Bart Allen

This is the way the world ends:

(He’s known it for years now, since one night when Jay and Donna were eight and they’d just gotten new powers and hardly ever stayed in one minute or another for its full duration. He mostly let Jenny and the Doctor deal with it, and just picked up the slack where he could. He didn’t mind, anyway; despite his speed, he can only catch them when they’re running linearly.

Jenny was in the library reading, because after all they’d done she still didn’t feel caught up with the universe and probably never would. The twins (ages seven and eight) piled onto the bed to wake him up, and he stayed up with them for hours while they told him all about where they’d been and what they’d seen, and he grinned crookedly at them and told them they had a nightmare and they could sleep with him if they wanted.)

He almost won’t feel it, because it will have happened so fast, just a little bit faster than he can run, won’t even know it happened until he drops out of superspeed, arms and knees bloody from tearing into the ground, but it won’t matter because it’ll be

            (He’s known it for years now, catching little things here and there: an unprovoked apology, a hug just a little too tight from Donna when she dropped in from the future, the look the Doctor gave him the last time they saw him, like he was gone already and just hanging around by chance. Past, future, present, they all spill into each other when you’re married to a Time Lady.)

too fast to do anything, go anywhere, say anything, just a little bit faster than he can breathe, lungs collapsing and Jenny’s there and Jay and Donna and he won’t know how or why or what to say, nothing will seem right at the time, but it won’t matter because he’ll be

   (He wonders, sometimes, if it will hurt.)

drowning in his own blood, too fast to fix, just a little bit faster than he can think, trying to talk to Jenny, Jay, Donna, it’s okay, he’s known about this for years now, but it won’t matter because it’ll be

                                                                         (I’ll be gone before you can even blink.)

quick, like he’s always known it would be.