Young Writers Society

Elijah felt his heart pounding when the intimidating man had asked him if those were his real f-ing memories.

Because now that he'd remembered Sarah, almost everything was coming back now. Her father's hotel. Their first night together. Their courtship, which had been perfect, except for every time Sarah turned him down before she finally said yes.

And then their two kids.

Adam, and then Susan.

Susan. His beautiful daughter who hadn't made it. Brain cancer at age 2. What were the odds of that? Sarah hadn't been the same and he hadn't either.
Elijah took a deep breath. He hoped that soon he'd remember his name.

"Yes," he said as calmly as he possibly could. "Those were my real memories."

The boy watched the memories around him. The mirror, the wall, and he expected there would be more to come. A strange sort of magic it was, to meddle with the matters of memory.

The man with the artwork seemed quite adverse to it, however, and the odd, tall man confirming it didn't much help. "It's alright," the boy said, "they're just remembering, is all. Give them some time to process before you judge them for a fraction of a story, please." He didn't imagine he was being soothing, exactly, but that thought soon slipped his mind as something caught his eye.

It was a little glass globe, decorative, really, with a scene carved in vibrant crystal in the middle. A cliff face, with blue glass at the base of it to resemble water in the already water-filled globe. He went to this thing, which lay on one of the bedside tables, and picked it up. As it tilted, he saw bits of glitter hidden around the base. He gently shook it, and the scene glittered, as though by magic.

The music rang out over the crowd. A jovial din more than a song, it intertwined with the thumping of the feet of the partons and the drunken, off-key attempts to sing along to the shanty.

The boy upon the stage wasn't the star of the show - that honor belonged to the lovely lass whos booming voice managed still to dominate the ruckus of the crowd - but he was overjoyed to be there, part of the backdrop of this moment that wouldn't end up in anyone's history books.

And then the memory skipped, jumping ahead to a point he somehow knew was later.

He was on the edge of a cliff made entirely of solid crystal. Pinks, purples, oranges, and reds all danced around in the light of the setting sun. The colors danced across his clothes, his hair, and the fiddle in his hands, poised to play.

He played a crisp, clear note that rang out over the cliffs, echoing down into the caves surrounding.

He paused.

Grinned.

And started a song.

The vision ended, and he saw that last of it flicker by and abruptly end on the wall before him, along with a fractured, smaller version in the crystals in his hand.

He blinked.

Wally watched, detached, as both Elijah and the boy with the fiddler experienced what had to be their memories. He heard Matvei's question, too, but couldn't bring himself to answer it.

He knew those were his memories. He just couldn't explain the memory that had popped up in the middle of the original one - maybe he was a child actor. He didn't think he was an actor, but what other explanation did he have?

He stared at the mirror and raised a hand to touch his cheek.

...That second memory had felt right. He was younger than he was now, but for once his body felt the way it was supposed to. And he had been wearing a pair of goggles, too. Just like he was now. Didn't that mean something?

And why didn't the tears stop sliding his face when he looked down at the action figure his shaking hand was holding?

He looked at the little bat sticker, getting a sinking feeling in his gut he didn't like at all. When he glanced back up at the mirror a minute later, his memories - not in the same vivid way before - came back to him.

James...James was his best friend. They had grown up together. He had given him one of his action figures when they were kids after James had showed him his favorite show at the time. They had gone to college together. James had stupidly decided to be an English major, even when Wally had pointed out that he hated writing essays.

Then there had been the hiking trip.

He remembered heading up the hill. He remembered hearing the warnings from the people who had been on the trail, and remembered how he and James had disregarded them because the ledge had looked perfectly safe.

And how it hadn't been.

And how the dirt gave out, and James were tumbling down the cliff side. He had tried running to him, but he was too slow. If he had been as fast as he was supposed to be, he could have saved him. James wouldn't have become an unrecognizable heap of limps and blood on the ground below-

The action figure fell out of his hand.

Wally couldn't help it - he let out a quiet, pained sob.

They're just remembering is all.

