Chapter Eleven
Review Responses:
Crimson Comet- Yeah, I wasn't actually thinking about the significance of the color red when I was writing it, but it does pretty much work with everything that's happened. I just love identities which sounds strange. There just really cool to think about.
Legendoffun- It's not Tess something, but you might want to read this chapter now. Hint. Hint.
Ratchetlover- Here you go!
"You got up there," Joe points and gapes up to the opening at the very top of the rocky cliff. "By climbing stairs made up ice."
"You mean 'we're going to get up there again' by climbing stairs made of ice." Cisco corrects him, glancing sadly at the empty licorice pocket he hadn't had the heart to fill up again before they had left.
"It's more of a slope." Frost says.
"A slope?"
"A slick slope."
Joe sighs.
"Great."
It took them almost an hour to get to where they were now in the forest outside the mountains. The air is even colder than it had been just the days before. Cisco feels like it suits the mood more. Cold means no nonsense. Just look at Killer Frost.
How much longer does it take them to actually get up to the cave?
Much too long considering going straight up got them no closer to Barry. At least, they all hoped that with pretty much everything they had left to hope with at this point it didn't.
"Which way is it when we finally get up there?" Joe motions toward the entrance.
"There's-" Jay starts, then suddenly stops both with his sentence and his feet, almost sending those before him back down the snow slide.
"Woah," Cisco shouts.
"Sorry, I just...I was going to say good question. Which way do we go?" He gets several strange looks. "Sorry."
"There's only one way. Straight." Wells tells them.
Joe nods and matches step with Jay, passing him in just a few moments.
"So, we are sure Barry's not in here. Right?" Joe hesitates before asking. He couldn't seem to decide whether or not that would be what he would want.
"Yes. Well, we're pretty sure. No, we're really sure, aren't we?" Cisco looks back to Caitlin-2."
"Last time I saw Barry, it sure wasn't here." She shrugs.
"Yeah, we're sure."
Joe nods again, seeming to not have much of an interest of truly responding today.
The group remains silent the remaining chunk of time it takes them to find their way, step by step, to the opening. It's a strange thing in your life to be so focused on time. Every hour. Every minute.
Every second.
Joe, Jay, Cisco, Wells. They all pause for one of those seconds as the ice turns to a concrete floor under their feet.
"I see what you mean."
Joe studies the looming hallway intently, sliding his gun out of its holster without making a sound. "Let's get this guy and get out."
He leads the way into the lair by habit, but Cisco stops him just before a corner.
"It's here." The younger man whispers and slowly peeks his head around the corner. Like lightning, he pulls his head back around and gasps.
"What?" Wells demands.
"It's all clear."
Cisco shakes out his shoulders and walks right down and around the corner.
"Why did you react like that?"
Cisco looks over to the doctor like it was obvious.
"I was being prepared. What if Zoom was over there?"
"Yes, because you using your great speed capabilities would surely escape Zoom." Wells mutters as he follows closely behind him.
The room gets darker as they edge around the bend.
It's a harsh memory for Cisco most of all. He had been the one to finally decide to leave and he knew it. Wells had his daughter to look after. He had a reason to get out of there as soon as possible. What about him, though, Cisco considers at the beginning of the series of cages. He could have stayed. An extra couple of seconds has helped them immensely in the past.
He pushes it back in his mind. Guilt can wait for when he's rectified what he has to feel guilty about.
"Barry's not here." Wells say, clarifying the obvious to his team. "The cage is gone that Barry was trapped in."
"So the message was real then." Joe murmurs.
Also real was the barred cage in the corner, carrying the barred face of its prisoner. The man looks over to them and looked as shocked as any masked man could look.
"Hey." Cisco almost waves before stopping himself. It didn't seen like the most appropriate thing to do.
Unsurprisingly, the man doesn't wave back, but stares back at him.
"Hand me your shatterer." Wells tells Cisco, holding out an open palm.
"You don't have yours?" He asks.
"I have mine."
Cisco stares at him with the device pulled from his jeans pocket.
"So, why do you need mine?"
