Nightwing Josh - The truth? In an early draft, Laurel was replaced by the Black Widow, but then I figured that wouldn't work out and changed it last second. Didn't notice I left that description in there.
The Watcher eyed the heroes as they all stared at the newspaper article.
"Knowing too much about your future has consequences on the timeline on its own." The Watcher narrated as Barry took a step forward. "But sometimes knowing your destiny is what causes that destiny to occur."
"Flash Vanished in Crisis?" Bobby asked in shock.
"During an epic street battle with the Reverse Flash, our city's own Scarlet Speedster disappeared in an explosion of light?" Barry read what the article was saying.
"The city's Scarlet Spider had also not been sighted since his confrontation with the villain known as Cadaverous." Peter read the next part of the paper.
"Barry. Look at the date." Caitlin said as she eyed the date this was released.
April 25, 2024
"Wait...so we're all thinking the same thing, right?" Bobby asked the group.
"That the newspaper is from...the future?" Crystal asked in shock.
"That would mean whoever imposter Wells is would also be from the future," Cisco commented as he looked at the Spider-Man and Flash picture on the newspaper. "I have to say, I am digging the brighter red on the suits. And those white matching emblems." Then he started to become afraid and question everything. "Wait. Suppose we now change both of your suits. Would that mean we got the idea from this picture? That would mean we're living in a causal nexus. This is so trippy."
"Not as trippy as the name on the byline," Caitlin commented as she looked at it.
BY: MARY JANE WATSON-PARKER
"Mary Jane Watson...Parker?" Peter asked in shock, looking back to MJ who had a look of shock on her face as well.
"Mazel tov?" Cisco didn't know exactly what to say here regarding that information.
"Hebrew." A sudden voice called, scaring the entire group. "Ancient language of the Jewish people."
"Nope!" Cisco cried in anger, pointing to the ceiling. "No! What the hell was that?"
"Who's there?" Barry asked.
That's when Gideon showed herself in a giant hologram of her face. "Good evening, Barry Allen."
"Okay, that's a new one," Peter commented.
"You know who I am?" Barry asked the hologram.
"Of course, Barry Allen, director of Central City Police, CSI Division," Gideon informed Barry.
Barry was shocked to hear that and looked between his friends. "Director?"
"Guess you're due for a promotion." Harry joked.
"Harry Osborn." Gideon greeted the child. "Owner and savior of OsCorp. Partner of STAR Labs and STARK Industries."
"Partner?" Harry was shocked to hear.
"That's something to look forward to." Peter joked.
"Peter Allen." Gideon greeted him. "Also known as Spider-Man. Leader of-"
"Wait, what are you?" Mary Jane finally found her voice again.
"I am Gideon, an interactive artificial consciousness," Gideon explains to them.
"An artificial intelligence?" Peter was shocked to hear. "This just got cooler."
"You know Dr. Wells?" Barry asked the AI.
"Yes."
Then it came time to the bigger question. "Do you know who he really is?"
"I don't understand the question." She tells them and they saw she knows just as much about his true identity as they do.
"Okay, what is he doing here? What is he planning?" Barry asks Gideon.
Gideon then became a full human holographic being. "To kill you."
That shocked everyone as they wondered why Wells would want to kill Barry. After everything that he has done to keep Barry alive, his ultimate plan was to kill the Flash?"
Cisco's phone goes off and he checks it. "Wells is in the building,"
"How do you know?" Mary Jane asks her while Barry and Peter take in the new information they were just told.
"I put a tracker on his wheelchair. Which, if we are wrong about him and he is actually paralyzed, I am going to hell for that." Cisco explains and sees he's in the cortex. "Ask questions faster!"
"Why did he kill Nora Allen?" Barry asks Gideon.
"Because he was angry that you escaped," Gideon explains to him and Cisco warns that Wells is on his way to the time vault.
"What does he want from me?" Barry wonders,
"For you to become the Flash," Gideon informed Barry.
"Is that why he let the accelerator explode?" Caitlin wonders. "So you could become the Flash?"
"Why?" Barry questions. "What's the reason?"
"Guys, we got to go. He's almost here!" Cisco warns the group.
"Hurry." Caitlin gestured for everyone to get out.
"Wait." Peter quickly stopped them and gestured to the AI. "How do we know Cortana won't tell Wells we were in here?"
