Chapter Text
Impulse narrowed his eyes, steadied his breathing, and let the energy build up for a moment before rocketing off across the sand, sending up a plume of it in his wake. Everything blurred and his breath hitched in excitement, which was the exact moment he tripped over a rock and went headfirst into a dune. The force of the impact sent a cloud of sand into the air which then rained down upon him.
He had his goggles to protect his eyes, but nothing to keep from eating a mouthful of hot, dry sand.
Impulse gagged as he tried to spit it all out.
“Ugh,” he groaned as he let his head tip back. The tinted goggles also saved his eyes from the full intensity of the sun, which had risen high and hot in the Texas sky.
Maybe it was hopeless.
Maybe the legend his Aunt told him was just that, a legend. A story meant to inspire and entertain a pup who was forced to grow up too quickly. Time travel was possible - he wouldn’t be where he was if it wasn’t - but running fast enough to generate the right kind of energy to do so without the aid of a machine was starting to feel impossible.
But hadn’t he already done the impossible once before?
Using a time machine was a last-ditch effort. It wasn’t a lack of faith in him that led everyone to believe it wouldn’t succeed, but the acknowledgment of how greatly things were stacked against their favor.
And yet, Bart had traveled back in time and succeeded at each of his goals: save his grandfather, the Flash; stop the Blue Beetle from joining up with the Reach; and prevent the Reach apocalypse from occurring, no matter the cost.
He had done all of it. He saved Barry Allen from an untimely death during his first hour in the past. And, okay, Blue Beetle had joined the Reach for a while, but it was entirely against his will and Bart was part of the team who helped get him off mode again, so it all worked out in the end! The Reach were sent packing after that and the day was saved!
Except then they lost Wally.
It should have been Bart.
Bart was the one who should have faded. He’d done what he needed to do and helped rewrite the future of Earth, which included his birth and life, so what need did the universe have for him?
The question remained in his thoughts for years, cropping up whenever he thought of Wally or the Pack he’d left behind. They were all there in the present with him - Dick, Jason, Damian - but they shared none of his memories. As welcoming as Dick had been, even going as far as to forge a Pack Bond with him, it wasn’t the same.
Damian - his Baba - was five , a far cry from the grown omega who took Bart into his arms, adopted him as a son, and taught him to fight.
Bart shook his head and felt sand cascade from his hair.
He needed to focus on the future, not the past. (His past that was once the future?)
The (new) future was why he was alone in the desert, using the big, empty space to run as far and as fast as he could in the hope that he could generate enough of the Speed Force his Aunt always talked about and run through time itself. All he wanted was a glimpse of the future he helped change. Just one little peek to reassure himself that he’d really done it, he hadn’t just delayed the Reach and their hostile takeover of Earth, but stopped it completely.
He had another reason as well.
Just the night before, Bart had gotten a call from Dick for help with a covert mission. He, Nightwing, Tigress, and the mysterious Red Hood (who Bart had always known was Jason Todd) borrowed Bioship from Miss Martian and traversed to the other side of the world, where they picked up Damian al Ghul (with Talia’s permission) and took him to live with his father in Gotham. Bart stayed with them overnight and then accompanied Jason and Tim (who showed up that morning) on a shopping trip to pick out clothing and toys for Damian, which was when Jason let slip a piece of information that made Bart’s heart race.
“Dick won’t like that I’m saying anything yet, but we learned something that we’re going to need help with. You seem like someone good at keeping secrets, so I’m going to tell you on the condition that you don’t breathe a word of this to Artemis until we know the truth.” Jason had paused for a moment as he nodded at one of the shirts Tim held up for him to see. “When Dick and I were looking at Artemis’ aura, we saw something. It happened twice, so I know it wasn’t just a remnant or mirage or whatever. We saw Wally’s aura. It was… odd. Frantic. Like a rubber band stretched taut until it snaps, only to reform, I guess, and stretch out again. Like it’s here, but not.”
In the moment, all Bart could think to do was agree to stay quiet and look into it however he could. It hadn’t taken him long to wonder if time travel was the answer. After all, if the key to it was enough Speed Force created by a speedster, then wasn’t it possible that the energy they created that day at the magnetic North Pole was enough, not to make Wally fade from existence, but to send him through time ?
Bart got back to his feet and tried again.
And again.
And again.
He slid to a stop in the sand with an agonized scream and then fell to his knees, his vision blurring with hot tears of frustration.
Why couldn’t he do it?
He had to do it. He had to set things right and bring back Wally. Everything would be right then. Artemis would have back the man she loved, Grandpa Barry and Grandma Iris would have back their beloved nephew, Dick would have back his best friend, and Bart - Bart could let go of some of the guilt he felt for being the reason Wally disappeared.
A large shadow passed overhead.
Bart dismissed it as belonging to a bird at first, but then he started to hear the familiar hum of Blue Beetle’s thrusters as he came in for a controlled landing. Bart lifted his goggles and hurriedly wiped away his tears before his friend could see.
“Everything crash, ese?” Blue Beetle asked as the full mask covering his face peeled back to reveal Jaime’s handsome face. “Khaji Da picked up on some serious energy readings coming from out here. Was that all you?”
“Yup. All me. I’m just, uh, practicing,” Bart said evasively.
Fuck, did he not want to lie to Jaime.
Way back when Bart first arrived, he saw Jaime as an… unexpected complication to his plan. Whenever he thought of the Blue Beetle, it was the image of a hulking monster who’d been the star of nearly every nightmare he’d ever had that came to mind. Meeting Jaime, seeing that he was only a few years older than Bart, and then getting to know the teen, had nearly derailed everything. Because Jaime was good . He was good and kind and, okay, so he got a little snippy with Bart sometimes, but to be fair, Bart had gone out of his way to be annoying those first few months to maintain his cover as a “happy-go-lucky speedster tourist from the future”.
