Hello, all! This and next week will be a couple of short chapters showing what Barry gets up to during the Year That Never Was. If you're curious about what other adventures he has, I highly recommend the BBC novel The Story of Martha. Actually, basically all the BBC novels happened in this universe offscreen.
Thanks to Zaphod77 for the interesting conversation about the Arrowverse laws of time travel.
Also, the "werewolf girl" bit is a shout-out to my good friend and unofficial beta Sparky She-Demon and her lovely Werewolves of Starling. Without any further ado...
"So I'm in the Arrowcave, trying out some archery, right?" Barry narrated to Martha as they pedaled a pair of bikes they'd liberated from a sporting goods store down a tree-lined pathway.
"But I missed the target completely, shot that little couch loveseat thing Felicity had over in the corner. And Oliver goes…"
At this point, Barry deepened his voice, doing his best imitation of the Arrow. "Barry Allen! You have failed! This! Settee!"
Martha cracked up, laughing. "So, did you have, like, a codename, while you were super-heroing?"
"Yeah, yeah, I was Scarlet Speedster. Not super original, but it kinda worked, you know?"
"Right."
"We had some pretty cool adventures," Barry reminisced. "The Undertaking, that thing with the werewolf girl, Huntress, bunch of copycat Hoods…Anyway, in the meantime, I went back to college, took some classes at Starling City University. Obviously, you know, I didn't want to be in Central City, less chance of running into my future self or anyone who knows him. Me. Whatever."
"Time travel tenses," Martha agreed with a shake of her head.
"The Doctor says quantum physics does't translate well into a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is."
She snorted. "That's the kind of thing he would say. So what did you study?"
He shrugged. "Physics, chemistry, and an archaeology class so I could look up what the Doctor's been up to."
"Makes sense," she nodded, smiling.
"I had this really great archaeology professor," Barry reminisced. "She just really knew her stuff. Everyone liked her. We had this little joke, actually, because she looked just like this other history professor, apparently…Song, her name was. Doctor River Song."
"You should look her up when all this is over."
"Yeah, yeah, it's just she said she was only there for the one semester, apparently. Anyway, uh, when did Percy Sheldrake say that cargo ship is leaving for Normandy?"
"Two hours."
A burst of wind sent leaves and dead branches whirling through the air.
"You won't be going anywhere," a voice growled. Standing right in front of them was a man in a yellow suit with a lightning bolt the color of dried blood emblazoned on his chest. His face was vibrating, but she could make out glowing red eyes and a demonic smirk. She'd never seen him before, but she'd heard about him from Barry. The man who had killed his mother.
Slowly, the speedster dismounted his bike, his whole body trembling with rage.
Martha looked over at him. Usually, Barry reminded her of Leo, his happy-go-lucky, adorkable, upbeat nature inspiring hope wherever and whenever they went. He was seldom short of a pop-culture reference or a sarcastic quip, and his bickering with the Doctor had lightened dozens of seemingly hopeless situations. Most of the time, she saw his speed as a fun gimmick or a useful ace card. Once in a while, though, she was reminded of the fact that her best friend could, in fact, be a very scary and dangerous person.
Lightning flickered between his eyes and over his body, and in a second, he'd stepped into his super suit. His face—what she could see of it—grew hard and cold, and if looks could kill, the other speedster would have been impaled a thousand times over on the spot.
"Get out of here," he ordered Martha. With a yell of rage, he threw himself at his enemy.
Martha Jones was no stranger to watching super-speed battles. She had seen Barry duel with a Garatron, a quadruped alien with super speed, on the cliffs of Draconia, and watched him train and spar with Max dozens of times. But never had she seen anything like this. For her, it lasted only seconds. She couldn't imagine how long it was for the two speedsters, each moving in a tornado of wind and lightning at hundreds of miles an hour, sending leaves and tree branches flying in every direction. But it ended abruptly with Barry's enemy shoving him against a tree, one hand pressing into his throat. Barry's left arm hung limp at his side, with what looked like a compound fracture, and a major bruise was forming on his cheek. The other speedster wasn't unharmed, either—he was heavily favoring his right leg, and he had a smear of blood on his chin, but his smug, almost demonic smile made it seem like these were trivial in comparison to finally having his foe at his mercy.
