#Dani Phantom is the Ancient of the Speedforce

[spacedace]

“Hey, I need to get married for bullshit Infinite Realms reasons, you two in?”

“Tt, of course.”

“Sure thing! Do we need to get going for that like, right now? Or later?”

“Eh, like in a couple of hours? The Observants are demanding some Royal Ball or something and they pulled out some stupid old laws out of their collective asses that if I’m not married by the time it starts they can assign me spouses of their choosing, can you fucking believe that shit?”

“Woah, what the hell? Can they even do that?”

“I was under the impression they were only permitted to observe.”

“Right? It’s total crap, but apparently there’s like this super old law on the books and they didn’t bring it up until now when there’s like no time left to try and force me to marry someone they pick.”

“They are training to gain influence over you?”

“Eh, more like they’re trying to get control of my Dad by way of me. But still fucked as hell.”

“So why do you need to marry both of us? Or do you just need to marry one of us and we should play rock paper scissor for it?”

“Technically I only need to marry one of you, but I don’t want them pulling out any loopholes or something. So, it’d be great if one of you could be my consort for my role as Queen of Mirrors, and one could be my consort for my role as Crown Princess. You two can figure who’s who on that all that, I’m good with whatever.”

“Oooh, can I be consort for the Mirror Court? I can annoy Kon more that way.”

“I am amenable to that. Grandfather will have a fit when he learns that I can cut his access to the Pits off at my discretion and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

“Awesome, okay are you two good for meeting up at like, three? We can pop over to my Lair and get everything sorted out there.”

“Works for me, my only class til this afternoon is at one and the professor already said we’re cutting out early because she has to go out of town this weekend.”

“Four would be more agreeable if possible, I have to take Titus to the vet for his checkup.”

“Okay let’s aim for four then. It’s just signing some paperwork, making some quick blood-slash-ectoplasm pacts and swearing a couple binding oaths… Should only take like five or ten minutes?”

“They’re not gonna make you have a huge royal wedding or anything?”

“Nah. Dad keeps things pretty chill so as long as the paperwork is all in order we’ll be good. Though once Auntie Dorathea finds out she’s absolutely gonna make us have one. She loves planning weddings. Swear its what she makes her hoard out of somehow.”

“So long as we have a say in some of the proceedings I have no issue with that eventuality.”

“Same, it sounds like it’d be a fun way to annoy the Observants even more.”

“Don’t for get all the weirdos trying to be my suitors and all that bullshit.”

“We have an accord then. We can reconvene at the usual place.”

“Awesome, you two are the best! I gotta jet and let everyone know and get the ball rolling on the paperwork stuff. See you guys at four!”

With that, Nomad - Stella Phantom, Crown Princess of the Infinite Realms, Queen of Mirrors, Core of the Speedforce and ghostly hero of the Titans and the Justice League - tore a rip in the fabric of space and time and darted out of the room the same way she came. Through the mind-bending tear in reality the eerie, eye-searing green of the Infinite Realms glowed in all its unsettling glory, Phantom Keep a glittering expanse of night sky made solid in the distance.

Jon waved at her cheerfully as Damian gave a nod of farewell before both silently turned their attention back to their respective tablets as the portal closed behind their friend and teammate and the glimpse of the Ghost Zone disappeared again. Completely unbothered by the conversation just held or the life changing implications that came with them.

Jon was humming as he tapped away at something on the screen before him, Damian propping his head up on his fist in vague boredom as he frowned down at the information he was reading.

The rest of the room Nomad had left behind was caught in a frozen, stunned silence in the wake of the baffling conversation they’d all just been witness to. All eyes in the room darted between Flamebird and Pheonix seated calmly at the end of the table, then to the space where Nomad had disappeared to, back to the young men, and then towards the head of the table where Superman and Batman sat looking bewildered and a bit on the verge of heart attacks.

The short status update meeting was about to become much, much longer it seemed.

Though a lot more entertaining.

[stealingyourbones]

DPXDC Prompt Masterlist #401-450

401. Bat Tutor

402. Time to Give an Old Friend a Call...

403. Wes Weston, Reporter for the Gotham Gazette

404. Unwanted Heirloom: The Ghost King's Contract

405. Danny: CCPN Photographer

406. Danny: Gotham Biochemist

407. New Management and Better Ghost Gear

408. Ancient Flowers for Poison Ivy

409. Fix and Unthaw (Dr. Freeze)

410. Sam finds Injured Jason

411. Dangerous Feedback (GL)

412. Batman took Ghost Drugs

413. Wes Weston finds Jason Todd

414. Magic and Monster Fucker (John Constantine)

415. Glow In The Dark Eyes (Wes)

416. Constantine meets Clockwork

417. Ghostly Wing AU

418. Do Not Enter: Radiation Hazard (DP)

419. Eldritch Dreams and Nightmares

420. Danny is Terry's Dad

421. Jason's Aunt: Sam Manson

422. Jason Watches his Death Again

423. GZ Out of Sync with Reality (Fav Prompts)

424. What a Tall Woman

425. Jason Time Swap AU (Fav Prompts)

426. Jason Rewatches the Titan Tower Incident

427. John Constantine Saves Danny

428. Only Liminal People can see Ghosts. Tim isn't Liminal

429. Danny Possesses Jason's Motorcycle.

430. Killer Moth's Sidekick

431. Impaired Speaking Jason with Ghost Speak (Fav Prompts)

432. Jason and Jazz go to the same Gym

433. Oracle meets Jazz Fenton

434. Danny thinks GL's are Ghosts

435. Maddie is Friends with Jim Gordon (Fav Prompts)

436. Danny owns a DC Character's Soul

437. Tech Disaster

438. Dani meets Dick Grayson.

439. Dick Mistakes Jazz as Babs

440. Billy's Twitch Chat Rants

441. Kwan works in the Wayne PR Dept.

442. Ra's tries to Clone Tim. Instead Teleports Dani

443. Danny meets the Ghost of Robin

444. Twinsies! (Damian and Danny family bonding)

445. Damian gets Revived. Wakes up in GZ

446. Danny is Wayne's Personal Pilot (Fav Prompts)

447. Tim Drake's Secretary: Daniel Fenton (Fav Prompts)

448. Golden Age Superman Meets Danny

449. Dan Phantom and Jason Todd are Bros

450. The Speedforce rejects the GZ

[spacedace]

Reluctant War AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Everything I know about Flash and the FlashFam (& Flash enemies) comes from fandom and theflashmuseum on tiktok so fair warning on that lol

Sorry if Barry is out of character or things don't line up with canon. Canon is a stranger I think I passed in a crowded room once, I did not ask for its number lol

Anyway, time to touch a bit more on that whole Ancient of the Speedforce Elle thing yeah? Here be a sprinkle more of that and I promise there's more to come haha

Gonna start posting this on Ao3 soon, probably Monday or Tuesday, so heads up I may stop adding these parts here on tumblr once I do

---

It lived beneath his skin.

For a long time Barry had never believed in magic. His world was grounded, scientific, made of predictable rules and laws. Tools that could be used to explain everything strange or supernatural away as just another odd twist of the massive universe they all belonged to.

It took perhaps a little longer than it should have to admit that magic was as real as thermodynamics and gravity and atoms. That the world was a great deal stranger than even science - for all its own wildness at times - could account for. There were things that went bump in the night. Hells below and heavens above and things that crawled and clawed their way out from the places in between.

It was almost a little embarrassing how long it had taken him to admit to such things, when considering his relationship with the Speedforce.

A force of the universe. Like gravity or time, pushing and pulling everything along. Something that could be explained with all the familiar scientific concepts that had buoyed him along in life for so long.

Except.

Except.

Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful but felt. Making his hair stand on end, his fingers tingle and numb. Sliding against his veins, bouncing between scar tissue and freckles. Pressing out from the confines of his sternum, rattling against his rib cage as it shifted and moved. Twining around each and every vertebrae. Coiling over and under itself within his skull, darting along the paths of his neurons and nerves. It hummed in every cell in his body. Darted and danced in the space between the atoms that made up his very existence.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

Lived.

Not existed. Not contained. Lived.

He couched it in terms of science, but science - despite his long time refusal to acknowledge it - wasn’t really able to explain the full scope of what he could feel. Not just the power of the Speedforce, but the…the identity of it. The living part that made it’s home in his body, existing in a way that was separate from him. Distant and indistinct most of the time, but…sentient.

He could feel it. Warm and excitable, delighting every time he tapped into it. Pushing him from behind urging him on and on, tugging him forward from ahead beckoning to go, faster, faster. Joyful in his victories, despairing in his loses.

It lived beneath his skin.

Until it didn’t.

He followed its joyful calls, pushed beyond what he should, what he knew was safe. Chasing that welcoming chant of faster, faster until he was there. In the Speedforce. More even, was the Speedforce.

He was everywhere. Beyond everywhere. In every possible everywhere it was possible to be. Every world, every universe, every multiverse.

To enter the Speedforce, to merge with it, was to become part of existence itself.

He couldn’t remember everything about it once he came back. He got flashes, sometimes, quick moments in dreams of places, of moments. What stuck with him most had been the feeling of it all. That had been the hardest part of returning. The sense of terrible loss, of having been surrounded by such a giddy, delighted, devoted love only to be pulled back from the heart of it. Returned to how he had been before, drifting at the edge of it all, it had been painful, agonizing even.

He…adapted, eventually. The sense of it all was still there, just distant. Something he’d come to feel he’d see again, someday.

It had been different, recently.

His powers were the same, he just as fast as ever, but…there was something…off. Changed. A sense that while his speed remained, the Speedforce had become, for lack of a better word, quiet. Distant.

He’d been having dreams, since it started. Not the quick glimpses of his time where he’d merged with the Speedforce. No, instead they were more nightmarish. Not nightmares exactly, though he felt like they should be with what they contained, but something else. Something that felt unnervingly real, left him confused and reeling when he woke with the certainty that when he opened his eyes he’d see the same as what his dreams held.

In the dream, he was in a room.

Cement and metal, hostile and brutalistic in design. He was bound in place, standing upright with feet and hands spread wide and locked in place within strange devices. Gleaming chrome and brilliant green, a painful thrum of energy surging through his body - not the Speedforce, something else, deeply unpleasant pulsing through every cell of his being and freezing him in place more firmly then the restraints did. Projectors hung from the ceiling, displaying images of landscapes, changing every ten second or so.

The sight of them made him nauseous, body shivering and spasming with the burning, agonizing need to go, but at the same time there was something distantly soothed by them too. Like a gnawing hunger abated with water and crumbs. The need for food not gone but the pangs diminished by the false feeling of being full.

In the dream he felt like he was dying.

In the dream he was afraid that maybe he couldn’t.

That he’d be trapped alive in that state forever, watching places he’d never see in person again as he was trapped in one place. His mind spiraling his Core splintering under the weight of it all, scared so scared. He wanted his brother, wanted to see the cement walls explode into dust and debris and see him there, ready to save the day like he had so many times before.

He just had to wait. His brother was looking for him, would have everyone in the Realms looking for him. He just had to hold on.

Barry didn’t have a brother. He only remembered when he woke, heart hammering in his chest fast even by his own standards, mouth tasting of bile and body aching with the need to go.

He hadn’t been sleeping much these days, even before the King of the Dead declared war.

It was having its effects, as sleep deprivation always did. His mind drifting, catching again and again on the dream, attention far away from the world around him. How many times had he been startled by someone calling his name, touching his arm? How many times had they given him a pinched, worried look that told him they’d been trying to reach him for longer than they should have before he noticed.

He was aware, distantly, of the glowering, stern faces around him. The flinty looks of his friends’ and partners’ eyes as they stared at the image of Waller’s scowling mug.

She’d declined an in-person meeting, hunkering down in some bunker somewhere trying to avoid the consequences of her latest atrocities. Or maybe just trying to avoid the very real possibility that one of the members of JL Dark might try to kill her for what she’s caused.

Or JL light, for that matter.

Bruce and Clark had their rules that they lived by, but Diana certainly wouldn’t hesitate to splatter Waller’s brains across the nearest available wall. In reviewing footage of one of the last battles - she’d been at the other one at the time, trying to contend with a ghost in the shape of an ethereal dragon - she’d recognized the spectral figures of Amazons long dead, fierce even in death as they fought with a warrior’s pride along side the rest of Phantom’s armies. They followed a figure that towered even above the Amazons, four arms and gleaming armor and a name that Barry associated with ruin and forgotten hope but who was so much more to Diana. Heroes long departed to the fields of Elysium, stepping out of their well earned rest to fight once more.

A few hadn’t survived the weapons the GIW shot them with. Barry didn’t know what that meant, for a ghost to die. If they simply returned to their afterlife or -

He tried not to think about the or.

They’d been going back and forth for awhile now. Voices faraway, muffled. The world felt as if it was underwater, blurred and cold. Clark had gotten to his feet at some point, Waller’s grip on a pen so tight on the screen he expected to see if burst at any moment. It was an important meeting, an important discussion. One he needed to be apart of, aware of, but it all escaped him. Sand held too tightly, slipping through his fingers. On the screen, Waller hit a button on the computer beside her and the image changed.

The world burned back to life in sharp relief.

The dream.

The room.

Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain.

It looked larger on the screen.

Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

She was young. A child, no older than Superboy Jr. or Robin. She looked like Phantom - her father - but there were differences. Her hair was white, but it didn’t look like the spun starlight of her father’s. Instead it burned, the bright hot crackling of the plasma of a lighting bolt striking. Skin the blur of shapes caught just at the corner of the eye as you ran past, Eyes -

Looking at him.

The image had come up, a live feed - he knew it was live, knew he was looking at her where she was at that exact moment - and she’d been as he was every time he tried to sleep. Trembling and shuttering, eyes squinting against the pain, trying to stay open so as not to miss a single moment of the flat images imposed on blank cement walls. Desperate to fill the fathomless hunger burning deep down in the Core of her.

But then a shuttering breath and her eyes - the burning green of an afterimage - snapped up to the camera. Snapped up to look at him, recognition in her young face. And despite never having seen this girl before, he recognized her too.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

She lived beneath his skin.

He could feel her there. Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful, but felt.

Not as felt as she used to be.

The image snapped back to Waller’s face, smug and self-satisfied. Talking - lying - about the how the girl was there, what the GIW’s intentions for her were. Barry was on his feet, but so was everyone else. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only hear static, the rush of wind, the crack of the lightning bolt. A call for help.

It was then that the alarms began to blare. On the screen someone rushed in to whisper into Waller’s ear. Bruce was running out of the room towards the Zeta tubes and Barry was right there with him and there was so much chaos around them, men in white and Gothamites and Ghosts banding together to rain terror down upon them and something massive and horrible and living towering above it all and Barry let go of that last bits of logic and thought.

Instinct, older than he was. The echo of a voice that had called him for years now, carrying him along, biding him forward:

Run.

Someone might have shouted after him as he left Gotham behind. He didn’t know.

All he knew was the pounding of his feet upon the ground, the wind in his face, the Speedforce lashing and frantic and hopeful burning and sizzling beneath his skin. Calling him further and further away until he stood in a vast, empty field staring at a single, rusted shack near ready to collapse before him.

He wasn’t alone.

Wally. Bart. Max. More still. Not just his family and friends. Eobard. Hunter. Thaddeus. Everyone touched by the Speedforce.

They didn’t speak. Bodies humming and thrumming, crackling with energy and intent.

Minds as one, they focused on the shed, the hidden hatch inside, the base hidden deep below.

