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In one timeline we kiss but the stars don’t come down.
That’s the timeline where I love her and you love him and everything makes sense until it doesn’t. Until you ride off into the sunset and I get lost in the swirling vortex of could-have-beens, should-have-beens, and were’s until I realize maybe I’ve loved her for so long and blurred the lines between platonic and romantic for so long that one type of my love for you has seeped into another.
I lose myself in that vortex. And she’s may be the thing that brings me back but you’re the thing that almost draws me into a different world, and maybe a better one, every time I pass one by.
In another you set a world on fire for me but I perish in the flames.
There are the timelines where I don’t survive the lightning. One where you and Iris meet only because you refuse to leave my side because you just know something bad will happen if you leave. One where S.T.A.R. Labs is not there for me and I go to you and Oliver instead and you build me up into something great until I run too fast trying to save you and I vanish in the speedforce, and Iris isn’t quite enough to call me back. One where the Man in Yellow rips out my heart and you destroy not only his future but yours as well with a few strokes of the keys.
Another and we’re strangers on a busy street, brushing by close enough to send each other reeling off balance but not stopping.
You spill your coffee on my shirt. We’re lab partners once in high school. You’re just Oliver Queen’s assistant and we never work together. I’m in line behind you at Jitters. You’re a Black Widow and I’m a Hawkeye at Comic Con and we take a picture together. You’re Iris’ best friend, Linda’s ex, Caitlin’s sister and I hear about you many times but never really meet you.
Somewhere there’s a final space where your hand on my face is the punchy climax to an epic saga, where the way our mouths meet takes the breath right out of people’s throats.
And then there are the times where the odds and our hearts are not against us. The times where you don’t love him and I don’t love her and our love is one for the papers, for the tumblr ship name tags, for the history books. In one you’re Black Canary’s secret weapon that she occasionally brings to the Justice League Headquarters and I see you in action once and have to ask you out in front of half the city. In one your father gets to you before Oliver does and we sneak kisses in between punches and try to convert the other to what we think is our noble cause. In one I think I save you but it turns out you’re the one saving me. In one we fall in love as our secret identities and as real people too and the reveal is emotional. In each and every one we finally fit together in a way I could only imagine before I saw it, and once I did I could not let it go.
One universe has us right, of all the millions stacked on millions.
There is one, however, one that seems almost too perfect.
There is no Flash, no Arrow, no meta’s, no League of Assassins, no anything that seems even remotely fantastical.
Where I meet you on a case, one that I’m actually assigned to and we meet and get coffee and I fall in love with the beating of your heartbeat and the glow of your blonde hair in the early morning and we talk and whisper our dreams to each other and we let the waffles on the stove burn because we get distracted by each other. Where we get married in the park and you are swarmed by Iris and Eddie’s kids along with Conner Queen, and his father tells you you look beautiful and kisses you on the cheek but it’s nothing like the way he does in the universe I come from because then he goes and kisses Conner’s mother and Laurel holds the flowers but cannot stop looking at Cisco during the ceremony and Caitlin finds out she’s pregnant the next day and interrupts our honeymoon with the news. Where you win a nobel prize and I invent artificial intelligence and our kids grow up geniuses too. Where nothing happens the way it’s going to but absolutely the way it’s supposed to and I live through that life a thousand times to find the one version where we don’t fight over the frootloops or the mortgage and the one version where no one we love dies from anything horrible.
But it’s not the version I belong to.
So it’s not this one. I can live with that.
The world is full of wonders and a hundred years ago the moon was too much to dream of touching. Look how far we’ve come. Turn over your shoulder and just look.
And then, when I’m almost home. When I’ve found my way back through the speed force, when I’ve stopped the black hole from destroying my city after going back in time, when I’ve had hours, days, maybe even years devoted to pondering how absolutely crazy my life has become, there is one more universe left to explore.
The way to it is small and not flashy, not like the one to the world where everything was too perfect to be true. I peek inside anyways. And everything looks the same, almost entirely, except our roles are reversed. I am the IT-guy turned-CEO of a major corporation currently driving through Route 66 with Oliver Queen and very much in love and you, you have become something amazing.
I never truly knew the color of your hair until I saw a whisp of it against the red cowl of my suit. And then you come racing out.
Maybe we’ll come across each other at the turning of the century, racing across the breaches between worlds.
And it’s not really you, I know that. None of them have been. None of them are exactly the woman I’ve found myself in love with, despite also being much more deeply in love with her and you being much more deeply in love with him. But her, she looks so close enough to being you.
She smells faintly of Iris, like maybe Iris also kissed her goodbye before she ran through time and space.
We stop in the middle of the cosmos, in the breach between all worlds, and just stare at each other.
“Barry?” You ask.
“Felicity?” I breathe out.
You pull off your hood and I pull off mine and I wonder why the drops of sweat running down your neckline as you do so only enhance your beauty, whereas they just make me look tired. And I am so tired. So, so tired of running.
We don’t ask each other how this is possible, because the evidence is laid out in front of us like a puzzle in which we are the two final pieces that fit together and complete the universe.
“It’s fun to explore, but I think I’m going home now.” I tell you, and I trust you, implicitly, even when I don’t even know you.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” You respond, and you also sound winded from the running. “Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Maybe we will.”
“Bye, Barry.”
“Bye, Felicity.”
I zoom back to the world I come from, where everything is as it should be but not as it could be, where I love her and you love him and we were nothing but an almost. Nothing but a maybe.
I’ll build my life on that maybe