"Not bad," he gloated. "Not bad at all. But not fast enough to beat me. And then, once you're dead, the Master will send me home."
He pulled back his other hand, prepared to plunge it into Barry's heart. A dry, academic corner of Martha's brain considered what a hand vibrating at super-speed could do to the inside of someone's chest.
The rest of her brain, however, was busy finding the largest branch she could, slipping around behind the other speedster, and hitting him very hard with it. The branch broke (speedsters are more durable than normal folks, she reminded herself, you know that from working on Barry), but the Man In Yellow didn't look very good either, so she followed up her first strike with a punch to the neck. That did the trick, and she hit him once more for good measure.
"Thanks," Barry wheezed as soon as he could take a breath, resting one hand on his knees as he massaged his throat with the other.
"No problem," she responded. "What do we do with him now? We can't kill him…"
"No," Barry agreed, eyes narrowed. "Huh. Hmm…I'll be right back."
And before she could say anything, he'd grabbed the Man In Yellow and was gone.
Two and a half years before, on his eighteenth birthday, Kara and Clark had given Barry a present (well, technically, Kara's present had been in two parts, and the second part had involved a lot of ripped clothing). The part they'd collaborated on, however, had been a trip to the their super-awesome, super-secret Arctic base. They'd shown him around, registered his fingerprints, and introduced him to the hologram of Clark's biological father Jor-El, who was linked to Mr. Smith. Between the Xylok and Kryptonian databases, they'd proudly explained, there was very little information they couldn't get access to.
"What do you call this place?"
"The Fortress of Solitude."
Dragging his enemy by the ankle, Barry raced from the south of England to the Arctic, arriving in about five minutes. He pressed his hand to a patch of ice practically indistinguishable to the eye from any other patch of ice, and after a moment, it glowed green. A doorway slid open at his approach.
He'd been back to the Fortress a few times since, and every time, it took his breath away. A vaulted ice ceiling stretched high above. Statues of Lara Lor-Van and Jor-El, and Alura In-Ze and Zor-El, towered above, like icy versions of the Argonath statues. Several portals led from the main room into various other corridors. So far, Barry had seen the main and secondary control rooms, the zoo of Kryptonian beasts, training room, arboretum, guest rooms, and a hallway containing a series of armored suits like the ones the three of them wore.
"Hello Barry Allen."
He turned to wave at the hologram of a man in Kryptonian robes, wincing as his shoulder ached.
"Hey, Jor-El. Could you open up the Phantom Zone projector?"
"Of course."
Barry knelt and pulled down the cowl of his enemy, the man who had murdered his mother, who had once upon a time been responsible for his father spending a decade in prison, who had sworn vengeance for some unknown crime upon Barry himself. He looked into the semiconscious face of…
"Harrison Wells?"
"Harrison Wells?" Martha repeated. "Isn't he that tech guy?"
"Tech genius, more like," Barry corrected her. "He founded STAR Labs in Central City, came up with a dozen patents in half as many years. He…he was one of my childhood heroes."
"STAR Labs, right," Martha nodded. "So he's actually this, this other speedster?"
"I guess so," Barry frowned. "Jor-El said there was something weird about his genetic structure, like one set of DNA was overlaid over another."
He shook his head firmly. "He's in the Phantom Zone, now. And he'll stay there for good. In the meantime, we've got work to do."
Martha nodded.
"Then let's get to it."
So, yeah, Barry now knows his arch-enemy's identity, which is going to have no small impact on future events. For those worrying that Eobard will now be an easy victory, I urge you not to worry: He'll still be causing a fair amount more mischief in years to come, and no small amount of consternation for Barry. That being said, I will be going by Doctor Who rather than Arrowverse laws of time travel. What do I mean by that?
Spoilers! ;)
If you're wondering why Eobard isn't referred to as the Reverse-Flash, bear in mind Barry doesn't know the term, plus the only time they met, the timelines were so messed up he only has a vague memory of that night. Go back to Mother's Day if you need a reminder.
As always, please leave your questions, thoughts, and comments below; trolls will be ignored.