The Speedforce lived beneath their skin, and no one was going to steal it away from them.

[spacedace]

Here be the first little bit of the new DP x DC AU I warned about earlier where Tim, due to his constant repeated attempts at cloning Bart & Kon, accidentally summons slightly eldritch Elle who is very interested in what he’s up to.

As always feel free to run with this as a prompt if yall find anything here interesting :D

*

Tim didn’t mean to summon her.

He’d been in the lab, staring at the data on the latest failed attempts at cloning Kon and Bart and feeling like he was cracking in two. Eyes burning, chest tight, world spinning out into shifting impossible shadows around him as his mind and body struggled to push him forward into another day without sleep. The hush of water in the tanks, his unsteady steps on the cement floor, the chill seeping into his bones.

He stumbled and swayed through the maze of the lab, numbers dripping like blood down the screen as he tried to stare at the figures. He needed to try again, needed to bring them back, in whatever capacity he could. This time would work. This time he’d get it right.

When he saw her, feet clumsy as he rounded a corner, he thought she was just another hallucination.

How could she be anything else?

Skin like a polished mirror, hair like the white-hot flash of lightning, eyes as green as the depths of the Lazarus Pits. She floated before a tank, spectral and strange with a long wisping tail that drifted off into nothingness in place of legs, body shifting and changing before his eyes in ways that bodies should not be able to. Outside of the eyes the face was…not there. An impression of the shapes that you’d expect to see in a human face, like the Question’s. Sometimes though the features defined, sharpened. Mirror bright skin crackling as faces took shape in the glass.

In the low light of the lab, he almost imaged one of those faces was Kon’s. Dimples and freckles and high cheek bones and the slant of a silhouette that haunted Tim’s dreams at night. A flicker of her lightining hair and it was gone. Smoothed back into soft blankness once more.

He watched from the of the aisle as she lifted too-long mirror shard fingers and rest them gently on the glass as she seemed to peer in at the lifeless body inside.

Attempt 76.

One of his tries with Bart. The organs hadn’t grown right during the age-up process. Tim had cried for that one as he had for all the others. As he had for Bart and Kon when they had died. As he still did as the fact that it was more maddened grief than hope that kept him pushing forward anyway.

He closed his eyes to the hallucination at the end of the aisle. Breathed deep and steady. It might be gone when he opened his eyes again. It might not be. It might be something - someone - else when he dares look next. He’d been through this time and time again over the days and weeks he’d been throwing himself at this agonizing wall. The only difference this time was the intricate strangeness, the total lack of recognition he had for the figure, baring the moment he almost saw Kon in its face.

Coffee. Maybe some harder stimulants, if he had any left. New data to review, new attempts to be made. He didn’t have time for the effects of sleep deprivation.

Tim opened his eyes.

He jerked back as he came face to face with himself, warped and strange and green in the reflective face of the being where it now hovered so close that if it breathed he would feel it upon his face.

She tilted her head at him, curious. Hands rose to cup his face, rest on his shoulders, wrap around his arms, cradle his hands. More hands than he’d seen before. More hands than he was able to truly comprehend, stomach souring as his eyes stung and strained in the attempt to look at the impossible warping of her body. Despite the glint of shattered glass that made up her fractured palms and splintered silver fingers, her hands were soft and warm where they curled around him. Almost human in the way they held him in place, the hold pleasantly firm.

He’d never had a doting elder aunt to pinch his cheeks and demand to get a look at him, but he imagined this might be what that felt like. The way the being shifted her head from side to side, his reflection warping in the curved reflection of the planes of her featureless face, added to the strange idea. His hallucinations didn’t normally touch him, though. And never so…kindly.

Tim felt his blood go cold as he realized it might not be a figment of his fracturing mind floating before him.

Swallowing nervously, he tried to shift backwards, to slip out of the many grasping hands before the softness turned sharp and began to cut into him. He felt something cool against the back of his legs, hair standing on end as static electricity built up on his skin where he brushed the trailing tail he hadn’t noticed her curl around him. The entity leaned in close, the depthless green of her glowing eyes consuming Tim’s entire field of vision, and he was flooded by the sudden, horrible awareness of being Known.

The world fell away from him, his stomach lurching with the sick-sweet feel of free fall that used to exhilarate him when he’d first become Robin and had flown from rooftops dangling by his grapple and his belief in the magic being Robin instilled in him. The lab, the equipment, the piles of data and desperate scribbles, the failed clones, Tim himself. All swept away in the flood of green and the roar of lightning and the cool press of glass.

He came to would could have been minutes or centuries later. Gasping and sick on the cold cement floor, shivering as he dry heaved. His mouth full of salt and copper and the burning crackle of ozone at the back of his throat.

For a moment, disoriented and dizzy, he thought it had all been a hallucination after all. Or some fractious dream visited upon him by his torn and tattered mind after he’d finally collapsed from exhaustion on the lab floor. That the entity truly had been just in his mind, a consequence of his refusal to rest until his work was done.

Then he felt the glass-cool fingers running through his hair, the warm hand rubbing at his back, heard the low murmurs of reassurance in a voice that was almost, almost human.

He spasmed as he tried to jerk away, hissing with the sharp sting of pins and needles dancing over every nerve. His limbs were heavy and clumsy, and he was crashing back to the cold floor under his own weight before he could even try and drag himself away. His breathing came in short, aching gasps as he tried to twist away, only managing to roll to his back to see the entity where it sat calmly looking down at him.

She had a face now. A solid, steady one that fit her in a way that made him think it must be her real one, though what that meant exactly he didn’t know. The glowing eyes had dimmed and shifted, more human looking with black pupils and white sclera. Button nose marked with silver-tarnish freckles that spread over her cheeks too. A mouth, with lips curled into an apologetic smile. Her hair, still shifting as if caught in a wind that wasn’t there, was still the bright white it’d been before, but the lighting of the locks had settled into faint crackles between the curls. Whatever she was, whatever she’d done to him, he could look at her without feeling like his mind might just crack in two.

“Wha-“ His voice cracked, painful and hoarse like he’d been screaming. Maybe he had been. Swallowing around the burn in his throat, he choked out a hissed, “What are you?”

Her head tilted in that curious slant again, more human features giving her a bright, youthful look as she peered down at him questioningly. “You summoned me, Little Gaffer, shouldn’t you know?”

*

Gaffer is a term used for a glass crafter, as well as light technicians for stage/movie productions. I’m using it as the term for the person who creates a Clone, with the clone themselves being a Mirrorborn, and the person they are cloned from being called the clone’s Reflected. Gaffer is probably a bit of a stretch for this, technically I think someone who makes mirrors would be called a Glazier (Glaziers are glassmakers) but I wasn’t vibing that as much. Besides I like the vibe of glass + light = mirror in a way.

Anyway, opening volley of a new AU where Tim ends up becoming like a warlock to Elle to get his loved ones back, while Elle is just having the time of her sorta eldritch little life watching this absolute mess of a human wreck shit and cause so much chaos even without the powers she starts giving him.

(Elle in this is both the God Queen of Clones/Mirrorborn as well as the Ancient of the Speedforce (which I’ve decided is called the Ever Onward in the Infinite Realms, because I literally can’t be stopped from trying to make normal DC things sound mystical because spooky Infinite Realms aesthetics haha)

Have a tiny bit more written for this, but don’t know how much I’ll end up writing for it with all the other projects I have currently lol, so if anyone is interested feel free to run with it as you so desire haha

[spacedace]

John Constantine knew what he was. Knew he wasn’t a good man. He tried, sometimes. Got credit for it more often than he should. But at the end of the day, he was a bastard of the highest sort and nothing was going to change that fact. A rogue and a rake through and through. He lied, he cheated, he stole, and delighted in doing so. Cut from the same cloth as ol’ Stingy Jack who tricked the devil into letting him live longer than he should and managed to keep himself out of hell to boot after he’d finally shuffled off his mortal coil. John liked to think his cloth had been sewn into a much sharper suit though. He’d been clever enough to avoid the dying altogether, no carrying around smoldering turnips in the bleak between of closed-off afterlives for him, thanks. He was a charlatan and a scoundrel, and many, many worse things besides. John knew what he was. The woman who appeared in his dank and stinking flop house room in the middle of the night knew what he was too.

