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The scarab doesn’t like the ocean.
There are too many unknown factors in there, Jaime Reyes, it tells him sternly, hunched like an unhappy cat in the lap of his consciousness. Anything might emerge at any moment. The tactical risks alone cannot be enumerated.
“Yeah, yeah,” he tells it, but fondly.
It tries to suit him up when he steps on wet kelp (doesn’t like the feeling), when he slides a little hiking through the sand (thinks they’re being ambushed from below), and when a black dog bursts back out of the ocean with a frisbee the scarab hadn’t seen get tossed (self explanatory).
It doesn’t react at all when Bart shows up in a blur of auburn. It recognizes everything about Bart by now, from the electric shift in the air when he’s nearby to the unnatural stillness that a place seems to take on after he leaves.
Sand flies up all around them both as Bart comes to a halt. The beach is mostly empty, save the dog and the frisbee and the distant frisbee-thrower, so no one’s around to notice.
“You’re late,” Jaime says, folding his arms. “This was your idea.”
“I know I know I know,” Bart says, kicking his red sneakers off before he’s even reached a full stop. One of them nearly whacks Jaime in the face. The other flies so far across the beach that Jaime’s not sure how he’s going to find it again. “There was this whole thing, last minute tiger android attack on Central, cut to classic Flash fam team-up, even Jay dug his suit out to help because that guy is never going to retire.”
He’s wrestling off his blue hoodie now, like it’s attacking him. “Totally owned the catdroids bee-tee-double-you—I came up with that, don’t you think it’s a good name? Because they’re cats who are—can you believe Wally still won’t let me use his motorcycle?”
“You can run faster than the motorcycle,” Jaime says, but he’s badly losing the battle not to crack a smile. He steps forward to help free Bart from the hoodie. After a moment of tugging, Bart’s fluffy red head appears, and then his face beneath it, scattered with new freckles from the summer. He beams at Jaime, then clicks his tongue. “Not the point, not the point,” he chides, shaking his head.
His white t-shirt had gotten pulled half-over his head with the sweatshirt. Jaime looks away as he jerks it back down, unconcerned.
Jaime Reyes, the scarab says, alert. You are in pain. Are we under attack?
“Oh,” Bart says, distracting Jaime before he can answer. He blinks, really seeming to see where they are for the first time. His eyes widen as he looks out at the water. It’s nearly sunset, because Bart was late, and the deep blue of the sea is drenched gold and pink. “Oh.”
“No ocean where you come from, huh?” Jaime asks. It’s a rhetorical question. He sticks his hands in his jeans pockets and takes a few steps down the beach then looks back, waiting.
Bart shakes his head very fast and follows, still staring. He stumbles a little at the place where dry sand gives way to wet, not expecting the switch to surer footing.
Jaime feels a lump form in his throat, looking at the wonder and joy on Bart’s face. Guilt surrounds his whole body and presses in, inexorable, like a fist crushing an aluminum can. The way it always does when Bart lets slip something about the future he came from. The future that is Jaime’s fault.
I took that from you. I did this to you.
Bart takes his hand, tugging it from his pocket to tangle their fingers together, and Jaime’s skin sings from fingertip to elbow. “Come on, you’re so slooooow,” Bart groans, dragging him forward.
“It’s not going anywhere, hermano,” Jaime says. But he lets himself be pulled.
This had been Bart’s idea, to come to the beach before summer vacation was over. Summer vacation for Jaime, obviously; Bart didn’t go to school. Wally and Barry were still losing that battle, hard.
They’d been meaning to do the beach thing for the past three weeks, but things just kept coming up. Team covert ops in Brazil, and then a new nanotech threat that had taken Bart to Indonesia, and then Jaime was needed offworld to help the Lanterns recapture one of their Reds.
And now it’s the last week of August, and they’d almost run out of time.
