Ideally, Barry's visit would be glossed over.
Get in, get the information, get out, and leave none of the participants any wiser to his scheme. At the most, he should be a hiccup in the timeline, a forgotten interlude which neither paused nor altered the course of history.
In the non-ideal construction of the real world, Barry isn't surprised that things don't go according to plan. He's early – Hartley and Other Barry are still on the streets – but the mission can still be completed. In fact, the more he watches, the more inspired he becomes: he hadn't planned to switch out until they were back at Star Labs, but Hartley throws Other Barry through a glass wall and Barry surges into motion.
It's a bad omen that Other Barry doesn't go down easily.
Barry runs after him, faster, faster, faster, cutting off Other Barry's advantageous head start almost immediately. Other Barry doesn't stand a chance: he hasn't even time-traveled. It's a critical threshold that he won't reach for several months.
Pausing on a fire escape as Other Barry does, Barry dodges his punches, one hand still diverted to holding the needle. In a way, the fight reminds him of Everyman: same face, different fighting capabilities. In Everyman's case, they were vastly different because he couldn't absorb Barry's Speed. But in Other Barry's case, it isn't so different: they're both speedsters. If Barry's hand wasn't proverbially tied behind his back, then he could have overtaken his younger counterpart right there.
As it stands, Other Barry knocks the dart out of his hands and the chase resumes.
Barry may not be fast enough to beat Zoom, but he handily outruns his younger counterpart. Meeting resistance, he feels a twinge of guilt: it's too easy to put himself in Other Barry's shoes, closing in on the kill from both predator and prey perspective. Part of him wants to abort the mission, but he can't risk it: letting Other Barry go now would shatter the continuity of the timeline. He has to intervene or every future event is at stake.
With renewed determination, Barry throws Other Barry against the asphalt because he needs to pin him down, dammit, and the needle sheaths into his thigh like an oversized tack. The pain is so acute in Barry's memory (double-slice stabbing aching unbearable pressure get-them-out-of-me) that he feels a sharp stab of it in his own chest. Other Barry sinks back against the concrete, open-mouthed, agony and horror written across his face.
"This'll all make sense eventually," Barry lies, waiting until he is sure Other Barry is unconscious before swapping out their emblems.
It clicks into place and Barry feels a shift settle over him, all too aware of an inescapable fact: You're changing his future. In Barry's timeline, this event never happened: he took down Hartley without interference from any malevolent future versions of himself. In Other Barry's timeline – and he truly is an Other now – Barry halted him in his tracks.
Still, urgency drives Barry to action. Other Barry gets deposited on a rooftop under a tarp, nondescript but not undiscoverable, a fact that sits unnervingly close to the forefront of Barry's consciousness as he Flashes back to the original crime scene.
With a fluidity born of experience, Barry follows in his own footsteps. Nightsticks strike Hartley from three different sides. He flings up an arm in slow motion to intercept the fourth and fifth blows, but before he can lower it Barry rushes him and yanks both gloves off. They clatter noisily off to one side, a discordant ceasefire settling in the space between them.
Holding onto Hartley's jacket, Barry grins and says, "I got you again."
Hartley frowns and do-no-harm flashes across Barry's mind. He has already altered the timeline more than anticipated; he needs to be careful.
Aware that no amount of subtlety could reverse the new timeline, Barry lets go of the trepidation associated with it.
. o .
A little more trepidation would have saved him a lot of trouble. Had he recognized the insidious calm in Eobard's voice, he might not have followed him so eagerly into Eobard's office. The invitation didn't just seem too-good-to-be-true; it was.
In retrospect, he should have seen it coming. After all, they used the exact same trick on his Earth-2 counterpart. All they needed was a distraction: Yes, they gave me an award, isn't it nice? The fatherly tone, the kindness of the gesture, the apparently genuine and undivided attention were all Harrison needed to hold Earth-2 Barry's interest. Then Barry knocked him out.
Eobard doesn't even need an accomplice. In quick, calculated steps, Eobard steps up behind and to the side of Barry. Before Barry can think, too easy, pain shatters across the back of his head.
Then darkness and silence take over.
. o .
