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FINALLY I CAN TALK ABOUT MY AU

This has been rotting in my head for like a year at this point, and I am not gonna do justice in this one post but!! Let's talk about Percy's Mercury!Bart Allen Au.

So the idea of Bart taking Max's mantle is not my own original idea, I see it all the time on comic book twitter and tumblr and it's a very common concept and it makes a lot of sense. Given how Bart failed Terrifically at being the flash, and so if he were to grow out of the Impulse title and role, I think this would be that story (if that makes any sense??). Cue: my rambles

So there's a lot of parts where I could start this AU, but hear me out, what if we start with an alternate ending to Mercury Falling? Inertia pulls a rotting Max Mercury into the speedforce and Impulse barrels through to try and save his parental mentor figure. Bart canonically wants to save both Thad and Max, and I think at the state Bart was with his training meant that the ability of him saving either of them when all chaos breaks loose in the speedforce is incredibly thin. In a good ending Bart ends up saving Thad and Max and there is a possible start of Thaddeus redemption arc, in the real ending we got Bart saves Max and Thad poofs into speedforce dust, and in a bad ending Bart watches Thaddeus and Max fade in front of him.

Can you take a guess at which one I'm gonna pick for this AU? What can I say, fuckers love angst (I am fuckers).

Ok so Bart crawls out of the speedforce, torn in shambles and in front of him is Helen and Max's colleague who was attempting to treat him. They all stare at each other with thick disbelief of what had just happened, and neither of the adults can find it in themselves to ask the quivering teen in shambles the thick details. All they can manage is to pick up the boy and comfort him, rest assured he is safe at the end of the day. The rest of the details follow out similar to the end of Impulse, where when Max goes missing the Allen family decide to assign Jay Garrick as Bart's caretaker since he can continue mentoring him and be the best fit. When Bart moves in with the Garricks, across the country and away from his school friends and Helen, he is still injured and recovering, which he shouldn't be injured since speedsters usually only take like what? a few hours and they're back on their speedy feet? Jay speculates Bart still has broken bones because they not only settled in the wrong spots, making it impossible to make a proper recovery (unless he wants to repetitively break the same bones until they set them in the right spots) or because the injuries forming in the speedforce threw the body and metabolism in for a loop.

Either way, from this point on the canon stays loosely the same. Bart stays with Jay, learns with him, and some Young Justice shenanigans ensue. Up until we get to around the Flash Rebirth comic, I'm gonna mess around with this point. Wally notices that when Barry comes back the speedforce is acting very strange again, and so does Barry as they both hear the souls of Max and Johnny Quick in the speedforce. This peaks Bart's curiosity, and just like when he was a younger kid he's gonna try to make a run back into the speedforce to check it out. Everyone advises Bart not to run back into the speedforce, a whole dictionary's worth of reasons why it's not a good idea, but Bart will stay stubborn and keep working his way up into breaking that barrier.

Bart eventually enters the speedforce looking for Max, and he enters the speedforce a handful of amount of times before finding him. He treats these visits like entering a containment zone, enter for only a short time and once anything feels funny evacuation ASAP. When he finds Max, on his seventh run through, the man is ethereal, what was a conduit of the speedforce is now a spectral image of what the speedforce captured him as. The two manage to hold conversation in a thick maelstrom of kinetic energy, which now limits their time as Bart is starting to get battered up for being a freshie to the intense form of travel.

It was obvious that Max couldn't go back to earth with Bart, as his body wasn't the same and it would put the two in a whole bunch of unnecessary issues. When it's getting to that point where Bart is hitting that upper limit of speedforce exposure, he asks Max if he could see him soon. In the typical always cryptic Max manner, he just laughs and puts a phantasmic hand on Bart's shoulder and tells him that he'll know where to find him. This is what I'd consider to be the transfer of "zen speedforce master" powers to Bart, and it kinda fucks him up you know, it's a lot of beyond radioactive energy being transferred into one of the most unstable conduits. He's gonna knock out and wake up on the floor of Jay's basement with the ability to feel everything moving, and at what speed they're moving.

The shuffling of Jay and Joan cooking dinner together is magnified in a sense that even Clark Kent couldn't understand it, he could clock down Wally running to the Titan's tower, he could feel Tim Drake grapple building to building. It's a lot to take in, but he could also very faintly feel a swirling force in him, a very soothing force that reminds him so faintly of that house in Manchester, Alabama.