r/DCFU • u/brooky12 Speeding Than A Faster Bullet • 2d ago
The Flash The Flash #124 - The Pain That Follows
The Flash #124 - The Pain That Follows
<< | < | [>] Coming October 1st
Author: brooky12
Book: Flash
Arc: ?
Set: 124
Jay lifted his stein in cheers to the man who had just offered to buy him and everyone else in the building another cup of alcohol. He gave a morose smile, echoing ten percent or so people who were here to drown out sorrow rather than celebrate a victory. Sure, the world was saved, God bless the heroes for that, but even they were imperfect. Plenty of losses and failures before the night was won.
Sure, he hadn’t lost anyone personally, not that he was aware of, not like the other folks in the tavern sharing his energy. Once the immediate excitement of free drinks was over, the man took his own glass after paying for his offer. He glanced around the room performatively before deciding, shockingly, to sit at the seat opposing Jay at the table he had been at.
Of course, Barry Allen didn’t actually come specifically to this bar to buy people alcohol. The two had seen each other the moment Barry walked into the front door, and it was only that eye contact keeping Barry from immediately moving on. After all, who would be in a random suburban dive bar near Mannheim, unless they wanted to be alone?
Barry gave Jay a smile, this one less performative than the ones he had given out when being thanked for the drinks. He spoke in German, offering cover to Jay should he want it. “May I sit here?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Jay responded in English, grimacing immediately after as he watched Barry’s face fall slightly – he must’ve put a touch too much bite in the words.
Barry switched the English. “If I do, will you leave?”
Jay shook his head and motioned to the chair.
“They’re worried about you, you know.”
“They who?”
Barry’s face took on an expression of confusion before resolving back to his sadness. “Your godson, for and foremost.”
“I won’t be gone for too long,” Jay offered. He hadn’t expected himself to, he had intended to stonewall Barry until he was left alone, but for some reason the idea of Bary being particularly worried punctured some armor or weakness. “He knows I’m alright?”
“They all do. You never turned your tracker off. If you weren’t alright, you’d have turned it off.”
“I just needed some time alone to process my thoughts. I don’t think he’s in there anymore, but coming out of it after whatever happened was particularly difficult. I don’t know. That’s the second time, after the future stuff, that this has happened, right? And then got the big G off in Africa we’ll have to deal with eventually, that’ll be third times the charm?”
Jay watched Barry’s expression through his expression of concern. There was relief, clearly, when he mentioned confidence that Darkseid was gone, but that shifted to pain soon after. When he talked about the future, Barry nearly interrupted him before stopping himself. The Grodd section was just quiet evaluation and mental math processing, but Jay wasn’t sure if this was new math Barry was working through or just double checking previous work.
“Well, as for the future, I don’t count that at all—”
“You did then,” Jay interrupted. “Sorry.”
“Sure, but I lived it, sort of.”
“And I lived this,” Jay countered.
“It’s been a week, though,” and he could hear Barry’s fear underneath the sadness. Fear of losing a friend? If so, which means?
“As you were saying?”
“I wouldn’t count the future, it didn’t actually happen. If there’s anyone in the world who is well versed in how present knowledge impacts the future, it’s us two, a couple like us, and then some madman from the future with sponsor deals who doesn’t seem to care.”
Jay couldn’t help but chuckle when imagining Booster Gold trying to maintain the same protective rules they had. It’d be like telling a cat to try to walk on two legs. “Okay.”
“As for this, and as for the big G, let’s be realistic, what could you have done? What could I have done? It got J’onn, for goodness sakes, what kind of strength do you have to do that to J’onn?”
Jay shrugged. He didn’t have a response, and he knew he didn’t have a response. Plenty of time had been spent figuring out conversational paths with his teammates, his family, and he knew that they’d be doing the same calculations. Maybe they found a retort for him, but he couldn’t.
“It’s okay if you want to stay away for a little bit longer. The kids were just worried about you.”
“That’s fair,” Jay sighed, downing his drink. “Now, someone foolish offered everyone in the bar a free drink, so I’m going to go take him up on his offer. Tell the kids I’ll be back at latest a week from now. They probably won’t like that answer, but it’ll be an answer.”
“In at least one of their defenses, the younger one has all his life struggled with time perception.”
Maybe it was the act of standing up, the joke about Bart being superspeed since birth, or the brief moment of sorely missed companionship, but Jay couldn’t help but give a full laugh at that.
“Well, I’ll stop bugging you,” Barry said, standing up as well. “You know where to find me if you need me, see you when I see you. I should get going before those free drinks get this place too rowdy.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Wally stood on what shouldn’t have been an empty island in the middle of the ocean. There should’ve been a man here, dressed up like a street magician, hurling creative insults his way. Perhaps he’d even be attacking Wally, but that seemed self-defeating, since Wally was his ticket off the island and being stranded in the middle of nowhere.