Matvei knew that. He knew that. He just didn't like the idea of their memories being something everyone else could see. He had a faint feeling in his gut that his memories were not something people should see, or something he would want people to see. It made him more reluctant to search the room. What if he found something he didn't want to find?

He looked over at the fiddler boy's memory as it played out. Two different songs playing in two very different places. That boy and his fiddle seemed inseparable.

He shuffled towards the back of the room as Waldo started to cry. His mind was starting to tear in two directions. All he'd wanted to do up until this point was fight, but there was an unwelcome heaviness twisting around his heart that made him want to leave. Not run. But leave.

He felt glass crack under his heel as he took a step back and looked down. He'd shattered the glass and fractured the frame of a picture. He hesitated for a moment before bending down to pick it up, brushing the broken glass out of the way, and pulling the photo out of the frame.

It was him, and a woman, smiling. She was beautiful, and had long brown hair and had her head tucked into his neck on his shoulder. It looked like she'd taken the picture, facing the camera towards them.

Megan.

He was in a hospital waiting room. The sterile smell of plastic and the dull colors of the walls felt suffocating, and he was bent over in his seat. He looked up when he heard feet shuffling towards him.

He took one look at the nurse in their blue scrubs and knew what she was going to say before she said it.

Megan hadn't made it.

Her voice felt like it was coming through a fishbowl, distant in the water.

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Petrov... complication... internal bleeding... but your baby boy is fine. He's a picture of health."

Matvei's heart stopped, and he rushed to follow the nurse as she led him to his son, who a nurse handed to him gently. Tears welled up in his eyes as he looked down at his little boy, wrapped in a small hospital blanket, with a blue cap on his head.

Andrei.

And then it ended. Matvei stared down at the picture in his hands and stiffly tucked it away in his jacket pocket, blinking away the tears in his eyes.

He had a son. He'd had the love of his life. How could he have forgotten?

He cleared his throat and straightened up. For once in his life, he couldn't think of anything to say.

Matvei was crying.

Wally didn't know how to respond. He was trying to hold back tears, too, but failing miserably. But there was just something heartbreaking about seeing someone who had come across so confident and unafraid of, well, everything break down and cry.

"I'm sorry," he said, finally finding his voice. He looked up at Matvei. "I...I lost someone close to me, too. We were just best friends, but..."

He glanced away.

Then he leaned down and carefully picked up the action figure from the ground, holding it gently in his hands as he looked around the room. He needed to remember more. There were still blanks in his memory. Even though James felt like he had been Wally's entire world, he knew there were still some things he needed to remember.

There was a crate next to the bed. It was overturned with filth and other things on it, but Wally wasn't really paying attention to that. Gripping the action figure tightly in his hand, he approached the crate.

Without touching the crate itself, he cleaned off the objects that had been piled on top.

Then his fingers brushed up against the crate.

--The motel room was replaced by a parking lot and an open garage. He was standing between them, the crate in his arms as he studied the array of furniture and belongings shoved into the back of an old, beat-up pickup truck.

There was a boy and a girl there. The boy looked young, with messy black hair and bright green eyes. The girl was around his age, too, her curly blond hair thrown up in a ponytail that didn't really want to stay together. All he had to do was take one look at them to know they were a couple - even without the context of the memory.

"Thanks for the help," Wally said, giving a tired smile. When he glanced down at the crate in his arms, he saw that he was wearing a suit - the kind that you wore to a funeral. "I don't know how I would have been able to move everything without your dad's pickup truck."

"Don't worry about it," the boy - Jack - said. He gave him a smile, too, but Wally didn't miss the look of pity in his eyes. "Lila and I were happy to help. You've always been like a big brother to me."

"I know you only asked us to bring everything here," Lila said, grabbing another off-color crate from the truck bed, "but we can stay longer than that. Mourning...mourning shouldn't be done alone."

Wally shook his head.

"I'm alright," he said. "I...I just need some time to think."

Jack and Lila exchanged worried looks.