"That would be all kinds of bad." Mary Jane commented.
"If I can get into its operating system, maybe I can disable its memory core," Cisco commented as he handed the device to Caitlin.
"Gideon, could you show us where your operating system is?" Barry asks the AI.
"Certainly," Gideon says as she opened an operation of the wall.
Except when she did, all they saw was a strange system that was more advanced than anything they'd ever seen.
Cisco ends up laughing and walking away. "Yeah, nope. That's not gonna happen."
"Okay, what are we gonna do?" Harry asked them.
"Gideon, do you mind just...not telling Dr. Wells we were here?" Peter asked the AI, going for a pleading approach.
"Of course. I am happy to accept any command given to me by you." Gideon assured him.
"Okay, great, time to go!" Mary Jane stated, trying to drag Peter out.
"Wait, why?" Peter quickly asked Gideon.
"Because...you are my co-creator," Gideon explains, shocking everyone. "Barry Allen and Peter Allen are my creators."
But none of them had the time to process that as Wells was coming and they needed to go. Grabbing everyone, Barry sped them out of the Time Vault and made it down the hall before Wells could make it.
They make it to Joe's place and fill him in on what they found out. They filled him, May, and Eddie on what they did and what they discovered.
"Really? For five very smart people, that was really stupid." Joe states to them. "What if Wells has caught you in that..."
"Time Vault." Cisco quickly named it.
"Thank you," Joe replied.
"Okay, I know we've seen a lot this past year, but time travel?" Eddie asks, not believing it.
"I did it," Barry confesses, thinking back to when he traveled back a day during the Sinister Six incident. "Or I will do it."
"Excuse me?" Eddie asks, not understanding.
"One of the two speedsters in Barry's House the night his mother was killed was Barry," Cisco explains to him.
"Which means that in the future, Barry will eventually travel back to that night while battling the Reverse Flash." Peter finishes Cisco's thought.
"Actually, I wasn't talking about that," Barry says, thinking it's time they all knew the truth. "I kind of already time traveled. By accident. I was running to stop a giant inferno from hitting the city."
"When did this happen?" May asks.
"It was a few days before Cisco started getting the dreams," Barry explains to them and gestured to Cisco.
"Oh, those dreams where Wells uses his super shedding hand to shred apart my heart?" Cisco asks him and that puts mental images into the others they didn't want.
"What if those dreams were actually memories?" Barry questions them. "What if that day, Cisco found out that Wells is the Reverse Flash and then Wells killed him? But when I ran back a day, stopping that event from happening."
"If it never happened, then how is it that Cisco remembers it happening?" Mary Jane asks and Joe agrees to wonder the same thing.
"Finally, someone else not following," Joe commented, having the same question.
"I think the important thing here is that he does remember. I think I've got a really bad idea." Barry tells them and they know they're gonna go along with whatever he says.
"We have to access Cisco's memories somehow. Somewhere in his subconscious could hold the key to everything." Barry explains the plan. "This could be the key to getting our dad out of prison. We're gonna have Wells confess to killing our mother."
"Okay, but how on earth do you plan on achieving that?" Harry asks, not even knowing where to start on that.
Despite Peter's comment on how hard it would be, it actually turned out to be barely an inconvenience to create it. They managed to make a device in less than a night to help them.
"Okay, that was a lot quicker than I figured," Harry commented as he looked at the glasses.
"So this will allow Cisco to see into his dream?" Barry asks them while working on it.
"I got the idea from a journal article on lucid dream therapy. They think it can be used to help people suffering from PTSD." Caitlin explains to him.
"Traumatized, stressed? Check and check." Cisco states that he is both of those things as of now.
"The theory is that it will allow people to objectively enter their dreams and face their fears. Still working on the talking part." Caitlin explains.
"Are you sure this isn't gonna like destroy his brain?" Bobby wonders, not entirely on board with this.
"The amount of electricity required to trigger lucid dreaming is harmless. Probably." Caitlin tells him, trying to ease his fear when Wells comes in.
"Who's going to be lucid dreaming?" Wells asks them and they have to quickly come up with an excuse.
"With all of the metahumans in Central City, people have been seeing strange things, things they can't understand. And it's really just a matter of time before psychological issues develop." Caitlin tells him and Wells moves to look over the glasses.
