A/N: Oh my gosh guys I am so excited to start this! I've already brainstormed like seven chapters and I'm so ready to write it out! I hope you like it, the story chapter length mayfluctuate, okay, so don't expect like a rigid 2,000-3,000 word count or something. I hope you have fun reading it because I sure did have fun writing it.
The Problem with Multi-Dimensional Travel
oO-Oo
Barry Allen is the fastest man alive and he feels like a pile of shit. Seriously, his entire body ached, from his toes to his ears. It ran bone-deep, pulling a groan from his reluctant lips. He had no recollection of where he was for a moment until he remembered that he'd gotten himself in some deep, deep trouble. As in, multi-dimensional trouble.
Yep. He'd poked a hole in space time again and ended up God knows where. This realization prompted his eyes snapping open in an attempt to figure out what dimension he'd popped into. The first thing he saw was raindrop shadows across an otherwise brightly lit ceiling. His eyes burned and his head throbbed spectacularly. He groaned again.
"Glad to see you're awake," a low, gravelly voice made his heart beat too fast for a heart monitor to pick up. He sat up sharply and regretted it instantly. The muscles he used to sit up burned horribly, making him fall back into the couch he was laying on.
"Oh fuck- Please don't kill me." Barry huffed; his arms coming up to feebly block an attack – which didn't come.
"Don't worry. I won't hurt you." That's what I believed about Jay and then he broke my back, Barry thought bitterly. He still wasn't over it. He wouldn't be over it in a long time. The memory of him lying on the ground in agony with fading sight and hearing his friends telling him to stay awake was burned into his brain. He would never, ever forget it. Anyway, Barry turned his head carefully and saw a man. The man had a good build, and was wearing only sweatpants. It almost made him blush to see the stranger half naked but the heat rising to his cheeks soon turned cold and he paled instead. The man had a large cut on his right shoulder and butterfly stitches on his eyebrow. He had bruises all over him, too. His eyes were unfocused and but were looking somewhere above Barry's head.
"I've heard that before," he muttered under his breath. And, maybe it was his imagination, but the man's face seemed to soften. Oh, yeah, and the man was incredibly gorgeous. He had a sort of…"wounded duck" sort of vibe though. This thought prompted another little freak out because he remembered Cisco, and then everyone else back home that loved him and would no doubt smack him if- when he got back to his universe. "Who are you? Where am I? What's going on?" Barry dragged his hand down his face and then rubbed his temple roughly. The pounding of his brain was annoying and painful. He just wanted it to stop.
"Well, I'm Matt Murdock. You're in Hell's Kitchen, New York. Do you remember anything that happened?" Matt asked. Concern seeped into his voice and he tentatively leaned forward, placing his hand on Barry's shoulder. He flinched but settled back into the cushions and tried to make sense of the memories flashing through his brain (no pun intended).
"I-I'm Barry Allen. What's the date? And time?" He asked, the wheels in his head spinning.
"Ah- July 30th. Around midnight."
"No, no, the year?" Barry pressed. He tensed his muscles and tried to sit up again, and much to his satisfaction, he was able to this time. Matt's hand splayed against his shoulder blade to help him up.
"…2016. Why is this important?" Barry let out a huge sigh of relief. It was the same day that it had been in his universe, so he didn't have to be careful about not changing the entire timeline and messing things up. Well, unintentionally.
Barry had been about to go back in time to save his mother from Eobard Thawne. He had felt so, so broken out on the patio with Iris. It had finally hit him that he was an orphan, that the two people that had brought him into the world were gone and dead. The cruel irony filled him with anger. Both of them had been killed in virtually the same spot, in the same house. The house he'd grown up in. Jay Garrick, a formerly close friend, had stabbed him in the back – almost literally. He had been stabbed actually, in three different spots, and the claws had grazed his lungs. He could still remember how they'd pierced him skin, bright hot, unfathomable pain tearing through him-
"Barry? Are you okay?" Matt's voice drew him out of his dark thoughts. He shook his head to try and clear it.
"It's a long story," Barry said slowly. He tried to sort out exactly how to tell Matt his predicament.
The only reason he was even going to try and tell him was because Barry knew that Matthew Murdock is a vigilante called Daredevil by the residents of the city. Seconds after he'd punctured a hole in space time, he had skidded to a stop in the middle of a random roof in a very dark city. On a roof across from his, he'd seen a figure with little horns sticking out the top of its head move toward him quickly. Barry had tried to get away but his knees had buckled and his muscles completely gave out. He stayed conscious for several minutes after that, and had been able to get a close look at the masked face of the man that had picked him up as if he weighed as much as a kitten. He'd also heard the man talking, most likely into a comm., alerting other possibly dangerous people that "something really weird just happened". It had taken a very small amount of time to get to a roof where the man/possible metahuman had deposited him onto a couch, and that was when he'd seen the man take off his mask. The last thing Barry saw before he passed out was a very handsome and also bleeding face.
This guy trusted him with his secret identity, and Barry's cowl was already down, so there was no point in holding back. So he started to ramble on about particle accelerators, trusted mentors betraying him, time travel, and trying to save his dead mother and father. By the end of it, he needed a glass of water and definitely another nap.
"That's. Well. That's pretty…" Matt fumbled for words.
"Yeah. Um, sorry, that's a lot of information, huh? The problem is that-" Barry interrupted when he heard a door opening and tried to whip around to see who'd arrived but only succeeded in becoming incredibly nauseated. His head spun like a top and he fell back onto the couch on his side. "Crap," he said sharply, scrambling to try and sit up again.
"Barry, calm down, it's okay. My team is here- they won't hurt you. Relax," Matt said, standing up and switching his attention at what Barry assumed was a group of people. He complied and lay back down. Matt had indeed been talking to a group of people, a fairly large group at that. There were 12 people filing into the living room. Well, it was more like 11 people and one…humanoid…thing. And one guy had a metal arm, but none of those facts really fazed him after months of metahumans fucking around in Central City. He introduced them as Steve, Tony, Natasha, Bucky, Sam, Clint, Vision, Wanda, Scott, Peter, Bruce, and Rhodey. Vision was the weird…whatever and Bucky had the metal arm. They both also had a sort-of-dead look in their eyes, but Vision's eyes were blanker than they were dead. Wanda had a foreign accent and was very pretty, like the other lady, Natasha who he could feel a potential danger radiating off her. Peter was very young compared to the rest of them. "Now, what were you going to say, Barry?"
Barry's exhaustion was beginning to catch up to him. The edges of his vision darkened and his tongue felt numb in his mouth. "I was gonna say," he swallowed and struggled to stay awake, Matt's concerned face swimming in front of him, "that I'm not- not from this universe." And then he passed out.