Wally, meanwhile, glanced around the garage. It would work. It wasn't exactly what he had imagined, but all he had to do was close his eyes and let the memory play out. The not-voice in his head was a welcome guest these days.

When he popped his eyes open again, the scene had shifted. He was the same size he had been in the last memory. He glanced outside of the bedroom he was in - his uncle's - and made sure no one was coming. Aunt Iris was out in the kitchen talking to his mom on the phone; Uncle Barry was off at work.

Wally grinned.

If he had a secret as colossal as the one he was pretty sure Uncle Barry had, he would have hidden all of his super secret research notes in the closet. One quick check in a dusty shoe box later, and Wally's suspicions were confirmed.

"I knew it," he whispered. "I knew Uncle Barry was special!"

He flipped through the pages of the book. It wasn't just a diary - it was a recipe. And even though Aunt Iris had only just started teaching him how to cook, it was a kind of recipe he would see in one of the chem sets he had gotten for Christmas. All he needed was the right set of chemicals, the right place to do the experiment, and a nice, stormy day...

Wally's grin grew even more. Uncle Barry was going to be so excited!

The scene glitched out. He was opening his eyes up back in the garage, with Jack giving him a worried look.

"Are you sure everything's alright?" Jack asked. Lila was gone, now - she must have gone upstairs with the crate. "I...I know I shouldn't pry, but..."

He sighed.

"...You're moving into your new house on the day of James's funeral," he pointed out.

Wally gave another tired smile.

"I'm fine," he reassured him. "I just needed to get away from my parents. You know how they are. I told them I'd only stay until the funeral."

He looked down at the crate.

It wasn't like they were all that sad to see him go, anyways. Things had been tense ever since he had moved back in.

Jack let out another sigh.

"Well," he said, "you're not alone. If you ever need someone to talk to or hang out with, I'm here for you."

Wally looked over at him.

"Thanks," he softly said.--

The scene came to a close.

Wally let out a sigh of his own, sitting atop of the crate and staring down at the action figure in his hands. He couldn't remember everything, yet, but he could remember the arguments between him and his parents. Saying that they had been tense was an understatement - it had felt like a war zone. Staying on campus and at James's house had made him forget how bad things had been between him and his parents.

But even as he reminisced on the family he suddenly remembered having, his mind started to travel to the notebook he had found in the second memory. His uncle had written it, even though his only uncle was Jack's dad - and he wasn't the type to do any kind of experiment.

The intimidating man had a child and a love too. Maybe they had more in common than he wanted to believe. He wouldn't make for a bad friend or at least an ally if he wasn't so closed off. The unremarkable man had a memory too, but honestly, Elijah had been zoned out, thinking about Sarah and how he wanted to remember everything about her.

When the unremarkable man's memory faded and he came to, Elijah's eyes caught a Barbie sitting close to where the record had been. It had a blonde updo and was wearing a pink dress. Elijah was drawn to it. Somehow, he knew what was about to happen, but he picked it up anyway.

This next memory he knew was one he didn't want anyone else to see. And yet, he couldn't resist. Elijah walked into the same living room they were in before, but it was a few years later. The radio was different. So where the curtains on their window. There were a young boy's toys scattered on the floor. And the Barbie on the end table.

Elijah looked out the window and saw snow up to the window pane. The sky was pink. He went to the thermometer and saw it was ten degrees. The clock said it was five am. Not that that mattered right now. Sarah was sitting on the couch, in a long fleece nightgown, deep bags under her eyes.

She held a two year old girl with wide blue eyes in her arms. Except something was wrong with the girl. Her dark hair was falling out in clumps, and she seemed to be half asleep.

"She wouldn't eat this morning," Sarah said. Elijah sat down and put his arm around Sarah, looking into his daughter's eyes. "Get her Patty."

In his memory, Elijah reached for the Barbie. He put up to his daughter's line of his sight.

"Yeah, that's your friend Patty," Sarah said. When that didn't work, she turned to Elijah. "Susan, your daddy's here."

