A/N: I was meant to start writing and posting these back in January, however life happened, and progress didn't happen, so now here I am, a little over two months late but finally kicking things off! This coming July, as I've done for the past two summers, I'll be leading a 100-day countdown story set across the Arrowverse (featuring Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow). I decided to do things a little differently this year. For one thing, the entire 100 days will be a single story spread over 100 days, one chapter to every day. And for another, the more planning I did, I saw the possibility and the need to lay in some ground work in the form of preludes.

Twenty-four prelude one-shot stories, six each to the four series (again, it was meant so that each month from January to June would have one of each show, but now… yeah ;)), posted every 5 (or 6) days.

The story this will all be leading to, Once More Unto the Breach, is an alternate universe story (not another Earth, ha :D), which will soon become evident enough. It's very possible you do not watch all four of the shows, but I highly encourage you to seek out the other preludes, as they will help to fill in this world I'm very excited to share with you guys!

Alright, enough chit chat, let's go! If you have any questions, send them my way and I'll be happy to answer them!

THE GREAT ALLEN EMPIRE
Prelude to ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH
(6 of 24)

Location:
MAIN EARTH, THE CITY BENEATH THE BREACH
(ARGUS designation)

Nora Allen was known. So many people knew her, but so few knew her. Oh, sure, it was easy to imagine you knew her, with her being in the public eye as she was, growing in renown along with her company, her empire. Anyone living in the city would have had to run across the great tall building branded with the header to her NorCo, would have seen her magazines, seen her on television one time or another. And even if they weren't from the city, well… they'd know her just as well. They would know Nora Allen, that Nora Allen, the one she presented, the public face of the great Allen empire. And yet… and yet… If she was the only one they knew, then no. They did not know her at all.

Plenty had tried to dig deeper, to discover who hid beneath the pristine façade, tried and found themselves striking a brick wall. She would be courteous as she would be firm. Her personal life was off limits. This would be the perfect sort of fodder for the types who would see it as an invitation to dig deeper, to see what dark secrets she kept hidden. That wasn't why she kept it to herself though, not at all. Still, there was such a thing as protecting one's innermost self, and those it was reserved for.

There was great interest for her to write her autobiography, as many had told her before, but for those same reasons she always refused. If she were to write it though…

Many years ago, before NorCo, before everything, before she had any aspirations at all to run any company at all, big or small, she had only just started putting her life together. What dreams and goals she had, back then, resembled something like happiness, and really it was. She had an assistant's job, where she flourished, thanks to a self-sufficiency and drive she was still discovering in a lot of ways, not yet knowing how far they would take her. And she had met a young man she would fall for, oh, how she would love him, her Henry Allen. The day she would marry him would become the benchmark, the happiest day of her life, right to the day that dethroned it, the day her son was born and she held him in her arms.

She would think back to those days, Henry and her and their little boy, their Barry, and it would feel like she had stepped into some fantasy, some cozy sort of tale she believed would continue on its path as they went through the years, because what else could they be but ridiculously happy?

The change didn't come up so bold at all. It happened over the years that followed, in such a way that she would only stop and look back to realize where she'd come to stand on the day Henry announced he was leaving her. He was leaving her, and he was seeking custody of their son, almost six years old at the time.

How? How had they gotten there? Hadn't things been going so well? Her work, what had started out as such a simple, seemingly directionless sort of career had evolved, thanks to her wanting to be better, to do better, for them as much as for herself. She wanted to make them proud, that was all, and maybe Barry couldn't know it, being so small as he was at the time, but for what he lacked in awareness of his mother's work, he made up for in looking at her like she was the most wonderful living being in the world, and she couldn't ask for more. But Henry, her Henry, he had been proud of what she did, hadn't he? She had climbed through the ranks, made the kind of surging climb that earned her the attention of the world in due time. Barry had just turned four when NorCo had come into being. It would still take some years for it to become what it was today, but it existed, and it thrived, and so did she.

What she hadn't seen, according to Henry, to his reasons for moving away from her, was just how much the company and her work there had seemingly redirected her attention and her motivations. Her priorities. He was becoming so much of their son's world now that the boy had become accustomed to her not being there, and that had been the thing to open his eyes, to make him decide it was time.

