written-by-pyrolitheus

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

Fanfic: Yet Another Timeline for the Flash

Spoiler alert: We begin with Season 3, Episode 23 (“Finish Line”), around the 20-minute mark, which hit Netflix in 2016. If you haven’t watched the first three seasons, you will be lost on the plot of this fic. Ch 1 spoils the third season immensely and the 4th season minorly. If you want to, you can read this fic on AO3 instead.

Special content notice for the first chapter: It's written from Savitar's point of view. The guy has some messed up ways of thinking. CHAPTER 1: The Beginning of the End (of Savitar's Loop) With only Barry and Iris in the med lab, Savitar gave himself time to feel the nostalgia. That was one thing he was certainly better at than Barry - taking his time. It was a skill he had been forced to learn in the ages he spent in Barry’s Speed Force prison. “Strange being back here,” he remarked. And it was. “You remember Star Labs?” Iris asked, proving just how much of a fake she saw him to be. She didn’t really believe he had once been hers, her Barry, or she would never have needed to ask. He employed the other lesson he had learned in prison and shoved the pain her comment sparked down into that place where it fueled his resolve. “I remember everything,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added, “This is where we came up with the cerebral inhibitor. To use against DeVoe.” “Who?” Barry asked immediately. Of course he did. “You haven’t gotten there yet,” he remarked, and then wondered why he was helping. Why was he giving hints that could help Team Flash defeat foes a little faster? DeVoe was formidable of course, but not anything beyond what Team Flash could handle once they got their heads out of their own asses. Yes. There it was. The contempt that he needed to push himself to go through with his plan for his own birth. “So, how’s this gonna work?” Savitar remarked. “Where will I live?” “What do you mean?” Barry asked. “Are Wally and I gonna be bunkmates? Am I supposed to just rejoin Team Flash, fight some rogues? What kind of life were you thinking I’d lead?” Savitar knew the answer already. “I-I hadn’t gotten that far yet,” Barry stammered. Savitar hated himself, his past self that is, for being so incredibly thoughtless. He remembered how smart he’d thought he was at that age. What idiot thinks he is smart but doesn’t plan ahead? “How do we explain me at the wedding?” Savitar continued to rub Barry’s face in his own idiocy, “and do I sit on the bride’s side, or the groom’s side?” He gestured at each of them as he spoke and took neither pain nor delight at the awkward looks this generated. Or was it both pain and delight? He set that question down. The answer didn’t matter. “Ah,” Barry said, “Look I mean, we don’t have all the answers. You know. We’re going to have to figure it out. Together.” Savitar watched as Barry and Iris looked at each other with nodding heads. They had discussed this. They meant it. He remembered that clearly. This was no trick. But it didn’t matter. They did not want him to be Barry Allen. They already had one. They would reject him. Siding with them now meant he would become a time paradox and cease to exist. No, he had his own plans to prevent that from happening. “No,” Savitar said. “Not together.” He turned towards Iris. “Love, and hate, they’re so close. It’s easy to mistake one for the other.” Iris hated him. He knew it. He could remember everything she had said to him about Savitar when he was still Barry. She could not possibly love him, no matter what her eyes were saying now. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life with him. But I remember giving you the ring. Singing to you. Asking you to marry me.” Savitar took a deep breath to swallow his disappointment before continuing quietly. “I can’t do this.” He turned to leave, but Iris blocked his path. “No,” she said. He blinked. This was not how he remembered this conversation. She was supposed to say “Yes you can, okay. I will be here for you.” It was seared into his memory as firmly as the feel of her lips on his, the spark between their fingers, and the look on her face when she had clapped her hands over her mouth when he pulled out the ring during the last few lyrics as he sang to her that night, that night when he proposed to her for the second time, out of pure love. “No, what?” Savitar asked. He noticed Barry looking at her curiously. “No, I’m not going to marry him. Or you. Not right away anyway,” she said hastily, glancing briefly at Barry. “Wha-” Barry started to ask but Iris kept talking. “You proposed to me,” she said, looking at Savitar. Then she jabbed him in the chest with her pointer finger. “You did. You. He did too. But you two were literally the same person when that happened, the same exact person. And you and I have never broken up. So as far as I am concerned, I have two fiances, and that is something we are going to need to talk about - all three of us - before we decide how to handle our lives, much less things like whether to have two weddings or one for all three of us.”