Bart only lets go of Jaime’s hand when they reach the water. He bends over and rolls up his ratty jeans to the knees, careless, before bounding forward to splash in the last gentle push of dying waves near the shore.
Jaime watches him and thinks about how those waves started out different, crashing and huge and violent further out. It had taken them so long to get here that they’d changed in the process.
Jaime sits down at the edge of the sand a few feet above where the wet tracks end, the furthest point the ocean was able to reach.
“You’ve calmed down,” he says to the scarab, which is emitting what he can only equate to a feeling like someone humming a quiet tune without realizing. “Did you decide it’s not so bad?”
Spring tide is imminent, the scarab speaks up, tone watchful. In precisely sixteen minutes, the water will intersect with our location.
“Hey, the tide is coming in,” Jaime calls to Bart, cupping a hand around his mouth so his voice will carry.
There’s been a chill in the air the past few nights, the warning of September relentless at their door, but it still feels like summer tonight.
“That’s fine,” Bart yells, turning half-back to grin at him. He’s backlit, the setting sun cutting his silhouette out like paper. Then he’s skipping back, not Flash-fast but still so quick it’s like Jaime blinks and he’s somewhere else.
He’s always worried one of these days he’ll blink, and Bart will be gone.
“This is so crash.” Bart drops to his knees in the sand in front of Jaime like a puppet with cut strings, resting his hands on Jaime’s crossed legs. His tone turns wheedling. “Will you go in with me?”
Jaime sighs and lets his head fall back like he’s got to think about it, but he already knows he’s going in the water.
“Please?” Bart asks, leaning in closer. He’d topple over into Jaime’s lap if Jaime knocked his braced elbows. Jaime has the insane thought that the ocean is making his green eyes greener. “Pleeeeeease?”
“Fine,” Jaime says. He takes care to sound much more put-upon than he feels because he knows how much Bart loves to feel like he’s won a victory.
Bart laughs delightedly when Jaime pushes him off so he can stand up. He all but tackles him, bounding to his feet and grabbing the zip of his sweatshirt to yank it down and help push the garment off his shoulders.
“I can do that myself,” Jaime complains, but it’s half-hearted, because Bart is so close and Jaime could never complain about that. He smells clean, like whatever generic drugstore shampoo and soap Wally buys him. Jaime lets Bart strip the sweatshirt off him, first one sleeve, then the other.
“You’re so much smaller than you used to be,” Bart observes with the sweatshirt balled up in his hands, looking him over, and when Jaime stares down at him, not sure if he should be offended and very sure Bart is one to talk, Bart screws up his face and smacks his forehead. “That came out wrong. Not used to be. Will be. Would be. Won’t be, now, fingers crossed. Anyway!”
He skips back, shaking his head too fast, the way he does sometimes when he needs to reorder his thoughts. His foot starts tapping the ground frenetically. Jaime watches him and wonders what it’s like, having memories of things that haven’t happened yet.
That’s just about one of the only pieces of information Bart doesn’t offer up, and that’s pretty telling all by itself.
Jaime steps out of his jeans and pulls his t-shirt over his head, jogging in his boxers to set the bundle of clothes back several feet to keep them clear of the encroaching tide.
When he turns back, Bart’s undressed too, stretching his arms over his head. For several seconds, Jaime can’t stop staring at his shoulder blades moving beneath bronzed skin. Then he’s staring at something else.
He’s never seen Bart without his shirt on.
Bart has scars all over him.
He’s spent so much time out in the sun since he’d gotten here to the past, that they stand out in sharp relief: white and pink lines, some faint and barely noticeable, some huge and dark and angry.
“What happened?” Jaime blurts out, even though immediately upon hearing it he knows it’s not a specific enough question to encompass what he’s looking at.
“What do you mean?” Bart asks, turning, expression genuinely confused. He looks down at himself, putting a hand over his stomach. “Oh! That’s no big, I got that forever ago.”
