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He runs.
There is no time, no space.
He runs.
Sometimes he wonders why he does so.
He just knows he has to run because otherwise his home (?) wouldn’t exist anymore.
He runs.
Sometimes ‘home’ is a blue, green and brown sphere.
He likes its blue parts best.
He runs.
Sometimes home is a girl with eyes so blue he could drown in them, but so peacefully he wouldn’t even notice it (sometimes he thinks that drowning in her would be the best death anyone could have).
He runs.
Sometimes home is a girl with raven hair and warm hands and a laughter that’s so loud and so true it reverbs right into his soul.
And then… then he hears a laugh, the girl’s laugh, and he follows it like a siren’s song.
There is a girl with raven hair and warm hands and a laugh that is sad but true while she holds a toddler that looks just like her.
The baby’s eyes are blue and still full of wonder.
The girl’s eyes are jade green (wrong) and so sad they made him ache.
The girl’s name is Rabi’a (wrong) and she has the toddler in her arms while she runs far, far away.
The girl’s eyes are like steel, her face like stone, when she gives the toddler to a man whose hair is as dark as hers.
The toddler cries when she hands him over, his arms outstretched towards her in a plea to not be left behind.
The man offers her shelter, telling her that what she has done was just to survive, that she too can stay in his home.
She smiles, a sad, wrenched thing, and she tells the man that the Demon needs its head, that she is already damned, already gone but the baby (Damian) doesn’t need to be.
And then, then the girl goes away and she cries and cries and then she wipes away her tears and she goes back to the place that robbed the blue from her eyes (and he doesn’t know why he knows it, but he knows that her eyes once were blue like the toddler she loves so much).
His heart breaks for her, and he would like to hold her close, to console her, but then another laughter brings him away.
There is the same girl, her eyes blue (and beautiful beyond comprehension) whispering words of love to a girl with short, ginger hair. The ginger is pretty, he guesses, but too tall, too lanky, too angular, too masculine for her to be called beautiful.
The girl (with her raven hair and her blue blue eyes) is named Rikki, but she goes by Dixie (and the vowels of that name are familiar and oh so sweet on his tongue) and she smiles that beautiful smile of hers before telling the other girl “I’ll love you either way Winnie”.
Winnie is scared, her eyes full of love but struggling to accept it. Winnie is scared, and he doesn’t understand why, because being given Dixie’s love seems a wonderful thing.
But in the end Winnie runs away, and Dixie once again ends up crying alone in her corner of the universe.
Dixie isn’t there the next time. She isn’t there and in her place there is a beautiful, beautiful boy (not handsome, beautiful) with eyes just as blue as hers. The boy’s eyes are sad though, even when he is kissing a girl with hair that is like burning flames. And the fact is he knows the boy (Richard or Dick or Rikki or Dixie, because a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and it doesn’t matter which body she or he or them wear, she or he or them are his love) isn’t in love with that girl (a girl who is basically perfect, a girl with eyes that aren’t just green but nuclear, a girl with hair that are like burning flames, a girl who is a princess, a girl who can fly).
And the girl with hair like flames knows it, knows that Dick’s eyes only become softer around a boy who can run like light (a boy Wally knows, because his name and his body and his face are his too) but she doesn't care, because Dick is just perfect enough to be worth it.
He hops in between timelines, in between realities, in between dimensions, in between universes for what feels like lifetimes.
He discovers that his name is Wally during those travels, just like he discovers fragments of his life he didn’t know he had forgotten.
In some of those universes he is a girl named Winifred and she and Dixie, who is a boy named Dick, are in love.
In some universes there are Winifred and Dixie, dancing around each other most of the time and getting together in others, because Winnie isn’t always brave enough to accept herself in love with another woman. Those times, the ones in which Winnie is too afraid to live how she wants, Dixie gets together in the long run with Roy, or Barbra or even Kori and Winifred spends her life alone, struggling to accept her own attraction to her best friend.