She wasn't proud to say, not by a long mile, of how the next several years had unfolded. Oh on the outside, on the side of 'the world's Nora Allen,' everything was going splendidly, but then the reason that that was merely that she had nothing better to do but to devote herself to what remained to her, which was her company. Henry had gone, and he had Barry, and little by little it just became the norm that she only rarely saw them. It made her see what her now ex-husband had been seeing all along, and rather than to let herself dwell on it, she had kept moving. What else could she do?

By the time her company's letters had been mounted to the top of the building she now occupied, ten years had passed since the divorce, and as she stood up there, ready to make her speech, some things continued to spin through her thoughts. She had sent invitations to both her former husband and their son, for them to be present at the unveiling and the party that was to follow. Surely they would be here, regardless…

She had inquired with her assistant, wanting to know if they had responded to the invitation, if they had arrived. When her assistant had looked at her with some barely concealed surprised at the fact that she had a family, that she had a child, it had struck her at once that she had let herself get fooled… by herself. They wouldn't come. She hadn't seen them or spoken to them in weeks. She'd been so busy, the move, the building, she'd just… she'd had no time…

That had been the start, of things taking a turn for the better, though it would be a few years more before it actually came to fruition. She knew there was no going back, not with Henry, but Barry… her little boy, not nearly so little anymore, surely… surely they could mend things somehow. They could be mother and son again. All she had to do was make time for him. If she had to schedule it at first, so be it. In the end, it would become what it should always have been. She hoped… deep down, she hoped. On the outside, the leader of the Great Allen Empire, as Barry had once called it in a fit of – justified – frustration with her, carried on business as usual, betraying nothing of the turmoil in her head and her heart.

Those first steps had not been easy, but then regardless of the difficulties, she knew what was at stake was plenty worth the wounds to her pride, and so she carried on. It was right about that time that an old friend had come back into her life.

Eobard Thawne had been someone she'd come to know in those old days when she had been the assistant, rather than being the one who had an assistant. He hadn't been one of her closest friends, not exactly, but close enough that to have him returned to acquaintance had felt agreeable. And somehow it had come to be that he became the one she confided all her absentee mother angst to, the one who listened, and counseled her. Truthfully, if she ever did write that autobiography, there would have to be some mention given to the fact that she wouldn't have the relationship she had with her son now if it wasn't for Eobard Thawne.

It started with plain and open honesty. She had no right to expect him to treat her as though all was well, and it likely never would be that way. The best she could hope for was for them to learn to be in each other's lives again and maybe, just maybe, they would find friendship and confidence and growth and be something not so much salvaged, just… built out of this honesty. He would follow his own policy, confessing how she had hurt him, and how in times he had felt something that felt a lot like anger, like abandonment… but never hate, and so for that he was willing to give her a second chance.

These past years, with Barry in her life again, how they had been their own kind of trial, not for her failure or for her unhappiness, quite the opposite in fact. But then she carried in her all the times where she had failed, freely confessed to him now that they had found a way to mend into something solid, and it forced her to become bonded to a nagging fear, that someday she would fail, and there would be no third chance. For that, she had to learn to find balance, to stop and consider some of her choices not as she had been making them in the years after the divorce but in a conscientious way that didn't leave Barry cut short from the place he should have been occupying all along. In the beginning, she'd thought for sure her company would suffer for it, that someone would discover this streak of weakness in her and exploit it for all it was worth, pushing her out of everything she had built. But it hadn't, it wouldn't, because of what the 'Great Allen Empire' had come to stand for in this city.

Because on top of everything, the normal daily news, the politics and the city, there was something else. There was the world of heroes and what they fought for and what they fought it with. And Nora Allen had somehow become instrumental in that world, with no power to her name but the one she had built into NorCo.

Her positions had more than once put her in the crosshairs of some less savory types, and more than once it had put her life directly in danger. She might not have still been here, alive to this day, if not for the intervention of some of their city's heroes, superpowered, unpowered, and costumes for all. Archers, speedsters, aliens, fire, ice… What a time to be alive…

Following her first averted attack, she had really started to look on to this subset of the city's people, and she really had no choice but to recognize their worth, their necessity, especially with these rumors, these whispers of some other world hanging right over their heads and raining down trouble on them at every turn. What could her duty be except to back them up, to encourage them to carry on protecting them, because when the chips were down, they were the ones to make a difference.