Something in Jaime’s face must betray that he wasn’t talking about a specific scar, that he hadn’t even seen that one, a jagged line running from Bart’s belly button to his hip. He sees Bart realize, catches the barest second when his smile slips before he shrugs, plastering it back in place. “You know how it is, apocalyptic future! Oops, well, no you don’t, never mind, the point is, I’m fine. Stop making that face at me! We all have scars!”
Jaime doesn’t think they all have scars the way Bart has scars. He has a pink line just below his left kneecap from a skateboarding accident, and a neat white dot on the back of each hand from childhood IVs the month he was in the hospital as a baby, and probably some other minor ones he hasn’t noticed.
But that’s not the same as the map of harm he can see all over Bart’s body.
“Hey, hey!” Bart says, grabbing hold of his shoulders and forcing Jaime’s eyes off his torso, back to his face. “It’s fine! They look worse than they are, I promise.” He takes Jaime’s hand again. “Now come on, we’re running out of time.”
Again, he’s pulling. Again, Jaime goes.
The water is of course freezing; the first touch of it makes the scarab jolt like it’s been startled. “You’ll get used to it,” he tells it before it can get upset with him.
Bart has already waded in up to his hips by the time Jaime catches up with him. He’s not as much shorter than Jaime as he used to be, which is sometimes startling. As Jaime watches, he dives forward under a cresting wave and emerges in a spray of salt water, shaking his head like a dog. “Cold!” he yelps. “Cold, cold!”
He lunges back towards Jaime, who isn’t expecting it. He loses his footing as Bart lands heavy in his arms, and hasn’t quite found it again when a new wave slams into them. They both topple over, and Jaime hears only an alarmed Jaime Reyes! in his head and Bart’s genuine, startled laugh, the one that makes him feel warm all over, out loud, before the frigid water swallows them both in a shock of silence.
There’s a moment of stillness, where the press of water all around him makes him forget where he is, who he is.
Then he opens his eyes and sees the red of Bart’s hair, and he jolts back to life. His arm tightens around Bart’s waist and his feet find the sandy floor of the ocean beneath them. He remembers which way is up, and he drags them both back to it.
Bart is already laughing, or maybe still laughing, when they break the surface. He’s clinging to Jaime with one arm draped around his shoulders, using the other hand to whip his wet hair out of his eyes. The sea is making them greener. Jaime’s sure of it.
“Crash,” he says, panting and looking around them, eyes huge. He’s dripping seawater from the ends of his hair, his eyelashes, his nose and mouth. Jaime watches a rivulet run from his forehead to his top lip and wonders if he would taste like salt.
“Come on,” Jaime says, voice hoarse from the cold. He half-carries and half-tows Bart back towards the shore. “That’s enough of a near-drowning experience for me today, thanks.”
“You’re suuuuuuch a buzzkill,” Bart complains, squirming.
Jaime hadn’t planned on going into the water, and Bart never plans for anything with less than world-threatening stakes, so they don’t have towels. Jaime uses his own sweatshirt to inefficiently dry off his own hair, and then Bart’s, and then they pull on their jeans and t-shirts again, damp from the sea air.
Jaime’s brushing sand off his feet so he can wrestle his socks on when he hears Bart say, “Is that a crab?” and leap to his feet, darting off down the beach. Gulls go flying in his wake, screaming their affront.
Jaime resigns himself to explaining what is and isn’t a crab to someone who’s never seen seafood before and sets his socks aside, shoves them back into his shoes so he can follow Bart’s footprints to where he’s kneeling in the sand.
He’s hunched over something when Jaime comes around to see what he’s looking at. “Oh,” he says, startled, rubbing at the back of his neck. “That’s…a crab.”
It’s upside-down, white underbelly up and legs splayed. Jaime crouches down next to Bart, leaning in to peer at the crab. He’d thought it was already dead, but as he watches, one of the legs extends and then tucks in again.