The Wild Hunt calls. For better or worse, John Constantine answers.

-

Chapter 6 is up! 😄

[spacedace]

Sat down to write more Ghosts of Gotham adn Business of Family.

Have instead written an opening bit of an AU where Tim accidentally summoned a slightly eldritch Mirrorborn (clone) Queen/Ancient of the Ever Onward (Speedforce) Elle with his whole "try to clone my two dead best friends hundreds of times" thing.

...it's slowly morphing into Tim accidentally/on purpose becoming a warlock with Elle as his equal parts delighted and confused Patron to get his loved ones back. He might unintentionally start a cult (it might be intentional I don't know how unhinged this is gonna get)

Send help, I've started world building again 😭

(Also as always take this mess as a writing prompt if any of my nonsense sounds neat to you ❤️)

[spacedace]

Time was a steady thing. But only in the broadest sense of the word. Steady like the ticking of a clock. Like the countdown of a timer. Like the grains of sand slipping down the hourglass. Not steady in the sense of stable.

Clockwork muses on matters past, present and future.

[spacedace]

The world burned back to life in sharp relief. The dream. The room. Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain. It looked larger on the screen. Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

Barry's been having trouble sleeping recently.

[spacedace]

@url-is-url I am begging you for thr fic name please!!

Ancient of the Speedforce Elle is eating me alive, I am obsessed with the idea and I haven't been able to find any fics for it that haven't come out of my own brain rot lol

Okay dp x dc prompt:

Clockwork is the Ancient of Time

Danny is the Ancient of Space.

Elle is/becomes the Ancient of the Speedforce.

And she curious about these fast little dudes that keep merging with her core and refusing to stay there. So, obviously, she's got to go to the universe they're from and say hi and see what's up and maybe hang around for a bit and actually get to know this crazy fast time traveling/dimension hopping family that are driving her Grandpa CW up the wall.

The Justice League are not ready for the Flash Family’s newest addition. The fact that she sometimes looks like prime Bat Adoption bait is not helping.

[catastrophic-crow]

dear gods; @spacedace this is less of a brain worm and more of a brain thresher maw (and my attention has been devoured)

(also, consider me a convert when it comes to "ancient of the speedforce Elle." that's excellent and correct, i decided and i really like the names)

Had a dc x dp brain worm, feel free to use as a prompt <3

Sidenote, I decided to get fancy with the Ancients titles because of course I did lol

Shifting Where = Space (Danny)

Eternal When = Time (Clockwork)

Ever Onward = Speedforce (Ellie)

-

Bruce watched the footage again.

And again.

Again.

It didn’t make sense.

A week ago every television, radio, computer, phone - even the LED billboards - had been taken over to deliver a message. Across the United States. In every territory it held. Every military base. Down in the depths of the oceans where American submarines tried to creep past Atlantian patrols. In the endless cold white of Antarctica. Even far above in the International Space Station. Any place the United States Government had control over, any place one of its citizens found themselves. There was the message.

The face of an entity, human in shape but not in form. Hair as gleaming white as starlight, eyes bright as the twisting dance of the Aurora Borealis, skin as cold and blue as the tail of a comet. The entity wore armor as black as the depths of space with a crown to match, the later glinting and shifting with the twisting birth and death of galaxies. A cloak of nebulae danced down his shoulders, eclipsing the world beyond the entity entirely.

He named himself, jaw tight, expression serious.

High King Phantom of the Infinite Realms.

The Shifting Where. Son of the Eternal When. Father of the Ever Onward. His Epitaphs many and ever growing. The True Balance. The Bridge Between. The Devourer of Dark. The Last Child of Between. The Great One.

King of the Dead. King of the Infinite Worlds. King of so much more than Bruce had ever even known was possible.

King who had declared war. Who marshaled his endless armies. Who spoke of warnings, of efforts to reach a peace, of trying again and again and again to find a way to not plunge into violence and bloodshed. All things living come to call him King in time, he had no want or need to go out and hurry that along. But there were no options left to him now. He had tried for peace. He had been denied.

He would not see his people suffer any longer. Would not see those he’d sworn to lead and protect imprisoned by fools who had sworn themselves enemies to all the afterlives. Would no longer permit the vicious cruelty to continue.

The message was a final warning.

A final offer.

Three days, Phantom said. The United States government would have three days to release their prisoners, to begin the process of dismantling the laws that made death itself an illegal act.

If they refused, he would lead his endless armies personally in the war to come.

It had not been an idle threat.

Three days after the message, after Bruce and the rest of the Justice League scrambled to try and figure out just what it was it was all about, after Justice League Dark’s members shakily took turns explaining just how powerful the being that had gave that message was and how much danger the world was in should he and his armies march upon their world, war came.

Of all places, it began in a town in Illinois.

The sky shattered like broken glass above, Lazarus Green beyond, and the Dead poured out.

It started in Illinois.

It did not end there.

Bruce watched the footage of it all, eyes burning as he watched every second of CCTV footage, every shaky phone camera video, every news broadcast.

Most of them looked human enough. Changed in death, but recognizably human once. A pair of glowing teenagers on a motorcycle, a writhing shadow twisting about at their command sweeping chaos upon the battlefield. A young woman dressed to perform with hair a literal flame, burning bright blue and snapping furiously as she played devastation upon her enemies with her guitar. A child with corpse gray skin and luminescent green hair, flickering in and out of Bruce’s ability to see as if fighting against a law of existence to be visible, screaming orders to a skeleton crew from his place on deck of a 1700s ship that sailed through the sky, disappearing into clouds before raining down attacks from above.

There was more. Glowing skeletons dressed in the fashions of war spanning every culture going back millennia. Robots with weapons far beyond the technology they had even in the League. Creatures of myth and legend. Things of nightmares.

Leading them all, as he had promised, was Phantom.

He looked younger, smaller. Just a boy, really, a gangly teenager that hadn’t quite finished growing into himself. One holding power beyond anything Bruce could ever imagine, but still just a child as far as he could see, no older than Tim who’d just graduated high school. Frantic research found Phantom appearing as far back as human history, but those sightings had to have been after his death. Bruce can’t help but wonder how young the boy had been when he died, how much of that youth still clung to him through all these eons.

It wasn’t something he’d let him self consider normally, not with something like this.

A dangerous unknown appearing without warning and attacking with unimaginable power and seemingly endless forces. It was something that would normally eclipse everything else. Something that would make Bruce put aside the ache at seeing a face so young twisted in rage.

But.

He watched all the footage.

Civilians were put in the crossfire. Were shot at and endangered. Were left terrified and scrambling for safety in buildings that were rapidly being torn away by stray artillery.

But never by Phantom or his armies.

The dead, in fact, went very far out of their way to ensure civilians weren’t harmed. Sweeping people up out of the way of falling debris. Shielding them from attacks that would have most certainly killed a normal human. Some dead even helped evacuate, ushering a frightened and panicked populous to safety as gently as they were capable of. Some of the less human creatures - giant bear-like beings with horns and fangs and ice edging their burly frames - even rushed forward to offer medical aid.

When the sky shattered open and the armies of the dead swept in, they ignored the town below. They focused instead on what was discovered later to be the base of a secretive government agency. The dead’s fight focused on those individuals in sharp white suits, bearing weapons capable of actually injuring King Phantom’s people.

It was these agents that brought the fight to the streets to Amity Park. That fired recklessly and without thought or care to the casualties they could inflict. That didn’t seem to care if they killed a hundred civilians if it meant hurting just one of Phantom’s soldiers.

