Chapter 104: Zoom

"How?" was the first thing to come out of Barry's mouth.

Hunter's eyes were half-lidded, a smug smile stretched across his lips. Together, the expression they made conveyed a distinct message: 'I've won, and you've only now realized it.' It didn't matter what happened from here on out, Hunter was trying to tell him. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

Barry wanted to punch him in the face, if only just to prove him wrong.

"Time travel," his enemy finally said, slow and deliberate. He didn't elaborate further, as if those two words were the only clue Barry needed.

He was right.

It was instant, the connections made. Barry was brilliant, had always been brilliant, because he would not be allowed to live if he were anything less. Time travel. Of course. "You made a temporal duplicate," Barry concluded, though with an accusing tone. "All it would take is traveling back one second, if that, and there's two of you running around. The same thoughts, the same feelings—"

"—the same powers," Hunter finished, quirking his lips. "Us speedsters call them time remnants, by the way."

"That's how you were able to fake your death as 'Jay Garrick,'" Barry continued, as if Hunter hadn't spoken. "You made a time remnant and had that one masquerade as the Flash of Earth-2. Then, when the time came, you murdered him. Just like how the time remnant you made killed himself to frame me for his murder."

"Correct on all accounts," Hunter praised him. "You always were my most brilliant student. Then again, the only reason you were in my class to begin with was to keep an eye on me, wasn't it?"

Barry narrowed his eyes, and didn't answer.

Hunter leaned forward, that stupid smirk still on his face. "I didn't get as far as I did by being stupid and ignorant. You're good, Barry, and you hid it well, but when it comes down to it, you and I are the same. I knew you were suspicious of me, just like how you knew there was something off about me."

"We are not the same," Barry hissed.

"Oh really?" Hunter didn't sound particularly convinced, judging by how he raised his eyebrow. "I beg to differ, Barry. Same reason for running, same tragic background," he bared his teeth, "same killing instinct."

"Tch. Way to generalize it, Zolomon. You and I both know it's not as simple as that."

"So you say, Allen. So you say." Hunter leaned his right arm against the bars of the cage. "Do you wanna know why I did what I did? Why I killed 'Jay Garrick'? Why I framed you?"

Barry said nothing.

Hunter leaned forward even further. "Because I felt like it," he said gleefully, his voice barely above a whisper, and yet it seemed to echo in the near-silent room. "I gave the people of my earth hope so I could rip it away from them. I framed you for my murder for kicks. And now, I'm going to take over your earth because my own is getting a little boring for my tastes, and I figured 'Hey, why not take over this earth, too?'"

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why this earth?" Barry clarified. "Why come after us? Come after me?"

Hunter shrugged. "Well, for one, I didn't want you to have all the fun." Both of Barry's eyebrows raised up that, but Hunter continued on regardless. "You and your Justice League gave so much hope to this world — I wasn't going to let you have the pleasure of crushing it before I could."

"You really think we did all this because we wanted to make people miserable?" Barry asked, allowing incredulity to color his tone.

"Of course you did," Hunter responded, similarly incredulous for an entirely different reason. "It's what I did, isn't it? But that's not all there is to it. It's also because of you."

Barry blinked. "Because of me? I literally didn't know you existed until you showed up and broke my back!"

Hunter ignored him, continuing to speak. "See, Barry, I love speed. I love getting faster. It's a bit of an addiction for me, to be honest. And while the speed I gained was intoxicating, it just simply wasn't enough. I needed more. So, I went to the… artificial route."

"You made a drug," Barry instantly deduced.

"Velocity-9," Hunter confirmed. "It made me faster than I could ever dream of. Even allowed me to travel to other earths. But the effects… well, they were less than ideal."

"It was killing you," Barry stated more than questioned. "But of course it was. It was an untested speed drug, and you were the one who stupidly injected it into yourself just because you wanted to get faster."

For a moment, Hunter frowned, the first sign of weakness he had shown since the conversation started. But that frown was only there for a second, and that smug expression of his returned. "I needed a cure, you see. Another speedster's speed. I was originally going to use Jay Garrick, the real Jay Garrick, of Earth-3. But… I was beginning to have doubts about using him. He was just so old. So I went looking around different earths — and I saw you."

"You… you were fascinating. Unlike all the other speedsters I found. A killer like me, someone that could finally understand me." The supervillain almost sounded wistful. "I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to know you."

And here, he grew angry. It was almost unsettling. "But you were elusive too. Paranoid. It took me months to figure out your secret identity, and by that point, it was almost too late. I needed someone's speed to keep living, and you were never going to give it to me. So I used Jay's, and it worked, thankfully."

"Yay, you got what you wanted," Barry commented dryly, gritting his teeth. "Why did you still come after me, then?"

"Because I didn't put in all that work to figure it out just for it all to come to nothing!" Hunter suddenly shouted, causing everyone else in the room except Barry to jump. "It couldn't be for nothing. I needed to make something of it, and, well, I was getting bored on Earth-2, like I told you. So I thought — why not terrorize this earth too? It would be the perfect revenge for all the trouble you caused me."

