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The world changed, but these things don’t happen all at once. If you’re very very clever, sometimes, you can find a way to pull at the seams.
After all, what is a trick but a particularly good story?
The universe knew that James Jesse was trapped, held captive by someone who hated him. It wasn’t hard to adjust the details, if you knew what you were doing. If you’d already tricked Neron once and paid the price and were no longer afraid of any consequences. If you were already trapped somewhere that wasn’t quite real.
Warden Wolfe liked to brag about how he’d made the Trickster disappear, but even he didn’t have that sort of power. He burned a few files. The world itself made James Jesse disappear, because James Jesse was supposed to be dead. He was supposed to be left behind in a world that no longer mattered.
Iron Heights wasn’t that much of a step up, but where there’s life there’s hope, as they always say.
Once he had escaped Hell (twice), Iron Heights was nothing.
--
Or that’s how he should have felt.
As he stood at the height of the prison fortress, James Jesse felt the old fear rising in him. His hands were shaking, his feet were bare, and the fall before him was real. He’d made all the calculations. This was the only way out.
Oh, the irony.
It shouldn’t kill him. It wouldn’t much matter if it did. He’d only be back where he started.
And still, the fear coursed through him. Held his feet to the solid stone below them.
There was a clatter behind him, and he knew he had run out of time.
It was the empty space below or the prison cell behind him. A chance of escape or the certainty of continued imprisonment.
He thought about the look on Hartley’s face when everything went to hell and all the things unsaid between them. He thought about the Rogues. He thought about Mindy and Billy, and wondered if they’d even still exist when things had changed so much. He thought the chances might be better if he was around.
James closed his eyes and did the one thing he’d spent his entire life avoiding.
--
The Rogues had never much listened when Hartley went off on rants about socialism and making the world a better place. But the rants about prison abolition? Well, at the very least, you could get in a good bitch session with the guy after the team broke you out for the umpteenth time, and he wouldn’t mock you if you admitted that you’d been scared for those few hours or days or sometimes months before Len had a solid plan to get you out.
The man had a point . Nobody cared what happened to you behind bars. The hero of Central City was conspicuously absent when abuses were perpetuated against those the courts had judged worthy of punishment. And it didn’t take a genius (of which the Rogues had several) to notice that the nonviolent drug possession cases didn’t get any better treatment than the murderers. And when Central had decided that they needed a prison specifically devoted to metahumans and supervillains, none of the Rogues were surprised when the abuses only got worse.
Nobody wanted to admit it, but the promise that the Rogues would always break each other out became more and more important.
--
And then everyone went straight.
Hartley was the first one to do it, and the only one to really stick to it. None of them were surprised when the younger Flash’s politics evolved in a very particular direction shortly afterwards. And for once, things weren’t getting worse. They weren’t getting too much better, but the Flash could be relied on to at least try to stand up for you.
But things had changed when the world reset itself. James wasn’t even sure that the younger Flash had survived the change.
Which meant they were back to a Flash who saw Wolfe’s abuses as par for the course and would drop criminals directly into prison without even bothering with a trial.
--
James’ first thought when he made it to freedom had been to recruit Hartley, but luckily he’d never been one to rush into things. He did his research. Hartley was dating a cop now. Which meant the Hartley James knew might as well be dead.
He vaguely wondered what had happened to the other James Hartley had dated for a few years. The man had been dull as a doornail, but he’d made Hartley smile. And he hadn’t been a cop. Eventually, James tracked the man down in a cute little rooftop apartment on the other side of the city. After a moment of hesitation, he slipped a concert ticket under the doorway.
It wouldn’t bring his Hartley back - he wasn’t stupid - but it felt right.
So perhaps his scheme was a bit sentimental. Something his Hartley would have come up with when he was particularly bitter. But Hartley knew what he was talking about, and James couldn’t deny that it felt good to throw his words in the Flash’s face.
Not that any of them seemed to stick. Unlike the younger Flash, the older one didn’t care to empathize with his villains. At least, not the ones he hadn’t been friends with before their turn.
--
James made it out, but he hadn’t won and that knowledge burned like acid in his chest.
----
“Do you think I’m out of touch?”
Hartley was laying on the couch with his head in David's lap, a familiar look of concern on his face. David sighed and swept a stray lock of hair behind his partner’s ear.
