Barry Allen was by no means an extraordinary person prior to his accident. By every definition in the book, he was a completely normal, bland person before the fateful night he was struck by lightning. He was born on a rainy evening in September to a loving mother and successful father who loved him unconditionally from the very moment he was brought into the world. Unbeknownst to him, he had been born as a twin, but Nora and Henry Allen were not graced with the ability to raise their two boys together. The second boy was pronounced stillborn despite actually having been born healthy and very much alive. While this mistake upset the Allen family, it graced another. The Thawne family had been the ones to lose their child in birth, but they were lucky enough to adopt the lost Allen boy in the process. They were given the chance to raise their new son, Malcolm, as if he were their own, and they made sure that he knew that he was loved his entire life.
Until he was eleven years old, Barry had not known tragedy. He had barely experienced any kind of sadness until he reached that age. He lived a happy and normal life with his mother and father. He played with friends, participated in school sports, and excelled in school with his parents' love and support helping him through everything. They celebrated birthdays and holidays as most families do, all of those days creating memories that lived with them. Nora had even been lucky enough to see her son begin to fall in love with another girl before her life was tragically cut short. An intruder had entered their home in the middle of the knight and stabbed her through the heart. Young Barry had come downstairs to investigate the noises that stirred him from his sleep, and he woke to find his mother's near-lifeless body lying on the floor as his father fought for her life. While trying to save his wife, Henry Allen had accidentally implicated himself in the process. His fingerprints were plastered all over the handle of the knife, and his wife's blood covered his pajamas. The evidence of his attempt to save his wife's life was taken in the worst way possible; he was now seen as the reason she was dead instead of a factor in trying to save her life. No amount of defense from him or from his young son could convince the police force-and later a jury-of his innocence, and he was sent to prison for a murder that he did not commit.
The verdict went on to haunt Barry for his entire life. At the beginning, most of his fellow classmates didn't understand what had happened to him and his family, but as they all grew older, their parents' stories and old police reports began to make more and more sense. People often stared at him in the hallways or on the street, whispering about his father's nonexistent crime behind his back. One of the only things that pulled him through was his best friend and secret love, Iris West. She was a small force of knowledge and loyalty to her best friend, and it was known to almost everyone who came into contact with her that she was most definitely a force to be reckoned with. People knew not to cross her in order to get to Barry, and she was as much his silent protector as she was his family. Even before his family's tragedy, they had been the best of friends, but their relationship grew so much stronger afterwards. Her family had taken him in during the darkest time of his life, and their relationship grew each day because of it. They spent most nights awake talking to each other about their fears and their nightmares, and it was a shock to everyone around them that they chose to keep their feelings for one another a secret for as long as they were aware of them. Just about everyone outside of the two in question knew that they were madly in love with one another, and it was strange for two people to be so in love and to chose to only stay friends. They were both too afraid of losing their friendship to confess, so they thought it best to remain platonic for as long as they had to.
Up until one fateful night in Central City, Barry's life had remained utterly bland and normal. He had a routine job as a forensic scientist at the Central City Police Department, spending most of his nights buried underneath paperwork or various lab procedures that he needed to catch up. He lived in a shoebox apartment a few blocks away from the precinct and only a short block away from Iris. Every day, he would wake up, go to work, occasionally go out with Iris or another friend, go home and then sleep until his cycle repeated again. There was a very slight variation in his routine, either from lack of motivation to go out and do something or lack of the ability to. Something that would often ease his boredom from his mundane life was reading various tabloids both from Central City and other cities around the country. He would read about vigilantes or aliens from cities all over, but never thought that he would experience the chance to become one. In a way, he idolized them, but he never really allowed himself to believe that there was a chance that he could be anything remotely related to the symbols they were.
That all changed the night of the accident.
Barry had been working late one particularly stormy night, attempting to finish a blood analysis that he had been struggling with the entire day. The lightning had been striking throughout the city the entire day, but he hadn't taken much notice. Once he was focused on something such as analyzing fingerprints or blood samples, there really wasn't much that you could do to pull him away from it until the job was finished. Iris had been begging him the entire day to come out with her that night, and he promised her that he would as soon as he was finished. Sadly, he never got the chance to fulfill his promise to her. While he was passing by a shelf filled with various inks and chemicals used in his work, a stray lightning bolt had shot through the ceiling of the forensics lab, striking Barry in the heart. The bolt caused all of the glass surrounding Barry to shatter, the chemicals inside spilling onto him. His body absorbed the chemicals and the lightning, the mixture changing his molecular structure at a rapid pace. The pain of this change rendered him unconscious so that he would not suffer, and his coworkers in the department called an ambulance as soon as they found Barry lying in an unconscious heap on the lab floor. Little did any of them know what was going on inside of him as the paramedics rushed him to the nearest hospital.
He was in a medically-induced coma for less than a week. The estimate for his coma had been much longer than what he had experienced, but his body absorbed the sedatives at a much faster rate than anyone in the hospital could comprehend. Even though the coma was a fraction of the time that everyone thought it would be, Iris never left Barry's bedside. Her father often encouraged her to go home, saying that Barry wouldn't be awake when she was gone, but she refused to leave her best friend and the only man she'd ever loved. She wanted to be there when he finally woke up, and hers was the first face that he saw when all of the drugs in his system had finally worn off. They were both ecstatic to see one another, but the doctors wouldn't allow either one of them to embrace the other or celebrate much of anything until they had run a full battery of tests to see what had happened to Barry when he was struck by the lightning.
The doctors had assumed that he would never be the same after being struck by lightning. They assumed that, due to the massive amounts of electricity and chemicals that he had been exposed to, he wouldn't live to be much older than he was now, and they were shocked to find that he was completely normal and healthy. He now felt better than he had in his entire life. With this new lease on life, Barry swore to himself that he wouldn't take advantage of his life like he had been. He wouldn't sit idly by while the world happened around him. He was prepared to become something better than he had ever been, and he had no idea what he was capable of until he discovered that not only had he gained a second chance at life, he had gained extraordinary powers from the accident that would have killed any other human being.
Before he was struck, Barry was notorious for being one of the slowest people in the entire precinct. He was usually the last to turn in any kind of paperwork, and it was amazing that he was ever on time for his shifts. Now, after experiencing a one in a million accident, he could run and more thousands of times faster than he was able to before. He could react faster and even heal faster than a normal human should be able to. He now possessed the ability to do things that normal humans should be able to do. At first, he wasn't sure what to do with these powers. It took him what felt like forever just to learn how to control them so that he wouldn't accidentally reveal himself to the entire city. Then he had the idea that maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing to happen.
With these newfound abilities, Barry had the opportunity to help his home in the way that he couldn't before. He was able to do amazing things and put horrible people behind bars from his lab, but he knew deep down that that wasn't enough. There were people out there who were smart enough to avoid the police, either by clean up or by bribes. Being something greater than a forensic scientist would give him the chance to be a greater difference in his city. He would be able to bring justice to those who need it, and he would be able to right the wrongs that no even the police could fix. He had the ability to become like all of the heroes and vigilantes that he'd read about, but in a better way. He didn't want to be held up like a god, and he didn't want to be labeled as a lawless murder. He wanted to be someone that gave the people hope, someone who took care of them and made sure that they were taken care of in full.
When he first put on the mask, he swore to himself that he wouldn't let his city continue to live fear of criminals like it had been. He swore to stand up against crime and danger to keep the citizens of his home safe. With this oath, he donned a new name that helped him become the symbol of hope that Central City needed. His new name soon spread throughout the media like a wildfire, soon being associated with justice and hope. He became the fastest man alive by chance, but he became The Flash by choice.