The point was, any half-baked thoughts about killing the Blue Beetle and locking the scarab into a tiny box and burying it where no one could ever find it had gone straight out the window when he laid eyes on sixteen-year-old Jaime Reyes.
And somewhere along the way, Jaime became Bart’s best friend.
It’d been exciting at first. A best friend ! Bart only had his Pack when he was growing up and there wasn’t really time for friends, especially when there were so few pups his own age. But then, well…
Bart’s feelings shifted. Or maybe they’d been that way the whole time and he’d been too blind to see it, he wasn’t really sure. Instead of just wanting to hang out, he found that he wanted to hold Jaime’s hand and give him compliments and, uh, do mushy stuff that he’d always seen from Dick and Jason and the RomComs that they sometimes watched for movie nights.
Bart had a crush on Jaime.
Jaime, who was dating Traci and always looked so happy with her.
Which was crash!
Bart was super great at keeping things a secret and hiding his (huge) crush on Jaime was no problem! Presenting as an omega and occasionally swiping Jaime’s clothes for his nest did absolutely nothing to complicate things! Really!
(Bart could have died of mortification the first time he panicked about something and literally swiped the hoody his friend was wearing off of his back. Luckily, Jaime took it in stride, and never made much of a fuss about it when it happened a few more times.)
But back to the point:
Jaime was Bart’s best friend and he didn’t like to lie to him. It would be the case even if Jaime didn’t have the scarab - Khaji Da, as it named itself, and yes it was very weird that the scarab gave itself a name, but it was a good weird - which could tell when Bart wasn’t being truthful.
Well, Jason only specified that Bart couldn’t tell Artemis, so…
“Jason thinks Wally is alive because he and Dick could see his aura and it was behaving oddly, like-it’s-here-but-not-so-I-came-out-here-to-see-if-I-can-generate-enough-energy-to-travel-through-time-so-I-can-find-him!”
As always, it took Jaime a few minutes to catch up to what Bart was speed-speaking as Khaji Da served as a dutiful translator.
Jaime pinched his brow with a sigh. “Let’s go through this a little more slowly. Are you talking about Jason Todd? Dick knows he’s alive now?”
Bart nodded with a broad grin. “He found out a few days ago, I’d guess? Artemis and Tim know too! Oh, and we went to Nanda Parbat to see Baba, so now he’s in Gotham and gets the chance to know Bruce and it’s all turning out better than I could have dreamed!”
“Okay,” Jaime said as he lowered his hand. “Okay, so no more secrets about your past, right?”
“No more secrets. I even told them about Baba taking me in and then Dick made me an official member of the Pack,” Bart said.
They were a little too far for Bart to pick up on their vibrational frequencies, but if he focused really hard, he could almost sense Dick’s, and only because their Bond was the strongest.
Jaime’s smile reached his eyes, which crinkled a little at the corners. “I’m happy for you, Bart. But also, going to need you to explain the bit about Wally. He’s alive? But how and where is he?”
“That I’m not sure about, but Jason sounded pretty confident, so how can I not look into it?” Bart asked rhetorically. “As far as where he is… I think it might be more like when he is.”
Bart did his best to explain the Speed Force and how he’d been taught that it was a type of energy generated by a speedster as they ran. Build up enough of it and odd things could happen, like reversing magnetic polarity or easing the effects of gravity in a contained space or opening a doorway (of sorts) to travel through time.
“Aunt Dawn used to tell me stories about it being possible, but as far as I know, it’s never been done,” Bart explained. “But I started to think, what if Wally didn’t disappear the way we all thought? What if the three of us created the exact right kind of energy to send him through time?”
“And if you can match that energy, you think you could use that to find him?” Jaime asked.
“Something like that.”
Jaime muttered something in Spanish that Bart couldn’t understand. “Okay. Okay, so, Khaji Da wants to know how your time machine worked. Not the components, but, uh, how did it know to bring you to this time period, exactly?”
“That, I’m not really sure about,” Bart admitted as he rocked on his heels. “I helped build it and I understood most of the math and science behind it, but it was all designed by Oracle and her team. All we had to do was put it together and put in the right date.”
Jaime took a moment to respond as he first listened to whatever Khaji Da was saying. “By putting in a date to travel to, you gave the machine a point to focus on. Khaji Da says that, in theory, it should work the same for you, you just need a specific thing to focus on. Or a specific person.”
“You’re saying that… that if I focus really hard on Wally, I might be able to travel through time and arrive wherever he’s at?” Bart asked.
It was so simple. So obvious. Why had he never considered that?
Jaime started to say something else, but his words were slow and drawn out in a way that made them impossible to understand as Bart began to vibrate in a way that slowed down the world around him.
All that time he spent willing himself to go faster, faster, faster and paying more attention to the build-up of energy around him than what his goal truly was had been what held him back all along.
He needed to stop and focus.
Wally.
He wanted to find Wally.
He didn’t know what the beta’s vibrational frequency felt like - Bart presented as an omega long after his cousin disappeared - but he knew what Wally looked like. He knew the pulse of a speedster’s energy. He knew Wally.
They had a Bond and all he needed to do was find it.
Bart turned his focus inward and listened. It would be distant. Coming and going in the way Jason described to him, but real enough to sense. And there was something. A strange frequency that seemed to bounce around and crackle like poor reception on the radio, cutting in and out.
Bart ran toward it, leaving behind a bewildered Jaime to stand there and stare after him as the speedster vanished in a flash of light.
“…how am I supposed to explain this?” Jaime asked the desert sands.