One day

I didn't know how to love you

"Time to get in character."

*

Bart didn't have much of a choice when it came to deciding who exactly he was going to portray. He had to prove that he was of Allen origin, he had to make them believe that his family was there to teach him, to infest him with good spirits and never-ending energy. That he was one of their own. They said his grandfather was constantly joking and talking, but Bart had no way of verifying it. His own father had not met grandfather at all. Bartholomew Allen died not knowing that he was going to be a father and therefore Don Allen couldn't describe him to his son. Not that he would have opportunity to do that anyway. He died when Bart was two.

That left only one member of Flash family Bart could base his cover on. Wally West.

He was the Flash Bart's mother remembered and told him about, he was the one the last cameras had recorded in his fight against the Reach. He joked till the very end, Bart noticed, clandestinely re-watching the discs he stole from the building that once was a TV-station in the Central City. He was lucky he met Nathaniel at all, even luckier that they were able to find a grotto the Reach seemed unaware of, perhaps because of the location. Mount Justice was not a place the Reach wanted to be remembered. In the grotto he had plenty of time to practice his smiles, his jokes, his attitude. Just like a costume, he was sawing his new personality from the scraps of the past, hoping that no one would notice how improbable and fake it seemed. If he was loud enough, funny enough, colorful enough, he would pass. So he watched everything he could that contained even a little of Wally West and tried on different smirks and smiles, trying to lose the true Bart Allen somewhere in the new Allen he was creating.

*

He should have known how the universe worked at this point. He got lazy, he grew stupid.

Drunk on his success in saving both grandpa and Nathaniel, blinded by his growing fondness of the boy that was destined to destroy everything Bart ever loved, blinded by his attempts to save him instead of stopping him, Bart stopped thinking. And this time it was not him who had paid the price. It was never him. The last time he had made a grave mistake, it was his mother who got punished. He should have remembered that as a rule. The future had one Flash and one Kid Flash, that was a fact. That was not something Bart should have changed, he didn't even mean to change it, didn't believe he could. He should have protested when Wally asked him about taking up the Kid Flash mantle, there should have been alarms going through his head. But there had been none. Because they were winning, because Jaime was safe, because Wally finally acted as if he liked Bart even a little bit. Everything was well and Bart allowed himself to stop thinking, to be lost in the happy mask he had created himself.

And now Wally West was dead.

He was dead because he acted like a hero he was, the Team had said.

But Bart knew the truth. He died because Bart was here. Because Bart had upset the reality with providing one speedster too many, the universe had to take one out of the equation. He should have known, he had built a time-machine, for god's sake! He should have slowed down even more, allowing Flash and Wally to outrun him, taking the shocks upon himself. But he didn't, because as always he wanted to protect his grandfather. He came here to meet him after all. To have a chance of loving him and be loved by him. To see how his father might have looked like. He was so absorbed with his feelings, with his need to save Barry, that his brain couldn't figure out that Wally was disappearing until it was too late. It should have been him.

When he saw Artemis crying in Miss Martian arms, he was sure it was supposed to be him. He was an intruder no one would cry that hard after. The one who changed the past. It was his presence that upset the history and took the love of her life from Artemis. He was ready for her to blame him, he was prepared. But when he put on the costume, she was smiling. A sad smile, true, but a smile nonetheless.