Time unraveled before his eyes, like a snag in a sweater or a sock, leaving bare ladders behind, and he knew he'd need to work the repair with great care or he'd end up undoing everything.
Existence flickered – door, street, room, Mom! – and Barry swayed dizzily in place. He couldn’t tell where to put his own feet, disoriented, unsure where the realities divided. There was no line separating them, himself, his doppelgangers: he was all of them.
Barry could feel the cool press of wood against his sweating palm, nerves firing under his skin, spurring every hyperventilatory breath with the incessant reminder that he had two minutes, two minutes.
In the center of the room, Barry felt the same urgency embodied by a tender, bleeding ribcage, his bright red suit’s capacity to suffer pain stretched to its limits, singed, seared in the preceding explosion, the Crisis that changed everything. It didn’t matter anymore, superseceded by a tightness in every inhale that felt doomed, his thoughts consumed by Reverse, Reverse, Reverse.
Barry didn’t stay with the Eldest for long, drifting to the opposite end of the spectrum, his attention falling on the shaken bystander, a fuzzy flashback of red and yellow chasing itself past his eleven-year-old eyes.
Aware of them, Barry was equally aware that they were not alone: he could feel the sinister, irrepressible determination of a Fourth, Uninvited Presence nearby. It raised the hairs on his arm, knowing that everything – everything – came down to silencing that Intruder, to leading the wolf away from the slaughter.
Barry took a deep breath, steadying the cold asphalt of the street under his feet, aware of the howling enormity of what he was about to do, and Flashed forward, stopping the Intruder and rewriting history.
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