"What does that mean?" Barry demanded. "How could it be gone?"
"Do you think I know? It's just—I've been able to talk to the alternate me ever since the accelerator explosion, but he's not there anymore. And I still remember what happened in the other timeline, but I can't vibe there anymore. It's gone."
Barry glanced around at the other Rogues, They, without ever having experienced time travel, understood even less than he did.
"We need to figure out what this means," he said.
Cisco tossed his hands in the air. "I know! But what do I look like, Professor Stein?"
Barry's eyes widened. Stein would understand time travel…
…if he was the same as his alternate version, that was. Besides, it would take too long to get him up to speed.
"Other timeline?" Roy asked.
The S.T.A.R. Labs group, plus Eddie and Iris, generally rolled their eyes at the mention of it. Leonard started explaining the whole alternate-timeline thing to the rest of the Rogues. Barry paused in his thoughts for a moment to consider that maybe Leonard being the one to explain it wouldn't paint him in the best light.
But at the moment, it was a little more important to figure out why the other timeline had vanished, and none of the Rogues, even Barry, fully comprehended how the timelines worked. Harry had understood time travel pretty well, maybe him…
No, trying to bring Harry back to help would only put him and his daughter in danger. Not to mention what could happen if Harrison got into other universes.
"Isn't that exactly what Harrison's doing?" Albert asked when Leonard finished his abbreviated explanation.
"No," Barry said defensively. "I knew what I was doing—at least, sort of, there's only one person who really understands what he's doing… when it comes to time travel…" He started trailing off near the end of the sentence.
No. No.
But…
"Desperate times," Barry muttered, changing into his suit.
"Barry, what are you planning?" Cisco asked sharply. "That's your I-have-a-bad-idea look!"
"Nobody move," Barry said. "If everything goes well, I'll be back in a second."
Before anyone could ask more questions, or try to stop him, Barry was off, tearing through the streets. He ducked out of the way of a loophole in the middle of the road, and opened something quite like a loophole of his own.
A breach to the future.
He focused on his target and emerged, gasping, in an alleyway.
Barry hadn't specified a place or time, but based on who he was looking for, he could guess where he'd ended up.
Central City. 21-something.
The home of the Reverse Flash.
His vague focal point had served him well. He only had to wait half a second before a yellow blur streaked around the corner—and stopped dead in his tracks.
"Barry?" Eobard, his voice distorted and his eyes glowing red, sounded completely shocked.
"Thanks for shouting out my identity in the middle of the street," Barry said casually. "Very thoughtful of you, Eobard." He had to admit, it was nice having one-up on the Reverse Flash. That was rare.
His momentary triumph immediately fell flat when Eobard blurred toward him. Before Barry could defend himself, before he could even begin to react, he found himself pressed flat against the alley wall, one of Eobard's hands vibrating and ready to strike. "If you're here for revenge, let me warn you…"
"Hey, woah, woah, woah!" Barry raised his hands. "I thought we'd moved past the trying to kill each other! I'm not here to fight you!"
In the blink of an eye, and Barry could blink fast, Eobard had moved back, standing against the wall on the other side of the alley. His eyes stopped glowing and he spoke normally, clearly confused. "Then why are you here?"
"First things first, holy cow, Eobard, you're fast!"
"Holy cow? Very insensitive choice of words, Barry, we don't have cows here."
"Never heard that one before."
A trace of a smirk flitted across Eobard's face. "To answer the implied question, on average, I'm twelve times faster than your top recorded speed." He shrugged. "Proximity to the explosion; does wonders for the Speed Force. So why are you here?"
"Kind of a long story, but it ends with the old timeline disappearing, and you're the only one I know who—"
Before he could finish the sentence, Barry found himself whisked away. Even his quicker senses couldn't process the blurs of color around him, until he found himself motionless again on a couch somewhere. He blinked.
"Now I understand how disorienting that is…"
Eobard, mask pulled off and expression serious, sat in an armchair across from him. He leaned forward intently. "Tell me the whole story."
Barry glanced around. "Nice place." It was as spacious as Eobard-as-Wells's house had been in his time, but there was far more warmth and character (not to mention the future tech, which Barry would be far more interested in if he wasn't so worried about the timeline). Not just a house—this was Eobard's home. What he'd tried to get back to for so long.
Eobard waved a hand dismissively. "Yes, yes, thanks. What's going on?"
Barry explained. The aftermath, the Rogues, Tess, Harrison, Legion, Loophole's powers, and the chaos in the city because of it.
Eobard nodded slowly throughout the tale, wincing occasionally. "I'm truly sorry to hear about Tess, and what's happened to Harrison because of it."
"It wasn't your fault," Barry said, even though, technically speaking, it was.