Barry's shoulders are stiff.
He blinks and tugs instinctively at the source of his discomfort. A handcuff holds him back. Outward calm keeps him silent, assessing, but his heart rate climbs as he realizes the gravity of his predicament. Time vault.
Looking up, he sees Eobard.
There is no trace of Harrison Wells in his eyes. It's like looking at Everyman's cocky, confident sneer; Barry sees a familiar image but it doesn't match the reality he knows. This man isn't Harrison.
He's your enemy. Tread carefully.
Eobard waves. Just once. Remember me?
"Now," he says softly, "who are you?" With a twitch that could be interpreted as exasperation, he adds in the same cold tone, "I mean, who are you really?"
Play dumb. "Dr. Wells," Barry implores. His voice is husky with disuse; it works in naiveté's favor. "What are you doing?"
Eobard doesn't buy the act. Barry can see it, can feel it in the air between them, a storm which has not broken yet, but Eobard doesn't respond to it. Instead, he says, "None of it adds up." He seems genuinely distressed, albeit in his own spectacularly angry way. "The interference with the comms, the Speed equation, the time wraith."
Barry's eyes give something away. Or perhaps his instinctive repulsion towards the Speed demon shows. Either way, Eobard smiles. It isn't amused. "That's what we call them. Time wraiths." In a soft, devastating voice, he adds with a chuckle, "Scary, aren't they?"
It hits Barry that he isn't dealing with a rational human being. There's a wild look in Eobard's expression that reveals no reluctance to kill or maim or torture for his goal. All that matters is that article: Flash Vanishes in Crisis.
The entire world can burn as long as it does so in the right place, at the right time.
Eobard speaks softly, savoring what he undoubtedly envisions as the last few minutes of Barry's life. "I thought, 'Oh, no, a time wraith has found me.' But then I thought, 'No, no, no. You know what you're doing. Now the time wraith is after someone who's traveled through time . . . and doesn't know what they're doing.'"
Barry thinks, Verifiably insane.
He's seen people like Eobard before. At CCPD, colorful characters walk through the door every day, escorted by police officers. Some are more striking than others; most tend to be run-of-the-mill. A few stand out for the wrong reasons: they're too quiet, too argumentative, too loud, too out-of-it. They don't seem fully aware of what happened or is happening, treating the situation in erratic impulses, like they aren't fully awake.
Pleas of insanity are rare.
But listening to Eobard speak, Barry thinks he could make a case.
They called you crazy, too.
To his face, not in as many words, but Barry heard them talk about the poor kid who believed some crazy story that his dad hadn't killed his mom. He heard variations of the same theme for fourteen years. No one believed him; no one ever seriously entertained the idea. It was crazy: according to empirical evidence, lightning couldn't zip in violent circles around a room, streaked in reds and yellows. It certainly couldn't sink a knife into his mom's chest. No matter how true it was, it just didn't fit within acceptable standards.
So they let him speak, but they never listened to him.
The only thing that kept him sane, that gave him the strength to ignore everyone else, was his own conviction.
My dad did not kill my mom. The man-in -yellow did.
Eobard's conviction reads less like insanity than determination, but Barry thinks his sheer inability to assimilate to his new reality – his unceasing quest for a seemingly impossible goal – pleads a much different case.
He flipped through that chart for the better part of a decade, building evidence, tying strings, repeating an exercise that never yielded a different result over and over and over in the hope that it would this time. He examined all of the evidence so frequently he could remember whole paragraphs of the trial's transcript, but he could never assemble a more convincing counterargument despite his most rigorous attempts. Age brought frustration: the older he was, the more it seemed there had to be some glaring piece of evidence he had missed.
Lightning couldn't have left no mark. It had to be there. My dad did not kill my mom. The man-in -yellow did. It hung over him: no matter how hard he tried to forgive and forget, he could not assimilate to his new reality.
He could not accept that the error was the final answer. He had to fix it. He had to try.
Even if it killed him, he would go to his grave defending his dad and seeking justice for his mom.
