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AN: This chapter starts just as Barry is trying to stop the tsunami Mark Mardon was prepared to unleash on Central City in "Out of Time", but after that… well, it gets interesting.
Run & Repeat
As he ran along the coastline, Barry could only pray that this plan was going to work; he had come so far since he woke up from that coma months ago, but this was far and away the biggest thing he'd ever had to do.
The Undertaking in Starling City had been devastating enough even after the Hood/Arrow/Oliver had managed to stop one of those earthquake machine things that Merlyn was using; if a wave that big hit Central City… if all those people died because he wasn't fast enough… if it killed Iris after what she'd just told him…
He wouldn't let himself focus on what could happen; he had to stop this.
As he ran back and forth along the coastline, heading from one end of the city to the other, moving so fast that he was amazed he wasn't seeing himself coming the other way as some kind of 'speed mirage', Barry couldn't believe that Mardon could be this fixated. He could just about understand the guy being angry about his brother's death, but summoning a wave that big when Iris had to be his primary target…
As he registered the updraft created by his speed force the worst of the water back, Barry just kept pushing himself harder and harder, faster and faster, fighting to keep the race going for as long as that wave threatened the city… Mardon had to give up eventually; there was no way it could be easy for him to maintain something that big for this length of time…
As Barry let out a defiant roar, he put on another new burst of speed, and suddenly felt as though he'd just run through something that had appeared in front of him. For a moment Barry just kept running, but then he realised that there was someone standing in his path. Barry quickly halted his forward momentum before he could fully acknowledge that something like that should be impossible, but then he felt something seem to shift over his body, and looked down to see…
Barry couldn't understand what he was looking at; his Flash suit was literally fading away as he looked at himself, leaving him in casual clothing that was definitely not the green shirt and dark trousers he'd been wearing when he'd accompanied Iris to the coastline.
The unexplained wardrobe change would have been bizarre enough on its own, but when he turned his attention to his surroundings, Barry was left feeling even more confused when he realised that he was standing in the living room of the apartment he'd owned before the particle accelerator explosion. Joe had sold this flat and put most of his stuff in storage when Barry was being treated at S.T.A.R. Labs, and the place he'd found when he woke up had been a fairly basic residence before he had to move in with Joe because the new building wasn't private enough to hide his activities as the Flash…
"What the Hell?" Barry said, looking at the apartment in confusion before heading for a window. It had been a while since he'd even bothered looking up his old neighbourhood, but even if the new resident might have decorated this apartment the same way he had by sheer coincidence, he definitely remembered that the building opposite had suffered damage in the particle accelerator explosion… and now it looked fine?
"Oh God," he said, suddenly remembering everything he'd discussed with Professor Stein just last week. Pulling his phone out of his pocket- an older model he'd lost in the explosion- Barry pulled up the calendar and stared at the date in shock.
12 February 2013.
Two years in the past, Barry thought, staring numbly at the phone. Oh my God…
His immediate thought was to run to S.T.A.R. Labs for help, but he quickly stopped that train of thought. He trusted Caitlin, Cisco and Doctor Wells, but right now none of them even knew who he was, and he suddenly had all kinds of dark thoughts running through his mind about what could happen if he told them about the future. Professor Stein's theory about time-travel at least assured him that what had just happened to him was theoretically possible, but he'd spent the last few nights catching up on all kinds of time-travel films and TV shows that might give him some ideas about how that would work, and he'd seen enough to know that doing that might be a risk.
Barry hated even the idea of being so selfish that he'd let the particle accelerator explosion happen just to make sure he still became the Flash, but if he stopped it under these circumstances he suddenly had this horrible image of being caught in some kind of warped grandfather paradox-style time loop where he stopped the explosion, couldn't go back to stop it without his powers, got his powers and went back to stop it, had no way to stop it so it ended up happening, and so on and so on…
"No," he told himself solemnly; as much as he hated the idea, doing anything that could directly interfere with his own life as the Flash was too great a risk. Saving his mother should be safe enough if/when he got the chance to do that, as he couldn't see his parents moving away from Central City and his family's friendship with the Wests should still leave him with an interest in solving crimes even if he wouldn't have his more personal motives. Still, even if he couldn't do anything about the biggest event in his life right now, there had to be something he could-
The Undertaking.
As soon as the idea came to him, Barry didn't know why he hadn't thought of it the moment he realised time travel was possible.
He wasn't sure about trying to go back again to save his mother from the Reverse Flash right now, but if he was already here… with a couple of months to go until everything went down with Malcolm Merlyn's plans…
He recognised that Oliver had done the best he could to stop the devastation of the Glades in his first year, but the loss of those lives still weighed heavily on his friend; if Barry could somehow find a way to help him, he had to at least try.
Miles away, the man known to the public as Harrison Wells watched in confusion as one of the video monitors in his private lab displayed Barry Allen vanish from his apartment in a burst of crackling energy.
"How did that happen…?" the temporally-displaced scientist mused to himself. "And more importantly, where did Mr Allen go…?"