"No," Eobard agreed offhandedly, looking in deep thought. "It was yours."
Barry's jaw dropped at the audacity. "Seriously? How is this my fault?"
Eobard fully focused on him. "You created this timeline, Flash. Remember the Time Wraiths? Those were your formal warning on the part of the universe. You shouldn't mess with time."
"You're one to talk!" Barry couldn't believe what he was hearing. Yeah, he'd come to ask for help, but that didn't mean he was going to put up with this. "You hijacked my whole timeline and altered it at your whim for fifteen years."
"So I've heard. And you saw how well that ended for me."
Barry blinked. He was certain he'd never told Eobard about his real fate in Barry's timeline. So how…?
Eobard saw Barry's confusion and gave a wry smile. "I'm sure you've noticed that the same people have ended up with the same powers, despite the different circumstances. Time wants to happen. The universe tries to keep events the same in each timeline."
"And?" Barry didn't see the link.
"Eddie Thawne. My ancestor wasn't a metahuman in my timeline, yet here he is manipulating spacetime into contradictions of itself—paradoxes. His origin story had to happen in your timeline, and given his powers plus what you've already told me, it's not a hard conclusion to draw. He had to have created a paradox in your timeline to end up with those powers in this one. He killed himself to stop me." Eobard didn't sound resentful, just vaguely tired.
"Well, yeah," Barry admitted.
Eobard laughed drily. "I change time, and I'm erased from existence." He met Barry's eyes steadily. "I wonder what your punishment will be."
Barry flinched. There was a long moment of silence before he finally said, "We should go back. I still don't understand what's happened to the other timeline."
"Right!" Eobard said, entirely too cheerfully. He stood up and gestured toward the door. "I knew something had to have gone wrong in 2016—every anime stopped production in that year, disappointing, My Hero Academia was truly inspirational—but if I had known how bad it was, I would have come back myself…"
Barry stifled a laugh. "You actually watch anime? Still?"
Eobard fixed him with a deadly glare. "You might have just destroyed the entire universe, Barry, I don't think you get to judge me on my hobbies."
"It's still mostly your fault," Barry pointed out.
"I'll settle for half the blame."
They started running, Eobard keeping to a slower pace to follow Barry back to the right time and place. There was a strange resistance from the timestream as they got closer to 2016, and Barry fell more than ran into the street outside the old precinct.
Eobard arrived next to him and shuddered. "No more time travel."
"What do you mean?"
"Part of the explanation. Do you happen to have a whiteboard in your headquarters?"
"I'll see what I can find."
They entered the precinct, twin and opposite blurs.
The Rogues jumped at the sight of Eobard. Leonard, Caitlin, Hartley, Ronnie, and Cisco especially looked absolutely furious.
"What is he doing here?" Leonard demanded, raising his gun.
"Calm down!" Barry said, holding his hands up pacifyingly. "He's here because he understands time travel and he wants to make sure the world doesn't end."
"Who is he?" Eddie asked.
"This is Eobard Thawne. A speedster from the future… and your great-great-great-great-grandson, Eddie."
Eddie stared at Eobard, eyes wide. Eobard didn't react beyond a slight, sarcastic twitch of an eyebrow.
"He's also Barry's mom's murderer in the other timeline, and the reason the particle accelerator exploded," Cisco said, voice brimming with anger. He held up his hand and shot a highly focused, high-power vibe blast at Eobard.
Eobard, as he'd done throughout the conversation, just stood unmoving. The blast sent him flying into the opposite wall.
"Cisco!" Barry said.
"Yeah, I'm not sorry. I've owed Thawne that for a few timelines now."
Across the room, Eobard got to his feet, and in an instant he'd blurred over to Cisco, staring him down, his face inches away and his hand knotted in Cisco's shirt.
Barry tensed. Everything was already falling apart. This was a mistake.
But when Eobard spoke, it was calm, albeit very intent. "I understand that I probably deserved that. But I am here to help you. I could simply run to another Earth and leave you to your fate, but I'm here. Attack me again and I'm done."
Cisco shoved Eobard's shoulders, scowling, and Eobard released his shirt and stepped back, adding, "Same goes for all of you. Now, does this place have a whiteboard? I have some diagrams to draw."
The closest they could find was a chalkboard, which Eobard scoffed at but deemed good enough. He started sketching across it immediately and stepped back to reveal a series of timelines across the board. The Rogues all watched him, their expressions mixtures of suspicion and confusion.
"This is reality. More or less. I have no idea how many timelines are out there, but it's enough to give you an idea. This," he indicated the bottom one, "is our timeline." The next one up. "This is the one Barry's from and Cisco remembers," one more up, "and this one's mine. Roughly. I'm sure there are a few more timelines squished in between somewhere, but you get the picture."
