Summary: The question isn't so much when this story started. There are so many beginnings that by now the ones who'd remember the truth no longer exist anyway.
Erased, rewritten, overwritten, deleted.
The question has become where this story will end.
(The younger Eobard looked at the older one, wearing a face not their own and sporting a broken connection to the Speed Force and sitting in a wheelchair that he did - in fact - actually need to use some of the time, and found him wanting. "What could you possibly have that's worth becoming you?"
And the older Eobard, who sometimes called himself Harrison Wells, tilted his head to the side and catching the glare of the light on his glasses just right. Which was, admittedly, a bit intriguing in and of itself since Eobard - the younger - hadn't realized the anime glasses glare was something that could happen in real life. "What do I have you don't?" he asked, echoing the younger's question with a mocking laugh. "Character development.")
Notes: I have no idea what I'm doing. Absolutely none.
I'm gonna keep doing it anyway.
Spiral
This story began with a young man some centuries away in the future. Intellectually smarter than his peers and even his parents, none of whom ever really bothered to understand him.
Didn't want to understand him. To his parents he was an obligation, an heir, a continuation of their great family line. To his peers he was the disruption of the grading curve, the socially awkward pest, the guy who didn't know when to shut up, didn't understand that no one cared if he was wrong or right. He wasn't a person to them - to any of them - and he was smart enough to know that, to know it wasn't going to change.
But there began the start of a pattern. He tried to change it anyway. And failed.
So, not unlike the many other children across history in his position, he imagined himself a better life. He imagined his greatest hero as a kid not unlike himself. Too smart for his own good and ostracized for it. Except they'd be friends. Eobard and the Flash.
Of course, his obsession with a myth, a story based on rumor and legend and certainly not historical fact is just another mark against him. Another reason his detractors used to paint him as strange and weird and other, despite not really being any of those things at all.
But myth and rumor and legends all have to start somewhere. Ordinary history twisted beyond recognition with something factual nestled at its heart.
At the start of this story we have this young man, Eobard, who is too smart for his own good and very, very tired of being disliked for simply existing and obsessed with a past that might never have been real but smart enough to prove it must have been, once upon a time. Genius enough to recreate a myth in his lab and learn to run faster than the speed of sound while still being lonely enough to think of only one person in all of time and space that he wanted to share that discovery with.
There are, of course, many paths this story could have taken.
(He runs back in time and learns there was never any Flash. He was wrong, his detractors were right. Except there's Eobard and he could be the Flash, couldn't he?)
(He arrives in the past and learns the Flash is himself and its a disappointment because he's still alone. So terribly alone.)
(His loneliness echoes into the past before he even gets there and finds root in the imagination of another troubled young man who might've very well befriended Eobard when they were children, if not for the centuries between them. Destiny fashions this man into the Flash, into the nameless hero that Eobard worshiped. But he didn't ask for this power and didn't ask to be alone and its not the hopeful young man new to his powers that Eobard meets. It's one who is stressed and tired and given up. He isn't interested in making time for Eobard and Eobard learns why the cliché 'never meet your heroes' persists for millennia. He goes home, disappointed, and gives up.)
(Or he doesn't just give up, but tries to stop himself from going back in time in the first place. But he only succeeds in tainting the experiment and connecting to the Negative Speed Force, which he'd never dreamed existed. Doesn't know what he's done yet. Doesn't realize just how much the story just changed. Because now disappointment is a dangerous thing.)
(He's dismissed by his hero and something snaps. He's never going to get the positive attention he dreams of and craves and aches for the lack. But he knows how to garner another sort of attention and if that's all that he's allowed then he might as well embrace it.)
But this is just one of the ways the story could have started. There are so many beginnings and most have been forgotten. Or worse.
Erased. Rewritten. Overwritten. Deleted.
Some say time is a spiral, always taking the same basic shape - telling the same basic story - and for all that the story grows bigger (elaborated as new details slip into place) it is still the same basic story in the end.
(We'll get back to that other young man eventually. He's important, so don't forget him. But this is Eobard Thawne's story. At least, until it isn't any longer.)
Rewind, go further back in time (further into Eobard's future) and he makes himself an enemy of the Flash. Fast forward, a little bit into the future (a little further back in Eobard's past) and his first meeting with the Flash is no longer mere disappointment. It's a disaster.
Cause before effect.
The story evolves.
It's only a matter of time before a time traveler meets themselves traveling along different points of the same path, looking across from one side of the spiral to the other (one looking up and the other down, though neither knows it quite yet) and the story changes again.
Eobard meets himself traveling one night in Central City, sometime in the mid 2030s. There's something about that decade - and the preceding one - that calls to him in particular. Though he's been up and down the whole century more than a few times.
So, honestly, this was bound to happen eventually.
He's going one way and his younger self is running the other.
