❛ And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes,
in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality,
I'd find you and I'd choose you. ❜

EDGE OF TOMORROW

Reality was never meant to be broken, but Lizette Reyes had been bending it for as long as she could remember.

She wasn't supposed to be able to. No one was. The universe operated on a strict, unyielding code—linear time, cause and effect, actions and consequences, all neatly slotted into place like an impossibly complex machine. Yet, Lizette remained a single flaw in the system. A corrupted file. A walking, talking error that the universe kept trying—and failing—to fix. Her powers—if they could even be called that—were never precise, never something she could control at will. Glitching, they called it, though no one really understood what that truly meant. A stutter in the universe. A cosmic malfunction. A jagged tear in the fabric of existence that sent her skipping through time and space like a scratched DVD, caught in an unimaginable multitude of broken moments. Sometimes she skipped forward, watching conversations unfold in fast-forward like reality had hit the wrong button on its remote. Other times, she rewound—jerked back into moments she had already lived, forced to experience them all over again like a cruel joke.

And then there were the worst ones. The fragments. The times when reality didn't just pull her back or shove her forward but shattered around her. She wasn't just moving through time—she was splintering across it. Her consciousness scattered into different versions of herself, different choices, different possibilities. She existed everywhere and nowhere all at once, slipping between lives that weren't hers, flickering in and out of moments she didn't recognize. It was disorienting. It was terrifying.

And for the longest time, it had only ever happened once.

One fracture. One anomaly that had sent her spiraling into a world that wasn't hers—a whole entire different world full of heroes, capes, and things that had no place in her reality, her dimension. A world she had spent years trying to survive in, adapting as best she could. The Team had learned to work around her quirks and glitches, her skips and jumps, her ability to see pieces of a future that might never come or slip back into moments already past. Her power was never reliable—half the time, it felt like the universe was yanking her around just for fun—but she had made it work. Because in this world, she had found something—someone—worth anchoring herself to.

Wally West.

From the moment she met him, he was a blur of energy—grinning too wide, talking too fast, moving like the world itself was struggling to keep up. Green eyes full of mischief, warm hands that always found hers, a laugh that felt like standing in the sun. Wally, who had looked at her—this fractured, misplaced girl—and decided she was more than a glitch in the universe. More than an anomaly waiting to be erased. To him, she was everything.

And Lizette? She had been his from the very start.

Not in the way stories told it, not in some neat, fairytale kind of way. It was messy. It was hard. But he had carved out a space in her life as if he belonged there, as if he had always been meant to find her. Flirtations turned into late-night conversations, teasing into trust, friendship into something deeper. Something she had never let herself believe she could have–love.

Six years had passed of standing by his side.

Six years of stolen kisses between missions, of tangled limbs, and whispered promises spoken into each other's skin. Six years of building a life in a world that was never meant to be hers.

Wally was home.

His voice, his laugh, the way he made time feel like it could slow down just for them. She knew every version of him: the cocky hero with his effortless charm, the scientist with his brow furrowed in concentration, the idiot who thought eating three burgers in under a minute was an Olympic sport. And then there was her Wally—the one who pulled her close in the quiet hours of the night, who murmured her name as if it were sacred, who made her believe that maybe—just maybe—she wasn't some interdimensional mistake.

For six years, Wally West was hers.

Her speedster. Her reckless smartass. Her love. Her home.

Until he wasn't. Until the day it happened.

The day Wally West died.

One moment, he was running, pushing past his limits like he always did, like he had to, like it was the only way to save the world—because it was. The next—a golden blaze, a streak of light, and then, he was gone, disappeared right before her eyes, completely vanished from existence. In that moment, Lizette refused and, in doing so, she shattered. Not in the way grief eroded a person, slow and suffocating. Not in the way loss settled in the chest, heavy and hollow, carving out everything it touched. No, this was something else. Something violent. Completely cataclysmic.

A rupture in reality itself.

