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Four months ago, Max mysteriously went missing.
That same month, he learned that he had to move all the way to Denver with Jay and Joan Garrick so he could continue his training. He was going to live so far away from all his friends and Carol back in Manchester. He didn't want to start over. He didn’t want new friends. And he certainly didn't want a new old man to take care of him and show him how to be “patient” or whatever. It took ages for Max and him to understand each other. He didn’t understand why he couldn't just live with Helen and her new husband. He ran around, made a fuss, and all it got him was nothing.
That same month, he and Wally had a confrontation. They fought and spat at each other, but when the dust settled, Bart came to a new understanding of Wally. He liked to think Wally saw something new in him, too.
He told him he’d give Denver a try.
Deep down, he knew it wouldn’t last. Just like everything else in his life.
Three months ago, it was revealed that Rival possessed Max’s body.
That same month, Rival stole a time machine and left with Max’s body. Jay promised they would get him back. That they would find Max.
That same month, Bart said goodbye to his friends in Manchester, officially. Preston weeped when Bart told him the news, and Rolly gave him a crushing bear hug goodbye. He reassured them that he would stay in contact and he would be coming back to visit from time to time. On the last day of school, Manchester High said goodbye to him a second time. He hoped it wouldn’t be forever.
Carol, finally back in the present after events that he would keep locked in his mind, was given her own private moment with him.
Bart nearly teared up.
Nearly.
That same month, Bart unpacked his new room (at normal speed no less! Max would be… oh.) in Denver. Bart was dreading the move, as everyone was warning him about how bitingly cold Colorado was supposed to be.
The day they’d moved in, it was swelteringly hot.
Not too dissimilar from Manchester, after all.
Summer break was officially here, and he had nobody his age to hang out with.
That same month, he bothered Wally relentlessly about finding Max, both body and spirit. Every time, Wally looked at him with a sadness that Bart couldn't place.
That same month, Jay, Joan, and Wally sat him down to tell him that Max wasn't coming back.
Bart refused. He screamed at them for giving up on Max so quickly. For not trying hard enough. For giving up on understanding him. The scene looked not too dissimilar to the month before, but that didn’t stop him from barging out the room again.
Bart never thought he would be without Max. Max didn’t really want him at first, he knew that well, but Max actually took an effort to understand him. To teach him. To see him.
How could Max be okay with leaving him this suddenly? When he still had a lot to learn from him?
He didn’t believe it. He refused. Max would never have done this to him.
Bart ran away from that new house in Denver. He ran, and ran, and ran. Bart wanted so badly for a new truth, a new reality, a new revelation, a new anything that would give him Max back.
He kept running until his fingertips ghosted against the speedforce, trying to find something, anything, that would be a sign of Max.
The world was a blur of orange and yellows, the laws of physics bending right before it broke.
Bart felt like he could see Max beyond that barrier between the physical and metaphysical.
He was right there, he swore it.
He blinked.
There was nothing there.
Just the speedforce and her terrifying and comforting outreached arms. Ready to embrace.
He found no new lead, no new sign, no new respect for life.
Only the cold void in his heart.
He could’ve stayed there, then. With the speed force. But he didn’t.
When he was back to reality, he kept running until he knew he couldn’t be found.
He ended up at a cliff edge, the sound of crashing waves the soundtrack to the burning pain of the truth building in his throat.
It reminded him of not too long ago, when Iris first broke him out and brought him here.
If he had known how painful life really was, maybe he would've never followed Iris.
When he knew he was alone, truly alone, he sat down and cried.
He returned to that Denver House deep into the night, when he knew Jay and Joan would be asleep.
This house was not his home, because his home was Max.
And Home was nowhere to be found.
Two months ago, Bart was officially enrolled into high school for sophomore year. He, Jay, and Joan were given a tour of the high school, and Bart decided he absolutely despised everything about it.
The hallways were this depressing beige color, the library smelled like dust, the campus was a good deal smaller than manchester’s, and the cafeteria looked like it was asking to be set ablaze by a semi-suicidal teenager.
Jay told him to give it a chance when there were kids actually attending school.
Bart nodded glumly, but he knew he didn’t have the heart for it.
That same month, Bart buried himself in Young Justice missions. He yucked it up with his friends, made sure to act as normal as he wanted to feel.
He ignored the emptiness he felt, focusing on doing the world good. If Tim, Kon, Cassie, or even Anita noticed a change in demeanor, they certainly didn’t mention it to him.
When he wasn't out on Missions for Young Justice, he read. Anything to keep him distracted. He read anything from biographies to fiction to even the morning newspaper, after Jay was finished with it.
At night, when he couldn’t stop thinking about Max, he made sure to repeat each and every word he’d read that day until he settled back into a restless sleep.
He never was good at sleeping. It never came naturally to him, but now it was much, much worse.
That same month, they celebrated his 16th birthday. He held his birthday party at Helen’s, and everyone and their brother came to celebrate. Even most of Young Justice came, all with their own congratulations and gifts.
Anita was preoccupied with her parents, but she made sure to send him a sweet birthday message.
Outside of his Manchester friends, Tim was the first to arrive. Tim was a bit anal about not being recognized, so he gave Bart a congratulations, and settled on a wall to lean against for the rest of the party, silently observing the chatter.
He caught up with Cissie and Greta, hearing about how the last couple of months treated them and what they were up to now that school was out. He laughed at their jokes, and smiled and nodded when he was supposed to.
When Cissie asked him how Denver was treating him so far, he just smiled and told them it was too early to tell.
When Cassie arrived, she shoved a small gift into his arms and nearly crushed it between them with the force of her hug.
When Kon arrived fashionably late, he tackled Bart to the ground to congratulate him. Bart actually laughed and even smiled when he felt Kon’s TTK envelop him and squeeze him tighter.
