pompon

The polaroids had become a tradition long before the rest of your husband’s team had become involved in your relationship. It’s more than just something to help him de-stress while you’re gone– it’s an incentive to come back. 

That’s why when John suggested you start sending the boys some as well, you didn’t hesitate. He loves his team so much– and so do you– so why wouldn’t you remind them what they have waiting at home?

You’ve quickly learned that they all have very different tastes– that’s what makes this game they proposed so confusing. 

They’re all scattered across the living room, John’s sitting in his usual recliner. Meanwhile, Simon and Kyle are on the couch, sitting so close together their thighs are touching. Johnny’s perched in the armchair, staring straight at you with a smirk. 

“I, I don’t get it?” You mumble, staring at the four polaroids lined up neatly on your coffee table, all different and all covered in various fluids

John smiles at you, eyes crinkling in a way that you know by now means trouble. “Just a silly game, love. Want you to guess who used which photo.”

You blink, slowly glancing down at the table before your eyes flicker between the men. “What happens if I guess wrong?”

The sweet smile Kyle gives you does nothing to settle your nerves. “Then Cap gets to pick who fucks your cunt tonight.” You swallow hard, knowing he’s mean enough to let Simon fuck you first purely because of how big– too big– he is. Or, even worse: let Johnny overstimulate before the rest of them ever even get a turn.

“And if I guess right?” 

Simon’s eyes stare straight into yours– he’s smug as if he’s already won. “Then you get to pick, lovie.”

You pause for a moment. It’s a high-risk, high-reward scenario. You’ve taken dozens upon dozens of photos by now– you know their preferences intimately well– there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do it. 

“Alright, let’s play.”

The carpet’s rough against your skin as you kneel in front of the table. Now that you're closer to the pictures, you can see– and smell– just how gross and overused they really are. 

You almost don’t want to touch them, but you know that’d be forfeiting. You can feel their ravenous eyes on you, practically buzzing in their seats from excitement. 

The first one you pick up is in the best condition. A few dried stains around the edges, but the image itself is still entirely visible. 

You’re in a white babydoll style lingerie– something you’d bought at a bridal shop right before your honeymoon– and you’re bent in a pose that had left you aching for days. “John,” you say without any hesitation. 

The next one you pick up is also stained. In it, you’re flat on your back, lying in bed. Your black lace slip dress bunched up at your hips, legs spread wide to show your dripping cunt. 

Your fingers brush against it, and you notice then just how different the liquid staining the edges is–a slightly yellow tint and far more watery.  You glance up, feeling his dark-brown eyes already staring you down. “Simon.”

“Johnny!” You don’t even have to pick it up to know who it belongs to. There’s an excessive amount of dried cum covering you can hardly even see the actual image. Every time he finishes, there’s just so much– too much– your thighs squeeze together just thinking about it. 

You know what he likes well enough to guess what you were wearing when you took it. An overly complicated bodysuit, all lace and straps in a borderline obnoxiously bright color. 

The last must be Kyle’s; you can tell not just through the process of elimination but just by looking at it. You whisper his name before picking it up. 

The image is focused on your lower half– lace stockings on your thighs with two fingers knuckle deep in your pussy. The edges are wrinkled slightly. You can practically see him gripping it tight with one hand, his fist instinctively curling up around it as he cums– crumpling the edge. 

The longer the men are silent, the more confident you get. “I got it right. I know I did.” 

Your stomach sinks when you hear John’s chuckle, the others shortly following after him. “What? Why are you laughing?” you frantically ask, eyes flickering around the room– unsure who to look at. 

John shakes his head at you, faux sympathy shining in his eyes. “You lost, sweetheart.” He makes it sound so final– no room for argument. 

You know your logic was solid, and your mind races trying to figure out where you went wrong. They must feel some sort of pity for you because one by one, they tell you the correct answers. 

Simon picks up the crumbled polaroid before grinning at you. “Silly little dove, ‘M not a mutt, not gonna piss just anywhere– it’s a waste if it’s not inside. Garrick, though…”

“I’m sorry, petal, just had to go so bad– couldn’t help myself,” he whines, looking at you with a mocking pout. 

You look over at John, who’s proudly holding the nastiest of them– the one you were so sure belonged to Johnny. “Saved up for two weeks for that one, poppet.”

Johnny sweetly smiles at you. “Bonnie, you looked so pretty in white, I couldnae help myself. Our pretty little wifey," he coos at you. 

“That’s not fair, you tricked me. You cheated–”

John’s hand pats his lap once, then twice, beckoning you to come over. You wordlessly set yourself in his lap, back pressed against his chest as three sets of eyes stare straight at the two of you. “It’s not nice to accuse us like that, sweetheart.”

Kyle’s the first to get closer, kneeling on the floor as his hand slowly snakes up your leg. “You’re so silly, petal, can’t cheat when we’re the ones makin’ the rules.”

Tears threaten to spill from your eyes, and you can hear Johnny snickering at you. 

“Stop bein’ a sore loser, dove.” Simon scolds. You make the mistake of letting your eyes trail down, his legs spread open, showing just how hard he is. 

You find yourself glancing back at John helplessly. The corners of his mouth twisted up in a smirk. Your heart’s beating so hard in your chest, you wouldn’t be surprised if they could all hear it. 

“Dinnae keep the poor girl waiting, Cap,” Johnny says. You can’t help but stare as his hand palms himself through his jeans. 

John’s hand is cupping your face– forcing you to look at the boys. “Y’know, sweetheart, Kyle had such a rough go on this last mission. Poor lad needs somethin’ to take it all out on…”

Yeah, you're so fucked– you think to yourself. 

Kyle’s normally the sweetest of the group– or at least he pretends to be– all gentle groping and loving whispers.

There’s nothing soft about the way he shoves you onto all fours. Your face is smushed against the rug, his hands gripping your hips tight, forcing your ass up– soaked cunt proudly on display. 

“Who gets ‘er mouth?” Simon asks as if you’re not even there, looking over at John.  

You gasp at the feeling of fingers running between your folds. “So fuckin’ wet, you like it when we treat you like a slag?” Kyle groans, staring straight at you as he licks your juices off his digits. 

You try to speak, argue, only for John to cut you off. “Johnny, you want a go at it?”

Your eyes widen as you lift your head in alarm, quickly shaking it in disagreement. He may not be as long as the rest of the guys, but Johnny’s cock is heavy, and there’s always so much cum that you can never swallow it all. 

“What, y’ dinnae wanna suck me off?” Soap taunts, thumb tracing your jaw as he kneels in front of you. Your cunt clenches around nothing at the sight of his leaking tip. 

“C’mon now, sweetheart, be a good girl and help ‘im out, yeah?” You glance back at John and find that he’s already stripped himself and Simon. He’s got the lieutenant bent over the side of the couch, two of his thick fingers working him open.  

Kyle chuckles, sliding himself in between your folds using your slick to lube up his cock. “Aw, quit whinging, Johnny, she’s just bein’ a brat– can tell by how soaked she is.”

He shoves himself into you in one go, giving you no time to adjust before he starts to thrust into you. Johnny takes advantage of the way your mouth falls open in a gasp, hand gripping your jaw as he pushes his thick member past your lips. 

You can’t help but moan around him while Kyle continues to fuck you hard and fast. Every time he thrusts deeper into your cunt, he’s shoving your nose against Johnny’s pubes. 

“Fuck,” he groans as his tip brushes against the deepest part of you. “Tha’s our good girl,” he mumbles, leaning down to nibble at your shoulder. 

You look up at Johnny, eyes wide as you try your best to bob your head in sync with his thrusts.

The noises filling the room are obscene and overwhelming; Simon groaning as John thrusts inside him, your dripping cunt, the wet noise of Johnny and Kyle sloppily making out above you. 

You can feel one of Johnny’s hands slide down your chest before roughly pawing at your breast– fingers giving sharp pinches to your nipples.

 “Think she likes that, look at how she’s clenchin’ around ye.” You faintly hear him mumble against Kyle’s lips. 

It’s hard to concentrate on anything other than the feeling of being full, hands all over you, the pretty noises Simon makes as John’s thrusts start to stutter. 

You don’t want it to be over yet, but you can feel that tight pressure building in your body– begging at you to let go. Kyle’s hand reaches down, his thumb drawing harsh circles on your clit. Your eyes roll back, mind hazy as you cum all over his cock. 

“Hng, so pretty when she lets go,” Johnny groans, his hips stuttering right before he spills in your mouth without any warning. 

You gag around him at the sheer volume of it. It fills up your mouth and dribbles down your chin before he pulls out of you, shooting one last spurt of cum on your cheek. You don’t swallow yet– you know how much he loves to see it sitting on your tongue. 

You keep your jaw open, white spilling out of your mouth each time Kyle lazy thrusts into you. He groans as you clench around him, knowing just how close he is. 

Johnny pulls you into a messy kiss, licking his own seed off your face and out of your mouth. A string of white falls down his lips when he pulls away, finally giving you the chance to swallow the mixture of spit and cum. 

The sight must be what pushes both Kyle and John over the edge. You can hear the familiar sound of John letting go, combined with the feeling of cum being split deep inside your cunt– it’s enough to bring you to another orgasm. 

You breathe heavy, legs wobbly as someone, probably Kyle, tugs some boxers onto your lower half and a shirt over your head before curling up with you on the couch. You don’t question where your underwear went– Johnny’s not subtle. 

You look down at the rug– a gross mess of fluids you know you’ll regret when you have to clean them later. Maybe you can convince John to let you throw it out. 

“Did so perfect for us, Bonnie,” Johnny mumbles, pressing a soft kiss to the side of your head. 