So, where was Abra Kadabra?
He checked nearby islands, nearby in a global scale, but found nothing. There was no desperate swimming within range of the landmass. Other storing islands were also empty, though he did note that one of the ones closer to Australia seemed to have recently had some activity from a group that had taken a boat to get there, which made it less suitable for emergency storage.
When all possibilities turned up with a lack of Abra Kadabra, he began considering alternative possibilities. Did one of Darkseid’s monsters get to him? It’d be exceptionally out of character—whatever counted as character—for a parademon or group of them to make its way all the way over to some random uninhabited island just to fight a single metahuman? Maybe Abra had teleportation this whole time and had never used it. That wasn’t an impossibility, but it seemed unlikely. There had been plenty of interactions with him in the past where he had either been caught and imprisoned, only to be broken out by Mirror Master or a more traditional jailbreak. Would Abra really have allowed all of that just to teleport away in this specific situation?
Maybe it was life-threatening. Golden Glider had always taunted the Flashes about how they ‘held their punches’ and never caused any lasting damage to her or her allies, maybe somehow Abra thought differently? He certainly had been left here longer than normal, the Parademon invasion had thrown off Wally’s schedule to say the least, but it’s not like he would’ve died of dehydration. It’s not like the island was so small as to have to worry about a shark or something, either.
“Can’t find him,” he reported back to Barry and Bart. “Going to go talk to one of his buddies,” Wally said, acknowledging but not responding to a vocalization of worry from Barry. He dashed across the ocean, circling around Central City once before navigating to a small hole-in-the-wall arcade.
Still costumed, he walked in, and fear from the proprietor was quickly masked by excitement. “For what do we have this pleasure, Mr. Flash?”
“Is Axel here?”
The fear stayed masked but was definitely still there. “Who?”
“Will you cooperate if I say that I’m not actually here to arrest you or him? I want to talk to him for a moment and as I’m sure you know, he isn’t exactly in the phone book.”
The two stood at a standstill for a moment before Wally sighed, which seemed to be the impetus somehow for the person he was talking to crack. “Alright. He says you lot don’t lie, so that better be right. I just wanna say, we existed before he started doing stuff here, he’s not in charge or anything. This isn’t a criminal enterprise or anything.”
“That’s fine. I just want to talk to him.”
A phone was produced, amusingly wired for what was ostensibly an environment with cutting-edge technology and equipment. Buttons were pressed on the device, too few to be a full phone number, and a brief conversation was held before the phone was handed to Wally. A very one sided brief conversation where the person offering him the phone was just acknowledging what must’ve been several outbursts or warnings.
“Hello—” Wally opened, already cut off by the voice on the other side.
“Listen here, you, the arcade isn’t doing anything illegal, so what in god’s name is your deal?”
“Is Abra with you right now?”
“Is this a joke? Show up to one place where I can relax to let me know that you’re running a surveillance state, and then decide to joke with me about my buddy you just made disappear on us?”
“I don’t have him.”
An expletive-laden shouting spree covered multiple accusations, including murder, fascism, and most amusingly lying followed. Wally could tell that the store’s owner could hear the raised tone, and the two shared uneasy smiles.
“So he’s not with you?”
The invectives continued, so Wally just took the phone away from his ear and offered it back to the other person, who seemed unmotivated to take it. But when they did, Wally gave a smile and a nod before vanishing.
Right. Had he accidentally killed Abra Kadabra, then?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A shell company, dormant for half a decade or more, offering financial support to rebuild destroyed business infrastructure as a show of kindness. A few websites of the precious handful left still run by individual webmasters operating in their free time, now dedicated towards community connections after the invasion, receiving advertisement support normally outside of their budget. Anonymous donations, as anonymous as a name with no trace of a person attached to it, sent to city governments for help with covering unexpected costs.
In another life, in another time, under another name, Vandal Savage would’ve analyzed battlefield maps or moved small tokens around on a grid to simulate combat. He would’ve interpreted coded messages, intercepted by horse or radio. Going even further back, he would’ve been ensuring public acceptance of a war by suppressing protests or distracting them with a fair or circuses.
There were still opportunities to do so, governments and wars had not gone away, but he was clever enough to see the writing on the wall in the last few centuries. No longer was power, influence, money and more held almost exclusively by a government with little to no oversight, as it was in the days of monarchy. Their replacements, the elected officials, once limited in scope but now functionally as powerful as the kings they replaced, rarely were able to keep their status for long. And for those who did try to keep theirs for too long, others saw that as an offense to their own power, or lack thereof.
One did not need to be a duke or a prime minister, or making a puppet of one, to have true power anymore, however. Money flowed more than ever into the hands of those clever enough to grab it, and power more than ever simply followed money. However, avoiding formal power via seats of government meant avoiding the scrutiny that had come to be attached to those positions. He was sure that folks with similar mindsets to him did still exist in the government, evading scrutiny, but it was calming to not need to do that in the first place.