Preston told him he was glad he found some friends in Denver, gesturing to his Civvie-clad hero friends.
Bart just smiled and let him believe it.
One month ago, Donna Troy died. Young Justice was disbanded, and the Hotel-turned-headquarters tucked in the Catskill mountains became empty once again.
Cassie and Tim weren’t answering his texts, Kon barely responded, and Anita fell off the face of the Earth.
That same month, Bart read everything that Jay and Joan had to offer.
With nothing left to distract him, he started thinking about Max again.
Instead of wallowing in his sadness, he went for runs. Sometimes he spent them looking for Max. various stops back to the edge of the speedforce to see if he missed something. Other times, he just wanted to feel something, outrun the despair he felt constantly nowadays.
(If he was really honest with himself, fully and truly? Most of the time, he stared into the speedforce, hoping it would take him instead.)
He would be gone for hours at a time. He never announced when he left. When he returned, they would always leave his dinner in the fridge. He’d stare at the plate angrily, picked his fill, and made sure to clean the dish so there was no evidence of him ever being there.
He kept his room sterile and undecorated, keeping his personal possessions from Manchester stored away in a never unpacked box tucked in the corner of his closet. It held the movie Preston made with him and his friends. It held the keepsakes that reminded him of Max. He looked at the closet longingly, and then collapsed onto the bed.
By the time his head hit the pillow, Bart was finally exhausted enough to fall into a dreamless sleep.
The next day, Bart clambered out of bed at noon. Despite a speedster's quick healing and metabolism, he felt exhausted and utterly ravenous.
When he entered the kitchen, Jay was sitting at the dining table with a straight face.
“Did you want to tell me where you were yesterday?” Jay asked in his gravelly voice, barely above a whisper.
Bart could tell Jay was upset.
“Out for a run. Sorry I didn’t tell you,” Bart mumbled.
He tried to stay still. He dug his thumb into the muscle just beneath his other hand’s thumb (it’s called the Thenar Eminence, Bart recalled reading in a book about human anatomy) so the electricity in his veins would stay quiet.
Bart’s heart picked up waiting for Jay to respond. He looked bothered. Bart was sure that Jay was going to rip him a new one, but Jay’s irritation faded into a painfully tiring look. One that everyone gave him when he said something honest.
It turned into pity. He was sick of that look.
“Okay, son. Just tell me or Joan next time you leave. You gave us a right scare.” Jay relented, relaxing into the back of the chair.
Bart nodded.
As he made lunch, something in Bart's chest felt out of place after that interaction.
So Bart did it again. And again.
Each time, he spent a little bit longer staring into the speedforce. Each time, he spent longer and longer away.
Finally, Jay yelled at him after the fifth time he ran off, when he arrived at the Garrick’s house at 6 in the morning. Jay warned him that there would be dire consequences if he kept disobeying Jay’s orders.
Finally, that same something in his chest stepped back into place when he could yell at him right back. This was familiar, he knew this dance and game. If it went the way it always went, Jay, and in turn Joan, will get sick of him in the coming months and leave him in the dust.
Hopefully, everyone will leave him alone.
So he continued to run.
That same month, Bart was getting ready to be the new kid in school again. He fought Jay every step of the way. He dragged his feet while shopping for school supplies, he tried to convince Joan that he would fare much better from homeschooling, and he even tried to feign sickness on the morning of his first day.
None of his attempts were successful, but even as he dragged his feet into his first class, he knew he was going to hate everything about it.
Despite the crowding, he still felt alone walking through the hallways.
All the kids looked at him weird. He sat silent in the back of each room during every class and stayed silent when the Teachers thought it was a smart idea to play some dumb ice breaker game.
He made sure to keep to himself, and he poked at his lunch alone in the stupid ugly cafeteria, imagining him in the center as the walls melted from the flames he would’ve set if he was a suicidal teen.
When Jay took him back to the house, Bart knew he wasn't going to be there very long at all.
Three weeks ago, he got into his first school fight.
Unlike his first squabble on the football field in Manchester, he only pissed off one random teenager.
Well, really, they pissed him off. They pulled his hair and then he punched them in the face.
He couldn’t really remember why he threw the punch, but it felt good. It felt better when the kid hit him back, too.
Bart had a bloody nose and the kid’s left eye was beginning to swell up when they were finally pulled off of each other.
As he sat in front of the principal’s office waiting for Jay to pick him up, he felt nothing.
He just stared at the blood dripping down into the napkin the nurse handed him.
He didn’t answer the principal or Jay when he asked why he started the fight. He didn’t correct them.
The principal suspended him for three days for starting a fight.
In the car, Jay lectured him sternly about how he shouldn’t attack random people especially when he could have genuinely hurt the kid with his advanced strength.
He still felt nothing.
That same night, he cut his hair short.
Two weeks ago, he got into another fight. This time, he used his words to start the fight. He didn’t care enough to remember what he told the kid, but the kid slammed him against a locker and started hitting. He threw in a few half hearted punches, but the new ache in his jaw made him feel alive.
They split them up pretty fast this time.
It only disappointed him more.
Jay drove him to the house in complete silence.
That same night, Jay and Joan went out and Wally was stuck babysitting him.
Wally tried to talk to him, but he drowned him out.
That same week, he picked a fight any chance he could get. It didn’t always work, but he knew it worked when Jay and Joan set him up with another babysitter.
One week ago, Bart was invited to return to the teen titans. Wally didn't think he was ready, and Jay and Joan were glad to be rid of him on the weekends.
What the hell did Wally know? He was a titan before, he could certainly be a titan again.
Maybe when the titans disband again and the Garricks got tired of him finally, maybe he’d return to the speedforce.
Maybe he’d finally be able to return home.