As her stance came to be known, again, some tried to use it to push her aside, but she wasn't going to let it happen. She had finally, finally found a way to balance her thriving business and her salvaged bond to her son, and that filled her with a new strength, aided further by her discovery of a new calling, as the voice of heroes. More than once now, she had been contacted, called into collaboration, to prevent one catastrophe or another. And through it all, NorCo had stood tall, unshakeable, and so had Nora Allen.

Nowhere in this imaginary autobiography would she come to mention her deepest secret. Never would she mark it anywhere it could ever be found, and used, against her, or against the one this secret belonged to. Barry, her son… He didn't even know that she knew it, and she wouldn't tell him she knew, because why would she? If he hadn't told her, then clearly he didn't want her knowing. Now, this could be due to the time they had spent estranged, instilling in him this belief that she shouldn't be told or couldn't be told, for some reason or another. Or it might be there was no other reason but a noble one, to protect her from danger, more danger than already roamed near her.

Whatever the case may have been, let the record show, or in this case not show, that she was wholly aware of her son's heroic double life. To be clear, she hadn't known from the beginning, no, and she hadn't come by it all at once either. She had come to believe at first that he had a secret, something he wasn't telling her, for whatever reason, and in the beginning she could have assumed it was any number of things, each one further away from what came to be shown as the actual truth. But then after that her suspicions started to become more and more specific, until she was just about sure he was involved in some way or another with these heroes.

Then, one day, he had saved her life.

It would hardly have been good parental form for her not to realize the costumed man standing before her was her own son, and on that she had not failed him. But then for whatever reason he did not wish to come clean with her, and she was all too happy to play dumb and act as though she knew nothing. And in doing so, she had allowed something else to happen, somewhere between bittersweet and reassuring. More than once since that day he had come in contact with her, in the guise of his alter ego, and when he did, he would speak with her, sharing things with her that he never would as himself, with his mother. If that was how he wanted it, if that was what he needed from her, then she wouldn't take it from him. He was confiding in her, in a way that told her he wanted to do it, but didn't know how to go through with it. Maybe it was a bit wrong, to let him believe he had the wool over her eyes when he didn't, but she saw it as her protecting him, as his mother should.

"Miss Allen?" her assistant poked her head into her office, looking as always as though she would rather run off than remain too close to her for very long, like she might get bitten. Nora couldn't say where this impression had come from, but here they were. "Your two o'clock is here?"

"What two o'clock?" she frowned. She wasn't so caught up in her work that she wouldn't know if she had any appointments set for the day. She wasn't, and she didn't. Still, her assistant turned to another woman stood a few paces behind her, quietly asking if she'd gotten the date wrong, but soon as Nora saw her, she knew there'd be no point in double checking. She didn't know this young woman, and there were no appointments set in her books with anyone she didn't know. "Let her through?" she instructed her assistant, who gladly stepped aside and went back to work. As her visitor walked into her office, Nora stood from her desk. "Should I call for coffee or security?" she casually asked.

"Water would be fine," the woman returned in a similarly casual tone. Nora observed her for a moment before indicating that she could sit, before moving to get her the water. Never would it be said that Nora Allen couldn't be inviting, especially for the initial feeling she had about the woman now sitting behind her. The glass was filled and brought to her, and Nora sat with her.

"What can I do for you, Miss…"

"Tomaz, Zari… Tomaz," she introduced herself, holding out her hand as though she'd briefly forgotten herself. Nora shook her hand. "Your reputation precedes you, Miss Allen," she slowly started, her head tipping in such a way that Nora could practically hear her smacking herself internally. She was nervous, that much was certain. Very nervous, in a way that Nora was confident she recognized.

"Tell you what, Miss Tomaz, I think we would both feel a lot better if you went straight to the point," Nora gave her a look, and within seconds she saw it did the trick.

"I'm not exactly from… here," she explained, searching for her words. "Where I was from, see, there was a war, for as long as I can remember. And one day these people came, and… they saved me. They brought me here, and since then I've been hiding, working. I became a reporter, but I swear I'm not here about a story," she was quick to specify.

"And you came to me because…" Nora didn't question her purpose, or her tale, not yet.

"Because you're known to people here as someone who will listen, who will back us up if needed."

"Us?" Nora repeated, sitting up. "Metahuman?" she asked. "Alien?"

"Neither. Just human," Zari shook her head. "I'm not from this Earth, no, but I am from Earth, just… a different one. Some people call it Breach Earth." Now she had her attention.

THE END

Check out the next prelude, coming April 5th!