No response. Sarah started crying. "She was just playing with her yesterday. I don't know what to do. I'm scared."

"It's okay," Elijah replied, although he was clearly worried as well.

Just then, Susan started vomiting blood. "We have to take her to the hospital," Sarah said.

"I'll get my keys," Elijah replied. "Just give me a minute and I'll start icing off the car." He kissed Sarah and started down the hallway.

"Wait," Sarah said, "What about Adam?"

"Let's wake him up," Elijah said. "He can come with us."

Just like that, the memory faded, and Elijah was back in the hotel. He dropped the Barbie right on the floor. "Susan," he said audibly.

Waldo's words fell on deaf ears.

Things were coming back to him. Megan's family, furious, shutting him out. He wasn't invited to the funeral. He and Megan had never married. He'd planned on proposing sometime after the birth but never had the chance. They'd talked about marriage, but knew it would be complicated. Her family never liked him, or approved of him, or wanted anything to do with him, and the sure didn't after her death.

All because he was a hitman.

It hit him like a truck, and he inched back against the wall, beside the back window.

That made sense. That felt right.

He looked up as the other memories started to play.

He felt numb as he watched Waldo talking to old friends about the death of the guy from the first memory. James. And creepy guy had lost someone too - his daughter, Susan, when she was just a baby.

What kind of sh*tshow was this? Playing back all of their memories like bad dreams. Why did they have to remember all of the bad stuff? It made sense, but he didn't like it. The shadow man wanted them to remember, but this wasn't lighthearted nostalgia. This was like remembering all of your worst moments all at once.

Matvei didn't want to admit it, but it hurt.

He shut his eyes tightly for a moment, forcing them to go dry as he straightened up. He wasn't going to let the shadow man have the pleasure of seeing him cry. Sure, they would keep remembering things, but he didn't have to react.

He looked to the fiddle boy. His memory had actually seemed nice.

"I don't like this," he said, his voice a low growl. "I don't need to know what happened in your lives. It's none of my business."

"Hey buddy, do you think I wanted anyone to see that?" Elijah snapped. He was shaking now, the memories he'd seen now making him feel incredibly vulnerable. It was something he wasn't used to feeling like that. "My girlfriend never even knew." The words just came out of him before he had a chance to really understand what they meant.

Then he remembered. Girlfriend? He remembered now. Long blonde hair. Wide blue eyes. And an adorable smile. They'd been at a bookstore. She had a soothing voice and most of the time what she would say would go in one ear and out the other, and he'd just listen to the sound of her voice. What was her name? Bonnie? No, that wasn't it.

Elijah took a deep breath. If he'd a girlfriend, what had happened to Sarah? To his children?

The boy looked in confusion between all the others. Such sad memories they all had; even the good ones seemed bittersweet.

His own memories weren't like that. They were happy, or mundane, never really containing the same people or places. But there was something off about them. There were...too many. Too much distance between places, too many memories, not enough change. He didn't remember being a child, and he was at this age for far too long.

He puzzled over this for a minute, then shook his head. He'd understand when he remembered more, he supposed, and if he didn't, then that was how it was.

"I don't like this, either," Wally quietly said, holding the action figure loosely in his hands. He stared down at its worn, chipped body. He wished he had the not-voice more than he had before - even in a room full of people, he felt so alone.

Wally took a deep breath.

"...I feel like this was supposed to stop soon," he said. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to the others or himself. His group on the action figure tightened. "I...I was supposed to be done with this."

What "this" was, Wally really wasn't sure.

He got back to his feet and headed to the next object that stuck out to him - an unopened gift card with Jack's handwriting on it.

--Suddenly he was in the living room of his house. There was a girl outside the window. He felt like she was important - or would be important, eventually.

But his past self hadn't been focused on her. He was looking at the TV screen. He didn't usually watch the news, but he had the TV on in the background while he was perfecting some of his research notes.

There was a reporter from a local station talking about a car crash. There was live footage from the scene, too - the entire car was in flames. Most of it was a charred mess, but Wally could make out the license plate as the paramedics raised two limp almost unrecognizable bodies out of the wreck.