Barry flared his nostrils, inhaling deeply. "So you're telling me that you caused all this trouble — making clones of yourself to kill, murdering all those innocent people, kidnapping my friends and replacing them with your cronies, breaking my fucking back… because you were pissed that it wasn't my speed you used to cure yourself?"

Hunter flared out his arms, looking completely unrepentant. "Guilty as charged."

That was it. Barry lost it.

"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!" He screamed into the other speedster's face. "That is some of the pettiest bullshit I have ever fucking heard in my entire life, and I pal around with the sister of Talia al Ghul! You screw over my entire world just because you didn't get to screw me over? You fucking asshole!" Barry started throwing even more expletives in the other man's face, except now they were in Arabic, which more than showed how angry he was.

Surprisingly, Hunter wasn't delighted in the loss of composure. Instead, he looked distinctly unamused. "I don't want to hear that coming from you! You and I are the same—"

"We are not the fucking same, Zolomon," Barry cut him off before he could say more, a death glare plain on his face.

"You became a killer like me!" Hunter insisted. "After your mother was murdered—"

"—And my father was framed," Barry pointed out. "Unlike your daddy, who shot lead into your mother's face, right before your eyes."

Hunter grabbed the bars of the cage harshly. "The difference didn't mean much in the end, did it?" he pointed out, grinning.

Barry stared at him.

And then started laughing.

Hunter froze, as did everyone else, the spectators of a conversation that would haunt them all for years to come. Barry laughed and laughed, and there was no mirth to it at all. It was a bitter sound, filled with an endless amount of pain.

Suddenly, he stopped, and he glared at Hunter Zolomon with a tranquil fury that was far more intimidating than anything else the other man had displayed throughout the last several minutes. "You think it was that tragedy alone that made me what I am today?" Barry whispered, ominously quiet. "You think it was one thing that turned me into this?"

It took Hunter all of his self-control not to flinch.

"Get real," Barry told him, voice completely flat and derisive. "It took years of tragedy to make me what I am. Years of pain I had to endure, year of scars I was forced to bear, years and years of swallowing my tears as I tried to make it through to the next day. All those crimes I committed, all the blood on my hands, it'll all never wash away. I'll live with it and eventually, I'm sure I'll die for it. And whatever hell that's waiting for me afterward, it'll be nothing less than what I deserve."

"But," and here Barry glared into his enemy's eyes, refusing to break the connection, "if there's one consolation prize to all of it, it's that not even the worst of what I lived through made me as depraved a monster as you. I only ever killed because I had to, Hunter Zolomon. You only ever killed because you could."

Barry could see it. The moment his opponent snapped. The well of fury and anger that Hunter kept at a simmer, boiling over and completely and utterly consuming him. A second later, the front of his suit was grabbed and pulled forward, slamming his face against the vertical bars of his cage. Barry barely reacted to the pain, nor to the vibrating hand that was poised to pierce his chest.

"Do it," Barry tauntingly dared his rival. "Death is an old friend. I'm sure she's been waiting for me for a long time. And whatever she has in store for me, it'll be far kinder than whatever fate she's decided for you."

Hunter glowered down at him, at his defiant look. After a tense moment, however, his hand stopped vibrating, and he let go of Barry's suit. Barry stepped away from the bars of the cage again, adopting a more neutral expression to meet his captor's glare. "What's your plan, Zoom?" Barry asked, tone now curious. "Why do you want to re-bathe this city in dark matter?"

The enemy speedster eyed him for a moment, then smirked. "Like I told you before, Flash. I want your world." And then he shrugged. "But I'm not stupid. If it was just you, I'd do it myself. But no, there's still your little Justice League I need to contend with. Together, you might actually be able to stop me. So I needed some help of my own."

Barry tightened his fists. "You're planning an invasion." But of course. Because the Dominators weren't enough, were they?

"I have an army already," Hunter continued, implicitly confirming Barry's claim, "But alas, it's on Earth-2."

"Then why not just breach them over? You and fake-Cisco over there are perfectly capable of it."

Hunter snorted. "And bottleneck their arrival? Have you and your Justice League discover us before we can bring more than a couple over and take us down? Please, Flash. Don't take me for a fool."

"Speed drug."

"Shut up," Hunter growled darkly. Barry scowled at him but complied. Once he was sure the younger man was staying silent, Hunter took a deep breath and continued with the explanation. "I knew that if this was going to work, my army needed multiple points of entry. So the plan is this — bathe the city in another wave of dark matter. Weaken the dimensional barrier enough so multiple stable breaches can be formed using a number of the breach device whose design I stole from the Harrison Wells of my earth, and have the hundreds of my metahuman army arrive all at once. Once they're all here, not even you and your Justice League will be able to stop us."

"You wanna bet?" Barry challenged him.

"Yeah, I would," Hunter goaded back. "I've already won, Flash. You just haven't accepted it yet. But… maybe this will help you understand."