Bruce watched all the footage.

And again.

Again.

Phantom had declared war.

Phantom spoke in his message of being out of options, of attempting peace. Phantom gave three days time for the release of captives. Phantom lead armies who fought viciously but never once willingly harmed civilians.

Phantom declared war, but he didn’t want it.

“Amanda Waller has reached out.”

Bruce didn’t turn his attention from the screens before him, eyes burning as he followed Phantom as the King dove away from the middle of locked combat to shield a child from a pulse of green energy from something like a grenade another agent in white had carelessly thrown. The child was crying but unharmed. The left pauldron of Phantom’s armor cracked and shattered from a direct shot from the enemy he’d just been fighting that he’d turned his back on, a glowing green liquid uncomfortably like Lazarus Water dripped down from a smoldering wound.

Clark stepped up to stand beside him as he watched, face worn and tired. The League had missed the first battle, but they’d been quick to appear at the rest. Phantom and his army ignored them unless they put themselves purposefully in the way of the fight. They were, as Justice League Dark had warned, vastly out powered by the entities fighting. A hulking giant knight made of shadow riding a nightmarish steed had driven Clark six feet down into the dirt when he’d attempted to make his way to Phantom directly to try and talk to the king.

The depth Clark had ended up felt like a warning of what would happen if he tried to get close to the king again.

It probably was.

“She said they have intel for us.” A faint twitch of fingers, jaw clenching, voice flat in that way that told Bruce his old friend was fighting back anger with everything he had. “That she has options for how to deal with the insurgence.”

Bruce shut off the monitors.

He’d seen enough.

Now was time to get answers to just what, exactly, Amanda Waller and the US government had done to cause the Dead to rise and rage.

[batfamdannyphantomsstuff]

Why would you hide this in the tags

Reluctant War AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Everything I know about Flash and the FlashFam (& Flash enemies) comes from fandom and theflashmuseum on tiktok so fair warning on that lol

Sorry if Barry is out of character or things don't line up with canon. Canon is a stranger I think I passed in a crowded room once, I did not ask for its number lol

Anyway, time to touch a bit more on that whole Ancient of the Speedforce Elle thing yeah? Here be a sprinkle more of that and I promise there's more to come haha

Gonna start posting this on Ao3 soon, probably Monday or Tuesday, so heads up I may stop adding these parts here on tumblr once I do

---

It lived beneath his skin.

For a long time Barry had never believed in magic. His world was grounded, scientific, made of predictable rules and laws. Tools that could be used to explain everything strange or supernatural away as just another odd twist of the massive universe they all belonged to.

It took perhaps a little longer than it should have to admit that magic was as real as thermodynamics and gravity and atoms. That the world was a great deal stranger than even science - for all its own wildness at times - could account for. There were things that went bump in the night. Hells below and heavens above and things that crawled and clawed their way out from the places in between.

It was almost a little embarrassing how long it had taken him to admit to such things, when considering his relationship with the Speedforce.

A force of the universe. Like gravity or time, pushing and pulling everything along. Something that could be explained with all the familiar scientific concepts that had buoyed him along in life for so long.

Except.

Except.

Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful but felt. Making his hair stand on end, his fingers tingle and numb. Sliding against his veins, bouncing between scar tissue and freckles. Pressing out from the confines of his sternum, rattling against his rib cage as it shifted and moved. Twining around each and every vertebrae. Coiling over and under itself within his skull, darting along the paths of his neurons and nerves. It hummed in every cell in his body. Darted and danced in the space between the atoms that made up his very existence.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

Lived.

Not existed. Not contained. Lived.

He couched it in terms of science, but science - despite his long time refusal to acknowledge it - wasn’t really able to explain the full scope of what he could feel. Not just the power of the Speedforce, but the…the identity of it. The living part that made it’s home in his body, existing in a way that was separate from him. Distant and indistinct most of the time, but…sentient.

He could feel it. Warm and excitable, delighting every time he tapped into it. Pushing him from behind urging him on and on, tugging him forward from ahead beckoning to go, faster, faster. Joyful in his victories, despairing in his loses.

It lived beneath his skin.

Until it didn’t.

He followed its joyful calls, pushed beyond what he should, what he knew was safe. Chasing that welcoming chant of faster, faster until he was there. In the Speedforce. More even, was the Speedforce.

He was everywhere. Beyond everywhere. In every possible everywhere it was possible to be. Every world, every universe, every multiverse.

To enter the Speedforce, to merge with it, was to become part of existence itself.

He couldn’t remember everything about it once he came back. He got flashes, sometimes, quick moments in dreams of places, of moments. What stuck with him most had been the feeling of it all. That had been the hardest part of returning. The sense of terrible loss, of having been surrounded by such a giddy, delighted, devoted love only to be pulled back from the heart of it. Returned to how he had been before, drifting at the edge of it all, it had been painful, agonizing even.

He…adapted, eventually. The sense of it all was still there, just distant. Something he’d come to feel he’d see again, someday.

It had been different, recently.

His powers were the same, he just as fast as ever, but…there was something…off. Changed. A sense that while his speed remained, the Speedforce had become, for lack of a better word, quiet. Distant.

He’d been having dreams, since it started. Not the quick glimpses of his time where he’d merged with the Speedforce. No, instead they were more nightmarish. Not nightmares exactly, though he felt like they should be with what they contained, but something else. Something that felt unnervingly real, left him confused and reeling when he woke with the certainty that when he opened his eyes he’d see the same as what his dreams held.

In the dream, he was in a room.

Cement and metal, hostile and brutalistic in design. He was bound in place, standing upright with feet and hands spread wide and locked in place within strange devices. Gleaming chrome and brilliant green, a painful thrum of energy surging through his body - not the Speedforce, something else, deeply unpleasant pulsing through every cell of his being and freezing him in place more firmly then the restraints did. Projectors hung from the ceiling, displaying images of landscapes, changing every ten second or so.

The sight of them made him nauseous, body shivering and spasming with the burning, agonizing need to go, but at the same time there was something distantly soothed by them too. Like a gnawing hunger abated with water and crumbs. The need for food not gone but the pangs diminished by the false feeling of being full.

In the dream he felt like he was dying.

In the dream he was afraid that maybe he couldn’t.

That he’d be trapped alive in that state forever, watching places he’d never see in person again as he was trapped in one place. His mind spiraling his Core splintering under the weight of it all, scared so scared. He wanted his brother, wanted to see the cement walls explode into dust and debris and see him there, ready to save the day like he had so many times before.

He just had to wait. His brother was looking for him, would have everyone in the Realms looking for him. He just had to hold on.

Barry didn’t have a brother. He only remembered when he woke, heart hammering in his chest fast even by his own standards, mouth tasting of bile and body aching with the need to go.

He hadn’t been sleeping much these days, even before the King of the Dead declared war.

It was having its effects, as sleep deprivation always did. His mind drifting, catching again and again on the dream, attention far away from the world around him. How many times had he been startled by someone calling his name, touching his arm? How many times had they given him a pinched, worried look that told him they’d been trying to reach him for longer than they should have before he noticed.

He was aware, distantly, of the glowering, stern faces around him. The flinty looks of his friends’ and partners’ eyes as they stared at the image of Waller’s scowling mug.

She’d declined an in-person meeting, hunkering down in some bunker somewhere trying to avoid the consequences of her latest atrocities. Or maybe just trying to avoid the very real possibility that one of the members of JL Dark might try to kill her for what she’s caused.

Or JL light, for that matter.

Bruce and Clark had their rules that they lived by, but Diana certainly wouldn’t hesitate to splatter Waller’s brains across the nearest available wall. In reviewing footage of one of the last battles - she’d been at the other one at the time, trying to contend with a ghost in the shape of an ethereal dragon - she’d recognized the spectral figures of Amazons long dead, fierce even in death as they fought with a warrior’s pride along side the rest of Phantom’s armies. They followed a figure that towered even above the Amazons, four arms and gleaming armor and a name that Barry associated with ruin and forgotten hope but who was so much more to Diana. Heroes long departed to the fields of Elysium, stepping out of their well earned rest to fight once more.