You glance over at John and smile at the sight of him and Simon exchanging gentle touches. “Our dove always takes such good care of us,” he mumbles, curling up against your husband. 

You peek at the coffee table, Polaroids still neatly lined up. “I still think you all cheated,” you grumble out, squealing when Kyle pinches at your side. 

“Fine, sweetheart, you can choose the next game then,” John decides, instantly regretting the words when he sees the crazed glint in your eye. 

“Awe, c’mon, Cap, that’s pure shan! Y’know she’s gonnae cheat,” Johnny whines, burying his head in your neck. 

You look at your husband, a knowing smirk on your face. “Can’t cheat when you’re the one making the rules. Right, Kyle?” 

“Hi, Mr. Price… I, um… baked too many. Thought you might want some.”

He leaned on the doorway, body huge in the frame. His eyes dragged over you, slow and unashamed, making your spine fizz.

“Too many cookies,” he murmured. “Dangerous thing to bring to a man living alone.”

“You always help me with my packages,” you babbled. “I just wanted to thank you.”

His mouth twitched, a private little smile that promised nothing wholesome.

“You sure you’re thanking me,” he said, stepping aside, “and not just looking for an excuse to come in?”

You blinked. Didn’t deny it. So you crossed the threshold. And Price shuts the door behind you. He took the plate from your hands, set it down, then pressed a rough palm to your lower back. 

“You have any idea,” he murmured against your ear, voice a low rumble, “how hard it is to behave when you look like that every day?”

Your breath hitched. His fingers slid south, tracing the hem of your little shorts.

“I—I didn’t know you looked at me like that…”

He chuckled. “Sweetheart, I’ve memorized every sound you make up there.”

Your knees nearly gave out. He caught your chin between thumb and forefinger, tilting your face up like he was examining something precious he planned to ruin gently.

“I shouldn’t want you,” he said. “But I do. Badly.”

Your pulse stuttered.

“Tell me no,” he whispered, nose brushing yours. “Or I’m going to take exactly what you came here offering.”

You didn’t say no. Price kissed you like a man finally unburdened. Hungry, and slow. His hand cupped your ass, squeezing like he’d dreamed of it, dragging you flush against the hard, unmistakable shape in his trousers.

“Pretty thing,” he rasped. “You’ve been prancing around upstairs driving me mad. Couldn’t go a single night without thinking about you.”

Your hips rolled instinctively. His groan vibrated through your bones.

He lifted you, and set you on his kitchen counter, your thighs spreading around his hips like they were meant to.

“Good girl,” he praised. “Open up for me.”

His palm slid between your legs, rubbing slow, coaxing you into a breathless, needy mess.

“Already so warm,” he murmured. “I haven’t even touched you properly.”

“John,” you gasped, tugging at his shirt.

He smirked, lips brushing your throat. “There it is. Say it again.”

“John…”

“That’s right. Use my name. You’re not a child, sweetheart.” His thumb pressed right where you needed it. You shivered. “You’re a grown woman letting her neighbor ruin her.”

His mouth sealed over your neck as his fingers dipped under your waistband. And then his breath hitched. “No panties?” he rumbled.

Your cheeks burned. “I—I didn’t think—”

He slid a thick finger through your slick heat, shuddering like he’d been blessed.

“You did,” he growled. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”

His voice dropped, low and sinful, as his finger pushed inside you. “Let your old man have you.”

A hush rolled over the kitchen. Price kept his finger inside you, slow to move it, like he was testing just how tightly you gripped him. His gaze dragged up your body until it locked on your face, and something wicked flickered there.

“Keep looking at me,” he ordered softly, the kind of softness that lands like a command.

You tried, you really did, but your eyelids fluttered as his finger curled just right.

He smirked. “Such a pretty reaction. Makes me imagine what you’ll look like when I’m deep in you.”

Your breath stuttered into a sigh, knees falling open wider. The counter felt cold under your thighs, but his body radiated heat. He stepped in close until the hard line of him pressed against your inner thigh.

Then another finger joined the first. Your hand shot to his shoulder.

“Good girl,” he murmured, lips brushing your cheek like a filthy promise. “Take both.”

You clenched around him, helpless. He moved them in a lazy rhythm at first, drawing small circles with his thumb that made you gasp and bite your lip. The sound you made earned a low, pleased growl from him.

“You get worked up so easy,” he teased. “Bet you’ve thought about this. Bet you’ve touched yourself thinking about me.”

Heat shot through you. “John—”

“That a yes?” he pushed.

You nodded, cheeks burning.

He groaned like you’d just handed him a loaded fantasy. “Let me guess. You imagine me walking in? Hand over your mouth to keep you quiet?”

Your thighs trembled under his grip. Your voice turned breathy. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” he echoed with a grin, curling his fingers deeper until you choked on a gasp. “Sweetheart, you’d melt if I actually did that.”

Your head tipped back, but he grabbed your chin, forcing your gaze back to him.

“No hiding.” His voice was low, rough, coaxing. “I want to see you fall apart.”

He curled his fingers again, and your hips lurched. The wet sound of him working you open filled the kitchen, obscene under the hum of the refrigerator.

Price kissed your jaw, scraping his beard along your skin. “You’re gripping me like you’re close. You gonna come on my fingers?”

Your nails bit into his shoulder. “Feels—feels so good—”

“That’s it,” he whispered, speeding up just a little, enough to push you toward that edge with intention. His free hand slid up your back, holding you steady as your body tensed. “Let go for me.”

Your breath hitched, legs shaking.

“Go on,” he coaxed, voice dark honey. “Give it to me.”

And then you did. Your body arched, every nerve sparking as the orgasm crashed through you. Price groaned at the way you pulsed around his fingers, savoring it like he’d earned it. He didn’t stop. Didn’t let you drift down easy. He kept his fingers moving until you whimpered and clutched at him.

“Beautiful,” he murmured against your neck. “Just beautiful.”

He withdrew his fingers slowly, coated with slick, and held your gaze as he brought them to his mouth. He sucked them clean, groaning like a man who’d been starving.

“Tastes even better than I imagined.”

You shivered, still breathless.

On the worst day of your life, the sky above Central City split open in red and gold.

You were in the basement archives of the Central City Museum when the alarms started screaming. The storage wing was supposed to be secure against fire, flood, theft, and most ordinary forms of metahuman disaster. That was what the trustees said during fundraisers, anyway, usually while standing near glass cases full of artifacts that had survived wars, dynasties, and colonial looting only to be entrusted to a building with questionable wiring and a gift shop shaped like a lightning bolt.

You had been cataloging damaged objects from the last superhero incident when the lights flickered once.

Then again.

Then the room bent.

There was no better word for it. The walls did not shake. The floor did not crack at first. Reality folded inward like someone had gripped the edges of the world and pulled too hard. The archive shelves stretched long, then snapped back into place. A bronze helmet on your table aged green and copper and green again in the space of a second. Your phone flashed through dates too quickly to read.

You heard yourself breathe in.

You did not hear yourself breathe out.

The air turned electric. Every hair on your arms lifted. Somewhere above you, people shouted. Somewhere much closer, something bright and violent punched through the ceiling.

Lightning hit the floor in front of you.

It should have killed you. You had enough time to know that. You saw the white-gold flare, smelled ozone and burning dust, felt the impossible heat open in the air, and understood in the small, clear part of your mind that survived panic that your body was standing directly in the path of something it could not endure.

Then a hand caught your wrist.

The world stopped.

Not slowed. Not quieted. Stopped.

A shard of ceiling hung in the air six inches from your face. Papers floated around you, frozen mid-whirl. The red emergency lights held between flashes, staining everything in a suspended pulse. Your breath was halfway out of your chest and would not move.

The only thing alive in the room was the man holding your wrist.

He was dressed in red. That was your first thought, stupidly ordinary against the impossible. Red suit, gold lightning, hair like copper under the emergency lights, face smudged with soot and blood at his temple. You knew who he was in the vague way everyone in Central City knew who he was. The Flash. Wally West. Hero, menace, headline, beloved civic hazard.

Except he was looking at you like you were not vague to him at all.

His grip tightened around your wrist. His eyes moved over your face with such raw relief that your fear briefly lost its shape.

“Oh, thank God,” he breathed.

You stared at him.

He said your name.

Not a question. Not a guess. He said it the way someone said a prayer after surviving the answer.

Your stomach dropped. “How do you know my name?”

Wally’s expression changed. Grief crossed it so quickly you might have missed it if the whole world had not been holding still around you. He looked older than the photos you had seen of him, not much, maybe a year or two, but exhaustion had carved something sharp into the brightness of his face. There was blood on his mouth. His suit was torn at the shoulder. One of his hands was trembling.

“You’re early,” he said.

“For what?”

His smile broke before it became anything useful. “For me.”

The ceiling moved half an inch.

Wally looked up sharply. The lightning around him flared, throwing gold across the frozen wreckage. You felt the air press against your skin, time straining to resume.

“Listen to me,” he said, too quickly now. “You’re going to get out of here. Captain Singh is going to ask you what happened, and you’re going to tell him the truth.”

“The truth is that the Flash knows my name and the ceiling froze.”

“Yeah.” His mouth twitched with something too wounded to be humor. “Maybe soften the delivery.”

“Wally.”

His eyes snapped back to yours.

You had not meant to say it like that. You had not meant to say it at all. His name came out frightened, intimate, shaped around a future you did not have.

For one impossible second, he looked ruined by the sound.

Then he reached for you.

You should have pulled away. He was a stranger wearing a hero’s face, standing in a broken second, blood on his lips and your name in his mouth. Every reasonable instinct in your body should have rejected his touch. Instead, you stood there as his fingers brushed your cheek with devastating care.