He snapped his fingers, and the deferent Reverb lifted his arm and opened a breach behind him. Hunter sped inside it, and quickly returned with a television set, which he placed directly in front of Barry's cell. "When I stole Jay Garrick's speed, he was still alive. I was originally planning on keeping him in my lair as a trophy, like what I'm going to do to you. Then, I got bored again, and I had a wonderful idea."

"I doubt our ideas of 'wonderful' are one and the same, Hunter."

Hunter adopted a small smile. "Oh, I wouldn't say that. Anyway, I had an idea. A thought. A question, really. What would it take to break a speedster? After all, with our super-healing and stronger constitutions, pain doesn't really apply to us the same way it does to other people, even normal metahumans. So, I decided to… experiment."

"You tortured him," Barry spat out.

The older man shrugged. "Tomato, Tomato. Not much of a difference in the end." Hunter stepped forward, his smile widening back into that familiar, psychotic grin of his. "It was for science, Barry. I hope you can understand that."

Barry stayed stubbornly silent.

"I recorded the sessions for posterity. Would you like to watch?" Of course, it really wasn't a question. Barry was going to watch, even if Hunter had to force his eyes open himself.

The former assassin had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Torture. Yay. Barry had done more than his fair share of torture, and while he wasn't proud of it, it did mean that whatever Hunter was going to show him wasn't new. He'd probably be sick at the end, but—

The television turned on.

Henry Allen's face appeared on it.

Barry paled.

"Oh, did I forget to mention?" Hunter 'casually' commented. "Jay also has an Earth-1 doppelganger. Henry Allen. I believe you know him. Right, Barry Allen?"

Barry didn't hear him. Or he did, but he didn't care. Despite his mind desperately urging him away, he couldn't help but keep his gaze on the screen, watching as the mirror image of his father was dragged onto a chair by his enemy. As said enemy began vibrating a finger and dashing it against the skin, leaving marks in its wake. As he began injecting pain-inducing drugs, causing Jay to scream. As he—as he—

That's not dad. Barry had to remind himself. That's not dad.

It was supposed to be comforting.

It didn't work.

The video continued on and on, as Jay Garrick was slowly made into a shell of his former self. His screams grew hoarse, his eyes dull. The fight gradually left him, and as the video slowed to a stop, he stopped with the threats and began begging for death. And then… and then…

Zoom stopped with the torture. He nursed Jay Garrick to health. Gave him food, water. Made him grateful for his captor's mercy. And just as Jay Garrick was becoming himself again, just as he was beginning to live again—

He died. Vibrating hand through the heart, right from the back.

Barry felt his own heart die with him, and silently cursed his eidetic memory, not for the first time. This, all of this — it would never be leaving him. Ever. He would never be able to look his father in the face without being reminded of how a monster from another world tortured his doppelganger. Barry…

"I already tried out everything I could think of," Hunter explained, as if he were talking about the weather, "And it was fun for a while but soon it got tedious. So I killed him."

Barry has never hated anyone more in his entire life.

"I'm going to kill you," Barry said. It wasn't some vow, some curse. It was said matter-of-factly, as if it was going to happen, no matter what.

But Hunter Zolomon didn't view it that way. All he heard was a promise his enemy would never be able to keep. "You're welcome to try. Of course, you won't be getting the chance any time soon, Flash. You're not leaving here for a long time."

The final word said, he put his mask back on and glanced at Reverb and Rupture. They, like Dante, had wisely not once interjected into the conversation, trying to keep their heads out of it. The Flash was Zoom's enemy, no one else's. They were lucky Zoom hadn't tried to kill both of them for threatening harm on an opponent only Zoom was allowed to play around with.

"It's time for us to go." It was an order, not a statement.

Nodding, Reverb opened another breach, and allowed all three of them to exit. Zoom looked at Barry one last time, his black, soulless eyes meeting Barry's furious green. Then he turned back around, and disappeared into the portal, which soon faded into nothingness.

The moment they were gone, Barry closed his eyes, and collapsed to his knees.

He could hear someone saddling up next to him, next to the bars that separated the cells. Dante. Had to be. Barry had almost forgotten about him in the wake of his confrontation with Zoom.

Dante didn't say anything. He didn't know what to say, because he barely knew Barry at all. Nothing he could say would ever touch him the way someone close to him would.

But he was the only other person here. So he reached out, and placed a comforting hand on Barry's shoulder.

Barry was grateful. It was the only thing stopping him from breaking down completely.

This conversation covered the entire chapter. Amazing. I was looking forward to writing this for a while but… I think it's better than I could ever hope for.

You know why Zoom is my favorite Flash villain? It's because he's evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. Every other villain on the Flash, even Thawne, has some ulterior motive. Something that makes them even vaguely sympathetic. Something that makes them seem, well, good.

Not Zoom. Zoom is a monster, and he openly embraces it. He's a horrible person, and it's going to be so, so satisfying when he's finally defeated. I told you I would make him Barry's most hated enemy, even above Thawne, and I think I succeeded.

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