He stared at her in momentary disbelief. So, she did get it. She must have been testing him earlier with that question about his memory. Barry was staring at Iris with his mouth open. She clearly hadn’t talked to him about this yet. The changes to the timeline hadn’t caught up to Savitar’s memories yet and he had no idea what was going to happen next, so he simply said nothing. Barry closed his mouth and just nodded. Savitar sat down on the gurney and Barry finally stopped looking at Iris and turned to him, looking over his face before speaking. “This… isn’t what you remember happening last time, is it?” Barry asked. “No, it’s not,” Savitar confirmed. Then, he looked at Iris. Maybe things would go back on track if he picked up the conversation where it had changed. “I tried to kill you. I killed HR.” “You tried to kill me because you convinced yourself that it was the only way you could exist,” she said, “but there is always another way. And the fact that you would choose yourself over me means you must have experienced something that changed part of you, something that flipped off your hero switch. You have always had this…this darkness in you. It has always been a choice for you to be a hero and you have struggled with that. I know you have. But,” she moved closer and took his hands in hers, “it’s just like you said to me: There is no Flash without Iris West. And you haven’t had an Iris West in a very long time.” Savitar could feel tears appearing at his eyes even though he was not letting his body shake with the crying that wanted to wrack through him. He kept shoving and shoving until his emotions were - mostly - bottled back up again. “But I…I killed H.R.,” he said, to move the conversation back to what he remembered, back to a place where he was in control of his destiny, to a place where Iris would not convince him to give up his own existence, and where he would not give in to her and prevent his own birth and turn into a time paradox and disappear into nothing, never having existed in the first place. He thought of all the other people he had also killed as the price of his own existence and let it harden his heart. “Yes, you did,” she said, and just as he thought things were going back on track, back his way…she said something new, something that broke something inside him, “and I don’t know how you are going to do due justice for that, but we are going to figure that out too after we figure out how to prevent the time paradox from erasing you from existence, because that is part of being a hero, and that is what you are, truly, at your core. You are a hero.” He took a deep breath, savoring her touch on his hands. “H.R. was not the only one,” his voice was barely audible and he hated that something that almost sounded like lamentation showed in it. He needed to be evil, needed that to survive. “I know,” Iris said slowly at first, nodding, “I know. But Savitar or Barry or whatever name you want to use, I can see how much pain you are in. You never wanted to kill anybody. I know you and even though you know there is always another way you also have a tendency to convince yourself that there is only one way to solve a problem. When you get like that, you make rash decisions and act on them no matter what other people have to say, and you can because no one else is fast enough to stop you. That was true before, but God, you’re so fast now that even he can barely see you sometimes,” she gestured at Barry. “I donnnn’t do that…do I?” Barry - the man who had made Flashpoint and thereby created his miserable time loop - asked and sounded serious. Savitar hated him for it, but pity for Barry’s lack of self awareness weakened that hate. “Yes, you do,” Savitar and Iris said together. Then she smiled at him for a moment. And for that moment, the world - and his pain - stopped. There was only her smile. He gave up. He