The Leaden Thunders Crashed

Chapter 2

A/N: Arghle blarghle I thought I posted the second half of this a month ago! Sorry and thanks to everybody! (Especially TaeKwonDoAsskicking, who is the reason I noticed now.) Uh, Merry Christmas?

The weirdest thing about preparing for a mission to the past wasn't designing a superhero costume, or practicing smiling all the time, or trying to get ready to be confronted by all that wealth and freedom, or getting an enormous mountain of confidential information drilled into him by Batman, or even the way that information-drilling kept straying amazingly close to a gruff, businesslike version of his Grandma's storytelling. No, it was the food.

Bart always needed to eat more than anyone else. Janet and Fu Li and Ratboy in the scouts complained about his extra rations. Some of the time, he had to carry an active inhibitor collar (with a disabled clasp and transponder, of course) around with him, and wear it when he slept and debriefed and did pretty much anything else that didn't happen at superspeed, just to slow down his metabolism so there was enough to go around.

But most of the time, he was on some kind of mission, and that meant he had to run. He got three times normal rations, and made up the rest by scavenging—he was really good at it, because he could get easily to places most people didn't have the time to bother approaching. He even shared out most of the best stuff, which was probably the only reason Ratboy didn't hate him.

Still, he was skinny. His body just didn't have the resources to be anything else. Batman put him on a double-sized high-protein diet for the two months leading up to the mission, and made him do some heavy-lifting work that normally would have been assigned to someone bigger. "The people you're meeting know speedsters," he lectured, with that clipped pattern that came into his voice whenever he wasn't focusing on the way he sounded. Bart wasn't sure why Batman had a problem with his own accent, but given the times he took the trouble to get rid of it, figured it had something to do with being more like the original, who must have spoken differently, even if they were father and son.

"They have expectations about the body type and behavior of someone with your powers. You have to be what they expect. Give them no reason to question. We are taking advantage of a common cognitive error known as the valence effect—most people are more willing to believe things that they find appealing. Therefore, the future is comfortable and safe. History remembers them as heroes. And this outcome depends on their not inquiring into the details. Do not allow the illusion to crack."

Batman—whose name turned out to be Damian, which was one of the few things he hadn't taught Bart on purpose; Bart fully intended to look up the little kid version in the past if he survived the mission, if only for the chance to get away with teasing him, and maybe pay him back for the ridiculous volume of info-mentorship.

Anyway, Batman was way helpful with big-picture stuff, and the detailed secrets Bart would need to strew around to make the heroes of the past eager to shut him up rather than interrogate him, and was just about the only one left who'd actually known any superheroes long enough to have meaningful advice about how they'd worked, for Bart to add to Grandma's stories as he designed his character, while Condor had a lot of tips on infiltration specifics—"Remember you have an excuse to change the subject often," was a good one. "Speedsters are expected to be distractible. Cultivate that."

Which wouldn't be hard. Bart did notice about eighty things a minute, plenty of which were interesting. Staying focused didn't take an effort, exactly, anymore, not so long as there was something important to be focused on, but he wouldn't have to pretend, exactly, either. That went with something he'd kind of known already, but which Red Condor made sure to drive in: Lie as little as possible. Say as little as possible, but never seem mysterious. Be someone trustworthy. That is the heart of a liar.

This provoked a reminder from Batman that everyone trusted the Flashes. That was key to the plan—Bart had to be trusted, underestimated, and allowed near the action, so he had to be on the Team. Superpowers, already knowing everything about them so there was nothing to hide, and something called nepotism was expected to be enough to get him in; if not, he had to follow them around until he got a chance to save someone's life and prove his loyalty and usefulness. A little trickier to pull off without attracting suspicion, but doable.

At this point Batman attempted to lecture him about human tribal tendencies, and Bart left to find Nathaniel, reasoning that if he got in trouble he could say he was practicing being Impulse, who would totally zip off in the middle of a boring lecture. Crash.

"Hey," Bart said as he made a hard right out of a crowded tunnel and zipped up beside the tall bald guy, who almost smiled.

