The Flash Museum.

"Linda," Wally said. "Look -- we need to talk. Let me fix Karen so she's not a gorilla any--"

"I see she's Karen now, and not Power Girl. Maybe if you slept with Superman, he'd finally let you call him Kal."

"Linda!"

Angel and Sam stood around awkwardly; Wally could see they didn't want to be here, but by the same token, they were the ones who needed to use the ape-ray. Karen grunted a few times in dismay; at least she retained her intelligence.

He could solve this all at a speed so fast it would make an eyeblink look glacial -- if it weren't for the slow-timers. Without even meaning to, he felt himself plotting the course: move Angel and the Ape out of the way; put Karen in place; reverse the flow of the ray to turn Karen back into a human (or Atlantean, or whatever); move Karen aside, pull Angel into the ray, turn her into an ape; ameliorate Linda's feelings; talk her down; smooch on her a bit; buy her some flowers.

But he was the only one in the room who could operate at that speed. As always, he was stuck doing things in slow-motion, waiting for the world to catch up. This wasn't deflecting bullets or moving an old lady out of the way of a moving car -- this depended on other people being aware of him, in sync with him.

They couldn't ever really be in sync; all they could do was plod along as he waited for them to catch up. Because he was Wally West --

	The Fastest Man Alive: "Speed of Life"
Flash #6 - June, Year One	by Bill Kte'pi

"Wally, you look at me. You want one more chance? Fine. Forget Karen. She can be an ape for awhile."

"Linda, that's just petty."

"No. You know what? No. It isn't. She's a superhero. This is what HAPPENS to superheroes, Wally. They turn into apes sometimes. By the end of the day, everyone's all better. That's the life you lead, the life she leads. So if you want that second chance, you come with me right now, and -- Wally!"

He'd turned to the side, to see how the other three were reacting to all of this -- too fast for her to see, though. He was sure of it! Too fast for her to see!

"What? I was listening! I'm paying attention!"

"Damn it, Wally. I know you. You live at a speed I can't even comprehend. God knows how many different things you've thought of, how many laundry lists you've compiled or new strategies you've developed for fighting Captain Cold, just since I started this sentence. I know I can't ever have your full attention, because it isn't possible. But I'm sick of feeling like I don't deserve it."

And she was gone. Oh, he could have stopped her. He could have stolen her velocity, so that she'd spend an eternity just trying to complete that first step. He could have spun her in circles. He could have tugged her backwards with each step, so she'd be walking in place for eternity. He could simply have blocked the door. But she had that look on her face which meant she was leaving, and he knew no matter how he stopped her, it wouldn't do any good.

He didn't really hear what anyone said, as he slow-walked through the previous plan: turn Karen back to normal, turn Angel into an ape, send them all on their way. He must have returned the appropriate responses, his conversational skills acting on that auto-pilot people develop to get through long bus rides and waiting in line. Small talk was for people who were forced to live the moment slower than they wanted to; it was something to fill the spaces with.

He excelled at it. He'd talked Donna out of buying an expensive dress once, without having any idea what the conversation was about. You HAD to be good at small talk when you could fill a book with the thoughts you had, run a marathon in the subjective time which passed, between other people's words. You had to learn to glean meaning from tone of voice and body language, because otherwise, when you could recite one of Shakespeare's plays from memory in between "Good" and "morning," by the time "morning" came, you'd forget if it was good or not.

So after awhile, there he was, alone in the Flash Museum. Angel and Sam had gone off to Gorilla City, where they could live happily ever after now that she was an ape. Karen had gone off to ... where? to her apartment, where she could... live happily ever after? Who knew. Where she could live, anyway, as a human, instead of a human in a gorilla's body.

And Linda was gone. He could almost feel where she was; it was like he recognized her velocity in the vast field of motion which was Keystone City.

Personal life was done with for the moment; time to fight crime.

That's how this had started, wasn't it? By splitting into two Flashes, one to fight crime and one to be with Linda. Now he was just one again -- and no Linda. He guessed that answered which one he was.

"You're saving the city again, aren't you?" Linda asked. He wasn't sure if she knew he could hear; he passed by the house regularly on his patrol, just checking up on her, making sure everything was okay, and the chopped-up words flowed together into a sentence. "I don't think I ever told you this, Wally. I don't know if anyone has. But that's friggin creepy."

Kitten falling out of a tree at 227 Brookstone. Drunk driver eastbound on Thirteenth, about to kill herself slamming into a telephone poll. A guy outside the nameless club on Meadow about to hit the girl who won't go home with him. He handled all of it, skimming by the house in the slices between to intercept the vibrations through the air which carried Linda's voice.

