were fast enough to do it on their own, but if they could get the technology to facilitate them… if Bart thinks back, he can remember the presses of those quiet voices, logistic talks of a resistance group in a world that was already ended.
The Dick that Bart had known never got to see anything come to fruition. He was killed during a raid to free a labour camp, to steal supplies. The Dick Grayson here and now smiles tiredly at Bart, moves his hands closer to his chest in a more defensive position.
“Like this, see?” he says. His voice doesn’t creak, young and soft and smooth. “Protect your centre. I know you’ve got superspeed, but it’s good to know how to fight without it.”
Bart doesn’t tell him he already knows that. He doesn’t tell him that he already knows what Dick is going to look like when he grows old, all silver hair and bushy eyebrows and strong gnarled hands. He doesn’t tell him that, when he came to the past, he had expected Dick to look less like the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
“Sure, of course, makes total sense, considering,” he says, instead, and puts all his manic energy into a grin good enough to fool even a Bat.
When Bart had first been born, there had been twelve of them remaining. Twelve resistance members, travelling together, or at least meeting up somewhat regularly. Aunt Dawn used to sit him on her bony lap, run fingers through his tangled hair. “We were so happy when you joined us, little lightning bug,” she used to say. “Nothing like a baby to remind you why you’re still fighting, hmm?”
“Not a baby!” he always protested, reaching out to tug on her hair. It had been cropped short with a pair of dull scissors, hanging in wisps around her ears.
“You keep telling yourself that,” would be her scripted response, until he turned six and she turned dead.
Bart places Dawn on his lap, now. He picks through her curly red hair, notes that it’s turning a more familiar strawberry blonde in colour. This baby is nothing like the strong, wiry woman he had once known, all practical lines and bitter anger, a dirty fighter and somewhat decent English teacher. This baby can hardly keep her balance and is very insistent on shoving her hands into his mouth.
If they’re lucky, this baby will never grow up to be the aunt he knew and loved, that woman born out of a lifetime of apocalypse.
She’ll still be Dawn, though. Bart tries to hold onto that. It’s weird to grieve for someone sitting right on top of you, to grieve a woman and hold a child who are both, technically, the same.
But Bart grieves for most of them, even the ones he can’t remember the faces of. The Reach had been narrowing in on the resistance for a while, picking them off one by one. By the time Bart had been six, his Aunt Dawn had been one of the five remaining.
By the time he had been seven they were, all of them, captured and in the camps.
But Bart didn’t like to think about that.
Instead, he breathes. Holds little baby Dawn. Traces the shape of her brow, the bump of her little nose. It’s a matter of grief. It’s a matter of life. It’s a matter of survival, and Bart can make it through this dissonance. He’s made it through everything else.
“Hey, there, lightning bug,” he says, and tries his best to not look for his Aunt in little baby Dawn’s laugh.
You have to exist in your own skin, is the thing. Bart stands with his scars and aches and breathes, mostly in rhythm. There’s a mirror in his room at the Garrick's, a long full bodied thing, and Bart does what he can to throw clothes on top of it, hiding his reflection in a way that looks haphazard and not obvious.
Old wounds, they’re tucked inside his chest. The camps were labour intensive and isolating. He never found out where most of the others had been put, if they had survived the skirmish that had resulted in their capture. He knows his father didn’t. Remembers breathing shallowly through his mouth the whole trip over, even long after the scorched smell had faded.
That first night, after being searched and introduced to the stinging pain of the inhibitor collar, Bart had sat in a kind of shock and blanketed grief on the ashy ground. A woman, maybe twenty, maybe older, maybe younger, had taken pity on him, heaved him to his feet and pulled him over to her circle.
“You sleep, kid, I’ll keep watch.”
It was a familiar phrase. You don’t promise to keep someone safe in the apocalypse, not when there’s no real way you can make it happen. But you can promise to keep watch.