He touched you like he had done it before.

He touched you like he was trying to remember how it felt.

“Don’t let me run from you,” he said.

Your throat tightened. “What does that mean?”

The ceiling gave another inch. Sound rushed back in at the edges of the room, a low roar dragging the world toward motion.

Wally caught your hand, lifted it, and pressed his mouth to your knuckles.

It was not a flirtation. It was not charming. It was the saddest kiss you had ever received, and it lasted barely long enough to become real.

Then he pushed you behind him, and the world exploded.

You remembered speed after that. A blur of red. Gold lightning. His arm around your waist. Heat, then cold, then the brutal slap of the evening air as you landed on the sidewalk outside the museum, sirens wailing around you. People screamed. Glass rained down behind police barricades. Someone wrapped a blanket around your shoulders. Someone else asked if you were hurt.

You looked down at your hand.

Your knuckles still tingled.

By the time you looked up, Wally West was gone.

Displacement

Six months after the museum basement, Wally West ran into you again by accident.

For him, that was all it was.

For you, it was the second time the fastest man alive had ruined your day.

It was good coffee, too. It was a splurge for you, from the place that was twice as expensive as every other coffee shop in the area. That was the part you resented most in the first three seconds before you looked up and saw him standing in front of you with two empty cups, one horrified expression, and the kind of face that made women with coffee spilled on them forgive the spill as a reflex.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I am so sorry. I swear I usually have better hand-eye coordination. Like, professionally better. Historically better. Statistically, this is an outlier.”

You stared at the brown stain spreading across the tops of your shoes.

He continued, “I can buy you new ones. Or pay for cleaning. Do people clean shoes? That sounds fake. I can Google it. I can also stop talking, which is probably the strongest option on the table right now.”

You looked at his face.

The effect was immediate and deeply inconvenient.

You knew him.

You knew the slope of his nose, the line of his mouth, the warm copper of his hair. You knew the way his eyes went soft around your name before he said it. You knew what his hand felt like around your wrist. You knew what his mouth felt like on your knuckles.

Except this Wally was not wrecked. He was not bleeding, older-eyed, or standing in a frozen disaster with lightning tearing apart the world. He was bright and sheepish and painfully alive under the warm lights of a Central City coffee shop. His hoodie was yellow. His sneakers were red. He had whipped cream on one knuckle and no idea who you were.

Your heart forgot how time worked before you knew what kind of lightning could split a life in two.

“Are you okay?” he asked, smile dimming. “Did I burn you?”

“No,” you said.

“Okay. Good. Good, that’s good. Your shoes may never forgive me, but skin is the priority.”

You should have laughed. He was trying for it. Everything about him seemed designed to pull humor from disaster before anyone could panic. His mouth tilted hopefully, as if he had spent his whole life learning that a grin was useful armor.

Instead, you said, “Do I know you?”

Wally blinked. “I feel like I’d remember that.”

Your throat felt tight. “Would you?”

Something flickered across his face. It was small, almost nothing, but for the first time since he had crashed into you, he looked less like a man apologizing over coffee and more like a hero who had heard the wrong note in a familiar room.

“I’m Wally,” he said carefully.

“I know.”

His eyebrows rose. “Cool. Usually flattering. Slightly ominous in context.”

You gave him your name.

Nothing happened.

That was the cruel part. No lightning. No recognition. No break in the air. He only smiled, warm and easy, and repeated it once as if he were testing the shape of it.

It sounded nothing like the way he had said it with blood on his mouth and the world falling apart around you.

You hated him a little for that.

“Well,” he said, recovering with a speed that felt unfairly on-brand, “since I ruined your shoes and possibly your morning, can I replace the coffee I also ruined? I promise the second attempt comes with at least forty percent less property damage.”

You looked down at your shoes again because his face was too much.

“I’m late for work.”

“Right. Museum, yeah?”

Your gaze snapped up.

Wally froze.

For half a second, neither of you spoke.

Then he pointed weakly at the lanyard around your neck. “Badge. Your badge says Central City Museum. I am observant in a normal, non-creepy way.”

You looked down. Your badge was turned outward, your name and department visible under the museum logo.

For him, it was an explanation.

For you, it was a warning shot.

“Right,” you said.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“No, totally fair. I did just attack you with coffee.”

You stepped around him, careful not to brush his shoulder. “Have a nice day, Wally.”

“You too,” he called after you. Then, because apparently he was incapable of letting a moment end gracefully, “And seriously, about the shoes. I’m good for it. I have a job. Several, depending on how you define tax fraud.”

You did laugh then, unwillingly, once, and hated him more for making it happen.

When you glanced back through the window, he was still watching you with his head tilted, as if trying to figure out why a stranger’s almost-smile felt like something he had been waiting for.

Afterimage

The next time Wally West entered your life, he was two months ahead and bleeding on your fire escape.

You were not proud of the noise you made.

To be fair, it was two in the morning. You were asleep. There was a thunderstorm shaking rain against the glass, and your apartment was on the fifth floor. A person appearing on your fire escape under those conditions deserved whatever unflattering sound came out of your mouth when you woke to knuckles tapping against the pane.

Wally waved weakly through the window.

He was bleeding.

You sat upright so fast your blanket tangled around your legs. For one disorienting second, your mind tried to reconcile too many versions of him at once. Coffee-shop Wally, grinning and careless. Museum Wally, bloody and heartbroken. This Wally, soaked to the skin, one hand pressed to his ribs, looking almost embarrassed to be dying outside your apartment.

You opened the window.

Rain blew in immediately.

“What the hell?” you demanded.

“Hi,” he said. “Funny story.”

“You’re bleeding on my fire escape.”

“Yeah, that’s the less funny part.”

You grabbed his arm and pulled. He could have made it easy. You knew that even if you did not yet understand the full physics of him. He could have been inside before your hand closed around his wrist. Instead, he let you haul him awkwardly through the window like a normal person, all long limbs and wet fabric and a pained hiss when his side hit the sill.

He landed on your bedroom floor and looked around.

“Huh,” he said.

You stood over him as he dripped rainwater onto your rug. “Huh?”

“Your room is different.”

Your blood went cold.

Not nice. Not small. Not messy. Different.

As if he had seen it before.

As if he had seen another version of it before.

Wally seemed to realize what he had said at the same time you did. His eyes lifted to yours, and the boyishness drained out of his face.

“You know this room,” you said.

His mouth parted.

“You know me.”

He did not deny it.

Not coffee-shop knew you. Not flirted-over-ruined-shoes knew you. This Wally knew where you kept your books. This Wally had seen your bedroom before. This Wally looked at you and forgot, for half a second, that you might not be the same you who had let him in last time.

“When are you from?” you asked.

The question should have sounded insane. Instead, after the museum basement, after the frozen ceiling, after his mouth on your knuckles and your name in his mouth, it felt like the only one left.

Wally pushed himself up against the side of your bed, one hand still pressed to his ribs. “What’s the date?”

You told him.

He closed his eyes. “Damn it.”

“Wally.”

“Two months ahead,” he said. “For me. I’m two months ahead of you.”

Your apartment seemed too small around the answer. Rain tapped hard against the window. The yellow light from your bedside lamp made him look almost human, except for the faint static crawling over his skin and the way the air shimmered around him like heat over pavement.

You grabbed the first-aid kit from your bathroom with hands that shook only after you turned away.

When you came back, he had managed to unzip the top half of his suit. There was a long, ugly cut along his ribs, already healing too quickly at the edges. You crouched beside him, opened the kit, and tried not to think about the fact that his body knew how to recover from things that would have put anyone else in an ambulance.

“You should go to a hospital.”

“Speedster metabolism.” He gave you a strained smile. “By the time they get a doctor in, I’d be healed and starving enough to eat the tongue depressors.”

“Do not try to be charming while bleeding.”

“That wasn’t trying. That was medical trivia with charm.”

You pressed gauze to his side.

He inhaled sharply. His hand shot out and caught your wrist, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to stop you. The contact flashed through you: his hand in the museum, his mouth on your knuckles, his voice telling you not to let him run.

Wally’s gaze dropped to where he was touching you.

He let go immediately.

“Sorry,” he said.

You kept the gauze in place. “What happens?”

His face tightened.

“With us,” you clarified, because apparently you had reached a point in your life where that was the simpler question. “What happens with us that you know my apartment?”

Wally leaned his head back against the bed. For once, he did not have a joke ready. The absence of one felt worse.

“We become friends,” he said.

You waited.

His smile was faint and pained. “You learn when I’m lying by omission.”

“That fast?”

“You’re really annoying about it.”

You pressed harder against the wound. “You broke into my apartment bleeding from the future.”

“Technically, I knocked.”

“Wally.”

His eyes found yours.

There was too much in them. That was the recurring problem with him. Present-day Wally had too little history with you. Future-Wally had too much. Neither version seemed capable of standing in front of you without making your chest ache.

“We don’t have the whole story,” he said softly. “Either of us. I remember things you haven’t done yet. You know things about me I haven’t told you yet. The Speed Force is…it’s looping something around us, and I don’t know why.”

“Can you fix it?”

Wally looked away.

That was answer enough.

You taped the gauze down in silence. His breathing steadied under your hands, but the room did not feel calmer. If anything, the quiet made him more dangerous. Wally West moving was a spectacle. Wally West not moving was intimate in a way you did not know how to defend against.

When you finished, he looked down at the bandage, then back at you.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For bleeding on my rug?”

“For all of it.” His voice thinned. “For whatever version of me you met first.”

You thought of lightning. His hand on your cheek. The unbearable tenderness of his mouth against your hand.