"It's not that you're not a nice guy. But holy crap, Wally. Don't you realize you could be living in a world without consequences? That most people, with your power, would be doing exactly that? God, the irrational part of me, it keeps wondering, now that I've broken up with you ... what if you don't accept that? There are so many things you could do without my knowing. You could be right here, sitting next to me, and I wouldn't know. Because you'd only be there for an instant, not even long enough to stir the air. You could come to my room tonight, make love to me, and be gone so fast I wouldn't even wake up."

The Central City Zoo had just gotten a shipment of koala bears which weren't koala bears; they were the first wave of alien shapeshifters bent on invading the Earth and converting the world's chlorophyll into the fuel their ships need to break the lightspeed barrier. It took him a little while to deal with them, so he missed the next few words.

"-- do that. But that's the point. Wally, you were a teenager when you got your powers. A teenage guy, full of hormones, and you could have had sex -- let's make no bones about it -- you could have had sex with any woman in the world, any time you wanted, without her ever knowing. If she doesn't know, what's the harm, right? No consequences, and no guilt. I know you think Barry Allen was more of a stand-up guy than you, but good God, Wally! Barry never dealt with near-omnipotence as a teenager! And it's not just sex I'm talking about -- you have a library card, Wally! Why? You can read any book in the library and put it back on the shelf so fast it's like it was never gone. There are a million things you could do for yourself with your speed, things which break rules designed for normal people, and most of them wouldn't even harm anyone. But you don't do them."

At the last minute, he veered away from a collision between a road-weary long-hauling trucker and a vacationing family in an SUV; Karen was there, lifting the truck up off of the highway. He could have done it faster; could have beat her to it; but he let her have this one. He was more than happy to steal Argus's thunder, but Karen was another story.

"Wally?" Karen asked. "Was that you?" She frowned. "It's harder to hide from me than from ordinary people, you know. I may not be Superman, but I can still see ... something. That flash of red. That brush of wind. What're you playing at?"

"Wally," Linda continued, talking to him or at him or whatever she was doing as she fixed herself a third bowl of Breyer's chocolate rainbow ice cream, "It's not just a matter of temptation. I know that's how you Justice Leaguers always put it. There's nothing inherently evil or unnatural about using your powers for your own benefit, as long as you're not going the supervillain route and benefitting at other's expense. It's what's NORMAL! Saying otherwise is like ... it's like saying that normal, healthy, athletic people are wrong and selfish and misguided if they don't become police officers, or firefighters, or doctors. Wally, everyone in the world has a gift for helping people. Hardly any of them do it for a living; and only a handful do it for free. You and your friends, you have this, like ... psychotic altruism."

Purse-snatcher on the corner of Forty-Third and Ojibwe. Disgruntled employee/would-be arsonist at the Spur by the interstate service road. Nervous graffiti artists redecorating the mosque on the east side. A 22 year attempting to bomb the women's health clinic because they wouldn't give his 14 year old girlfriend an abortion without her parents' consent, and now he can't see her anymore. A drunk at the Elks Club pulling a gun when the piano player won't play "Piano Man" for the fifth time of the night.

They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, Wally hummed to himself, but it's better than drinking alone. Damn song wouldn't get out of his head now.

"I mean, have you ever thought of this before?" Linda asked the air. The vibrations worked their snail's pace way through the empty-but-for-her house, out onto the street, meandering through those birthed by late-night cars and the infrasonic hum of streetlamps, until Wally could pick them out of the air. "Have you ever ... you know ... talked to a shrink about it? Because Wally, this is what I think. Superheroes ... guys like you ... women like Power Girl ... you're more than a costume and some powers and a sense of right and wrong. You're missing something the rest of us have -- or you have something we don't. It's more than a drive and it's more than morals. It's like ... I don't know, it's like a need. Like you need more than food and shelter and companionship. You need justice. It's your drug."

"I know I'm at fault here too," Karen said. "And dammit, I don't care if you can hear me or not. If you can't, this is practice. I'll tell you this later. Oh, hell, I will not. I can say things to your wake I'd never say to your face." She was flying over the city; Wally could feel the air moving gently beneath her, when he ran perpindicular to her path.

A fistfight at a bar with no name, just neon beer signs. A cornered thief opening fire on the KCPD.

"But Wally, you should have been honest with Linda. And you should have told me how you felt -- you should TELL me how you FEEL, because I have no idea. I never really hated you, but I never liked you, either, nor you me. And now, there's this ... this thing, you know? The elephant in the room no one's talking about. We have to talk about it. What we did, are we going to do it again? Are we a 'super-couple' now? I need to know. I need to at least know that you're wondering, too."