"And lucid dreaming will help the doctors better understand their fears. Intriguing. Of course, you still need to guide the patient from the outside. When we dream, the middle brain lights up with electrical activity, whereas the higher brain remains dormant." Wells offers while working on the computers and shows them what he means. "Once we find a way to make both parts of the brain active, then it's just a matter of finding the frequency that will stimulate the language center. Then the dreamer could speak to the outside world."
"I would try a frequency of 45 hertz to start." Wells offers to them and leaves them.
"Thank you, Dr. Wells," Caitlin said.
"Always here to help, Caitlin," Wells said as he strolled off.
Peter looked over to Mary Jane and noticed she hasn't looked him in the eye lately. "You okay?"
"Yeah." Mary Jane said, still not looking him in the eye.
"MJ, you're not even looking me in the eyes," Peter informed her.
"Just...what I saw in that vault..." Mary Jane admitted what she was worried about. "Things between us are cool, but when I saw we're supposed to end up together...something happened. It's like I-I froze."
Peter could see why she was weirded out by it. "Yeah, I get it. I was confused when I saw it, too. But hey, at least your journalist career takes off."
Mary Jane laughed at that, knowing that was something to look forward to. "Yeah, you're right."
"And hey, just because that newspaper said it's supposed to happen doesn't mean it needs to happen," Peter assures her. "I mean, I'm open to the idea, but..."
"Down the line." Mary Jane finished his thought.
"Way down the line," Peter confirmed with her. "Long way down."
"Years down the line." Mary Jane agreed.
"And if things have worked out between us that long, we'll talk," Peter promises her.
"Deal." Mary Jane agreed with a smile.
They take everything to the prescient, so Wells doesn't walk in on them doing it. Peter and his friends went home as they had to get to school and couldn't stay out even for this.
"Okay, can we go over this one more time?" Cisco asks them, even though they went over it at least a dozen different times.
"You put the glasses on, fall asleep, start dreaming. Not exactly that difficult, man." Barry states to his friend.
"Yeah, except I'm pretty sure I die in this dream," Cisco replies to them. "I mean, is this like Inception or Dreamscape?"
Joe then walked over and handed over a cup of milk. "Here. Drink this."
"What am I? Twelve?" Cisco asked him.
"Just drink it," Joe tells him.
"The glasses are emitting a low-level delta wave which should help you fall asleep," Caitlin tells him while placing the glasses on him.
Cisco lies down and as he's talking about how it's difficult for him to go to sleep, he imminently passes out mid-sentence.
"Oh, so that's how you get him to shut up." Joe jokes as he laughs.
"He's entering REM. It's working." Caitlin tells them and they're shocked to hear this
"Cisco, you hear us?" Barry asked his friend. "You're dreaming."
"Guys, this is mad freaky," Cisco states while looking around the labs in his dreams.
"Okay, where are you?" Barry's voice asks him.
"I'm in STAR Labs. It feels so real." Cisco commented as he was approaching the trap.
"What are you doing?" Caitlin asks him.
"I'm heading towards the trap. I think Wells tampered with the trap. I need to check." Cisco tells them while grabbing the computers to do the work. "Okay, now I'm running tests on the containment systems. All the supercapacitors were still fully charged. There is no reason Reverse Flash should have escaped."
Just then, everything is being booted up and he sees that the Reverse Flash is in the cell.
"My god. The Reverse Flash was just a hologram. He tricked us." Cisco tells them when the elevator shows up.
"Hello, Cisco." Wells greets him and Cisco starts freaking out.
"My name is Eobard Thawne," Wells tells Cisco in the dream.
"Eobard Thawne," Cisco says and they hear that.
"Thawne? Like Eddie?" Joe asks him.
"You killed Nora Allen," Cisco says as Wells closes down Cisco's laptop.
"It was never my intention," Wells confesses to him.
"What's happening?" Barry's voice asks Cisco.
"He's confessing. He didn't want to kill her. He was trying to kill you, Barry." Cisco tells him
A terrible dinging started, and Caitlin whipped towards Cisco's vitals. "His blood pressure is 200 and his heart rate is 147. Guys, he's losing higher brain function." She lurched over to her friend's side and grabbed his hand. "Cisco, you're going to be ok. It's just a dream, you're gonna be ok."
