"Your smile is not as bright as it used to be." Olivarry
Barry would’ve never thought that he’d feel sympathetic towards Eobard Thawne, but he has to admit that after a week of trying - and failing - to get himself out of 2074, the world’s starting to look a little too bleak for his tastes. It’s not that he doesn’t have time: in this year, as in any other he’s visited so far, Iris has been dead for decades and Barry still doesn’t have more than clues and hints about where to look next.
But Savitar’s identity remains a mystery, and Barry is stuck wandering the eerily clean streets of Central City that he doesn’t recognize.
When it becomes apparent his speed’s not up to par - and that STAR Labs has been shut down for years - he decides he needs to seek help elsewhere. And since he’s got no way of calling out to Ray, Stein or any of the other time-travelers after he’d used his one and only beacon in 2056, all Barry can think of is to haul ass to Star City, hoping for the best.
The headlines on one of the giant news projectors make it abundantly clear that Oliver’s not running the show anymore. Barry feels a momentary pang of fear - a few weeks ago, he’s stumbled upon the year where Joe died - but the lights in Oliver’s windows are on, and Barry doesn’t bother knocking before he phases through the door.
He hears the scream for a split second before he’s got his hands full with picking up a falling tray. He manages to save the glass and the plate, but the woman is still screaming when Barry comes back to a human speed. He winces and hands her the tray - that surprises her enough to silence her, which Barry’s grateful for.
“Hey,” he manages, lamely, “I’m sorry, I’m looking for Oli- for Mr. Queen, does he still live here?”
It takes a bit of persuading - she’s hell-bent on calling the police at first - but in the end, she motions her head towards a half-open door and Barry pushes through without further ado.
He should’ve expected the sight that greets him: it’s not like Ollie’s a meta, and it’s been nearly sixty years. But he’s so small against the pillows propping him up, so fragile with his bones almost visible through the paper-thin, wrinkled skin, dotted with spots. He turns his head, and his eyes are startlingly the same; there’s even a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he sees Barry standing in the doorway.
“I knew it,” he says, and his voice drags as if his throat doesn’t quite remember how to do its job. “I knew you’d be back, one day.”
Barry’s chest gets tighter, and he tries his best to tell himself that this is normal, this is just life, time passing in a way he’s never been so acutely aware of.
“I never left,” he breathes quietly and walks closer, caught in a trance-like state that pulls him towards Ollie’s bed and makes his heart beat faster. It’s stupid to fear a friend, an old man whose bony hands are too shaky to be a threat. But Barry’s not afraid of being attacked - what scares him is how much Oliver’s not his usual larger-than-life self.
He sits gingerly on the edge of Oliver’s bed and reaches out: Oliver’s hand feels so damn small in his own, even when it squeezes with a semblance of its old strength.
“You haven’t changed,” Ollie speaks again, and Barry can’t quite stop his eyes from watering, even as he tries to act normal, tries his hardest not to think of all the years he’s missed in Oliver’s life, all the things they had once tried and never finished, not really, both of them too caught up in their own lives to make a life that would be theirs. It had not lasted long, that illusion that maybe, they could - Barry wonders if Oliver still remembers those days, from time to time, and whether he has the right to remind him.
Whether he even wants to.
“But your smile,” Oliver continues, and his twitching thumb runs across Barry’s knuckles, “your smile’s not as bright as it used to be, ‘Flash’.”
“I need your help,” Barry croaks - it’s like his voice is trying to get closer to Oliver, any way it can, “I need to get back to… to 2017.”
He doesn’t say ‘my time’, because this time is as much his as it is Oliver’s - it’s just that he doesn’t want any of it, not yet, not before he can see where his life could lead if he does’t cheat himself through decades like levels in a game.
They talk, for a little while, but it becomes clear that Oliver doesn’t know anything that could help, in any way, even if he might have means of helping Barry get out of this time.
“You can talk to my R&D,” Oliver says, and when Barry tries to get up, his gnarly fingers, like roots of some magical tree, wrap around Barry’s wrist and refuse to let go.
“Tomorrow,” he adds, and it’s both a plea and an order. Barry hesitates: he can’t let himself get distracted, not now, not before he reaches his goal; not before he saves Iris and sees Oliver alive and well and young once again, strong and fearless, with years and years stretching ahead of him.
But he can’t bring himself to push Oliver’s hand away in the end.
“How about we catch up, huh?” Barry offers, “I mean, you can tell me what you’ve been doing, I guess I don’t have much to say,” he chuckles a little.
“There it is,” Oliver mutters, and his other hand brushes against Barry’s jaw, foreign in its age, gentle in its fragility. “That smile. I’ve spent fifty years waiting for you to come back, Barry… I knew you would. Everybody stopped believing… but I couldn’t, not after what you said that day.”
Barry’s got no idea what Oliver’s talking about - he suddenly feels left out, like Oliver’s talking about a time Barry hasn’t come to experience just yet, but he lets the old man ramble on, only half-listening, unable to concentrate.
But when Oliver’s eyelids start drooping and his voice trails off, Barry still leans over and presses a kiss to the old man’s wrinkled forehead. Oliver mumbles something, and his fingers around Barry’s hand tighten momentarily.
“I would’ve said yes,” he more breathes than whispers, and Barry’s eyes widen: but Oliver’s sound asleep then, and Barry doesn’t have the heart to ask for a clarification. Fifty years… Barry remembers the headline in the newspaper from 2024, about his disappearance, and he can’t help but wonder what happened between 2017 and that headline that made Oliver sound like this, after such a long time.
Barry’s own heart twists at the thought that maybe, in the end, after he had been done mourning Iris, maybe he took the chance that he had missed before. But that kind of thinking will lead him nowhere and he pushes the ‘maybe’s and ‘what if’s down before they can burrow deep into his heart and spring roots of doubt where only determination needs to grow.
Twelve hours later, when he’s armed with Queen Industries’ newest tech and speeding through time to decades not yet past, to find his way back to Iris, he still remembers Oliver’s green eyes as he said his ‘yes’ to a man who never really asked the question.
But a part of Barry’s brain keeps repeating a pig-headed ‘not yet’ all the way to 2097.