When their names are Wally and Dick they never get together. Dick loves him from the shadows and Wally never breaks free of his father’s judgment long enough for realizing himself in love with his best friend (because Dixie, Dick or whatever is the love of Wally’s life, they have always been in a way Artemis or even Linda can never be). Those times Dick usually ends up with Barbara or with Kori, even if Roy (Roy, who is Wally’s friend, Roy, who Wally hated so much when they were teens, because he had Robbie’s love) is always a strong contender. Those times Wally remains alone, or he enters in a relationship either with Artemis (Roy’s almost sister) or with Linda Parks, the girl to whom he gave his first kiss when he was in eighth grade. He is never as happy as the Wallies (or Winnies) that got together with their Dixies (or Dicks).
Wally looks at those Dixies and at those Dicks and remembers how looking into those eyes the tragedy of being a speedster, always surrounded by too slow things, becomes a blessing, cause for him a nanosecond is a year and an instant is a century and he can spend eons drowning into those eyes (that are just a tad bit wrong, because they aren’t the ones of HIS Dixie, but that are close enough to still make him shiver).
In some universes Dixie (or Dick) dies before Wally (or Winny). He doesn’t know what he would have done in those Wallies and Winnies’ place. He is glad he is never gonna find out.
In most universes the reiterations of him and Dixie aren’t happy or together or alive and Wally is a scientist and he knows probability well, and yet he also knows that he and Dixie are gonna have their happy ending, if only he manages to find a way to go back home.
And he tries and he tries and he tries and he tries again, relentless, just to see his Robbie again.
And then, then he is in the Arctic again, exactly where he disappeared in the cracks between the universes (exactly where he last saw Dixie, his Dixie at least).
In two seconds flat he goes from the middle of nowhere to a secluded alley near his and Robbie’s home. He puts his suit in the ring.
He walks (calmly, because that's what he has to do to appear normal) towards his home.
Walking down Bludhaven's streets is as easy as breathing, as familiar as breathing too. Not because he holds any particular love for the city itself, not at all. It's because of Dixie, because it has always been Dixie, since the very first time he met her.
Dixie, who is the other half of his soul, the only person he has ever loved, the only person he has ever wanted. If there isn't a red thread binding the two of them together (and Wally believes there has always been) he'd knit the threads of destiny together with his own bare hands, just to be sure, because even if fate doesn't exist he'd love her anyway, intentionally, like she always says she does.
There are a couple of stores he doesn't remember. It isn't all that worrying, since most stores in Blud never last more than a fleeting season.
He can't wait to be home, to Dixie.
He can't wait to be home and for Robbie to sock him in the face because he is late, because he left her alone.
He can't wait to hold Dixie close and to bury his face in her hair, his lips to the side of her neck, on her pulse point, to confirm himself that everything is alright again because he is finally in her arms again.
He can't wait to hold Robbie and to feel her arms around his neck and her mouth on his and her legs around his waist and her ringing laughter in his ears when he'll inevitably lose his balance and either he'll have to use his speed or she'll have to do one of her acrobatics moves for them not to tumble to the ground in a leap of flailing limbs and breathless laughter.
He can't wait to be one with her again, making love, because it doesn't matter if they do it slow and sweet or dirty and rough, because she is still Dixie and he is still Wally and they are in love.
He can't wait to look her in the eyes and to assure himself and her both that everything is gonna be alright, because he is healthy again and the life they planned together is once again a feasible thing, he can't wait to quell her fears (because he is a bit air-headed, sometimes, but he never missed the way she sometimes searched for his heartbeat to fall asleep).
There are a lot of stores he doesn't remember, not just a couple. And a thought makes way in his brain, nagging at him.
Maybe he has been gone for more than he thought.
Maybe Robbie fell in love again.
Maybe he'll arrive home and she'll open the door and she'll hug him close but not kiss him and she’ll tell him that they can't be what they had been, before.