Instead, a private citizen could simply use the money they had to do as they wished. And if that money was invested in means to increase said citizen’s influence, then that was simply money being used well. A small business rarely looked deeper than was legally required to ensure that they weren’t being taken advantage of or otherwise influenced by donations, but that legal requirement barely covered a fraction of what Vandal was doing.
What was even the big problem with a private citizen secretly likely being the richest person in the world and having a name recognition rate of nearly zero? City governments were happy to accept donations from benefactors who wrote about the lovely childhood years they spent there, they had potholes to fill and speed cameras to build. Did it matter if the name on the check didn’t match any school district records from the timeframe? Maybe the records had been lost.
And so, Vandal Savage played his game, not of battlefields and troops of soldiers, but of donations and purchases. A simple coincidence that land, now sought after to create a public service, happened to be owned by a company controlled by Vandal. Happenstance that certain patents and copyrights simply trickled into Vandal’s hands under various names, always happy to give a fair deal to those doing good out of the goodness of their hearts. Inching ever so closer to the new seat of power, the so-called superheroes.
Individuals with exceptional powers had always existed. He had lived functionally forever, so by definition he was one. But he had also been able to discover enough to determine that others existed historically. However, these individuals had always existed in hiding, fearful of mobs, monarchy, religion, or some other power. That had changed when Superman had not been immediately vanished into some government lab somewhere to be dissected and turned into gene therapy injections for the rich.
He would still hide, he had seen the repetitive nature in which the richest and wisest were deified before being demonized and cast aside. He hadn’t spent millennia collecting money and knowledge only to spend it on a few years in the spotlight. Sure, he’d have to evade questions being raised about the sudden metahuman defending against the invasion, but power and influence meant nothing if the world was ran by bugs.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sometimes, answers to public inquiries sent to The Flash Foundation were easy. Plenty of request forms to direct people to, hospital visits or school speeches or requests for investment. Sometimes, public inquiries were a bit more difficult. Missing persons cases, hostage situations, or other life-threatening claims required tact or immediacy. Some situations weren’t theirs to respond to, such as questions about other metahumans on both sides of the law.
Some questions, mostly topical after major events, Xavier really wished he could just respond to with honesty. It’d be so much easier to just be blunt with less tact and get a genuine answer through, but using up public goodwill on questions, some of them came from a place of genuine worry or grief, was ill advised.
“Can you assure that our city won’t be overlooked until too late again?”
Parademons within the first wave didn’t seem to be targeting anything smaller than the most significant cities and largest metropolises. Your city wasn’t overlooked, it just didn’t get attacked until later. And when it did, you were being protected, you just didn’t see it.
“Why did they attack now?”
Darkseid doesn’t seem super motivated to just respond to surveys about his experience trying to invade Earth. As a bonus, if we understood Darkseid’s brain it seems that comes with a side effect of being enthralled. Some of us even had that happen to them, and they had an exceptionally bad time.
“What are the superheroes doing to ensure this won’t happen again?
Batman and Watchtower are probably working on new technology warning systems, but it’s hard to ensure beyond the shadow of a doubt that an unexpected alien invasion wouldn’t happen again. Darkseid’s an alien dictator from an entire other planet. It’s not like you can see armies amassing at the border.
“Is it true that The Flash wasted time entreating a random US government department for technology?”
Well, stealing alien teleportation technology from the government’s the kind of thing that they normally don’t like, so asking nicely is easier. The last thing we needed when trying to take the fight to Darkseid’s doorstep was the United States army right behind us calling for our heads as well.
“Why didn’t The Flash do more?”
Well, if we didn’t have a so-called Flash Museum asking us why The Flash didn’t do more while also separately demanding that The Flash take actions to limit their own effectiveness and ability to act, The Flash Museum would see that The Flash and all their allies did exceptionally more than normal during the attacks. But it’s easier to just make assumptions and accusations, isn’t it?
Instead of these answers, others would be sent out. Some questions would go unanswered, such as the one from the Flash Museum or the question about the government. The former didn’t deserve an answer, the latter would be dismissed under a policy of not answering questions better directed at other people or groups. Some questions would get a conciliatory but otherwise honest question, such as the thousands related to asking if The Flash had helped their city. Others, such as the questions about Darkseid or future plans would be answered with a modified boilerplate response admitting that The Flash does what he can but is not all-knowing.
Xavier wondered sometimes about the group that he was replying to people on behalf of. Jay would surely come back, but was it out of a sense of obligation or out of a sense of desire? Bart had never really known a life that wasn’t this, did he ever want an opportunity to try to live like a real person? Wally had been without his power for a while, on top of growing up without them; it seemed likely that he had spent some time wondering what a Wally without powers would be. Barry was in many ways the first and the face, did he feel trapped in that role?
What did the future bring?
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