gave into that smile, to the pain, to the grief, to the guilt and the shame. He closed his eyes for one long moment, nearly drowning in all of it, and when he opened them, they were both looking at him, waiting, looking curious. “There was nothing rash about any of this,” he sighed, then gestured at Barry, “As he told you recently, I have had hundreds of years to plan this.” Iris’s eyes were piercing right through him. The tears were back. He wiped his face dry too fast for Iris to see and wondered if Barry noticed. “Hundreds of years to be stuck on the same plan and unable to think about anything else as it consumed your mind, yes, that is actually a lot more like you than you’ve ever really been able to admit to yourself,” - Barry flinched at Iris’s words - “But, it’s over now, isn’t it?” Iris asked and squeezed his hand. “You can stop. You can start healing now.” “I can’t.” Savitar said. “The time paradox,” Barry pointed out. “The time paradox,” Savitar confirmed, but really, he was thinking that being a murderer is something people just heal from. “Let’s fix the time paradox together, and then sort out the rest,” Iris said. “I already have a plan,” Savitar said, emotion making him weak enough to explain it to them. “As long as Cisco does his part - and he will - I will reach immortality before the time paradox reaches me.” Iris and Barry looked at each other briefly. “What is Cisco’s part?” Iris inquired. “And why will he do it?” Barry asked. “I may have led him to believe I would kill Caitlin if he didn’t build what I need,” Savitar said. “He would do anything for her.” Iris’s eyes narrowed. She was wondering whether he meant it. But there was no time for that conversation. It was time to act. He wasn’t sure why he trusted Barry and Iris this time around. But something was different. Something had shifted. Iris didn’t just see him as a charity case, a shadow of her Barry…she seemed to really see him, and Barry was following her lead. He smirked at himself, making a rash decision and acting on it for the first time in far more than just the "few hundred years" Barry had guessed earlier. “I’ll be right back,” he said. Before they could respond, he was already standing in the med bay with Frost - who the others would still think was Caitlin of course -, Cisco, the intradimensional quantum splicer Cisco had just finished constructing from the Speed Force Bazooka, and his emotions ablaze. “If you really mean you want to find a way to keep the paradox from catching up to me, now is the time to do it,” Savitar said.“I’m sorry, what? Uh, we are not doing that” Cisco’s words were exactly what Savitar was expecting. He didn’t need his memories to catch up to the timeline changes predict that response. “Guys, tell me we are not doing that?!”“Why are we here?” Frost sounded angry. “I thought you had a plan.”“I did,” Savitar said, “but plans change.”Barry’s face changed too.“You have an idea,” Iris’s words reflected Savitar’s thoughts.“I do,” Barry confirmed. He walked to Iris, took her hands in his, and tenderly kissed her cheek. It was a goodbye. Iris knew it too, but she was confused, and it showed in the wrinkle of her nose and the pinch of her eyes.“Look,” Barry said to Savitar, “There is one place where the time paradox can’t reach you.”“No! I am not -” he started to say, but Barry interrupted him.“I know, not alone anyway. I’m going with you.” Savitar stared at him, astonished. “It’s the only way,” Barry continued. “It will keep you safe from the paradox while Team Flash figures out how to rescue you, and I will be there so you don’t lose your mind again. We will be in this together. Besides, then Jay can be free and go back to protecting Earth 3.” Barry gestured at the team with his head. "Team Flash will figure out a way to save you and get us out of the Speed Force prison. It's the only way. We have to do this."