He flipped the blackboard around and drew a single timeline on the other side. "This is what happens to the timeline when Loophole's powers are used." Eobard dragged his finger through the line vertically, leaving a small gap. He repeated the action until there were about a dozen holes up and down the timeline. He nodded toward Eddie. "From the way I understand it, your powers are the worst kind of time travel. Your loopholes—well, Harrison's, now—they punch holes through the timestream and don't patch them up. They don't create new timelines, and they don't even bother changing the current one. Loopholes indeed."
He tapped the chalk against the holes in the line. "It wouldn't have been as much of an issue if you'd retained your powers, Eddie. Your effects were much smaller. But Harrison is bound and determined to rip the timeline to shreds if necessary. And time can't just not exist. So."
Eobard began to draw little slashes in the gaps, leaving tiny bits of space between each diagonal line. "So the timeline tries to mend itself. Little fragments of spacetime, maybe bits of the timestream, I'm not sure precisely what, but something is trying to fill the gaps, to stabilize the timeline."
"So it's going to be fine?" Barry asked hesitantly.
Eobard snorted. "Not even close. Two effects." He flipped the chalkboard back to the side with multiple timelines and replicated the gaps-and-slashes design on the bottom line. "Effect one."
He erased the other timelines with a wide sweep of his arm and started to redraw them, with one distinct difference: whenever a line reached one of the gaps in the current timeline, Eobard jagged the chalk down into a V before resuming its path across the board.
The effect, when he was done redrawing them, was that all the other timelines were being sucked into the holes in the current one.
Eobard glanced among the frightened and confused Rogues. "Nature abhors a vacuum. Whatever it is that tried to plug the gaps, it didn't do a good job. Defunct timelines are being dragged into the absences like water in a whirlpool, which destabilizes them. One by one, they're falling apart."
"So it's gone," Cisco said hollowly. "Everyone we knew there, everything that happened, it's just… gone?"
Barry looked as shell-shocked as Cisco.
"But we don't care about the other timelines," Leonard said.
Cisco and Barry both threw him offended glares.
"What?" Leonard shrugged. "I'm sure it sucks for them, but right now I'm a little bit more concerned about what happens to us. You said there were two effects, Thawne, what's the other one?"
Eobard nodded and flipped the board back over to the single line. "The larger the loophole, the more foreign time material the universe crammed in there as a fix-it." He scrubbed at both sides of one of the gaps, blurring the chalk. "This timeline will start to deteriorate around the loopholes. Any time travel will put even more strain on the timeline. The fact of the matter is, unless we can stop Harrison…" He swept his fingers vertically across the line, again and again, until the timeline was nothing more than a series of irregular dashes. "…every timeline is going to shatter. This world will stop existing. And there will be nothing we can do about it."
Barry stepped forward. "There is something we can do. I can stop all of this now. I can go back and—"
"No," Eobard interrupted.
Barry frowned. "You don't even know what I was going to say."
"I know exactly what you were going to say. You want to run back, stop yourself from stopping me from killing your mother, as though that'll set the timeline to rights. No. It won't work. That new timeline will fall to shreds too."
"Why? Isn't it only previous timelines that get sucked into that whole mess?"
Eobard let out a deep sigh. "As far as I know, yes. But you're missing a vital point." He erased the timeline completely and began to draw again, hand blurring to speed up the process. "We already know thanks to Cisco that aborted timelines keep going. What you're failing to see…" He stepped back from the chalkboard, revealing five timelines all sprouting off one point in the top timeline. Eobard labeled the divergence point 'March 18, 2000'. "…is that they were all one timeline. Right up until 2000, when they split."
He erased the line second from the bottom, following it backwards, up to the top line and tracing back from there, leaving the other four timelines hanging unattached. "Nothing before 2000 will exist in your newly created timeline. Which will also destabilize the timeline and bring the very fabric of reality crashing down around you." Eobard tossed the chalk onto the nearest desk. "Any questions?"
"Yeah," Cisco said, the only one not thrown into silence by the threat of their imminent demise. "How do you get your suit into the ring?"
Eobard rolled his eyes. "Any real questions?"
"What happens to the timeline if we do stop Harrison?" Caitlin asked.
"Is the damage already done enough to destroy the timeline anyway?" Ronnie added.
Eobard grimaced. "Honestly? I don't know. But we don't have any options. Either we stop Harrison and take our chances, or we wait until all of time shatters around us."
"He's right," Barry said.
The nearest computer let out a loud series of beeps. Eddie checked the screen. "Cisco and Hartley's app is sending in reports of a temporal anomaly at S.T.A.R. Labs. A huge one."
"The readings are off the charts," Caitlin said.
"I'm betting Harrison's decided it's time to save Tess," Barry said.