There were only ever glimpses of her after that, and he was never invited over to her circle again, but it was a kindness given and received nonetheless. Bart had been seven and then eight and then nine, and the inhibitor collar had just kept growing with him. It made him a target.
He wouldn’t affiliate with himself either.
He remembers Blue Beetle, his huge hulking frame, the orders and the malice and the shock cannon that still sometimes leaves his nose smelling burnt flesh. He remembers the hours of exhausting labour hauling supplies until he had blisters forming on his hands and feet. There were nights of hiccuping instead of crying, trying to preserve water. There were nights people took pity on him and invited him into their rest circles and nights where they didn’t.
He doesn’t really remember the time he spent at the pods. It’s all very blurry, in his mind, the Head Scientist a looming figure in his nightmares. He knows he spent a lot of time there, that as the last natural born speedster his connection to the speedforce had been fascinating, but what they actually did to him -
It’s mostly not there. Flashes of images and thoughts, a hell of a lot of pain. Whenever he tries to recall, it leaves his heart beating a mile a minute in his ears, loud and overwhelming.
Bart’s okay with not remembering the pods. He’d be okay with not remembering anything else, also, but those memories linger. Bart packs them away into neat little boxes and tucks said boxes into the back of his mind. Compartmentalization is key. The future has changed. It shouldn’t matter anymore. You have to exist in your own skin and he can’t do that if all he can think about is differences, if all he can think about is the way that he’s too goddamn broken to fit.
Little intricacies of self, the contradictions he keeps tucked close to his heart. The future carved him into the being of breath and bone he is and it is also the ugliest part of him. The future shouldn’t matter because it no longer exists. His very presence in this present-past proves that it once did, but he shouldn’t be here either.
Bart knows what it is to feel half-mad. He spent a year by himself on the run. He knows what it is to keep watch for yourself, to be wary of the world and all inside it, to crave touch, any touch, and to know that you cannot have it. He knows what it is to hold your own head in your hands and try to feel steady.
Bart walks the world of a past he shouldn’t belong to and tries to make it work. He does good and he works hard and he doesn’t sleep and spends long, slowed down moments absolutely frozen in self-contained panic attacks. They happen too fast for any one of his friends to notice, and even if something does feel off to them, Bart is very very good at using his chatter as a way of distraction.
As long as everybody looks but nobody sees, Bart can make it through this. He can.
He can. Really.
Really.
Something goes wrong on a mission.
All around him, there’s screaming. All Bart can think is these idiots are going to get us caught. All Bart can feel is terror. It’s in his lungs. It’s in his heart. It’s in his head. This overwhelming certainty that the Reach are coming for them. That the pods are waiting for him. That there’s already an inhibitor collar around his neck.
Bart does not move. He does not scream. He stays absolutely, perfectly still.
He breathes, mostly in rhythm.
Even when the fear is all-consuming, his body knows this game of survival. It’s been trained by hard experience and loss to not draw attention to itself. It knows. It knows.
There’s a prick at his neck. Bart squeezes his eyes shut, because oh god, oh god, she’s here, and doesn’t move. Stops breathing. Stays so, so very still.
A shadow looms over him. It's a Blue Beetle. It must be. There’s a whirring of his flash cannon. All Bart can smell is burnt flesh. His heartbeat is in his ears, screaming at him that he’s alive, probably because it knows that soon all of them are going to be dead.
Seconds tick by. Minutes. The screaming drops off, one by one by one. There’s linen under Bart’s cheek.
That doesn’t make any sense.
There are no linens in the apocalypse.
Slowly, he opens his eyes.
White room. Cots. Strewn forms of teenagers and mentors. Jaime is sitting upright in the corner, looking half asleep as he leans against Cassie’s shoulder. She’s rubbing up and down his arm. Barry is sitting next to Bart’s own bed, and he seems to be making a point of not touching him.
“Bart,” he says, and he sounds exhausted. “You with me?”