"His hand! It's vibrating. He's gonna kill me!" Cisco cried, and the beeping ratcheted up another notch.
"Oh my gosh, he's going to have a stroke," Caitlin said.
"Alright, get him out of there!" Barry yelled.
"Help me. Help me, please!" Cisco pleaded. His entire body was trembling.
"HELP ME!" Cisco let out a terrible scream and flew upright.
He tore the glasses off of his face, and sat there, shaking and panting for a moment. They started to calm him down whilst Barry was taking on eBay he was being told.
"My mom. This was my fault." Barry says in shock as Joe tried to comfort him when Wells calls him.
"What's going on?" Barry asks and gets told there's a fire and races off.
They come up with a plan for Wells to once again confess to Nora's murder. So, they go to the bunker and show Eddie and the kids the Reverse Flash hologram.
"So, Wells set up a fake showdown with a fake opponent who was never really here?" Eddie asks them.
"Points for creativity," Peter said sarcastically.
"He figured if we saw them in the same room together it would prove that he wasn't the Reverse," Cisco explains to them.
"This all just keeps getting crazier and crazier." Eddie states.
"What I've been telling myself ever since that stupid accelerator exploded," Bobby commented with a sigh.
"I just talked to Dr. Wells, he's attending a lecture downtown, and won't be back for a few hours," Caitlin tells the team as she gets off the elevator.
"Okay, Cisco, when he gets here, you need to be working on the trap, so he sees you set off the hologram," Barry explains to the team the plan. "Once he sees Cisco found out, he'll confess to everything."
"We sure this is a good idea?" Mary Jane asks. "I mean, I'm the new girl in all of this, but wouldn't this end in Cisco getting a fist to the heart?"
"Yes. But this time I'll make sure I don't get Temple of Doomed." Cisco says and walks up inside the trap. "I originally designed this to keep a speedster from escaping. But I reversed it, now it won't let one in."
Cisco then asked for them to test it. Barry decides to have a go and speeds up to the trap and is thrown back.
"You okay?" Caitlin asked as she ran over to him.
"I'm good," Barry promised.
"Good," Caitlin said as she smacked him over the head. "You idiot!"
After Caitlin had successfully gotten Wells down to the Bunker, she leaned forward and whispered into the mic. "Here he comes." She grabbed her computer and yanked it open, almost at Barry's speed, pulling up the feed from the Bunker. Mary Jane and May were somewhere safe and took Harry with them so that they could be out of the way and safe.
Dr. Wells walked into the room as he was clapping. "Hello, Cisco. You really are quite clever."
"You're him." Cisco played the part alarmingly well. "The Reverse Flash. Joe was right this whole time, wasn't he."
"Good old Joe." Wells closed Cisco's computer. "Joe West had his doubts all along- Even from that first night in the hospital. Joe knew something wasn't right. Cops. Be it now as they will be in a hundred years."
"You killed Barry's mother." Cisco breathed. "I wanna know why."
"It was never my intention to kill Nora. But, from my perspective, she was already dead. It just happened sooner than it was supposed to." Wells walked towards Cisco with his hand raised, and Cisco fell over the steps of their trap, trying to get away.
Something wasn't right. Wells hadn't actually admitted anything. Caitlin got shakily to her feet. There was something off here. Something that reminded her of... what? What did it remind her of?
"You're not going to get away with this," Cisco growled.
"I'm not going to get away with it?" Wells asked, that same evil smile plastered on his face.
Cisco activated the shield, and Wells stopped moving, looking around with a sardonic chuckle. "Oh, you're smart. You're smart, Cisco." Then he did something that nearly caused all their hearts to stop.
He stepped through the shield.
"But you're not that smart."
But before he had any way to attempt an attack, everyone attacked at once. Peter stepped forward and shot out a web. Bobby shot out a blast of ice. Joe pulled his gun and shot at Wells.
Barry shouts and speeds to stop the bullets and grabs all of them in time. But the icicle was impossible to catch as he runs into the trap and the icicle kills Wells. The icicle hits him in the chest, and he collapses to the ground.
Cisco..." Caitlin reached her friend and grasped his arm. "Are you ok?"
"Yeah..." Cisco said. "But I'm never ever gonna sleep, ever again. But yeah, I'm ok."
