"Barry—how are you already in Gotham?" Bruce kept his voice carefully neutral, hovering somewhere between pleasantly surprised and professionally curious. "It's been less than an hour since the call."
A pause on the other end. Several seconds of the particular silence of someone whose excitement has completely outpaced their ability to construct a coherent lie.
"I—yeah, actually, I wasn't in Central City before. I was already on a train to Metropolis. You know, to see Superman. He's great, I love—anyway, I got the call, and Gotham was the next stop, so."
"Your father was with you? I heard his voice on the phone earlier."
"Yes. Yes, he was. He came with me."
"Are you both coming to pick up Ms. Allen?"
Another pause. The math was visibly happening in real time.
"That's right. We'll come together."
"Wonderful. I'll send you my location. Where are you now—I can have someone come to you?"
"No, no need. I might be a little while yet. Don't worry about picking us up."
"The train is almost at the station actually. I just wanted to call ahead."
"Approximately how long?"
"Twenty minutes. Definitely within twenty minutes."
Bruce lowered the phone.
Jude looked at the ceiling.
Poor Barry. Batman's series of pleasant, reasonable questions had systematically stripped away every available exit. To maintain the story that he'd been on a train, Barry now had to somehow produce Henry Allen within twenty minutes—which meant running back to Central City, collecting his father, and returning to Gotham before the timeline collapsed under its own weight. All while his mother was alive and forty minutes away and he was running on an emotional high that had completely overridden his capacity for strategic thinking.
How could Batman be so evil.
The mild, thoughtful expression on Bruce's face confirmed that the calculation was already done. Jude had seen that look before. It reliably preceded something uncomfortable for someone else.
"You're estimating his speed," Jude said.
Bruce didn't deny it. "Central City to Gotham in under an hour, accounting for the time before he called. The answer he gave me confirms he thinks he can complete a round trip in twenty minutes." He paused. "That's considerably faster than I would have projected."
"The Flash's speed isn't fixed," Jude said. "It grows with training, experience, and necessity. This Barry has had months of active use since the Speed Force returned—he's fought speedsters, survived a singularity, been pushed to his actual limits more than once. His ceiling at this point is probably well above what you'd extrapolate from the data you have." He thought about it. "Twenty minutes might actually be him trying to slow down to seem plausible."
Bruce filed that away with the expression of a man updating a model.
"Somewhat rational," Jude concluded, "but not very."
Nora Allen had been listening to the whole exchange from two feet away, and her unease had taken on a quality—not fear exactly, but the careful attention of someone processing a situation that kept producing details that simply didn't fit together.
She didn't believe the young man on the phone was her son. Her Barry was eight years old. She knew her son's voice. And yet Henry had vouched for him, which made the whole thing stranger rather than simpler.
"Would you like to come inside?" Jude offered, noticing the way she was holding herself. "There are children here. Cookies." He paused. "Sometimes both helps."
She followed him in.
What followed was twenty minutes of Solomon Grundy—enormous, careful, wearing his patchwork clothes with the gravity of someone who understood they were precious—attempting to play a board game with several orphans who were loudly delighted to have company, while Nora Allen sat with a mug of tea and watched them with an expression that moved, gradually, from wariness toward something much softer.
Children had that effect. Especially on a woman whose own child was currently somewhere in her mind at eight years old, small and frightened and being carried away by a streak of gold lightning while she lay bleeding on the living room floor. These kids with their noise and their biscuit crumbs and their complete indifference to the weight of anything that had happened before this moment were, without trying, doing exactly what was needed.
I wonder how he is, she thought. Jude could see it in her face without her saying it.
Twenty minutes later, the knock came.
The door opened on Barry Allen and Henry Allen, and Nora Allen saw her husband first.
Henry's face had not aged the way she expected—it had aged more. Ten years more, at least, pressed into the deep lines around his eyes and the hard set of his mouth. She registered that in the space of a breath: Something happened to him. Something long.
Then she looked at the young man beside him.
He was tall. Early twenties. A face that was and wasn't familiar—the shape of something she knew, rearranged and grown into itself over years she hadn't been present for. His voice hadn't been her son's voice on the phone, and his face wasn't the face she carried in her memory.
But his eyes were.
She said his name before she'd made a conscious decision to.
"Barry."
It came out certain. Not a question. She couldn't have explained it—the mechanics of it were impossible and the logic was wrong and none of the evidence lined up—but from the moment she looked at him, she knew. The way you know things about your own children that have nothing to do with what they look like, the accumulated recognition of years compressed into an instant.
He broke before she did.
The sound Barry Allen made when he crossed the room and put his arms around his mother was not a Flash sound. It was not a hero sound. It was the sound of a twenty-something man who had been carrying the massive weight of a loss for most of his life and had just had it lifted without warning, and did not know how to hold his face together under those conditions.
Henry put his hand on both of them and wept quietly, without pretense.
Jude stood with his back to the wall and watched the three of them and said nothing.
The Flash can never save his mother. That was the truth of it—the truth Jude had understood in the timestream, watching the original timeline play out. Nora Allen's death was load-bearing. It created the wound that created the Flash, which created the conditions that produced every timeline Jude had touched. Barry had stood at that door in the Allen house and shaken his head, because he understood what the choice cost, and he'd made it. He'd chosen the world that existed over the one that might have been.
But this wasn't that choice. This was something else entirely. A soul that shouldn't have survived, quietly rerouted to somewhere it could continue. A woman alive in a world that hadn't accounted for her, crying into her adult son's shoulder.
You chose right, Jude thought. And this still happened anyway. Sometimes the math works out.
"Give them some time." He looked at Bruce and tilted his head toward the door.
Bruce looked at Barry—looked at him for a moment longer than a casual glance, with something in his expression that had no name and didn't need one—and then turned and left.
Jude followed him out and pulled the door softly closed behind them.