Justice League Rescue

Here is a thing that most people do not know about the Justice League.

The Flash is its most important member.

Not its most powerful — that argument would take a very long time and end inconclusively. Not its wisest, or its most experienced, or its best-prepared. But the most important, in the way that a particular kind of person is always the most important in any group: the person who makes everyone else work better just by being there.

Barry Allen showed up to Justice League missions in a way that was hard to explain and impossible to duplicate. He showed up warm — genuinely, unguardedly warm, in a job that tended to attract people who kept their warmth at a careful distance. He made jokes that landed at exactly the moments when someone needed a laugh. He noticed when someone on the team was struggling — not the physical kind of struggling, but the quietly-overwhelmed kind — and he found ways to stand near them without making it obvious that he was standing near them.

He also ran very fast. This was professionally useful.

The building collapse happened in Coast City — a mid-rise office building with a fault in its foundation that had been undetected until the moment it became very detected, all at once, on a Wednesday at two in the afternoon. Seven floors. Hundreds of people inside.

The Flash heard the news on the League comm at 2:04 PM.

At 2:04:01, he was already in Coast City.

The building was still in the process of falling when he arrived — the slow, terrible sequence of a structure that has lost its integrity, floors pressing on floors in a cascade that takes more seconds than it should. Barry moved into the building before the second floor finished collapsing, following paths through the debris with a perception that at maximum speed let him see the gaps between falling objects the way an ordinary person sees the gaps between raindrops.

He moved families from the fourth floor. He found the three people trapped in the stairwell on the second floor by hearing their heartbeats through three feet of concrete. He reached the office on the sixth floor where a meeting had been in progress and cleared twelve people in the time it took for the next floor to shift.

By 2:09, every person who had been in that building was outside it.

The building finished its collapse at 2:09:30. The dust cloud rose into the afternoon air.

The rest of the Justice League arrived at 2:10.

Superman landed beside him and looked at the settled rubble and the gathered crowd of dazed but living people. He looked at Barry. He said, "How many?"

"All of them," Barry said.

Superman was quiet for a moment. "You went in alone."

"It was faster. You were eleven minutes out." Barry stretched his hands behind his head. "I'm good."

Wonder Woman arrived a moment later, did her own rapid count of the survivors, and looked at the Flash with an expression that said, clearly, that she understood exactly what had just happened and was going to make sure nobody forgot it.

Later, in a debrief at the Watchtower, Batman was reviewing the timeline.

"You made seventeen separate trips through the structure in four minutes and thirty seconds," he said.

"Roughly," Barry said.

"The building was dynamically failing through all of those trips."

"Yeah, it was a little hectic."

Batman looked at him for a moment with the expression he used when he was deciding whether to say something. Then he said, "That's exceptional work."

Barry, who had not entirely been expecting that from Batman, blinked. "Thanks, Bruce."

Batman's eyes narrowed. "You know I prefer —"

"I know what you prefer. Thank you, Bruce."

There was a brief pause.

"...You're welcome," Batman said.

Barry Allen's laugh filled the Watchtower from end to end — bright and genuine and entirely uncalculated, the laugh of someone who has just done something very difficult and very good and is simply happy about it.

This was what the League needed. Not just the speed, though the speed was extraordinary. The laugh. The warmth. The person who ran into collapsing buildings for four and a half minutes at top speed and came out smiling and called Batman by his name.

The heart of the Justice League. Running, always running, toward the next person who needed help.