“He was sad,” you said.

Wally swallowed. “Yeah?”

“He looked at me like losing me had already happened.”

For a moment, the only sound was rain.

Then Wally said, very quietly, “That sounds like me.”

You did not know what to do with that.

So you set the bloody gauze aside, sat back on your heels, and made the first rule before time could take anything else from you.

“No using things I haven’t told you yet.”

Wally’s eyes sharpened.

You held his gaze. “If you remember things we do later, that doesn’t mean this version of me has agreed to them now. You don’t get to assume I want something because another version of me wanted it. You don’t get to skip ahead.”

His expression shifted with every sentence, the charm falling away piece by piece until only the man underneath remained.

“That sounds fair,” he said.

“No,” you said. “It’s necessary.”

Wally nodded once.

The air between you changed. It did not get less charged. If anything, the boundary made the charge worse because he understood it, because he did not argue, because he looked at you as if the rule hurt and relieved him at the same time.

“Okay,” he said. “No skipping ahead.”

You believed him because some part of you already knew that trusting Wally West would hurt, and that it might be worth it anyway.

Echo

The first time future-Wally appeared in your apartment without bleeding on anything, he was standing in your living room at dawn.

You found him because you had woken to the sound of your kettle turning on.

For a few seconds, your half-asleep mind tried to make the noise ordinary. Pipes, maybe. A neighbor. The old radiator knocking awake even though it was barely cold outside. Then you remembered you did not own a kettle with an automatic setting, and your body went still beneath the blankets.

You reached for the baseball bat beside your bed.

By the time you stepped into the hallway, future-Wally was already looking at you.

He stood in the dim blue-gray light near your kitchen counter, hair damp from rain that had not fallen in your timeline yet. His suit was scuffed but intact, mask pushed back, one hand braced beside the stove as if he had needed the counter to keep himself upright. The kettle clicked off behind him.

He looked at the bat in your hand.

His mouth twitched. “That’s new.”

You tightened your grip. “For me, or for you?”

The almost-smile vanished.

“For me,” he said.

That should have comforted you. It did not. Every time he knew something, the room tilted. Every time he did not, it hurt in a different direction.

He looked away from you and toward the mug sitting beside the stove. It was one of yours, chipped along the rim, a museum gift shop mug with a faded print of an ancient coin on the side. You had bought it years ago because it had been mispriced and ugly enough to make you laugh. Wally touched the handle with one finger, then drew his hand back before he could pick it up.

You noticed.

“You know that mug,” you said.

His eyes closed.

“Wally.”

“I know where you keep the tea,” he said, and his voice was too rough for something so small. “I know which mug you use when you can’t sleep. I know you hate when people leave spoons in the sink, but you do it all the time when you’re upset. I know there’s a blanket in the bottom drawer of your TV stand because you always say the couch is colder than it looks.”

Your hand lowered slightly around the bat.

He laughed once, without humor. “I also know I’m not supposed to know any of that yet.”

The apartment felt suddenly too full. Too lived-in. As if another version of you had already walked through it with him, already made room for him, already let him learn the quiet things nobody learned by accident.

“Are we together where you’re from?” you asked.

Wally’s face changed.

The answer was there before he refused to give it.

“I’m not allowed to answer that,” he said.

“You’re not allowed?”

“You made rules.”

“I made one rule.”

“You make more.” His mouth softened around the words, fondness slipping through before he could stop it. “You get very specific when you’re angry.”

You should not have liked knowing that. You should not have wanted the shape of those future arguments, the proof that you knew him well enough someday to be furious with precision. Instead, you stood in your own hallway with a baseball bat in your hand and felt jealousy move through you for a version of yourself who had already survived his closeness.

Wally looked at the bat again. “You should put that down before I say something stupid and deserve it.”

“You usually deserve it?”

“More often than I’d like.”

You leaned the bat against the wall, but you did not move closer. He watched the choice as if he understood every inch of distance between you and hated himself for recognizing it.

“What are you doing here?” you asked.

“I don’t know.” His eyes flicked toward the window, where early morning pressed pale and thin against the glass. “That’s a bad answer. I was running, and then I was here.”

“Running from what?”

He smiled faintly. “You’re going to hate the pattern.”

“Wally.”

“Consequences,” he said.

The word landed heavily.

He rubbed a hand over his face. For the first time, you saw how tired he really was. Not sleepy. Not bruised from one fight. Tired in a way that looked worn into him, like his body had healed too many times around the same wound.

“You need to listen to me,” he said.

You folded your arms. “Historically, that has not gone well.”

“I know.” His gaze came back to yours, sharp with urgency now. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If I show up and tell you not to go somewhere, don’t listen unless I tell you why.”

You stared at him.

He took one step toward you, then stopped himself. The restraint looked physical.

“Don’t let me turn fear into instructions,” he said. “Don’t let me make your choices and call it protection. I promised you I’d stop doing that.”

Your throat tightened.

“When?”

His face twisted.

“Later,” he said.

“That is a terrible answer.”

“It’s the only one I can give without making it worse.”

You almost laughed at that because the damage was already impossible to measure. Your kitchen smelled like hot water and ozone. Your mug sat untouched on the counter. Wally West stood in front of you like a man haunting a home he had not yet been invited into.

“Did you keep the promise?” you asked.

He looked at you for a long moment.

Then his expression broke.

“I’m trying,” he said.

That was when you understood that trying was not the same as succeeding.

Lightning crawled over his shoulders. He looked down at himself, jaw tightening, and you knew he was about to vanish because every version of him left before you could ask the question that mattered most.

You said his name anyway.

He looked up.

For half a second, the grief on his face became unbearable.

“Don’t let me run from you,” he said.

Then he was gone.

The kettle sat cooling on the counter. The mug stayed empty beside it.

You stood in the hallway until the dawn had finished brightening your apartment, thinking about promises made in a future you had not reached and broken by a man who still looked at you as if he were trying to save you from loving him.

Friction

Wally West was jealous of himself.

He tried to hide it, which was funny for about five minutes and then awful for much longer.

You saw it the first time future-Wally appeared in your kitchen while present-Wally was standing three feet away, eating cereal from a mug because you had not done the dishes that week. One second, present-Wally was talking too quickly about a fight with Mirror Master that had somehow involved a duck boat, three confused tourists, and a churro stand. The next, lightning snapped across your kitchen tile, and another Wally was there.

This one looked exhausted.

He was wearing the suit, mask gone, hair damp with sweat. There was ash on his cheek. His gaze swept the room, found you, and softened so intensely that present-Wally stopped mid-sentence.

“Oh,” future-Wally said.

Present-Wally’s spoon lowered. “Oh?”

Future-Wally glanced at him, then winced. “This is a bad one.”

“You think?” present-Wally asked.

You gripped the edge of the counter. “When are you from?”

Future-Wally looked back at you. “Two months after the fire escape.”

“I hate that that made sense to me,” you said.

He smiled, and the familiarity of it hurt.

Then he stepped toward you.

Present-Wally moved first.

It was barely a movement, more instinct than decision. A blur of red-gold, and he was between you and himself, shoulders tense. Future-Wally stopped immediately. Something passed between them that you could not read, except that both of them looked wounded by it.

“Relax,” future-Wally said softly. “I’m not here for that.”

“Then what?” present-Wally demanded.

Future-Wally’s eyes flicked to yours.

You knew before he said anything that the answer belonged to a version of you who had already lived something this kitchen had not reached.

Present-Wally knew it too.

His jaw tightened. “Right.”

“Wally,” you said.

Both of them looked at you.

You closed your eyes. “That is horrible.”

Future-Wally laughed once, tired and fond. Present-Wally looked like he wanted to punch him, which would have been more satisfying if the logistics had made any sense.

The future version did not stay long. He never did. That was another cruelty you started cataloging without meaning to. Future-Wally appeared like grief given a body, dropped an impossible warning, looked at you as if the sight of you were water in a desert, and vanished before you could decide whether you were angry or relieved.

This one was worse than the version of him who had stood in your kitchen at dawn and told you not to trust warnings without explanations. That Wally had still been trying to warn you against himself. This one looked like something had snapped between then and now. Like fear had finally taught him to ignore his own warning.

This time, he only said, “Don’t go to the museum gala next week.”

You stared at him. “Why?”

“Because I asked you to.”

Present-Wally made a sharp sound. “Absolutely not.”

Future-Wally’s face twisted. “You don’t know what happens.”

“No, I don’t, because you’re doing the dramatic, cryptic time-traveler thing instead of using your words like someone who has met another person before.”

“You think I haven’t tried?”

“I think you’re scaring her.”

Future-Wally flinched.

The kitchen went quiet.

He looked at you again, and the grief was back, older than the rest of him. “Please,” he said.

You hated that most. Not the warning. Not the fear. The please.

Then lightning crawled over his body. He looked at present-Wally. “Don’t make the choice for her.”

Present-Wally’s anger faltered.

Future-Wally vanished.

The cereal mug cracked in present-Wally’s hand.

Neither of you moved for a long moment. Then Wally looked down, cursed, and set the broken mug in the sink.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” he said.

“You say that a lot.”

“I break a lot of things.”

You leaned back against the counter. “I’m going to the gala.”

Wally nodded immediately. “I know.”

“You don’t get to tell me not to.”

“I know that too.”

“Even if he is you.”

“Especially if he’s me.”

That made something in your chest loosen, which was unfair because you were still angry. Wally looked at you with his hands braced on the sink, eyes too bright, mouth pressed into a line as if he was physically holding back every terrified thing he wanted to say.

Then, because he was Wally, he ruined the solemnity of the moment.

“For the record,” he said, “I hate future me.”

You blinked.