Bart liked Nathaniel. He was quiet and very sincere—he was sad, too, but who wasn't angry or sad sometimes? A lot, even? Nathaniel was adjusting. He'd been one of the first humans the Reach put on-mode, which in his case apparently meant it was like he'd gone to sleep one day, had a long, horrible nightmare, and woken up forty years later to find the world had ended and Batman was mad at him.

He'd told Bart once, only half joking, that the Batman part was so scary it got him past the first horror at everything else. Bart wasn't sure if that had been intentional or not. Batman seemed to know all about head games but not bother with them very much, but the thing was, Nathaniel was Neutron, and 'Neutron' was the supervillain who'd killed the Flash. Grandpa Barry, but to Batman just The Flash. (Even though Wally had taken up the name for years, during the early stages of Reach conquest, before they finally got him. Bart wondered whether Batman had known that Flash, as a kid.)

That was the first Reach victory, the beginning of the end, the first thing he had to stop to start setting time right. Bart didn't hate Nathaniel for it, of course—you can't crash the mode from inside, common sense—but sometimes he was pretty sure Batman and Nathaniel kind of did.

They were both really serious people, which might be why, but Bart had a theory that it went with the other main thing they had in common: Batman and Neutron both remembered the world before the Reach. They still didn't really accept that there were times when nothing you did could ever be enough, and that you couldn't blame people for that. You just had to help them past it however you could.

Bart got a lot of hints like that from talking to Nathaniel. He still had his Neutron powers even now that he was off-mode, and had been deployed twice to use them, but his best asset to the resistance right now was as the best living memory of humanity as a free people. The oldsters who were left had all spent more than half their lives under the heels of the bugs, being meat, and they belonged to this time, had changed to survive into it. Nathaniel had seen the changes only from a distance. He remembered.

"Hey," Nathaniel responded, setting down the knife he'd been chopping parsnips with. Bart stole a disc of root vegetable as soon as the older guy's eyes left the cutting board, more out of instinct than hunger, because of the aforementioned freakishly giant portions of food he'd been getting, and Nathaniel's eyebrows said that he knew what had just happened even if he hadn't seen it. "Avoiding Batman?"

"He teaches too much theory," Bart shrugged, reaching over to steal another piece of raw parsnip at normal speed, this time. Nathaniel was bad at guarding his own rations, never mind making sure people didn't steal while he was on mess duty; Bart had no idea why he was allowed to cook. No one let Bart cook. "I have a good memory but there is a limit."

"Hm," Nathaniel agreed, going back to chopping, like that was any deterrent to someone with Bart's speed. Back when Nathaniel first joined them, Bart had stolen so much of his food so often that he'd started getting faint from undernourishment.

Tre had been the one to figure it out, and talked very seriously to Bart before giving him punishment duty for carelessness endangering a comrade, and for abusing his powers, but he hadn't actually had to abuse them because Nathaniel had never tried to stop Bart companionably scavenging off his plate. Looking back, it had probably been a guilt thing—he'd maybe even thought Bart was punishing him, which made Bart feel practically moded himself when he thought about it too hard—but Bart had really just thought the guy wasn't hungry, because he hadn't acted defensive over his food at all until he was literally starving. It was like he didn't even have the instincts for hunger.

The past was going to be so weird.

Three weeks before departure time, Bart caught Condor looking at him funny while she recounted something she'd once heard about the second Flash, Bart's cousin Wally. (Who it turned out had been related to Condor's mom by marriage, how crash was that? Family! That was alive! He didn't try to hug her or anything, but it was pretty cool.) It was a soft sort of look, that seemed to go with the way she, like Batman, kept including details that couldn't possibly be useful with odd emphasis, and that night he finally figured it out, and felt like the slowest boy alive.

This wasn't a suicide mission, unless the machine broke in a particularly catastrophic way. This was a mission where the goal was to be the only survivor.