Bart looks up at him, and Jaime feels like he’s been punched in the chest. Bart’s eyes are gleaming with unshed tears, his mouth trembling. He looks back down at the crab, and Jaime watches his shoulders set in determination. “I’m going to put it back in the water.”
Jaime looks at the crab, flipped on its back and barely moving, and says as gently as he knows how, “It’s dying, hermano. I don’t know if you’ll make any difference.”
Bart’s eyes flash. “You don’t know that! We can at least give it a chance!”
He covers his hands with his hoodie and uses it to scoop the crab up, painfully gentle, and rights it. It moves several of its segmented legs, not in unison, as if experimenting. One of them is missing. It doesn’t make any move back towards the water.
“I think it’s just stunned,” Bart says. The tears that had been brimming are spilling over now, running down his face like the ocean water had. He doesn’t even seem to notice. He gives the crab an encouraging nudge with his balled up hoodie. “Come on, buddy. You’re okay. You can walk.”
Jaime and the crab look at each other with a kind of mutual despair.
The crab extends a clawed leg into the sand and then, with great gravity, brings it back to its strange mouthparts to eat something off of it, stalked eyes staring.
“We have to put it back,” Bart says, sitting back on his haunches and wiping his eyes off on his forearm. He looks up at Jaime again, expression openly pleading. “Don’t say it’s too late,” he says in a voice thick from crying. “It’s not, it’s alive and everything, and if we leave it they’ll get it again, and then it’ll die for sure, okay, Blue, we can’t leave it here.”
“Okay,” Jaime says, meaning it. He touches Bart’s hand. “Okay, we can’t. We won’t.”
Would it help to tell the Impulse the objective likelihood of the creature’s survival? The scarab asks. Jaime says, “No,” firmly, and ignores Bart’s questioning look.
The scarab knows what he wants. The clawed hands of the suit slip out to cover his own in hard bright blue, fingertip to wrists, and he carefully reaches out to slide them underneath the crab.
The crab, it turns out, does not seem to feel overly positive about being carried. It makes a clumsy, alarmed lurch to the side as Jaime lifts it up off the sand, and Bart reaches under to press his palms to the backs of Jaime’s hands and steady it.
They carry it like that, together, shuffling down the beach to the water. At first, they deposit the crab right where the water ends, in the furthest edge of the waves. Jaime’s hoping that the reminder of the ocean washing around it will help it remember where it’s from.
When that doesn’t do anything but wash the crab back towards them a few inches, they pick it up again, wordless this time, and wade further out, until they’re knee deep in the water.
This time, the water pulls the crab out of their joined hands when they lower it in. The sea rushes in around their legs and then back out, and the crab is gone.
“Oh,” Bart says like an exhale. He looks around, searching to make sure it hadn’t just gotten washed further down the beach. But the waves come in again, and then out, and it’s still nowhere to be seen. The beach is empty. The ocean had taken it back.
Bart sits down and watches the waterline for some time after that. The tide keeps climbing towards him, until it’s lapping inches from his feet. Jaime’s not sure if he’s still looking out for the crab, or if he’s somewhere far away.
“You were right,” Jaime tells him. He sinks to the sand next to Bart, digging his heels in and pulling his knees up to rest his elbows on. “It wasn’t too late.”
Bart gives him a watery smile. “You could have been right,” he says. He looks like he’s going to cry again. “It might die anyway.”
Jaime thinks he would do anything in his power or anyone else’s to keep him from crying. “Even if it does, you saved it,” he says. He nudges Bart’s shoulder with his own. “At least it won’t die alone, far from home. And who knows, you know? I think it might make it.”
Bart scrubs a hand over his eyes and takes a deep breath. He tears his gaze away from the horizon, looking back at Jaime instead. “Do you really?”
“I really do,” Jaime says, honest. If anything has ever made him believe in unlikely things, it’s Bart.
Bart looks at him for what feels like a long time, gaze moving intently over Jaime’s face, seeing—Jaime has no idea what. The present, or the future, or something else entirely.