“He’s got this whole tragic cheekbone thing going on. Very annoying. Very effective. I feel manipulated by my own bone structure.”

You laughed before you could stop yourself.

Wally’s face changed at the sound. He looked hungry for it, then immediately guilty for wanting anything from you while the air still smelled like lightning.

You crossed your arms. “Are you actually jealous of yourself?”

“Yes,” he said at once. “Deeply. In a way I’m not proud of but am choosing to be honest about for personal growth reasons.”

“Wally.”

“He knows things,” Wally said, the humor thinning into something true. “He looks at you like he knows what it feels like when you let him stay.”

Your breath caught.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. The man could probably count your heartbeats. He looked away anyway, giving you the mercy of pretending he had not.

“Do I?” he asked.

Your voice came out softer than you intended. “Do you what?”

“Make you happy?”

The question hurt because he was trying to sound casual. He was very bad at it.

“Sometimes,” you said.

Wally nodded. He absorbed that like it was more precious than a yes.

Then he asked, “Do I hurt you?”

You did not answer quickly enough.

His face fell in careful increments, hope withdrawing before he could embarrass either of you with how much it mattered.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“Wally, I don’t know what happens.”

“Neither do I.” He looked at his hands. “But I know myself.”

The memory hit him twenty minutes after the other Wally vanished.

One second, Wally was standing in your kitchen with his hand wrapped in a towel because he had managed to cut himself cleaning up the mug he had broken. The next, his face went blank. Not empty. Elsewhere.

You watched his fingers loosen around the towel.

“Wally?”

He blinked once. Lightning crawled over his knuckles and died there, trapped under his skin.

“I remember this,” he said.

Your stomach tightened. “The mug?”

“No.” His eyes lifted to yours, and whatever he saw made him look away again too quickly. “You. Standing there. Asking me if I’m going to keep punishing myself for choices I haven’t made yet.”

“I haven’t said that.”

“I know.”

The silence after that felt worse than the words. You could see him trying to put the memory down carefully, like something sharp he had found in the dark. He did not tell you what came before it. He did not tell you what came after. He only pressed the towel harder against his palm and breathed through whatever future had just crossed his face.

You hated that he was trying to protect you from it.

You hated more that he was probably trying to protect himself.

The gala happened three days later.

You went because you were stubborn, because future-Wally had warned instead of trusted, and because you refused to let any version of the man you were falling for start making your choices for you.

Present-Wally went with you because he was stubborn too, and because he had taken to hovering near your life with the restless restraint of someone trying very hard not to become a cage.

He wore a suit.

That felt important in a way you did not want to unpack. You had seen him in the Flash suit, in hoodies, in your apartment with blood on his skin and rain in his hair. You had never seen him like this, dressed in dark red with a gold tie and his hair combed back until it gave up halfway through the evening. 

He looked handsome enough to be irritating, which you told him as soon as he arrived.

His grin flashed. “I’ll take it.”

“You would take anything as a compliment.”

“From you? Mostly.”

His eyes dropped, not quickly enough to be subtle, taking in the deep burgundy dress you had chosen because it almost matched his suit, and the gold at your ears that echoed his tie. The grin softened into something less practiced. “You look beautiful.”

Your mouth forgot what it had been about to do.

Wally noticed. Of course he noticed. His smile tilted, gentler now, a little nervous around the edges. “Sorry. Was that too much?”

“No,” you said, and hated how honest it sounded.

His gaze flicked once more over the line of your dress, then came back to your face like he had made himself return there. “Good,” he said, smile going crooked. “Because I’ve been trying not to say it since you opened your door.”

You rolled your eyes and turned away before he could see too much.

The Central City Museum gala was exactly as unbearable as you expected. Donors smiled beside exhibits they did not understand. Champagne moved through the room on silver trays. Half the city’s wealthy philanthropists pretended not to stare at Wally, whose identity was public enough that people felt entitled to his attention and famous enough that they lowered their voices when he turned away.

For the first hour, nothing happened.

For the second, you almost relaxed.

That was when the ancient clock in the west gallery began ticking backward.

Wally heard it first.

You knew because his entire body changed before the room did — smile gone, shoulders tense, hand already finding your elbow. Then the lights flickered, and everyone else finally looked up.

“Stay behind me,” he said.

You gave him a look.

His mouth tightened. “Sorry. Stand wherever you want, preferably somewhere that puts my body between yours and the explosion.”

“Better.”

The glass cases rattled. Somewhere, someone screamed. Above the east hall, the clock began to chime and forgot when to stop.

Then every reflective surface in the gallery filled with lightning.

Wally pushed civilians toward the exits faster than human panic could understand. He was motion and command, red-gold arcs flickering under the cuffs of his suit because he had not changed, because there was no time, because there was never enough time with him.

You were halfway to the staff corridor when the rupture opened.

It did not look like the one from the museum basement. This one was narrower, almost beautiful, a vertical wound of white light splitting the air beside the ancient clock. You felt it pull at you. Not your body exactly. Something deeper. Memory, maybe. Possibility. The parts of you that had already touched Wally out of order.

You reached for the wall.

Wally shouted your name.

The world lurched.

A hand closed around yours.

For one dizzy second, you thought it was present-Wally. Then you looked up and saw the older eyes.

Future-Wally.

His grip was desperate. “I told you not to come.”

You should have been afraid.

Instead, anger hit first.

You slapped him.

The sound cracked through the gallery, sharp enough that even the rupture seemed to pause.

Future-Wally’s head turned with it. He froze, one hand still wrapped around yours, red blooming faintly on his cheek.

Across the room, present-Wally stared.

You pointed at the future version of him. “You do not get to appear in my kitchen, ask me to obey you without explanation, and then look betrayed when I don’t.”

Future-Wally’s jaw worked.

“You promised,” you said, and you did not know where the words came from until they were already out. “You promised you’d stop doing this.”

Both Wallys went still.

You felt the sentence settle into the wrong place in the timeline.

Future-Wally looked devastated.

Present-Wally looked like he had been shot.

The rupture screamed.

Future-Wally released your hand and shoved you toward his younger self. Present-Wally caught you immediately, one arm around your waist, his body braced between you and the white light.

“Get her out,” future-Wally said.

Present-Wally’s eyes burned. “What did you do?”

Future-Wally smiled without humor. “Loved her badly, apparently.”

Then the rupture swallowed him.

Heat Lightning

After the gala, Wally disappeared for four days.

Present-Wally. Your Wally, though you had not let yourself think of him that way until he was gone long enough for fear to make language honest.

You told yourself he was busy. Central City had disasters the way other cities had weather. You told yourself he was working with Barry, or the Titans, or the League, or whatever impossible network of people handled a Speed Force rupture when it started aiming itself at one woman’s life.

By the second day, you were angry.

By the third, you were scared.

By the fourth, you opened your apartment door and found him sitting in the hallway with his back against the opposite wall, knees drawn up, hair a mess, a paper bag from your favorite takeout place beside him.

He looked up at you.

“I didn’t want to knock if you were sleeping,” he said.

Your heart hurt so violently you almost closed the door in his face.

Instead, you stepped into the hallway. “You have superspeed.”

“Yeah.”

“You could have checked.”

“That felt creepy.”

“You have come through my window bleeding.”

“That was emergency creepy. Different category.”

You stared at him until his attempt at a smile collapsed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For which part?”

“All the parts currently available to me.”

That was such a Wally answer that it made you furious all over again.

You crossed your arms. “You disappeared.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to do that because a future version of you scared you.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to decide I’m safer if you’re gone.”

His eyes lifted to yours. “I know.”

The hallway went quiet. Somewhere behind a neighboring door, a television laugh track rose and faded. Wally looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. He looked young, too, painfully young compared to the version of him who had stood in the gala rupture and taken your slap like he believed he deserved it.

You hated that you understood him.

You hated more that understanding did not make the hurt vanish.

“I needed to know,” he said. “If staying away fixed anything.”

Your throat tightened. “Did it?”

“No.” He huffed a laugh and rubbed both hands over his face. “It made me useless and annoying. Barry threatened to sedate me with a sandwich.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It was a big sandwich.”

You did not want to smile. Your mouth did it anyway, traitorous and small.

Wally saw. The relief on his face was immediate and too much.

You opened the door wider. “Come in before my neighbors start enjoying this.”

He stood, grabbed the bag, and followed you inside.

For a while, you ate dinner on the floor because your coffee table was covered in museum paperwork and Wally seemed more comfortable there anyway. He finally told you what he knew. The rupture had attached itself to both of you during the basement incident from your past and his future. Or maybe his past and your past. The language kept failing. 

The important part was that the Speed Force was folding moments around an emotional anchor.

You looked at him over your noodles. “An emotional anchor.”

Wally winced. “That’s the term Barry used.”

“That sounds fake.”

“Most of my life sounds fake.”

“And I’m the anchor?”

“Maybe.” He looked down at his food. “Maybe we both are.”

You absorbed that slowly.

The apartment felt warm around you. Rain tapped softly against the windows, less violent than before. Wally sat across from you in sweatpants and an old Keystone City hoodie, socked feet stretched under your table, chopsticks held too carefully in hands that could break the sound barrier.

He was trying so hard to be still.

The realization moved through you like heat.

You set your food aside. “Do you remember things?”

He froze. “What?”

“From later.”

He did not answer immediately. You watched the rule pass behind his eyes, followed by something worse than guilt. 

Recognition.

That was answer enough.

You looked down at his hands, curled carefully against his own knees like he did not trust them to reach for you. “Is that what you’re doing?”

His voice came out quieter. “Doing what?”

“Waiting for me to become someone you have memories of.”

Wally looked away.