Bart blinks, slowly. Everything seems to be very far away.
Barry just keeps talking. “You’re alright. You and the Beta team got fear-gassed, but you’re all alright. You’re safe.”
Another blink. Garfield is crying into Miss Martian’s shoulder. The world feels like it’s in shades of grey. The world feels like it’s made of ash.
A sigh. A hand on his head. Bart flinches, hard, and then immediately freezes. He does not breathe until fingers hastily retreat.
“Okay. Okay, kiddo. Just sleep. Okay? I’ll keep watch. You sleep.”
Familiar words, familiar phrases. Bart closes his eyes. He dozes. At some point in the night he hears Batman’s gruff tones, Barry’s voice soft and fast. “I don’t know, Bats, I’ve never seen a speedster who’s fight or flight response was freeze…”
Bart doesn’t hear much else after that. He’s sleeping. He can sleep. Barry is keeping watch.
Other things that didn’t exist in the apocalypse:
The reassurance that you could survive an open wound. A feeling of amicable safety when encountering strangers. The secure knowledge of where you would get your next meal, of knowing you would get a next meal. Weather forecasts, and it was always a guessing game if it would rain acid or ash. There was some human technology, modge-podged solar powered machines, but no internet and no radio; it was just too easy to track.
Water. Fresh, clean, drinking water. Everything had to be boiled, including the stuff from rivers, and even then it usually wasn’t the safest. You made do with what you had.
Bart stands at a water park, fourteen, and thinks about passing out from heat exhaustion those long, slow months before he had found Neutron. He thinks about hazy memories of his youth, older hands taking water pouches away before he could drink his fill, making it last. He thinks about the camps, the water had to be earned by labour and obedience.
He had been enthused when the Garricks had first suggested this. They had made it sound so fun. He’s not so sure, now.
Water rushes past. Hundreds of gallons of it. This could have kept so many people alive who were now dead.
Except-
Except most of those people don’t even exist yet.
Bart breathes. Smiles, brightly, instinctively, when Joan glances his way. “So crash,” he tells her, and she laughs. Her bathing suit is plain and black. Her towel has flamingos on it. Swimsuits and towels and flamingos: Bart didn’t even know any of those things existed until a few short months ago.
The sound of moving water fills his ears. His breath feels short. His fingertips numb.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter. His future no longer exists.
Water spits and spurts down slides. Water bobs up and down in the wave pool. Water weaves through a loopty loop in a lazy current. Bart’s throat is as dry as a desert.
Children are screeching, far too loudly, running back and forth. They’re going to attract attention and the only shelter around is a few whimsy umbrellas here and there. They walk past a trash can and it is full to the brim of completely edible half eaten food, discarded like it’s not precious, life-saving calories.
“What do you want to do first, bud?” Jay asks, stretching his arms above his head. He’s got a pair of glasses on and he looks like a total dork. Bart desperately does not want him to die.
He can’t feel his hands. His heart is in his ears, loud and thrumming, louder even than the still rushing, wasting water. Bart is perfectly fine. “Anything,” he manages, and breathes only a little off rhythm. “Whatever you want.”
It’s not the right answer. Joan turns to look at him and immediately frowns, even though Bart is still smiling. “You feeling alright, hun?”
Is his chest made out of ice? He’s pretty sure his chest is made out of ice now. “Yup. Sure. I’m perfect. Absolutely crash. I can’t wait to-” he gestures around him, as if to encapsulate the entire water park. Makes a water sound. He’s sweating.
A hand folds behind his neck, cups around his ear. Bart jerks back at the contact, though he knows that’s just how the Garricks check for high temperatures. He’s breathing through his mouth, he realises, and closes it.
There are hotdogs cooking somewhere nearby, and the smell infiltrates his nose. Bart switches back to breathing through his mouth, and then he registers that Jay is looking at him, worried that he hasn’t spoken for too long, and he stops breathing entirely.