They stop and look at each other. Assessing danger because they're both far enough down the road they're on (not the literal one, but the metaphorical one that's really just life itself) to realize they're not automatically their own friend.
Eobard sees someone younger and inexperienced. Slower. Not a threat. He wonders what his younger self sees.
"Any mistakes you want to fix?" the younger one asks. Its a taunt.
Eobard ignores it. Keeps running.
"Any mistakes you want to fix?"
The question he asked the future him sticks in Eobard's mind. And there are mistakes. So many of them.
So by the time he's the older Eobard and he hears his younger self ask the question, he has too many answers to give.
"I wish I'd killed the Flash when I had the chance and he was too young to stop me." It's a flippant response because he's too tired to explain that he doesn't know why he's still trying and doesn't want to sound pathetic, admitting that he wishes he'd just go home. Because he has nothing worth going home to so what does it matter if he lets himself stay trapped in this loop forever.
Of course... the younger Eobard doesn't know any of this. All he knows is that his self-mocking question just received a very... interesting answer.
He goes back in time and fails to kill the Flash.
An older version of the Flash whisks the child off to safety and Eobard looks up. Sees himself in the mirror, Henry Allen unconscious on the floor and Nora Allen cowering in front of him and...
He doesn't recognize himself.
He leaves. Runs back to his time period and rips the Speed Force from his body and whatever's left when that's over isn't the Reverse Flash anymore.
But that's not the end of the Reverse Flash's story. Because now Barry Allen grows up with a grudge against the man who threatened his mother. And the story changes. The history of the enmity between the Flash and the Reverse Flash grows deeper. The divide between one side of the spiral and the next grows wider.
Time marches on.
This time the Reverse Flash doesn't look up. Doesn't see himself in the mirror and hate what's reflected there. He just rages that his prey got away and he doesn't even remember grabbing the knife.
Nora Allen dies at the Reverse Flash's hands and that's when he sees the blood on his hands.
He's killed before, but the saying about blood stained hands has never been so literal before. Even when phasing his hands into another person's chest, they always came away clean.
Eobard freezes. Stares at the dead woman on the floor beneath him, and wonders when he became a monster.
He's arrested and goes to jail and the story changes. The history of the enmity between the Flash and the Reverse Flash grows deeper. The divide between one side of the spiral and the next grows wider.
The Flash tries to kill the Reverse Flash. And in turn the Reverse Flash tries to kill the Flash and murders his mother instead, running away to let Henry Allen take the blame.
(How much can a story change before it's not the same story anymore?)
Alternatively the story starts with a Force of Nature.
It's alive but has no purpose and when it wakes for the first time, the dream it sees is someone else's.
A dream about pervading loneliness and the end of which is the Flash. A hero. The Speed Force's hero.
The Flash must exist for the loneliness to end. So the Flash exists. But which one?
There are several. Jay Garrick. Barry Allen. Wally West. And so many more. Each picking up the mantle where the last one left off.
Their stories diverge after a time, becoming too complicated to remain a single spiral. The multiverse splits and warps and rewrites itself. Not unlike time itself. The Speed Force honestly has no idea what its doing. It's just trying to stop being lonely.
It doesn't even know where the loneliness comes from anymore.
But Barry Allen is the one who makes it feel less lonely. So maybe that's why it's Barry Allen whom the Reverse Flash fixates on. He's not just any Reverse Flash - he's Barry Allen's Reverse Flash.
Or is it more like Barry Allen is the Reverse Flash's Flash? Certainly that's how Eobard sees things.
(Once upon a time the Speed Force claims that Barry Allen's creation as the Flash woke it up. But an alternate beginning that no one considers is that the Speed Force waking up recreated Barry Allen as the Flash. That somewhere in the future was a lonely young man, desperate to be loved but not sure he believes anyone ever could, who tries to access the Speed Force. The ripples spread out through time and the idea of the Flash is created. And where there is an idea, there is a story.)
The Speed Force isn't human. Doesn't have a human's understanding of morality or ethics. Doesn't understand concepts like compassion. But the Speed Force quickly comes to understand that stories are powerful.
All we are in the end are stories.
Eobard Thawne renames himself Harrison Wells, stealing the identity of a man he murders out of necessity. Or so he tells himself.
(Lies, much like the truth, are merely stories. If one tells it often enough, a lie can supplant the truth and become reality. The story changes, time marches on.)
He meets himself, along the side of a road. The elder with dark hair and another man's blue eyes. The younger with blond hair, but the blue eyes are the same for all they're not yet stolen.
They stare at each other as the younger one figures out who he's really looking at.
He's not impressed. "Any mistakes you want to fix?"
They're legion by now.
The older one laughs even though it's not funny in the slightest. "I wish I'd gone home when I still could."
So the younger one decides that's where he'll go once he's killed the Flash once and for all.
The story changes and Eobard's quest to not just regain his speed, but to go home consumes him.