A few hadn’t survived the weapons the GIW shot them with. Barry didn’t know what that meant, for a ghost to die. If they simply returned to their afterlife or -

He tried not to think about the or.

They’d been going back and forth for awhile now. Voices faraway, muffled. The world felt as if it was underwater, blurred and cold. Clark had gotten to his feet at some point, Waller’s grip on a pen so tight on the screen he expected to see if burst at any moment. It was an important meeting, an important discussion. One he needed to be apart of, aware of, but it all escaped him. Sand held too tightly, slipping through his fingers. On the screen, Waller hit a button on the computer beside her and the image changed.

The world burned back to life in sharp relief.

The dream.

The room.

Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain.

It looked larger on the screen.

Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

She was young. A child, no older than Superboy Jr. or Robin. She looked like Phantom - her father - but there were differences. Her hair was white, but it didn’t look like the spun starlight of her father’s. Instead it burned, the bright hot crackling of the plasma of a lighting bolt striking. Skin the blur of shapes caught just at the corner of the eye as you ran past, Eyes -

Looking at him.

The image had come up, a live feed - he knew it was live, knew he was looking at her where she was at that exact moment - and she’d been as he was every time he tried to sleep. Trembling and shuttering, eyes squinting against the pain, trying to stay open so as not to miss a single moment of the flat images imposed on blank cement walls. Desperate to fill the fathomless hunger burning deep down in the Core of her.

But then a shuttering breath and her eyes - the burning green of an afterimage - snapped up to the camera. Snapped up to look at him, recognition in her young face. And despite never having seen this girl before, he recognized her too.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

She lived beneath his skin.

He could feel her there. Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful, but felt.

Not as felt as she used to be.

The image snapped back to Waller’s face, smug and self-satisfied. Talking - lying - about the how the girl was there, what the GIW’s intentions for her were. Barry was on his feet, but so was everyone else. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only hear static, the rush of wind, the crack of the lightning bolt. A call for help.

It was then that the alarms began to blare. On the screen someone rushed in to whisper into Waller’s ear. Bruce was running out of the room towards the Zeta tubes and Barry was right there with him and there was so much chaos around them, men in white and Gothamites and Ghosts banding together to rain terror down upon them and something massive and horrible and living towering above it all and Barry let go of that last bits of logic and thought.

Instinct, older than he was. The echo of a voice that had called him for years now, carrying him along, biding him forward:

Run.

Someone might have shouted after him as he left Gotham behind. He didn’t know.

All he knew was the pounding of his feet upon the ground, the wind in his face, the Speedforce lashing and frantic and hopeful burning and sizzling beneath his skin. Calling him further and further away until he stood in a vast, empty field staring at a single, rusted shack near ready to collapse before him.

He wasn’t alone.

Wally. Bart. Max. More still. Not just his family and friends. Eobard. Hunter. Thaddeus. Everyone touched by the Speedforce.

They didn’t speak. Bodies humming and thrumming, crackling with energy and intent.

Minds as one, they focused on the shed, the hidden hatch inside, the base hidden deep below.

The Speedforce lived beneath their skin, and no one was going to steal it away from them.

[treepainting]

Reluctant War AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Everything I know about Flash and the FlashFam (& Flash enemies) comes from fandom and theflashmuseum on tiktok so fair warning on that lol

Sorry if Barry is out of character or things don't line up with canon. Canon is a stranger I think I passed in a crowded room once, I did not ask for its number lol

Anyway, time to touch a bit more on that whole Ancient of the Speedforce Elle thing yeah? Here be a sprinkle more of that and I promise there's more to come haha

Gonna start posting this on Ao3 soon, probably Monday or Tuesday, so heads up I may stop adding these parts here on tumblr once I do

---

It lived beneath his skin.

For a long time Barry had never believed in magic. His world was grounded, scientific, made of predictable rules and laws. Tools that could be used to explain everything strange or supernatural away as just another odd twist of the massive universe they all belonged to.

It took perhaps a little longer than it should have to admit that magic was as real as thermodynamics and gravity and atoms. That the world was a great deal stranger than even science - for all its own wildness at times - could account for. There were things that went bump in the night. Hells below and heavens above and things that crawled and clawed their way out from the places in between.

It was almost a little embarrassing how long it had taken him to admit to such things, when considering his relationship with the Speedforce.

A force of the universe. Like gravity or time, pushing and pulling everything along. Something that could be explained with all the familiar scientific concepts that had buoyed him along in life for so long.

Except.

Except.

Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful but felt. Making his hair stand on end, his fingers tingle and numb. Sliding against his veins, bouncing between scar tissue and freckles. Pressing out from the confines of his sternum, rattling against his rib cage as it shifted and moved. Twining around each and every vertebrae. Coiling over and under itself within his skull, darting along the paths of his neurons and nerves. It hummed in every cell in his body. Darted and danced in the space between the atoms that made up his very existence.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

Lived.

Not existed. Not contained. Lived.

He couched it in terms of science, but science - despite his long time refusal to acknowledge it - wasn’t really able to explain the full scope of what he could feel. Not just the power of the Speedforce, but the…the identity of it. The living part that made it’s home in his body, existing in a way that was separate from him. Distant and indistinct most of the time, but…sentient.

He could feel it. Warm and excitable, delighting every time he tapped into it. Pushing him from behind urging him on and on, tugging him forward from ahead beckoning to go, faster, faster. Joyful in his victories, despairing in his loses.

It lived beneath his skin.

Until it didn’t.

He followed its joyful calls, pushed beyond what he should, what he knew was safe. Chasing that welcoming chant of faster, faster until he was there. In the Speedforce. More even, was the Speedforce.

He was everywhere. Beyond everywhere. In every possible everywhere it was possible to be. Every world, every universe, every multiverse.

To enter the Speedforce, to merge with it, was to become part of existence itself.

He couldn’t remember everything about it once he came back. He got flashes, sometimes, quick moments in dreams of places, of moments. What stuck with him most had been the feeling of it all. That had been the hardest part of returning. The sense of terrible loss, of having been surrounded by such a giddy, delighted, devoted love only to be pulled back from the heart of it. Returned to how he had been before, drifting at the edge of it all, it had been painful, agonizing even.

He…adapted, eventually. The sense of it all was still there, just distant. Something he’d come to feel he’d see again, someday.

It had been different, recently.

His powers were the same, he just as fast as ever, but…there was something…off. Changed. A sense that while his speed remained, the Speedforce had become, for lack of a better word, quiet. Distant.

He’d been having dreams, since it started. Not the quick glimpses of his time where he’d merged with the Speedforce. No, instead they were more nightmarish. Not nightmares exactly, though he felt like they should be with what they contained, but something else. Something that felt unnervingly real, left him confused and reeling when he woke with the certainty that when he opened his eyes he’d see the same as what his dreams held.

In the dream, he was in a room.

Cement and metal, hostile and brutalistic in design. He was bound in place, standing upright with feet and hands spread wide and locked in place within strange devices. Gleaming chrome and brilliant green, a painful thrum of energy surging through his body - not the Speedforce, something else, deeply unpleasant pulsing through every cell of his being and freezing him in place more firmly then the restraints did. Projectors hung from the ceiling, displaying images of landscapes, changing every ten second or so.

The sight of them made him nauseous, body shivering and spasming with the burning, agonizing need to go, but at the same time there was something distantly soothed by them too. Like a gnawing hunger abated with water and crumbs. The need for food not gone but the pangs diminished by the false feeling of being full.

In the dream he felt like he was dying.

In the dream he was afraid that maybe he couldn’t.