And Wally would understand, even if it would destroy him. Dixie believes in circumstances, not in soulmates, like he himself does. And she always told him he was her perfect circumstance, but Wally was gone, so he couldn't be her circumstance anymore. So yes, it would destroy him, but he would understand. It would destroy him, knowing that what they share is really what they shared and that their relationship is dead and buried.
It would destroy him, but they would still be friends, best friends, and that would almost be enough (not to live, but to survive).
He takes the keys out of the front pocket of his jeans. They still work. It makes him hope, but he squashes that hope in the deep of his soul, because who changes the locks when their ex partner disappeared into nothing?
His and Robbie’s photos are still on the walls and lined on the shelves, and the prototype of the participation to their wedding is still framed over the mantle piece. He doesn’t think he could live in a home that’s a mausoleum to another love, and a part of his heart rejoices at the unchanging appearance of his home.
And yet…yet the house is strange. Too still. Too pristine.
The curtains drawn.
The mail piled up on the counter, like it always is when he isn't around, because Dixie isn't good at keeping track of it, but different, wrong, covered in dust, just like the photos on the shelves (the ones that picture them together, from the ages of sixteen and eighteen to the ones of twenty-three and twenty-five, or the other one, still, the one Robbie showed him after they moved in together, the one that depicts them, thirteen faced with fifteen, at a Mathletes competition, her eyes full of mirth while shaking his hand, his own baffled, uncomprehending). The fridge is empty (like it always is when he leaves Dixie to her own devices for more than a few days).
Their bed is pristine, but Robbie’s dresses are disseminated on the chaise-lounge, her heels (taller than the ones she usually prefers) scattered on the rug. The theatrical make-up she uses to cover up her scars in public disseminated on the vanity. And Wally loves all of Dixie, even her scars, because they are a part of her and a testimony to her resilience, to her will to do good and to survive while doing so. In stark difference with Dixie’s everything else, he also hates her scars, because some of them almost killed her, because they hurt when she received them and they hurt her still, either with the changing of the seasons or with their presence in her reflection in the mirror.
The opaque bag with her wedding dress still occupies their wardrobe (and Wally doesn’t take a peek, even if he really wants to, for the sake of tradition, but damn if it doesn’t make him softer around the edges, the idea that she kept that dress even with him gone).
He takes one of his energy bars (the ones calibrated on his own metabolism) out of the secret safe. The password is the same he remembers it being, the date of his first meeting with Robbie.
He waits.
He feels like his heart will burst out of his ribcage the moment he'll see Dixie again, screaming “Love, I'm here I am back”.
He waits.
He wants to be pinned between Robbie and the mattress, like a flower pressed in a book, to feel her skin against his, a reminder of the meaning of the word home.
He waits.
He wants to say her name (both her names, because she is Dixie and she is Robbie and she is his everything), over and over, like it's the only word that’s ever been spoken, like it’s the only prayer humanity has ever created.
He waits.
And then… then there is a young man in the kitchen, the line of his shoulders deceptively relaxed, but strung with a familiar kind of hidden tension (a tension he first saw in Dixie’s shoulders, when he was fourteen, and that he subsequently saw in every single ones of her little brothers’ bodies).
The young man has Robbie’s face and Damian’s green eyes (those same eyes that always made Wally think about little bitty pretty babies that looked like him and Dixie).
Damian is… he is taller than what Wally remembers him being.
Surely taller than Tim, probably taller than Robbie as well.
His shoulders just a smidge less broad than Jason’s.
His face is longer than what he remembers it being, the baby fat almost completely gone from his features. That face, Damian’s face, on the cusp of adulthood, but still made softer by adolescence, looks so, so much like Dixie’s, even more than it always did before.
Damian looks at him, his eyes like voids. Damian looks at him, and his eyes are desperate and full of emotion. Damian looks at him and speaks a few, fleeting words, words that have the power to make Wally’s entire universe collapse on itself.