Eobard looks at him like he-knows he-knows he-knows. He knows what it's like to sit up at night with that world-consuming anguish in his chest because there simply was no way to fix it but there had to be. He knows what it's like to be stranded without any leads, with only the stinging evidence of truth salting the wound. He knows what it's like to be utterly alone, to not be able to tell anyone because no one would believe him and even if they did, how could they help him?
They found different strategies to cope. A time-traveling genius, Eobard decided to manipulate the very fabric of his current reality to ensure a return to something approximating his original future. Barry chose to become a CSI, to structure his life around solving crimes, around finding closure, because it was a grief he could not move on from when the wrong man sat in prison.
A grief they could not move on from. You and I aren't so different.
"Dr. Wells, come on," Barry begins, slow, measured, letting out a laugh, an empirically conflicting statement to Eobard's lack of direct evidence. I know you're not really him, his eyes say, but Barry's nonchalance throws him.
I know what I saw falters in the face of what if I misread it?
"It's me. It's Barry. I don't—"
Then, with crushing finality, conviction stamps out doubt.
"Really?" Eobard casts off an increasingly volatile air, a storm building between them. "You are good," he murmurs, clapping. "You are good." Barry knows that it's easier to laugh it off than accept it, to pretend it didn't scare him as much as it did, to dismiss that moment of weakness. "And I would believe you," Eobard continues, equilibrium restored, conviction redoubling in the face of new evidence, "except that. . . ."
And Barry makes a fatal mistake.
He doesn't flinch.
His need to project calm and level out the situation overrides everything else. Besides, Eobard's speed is not new to him. It doesn't even trigger an involuntary flinch. Consciously, his failure to replicate a reaction is as damning as any confession.
"Nothing?" Eobard sounds delighted, now, albeit in the same way a cat is when pinning a mouse to the floor. "I move like this, you barely flinch."
Barry cannot speak.
I made a mistake, Harrison rasps, on the very cusp of Barry's consciousness, before Zoom sinks a claw deep into his chest.
I made a mistake.
"You know who I am," Eobard says, in power, in control, more so than ever before. "Don't you?"
Get out.
Barry escaped Zoom by phasing through the wall. In an ideal world, he phases through the handcuff without difficulty. He escapes in Eobard's momentary distraction. He completes the mission.
But real life is different. Barry's hand vibrates, but all that happens is metal burns against his skin. His efforts cease as the friction heats it up, threatening to brand him.
"Oh!" Eobard looks ready to snap his fingers with delight, giddy, neurotic. Closing in for the kill. I know how this works. "And you're from the future." Leaning forward conspiratorially, he adds, "Do you know how I know that?" Rocking back, he answers, "Because I haven't taught my Barry Allen how to phase through objects . . . yet."
The defensive, possessive tone makes Barry's skin crawl, aware of how much of a means-to-an-end his younger self is for Eobard. You're the sacrifice he needs, he thinks. Worse still, he's been led, unbound and eagerly, to his own altar. He won't see the knife. He won't even notice Eobard's telling silence. He will look into those eyes and see the father, the mentor, the beloved member of their team, and he will notice the knife too late to stop it.
And all the while Eobard will insist that he is my Barry Allen, my enemy, my Flash, my son.
It makes Barry's head spin. The temptation to spirit away his younger self, to spirit away all of them, and take Eobard out of the equation is strong.
But the do-no-harm chant rings out in the silence.
He has no more tactics left. Eobard won't listen to them, anyway; insanity is too pure to be diluted. It is all-consuming, unalterable, fixed. So he speaks with the voice of a man at the altar who has seen the knife too-late, who has noticed the betrayal too-late, who has seen the danger too-late, who cannot stop the next move. It's up to Eobard. But he has to try. "Let me out of here, Thawne."
Eobard sighs and Barry can almost see how he deeply, earnestly, honestly regrets that it comes to this moment. He doesn't want Barry there; any interruption to his plans is an interruption he did not plan for. Somehow, pointless murder seems almost beyond him; like a surgeon, he works methodically, inflicting pain only when necessary, suturing rather than mauling. His plan is delicate. He must be careful, no matter how strong his emotions run. But when something necessitates an alteration to that plan – a footnote, just another justifiable murder – Eobard does not flinch in the face of it.