“What brought this on?” he asked.
Hartley bit his lip and looked away. Something in the capes world, then.
“It’s impossible to keep up with the kids these days. You’re not out of touch for not having one of those tock-ticker accounts.”
Hartley snorted.
“I know full well you know what TikTok is called.”
David never knew how Hartley managed to pronounce brand names like that. You could hear the capital letters, but in a way that made you hate the concept of branding as a whole. It probably had something to do with being a sonic genius, but – as with most things – Hartley found the pettiest possible use of it.
Fuck, David loved him.
Petty anti-capitalism aside though...
“Seriously, what is it? Did you misinterpret a meme reference or something?”
“I wish,” Hartley groaned. “I met this kid. Trying to imitate my thing from back in the nineties. They were so mad at me. He thought I’d abandoned the cause.”
Presumably sensing David’s confusion, Hartley continued.
“Kid uses both he and they pronouns.”
David nodded. He tended to be the kind of person who tried to ignore the politics of his identity as much as possible, but Hartley had made a passionate case a few years back about how learning to respect trans people wasn’t political, it was just being a good person. And, as usual, he had been right, so David had listened through multiple of Hartley’s lectures on the subject and done some of his own research. He’d hardly consider himself an expert on the subject, but he knew enough to not be too tripped up by someone using multiple sets of pronouns.
“And you think they might have been right?” David asked.
“This Landlord-” and there were the offended capitals again, “-was trying to gentrify a queer co-op out by where I used to, well... They’ve been fundraising for months, and this is the first time it’s been on my radar.”
Ouch. Hartley tended to avoid his old haunts these days, but David remembered the way he’d smiled when he’d seen the news about the bookstore opening in one of the abandoned houses he'd spent a few months squatting in.
“You can’t know everything, Hartley,” David tried to soothe him.
Hartley shook his head.
“I should have known this. I used to know everyone up there by name. I didn’t even recognize this kid. One of Maya’s, I think, from some of the stuff he said, but I can’t even be sure about that.”
David had met Maya a few times – an incredibly overworked woman with a proud smile. She was a familiar sight at the station. Always there to bail out one of her kids and usually yelling at his officers about one thing or another they’d done wrong during the arrest. Unfortunately, she was usually right. Plenty of the men hated her, but David thought they hated him more for siding with her. He heard the grumbles behind his back, but he wouldn’t let those stop him. He had never expected his coworkers to like him. He didn’t particularly like most of them either.
“And you’re upset because you thought you left all that behind you?”
Hartley shrugged.
“That’s not exactly it. I didn’t realize I’d become so disconnected from it all. And that’s the problem. I used to help those people directly. I keep telling myself that I can do more good by maintaining my position and using my influence, but maybe I’m just fooling myself. Maybe I had it right back then. Hell, Trickster is more radical than me these days.”
A small part of David wondered if his boyfriend was right. But that was a part of himself he refused to listen to, because if he thought too hard about that he might have to quit his job.
“You blocked that Conversion Therapy bill in the state senate last week,” David pointed out. “That’s not nothing. There are kids who will be safer because of you.”
Hartley rolled his eyes. He was in full anxiety spiral now, which meant he was going to be snappish and bitter.
“You know how these things work,” he said. “They’ll just try to pass it again in a different guise. What if I miss it next time among all the legal jargon? I can’t read every word of everything they’re trying to pass all the time.”
David took Hartley’s hand in his own and stroked his knuckles.
“Isn’t that what you have The Flash for?”
Hartley looked up at him, gears turning behind his sharp blue eyes.
“I can’t have Flash read every bill introduced into law looking for human rights violations... can I?”
“It seems just as important to saving the world as punching supervillains,” David offered.
Hartley smiled.
“Huh. That’s a thought...”
----
The first time they stood face to face, the world tilted, and everything briefly went silent. Hartley reached to adjust his hearing aids, but the sound came rushing back moments later.
“James.”
He’d gotten used to the contradictory memories. What he wasn’t prepared for was the rush of emotions swirling in his chest. Relief, anger, confusion, and something he didn’t dare name.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, Hartley.”
“Here” being a charity gala for the music hall where Hartley spent most of his evenings conducting. It was a terrible lie, but James had always been happy to lie with impunity.