"I have reasonable faith that your's will be the one that finally opens Barry's cage for us." The doctor answers and Cisco needs a moment just to appreciate that and let it set in. "My second bet is on Detective West, so if you want me to test his out-"
"No, it's all good." Cisco says quickly.
"You go ahead." Wells puts down his hand in the last second before being handed Cisco's device.
Cisco takes four steps closer to the cage and lifts up his shatterer.
It clinks against the glass and he presses the bottom right above the small nozzle that changed the pressure. The masked man stands up and steps back to allow the scientists room to do whatever he might.
"Here we go." He whispers and it whirls on.
The glass stays eerily still and crack free for a split second before it suddenly shatters without warning.
"That's one way to do that." Frost grunts.
The masked man looks at the corners of his cage where the leftover angles of glass were still sticking out. He moves the shattered pieces away from his path out of the cell he had been stuck in for who knows how long.
He gestures toward the mechanism locking the mask over his face and points to Killer Frost.
"What?" She looks blank.
He gestures to the back of his mask again and she sighs.
"Come on, Frost. We need to move." Wells motions to her to just do it.
She gives him a dirty look, but does it, trying not to freeze his entire face of with it. It cracks and crackles until finally giving way under the ice.
The masked man pulls off the now freezing cold metal as they try to usher him out of the cage room and toward the hall.
"Okay, dude. Now, we're going to go get the Flash and if you happen to…" Cisco trails off as he turns his head toward the man he is trying to pull in the direction of the already moving group. "Oh my God." He whispers.
The VERY familiar man gives him a slightly suspicious look and stretches his arms out as they pick up the pace.
"Hello," He starts. "Thanks for the rescue."
"What are you doing here?" Cisco's tone the attention of the others. Wells and Joe visible pause and the entire group is halted. "I mean, I know that you're probably not actually you."
"What?" Frost asks.
The man looks back and forth between them.
"I'm not sure who you think I am, but you can call me," He hesitates a moment. "The Arrow."
"What the heck happened, Oliver?"
"You know me?" Oliver furrows his eyebrows. "From a different earth?"
"Um, yeah." Cisco nodds. "We fight crime together sometimes and it's awesome. Did Zoom get you while you were trying to stop him here?"
"Not here." Oliver corrects him, but seems to accept his other-world counterpart's connections.
"In Central City?"
"I mean, not on this Earth. I fought Zoom on our own Earth."
Cisco's jaw drops.
"We're leaving." Wells breaks up the circle. "Tell us on the way."
Oliver nods sharply and takes the lead almost immediately while Cisco stills tries to wrap his head around exactly what he had just learned.
"Zoom isn't even from Earth-2." Cisco starts, but it seems to only be paid attention to by himself. "Zoom is from...Earth-3. This changes everything we had thought about who he might be. We have no idea-"
"Zoom's identity no longer matters." Oliver says through gritted teeth. They reach the exit in almost half the time it had taken them to find Oliver in the back because of Oliver's pace.
"Why? Do you not know who he is?"
"No, I know who he is. Or I did. Zoom is no longer who he was before when he still considered himself to be a man."
"I don't know what that means."
Oliver is about to put a foot onto the ice slope when he seems to notice something one else does.
"Frost, destroy some of the ice." Oliver barks to her and she does it without hesitation, lifting her hand and smashing it down like the new ice that suddenly crushes the old.
"What's going on?"
Oliver doesn't say anything, but waves them down the hallway a dozen feet away that can barely be seen by the naked eye.
"Zoom's coming."
Each of them promptly flung themselves into the small closet area. The walls are darker and move in closer and closer as each person shuffles in with the last, Joe, closing the door as quickly and silently as he possible could.
"How did you see him coming?" Cisco dares to whisper.
"I've had practice." The Arrow answers back in the silence.
Cisco looks like he has a thousand different questions to ask before shifting his gaze back to the closed door.
Blue light zooms across the bottom slot of the door. Once. Twice. Three times in barely ten seconds.