That he’d be trapped alive in that state forever, watching places he’d never see in person again as he was trapped in one place. His mind spiraling his Core splintering under the weight of it all, scared so scared. He wanted his brother, wanted to see the cement walls explode into dust and debris and see him there, ready to save the day like he had so many times before.

He just had to wait. His brother was looking for him, would have everyone in the Realms looking for him. He just had to hold on.

Barry didn’t have a brother. He only remembered when he woke, heart hammering in his chest fast even by his own standards, mouth tasting of bile and body aching with the need to go.

He hadn’t been sleeping much these days, even before the King of the Dead declared war.

It was having its effects, as sleep deprivation always did. His mind drifting, catching again and again on the dream, attention far away from the world around him. How many times had he been startled by someone calling his name, touching his arm? How many times had they given him a pinched, worried look that told him they’d been trying to reach him for longer than they should have before he noticed.

He was aware, distantly, of the glowering, stern faces around him. The flinty looks of his friends’ and partners’ eyes as they stared at the image of Waller’s scowling mug.

She’d declined an in-person meeting, hunkering down in some bunker somewhere trying to avoid the consequences of her latest atrocities. Or maybe just trying to avoid the very real possibility that one of the members of JL Dark might try to kill her for what she’s caused.

Or JL light, for that matter.

Bruce and Clark had their rules that they lived by, but Diana certainly wouldn’t hesitate to splatter Waller’s brains across the nearest available wall. In reviewing footage of one of the last battles - she’d been at the other one at the time, trying to contend with a ghost in the shape of an ethereal dragon - she’d recognized the spectral figures of Amazons long dead, fierce even in death as they fought with a warrior’s pride along side the rest of Phantom’s armies. They followed a figure that towered even above the Amazons, four arms and gleaming armor and a name that Barry associated with ruin and forgotten hope but who was so much more to Diana. Heroes long departed to the fields of Elysium, stepping out of their well earned rest to fight once more.

A few hadn’t survived the weapons the GIW shot them with. Barry didn’t know what that meant, for a ghost to die. If they simply returned to their afterlife or -

He tried not to think about the or.

They’d been going back and forth for awhile now. Voices faraway, muffled. The world felt as if it was underwater, blurred and cold. Clark had gotten to his feet at some point, Waller’s grip on a pen so tight on the screen he expected to see if burst at any moment. It was an important meeting, an important discussion. One he needed to be apart of, aware of, but it all escaped him. Sand held too tightly, slipping through his fingers. On the screen, Waller hit a button on the computer beside her and the image changed.

The world burned back to life in sharp relief.

The dream.

The room.

Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain.

It looked larger on the screen.

Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

She was young. A child, no older than Superboy Jr. or Robin. She looked like Phantom - her father - but there were differences. Her hair was white, but it didn’t look like the spun starlight of her father’s. Instead it burned, the bright hot crackling of the plasma of a lighting bolt striking. Skin the blur of shapes caught just at the corner of the eye as you ran past, Eyes -

Looking at him.

The image had come up, a live feed - he knew it was live, knew he was looking at her where she was at that exact moment - and she’d been as he was every time he tried to sleep. Trembling and shuttering, eyes squinting against the pain, trying to stay open so as not to miss a single moment of the flat images imposed on blank cement walls. Desperate to fill the fathomless hunger burning deep down in the Core of her.

But then a shuttering breath and her eyes - the burning green of an afterimage - snapped up to the camera. Snapped up to look at him, recognition in her young face. And despite never having seen this girl before, he recognized her too.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

She lived beneath his skin.

He could feel her there. Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful, but felt.

Not as felt as she used to be.

The image snapped back to Waller’s face, smug and self-satisfied. Talking - lying - about the how the girl was there, what the GIW’s intentions for her were. Barry was on his feet, but so was everyone else. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only hear static, the rush of wind, the crack of the lightning bolt. A call for help.

It was then that the alarms began to blare. On the screen someone rushed in to whisper into Waller’s ear. Bruce was running out of the room towards the Zeta tubes and Barry was right there with him and there was so much chaos around them, men in white and Gothamites and Ghosts banding together to rain terror down upon them and something massive and horrible and living towering above it all and Barry let go of that last bits of logic and thought.

Instinct, older than he was. The echo of a voice that had called him for years now, carrying him along, biding him forward:

Run.

Someone might have shouted after him as he left Gotham behind. He didn’t know.

All he knew was the pounding of his feet upon the ground, the wind in his face, the Speedforce lashing and frantic and hopeful burning and sizzling beneath his skin. Calling him further and further away until he stood in a vast, empty field staring at a single, rusted shack near ready to collapse before him.

He wasn’t alone.

Wally. Bart. Max. More still. Not just his family and friends. Eobard. Hunter. Thaddeus. Everyone touched by the Speedforce.

They didn’t speak. Bodies humming and thrumming, crackling with energy and intent.

Minds as one, they focused on the shed, the hidden hatch inside, the base hidden deep below.

The Speedforce lived beneath their skin, and no one was going to steal it away from them.

[catastrophic-crow]

cut to 20 minutes later to all of the speedsters & Elle at a waffle house having the world's must awkward family reunion

do you promise? 🥺 she's gonna be okay in 20 minutes?

dear gods, @spacedace. i know i've already said that, but it keeps being true. also i can't wait to see this on ao3 i wanna be the first bookmark >:) (guess I'll have to keep an eye out for when you do post it—take your time tho; I'm really loving everything so far 💜 💜 💜)

really really really good.

also; yikes. yeah. Elle's... not having a good time.

love what you've done with the degree of connection the speedsters all share with Elle. does this mean Danny's a grandpa? ...does he know that?

the entire way you've described where Elle's suck and what is like is intensely uncomfortable very compelling!

i really like the way you've used degrees of dissociation and depersonalization and derealization to shade Barry's experience of everything going on around him. how can you focus when a piece of you is missing? how could you think about anything other than getting it back?

Reluctant War AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Everything I know about Flash and the FlashFam (& Flash enemies) comes from fandom and theflashmuseum on tiktok so fair warning on that lol

Sorry if Barry is out of character or things don't line up with canon. Canon is a stranger I think I passed in a crowded room once, I did not ask for its number lol

Anyway, time to touch a bit more on that whole Ancient of the Speedforce Elle thing yeah? Here be a sprinkle more of that and I promise there's more to come haha

Gonna start posting this on Ao3 soon, probably Monday or Tuesday, so heads up I may stop adding these parts here on tumblr once I do

---

It lived beneath his skin.

For a long time Barry had never believed in magic. His world was grounded, scientific, made of predictable rules and laws. Tools that could be used to explain everything strange or supernatural away as just another odd twist of the massive universe they all belonged to.

It took perhaps a little longer than it should have to admit that magic was as real as thermodynamics and gravity and atoms. That the world was a great deal stranger than even science - for all its own wildness at times - could account for. There were things that went bump in the night. Hells below and heavens above and things that crawled and clawed their way out from the places in between.

It was almost a little embarrassing how long it had taken him to admit to such things, when considering his relationship with the Speedforce.

A force of the universe. Like gravity or time, pushing and pulling everything along. Something that could be explained with all the familiar scientific concepts that had buoyed him along in life for so long.

Except.

Except.

Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful but felt. Making his hair stand on end, his fingers tingle and numb. Sliding against his veins, bouncing between scar tissue and freckles. Pressing out from the confines of his sternum, rattling against his rib cage as it shifted and moved. Twining around each and every vertebrae. Coiling over and under itself within his skull, darting along the paths of his neurons and nerves. It hummed in every cell in his body. Darted and danced in the space between the atoms that made up his very existence.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

Lived.

Not existed. Not contained. Lived.

He couched it in terms of science, but science - despite his long time refusal to acknowledge it - wasn’t really able to explain the full scope of what he could feel. Not just the power of the Speedforce, but the…the identity of it. The living part that made it’s home in his body, existing in a way that was separate from him. Distant and indistinct most of the time, but…sentient.