"Oh my god!" Bobby said in fear. "I killed him."
"You saved Cisco's life," Peter assured his friend.
"He didn't confess," Barry says as he gets back up and sees that there's no way to get his dad out of prison.
Caitlin looked in horror down at the floor, where the body of Dr. Wells was lying. She crouched down beside him and felt his pulse. "He's dead." She breathed.
"He didn't confess." Barry's voice was thick with tears and pain. "Joe, this was it. My dad's gonna be in prison forever."
But they watched as Wells' body suddenly began to shift and reveal to be the body of Chameleon.
"Hey, uh, whoa!" Cisco pointed to the body on the floor. "What the hell?"
"I told you this before. I am always one step ahead... Flash." The voice of Harrison Wells (or is it Eobard Thawne now?) fills the labs. "Allow me to reintroduce you to Dimitri Smerdyakov, and his incredible ability to transform into any person he sees. I knew that ability would come in handy. I did not expect it to be this soon, though. Especially back then when I hired him."
"That was you?!" Peter asked as he looked up at the speakers. "You killed my parents?"
"I will be honest; I did not know that they were your parents. Nor did I know that you were Allen's brother at the time, Peter. It just happened to be quite the coincidence."
"You used him!" Barry shouts, happy to finally say everything he kept inside for the past few weeks. "Like you used all of us!"
"It didn't take much convincing. Just the simple promise of his freedom." Wells tells them.
"You ruined my life! All of our lives!" Barry tells Wells.
"We stood by you after everything that happened," Caitlin states, joining in on the rant.
"I can see how this must be difficult for you to understand, but trust me, your lives now are so much better because of what I've done," Wells states since he changed everything over the past 15 years since he killed their mother.
"You don't have to hide anymore; we know you're not Harrison Wells," Joe states to him. "Just tell us who you are."
"A confession will get you nowhere. You've seen who I am. You knew what I can do." Wells tells them, loving every second of this.
"You want to kill me, go ahead. I'm not gonna fight you. But just tell the police what you did. Let my dad out of prison." Barry pleads with the psychopath. "Let them know what you did!"
"Hey, I didn't agree to that." Peter quickly cooled his brother down.
"I don't want to kill you, Barry," Wells admits to him. "I need you. And...I also did not anticipate as difficult as the past 15 years have been for me, how much I would come to love working with you and the accidental creation of the Amazing Spider-Man. And yet, this doesn't change what needs to happen. We will face each other again."
As they were talking, Cisco suddenly got a ping on his phone. "He's in the time vault!"
As soon as he heard that, Barry quickly sped off to find him.
When Barry gets there, all he saw was the wheelchair was there, but the Reverse Flash suit was gone, and the hologram is showing footage of everything from Joe's house all but May's household.
"It was all a setup." Barry realizes, Wells was always watching, he always knew. "We thought we set a trap for him, but he set a trap for us."
And Iris was the only one that isn't being protected by a hero.
Iris and Eddie are strolling across a bridge and Eddie is planning on proposing when the Reverse Flash comes speeding in and kidnaps him. Barry comes speeding up to see them vanish.
"Hey, Iris. It's okay." Barry reassured her, phasing his voice.
"He took Eddie," Iris tells him.
"I promise I'll find him, okay?" Barry says and promises to bring him back and speeds off.
But right before he left, Iris felt a jolt of electricity. Something she only felt once in the hospital with Barry.
"Barry?"
Meanwhile, in an abandoned OsCorp facility, Norman Osborn was walking back and forth, arguing with himself.
"Stay away from me," Norman demanded the Goblin.
"But why? You have seen his face! Your own son now sees you for nothing more than a monster." Goblin informed his alter ego. "I'm your only friend, Norman."
"And what are you doing?" Norman asked, looking at the vial he's synthesized.
"We haven't used that formula in this timeline," Goblin remembered the formula that finally put an end to Spider-Man. "But...I've improved upon it!"
"To do what?" Norman asks.
"Make it stronger. Faster. Enough to finally put that Spider-Man in the ground, without losing ourselves." Goblin explains as he chugged it down. "HahahahahahahahahhahahahahshahahaHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!"
The Watcher eyes the madman as he had started to transform into the monster inside. "The final battle is approaching. But who will reign victorious? This timeline is too fragile. Either side has a chance to win."