"Eddie, you're not going, are you?" Iris asked when he moved toward the exit.
Eddie paused, glancing back. "I should. I'm still a part of the team."
"You're not going," Eobard told him. "Stay here with Iris."
Eddie glared at him. "What gives you the right to tell me what to do?"
"The timeline's in enough danger as it is. If you die, I'm erased from existence, forcing a paradox. Barry can tell you the devastation that causes in an intact timeline. If it happens now, all of reality presumably falls apart. So do everyone a favor, Eddie, and stay alive."
Eddie sighed. "Fine."
Leonard lifted his gun over his shoulder. "Let's suit up. We have a world to save."
Eobard watched the Rogues file out of the room. Cisco waited a moment longer than the others, shooting Eobard a glare before walking toward the exit.
Eobard considered whether to ask the obvious question, going back and forth. When Cisco was nearly out of the room, he decided he might as well.
"So what did I do to you?"
Cisco paused, and Eobard waited patiently as Cisco made his own decision about whether or not to engage.
Finally, he spoke, turning back and crossing his arms. "You mean aside from murdering Barry's mom and the original Harrison and Tess, lying to all of us, betraying us, and causing Eddie's and Ronnie's deaths?"
"Well, that would be enough on its own. What is there aside from that?"
"You killed me," and it sounded like Cisco had been bursting to say that ever since Eobard arrived, "in an alternate timeline."
"I'm sorry," Eobard said, startled. With no idea of the circumstances, he could think of no justification other than, "I must have had a good reason."
Which was, apparently, the wrong line. Cisco threw his hands in the air and turned away. "I don't know why I ever bother talking to you. Any version of you."
"Cisco!" Eobard didn't know why he cared so much about Cisco's opinion of him. Maybe because it irked the supervillain in him not to have consciously earned the fury on his face. Maybe the other timeline was leaking in, lending this version of Eobard his alternate self's fondness.
Whatever the reason, he was across the room in an instant, grabbing Cisco's arm to keep him from leaving.
"Don't touch me." Cisco instantly snatched his arm away, his other hand coming up as though about to blast Eobard. He gritted his teeth and clenched his hand into a fist, slowly lowering it.
Eobard backed off immediately. "That was inappropriate; I apologize." He sighed and looked away. "…I don't know how not to be a villain."
Cisco scoffed. "Is that supposed to make me feel sorry for you?"
"No. Here." Eobard tugged off his ring and tossed it to Cisco, who caught it and squinted at Eobard, some mixture of suspicious and intrigued.
"If there's some semblance of a timeline still intact at the end of this, I'm sure you'll remember: look into nanotechnology. Specifically how it applies to extradimensional spaces. Ray Palmer will have some revolutionary ideas."
Cisco turned the ring over in his hands for a moment, considering, before sticking it into his pocket. "We should go. The others will be waiting for us." He didn't say thank you, but then, Eobard didn't expect that he would.
He nodded. "What was it that Citizen Cold said? We have a world to save."
Cisco and Eobard joined the Rogues at the threshold of the precinct. Barry gave them a glance—he didn't even want to ask what they'd talked about—and then returned to staring out at Central City, like everyone else was doing.
This was his home. He'd seen it wracked by the devastation of the particle accelerator, twice, the effects as clear nine months later as they were moments after. He'd seen it torn half to shreds by the singularity. He'd seen it set upon by metahuman after metahuman, Weather Wizard to Black Siren, Reverse Flash to Zoom.
But even Barry had never seen anything like this.
They set out. Walking rather than running; silent rather than cocky. Toward S.T.A.R. Labs, where everything had begun and now, everything had to end.
There was enough time, therefore, especially for one with a speedster's senses, to take in the sight of Central City more thoroughly broken than it had ever been before. There was nobody on the streets—most of the city had holed up in their homes, afraid to venture outside for fear of the loopholes that fragmented the city.
The loopholes were everywhere. Holes ripped straight through the fabric of spacetime. Breaches to Starling, gaps into yesterday. The abandoned streets were filled with the noise of a thousand other places and times, all ringing hollowly into here and now.
Barry felt the weight of the chaos this world had become settling in on him. Blame Eobard, yes—but when it came down to it, Barry was the one who'd created this hell of a timeline. He'd been the one to fashion Central City into this—this flashpoint of the fire that was set to consume all reality.
He cast his eyes heavenward, hoping for a miracle.
The glance upward did nothing to reassure him.
The skies were red.
A/N: The long-awaited return of Eobard Thawne, and finally name-dropping Flashpoint!
One chapter left. It should be up on Saturday if all goes well. If any of the time travel talk didn't make sense in this chapter, hit me up and I'll be glad to talk more about it.