“I don’t mean to.”

“I know.”

“I’m trying to keep it clean.”

“It isn’t clean, Wally.”

His laugh came out rough. “Yeah, I’m getting that.”

The silence between you stretched thin. 

“Some,” he said at last.

You looked back at him.

“I remember some things,” Wally said. “Not all the time. It’s not like watching a movie. It’s worse than that. It’s little things. I’ll know where you keep the spare blanket before I’ve ever seen you take it out. I’ll reach for a mug you haven’t bought yet. Sometimes you’ll say something, and I’ll remember missing it before you finish the sentence.”

Your throat tightened.

He laughed once, without humor. “There are jokes I know I’ve heard from you, but I don’t know when you tell them. There are arguments where I only remember my own side, which is probably exactly as useless as it sounds.”

His fingers flexed against his knees.

“Sometimes I remember your hand in mine,” he said. “Sometimes I remember letting go.”

“Wally.”

“I know.” He closed his eyes. “That’s the problem. I know too much and not enough, and none of it belongs to me yet.”

The last word did something awful to you.

Yet.

He opened his eyes again, and the restraint in them looked almost painful. “That’s why I can’t answer you the way part of me wants to. Because I remember wanting you before I earned it.”

Wally looked at you then. Really looked. The air between you tightened, not with lightning this time, but with all the ordinary danger of wanting someone who was trying to be good.

“You can ask me to leave,” he said.

“I know.”

“I probably should.”

“Probably.”

He swallowed. “I don’t want to kiss you because future me already got to.”

Despite yourself, your mouth twitched. “Got to?”

“Bad phrasing,” he said immediately. “Terrible phrasing. I mean—” He exhaled, the joke falling away. “I want to kiss you because I want to. Right now. And because you want me to. Not because time already filled in the blank.”

You moved closer before fear could talk you out of it. Wally went very still.

“I’m not kissing you because someday I might love you,” you said.

Something flickered across his face, too quick to name and too honest to miss.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to know the ending,” you said. “I’m asking you to stay in this part with me.”

For once, Wally West did not have a quip ready in a heartbeat.

You leaned in slowly enough that he could move away. He did not. He watched you like every inch was a choice he refused to steal. When your mouth touched his, he exhaled so softly it almost sounded like pain.

Wally kissed you and, for once, did not try to beat the moment to the finish line.

It was almost funny, how careful he was. Wally West, who could outrun time, holding himself still with one hand braced beside your head and the other curled loosely at your waist, as if touching you too quickly might send both of you into another century.

When he pulled back, his smile was crooked and ruined around the edges.

His hands did not tighten. That somehow made it worse. They hovered near your waist, fingers flexing with all the things he was not letting himself take, restraint trembling through him while his eyes dropped to your mouth.

You closed the distance this time.

He let you.

You tasted takeout sauce and mint and the faint electric edge that always seemed to cling to his skin. You kissed him harder, and Wally made himself stay with you second by second, letting you set the pace until your hand slid into his hair and pulled.

He groaned.

The sound went straight through you.

His hands found your waist then, careful even with the urgency in them.

“Tell me if I’m moving too fast,” he said.

You laughed breathlessly against his mouth. “That is a terrible thing for you to say.”

“I know.” His forehead tipped against yours, smile flickering helplessly back to life. “I realized it after I said it.”

You kissed him again because he was ridiculous and because you wanted him so badly your body felt bright with it. Wally’s hands tightened. In the next second, he lifted you into his lap like it cost him nothing. Then he froze beneath you, eyes wide, like he had surprised himself more than you.

“Was that okay?”

You looked down at him, at the flush high on his cheeks, at the effort written into every line of his body.

“Yes,” you said. “That was okay.”

Relief flickered across his face. Then you rolled your hips once, and relief became something much less composed.

“Jesus,” he breathed.

You smiled despite yourself. “Still jealous of future you?”

“Currently trying very hard not to think about that guy.”

“Good.”

You kissed him again, deeper this time, and felt him give under you in increments. The fastest man alive, and he let you slow him down with your hands in his hair and your body settling warm over his. His fingers slipped beneath the hem of your shirt, then stopped against your skin.

You pulled back. “Wally.”

His eyes lifted to yours.

“You can touch me.”

The words hit him hard. You saw it in his face, in the way desire moved through him and dragged reverence with it. His hands spread against your waist, warm and broad, thumbs stroking once over your skin like he was learning you for the first time because he was.

He did not say, I know.

He did not say, I remember.

He said, “Like this?”

Your chest tightened.

“Yes.”

His hands moved with aching care, up your sides, over your ribs, pausing when your breath caught. He watched your face for every answer you gave him, the spoken ones and the ones your body offered before language. When he drew your shirt up, he waited until you lifted your arms. When his mouth found your throat, he went slow enough that the scrape of his teeth made your thighs tighten around him.

“Wally,” you whispered.

His breath shuddered against your skin. “Yeah?”

“Bedroom.”

For half a second, you thought he might short-circuit.

Then he stood with you in his arms.

The world blurred.

Your back hit the mattress before you finished gasping. Wally was over you, one hand braced beside your head, already apologizing.

“Sorry. Sorry, that was—”

You caught his face and kissed him quiet.

He melted.

There was no other word for it. Wally West, all lightning and restless motion, softened over you when you kissed him like you wanted him there. His weight settled carefully between your thighs, and the hard line of him pressed against you through layers of clothing. Your body answered before you could think, hips lifting, friction dragging a gasp out of both of you.

Wally dropped his forehead to your shoulder. “I’m trying to be respectful.”

“You are.”

“I am also having several disrespectful thoughts.”

You laughed, breathless and wanting. “Good.”

His mouth found yours again, and after that, the room became touch.

He undressed you slowly because you asked him to. He kissed each inch of skin as it appeared, not with polished confidence, but with attention that made your hands shake. His mouth moved over your collarbone, the swell of your breast, the soft skin beneath. When he took your nipple into his mouth, your back arched, and his hand flattened against your spine to hold you without trapping you.

“Tell me,” he murmured against your skin.

You tangled your fingers in his hair. “Don’t stop.”

He obeyed like the words mattered.

By the time his hand slid between your thighs, you were slick and aching, your breath uneven in the quiet room. Wally looked up at you from where he had kissed a path down your stomach, hair mussed, eyes dark, mouth swollen from yours.

“I want to taste you,” he said.

Heat rushed through you.

He pressed a kiss to the inside of your thigh. “Present tense. Right now. Because I want to. Because you want me to, if you do.”

Your heart twisted so hard it almost hurt.

“Yes,” you said. “I want you to.”

Wally’s eyes closed for a moment, like he needed the words to settle.

Then he lowered his mouth to you.

The first slow drag of his tongue made you gasp. 

He paused immediately, arms looped beneath your thighs and palms spread over your hips, holding you open against his broad shoulders while his eyes flicked up to check your face. 

You nodded, and he did it again, slower this time, learning your pleasure with a focus that made your entire body burn. 

He was good. Of course he was good; he was responsive and eager and almost unbearably patient once he understood that patience made you shake.

Your thighs tightened around his shoulders. Wally groaned against you, the vibration dragging a broken sound from your throat.

“Please,” you managed.

He did it again.

The pleasure built with devastating precision, not rushed, not taken from memory, each stroke chosen because of the way you reacted beneath him. When he slid one finger inside you, he watched your face. When he added another, he waited for the soft yes you gave him before curling them just right.

Your orgasm hit slowly and then all at once, a wave of heat and release that made your hands clutch at his hair. Wally held you through it, mouth gentle as you came down, his hand easing away only when your body stopped trembling.

He kissed the inside of your thigh.

Then your hip.

Then your stomach.

When he climbed back up to you, his mouth was wet, his eyes bright, and something in his expression looked dangerously close to awe.

You pulled him down and kissed him.

He made a sound into your mouth that told you exactly how close he was to losing the last of his restraint.

“Condom?” you asked.

Wally nodded too quickly. “Wallet.”

“Your wallet is in the living room.”

He vanished.

A gust of air hit your bare skin.

He reappeared beside the bed with his wallet in hand and his hair even worse than before. “Sorry. Practical use of powers. Very sexy. Extremely romantic.”

You laughed so hard you covered your face.

Wally’s smile broke open, helpless and bright, and for one second, there he was. Your Wally. Young and nervous and trying, not future grief, not Speed Force omen, not a superhero, just a man standing half-undressed beside your bed with a condom wrapper in his hand and hope all over his face.

“Come here,” you said.

He did.

You pushed his hoodie up, and he let you pull it over his head. His body was lean and warm under your hands, muscle shifting beneath freckled skin, old scars silvering faintly across his chest and ribs. Your fingers drifted over his side, casual and curious.

Wally went still.

Not tense. Not exactly. More like something in him had skipped ahead without the rest of him.

You drew your hand back. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” he said too quickly, then softer, “No. You didn’t.”

But his eyes had gone distant, fixed on some point over your shoulder, as if he were listening to an echo you couldn’t hear.

You covered your hand with his.

“Stay here,” you whispered.

His gaze lifted.

“With me,” you said.

His throat moved. “I’m here.”

When he pushed into you, he did it slowly, jaw clenched with the effort of restraint. You felt every inch, the stretch, the heat, the way his breath broke when your body took him. He stopped once he was fully inside, trembling above you.

“Okay?” he asked.

You wrapped your legs around his waist. “Okay.”

He kissed you before he moved.

Maybe that was what undid you most. Not the speed. Not the strength. The kiss. The fact that he stayed close, forehead brushing yours, mouth finding yours again and again as his hips began to move. He built the rhythm carefully, letting you pull him deeper, letting your hands guide him, letting the present teach him what the future had no right to give.