She screamed, reached for her lover who was no longer there—and glitched. Reality stuttered. Skipped. Hiccuped. And for the first time in Lizette's life, the universe obeyed. It bent to her desperation, her anguish, her grief, her anger, her sheer will, reconstructing itself around her refusal to accept the fact that Wally was gone.

A system error, a fatal exception, the kind of malfunction that crashes the whole goddamn program. Then—she was back. Ripped from the present, dragged backward through fractured time like a skipping record caught in an endless loop. Back to the moment before everything went wrong. At first, she panicked. Then she fought. She threw herself at the timeline, tore apart cause and effect, rewrote the hard-coded rules of existence—all to stop him from running straight into oblivion.

She tackled him. (He phased through her, like a ghost.)

She warned him. (He didn't listen—of course he didn't.)

She begged him. (He smiled. Promised her it'd be okay. Then he was gone... again.)

No matter what she did, it never worked. So, she tried again. And again. And again. And again.

Each attempt was wrong. Imperfect. Messy. A warped VHS tape playing on a screen lined with static and frayed edges. A scene replayed over and over, but never quite the same. Sometimes, Wally's words changed. Sometimes, it was the sky—too dark, the sun two degrees too high, the shadows stretching in the wrong direction. Like reality itself was struggling to keep up. Like the universe was tired of being rewritten. With every failed reset, Lizette broke alongside it. Her thoughts flickered, static fuzzing the edges of her mind. Memories corrupted, wiped clean like unsaved data. Her body lagged, movements desynchronized—her limbs jittering, glitching, shifting through a kaleidoscope of hues, like she was buffering. A fragmented echo of herself instead of something real, tangible, solid. She was unraveling, atom by atom. And she didn't know if it was from the overuse of her abilities—or if the universe was trying to delete her altogether for committing such a catastrophic universal crime.

She lost count of her failures. A hundred? A thousand? Maybe more? The harder she fought, the worse it got—reality fractured. Cracks splintered through the world. Time stuttered. The sky glitched. And for the first time, doubt slithered in. Was she actually saving him? Or was she just breaking the universe trying? Still, she kept going. Because this was for Wally. Because a girl like Lizette would do anything for love. Even if it destroyed her. Even as her body failed—flickering in and out of existence, erratic and unstable, glitching like a corrupted file on its last desperate loop. Even as time frayed around her, the world distorting, rejecting her like a line of bad code.

She tried one final attempt.

Lizette could barely stand, barely hold herself together. The pain of too many failures pressed into her, crushing, collapsing like a black hole in her heart. The universe trembled under the strain, its patience exhausted. In the end, reality refused to bend. Refused to be rewritten. The sky pixelated, jagged and wrong, flickering like a dying screen. Space-time warped, distorted—tearing apart at the seams.

The world broke.

And Lizette broke along with it.

Lizette splintered, her consciousness fracturing into a thousand different places, a thousand different moments. She was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Past, present, future—none of it existed anymore, not really. The universe folded in on itself, devouring light, sound, everything, until there wass nothing left but a navy flicker of static fizzling out into darkness. No explosion. No final burst of energy. The universe had simply blinked out of existence.

No time. No space. No Wally.

Nothing.

And when it came back—when reality finally stitched itself into something vaguely resembling coherence—Lizette wasn't where she had been. She wasn't kneeling in the wreckage, screaming his name into the void. She was somewhere else.

Battered. Beaten. Broken.

Flat on her back, sprawled on the cold metal floor of a lab. She sucked in a breath—ragged, sharp, as if she were inhaling for the first time. Her lungs felt tight, fighting for air, desperate to fill a body that didn't quite feel like hers anymore. Her mind was... wrong. A tangled mess, scrambled and fractured, thoughts flickering like static on a broken TV screen with no signal. Her limbs felt heavy, as if they belonged to someone else. Her head pulsed with an excruciating ache, as if it had been split in half, memories dislocated, torn apart, and scattered in every direction. She couldn't piece them together.