They entire room is holding their breath and lets it out as another ten seconds pass with none of the trademark dark light showing its glow from the other side of the gap.
"Is he gone?" Cisco asks around. He knows that they could see just as badly as him, but a few of them happened to be detectives and superheroes so what the heck.
A moment passes.
"I think so. Frost destroying some of the ice made it seem like we came here earlier and the ice melted some." Joe says still quietly, but with a little more force than before. He seems to be shaking off the sudden paleness from the speedster being just outside the door.
"He's gone." Oliver agrees. "We need to wait here at least two more minutes before leaving, though. Zoom should be heading to wherever he's keeping Barry, but he may come back here and if he does, I imagine it will be very quickly."
"Okay." Cisco twitches his fingers from being kept in the room longer.
Wells looks around at the empty shelves of the closet.
"I suppose this would be a good time for an explanation." Wells says and Oliver purses his lips with a blank expression on his face.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything you know about Zoom. We need to know. Start from the beginning."
Oliver looks down and his hand moves back slightly like an unforgotten urge to check to make sure his bow is secured. Not that he has a bow now.
"You have to know that I don't think...Zoom was always like what he is know. Anyway, I met Zoom when he first got his powers. I don't know much about his past. There was an incident when he was a kid with what sounded like a metahuman. It was one the only things he told me about his past and apparently the whole thing was bad."
Cisco gulps. "How so?"
"A lot of people died. Civilians. Police officers. A detective or two. I imagine his parents must have been killed or somehow put out of the picture because after that he was put in the system. Who knows what happened when he was in there. I doubt it was good."
"How did you meet him?"
"He came to me after first getting his powers from a particle accelerator explosion created by," He points over to Wells. "You actually."
Wells winces.
"I'm aware. A similar event occurred in this world."
"Exact." Cisco coughs.
Wells shoots him a dirty glance that shuts him up quickly and Oliver continues.
"He was confused, didn't seem to have had any sort of power in his entire life, and I think scared. Really scared." Oliver looks down. "That made me careless. I didn't pick up on the things that were very wrong in him and I didn't help him in things I really should have helped him in. He wanted to be by himself in his city and even if he had actually started with intentions of some twisted good, it didn't take long for him to go dark. "
"Dark is an understatement." Cisco says and Oliver looks away to the door with some darkness in his own eyes.
"I tried to stop him. My entire team did. You can probably tell that it didn't end well and somehow I found myself here in this world with no idea of what happened. Zoom had contacts with a lot of scientists through his civilian job and I imagine one of them must have opened a portal here. I don't remember being brought here. I just woke up in that cage and then at some point you all showed up."
"I'm sorry." Joe says.
Oliver nods.
"It doesn't matter. All that matters now is that I stop Zoom."
"Good," Joe tells him. "We can do this together. We want to save our Barry and-"
"And I want to kill my Barry." Oliver finishes the sentence.
At that moment, the slightly warped story of a past very similar to Barry's clicked into place in all of their minds. The breath seemed to be suked out of the room.
"Where's Jay?" Wells suddenly asks as if the world hadn't suddenly crashed down around all of them. As if he hadn't even heard what Oliver had just said. Maybe, it was just the scientist in him. Maybe, it was because how much Barry had grown on him.
"What?" Joe doesn't seem to have heard Wells over his own thoughts. "Zoom is Barry."
"No, he's my Barry. Trust me, I only saw your's for a moment, but he's...everything Zoom isn't."
"You do realize that Jay is not here anymore." Wells tries again.
"Jay?" Oliver whips his head over to the doctor. "Jay Garrick? He was here too?"
"Yeah," Cisco looks blankly at him. "Have you seen him around here before. He was this world's Flash."
"He may have been this world's Flash, but he's bowed to Zoom since the second Zoom got here."
Next time on Prisoner of Earth-2, the team finally finds barry again, but will they be able to rescue him?
Author's note
Yes, I know Oliver refers to himself as GREEN Arrow, but G.A. would have been super obvious and the show is called The Arrow. He just decided to call himself The Arrow on Earth-3, so there.