There were people in the world older than forty, but with the cullings, not that many. Most of the people Bart had ever known who'd been alive forty years ago were dead now. He was pretty much setting out to kill everyone alive. No, not kill. Unmake. Uncreate his whole generation and most of the one before it.

After a night of tossing and turning, he took his shift on dawn watch. Ratboy, who was his partner because neither Batman or Condor was the kind of cell leader who took personal preferences into consideration when drawing up a roster, demanded to know what the hell was wrong with him, and Bart answered a little too willingly, "If it would save the world, would you be okay with never being born?"

Ratboy spat. "World like this? Like it's worth saving."

He risked his life for the resistance all the time, jerk or not, but that wasn't the world, not really, that was people. Their people. People Bart was going to kill. "But if we could go back and crash the mode before it started, so the Reach never won," he said. "Your parents might never meet. They might never even be born. Would that be okay?"

Tre would say yes, but Tre was a hero. Tre was brave and kind and completely ready to die. Ratboy was an angry, mean survivor. If he said yes…

He snorted. "You and your what-ifs, you walking stomach. Some of us don't have powers, can't afford to play pretend."

"Just if, though," Bart insisted, and Ratboy looked at him a little funny, and he knew he'd been too intense. He was giving too much away. But then, didn't people deserve to know? If they were going to destroy them all, for this plan. Didn't they deserve to have some kind of say? They couldn't ask everyone, because then the Reach would find out, and Batman and Condor wouldn't let public opinion affect their planning anyway, but if he could get a response from someone as bitter as Ratboy, that would mean something.

And then a Reach patrol hit the perimeter and they had to move, move, move.

Later, after they'd made sure no transmissions had gotten through and finished putting out the grassfire, Ratboy sidled up to Bart and looked at him slantwise, like he looked at most things. "Yeah."

"Huh?" Bart looked up from rubbing soot off his hands, clueless.

Ratboy rolled his eyes. "What you were asking earlier. This world is moded shit. If we could have something better, let it burn."

"Even if—"

"Yeah, even if it means I never existed. Whatever."

Bart grinned, and Ratboy definitely knew something was up, but he didn't ask, and he didn't gossip.

The drilling got harder and harder as the machine neared completion. And it turned out it wasn't just Batman and Condor; people who knew about the plan kept slipping up to him in odd moments and telling him things, tiny things, mostly, that had nothing to do with the mission.

Advice, sometimes, or stories about their lives, sweet things and angry things and accounts of particularly important battles and heroic sacrifices Bart hadn't witnessed, that would soon never have happened if he did this right. Stop, he wanted to tell them sometimes, when the weight of whatever they were entrusting was particularly large and he could feel it, threatening to weigh him down and make him slower. But he never did, and every time he didn't say it, he was glad after that he hadn't. Is glad, still.

He's going to have the whole future on his shoulders, whether he knows all the details that add up to the one he's leaving behind or not. Whether he remembers for them or not. He can't let it be too heavy. He can't let himself be too small to hold it. He's going back to save the past, and his memory is all he can offer the present.

And now. Now it's time. Now he's here in the ruins of a mountain once called Justice, torn down by treachery, ready to go back to when it was whole. Here beside the machine that he and Nathaniel carried here in pieces and assembled on the spot, and if either of them made a mistake it could mean disaster, but they didn't. He trusts them both.

Now Bart smiles grimly at Nathaniel, and opens the time machine, and doesn't think about who might be getting killed in the distraction Batman's staging further up the coast, because it doesn't really matter anymore. He thinks about heroes, instead. About how much he loves the idea of them. How much they gave, how much they're still giving. About sacrifice and hope and making a future worth protecting. About second chances for Grandpa and Nathaniel and Red Condor and Blue Beetle and everyone who'll still exist when this is over. He rolls his shoulders, and settles into character.

He appreciates all the training. He really does. Everything he's gotten from everyone. They've given him all kinds of tools to make this easier, and more importantly, they've given him their memories. But really, what he's going to need to do is wait for the right moment, and run. And smile. And pretend everything is fine. And he's going to do it alone.

Bart has been training for this mission his entire life.