His brain doesn't register the hours after that. His brain doesn’t register those hours during which his fiancé’s family test him, both to assure themselves that he really is who they think and to check his physical health. His brain doesn’t register those hours. They are useless hours, after all. The only thing in his mind is the litany that tells him ‘ Dixie is gone. He’ll never see her smile again. Dixie is gone. He’ll never hear her laughter again. Dixie is gone. The last kiss he gave her was really their last. Dixie is gone. He’ll never look at her again, his heart so full with love it aches. Dixie is gone. He’ll never wake up curled at her side ever again. Dixie is gone. He’ll never marry her. Dixie is gone. There never will be little kids running around their house able to wrap him around their tiny fingers with the flash of Dixie’s dimpled smile. Dixie is gone. He spent less than half of his life at her side. Dixie is gone. He was never supposed to outlive her, because between the two of them, she always was the strong one. Dixie is gone, because Robbie is dead, and his life stops having meaning in those three, little words. ’
Wally’s body is healthier now, his never-in-laws tell him, strong in a way it wasn’t, before.
Wally’s body is faster now, his never-in-laws tell him, faster even than his uncle.
And yet, his mind and his heart and his soul are irremediably broken (after all, they always belonged to Dixie, so it’s normal that they followed her to her grave).
Aunt Iris and uncle Barry come for him, two toddlers in the stroller they roll in with practiced grace. They cry with happiness seeing him, and he is happy to see them (as happy as he can be now that he knows that Robbie is gone). And yet…aunt Iris and uncle Barry had been his parents (not that he ever called them that way, because they would view it as strange) ever since he was thirteen and stupid enough to recreate the flash accident, and those two children (his cousins) have taken the title of (almost) son away from him. And it’s strange, because Wally doesn’t hate them, not at all, but he feels so, so alone now, no family left for him (because his parents never really wanted him and Aunt Iris and uncle Barry have their own kids and Dixie is gone gone gone and he is so utterly alone).
His never in laws help him come back into society, Timmy’s sharp brain concocting a lie to explain how he survived three years in the Arctic. Sometimes he wonders if it’s worth it.
Uncle Barry gives him the Flash name, since he can’t bear to look at his own suit anymore, since he can’t bear to be Flamebird, merely a half (the lesser one) of what once had been a whole.
His never father-in-law helps him and uncle Barry to murk the waters and to both bear the same name without the League ever finding out.
His never-in-laws tell him he can stay in the penthouse, even after everything, that it would be what Dixie would have wanted. But Dixie isn’t there (there isn’t the lingering smell of her overpriced perfume, nor the sound of her borderline maniacal laugh, there aren’t her hands splayed on his stomach while he cooks, nor her warm body plastered against his even warmer one in the bed). So he goes away, because all he feels there is the overwhelming weight of her absence.
His new house (not home, another word dead and buried beside Robbie) is new, and a little too cold, but with a little effort it could become quite cozy, or at least that’s what Donna tells him when she comes to visit. And he and Donna have always been friends, sure, but never enough to justify all her visits, not now that he and Dixie don’t share the same house (nor the same sky or the same universe or the same breath). And Wally is everything but stupid, and he knows that she is checking up on him (on her best friend’s almost-widow) for Dixie. And Wally loves Donna, but sometimes, seeing her raven hair, styled in a too-familiar set of braids (sets he once learned how to do for his own best friend, sets that he did every night of patrol for his girlfriend, sets whose knots he disentangled from his fiancé’s hair) only manages to hurt him. And Wally loves Donna, but he saw the photos of the last eight months before Nightwing disappeared into nothing (the eight months after Rikki Wayne’s extremely public murder) and he hates her, a little, for the gal she had to wear Dixie’s costume and her name and her identity, even if he knows perfectly well that’s what Robbie would have wanted, since she wrote it in one of her contingencies (those contingencies that Wally loves, because they saved her life more than once, those contingencies that Wally hates, for the time she had to spend wandering about her own death, devising plans to protect her family from it, but not herself, never herself).