Which isn’t helpful, exactly. Some kid starts yelling, and Bart twitches, minutely. Joan taps on his forearm twice and then links their elbows together, like she’s Dorathy and he’s the ridiculous scarecrow without a brain. “Let’s go somewhere a bit quieter,” she says, and leads them away.
It takes two entire agonising minutes for Bart’s words to come back. “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine. We should totally just- go down the slide thingy. Or the wavey pool. Or-”
“Bart,” Jay murmurs, softly, and Bart shuts up. Breathes off rhythm. “Would you like to go home?”
“What.”
He doesn’t mean for the word to come out as flat as it does, but he can’t quite bring himself to try and compensate by adding something else. In the shade of the tree they’re crowded by, he can actually feel the breeze. It whips at the sweat collecting on his skin and makes him feel cold. A little quieter now, but very clearly there, water rushes all around them.
“Home, honey,” Joan says, squeezing his numb hands. He hadn’t realised she had taken ahold of them. “If you’re not feeling good, we can just head home.”
“I’m fine.”
They just look at him. Their eyes are steady and calm.
“Really, I can do this. Let’s do this. I don’t- we don’t have to go back.”
“Bart, you’re shaking.”
He is. He pulls his arms out from their grasps and tucks them under his armpits. He’s still smiling. He feels manic. “It’s cold out.”
“It’s nearly eighty degrees.”
“I don’t really know what that means.”
Silence, again. Bart fills his lungs and lets the air go. A low rumbling fills the air and his neck jerks up so fast that he must have been using superspeed, but instead of a Reach ship all he sees is a military plane, already trailing to the other side of the horizon.
He breathes. It hitches on the intake.
They go home.
That night, Bart paces back and forth in his room and tries to figure out why he feels so panicked at the idea of people knowing, knowing that something is broken inside of him, knowing that he’s breathing off rhythm nearly all the time. They can’t send him back, even if they figured it out, and they’re probably not going to kill him, so really it’s a matter of needless panic.
Maybe it’s something like this: he isn’t supposed to exist. This past was never his to have. He was supposed to have died alongside everyone else and here he is, sitting with his heart in his throat, unable to shake off the ugly patches inside of him. Here he is, still, pathetic and small and unable to help himself.
He lays in bed for a while. Tries to sleep. Absolutely cannot sleep because his bed is too exposed, and so he slips off the side and then under it instead. Stares up at the dark wooden bed frame and worries at a loose thread in the mattress until a seam opens up. Panics, looks up how to sew on his phone, and then steals from Joan’s supplies to fix up the hole.
The work is shoddy, but it will hold. Probably.
Bart breathes. He feels exhausted and wired all at once.
There is absolutely no way he is going to be able to sleep here.
It’s fine. Bart doesn’t need sleep, necessarily. He has survived on less.
But he would like to.
Which is how Bart finds himself vibrating through Jaime Reyes’ window at three in the morning.
Jaime, who takes one look at him and groans, rolling over and covering his head with his pillow, sheets rumpling by his bare shoulders. “What now?” he asks, sounding a bit desperate. His phone slips off the edge of the bed with all his movements, thumping against the floor.
Bart thumps to the floor after it and snorts. It even feels sort of real. “Jaime, is that really any way to treat your buddy, your pal, your her-man-o, your amigo-”
“Is this a nightmare? This feels like a nightmare.”
“It’s a dream. A beautiful dream. You’ve had dreams exactly like this, admit it-”
Jaime rolls back over, pillow in hand to chuck at him, and then stills when he actually gets a good look at him, illuminated by the glow of the streetlight outside. Bart wonders what he sees that tips him off. Wonders when so many people got so good at reading him, when the Impulse character became just Bart, or vice versa.
He’s not supposed to exist.
“Dude, you alright? You look awful.”