"This is what I've been thinking about since talking to Power Girl. That you super-people, you're a breed apart. You're not normal people. It's something I should have realized a long time ago. I think I did -- I think everyone does -- but we don't talk about it. It's a little scary, Wally. You're like a secret race of gods. Why do you think no one believes Superman has a secret identity? Because that's frigging frightening, to think of a man that powerful living a normal life. It's like ... it's like that movie we saw on video, Highlander? Those immortals pretending to be part of human society, when the whole time they're just biding their time, waiting for this big conflict that'll give them ultimate power. I know you liked the movie, but ... it gave me nightmares. It was too close to home."

A teenager on the west side needs to be rushed to the hospital after trying to give himself powers by letting irradiated arachnids bite him. The bites are red and inflamed, like boils, and he keeps talking about how he'll never let anyone push him around again, how they'll all be sorry once he's a famous superhero.

"What's the other shoe, you know? That's what I wonder. We're so used to having superheroes around, we kind of take them for granted -- but what happens next? Do you replace us? What are we to you, Wally? I think, on some level you don't like to consider, we're just your props. We're the spear-carriers and peasants in your epic stories. We're the ones who get in jeopardy so you have something to do; we're the innocent lives the villains threaten, so you can define yourselves as heroes."

"I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop," Karen said, flying back home. "I want to know where I stand. Hell, just a few hours ago I was a gorilla. That I can handle. But this relationship stuff -- Wally, I suck at this. Give me an alien menace to battle, or an interdimensional virus to eradicate. Figuring out what to wear for a Friday night date? I freeze up. So you've got to let me in. You've got to tell me where you think things are. You owe it to all of us, you, me, and Linda. Because maybe you can work things out with her, but not until we put us to rest."

There's a lull, so he finishes off a construction job on a skyscraper downtown, and alphabetizes the city's tax files. He restacks the books in the city library which were dropped off in the overnight return bin. He rewinds all the videos in all the Blockbusters in Keystone and Central, diverting the velocity of the spinning wheels just enough to keep the videos from bursting into flame from the friction.

"If you're waiting for me to say it, I will," Karen sighed, taking her costume off. "And if you're watching me undress right now from just around the corner of my sight, you damn well come here and do something about it. I want you, Wally. I don't want you to go back to Linda. I think we could be good for each other."

"I love you," Linda said. "But I don't want you to come back. When I can, I think I'll leave Keystone, because being a reporter here is going to mean seeing you all the time, and I can't handle that. I need a world without superheroes for a while. A world where costumes only come on at Halloween parties and Mardi Gras. I don't think I can sleep with a man who's so much better than me."

There's no crime left to fight; the minor accidents and incidents of the city he can prevent with as little thought and effort as breathing. He does a circuit through Fiona's Temple, the one where her little cult is based, the one that thinks he's a god. Or an incarnation of a god, or whatever it is. They're sleeping in shifts, with the waking ones keeping time with a fast-swinging metronome, and chanting beneath their breath. Creepy, but ...

No. No but. It's just creepy.

He can't let it be anything but creepy.

The fastest MAN alive. The fastest MAN.

"That's not it, either," Linda said, turning out the lights in the kitchen and living room. "It isn't that you're better than me. It's that I feel sorry for you, Wally West. You and all of your super-friends. No one can have as much self-control as you do without suffering for it. I just hope the world survives, when the other shoe drops."

"I'm going to bed, Wally," Karen said. "I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if you care. But you're welcome to join me if you want, when you want. All I ask is that you be here in the morning."

He repairs every pothole in the city. He fixes the frayed wiring of a thousand appliances, traffic lights, and bridge controls, although they don't need it yet. On a whim he can't quite suppress, he plants as light-as-a-feather kiss on the forehead of everyone in the Temple. He feeds the city's neglected pets and strays. He warms the homeless of the city by lending them the heat of speed without the velocity, and he feeds them by taking a single item of food from every house which has too much.

When morning comes, traffic is as smooth as it's ever been, because Wally is there directing it -- not visibly, but lending just enough velocity here, stealing just enough there, to avoid so much as a shadow of gridlock. Cars pass through the city like the turning gears of a well-oiled clock. No one knows he's responsible; tonight, it will actually make the national nightly news, as one of those strange anomalies.

He makes beds for those who left for work without bothering. He does their dishes. He takes out their trash. He picks up every piece of litter in the cities' limits. He scrapes paint off of traffic lights, and reapplies it to peeling buildings. By evening, Keystone and Central are the cleanest, freshest cities in the world, as new and shiny as the skin beneath a picked-off scab.

He isn't just killing time. He isn't just looking for something to do. He isn't just finding excuses to avoid Karen and Linda.

He can't stop moving.

Wally West moves silent as scarlet through the streets of Keystone and Central, because he's forgotten how to slow down.