It was Jack's.

Wally's eyes widened in horror.

That...That couldn't be Jack and Lila, could it? That had to be someone else. He wanted it to be someone else. Jack and Lila were all he had left now. They were the reason he hadn't entirely given up yet. As long as they were there, things could get better--

Tears sprung up in Wally's eyes again, but this time he didn't let out any kind of cry. He was starting to understand what "this" was - he was tired of dealing with people dying. First James, now his cousin and his cousin's girlfriend. Who else was going to die in front of him?

Waldo had a really sad life where he lost lots of friends, and Matvei didn't want to see it anymore. He closed his eyes and turned away from the memory display, looking down at the floor and kicking away the broken glass at his feet.

He pulled his gun out of his pocket, flipping it over in his hands. He popped the magazine out and popped it back in absentmindedly, counting bullets. Four left. He counted heads in the room. Four, including himself.

He didn't say anything about it out loud, of course. He'd keep that information to himself.

As he tucked his gun away his eyes caught on something on the windowsill. The fact that anything caught his attention at this point was already starting to annoy him. It was a foldable hunting knife, which was useful, at least. As he grabbed for it he muttered under his breath.

"This better not be another object memory lesson."

It was.

As he flipped the knife out of the handle/sleeve, a very vivid scene played before him (not that he knew) on the wall beside him.

He was a little kid - no older than five or six, and was playing with the knife. Spinning it around between clumsy child hands before he steadied it and poked it between his left pinky toe and whatever the toe next to that was called.

Matvei knew what was going to happen before it did - and fortunately, the "camera" panned away when the pinky toe was lost. Matvei looked up to see his father running down the hall to meet him, eyes burning with a mix of rage and worry. Hearing his own child-like wail was unnerving, and he found himself reliving the pain and the feeling. The mixture of fascination, horror, and excitement.

"Vesna!" his father shouted, with a Russian accent even thicker than his own. Oh, that's right. He was Russian. "What the hell! You left your f*cking knife out!"

A woman who had to be his mother ran up. She had the same devious eyes, and the same mouth.

"What the f*ck are you blaming me for?" she shouted back. "God!" She ran off while his father picked him up.

"You f*cking proud of yourself? Damned
маленький дьявол. He cut off his toe Vesna!"

She shouted from another room. "Oh, god. It's just a toe! Calm down Matvei!"

Matvei's face turned red with anger as Vesna came running back in with a towel and what had to be a medkit.

Then it ended.

Apparently Matvei was his father's name, not his own. That made things confusing. He decided to refer to himself as Mat instead, to clear up his own confusion.

Mat immediately glanced down at his feet, even though he had shoes on. Slowly, he looked back up at the others. He looked at the window, fiddled with the lock, but it was jammed. He could see the silhouette of something in the darkness but couldn't make it out.

He pulled out his gun and threw the hilt back into the window's glass, and it shattered.

"No more memories," he demanded. "No more games."

He looked out the now open window and lifted his foot up against the sill, and then climbed through, jumping out into the darkness. He turned back around to stare at them for just a moment.

Wally went over to the window, but he didn't join Matvei - or whatever his name really was - outside it.

"You're willing to risk not knowing who you are?" he asked, gripping his action figure again. He felt like he should be following Matvei. Everything here was too painful, and Matvei leaving would probably make the shadow appear again.

But Wally still had so many questions. He didn't know why he had two sets of memories, or what the not-voice was. He still didn't remember how he had ended up here in the first place. He felt like all of those were important to know.

He thought for a moment, sighed, and hopped through the window after Matvei.

Elijah followed Matvei and Wally out the window.

He didn't answer Wally's question because he was torn. There was a part of him that wanted to remember, wanted to remember Sarah, and Bonnie, but he didn't know if he'd able to handle it if it all came back at once.