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

♡ Skelewitchy ♡

Part 1: Aurelia

Our phones were both on the cafe table, face down. Our toes touched under the pressed-together hems of our skirts. My date looked at me in that special way I desired only in other women. For once I was glad my youth was long gone and with it, any embarrassment that may have spoiled the moment.

"Your complexion is perfect. Like. So good."

"Thank you darling," I replied, trying to hide my rising level of pride. I wanted to tell her about the hard work that went into making that face, but it was not time yet. There were things I was not ready to share, ancient things that would be revealed if and only if we decided to go steady.

I made a point of taking the check and, later, offering her my arm and walking her home. She stopped at the doorstep and turned towards me, dropping her eyes to linger on my lips before raising them back to my eyes and very clearly willing me to kiss her. It's funny thing, having a soul and a skull and no brain. Other people's thoughts can leak in sometimes.

I smiled and looked down to keep up the pretense. I hoped I was not lying to myself that this pretense was only temporary if she liked me as much as I liked her.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked coyly.

"Kiss me, Aurelia?"

I did. It was the ultimate test of this face, and it passed. She liked it. She made that very clear.

"C...Come inside?" My dear woman was still breathless. “Come upstairs, come to bed?”

I wanted to, but she didn't know yet. She still thought I was a regular and complete human with flesh and everything. That meant her forwardness was not really consent to fuck me.

"Not yet," I whispered, and we kissed again.

I stepped back and waited to be sure she was safely inside before turning away to walk home in the midnight starlight. There was a time when I was afraid to walk alone at night as a woman, but there are certain threats that simply aren't a problem for skeletons, and I could hold my own. I had for centuries.

At my home, I closed all the blinds, drew the curtains, locked the door, and unlocked the mahogany wardrobe I made long ago when I was still fully human. I peeled my face off of my skull and set it on its rack next to my other silicone faces. Then, I peeled my carefully crafted hands off of my carpals and phalanges and put them in their drawer. This face is the one, I thought. It is so much easier having a dating life as a skeleton in the modern world with advanced prosthetic materials freely available online. This particular mask was the best I had ever made, and it showcased that I had finally mastered the art of human faces. My crafter’s soul soared nearly as high as my heart with the night's successes.

I turned my mind to my next challenge: find a way to ease Cynthia into the truth, and a way to help her see past what her kind thinks of mine, if she would let me.

Part 2: Cynthia

"You were right, OMG, you were SO right!" I said.

"Of course I was right, Cynthia," my twin said, "but what was it about this time?"

I laugh-snorted and rolled my eyes.

"About Aurelia! Her lips tasted like silicone," I explained. I hoped I wasn't blushing. "She has a silicone face so she is definitely one of the Ancient Coven witches, wearing one of those new face-face masks."

"Then we had better prepare the spell."

"I...um..."

"What is it?"

"Weeelllll..." I didn't know how to say I wanted a third date, but I really wanted a third date. I real-real liked her, not just "seduce you so my sister and I can use the magic in your living bones to seal the demon portal" like her.

"Spit it out."

"What if we just asked her to help us? Maybe she would know another way. I mean, she is Ancient by definition isn't she?"

"Don't tell me you've fallen for her."

I shrugged.

"You have had ONE date!"

"No! Two dates!"

My sister rolled her eyes and I opened my mouth to protest before realized how it would sound and closed it again.

"The Ancient Coven were and are demon worshipers. That's how they became living skeletons instead of dying natural deaths in the first place, remember?" “Ugh! Of course I remember,” I glared at her.

All witches were super aware of the Ancient Coven, which was way worse than the evil lawn gnome stories parents make up to scare little kids because the Ancient Coven is real and lawn gnomes are just plastic. But, Aurelia didn’t seem anything like the stories.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

22 October 1863 My Dearest Mr. Cottingham, I am writing to express my condolences for the recent passing of your wife. Although you were not in love, it is always difficult to lose family. I must also thank you for the chestnuts your son so graciously gathered and brought around. I used them to make my famous torte. Somewhat relatedly, our other “problem” is no longer a concern, as I must inform you of my husband’s passing. Yours in Truth, Mary Blightheart

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

An excerpt from an essay I wrote for my bioethics class

[There are] two main ways we have observed Americans going about being right: You can try to superimpose your reality on the world, or you can listen, observe, and adjust your thinking accordingly. Our conversations are generally about social justice ([my partner] is from an oppressed group I am not part of and vice versa which makes for fascinating discussions), but the same principles apply to science. I wonder sometimes if this application of “listen, observe, and adjust your beliefs based on your findings” from the scientific world to things outside of science is part of why so many great scientists from history were [also] social justice activists. I believe the practices we use [in science] to identify and modify our personal biases [with regards to desired experiment results, as well as to] remedy systemic biases in our [experiment] designs also serve to provide a useful lens for understanding the biases we see in the various tangled layers of the anthroposphere. It is when we refuse to recognize and remedy biases that we do bad things, whether that means reporting incorrect findings or repeating ableist slurs even though we have the information and evidence necessary to know better.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

The Writer's Rowling Spell

May my writing draw fans who will hold me accountable.