“Do I need to fetch my flute?” Hartley asked.
“Don’t bother. I’m not here to cause trouble.”
James was smiling a little too wide, hands shoved in his pockets – undoubtedly to fiddle with whatever fidget toys he kept there these days.
“You were dead,” Hartley said softly.
“Thanks for noticing,” James said cheerfully, if a little too loudly. “I put a lot of work into that little trick.”
Hartley shook his head. He could summon the memory of James’ faked death if he tried. An impressive spectacle, but lacking in substance. The lack of a body had been a dead giveaway.
“I’m not talking about that party trick. You were dead. Really dead. I dragged your decaying corpse through the desert for days.”
James was very good at hiding his reactions, but Hartley had always been very good at reading him. He was startled – truly surprised – to realize that Hartley remembered.
“I guess there is some of the old Hart in there,” James said primly.
Hartley crossed his arms.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re dating a cop, Piper.”
James’ voice took on the reedy quality that Hartley normally associated with James looking down from particularly high heights.
“What does my love life have to do with this?”
“The Piper I knew would never. ”
The sincerity in that statement felt like a punch to the gut.
“Grow up, James. Things have changed.”
“Of course they’ve changed. The whole damn universe was rewritten. You’re not my Hartley, even if you remember some of how it was before.”
“I was never yours.”
Hartley could feel the lie even as he spoke it. There was a part of him that had once belonged to James. There was another part of him that still did.
James sighed, searching Hartley’s face for... something.
“I missed you,” he said finally.
“I was lost without you,” Hartley admitted, just as quietly.
“And then things changed.”
Hartley nodded slowly.
“And then things changed.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I changed too, remember?”
Hartley looked away, searching for the words that would make this right.
“We would have changed anyway,” he said finally. “That’s what people do.”
James shrugged.
“We might not have changed in the same ways.”
“For the record, I like the change where you’re not dead anymore.”
He meant it. He liked having James in front of him, far too disruptive to be anything but alive.
“I’m rather pleased with that one myself,” James admitted. “It wasn’t exactly easy to rewrite reality while it was actively changing around me.”
Hartley raised a skeptical eyebrow. James plucked an hors d’oeuvre from a passing waiter and swallowed it in a single bite.
“I heard. What Wolfe did to you. That wasn’t right.”
Hartley had his own memories of Warden Wolfe, so jumbled and confused that he couldn’t tell which were current and which were echoes of the former world. When the old memories had started filtering in among the new ones, that was one of the few eras of his life he hadn’t obsessively researched the facts of to sort into old and new.
“It was that or Neron. I think I came out on top of the situation.”
Hartley winced at the confirmation of exactly how high a price James had paid to save Hartley’s life. He’d hoped...
“Hey, it was my choice,” James pointed out, seemingly reading his mind. “I didn’t regret it. I don’t regret it.”
“Why?” Hartley asked.
It was the one thing he had never understood. They’d barely been friends anymore when it happened. James had spent weeks being nothing but unkind to him. Sure, they’d reached something of an understanding just before the end, but that didn’t explain choosing literal Hell to save him. James could be kind, in his own ways, but he’d never been the sort to sacrifice himself for anyone else.
“For a genius, you can be pretty dumb sometimes, Hart.”
Hartley’s pride prickled at that.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re still adorable when you’re mad at me,” James remarked with a grin.
Before Hartley could even begin to process that, James had leaned in and then there were lips against his own, warm and real and impossibly perfect.
The world shifted again, and for a moment everything faded away and they were the only people in the world. They were the wrong versions of themselves and they were a whole universe away from anywhere this could mean anything, but just for a moment, that didn’t matter.
And then, just as suddenly, James was gone.
--
David approached only a few moments after James disappeared into the crowd, dashing Hartley’s hopes that he might not have seen that. (Even if he hadn’t, he would have heard about it sooner or later. In retrospect, Hartley shouldn’t have let his old... something... kiss him in the middle of a crowded public venue.)
“Who was that?” he asked, voice surprisingly gentle. “Should I be jealous?”
“No need. He’s... someone from another lifetime.”
Just at the edge of Hartley’s hearing, a man in the parking lot got into a car and drove away, a familiar Queen song playing on the radio.