“I’m fine,” Bart responds, automatic. Rubs at the back of his neck. Jaime is sitting up now, untangling himself from his sheets. There are stacks of empty cups on his bedspread, folded laundry discarded into a long forgotten corner. Bart feels so tired.
“You’re barefoot. You- ay, are you bleeding!?”
He looks down. He is, in fact, barefoot and bleeding onto Jaime’s bedroom floor. “Oops,” he mumbles, and scratches at the back of his neck again. Bart is feeling very numb to the world at the moment. It will probably hurt in a minute or so, and even more in the morning if he doesn’t get all the stuff out. It’s fine. He can deal.
Jaime’s already out the door. “Stay right there,” he says, tone commanding, and vanishes. Given a direct order, Bart sits down. He waits.
It goes like this: Blue Beetle feels like the most dangerous thing in the world to him sometimes, even now. But, also, Jaime is his friend. He knows all the things nobody else does. The ugly parts of Bart’s youth. The way he isn’t supposed to exist and the way he’s here anyway. He just doesn't care, treats Bart like he's a person worthy of kindness anyway, and that, somehow, inexplicably, makes the older teen safe.
Jaime comes back in with toilet paper and tweezers and a roll of bandages. He mutters in Spanish the whole time as he kidnaps the lamp from his nightstand and places it on the floor, angling it so he can get a good look at Bart’s feet, picking out gravel and glass before his healing can completely screw him over.
Bart just watches him. The exhaustion is back with vengeance. It feels like all his words are so far away. He stares at the glowing bulb until the afterimages stick to the back of his eyelids, and the slides his gaze away. It’s sort of cool how they can have light, even in the middle of the dark. All these strange, old magics. They still surprise him, sometimes, even now.
“Can I stay here, tonight?” he asks, quietly, just as Jaime finishes wrapping his feet. It gets his friend’s attention quickly, sharp brown eyes flashing up to him.
“Is everything okay at home?”
It’s easy to read the question in the question: are you safe? Bart offers a tired nod, eyes half-closed, and that more than anything seems to convince him he’s telling the truth.
Jaime tilts his head. Clicks his tongue, once, and then nods. “Yeah, sure. Whatever man, but I’m not giving up my bed.”
“Don’t want your bed,” Bart shoots back, and then graciously scrambles across the floor without putting pressure on the bottom of his feet to slide into the floor space underneath the bed frame. Jaime watches him do it, standing silhouetted against the streetlights coming in from the window.
“Why are you like this, again?”
“Apocalypse,” Bart says back, and turns around so he can look up at the mattress, fisting his fingers in his shirt so he won’t be tempted to make another tear.
Jaime lets out a long, slow sigh. The mattress above him creaks as the older teen lays down on it, and then again as he shifts. A pillow and a bundled up sheet appear by the crack where Bart had just squeezed himself through. He blinks at them: he wouldn’t have even thought to ask.
The gifts are accepted. Outside, the cicadas sing. There had still been cicadas, in the future, and Bart isn’t sure if he finds that little fact comforting or not. He wipes at his eyes silently. Breathes only a little shakily, only a little off-rhythm. Tries to feel safe.
Above him, there’s another creak, another shift. Jaime mumbles something like can’t believe I’m doing this, and then a dark hand gets shoved into the crevice between the floor and the bed. It wiggles, fingers motioning to him impatiently, and Bart lets out a choked laugh as he reaches out and grabs it.
“There,” Jaime says, tiredly. “Now go to sleep.”
He’s already half into a doze. “You’ll keep watch?” he mumbles, and hears Jaime hum something affirmative sounding.
It’s enough. Bart closes his eyes. He sleeps.
It goes like this, it goes like this: you have to exist in your own skin, but you have to live in it, too. This world is not so kind as to make it survive or nothing. It is not so cruel, either.
It goes like this: when Bart was eleven, in his last year before he escaped the camps, he stumbled over the lady who was kind to him, once.