May my writing draw fans who will give me chances.

May my writing draw fans who have an end to the chances they will give.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

Someone on the internet said "What if Cinderella was a trans woman" so I took the general canon, put it in an AU without magic, and sprinkled it with queer. I posted it to Archive Of Our Own if anyone wants to read it. Read at your own risk - this is the first time in many years that I've written more than a few paragraphs of fiction.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

To the tune of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

They asked me how I knew My true gender was true. Oh! I of course replied: Something here inside cannot be denied. (do do do, do do do, do do do wah) They said "someday you'll find chromosomes define Who you are” But when you believe in cis lies, You must realize, smoke gets in your eyes! So I shunned them and I waived them away To think they could doubt that I know who I am Yet today my label has flown away, I am without my pronoun (without my pronoun) Now my new friends support Me on my gender journey Oh! So I smile and say When you believe in cis lies smoke gets in your eyes. (Smoke gets in your eyes, smoke gets in your eyes.) Smoke gets in your eyes!

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

Somewhere in a Batman AU

Harvey Dent is at the hospital right after the incident that got half his face burned. In this universe, Rachel didn't die in the process. She goes to the hospital and at first he won't face her, because he doesn't want want her to see how bad it is. She finally coaxes him to turn toward her. As he faces her, her eyes fill with delight, and she whispers "WOW COOL" before she can stop herself. "Uh, I mean," she stammers, regaining her composure, "wow darling I can't imagine how much pain you must be in. Are they giving you the good stuff?" He notices, though, and doesn't let her off the hook. After pressing her, she admits to him that she's a closet hard core goth and that his new face makes him even sexier to her (insert flashback to dating Batman here). Harvey is confused at first, but takes her goth side in stride. She begins to show him that part of her world, and together they attend goth clubs and other events. Harvey makes appearances at "haunted houses" for charities and ultimately embraces his new face. The disfigurement becomes a part of him, and he thrives with it.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

To my fellow anti-racist white people, white advocates against abuse and/or for consent, and other white progressives in the USA:

I think there's a racist flaw in our methods with regards to pro-consent/anti-abuse movements that doesn't get talked about much and I want to point it out so we can start talking about it. This is long but important. Please bear with me as I am still struggling to figure out how to communicate about this. The following is the best I was able to come up with after chatting with others. __________ The consent and anti abuse movement within white liberal/progressive culture is a poignant thing and I'm seeing more and more examples of how it blinds us and creates new ways for us to be unwittingly racist.

