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They will teach us that Eternity is the Standing Still of the Present time.
- Leviathan IV, 46
Rip Hunter ran through a swampy forest. Around him the trees dried up into ash and sprouted green again in a chaotic, terrifying cycle.
Above, a red tempest was swallowing history, transforming into nothing but energy. The crimson cloud swept the skies, spitting lightning that smote everything it touched, returning it to the ash from whence it came. The young became old, and the old became neonate.
Time was unravelling, collapsing, unfolding.
He was looking for something, or someone, though he couldn’t remember a name or what it meant to him. He couldn’t remember his own name. But blue, he remembered blue.
And then he saw her there, standing at the heart of the storm, like a mirage.
Sara.
Her name was Sara.
She screamed his name and ran towards him, and he ran too, meeting her halfway. There was blood on her face. And her eyes (blue, so blue) were frightened. Sara, he said, suddenly remembering battlefields and decaying cities, ballrooms and cemeteries, streets of cobbled stones, the far future, the distant past. His hand upon her cheek.
Rip, she answered, his name on her lips like the most cruel of ellipsis, her face etched with regret the way his chest felt collapsed with the lifetime of silences that passed between them.
He could laugh. The last two people standing, hearts beating in unison finally saying yes there at the end of all time.
Before the day the red storms came he had made a hundred confessions, in battlefields and cemeteries, in decaying cities and streets of cobbled stones, in the quiet intimacy of hallways. He’d made a hundred confessions that revealed themselves ultimately worthless because he never said what he should’ve said. He’d lived too afraid of the answer to ever dare ask the question. A question she’d long ago answered, in battlefields and quiet hallways.
Lightning flashed around them and her hair turned gray in his grasp. Rip grabbed hold of Sara’s hands and brought them to his chest while the storm continued to crash around them, sizzling, twisting into a vortex, robbing time from them, robbing words even. He drew her body to his the way he’d never dared before as the deadly maelstrom encircled them.
He prayed to time to give them time.
An iridescent sphere of unbearable brilliance encased their bodies and splintered, unleashing new chaos. All of time and space, actual and undiminished, bounced around them as if every mirror in the world was reflecting every mirror. She looked at him and he looked at her and in her eyes was an infinite mirror in which he saw that his eyes were too an infinite mirror reflecting back at her. She saw a sunrise in France, he saw a sunset in Star City; she saw boots navigating the labyrinthine streets of London; he saw a yellow bird land on water and felt what it was like to drown; she saw his smile; he saw his lips bestow a kiss on her sweaty tangled hair, the soft inside of her thigh, the round freckle on her left breast; she saw bare feet tangled in white sheets in a summer house in Toulouse, the year 1923; he saw her wrinkled hands caressing his grey beard; she saw them dancing in a castle in 1759; he saw the empty halls of the Waverider long after they’d departed; she saw photographs on a table in a house with blue wallpaper; she felt the coldness of holding death in her arms; he saw the darkness of her soul; she saw her hands pressed against a wound on his side; he saw her face twist in pain and rapture; she saw flowers on her grave; he saw her walking away from him and then he saw her coming back; they saw a child, towheaded and freckled; they saw their love grow like a vine around the stream of time, quietly and inevitably; she saw him, and he saw her, and she saw herself and he himself; all this they saw simultaneously and they felt dizzy, caught between infinite joy and infinite sorrow, and so they wept, for their eyes had seen the unimaginable universe and then the storm stood still.