Stumbled, because she was on the ground. Her arm was swollen around a sluggishly bleeding wound, green pus seeping from the edges. Infected, most certainly, and her eyes were already full of fever.
It was night. Late. Rest circles had already been set up and they had only a few hours before it was back to work. She was alone and the ground was ash and there was absolutely nothing Bart could do for her, not really. He had no magic cure, no water, no nothing. Just a half dashed plan to finish what his family had started before they were caught, and if he succeeded then none of this would happen anyway. It wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t exist.
Bart ends up sitting with her, anyway. Keeping one last final watch. She’s delirious, but thankfully quiet. He runs his fingers through her greasy hair and says a hundred inane things, recalls stories told to him from his own youth. She calls him Tommy, once or twice, and he just nods along with the name.
“You’re a good kid,” she says, whisper-soft, at some point. “A good boy. You know that?”
Bart, his throat dry, had just nodded. Started humming. His fingers shook, but he didn’t stop petting at her hair, wiping away the sweat on her head.
She was dead by morning. Bart never learned her name.
But that’s not the point of it. The point of it was that she lived. The point of it was that she wasn’t alone. The point of it is that she mattered, that her life mattered, even if it no longer existed or exists.
It’s a matter of life. It’s a matter of grief. It’s a matter of holding the anger and fear under his skin and treating it gently. It existed for a reason. It got him this far.
It’s a matter of love. It’s a matter of the sacrifices made in the name of it. Bart is no fool: he knows he did not survive this long based solely on his own merit. The foundations of his youth are ugly brittle things, but there were roots of good there, too. Dandelion plants and gentle hands and stories told in the dark. People don’t make resistances if they have nothing to fight for.
It goes like this; Bart chases after two toddlers who aren’t going to grow up hungry or afraid. He does not shush them for their loud laughter, their brilliant joy, even if occasionally the urge rises in his chest. Instead, he catches Don first, and then Dawn, and tickles them until they shriek.
It goes like this: Iris takes him to see Much Ado About Nothing in an outdoor theatre in Central Park, performed by a local theatre. Barry shows up five minutes late and has to be shushed when he asks what he’s missed. Bart doesn’t really get all of what the actor’s are saying, but more than a few of the jokes land, and his not yet biological grandparents are warm by his side. Old, strange magic exists in many forms.
It goes like this: Jay and Joan sit with him as he does homework, making inane comments about how different it was in their day. They try to figure out technology together, awkwardly fiddling with screens and keyboards until things start to click into place. They don’t go back to the waterpark, but they do go to visit the ocean. Waves crash against the shore and seaweed tickles at his feet. Bart learns how to lie on his back and let the saltwater carry him.
It goes like this: Bart breathes, most of the time, and mostly in rhythm. Sometimes his chest is ice and his hands are numb. Sometimes the broken parts inside of him feel stronger than the whole ones. He can’t always sleep on his own.
It’s lucky, then, that there are a whole lot of people who love him, who are willing to keep watch in the night.
The world is wide and long. Bart goes on runs in the mornings, chasing the rising sun. He stops and touches green earth and breathes in fresh air. He talks in horrible Spanish in Spain and everyone treats him like a lost tourist, not a superhero or a saviour. Jaime serves him homemade tamales at a family dinner and laughs in his face when Bart has to drink a half gallon of milk from the spice.
It goes like this: Bart lives. All the days of his life.
Little intricacies and little contradictions. The funny little things of living in a body that is not supposed to exist. The future Bart grew up in is his past, now. Bart’s real future is wide open. He’s here, ready for it.
Bart stretches his arms above his head. He breathes, breathes, rhythm steady and strong. There are dandelions growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, growing upwards and outwards and out. His heart beats. Ahead, his friends gesture wildly for him to keep up, somebody cackling, somebody letting out an annoyed groan. The sun shines and the sky is perfectly blue.
He’s still here. It can be a rather wonderful thing to be.