A lot of the examples I see seem to involve some combination of the attitudes, intentional or otherwise, that "consent is good" and "racism is bad" and "therefore if it supports consent it cannot be racist." Which, to be blunt: Simply isn't true. Things are more complicated than that. We still need to be actively anti-racist when forming our pro-consent changes. - - - - - - - - - - - Here is an example from the western USA (and possibly other places): Blues dancing came from Black culture. Part of the dance involves "close embrace" which basically means physically connecting your bodies torso to torso while dancing in each other's arms, and is the traditional way to start a blues dance. When the consent movement hit predominantly white blues scenes a few years before #MeToo went viral, white people decided that close embrace is intimate enough that it requires pre-negotiated consent and vilified those who started a dance in close embrace without asking first. This served to switch white blues scenes from cultural appreciation to cultural appropriation by altering a fundamental aspect of the dance to accommodate a white perspective rather than white blues dancers adapting to the culture we claim to be celebrating. Furthermore, in the event of a black person walking into one such predominantly white scene for the first time who is unaware of this whitewashed change in consent philosophy, that person will likely assume that consent for close embrace at the start of the dance is as widely assumed there as it is in traditional scenes because it is part of how the dance works and is therefore literally what people paid money to be there to do; it is just as consensual despite the lack of verbal negotiation as being lectured at would be if you signed up for a history class. It thus becomes likely that this black dancer will be pegged as a monster/assailant/gross type of person by the white dancers just for starting a dance in the traditional manner with the traditional cultural assumptions. This is particularly a problem because the idea of the scary black villain is already a racist trope that black people have to deal with all the time, and which permeates white culture so much that it underlies white people's thoughts on race until (and sometimes even after) we put piles of work into fixing our thinking. Plus there's the part where new white dancers who started dancing within the past few years often assume that the way the scene is run is in the proper manner, and they are then poised to both unwittingly uphold this racist change within that scene and cause racist problems if they go visit a blues scene that is run in the traditional manner, all without recognizing their behavior as being racist and therefore also being prone to getting ridiculously defensive if it gets pointed out. In this way, white progressives unwittingly but effectively used the consent movement to add a few layers of racism to predominantly white blues scenes in ways that are capable of negatively impacting other blues scenes. - - - - - - - - - - - The first part of this paragraph is review for some of us, but there's this thing where we as white people tend to automatically assume that what we do is inherently good in a racial sense, no matter where we are in our process of removing the racist cultural programming from our minds. This background presumption that we are not ourselves capable of racism affects all of us because we are taught to believe that racism is both a thing of the past and only something that evil people are capable of, even though neither half of that is true. When we start from there and add in the feel-good nature of "we are fixing the world by making it more consensual," it becomes very easy to forget to work anti-racism into what we are doing. We need to make sure we do it anyway. - - - - - - - - - - - Here is another example from internet culture, especially PNW (Pacific Northwest) internet culture: There are several Facebook groups where people post screenshots of terrible things other people send them on dating apps. In these groups, people typically (and often aggressively) commiserate in the comments section and discuss how horribly the person who posted the screenshots was treated by the other person in the images. Most of these threads are about sexism and related consent violations such as unsolicited genital images, unsolicited sexting, messages asking for things that the person's user profile clearly said are not okay to ask for, and other gross things. How can that be racist, when we're essentially talking about the intersection of sexism and consent, especially within progressive spaces? Well, it comes down to how we discuss it and how we make fun of the person who was in the wrong. Sometimes it's as obvious as people making fun of AAVE, even suggesting that use of AAVE is part of what makes the messages gross/inappropriate. This reflects the white cultural attitude that Blackness isn't professional/good enough/etc. and should never be a part of the reasoning for why a black person was in the wrong/mean/gross/etc. Sometimes it is as simple as people becoming even more aggressive in their commissary than they would have if the harmful person was white. This reflects the systemic racism that disproportionately arrests and imprisons black people for the same crimes. - - - - - - - - - - - As one of my white friends said of white people when we talked about this, "we are inherently racist, and we can't ever assume we aren't being racist. There's always a power dynamic there no matter what."  We still need to be actively anti-racist when forming our pro-consent changes just like everything else in this country where racism permeates pretty much every aspect of life.

If you made it to the end, thank you for bearing with me. I am struggling to speak on this topic in any way that is actually intelligible. Hopefully I pulled it off.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

Compatible orientations is not consent.

[written-by-pyrolitheus]

A couple of human adventurers arrive at the home of elves in a forest because [plot reasons]. One of the humans wanders through the village in awe, looking at structures that have been built by elves patiently grooming the trees as they grow over centuries. The human doesn't know that yet, but we do, because I am a narrator and I just told you so. As the human wanders, soft notes of song drift through the air. Looking around for the source, the human spots two elves singing to a sapling as they plant it. "WHOA! Does your song make the trees grow?!" The elves look briefly at each other then back to the human. One of them is about to say something but the other cuts off the first with a quick, "Oh yes, absolutely. Song is d e f i n i t e l y how our trees grow." Seeing the enraptured look on the human's face, the second elf continues, "In fact, none of the trees would grow in this part of the forest without elves singing to them." "Wow! What a cool symbiosis!" The first elf facepalms.