But oh, he seems sad, tightening those ropes to prevent Barry's escape. "I know. You're upset." Toying with the knife, he adds, "But it does me good to hear that name again."
I bet it does.
He would have fallen at the feet of any person who believed his story. At their first meeting, Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak and John Diggle hadn't believed it, yet. But they had believed him. They did not say, You're crazy.
Had he not already been emotionally invested in their venture, he would have fallen hard for them for that alone.
"Now. Onto the bigger question," Eobard says, aware that he can leisure, he has the time. Barry's window of opportunity has passed. Death is closer than escape; he can only hang in the balance between them and hope for a God out of the machine. "Why are you here?"
Stall. "Because I want to go faster," he says without hesitation. His dying breaths will not be pleas for mercy. "And you're the only one who can teach me. You're the only one who's figured out the Speed equation. The Speed Force. You've manipulated it. How did you do that?"
Eobard seems to forget the knife he holds, momentarily distracted. Pacing, he walks past Barry. He says, "No."
"No, no, no, no, no, no," he echoes, agitated, frantic. "No. You'd only come here if something went wrong. If you're still alive, then that means . . . ." Eobard blinks, like he can't quite believe it himself. "I haven't beaten you. If you're still alive, that means my plan fails."
Barry can see himself in Eobard's shoes. Had a future Barry arrived to tell him that his original timeline was over, that this new, divergent timeline existed and his dad was going to die in it, he would have rejected it, too. He worked too hard. He worked too hard. His whole life is freeing his dad.
His whole life depends on the plan.
"And if my plan fails," Eobard growls, on the emotional rebound because anger is easier than anguish, kicking his chair over and exclaiming, "I don't get to go home! And if that's the case, well, then—"
Abort, abort, abort.
"No, no, no! Hey, hey, hey!" Barry is sharp, decisive, one arm between them, both hands palm-up, shunting Eobard back with as much force as he can. He scrambles to get away from the knife that is Eobard's vibrating hand, hovering unnervingly close to his heart. Barry knows it could be over in less than a second. So he keeps his argument quick, desperation driving it home: "It's the opposite! It's the opposite. It – you trick me. You harness my Speed. We turn on the particle accelerator to create a path for you to go home. I go back in time. You go back to yours. You won."
It's exactly what Eobard wants to hear. It's a future Barry grabbing him by the sleeve and insisting, Hey, hey! It's going to be fine. He died in my timeline, not yours. It's going to be okay. I'm here to fix it.
Which is why Eobard's next question isn't surprising: "Then why are you here?"
You cannot tell him about Zoom.
Thank God for Speed-thinking.
Singularity-I-can't-stop-it-Ronnie-no-omit-omit-omit-irrelevant-it's-too-strong-Eobard's-already-dead-Eobard-doesn't-know-that-Eobard-died-because-Eddie-shot-himself -Eddie-is-dead-Eddie-is-dead-shut-up-shut-up-shut-up-he-doesn't-know-that-I-can't-stop-the-singularity-I-can't-stop-it-I'm-not-strong-enough-that's-the-answer—
"Because when I got back, a singularity had formed," he says, and the rush of emotions is strong enough he can almost believe himself, I've-gotta-stop-it-it's-too-strong-it's-going-to-destroy-the-city-Eddie-Ronnie.
"And now the only way for me to learn how to get faster and stop the singularity from happening was to come here. Now."
Liar.
It doesn't feel like a lie, his heart is already pounding and Eddie-Ronnie-it-cannot-be-stopped-I-have-to-try—
"Well." Eobard's voice is cool, in sharp contrast to the heatedness threatening to consume Barry's rational thought and trigger panic-mode, fight-flight already in gear. "That's good to know."
Then he sighs.
Something in Barry's core chills.
"There's just . . . one thing that occurs to me." He walks closer and Barry wonders what he thinks about the-future, the indefinable, changeable, divergent future that he faces. It won't be the one Barry describes; that future was Barry's. Eobard's is on a different trajectory, now: this Eobard won't face the identical fate of his predecessor. This Eobard is still alive.
This Eobard can still change the game.