Mat saw shadows in the distance. The red light from the sigh out front barely reached the land behind the motel, but Mat's eyes started to adjust, and he walked slowly, letting them trace out the outlines of trees in the distance, and a plot of land ahead of them.

He hadn't gotten very far before he bumped into a rock - something hard at his feet. When he looked down it only took him a second to realize it was a headstone. He was standing on someone's grave.

There were four graves, each with gravestones, lined up in a row. The earth around them seemed fresh, as if the bodies had been freshly buried.

A chill ran up and down Mat's spine.

He backed off the dirt slowly and scanned the graves. He couldn't read them from afar, in the dark, but he didn't feel drawn to the first. He ran to the last one, slowing and grabbing the stone as he strained his eyes to read the words in the dark.




He couldn't breathe. The moment he saw his name, memories flooded back whether he wanted them or not. His son. Watching him grow up. Being framed. His incarceration. Bo, following in his footsteps and then falling off the face of the earth for what felt like an eternity before he came back - missing an eye and changed.

The years spent in prison, and the years of regret.

He'd missed so much. Bo's graduation. The crash. The recovery. Bo's wedding. His grandchildren being born.

Kazimir bent over, gripping the sides of the headstone tightly as a deep, guttural groan built up in his gut, leaking through grit teeth.

There were graves behind the motel.

If it wasn't for how creepy this place already was, Wally would have been surprised. If he hadn't already gotten the sneaking suspicion that he had been about to do something risky in his memories - that he was already heading into a downwards spiral - he would have been surprised, too. But when Wally saw Matvei stop in front of one of the graves and have the kind of reaction you only had when looking at your own grave and getting your memories back, Wally felt like he was drifting away from all of this.

Like it wasn't really real.

He walked over to the grave beside Matvei - or Kazimir, apparently - and looked at the letters on the stone. It didn't take long for his adjust to the darkness.



The memories started coming back in a rush. Charlie - that was his name, wasn't it? - couldn't handle it all. It felt like every memory was paired with an another, or even more than that. Countless different memories from countless different Charlies just kept playing through his head.

His legs gave out from underneath him; he barely missed hitting his grave when he went crashing to the ground. He was crouched over on the ground now, hands clasping his ears like it would keep some of the memories out. He remembered growing up with James. He remembered playing with Jack when he was a kid, and being introduced to Lila when Jack was only five. He remembered all of the fun, normal memories you had with your best friend and your cousin.

He remembered the arguing, too. How badly he wanted to get to college, and how badly he wished to be normal for almost all of his life. It was only when James died that he wanted to be somewhere else - someone else. Jack and Lila had died. The girl from outside the window - that had been Alex. Her family had lived in the house before, and she wanted closure. Their friendship had been strange, but neither one of them were your normal kind of person.

She had only been fourteen when she died in a house fire. Why did everyone keep dying?

But Charlie wasn't just Charlie.

He remembered the other lifetimes, too. Lifetimes that were his and weren't. That was the beauty of the multiverse - change up a few little variables, and you were an entirely different person. Have a world where superpowers didn't exist, and a boy who in other realities was supposed to become Keystone City's main hero had to settle for becoming a track star.

The content of those other memories didn't matter as much as Charlie's. He understood that. The not-voice (the Speed Force; how had he ever forgotten what it was?) had taken pity on him and decided he could just get a sneak peek at what he could have been - for all intents and purposes, he was just Charlie Greene.

Wally had been a nice guess for a name, hadn't it? It was what he wished his name was. He had gotten better at hiding the feeling that everything about his life was wrong, but he didn't have a filter anymore.

He looked at the action figure in his hands as the memories finally stopped.

He was Charlie Greene, but he should have been Wally West.

His gaze went up to the grave again.

Charlie didn't remember his death yet. He wasn't sure he wanted to. But the memories he had seen - the garage, the notes, the chemicals listed in them - were things he had taken from those other worlds he saw. Where he had become a hero.

He had been trying to give himself the same speed he had in all of those other lives.

But now he was looking at his own grave.

Tears sprung to his eyes.

"I...I failed?" he whispered.