He could feel it. Warm and excitable, delighting every time he tapped into it. Pushing him from behind urging him on and on, tugging him forward from ahead beckoning to go, faster, faster. Joyful in his victories, despairing in his loses.

It lived beneath his skin.

Until it didn’t.

He followed its joyful calls, pushed beyond what he should, what he knew was safe. Chasing that welcoming chant of faster, faster until he was there. In the Speedforce. More even, was the Speedforce.

He was everywhere. Beyond everywhere. In every possible everywhere it was possible to be. Every world, every universe, every multiverse.

To enter the Speedforce, to merge with it, was to become part of existence itself.

He couldn’t remember everything about it once he came back. He got flashes, sometimes, quick moments in dreams of places, of moments. What stuck with him most had been the feeling of it all. That had been the hardest part of returning. The sense of terrible loss, of having been surrounded by such a giddy, delighted, devoted love only to be pulled back from the heart of it. Returned to how he had been before, drifting at the edge of it all, it had been painful, agonizing even.

He…adapted, eventually. The sense of it all was still there, just distant. Something he’d come to feel he’d see again, someday.

It had been different, recently.

His powers were the same, he just as fast as ever, but…there was something…off. Changed. A sense that while his speed remained, the Speedforce had become, for lack of a better word, quiet. Distant.

He’d been having dreams, since it started. Not the quick glimpses of his time where he’d merged with the Speedforce. No, instead they were more nightmarish. Not nightmares exactly, though he felt like they should be with what they contained, but something else. Something that felt unnervingly real, left him confused and reeling when he woke with the certainty that when he opened his eyes he’d see the same as what his dreams held.

In the dream, he was in a room.

Cement and metal, hostile and brutalistic in design. He was bound in place, standing upright with feet and hands spread wide and locked in place within strange devices. Gleaming chrome and brilliant green, a painful thrum of energy surging through his body - not the Speedforce, something else, deeply unpleasant pulsing through every cell of his being and freezing him in place more firmly then the restraints did. Projectors hung from the ceiling, displaying images of landscapes, changing every ten second or so.

The sight of them made him nauseous, body shivering and spasming with the burning, agonizing need to go, but at the same time there was something distantly soothed by them too. Like a gnawing hunger abated with water and crumbs. The need for food not gone but the pangs diminished by the false feeling of being full.

In the dream he felt like he was dying.

In the dream he was afraid that maybe he couldn’t.

That he’d be trapped alive in that state forever, watching places he’d never see in person again as he was trapped in one place. His mind spiraling his Core splintering under the weight of it all, scared so scared. He wanted his brother, wanted to see the cement walls explode into dust and debris and see him there, ready to save the day like he had so many times before.

He just had to wait. His brother was looking for him, would have everyone in the Realms looking for him. He just had to hold on.

Barry didn’t have a brother. He only remembered when he woke, heart hammering in his chest fast even by his own standards, mouth tasting of bile and body aching with the need to go.

He hadn’t been sleeping much these days, even before the King of the Dead declared war.

It was having its effects, as sleep deprivation always did. His mind drifting, catching again and again on the dream, attention far away from the world around him. How many times had he been startled by someone calling his name, touching his arm? How many times had they given him a pinched, worried look that told him they’d been trying to reach him for longer than they should have before he noticed.

He was aware, distantly, of the glowering, stern faces around him. The flinty looks of his friends’ and partners’ eyes as they stared at the image of Waller’s scowling mug.

She’d declined an in-person meeting, hunkering down in some bunker somewhere trying to avoid the consequences of her latest atrocities. Or maybe just trying to avoid the very real possibility that one of the members of JL Dark might try to kill her for what she’s caused.

Or JL light, for that matter.

Bruce and Clark had their rules that they lived by, but Diana certainly wouldn’t hesitate to splatter Waller’s brains across the nearest available wall. In reviewing footage of one of the last battles - she’d been at the other one at the time, trying to contend with a ghost in the shape of an ethereal dragon - she’d recognized the spectral figures of Amazons long dead, fierce even in death as they fought with a warrior’s pride along side the rest of Phantom’s armies. They followed a figure that towered even above the Amazons, four arms and gleaming armor and a name that Barry associated with ruin and forgotten hope but who was so much more to Diana. Heroes long departed to the fields of Elysium, stepping out of their well earned rest to fight once more.

A few hadn’t survived the weapons the GIW shot them with. Barry didn’t know what that meant, for a ghost to die. If they simply returned to their afterlife or -

He tried not to think about the or.

They’d been going back and forth for awhile now. Voices faraway, muffled. The world felt as if it was underwater, blurred and cold. Clark had gotten to his feet at some point, Waller’s grip on a pen so tight on the screen he expected to see if burst at any moment. It was an important meeting, an important discussion. One he needed to be apart of, aware of, but it all escaped him. Sand held too tightly, slipping through his fingers. On the screen, Waller hit a button on the computer beside her and the image changed.

The world burned back to life in sharp relief.

The dream.

The room.

Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain.

It looked larger on the screen.

Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

She was young. A child, no older than Superboy Jr. or Robin. She looked like Phantom - her father - but there were differences. Her hair was white, but it didn’t look like the spun starlight of her father’s. Instead it burned, the bright hot crackling of the plasma of a lighting bolt striking. Skin the blur of shapes caught just at the corner of the eye as you ran past, Eyes -

Looking at him.

The image had come up, a live feed - he knew it was live, knew he was looking at her where she was at that exact moment - and she’d been as he was every time he tried to sleep. Trembling and shuttering, eyes squinting against the pain, trying to stay open so as not to miss a single moment of the flat images imposed on blank cement walls. Desperate to fill the fathomless hunger burning deep down in the Core of her.

But then a shuttering breath and her eyes - the burning green of an afterimage - snapped up to the camera. Snapped up to look at him, recognition in her young face. And despite never having seen this girl before, he recognized her too.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

She lived beneath his skin.

He could feel her there. Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful, but felt.

Not as felt as she used to be.

The image snapped back to Waller’s face, smug and self-satisfied. Talking - lying - about the how the girl was there, what the GIW’s intentions for her were. Barry was on his feet, but so was everyone else. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only hear static, the rush of wind, the crack of the lightning bolt. A call for help.

It was then that the alarms began to blare. On the screen someone rushed in to whisper into Waller’s ear. Bruce was running out of the room towards the Zeta tubes and Barry was right there with him and there was so much chaos around them, men in white and Gothamites and Ghosts banding together to rain terror down upon them and something massive and horrible and living towering above it all and Barry let go of that last bits of logic and thought.

Instinct, older than he was. The echo of a voice that had called him for years now, carrying him along, biding him forward:

Run.

Someone might have shouted after him as he left Gotham behind. He didn’t know.

All he knew was the pounding of his feet upon the ground, the wind in his face, the Speedforce lashing and frantic and hopeful burning and sizzling beneath his skin. Calling him further and further away until he stood in a vast, empty field staring at a single, rusted shack near ready to collapse before him.

He wasn’t alone.

Wally. Bart. Max. More still. Not just his family and friends. Eobard. Hunter. Thaddeus. Everyone touched by the Speedforce.

They didn’t speak. Bodies humming and thrumming, crackling with energy and intent.

Minds as one, they focused on the shed, the hidden hatch inside, the base hidden deep below.

The Speedforce lived beneath their skin, and no one was going to steal it away from them.

[catastrophic-crow]

haha, yeah; he's—he's good! he's... totally alright! don't need to worry for (...about?) this ghost!

also have a meme i edited:

what the observants are doing in the background, probably

Time was a steady thing. But only in the broadest sense of the word. Steady like the ticking of a clock. Like the countdown of a timer. Like the grains of sand slipping down the hourglass. Not steady in the sense of stable.

Clockwork muses on matters past, present and future.