This Eobard has a look of profound relief on his face. Twirling the knife, even; of idle exultation. Thank you for making my response clear.
He knows how to preserve his own future.
It occurs to Barry in the half-second before his next words.
"I don't need you."
I'm not your Barry. I'm a divergent. Killing me won't affect him.
Barry does not speak. He can't. I'm a divergent. I'm expendable. Killing me won't affect him.
I'm a divergent.
I'm a potential-problem an unknown an anomaly an error a catastrophe in the making.
Killing me won't affect him.
There's such relief in Eobard's eyes. It's the calm of justified violence. In Eobard's mind, Barry's death isn't excessive. On the contrary, it's necessary.
A divergent on the loose is a radical, something that can send the whole house of cards tumbling down with one wrong move. He's already proven he doesn't know how to handle time properly. He throws in anomalies. He mutates the very fabric of the universe, encoding error-error-error where uninterrupted time should be. He breaks apart the DNA of the divergent universe, making it more-different, more-unlike, less-stable than his own.
It will find a new stability. But if the changes are too severe and too numerous, it might simply collapse.
Delete the virus.
Eobard is doing his own universe a very big favor, from a do-no-harm perspective.
But Barry's selfish.
No virus wants to die.
"Do I? Not this you, certainly," Eobard muses. Then, looking right at him, recognizing how simple and eloquent and beautiful the solution is, he adds unflinchingly, "Oops. You probably should've thought of that before you came back here." Advancing, hand already vibrating, he grins, looking-forward-to-this, because he has wanted to kill the Flash since he knew what the Flash was and now he gets to without destroying his future.
Have your cake and eat it, too.
"Shame," Eobard laughs, and there's real delight in his voice, I-have-been-waiting-for-this, and Barry thinks about what it would be like if he was the one who had the power to stop Eobard from killing his mom without ruining his timeline and God it's heady.
"You ran all the way back here to die," Eobard finishes, standing over him.
Self-preservation gives him reasons to live.
Why-shouldn't-I-put-you-in-jail-Snart?
Because-if-you-do-I-have-a-message-and-it-will-go-viral-and-your-future-will-be-over.
"You kill me," he says, "Barry, this Barry, your Barry, he learns it all."
He doesn't know anything.
"There's a hidden letter," Barry continues. "Telling him how it ends. How to beat you. Everything. Anything happens to me, you never make it back home."
In Eobard's eyes, the world is ending. The utter hatred there is staggering. Barry doesn't let it give him pause.
"Go on," he goads softly, applying the right pressure to his doubt to make it hurt. Go on. Go on. Go on.
Fuck up, Thawne.
Make a mistake you can't fix.
Eobard's jaw tenses.
"Kill me, Thawne," Barry urges softly. "See how this all ends."
Eobard puts his back to him like he would rather burn the world down just to watch Barry suffer. His agony drives him: he flings the chair across the room, digs his hands into his hair, and steps up to the podium like he wants to summon Gideon but is terrified to reveal that knowledge to Barry.
I already know
The breakdown reminds Barry that at the end of the day, he knows more. He has a future trajectory. He's seen it happen.
He knows how this all will end.
Eobard only has expectations. He has no empirical evidence.
He only has conviction. He has no proof. And he's afraid.
It is the core of his very existence at stake, and Barry dangles it in front of him like it is bait. He shows him how fragile it really is.
Your whole world depends on my cooperation.
What if I refuse to give it?
Then Caitlin and Cisco call out an S.O.S. and Barry knows that it crosses Eobard's mind, if I burn you burn with me, but he interjects rationality because I can't let them die.
Eobard is detached enough Barry worries he might not be able to get through to him at all. In the end, shouting works: Eobard unclips him.
In Barry's mind, it isn't victory. Death merely sits back on its heels and watches them.
Waiting.
. o .
When it's time to go home, Other Barry saves his life.
The time wraith slows him down, dragging at his heels like a thousand pounds of deadweight. He's struggling just to stay on his feet. Then Other Barry appears and knocks the wraith out of its orbit, giving Barry the second he needs to escape.