When Bart leans in, Jaime’s somehow both expecting it and shocked by it.
He turns his face away, grabs Bart’s questing hand by the wrist. “Stop,” he says. It comes out as a gasp. The sun had sunk low while they helped the crab, and now pink light is fading to dusk all around them.
“Why?” Bart asks, sounding downright pleading. His breath is warm on Jaime’s cheek, his whole body angled in towards him. “Do you not—you don’t want to?”
“Of course I want to,” Jaime says. It’s strangely easy to admit, after all this time.
He squeezes his eyes shut. Even with them closed, he’s painfully aware of every part of his body that’s close to Bart’s. Their knees pressed together. Bart’s forehead resting against Jaime’s temple, the soft ends of his hair tickling Jaime’s neck. Bart’s pulse, racing too-fast under Jaime’s fingers the way Flashes’ hearts always do.
This is the quietest Bart’s ever been, in the whole time Jaime’s known him. He’s breathing softly against Jaime’s skin, still reaching, curving himself into Jaime’s body. “Then I don’t see the problem.”
“The problem is this,” Jaime says, pulling Bart’s arm in between them and twisting it wrist-side up, so that they’re both looking at the faded purple marks on Bart’s forearm, three in a line, like something had sunk claws into his flesh and pulled.
The problem is that Bart never thinks a cause is lost, even when the proof is right there in front of him, upside-down in the sand.
“I could always hurt you.” Jaime feels like he can’t get enough air back into his lungs. He closes his fingers back around Bart’s wrist, willing him to understand. “Don’t you get it? Whatever it is that, you know, makes me turn, there’s never going to be a way to know that it’s out of me. And I have to live with that, but you shouldn’t have to. I won’t let that, any of it, the future, happen to you, do you hear me? Not again.”
We now know how to handle that, the scarab speaks up, sounding indignant. We would never hurt the Impulse again.
It still calls Bart that, even though Bart’s been wearing Wally’s old costume for years now.
“You can’t promise that!” Jaime snaps at it.
Do not underestimate what we can and cannot promise.
“That’s so unfair!” Bart bursts out, distracting Jaime from arguing with the scarab. “Just because I’m from the timeline where you happen to be all mind-beetle-controlled and mean, you won’t kiss me? Do you have any idea how many timelines there probably are? What if this is the timeline where kissing me is what prevents you being mean? And you’re actually going to cause the end of the world if you don’t kiss me right now? What then?”
“I’m just trying to protect you,” Jaime says, frustrated. “You’re not taking this seriously.”
“I so am!” Bart says. “You’re saying you won’t be with me because you might hurt me, but you won’t, and I know you won’t!”
Jaime throws his hands up in exasperation. “That’s a terrible argument. I already did.”
The tide’s reached them, cold water rushing in around their bare feet. They both ignore it.
“No, you didn’t,” Bart insists stubbornly. He sighs audibly and walks on his knees between Jaime’s bent legs, poking him in the chest. “That wasn’t you, okay! He wasn’t my Blue, you’re my Blue, and you’ve never done anything bad to me, ever. Except not kiss me.”
Jaime can’t let himself get distracted by how it feels to hear you’re my Blue. It might sweep him away like the ocean.
“If it ever happens again,” he says, and falters. He feels his airway constrict at the thought of it, the memory of being trapped in his own mind and body while someone else controlled it. “If I ever get turned again…”
“I’ll stop you,” Bart says, kneeling in the high tide, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I’ll bring you back. I’ll always bring you back.”
“You should just stay away from me,” Jaime says. The words hurt to say. They get stuck in his throat.
“Don’t be stupid,” Bart says, wrinkling his nose, and Jaime feels something inside him crumble. “After I came all the way back here for you?”
Bart has to know Jaime’s going to kiss him. He must see it coming from the second Jaime first leans forward, the way he sees everything coming, because he experiences things so fast that everything’s in slow motion to him.