He visits Dixie’s grave, sometimes, but he never goes there alone because otherwise he would vibrate himself through the earth or he would dig with his own bare hands just to be buried in her same casket, letting himself die with what remains of her still in his arms.
He usually goes there with Garth (because Donna and her braided raven hair break his heart and Roy and his bottomless eyes hurt him and Garth is the only friend of his he manages to look in the eyes without crying nowadays).
Her full name in the marble feels wrong, just like the bouquet of red roses and baby’s breath (because Robbie was everything but a cliché but she always liked clichés) he always brings her, that same bouquet he knows she would have wanted for their wedding.
Her grave feels wrong. Too still. There is nothing of her lingering there, not her fidgeting hands or her lively eyes nor her perpetually in motion body.
He works at Wayne’s enterprises now, the only place that will give him all the leeway he needs with his new responsibilities and his (wonky) mental health. He hates the whispers of his colleagues, their looks of pity. They call him the man of the Arctic (that same arctic that took him away, that same Arctic that brought him back, in a world without Dixie in it) or the almost-widow (and Wally loves Dixie, he has always loved Dixie, he will always love Dixie, who is and will always be his only love and it hurts to know an ‘almost’ is all he and Robbie will ever have).
Dixie comes to him, sometimes, her form perched above him, her legs wrapped around his hips, pressing his body against the blankets, the dark cascade of her hair brushing his cheeks and dividing the two of them from the world.
He raises, in the morning, alone.
His new, antiseptic apartment does not emit a single sound.
Dixie came to him, and he expects to see her spread on the bed, or sitting at the table reading a report.
Dixie came into his apartment (and oh, the tragedy of it being HIS apartment) and she let him sleep and dream about her.
She should have woken him.
She should have told him she was coming.
It has been so long since he last saw her.
They have so much to talk about.
They have so much to see.
They have so much to do.
They have an entire life to plan.
But Dixie is only made of memories now and so all of Wally’s dreams are useless.
He cries a lot nowadays. If it happens more after he receives visits it is only because, most of the time, the ones that visit him are a cruel reminder of what will never be.
Bruce has Dixie’s same soft-sad eyes and her same caustic sense of humor.
Jason has Dixie’s mannerism and her same little idiosyncrasies and her same soft smile.
Tim has Dixie’s same kind of smarts and her same kind of craziness too (just less expertly hidden) lurking just behind his eyes.
Stephanie has Dixie’s laughter and she walks in Dixie’s shadow, protecting the city they once called theirs.
Damian is the one who hurts him the most (he is the one who he sees more often too and sometimes he wonders if Damian too sees in him all that’s left of his sister).
Damian is the one who hurts him the most, because he has Dixie’s everything, except her blue eyes, and he is an almost perfect reflection of how Dixie was before…before.
And looking at them, hearing them talk fucking hurts but they are all he has left of Robbie and he clings to them, to those little pieces of her he can still see and hear and love in them, even now that she is gone.
He thinks about killing himself, sometimes. And then he thinks of Dixie, of her words when he was twenty-two “I wouldn’t know up from down without you, idiot”, of her destroyed expression when he received his diagnosis, of her tear stained face before he turned around and ran towards his death. He doesn’t kill himself both out of love for her and because he needs to pay for his sin, because he left her alone. He gives himself three years. Just a little bit more than what Dixie had to live without him. It’s his only way to make it up to her now.
Wally runs.
No directions in his plans, no thoughts in his head.
He is the fastest man alive.
He is still unable to save everyone (he was unable to save Dixie).
He loses people.
He saves even more people.
Behind every single one of their faces he sees Dixie.
He doesn’t know if it hurts more when it’s in the dead or in the living.
Wally runs.
No directions in his plans, no thoughts in his head.
The only thing that really moves him, nowadays, is grief.