The bed creaked softly beneath you. Rain whispered against the windows. Wally’s breathing roughened as he drove into you, still controlled, still careful, but losing the battle by degrees.

You wanted him to lose it a little. You wanted to see what wanting looked like when he stopped being afraid of arriving too soon.

“Wally,” you gasped. “Harder.”

His eyes searched yours. Whatever he saw there broke something open.

He gave you harder.

The shift stole the breath from your lungs. His hips snapped into yours with more force, one hand locked around your thigh, holding you open for him while the other braced beside your head. Pleasure sparked hot and bright through your body. You clung to him, nails dragging down his back, and he groaned your name like it belonged to him only because you had handed it over.

Your second orgasm rose faster, pulled tight by the angle of his hips and the desperate sound of his voice against your throat.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m right here.”

You came with his name in your mouth.

Wally followed seconds later, shuddering hard above you, his face buried in your neck as he held himself still and let the pleasure take him.

You felt the last, helpless rhythm of him, the way his body went taut and then loose, the way his breath broke warm against your skin. His hand found yours beside your head and held on like he needed the anchor.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. His heartbeat hammered against yours. His skin was damp and hot. The room smelled like rain and sex and lightning.

Then Wally lifted his head, eyes hazy and dark, his mouth soft from yours. “Don’t move,” he murmured, then immediately winced. “Not in a weird way. In a responsible-condom-disposal way.”

A laugh slipped out of you, breathless and wrecked. “You are unbelievable.”

“I know. I’m devastatingly practical.”

He pulled away carefully, jaw tightening like even that was too much sensation, and tied off the condom before dropping it into the trash by your bed. When he came back, he did not rush. He stretched out beside you slowly, one hand finding your waist like he was asking permission to return.

You answered by turning into him.

Wally softened all at once, a quiet exhale leaving him as he gathered you closer with a care that made your chest ache, as if the shape of you against him were something he wanted to learn in the right order. His arm settled around your back, his palm warm between your shoulder blades, and your cheek found the damp curve of his chest.

For a while, there was only the rain against the window and the uneven slowing of his breath. His fingers moved absently over your spine, tracing nothing you could name. You felt his mouth press once to your hairline, then linger there.

Eventually, he lifted his head.

His expression was open in a way that scared you more than any rupture ever could.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you whispered.

His thumb brushed your cheek. “Like what?”

“Like losing me already happened.”

Pain flickered through his eyes.

Then he kissed you, soft and present.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll look at you like you’re here.”

Static

You woke to the smell of lightning.

For one soft, disoriented moment, you thought it came from the Wally beside you. Present-Wally. Your Wally. His arm was still heavy across your waist, his chest warm against your back, his breathing slow and even in a way you had not known he was capable of. Morning light filtered through the curtains in pale strips, touching the rumpled sheets, the clothes abandoned near the foot of the bed, the faint red marks his mouth had left at your shoulder, and the scratches you left along his back.

Then the air snapped.

Wally woke instantly.

His body went from sleep-warm to alert in less than a second, arm tightening around you before he seemed to remember himself. He loosened his grip, but he did not move away.

You knew before he said anything.

“It’s him?” you asked.

Wally’s jaw brushed your shoulder when he nodded.

Lightning flickered again, not in the bedroom, but somewhere beyond it. The hallway. Close enough to hear. Far enough that the other Wally had chosen not to come in.

That choice made the room feel colder.

Present-Wally sat up slowly. The sheet slipped to his waist, and for one painful second, he looked exactly like what he was: young, half-dressed, frightened, and still trying not to let fear tell him what to do. He reached for his clothes.

“You don’t have to go out there,” you said.

His mouth curved without humor. “Yeah, I do.”

You caught his wrist before he could stand.

He looked down at your hand, then back at you.

“Don’t let him make you hate yourself,” you said.

Wally’s face softened.

“I’ll try.”

You almost told him that trying had not saved the future version from anything. Instead, you let him go.

He pulled on his sweatpants and left the bedroom without turning on the light. You sat up, sheet held against your chest, and listened through the half-open door.

The hallway outside your bedroom was quiet for a moment.

Then, present-Wally said, “You’re getting worse.”

Future-Wally laughed softly.

It was a terrible sound.

“Good morning to you too.”

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“I know.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I know that too.”

You slipped out of bed and found Wally’s discarded hoodie tangled near the foot of the mattress. It was soft, warm from being trapped beneath the blanket, and it smelled like him. You pulled it on before stepping carefully toward the doorway.

From the shadows at the end of the hall, you could see them.

Present-Wally stood near the living room, barefoot and tense, shoulders squared like he could physically block the rest of the apartment from himself. Future-Wally stood by the front door. He had not crossed into the hall. His suit was torn worse than before, the red darkened in places you did not want to identify. There was a bruise along his jaw and blood at his hairline, but it was his expression that made your stomach twist.

He looked at the bedroom door as if it were both a holy ground and a crime scene.

Then his eyes found you.

The future version of Wally West went very still.

You suddenly felt aware of everything: the hoodie hanging loose around your thighs, your bare legs, your sleep-warmed skin, the tender aches in your body from the night before. Nothing about you was indecent, not really, but the intimacy of being seen like this by a version of him who looked as if he had already lost you made your throat tighten.

Future-Wally looked away first.

“Sorry,” he said.

Present-Wally’s hands curled into fists. “Don’t.”

“I said sorry.”

“No, you said it like you were apologizing for remembering.”

Future-Wally’s mouth tightened.

The room held its breath around them.

“You shouldn’t be here,” present-Wally said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you?”

Future-Wally’s gaze dragged back to him. “Because this is where I always lose.”

The words moved through the apartment like a draft.

Present-Wally stared at him. “What does that mean?”

Future-Wally looked past him, not at your body this time, but at your face. His expression changed again, and you hated how much of it you were beginning to understand. The hunger to reach for you. The fear of what reaching had done. The grief of standing outside a room where he had once been happy and knowing happiness had become part of the evidence.

“It means this is the part I keep trying to save,” he said.

Present-Wally’s voice dropped. “Or the part you keep trying to erase.”

Future-Wally flinched as if he had been struck.

You stepped fully into the hall.

Both of them looked at you.

You kept one hand curled in the hem of the hoodie because you needed something to hold on to. “Tell us what happens.”

Future-Wally’s face shut down.

“No.”

“Wally.”

“No.” His voice cracked on it, then steadied badly. “I tell you, and it changes how you walk into a room. It changes how he looks at every door. It changes the choice before you even get to make it.”

Present-Wally moved closer. “You don’t get to decide that.”

Future-Wally laughed once, sharp and broken. “I am the only one here who knows what happens when I don’t.”

“Then say it.”

The older Wally’s eyes went bright.

For a second, you thought he might.

Instead, he looked at present-Wally with something close to pity.

“You think restraint makes you different from me,” he said. “You think because you asked, because you waited, because you let her choose, you can’t still be the reason she ends up in that basement.”

Present-Wally went pale.

“That’s enough,” you said.

Future-Wally closed his eyes at the sound of your voice.

“I know,” he whispered.

“No, I don’t think you do.” You stepped closer despite the way present-Wally shifted, as if every instinct in his body wanted to stop you. “You keep coming here to warn us, but all you’re doing is turning yourself into proof that everything goes wrong.”

Future-Wally opened his eyes.

There was so much pain in them that your anger almost failed you.

Almost.

“You told me not to let you run from me,” you said. “This is you running, Wally. You’re just doing it in circles.”

His mouth parted.

Lightning sparked beneath his skin, wild and unstable.

Present-Wally glanced at it. “You need to leave before the rupture pulls you again.”

Future-Wally did not seem to hear him. He was still looking at you.

“You said that to me before,” he murmured.

“When?”

His smile broke. “After.”

The word hit the hallway strangely.

After what?

You knew he would not answer.

He stepped back toward the door, body already starting to blur at the edges. Present-Wally reached for him, but future-Wally shook his head.

“Don’t come after me.”

“You know I will,” present-Wally said.

“Yeah.” Future-Wally looked at him then, and for the first time, you saw the resemblance clearly. Not the face. The fear. “That’s the problem.”

Lightning gathered around him.

You moved before you thought better of it.

“Wally.”

He looked at you one last time.

You wanted to ask if he had loved you. You wanted to ask if you had loved him. You wanted to ask what kind of future could turn the man from your bed into the ghost at your door.

Instead, you said, “I’m still here.”

Future-Wally’s expression crumpled.

“I know,” he said.

Then he vanished.

The silence after him was worse than the lightning.

Present-Wally stood in the middle of your living room with his back to you, head bowed, shoulders shaking once with a breath he could not quite control. You crossed the space slowly and touched his arm.

He turned into you immediately.

For a while, neither of you spoke. He held you carefully, almost too carefully, his face buried against your hair. You felt his heartbeat racing against yours, too fast to be normal, too human to be frightening.

“I’m scared,” he said.

You closed your eyes.

“I know.”

His arms tightened. “I don’t want to become him.”

You thought of future-Wally’s face when he looked at your bedroom door. You thought of promises made later and broken earlier. You thought of the way every version of him kept trying to save you by taking choices out of your hands.

“Then don’t,” you said.

Wally laughed once, soft and miserable. “Just like that?”

“No.” You pulled back enough to look at him. “But start there.”

His eyes searched yours.

You touched his cheek. “Start by staying.”

So he did.

Threshold

The rupture peaked under the museum two days later.

Some part of you had known it would end where it began, beneath the storage wing where the air still smelled faintly of smoke and ozone no matter how many cleaning companies the museum hired. The basement had been closed for repairs since the incident six months ago. That was the official version, anyway. Time had made the truth harder to file.