She didn't even remember how she got here.

She didn't remember anything.

Her mind was a shattered puzzle—fragments of something familiar, something important, slipping away from her like sand through desperate fingers. There was a name, a flicker of recognition, something she should know, something that had mattered, once. She reached for it, but the harder she tried, the faster it dissolved—until it was gone. Wiped clean. She felt empty, like a ghost, a body without a past, without a purpose, untethered from the world.

Lizette was just... lost.

There was no before. Only now.

Only this–adrift on the edge of tomorrow.

Starring

Rachel Zegler as . . . . Lizette Reyes
( also known as ❛ GLITCH ❜ )
Main Theme: Where's Your Head At by Basement Jaxx

Froy Gutierrez as . . . . . Wally West
( also known as ❛ KID FLASH ❜ )
Main Theme: The Loneliness of the
Long Distance Runner by Iron Maiden

꩜ DISCLAIMER:  i do not own young justice, wally west, or any related characters, all of which belong to dc and warner bros. this is a work of fan fiction written for entertainment purposes only, with no intent to infringe on any copyrights. all original characters, including lizette reyes, and original plot elements are my own creation.

꩜ WARNINGS: mature themes, strong language, character deaths, graphic violence, sexual content, trauma, mental health issues, angst, drug/alcohol use, grief & loss, dissociation, derealization, potential triggering content, and etc.

            ꩜ AUTHOR'S NOTE: welcome to the edge of tomorrow! this fic has gone through quite a few revamps, but i truly believe this version is the one. a few things to clear up any confusion before diving in—this story begins at the end. the day wally west dies. lizette reyes, in her desperation to save him, shatters reality itself. but instead of fixing things, her powers do something far more chaotic—they reboot everything. earth-16 isn't just reset; it's recreated from the ground up, and lizette is thrown back to the very first day she ever glitched into this universe. the catch? she doesn't remember.

her own powers destroyed her, but they also saved her—like a corrupted file restoring itself from fragmented data. they remembered her as she was then, at seventeen, and so that's the lizette that returns. but the strain of such a massive reset didn't come without a cost—her mind is fractured, full of holes, memories wiped clean except for one thing: her name. she doesn't remember the team. she doesn't remember choosing to stay in earth-16 instead of glitching back to her original world (spoiler alert: that's our world—yeah, the real one!). she's a jumbled mess, stumbling through a timeline that feels eerily familiar but is just out of reach. history is repeating itself, but lizette doesn't know it.

act one kicks off at the very start—season 1, episode 1. lizette meets the team again, but this time, she's not the same girl she was before. her powers, while incredibly strong, are also wildly unstable, making her more of a liability than an asset. lizette's abilities—often referred to as glitching—are unpredictable, fragmented, and operate outside the normal rules of reality. lizette isn't just breaking reality—reality is trying to break her right back. she's very much so plagued by déjà vu, struggling with derealization and dissociation, constantly questioning what's real and what isn't. and like any messy teenager trying to cope, she has her vices—smoking that za to take the edge off a mind that won't stop glitching.

through it all, despite the differences, despite the reset, despite time itself breaking and bending around them—somehow, lizette and wally still find their way back to each other. no matter the timeline, no matter the dimension, some things are just inevitable—especially them.

this fic draws inspiration from some of my favorite films and shows, including edge of tomorrow, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, everything everywhere all at once, inception, alice in wonderland, wreck-it ralph (yes, i know, but lizette is so vanellope von schweetz-coded it physically pains me), donnie darko, interstellar, spider-man: into the spider-verse, and many more.

at its core, edge of tomorrow is about home. lizette doesn't know where she came from. she doesn't know if she even had a family. but the team becomes that missing piece, the family she never knew she lost. and wally? wally is her forever home.

as the story progresses, interludes will reveal glimpses of the first time around—what lizette and wally were like before his death, before the reset, before everything started over.

much love,
LUNA

EDGE OF TOMORROW
© BRUJ4S / 2025