He's in a wheelchair when a familiar red blur takes an interest in him along the side of the road.
(They're always headed in opposite directions but moving forward along the same path. Never at a crossroads. Eobard never considers the implications of that, but perhaps he ought to.)
It takes a minute for the younger Eobard to figure out who he's really looking at. The older one remembers this moment, though... he doesn't remember the wheelchair.
Once recognition set in, the younger Eobard narrowed his eyes at the older one, wearing a face not their own and sporting a broken connection to the Speed Force and sitting in a wheelchair that he did - in fact - actually need to use some of the time, and found him wanting. And, for once, the question changed. "What could you possibly have that's worth becoming you?"
And the older Eobard, who sometimes called himself Harrison Wells, tilted his head to the side and catching the glare of the light on his glasses just right. Which was, admittedly, a bit intriguing in and of itself since Eobard - the younger - hadn't realized the anime glasses glare was something that could happen in real life.
But while the younger Eobard found the elder one lacking, so too did the older of the two find his predecessor wanting.
What did he have now that he didn't have then? The reverse of the question had all too many answers. But there were even more things that, inevitably, stayed the same.
Loneliness can't cure itself. It's a hard won lesson that Eobard knows will be his destruction. He's too invested in his quest to go home to give up, but Cisco and Caitlin and even the hated Barry Allen had shown him that if things had been different - if he had been different - then maybe loneliness didn't have to be all there was.
But for the Reverse Flash, loneliness and the darkness born of it were all he had left. His past was mostly erased and rewritten, his future likely overwritten and deleted.
On this fool's errand, Eobard Thawne was the fool. But at least he finally understood that truth.
"What do I have you don't?" he asked, echoing the younger's question with a mocking laugh. "Character development."
(When the younger Eobard is the elder, sitting in that wheelchair and dreaming of a home that never existed in this timeline, he thinks not of fools errands, but of stories and myths and legends. How each retelling changes the narrative until an old story becomes something new.
"What do I have you don't?" he asked, echoing the words of the Eobard who came before. His answer is different. "My story is yet untold."
Untold, perhaps, but the ending was the same.)
Once upon a time there was a little boy named Barry Allen, whose mother was murdered.
He learns who, eventually. He never learns why.
(It isn't helped that, in truth, by this time Eobard Thawne doesn't know why. If he ever did.)
Barry grows up with his best friend Iris and makes new friends along the way. He becomes the Flash and saves the city and the world and the multiverse. The story changes around him and he even rewrites it a few times himself. Which, in hindsight, was perhaps not a great idea.
This is the story everyone always thinks is the most important. The story of the fastest man alive and his great capacity for love. A story running counterpoint to Eobard's, about loneliness and overcoming it. Finding happiness and treasuring it for what it is. A transitory state, with no permanence.
It's a story about what happens to loneliness when it's met with compassion. And it can be a gift, for those willing to share it.
(This is the story put on hold. His story is important, but in some ways... his story is still Eobard's story.)
The Reverse Flash runs into the past to kill Barry Allen. It's a deliberate act of malice and desperation. An act that always begins and ends with Eobard writing his own destruction. (Be it Eobard's death or Eddie's, it makes no difference. A story once told can ignore it's origin, but cannot erase it. Not entirely. It merely spirals further away from the start.)
In turn, Barry Allen runs into the future as an accident. And this is an act of desperation as well. But then, an act of time travel is always an act of desperation, one way or another. And where Eobard deliberately sought out the child Barry Allen on purpose, Barry Allen stumbles across the child Eobard Thawne by accident.
(What if Eobard Thawne's imaginary friend was real? What then? What happens when the stories in our head rewrites the reality around us?)
Barry Allen chases away the bullies and learns the name of the child he just saved.
"Why did you help me? No one else ever bothers. They say if I weren't so arrogant I wouldn't deserve it, but I'm not trying to be arrogant. I just know the answers they don't want to hear." Eobard watches Barry warily. "I'm always alone in the end."
"You don't deserve to be alone," Barry tells him. Because Barry remembers what it was like to feel lonely. To be the outcast and afraid. It's a transitory state of being, but it can feel like that's how life will always be when in the midst of it. "I promise you, you don't deserve to be hurt or lonely or afraid. I'm here to help you, Eobard. That's what friends are for."
No one's ever told Eobard that before. He's never known what it felt like to be on the receiving end of compassion.
And, for some, compassion can't be given if its never been received. Because how can you show others something you've never seen yourself?
(The Reverse Flash tries to kill Barry Allen and fails. In turn, the Flash defeats (even kills) the Reverse Flash over and over and over until there's no story left to tell. But Barry Allen saves Eobard Thawne and what becomes of loneliness in the face of compassion? A new story begins.
Of course, it's also true, from another point of view, that there are no new stories under the sun.)
Notes: I still have no idea where this came from and it's so weird...
But I kind of like it anyway.