You stopped trying to conjugate it.

By then, neither of you was pretending the future could be avoided by looking away from it. Wally had spent the last forty-eight hours with Barry, with sensors, with maps of temporal fractures spread across your kitchen table, with three empty pizza boxes stacked beside a notebook full of equations you could not read. He had slept for ninety minutes on your couch and woken with lightning under his skin, one hand reaching for you before his eyes opened.

He did not apologize for it.

You did not ask him to.

Wally’s Titan comm lit up on your kitchen table, a temporal-fracture warning flashing across the screen. He was on his feet before the first pulse finished. 

“Museum,” he said.

You were already standing by the door.

“You don’t have to come,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

He looked like he wanted to argue.

He didn’t.

That told you how bad it was.

He got you there fast enough that the city smeared into light and sirens. By the time your feet touched pavement again, police had already blocked off the street outside the museum. Wally did not slow until he had carried you past the barricade and through the broken service entrance, stopping only when the stairwell down to the archive cracked open ahead of you. 

Faint gold light pulsed below the floor like a heartbeat. The lower archive was almost unrecognizable. Shelving units had twisted into impossible shapes. Artifacts flickered through different states of decay, bronze shining new and then ancient, paper turning to dust and back again. In the center of the room, the rupture spun open, white-gold and hungry.

Future-Wally stood in front of it.

He looked worse than the last time you had seen him.

The blood and bruising were almost familiar by now. It was the rest of him that made your stomach drop: the scorched tear in his suit, the broken arcs of lightning crawling over his skin, the way his edges blurred every few seconds, as if the room were struggling to hold him in place.

He turned when present-Wally entered, and relief crossed his face before he saw you beside him.

Then the relief curdled.

“You brought her,” he said.

“She insisted,” present-Wally answered.

Future-Wally laughed, bitter and exhausted. “Yeah. She does that.”

You stepped forward. “Tell us how to close it.”

Future-Wally looked at you for a long moment.

Then he said, “I can reset it.”

Present-Wally went still beside you.

“What does that mean?” you asked.

Future-Wally’s mouth tightened. “I can go back to the first rupture and stop the tether from forming. You never get pulled in. The timeline stabilizes. You won’t remember any of this.”

The room seemed to tilt.

Present-Wally said, “And neither will I.”

Future-Wally did not answer.

That was answer enough.

Lightning cracked overhead. You felt Wally’s hand brush yours, then stop, waiting for permission even now. You took his hand and held it in yours.

Future-Wally watched the movement like it hurt him.

“You don’t know what happens if we don’t,” he said.

“You keep saying that,” you replied. “You keep warning me about pain like I haven’t already chosen any of this.”

His face twisted. “I watched you die.”

The words slammed into the room.

Present-Wally’s grip tightened around your hand.

Future-Wally looked at him. “That’s the part you don’t remember yet. That’s the part I’ve been trying to outrun. The rupture takes her because it’s attached to us. At least, that’s what I thought. Every time we chose each other, it got stronger, and I thought if I could make her hate me early enough, maybe it would let go.”

Your chest ached.

“You idiot,” you whispered.

He flinched.

“You absolute fucking idiot.”

Present-Wally let out a strangled laugh that had no humor in it. “Yeah. That tracks.”

Future-Wally looked between you both, frantic now. “You think this is romantic because you don’t remember holding her body.”

“No,” present-Wally said, voice shaking. “I think it’s wrong because you do.”

The rupture screamed louder. Wind tore through the archive. Papers flew around you in a cyclone of half-burned records and impossible dates. Future-Wally staggered toward the light.

“I can fix it,” he said.

Present-Wally moved.

For a second, the room filled with nothing but speed. Red and gold crashed against white. The two versions of him blurred together, then apart, lightning striking lightning. You shielded your face as they fought, not with hatred, but with the horror of two griefs trying to occupy the same body.

Then present-Wally broke through.

He grabbed future-Wally by the front of his torn suit and slammed him back against a warped shelving unit.

“You don’t get to call erasing her a rescue,” he said.

Future-Wally’s face crumpled.

“I can’t lose her,” he whispered.

Present-Wally’s voice broke. “Then stop making the choice for her.”

The rupture pulsed.

You felt it then. Not as science. Not as something Barry could name on a whiteboard or Wally could outrun if he found the right angle. You felt it in the pull beneath your ribs, in the way every impossible thread in the room stretched toward the same terrified center.

Wally.

Not just the one holding your hand. All of him. Every version that had reached backward. Every version that had tried to turn grief into strategy. Every version that had seen the ending and decided the only way to love you was to get there first and tear it apart before you could choose him.

The rupture was not feeding on the two of you loving each other.

It was feeding on him trying to undo it.

The light split open.

Possibility poured through in pieces: the loop, the museum basement, Wally’s hand on your wrist, his mouth on your knuckles, coffee on your shoes, blood on your bedroom floor, his mouth between your thighs, his voice saying he was here. Future-Wally crying over a version of you who had died because he tried to hold the timeline together with his bare hands.

And under it, through it, around it, an opening in the lightning.

Not a reset.

A release.

“Wally,” you said.

Both of them looked at you.

You held out your hand to the younger one.

Present-Wally came to you instantly, but not too fast. Even then, he remembered. Even with the world ending, he let you see him choose to cross the distance.

“The tether is not the problem,” you said.

Future-Wally stared. “What?”

“You’re pulling it tight.” You looked at the rupture, at the light bending toward every version of him that had tried to outrun grief. “You keep trying to control where it ends.”

Present-Wally’s hand slid into yours.

You squeezed once. “Let the moment finish.”

Present-Wally’s eyes met yours.

For one breath, the world narrowed to the warmth of his hand and the terror in his face. He did not understand all of it yet. Maybe neither of you did. But he trusted you anyway.

Across the rupture, Future-Wally went very still. Understanding, slowly and terribly, spread across his face, as if he had finally heard the thing he had been running from. 

“You want me to let go,” he said.

You shook your head. “I want you to stop holding on so hard that it breaks.” 

His mouth trembled around something too damaged to be a laugh. “If you’re wrong—”

“She might be,” present-Wally said.

The answer stunned him into silence.

Present-Wally looked at you. His face was pale. Afraid. Honest.

“We might be wrong,” he said. “But I’m not erasing you to make myself feel brave.”

The rupture opened wider.

For a terrible second, you thought that meant failure.

Then Future-Wally lowered his hand.

The lightning around him faltered.

All at once, you understood: the rupture had never been a wound trying to swallow you. It had never been trying to pull him apart. He had been holding it open, a fist clenched around the timeline, refusing to let the moment finish.

Future-Wally looked at you one last time, grief-stricken and impossibly young beneath all that ruin.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Then he stepped into the light.

For one second, everything happened.

You saw him as the light took him: Wally laughing too loudly with coffee splashed over his hand; Wally bleeding on your bedroom floor; Wally standing in your kitchen like he already knew where every mug belonged; Wally kissing you with rain still damp in his hair; Wally watching you sleep like the sight of you breathing was something he did not trust to last.

Then, the memories broke darker.

Wally running through lightning with your name caught in his throat. Wally reaching the museum too late. Wally holding a version of you who did not move. Wally tearing the timeline open with his bare hands because grief had convinced him that love was something he could fix if he only ran fast enough.

At the center of it all, Future-Wally stopped running.

The light collapsed.

Still

One week later, Wally West knocked on your door.

You knew it was your Wally before you opened it. You did not know how. Maybe you had learned the shape of his presence without lightning around it. Maybe you had learned the difference between a haunting and a homecoming. Maybe you had spent a week listening for footsteps that never came, and hope had finally learned his rhythm.

When you opened the door, he was standing in the hallway with flowers in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

His hair was a mess. His jacket was half-zipped. There was a faint bruise on his jaw, already yellowing at the edges. He looked nervous enough to run and stubborn enough to stay.

No lightning.

No future grief.

No borrowed intimacy.

Just Wally.

“Hi,” he said.

You looked at him for a long moment. “Hi, Wally.”

His shoulders dropped like your voice had unmade the end of the world.

“I brought replacement coffee,” he said, lifting the bag slightly. “And flowers, because apparently when you want to ask someone if you can start over, those are recommended. These are not apology flowers, though. Or they are. Actually, they might be. I panicked at the florist.”

You leaned against the doorframe. “You panicked?”

“The florist was very intense. She asked what message I wanted to send, and I said, ‘Sorry about the time shenanigans. And about my alternate self,’ which, in hindsight, was not helpful.”

You laughed.

Wally’s mouth softened.

For once, he did not rush to fill the silence after. He stood there and let the sound settle between you.

“Do you still remember too much?” you asked.

His fingers tightened around the flowers.

“Some,” he said. “Less every day. Barry says that’s probably good. The timeline is correcting around him letting go, apparently, which is a very Barry way to say my future-self finally stopped making everything worse.”

“And what do you say?”

Wally looked at you, open and scared and so careful it made your chest ache.

“I say I remember enough to know I don’t want to use any of it to skip ahead.”

Your throat tightened.

He held your gaze. “I’d like to know you in order, if you’ll let me.”

Outside, somewhere far off, thunder rolled over Central City. For once, it sounded only like weather.

You stepped aside.

“Yes,” you said.

Wally exhaled shakily.

“Yeah?”

“Yes, Wally.”

He smiled then, slow and bright and disbelieving, as if every version of him had been waiting at the edge of this moment and only this one had been allowed to enter it.

“You can come in,” you said, and this time there was no future hidden inside the invitation.

He crossed the threshold like he had all the time in the world.