Staggering back into view at Star Labs, Barry doesn't feel a surge of triumph. He's terrified: he can feel it, it's-coming-it's-coming-it's-coming, and it's worse than Zoom, it's worse than the Reverse Flash, because it is not human.
It has one mission: Destroy the virus.
He can't reason with it because it isn't human, he can't fight it because it isn't human, and he can't kill it because it isn't human.
So when it pins him to the concrete with a sharp, desiccated hand, Barry can almost hear Eobard's triumphant oops.
Didn't think of that one.
Years are condensed into milliseconds, heart beating so fast he can't even feel it, lungs stuttering to a halt as he strangles in the time wraith's hold. There is no future flashing before his eyes, only darkness and terror as they hurtle through space-time faster and faster and faster towards the singularity, gaining speed, and Barry's senses sh-sh-shut down until—
Life explodes into his senses, bright-noise-smell-light hitting him. The hammering of his slowing heart and the gasping of his jump-starting lungs pins him to the floor. When he looks up and sees Hartley, his heart skips a beat.
What did you do?
Joe's screaming it in Eddie's face, hands on his shoulders, anguish in his voice. What did you do?
Vision fading, he's aware of Caitlin and Cisco talking, of Hartley asking if he's okay, and then the world shuts down for a while, taking Barry with it.
. o .
After the dust settles, Barry visits the cliffs and comes to terms with living in a divergent universe, what living like this means. Together with Caitlin and Cisco and Harrison-not-Wells, they work with the Speed equations until a test run lands him in an alternate universe. With Kara's help, he comes home.
A lot changes in a week. But, at last, home finds him at CCPD on a hot afternoon.
The windows are open and it's still stifling, but Barry works without complaint. Mid-afternoon, CCPD is quiet, so he isn't worried about intrusions. Not that it matters.
Barry can't help but smile as he reaches up to unpin another article from the board. It finally doesn't matter anymore.
Eobard lived the remainder of his life in expectation of that moment. Of returning to an existence approximating home. Of fulfilling his goal.
He lived in expectation. He structured his entire life around it. He died without reaching his goal.
Barry?
Barry gets to have an after.
Clearing his board is a cathartic process. He's careful, neither rushing the process nor dwelling on the images. Nothing is damaged, but nothing is kept, either. He clears it all.
In the end, it fits in a single shoebox.
It surprises Barry how quantifiable it is.
Barry caps the box and tucks it under an arm. It has weight, but it's manageable. Surprisingly so.
What will you do without me? Eobard asked him in his last moments.
Looking out over Central City, Barry has a simple answer.
Live.
When Iris and Wally show up and invite him to go out clubbing, Barry's on his feet. He closes the windows. He throws on a jacket.
He walks out without looking back at the shoebox in the bottom shelf, a reminder of what-was and what will-never-be.
Redemption is sour lemons and almost snorting his drink when he sees Cisco dancing. Redemption is not rewinding the clock to savor every second, to enjoy the good times, too, but keeping them closer because they're precious and fleeting and unrepeatable. Redemption is Iris against his arm, Wally kicking both their asses as cards, and Caitlin recording Cisco on her phone.
And Barry knows that was Eobard's greatest mistake: he tried to plan his life. To erase the errors, to smooth over the skipping tracks, to bring it all together in an ideal scenario.
But real life isn't ideal. Real life is inconclusive and scattered and unpredictable. Real life is entropic: every stone set in motion ripples. Real life is time travel and speedsters and alternate universes, cross-generational rivalries and cross-dimensional friendships.
Real life doesn't go according to plan.
But, Barry thinks, looking around, realizing how much chaos is around him, he finds it's fun for it. Unpredictable leads to playful, to competitive, to expectation, to surprise, to joy, to relief. Scattered leads to unexpected friendships, to unlikely connections, to unplanned delights. And inconclusive?
Inconclusive leaves the future mutable. It leaves it in Barry's hands, in all of their hands. For better or worse. No matter how he alters the past, he cannot change his own. His existence is a fixed point, evidence of an uninterrupted series of events. It's: You are here.
Dr. Stein was right: they had only one way to go from here.
Clinking glasses with Wally and Iris, Barry smiles and says, "Kadima."
Forward.