He has to know, but he still gasps when Jaime’s lips brush over his. He still jolts like an electric charge has been run right through him.
Jaime cups the back of Bart’s neck with one hand, tangling his fingers in the wet curls of his hair, and kisses him for real.
The next thing he knows, Bart is in his lap with his arms flung around Jaime’s neck, and pressing in as close as he can get.
He’s greedy about kissing, hungry for it the way he’s hungry for anything else. Jaime can barely breathe in between the eager kisses Bart drops on his mouth, his nose, his cheeks, and that makes him laugh into Bart’s mouth as he wraps his own arms around Bart’s waist to keep him there.
“See?” Bart says in his ear, breathless and smiling. His rabbit heartbeat is hammering against Jaime’s chest. Jaime feels suffused by light. “You just saved the world.”
Jaime Reyes, the scarab pipes up unexpectedly. The Kid Flash will arrive in ten seconds.
Jaime feels like he’s been hit hard in the head, in a pleasant way, so it takes him a minute to parse this. If he wasn’t otherwise occupied he would tell the scarab that obviously, the Kid Flash is already here, because he is kissing him.
Too late, he feels the familiar electric hum of someone with super-speed arriving.
Too late, he remembers that even though it’s been longer since Wally West was called Kid Flash than it has been since Bart was Impulse, the scarab is nothing if not stubborn about first introductions.
“Oh no,” he says, and Wally says, “Oh God, what is happening,” and Bart twists to look over his shoulder, still in Jaime’s lap, and says, “Hi cuz!”
“What are you doing—no, don’t tell me,” Wally says loudly. He’s holding one hand out, palm up, as if to ward them off, and the other is clapped over his eyes. “Bart, what did you do with my motorcycle?”
“You said that he said you couldn’t borrow it!” Jaime says, looking at Bart, and Bart says, frowning as if he doesn’t understand why Jaime is saying this, “He did,” and Wally says, “Which is why he stole it, and can you please stop doing….that….stop….” he waves his hand pathetically and finishes, “Being teenagers. Please.”
Jaime has to lift Bart bodily off of him so he can scramble to his feet, adjusting his wet clothing. Bart’s already up, skipping forward. “You’re so dramatic,” he tells Wally, and pats his arm. “Your motorcycle is fine, it’s back at the cave! Why’s it so slow, anyway? It started making the worst noise when I took it over 120. Like, graaaaanhghhg rraaargh. Can you take us to Olive Garden? C’mon, Blue!”
“You’re the worst person I know,” Wally tells him. “Why would I take you to Olive Garden?”
“Because I’m starving,” Bart says, and turns around to walk backwards, holding a hand out to Jaime and wiggling his fingers until Jaime catches up and takes it. “What’d’ya say, Blue, Olive Garden? I’ll buy you breadsticks.”
“Breadsticks are free,” Wally says loudly from ahead of them. “And if you’re sharing them with anyone, it is me, for subjecting me to this.”
He digs a cell phone out of his pocket, hits a button, and holds it up to his ear.
“Who are you calling? Are you calling Artemis? Are you calling Artemis to pick us up, because you can’t drive?”
“I’m calling animal control,” Wally says. “They’re going to come pick you up in a butterfly ne—hi, babe,” he says, tone changing noticeably as someone on the other end answers, cadence gone soft and sweet. “I’m going to be home late. Don’t ask why, my life is a nightmare.” A pause, and then, indignant: “I’m not telling him hi!”
“Hi back,” Bart yells.
He’s still holding Jaime’s hand, and Jaime isn’t paying attention to the conversation even a little because his hand is being held by Bart, and Bart is watching him with a mischievous twist to his mouth, green eyes laughing.
You just saved the world, Bart had said to him, whispering it, sea-soaked and wearing the colors of the setting sun.
And looking at him smiling, Jaime really feels like he might’ve.