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AN: Timeline-wise, this starts in the last couple of minutes of "Betrayal" in the first season of the show, as Oliver and Diggle were talking in the Arrowcave, but things will swiftly diverge from that…

AN 2: Apologies for the exposition, but I think we can all agree that Barry can't exactly visit Oliver when the man's still calling himself 'the Hood' with no prior experience with metahumans and expect a warm welcome right off the bat, so there was some important ground to cover before they can get down to business.

Run and Repeat

Listening to his mother's voice talking about 'the usual threats' and something about the Queen's Gambit as he sat in his base, Oliver still wasn't sure how to process any of this.

"It's definitely her voice, Diggle," he conceded to his friend. "I just… I can't believe it's her."

"We all have blind spots when it comes to family," his bodyguard/friend observed.

"Yeah," Oliver said bitterly. "Laurel's almost got her killed tonight. Vanch never would have known about her connection to me if Lance hadn't lied to her."

"I guess the lesson here is blind trust can be dangerous."

Oliver chose not to respond to that, and instead played the tape again; he wasn't sure what he was expecting to gain from a repeat, but it was as though he had to be sure…

"I made it clear to him persuasively that his plans endangered the undertaking," his mother's voice said once again. "I didn't have to make the usual threats."

"What's the Undertaking?" Diggle said as Oliver turned off the recorder while that unidentified male voice said 'Excellent'.

"I don't know," Oliver replied. "But with all this talk about threats-"

"Whoa!" an unfamiliar voice said. Spinning around, Oliver was shocked to find a stranger standing nonchalantly in the middle of the lair, actually grinning at his surroundings before he looked at the two men. "Seriously, you used to have it like this? I knew you started out-"

Oliver lunged towards the man, aiming to grab him in a chokehold, but the man dodged him with a speed that Oliver hadn't seen in any of the people who'd trained him over the last five years.

"Right, you don't know me yet," the man said, looking at Oliver with a nonchalant grin that only made Oliver more concerned. "Look, Oliver-"

"How did you find this place?" Oliver glared at the young man, already contemplating the best way to get his hands on a weapon.

"Because I was brought here next year to save your life."

"You were- next year?" Diggle looked at the man in confusion. "What the Hell are you-?"

"OK, like I said, you don't know me yet, so let's take this from the top," the young man said, still grinning around at Oliver and Diggle as if they were old friends. "My name's Barry Allen; I'll be the Flash in a couple of years."

"The Flash?" Oliver looked the man over with a sceptical expression. "Shouldn't you have a longer coat?"

"A long- OK, I have to admit, I never heard that one before," the man who was apparently Barry Allen replied with a chuckle. "But seriously-"

There was a sudden flare of wind and lightning, and suddenly Oliver and Diggle were holding bottles of beer in their hands, the young man standing in front of them with his arms folded and a serious expression on his face.

"I thought you'd appreciate something to drink once you've heard what I'm about to tell you," the young man said solemnly.

"Which is?" Oliver asked, taking care to conceal his fear. Whoever and whatever this man was, whatever he was been capable of, he hadn't done anything to hurt Oliver or Diggle yet, so the best move would be to play along with whatever he had to tell them until Oliver could act.

"In a few months' time, Malcolm Merlyn is going to destroy the Glades as part of the Undertaking."

Oliver was prepared for many things, but hearing the term he'd only just learned about associated with a man he'd never even considered as a suspect to anything wrong with the city was such a shock that he almost dropped the bottle he was holding.

"Malcolm Merlyn?" Diggle said, voicing their shared incredulity at that news. "How do you… and what's with-?"

"Long story short, you'll meet me for the first time next year," Allen explained with a nonchalant smile, as though this whole story wasn't the most insane thing Oliver had ever heard. "I helped you all track down this superstrong guy using this drug- I think you called it Mirakuru-"

"Mirakuru?" Oliver repeated, putting the beer down and moving to grab Allen's arms, only for the young man to once again demonstrate a disturbing amount of speed as he sidestepped Oliver's attack and held up his hands.

"OK, I know you told me to be alert, but there's a difference between being alert and being paranoid, you know?" Allen said, still grinning at him even if his expression had shifted to reassuring rather than casual. "I'm not here to hurt you, Oliver; I'm trying to warn you-"

"About something that you say is only going to happen months in the future?"

"And what the hell is 'mirakuru'?" Diggle asked, his gaze shifting from Allen to Oliver. "And how do you know about it?"

"…It was some kind of super-soldier drug the Japanese were working on during the Second World War," Oliver said, deciding that he might as well satisfy Diggle's curiosity since Allen was still looking at him in a disturbingly nonchalant manner but showed no apparent interest in harming either of them yet. "There were stocks of it on a marooned ship I found on the island; I had to stop a scientist from finding a way to recreate it and sell it on to the highest bidder…"

He pushed back those dark memories of how he had lost Slade and Sara and looked resolutely at Allen. "But how do you know about it?"

"Like I told you, a guy shows up in this city using that drug next year and I helped you analyse it-"

"And why would we just… let you do that?" Diggle asked, looking at Allen in honest confusion. "Seriously, what's with all this crap about time travel?"

"OK, this is where it gets complicated-"

"Because it wasn't already?" Oliver countered in exasperation.

"My mom was murdered when I was eight years old."

That was enough for even Oliver to fall silent, looking at their visitor with a new sense of regret. Losing his father when the Gambit sank had been hard enough, but he'd been an adult; the idea that this young man had suffered such a loss at such a young age…

"I'm sorry," Diggle said, looking sympathetically at Allen. "Who did it?"

"Everyone thought that my dad did it, but it was actually… well, it was another speedster," Allen continued.

"Another?" Oliver repeated, mind scrambling to get this situation straight. "There's someone else like you out there?"

"And a couple of months ago- from my perspective, anyway- that other speedster showed up in my town and nearly beat me to death," Allen explained. "My team and I have since worked out… well, we found evidence that suggests that when my mom was killed, I was there as well, in the sense that I'm going to go back to that night at some point in my future and try to stop it."

"Hold on; you're suggesting that this other speedster went back in time to… kill your mom?" Diggle held up a hand in confusion. "And you followed him to stop it and just… missed?"

"Like I said, the part involving my future hasn't happened to me yet, so I don't know what happened exactly-"

"And you still haven't explained how any of this is possible," Oliver put in. "Where did you get these… powers… of yours?"

"Basically, in about a year's time, an accident will happen that resulted in me being struck by lightning and exposed to various chemicals and other-dimensional energies that gave me superspeed and created a whole wave of other metahumans in the process."

"…Metahumans?" Oliver and Diggle repeated, after a glance at each other confirmed neither of them understood what they'd just been told.

"Humans with various unusual powers; we've encountered an… interesting range of abilities so far," Allen said, before he shook his head. "What's important right now is that in my time, which is two years from now, I was trying to stop a tidal wave from hitting Central City by basically running back and forth along the coastline to create a wall of wind to cancel it out before it hit. I'm not sure if it would have worked, but somehow, when I pushed myself that fast, I ended up… well, I ran back through time and ended up here."

"You… ran back through time," Diggle repeated, wishing he'd drunk enough beer that he didn't have to think about just how crazy his world was becoming. "That's a thing now?"

"I spoke with a physicist who speculated that it could be possible for me to move so fast that I could generate enough kinetic energy to… basically, I made a hole in the space-time continuum and ran to another period of history."

"OK…" Oliver nodded, before he decided to just accept that and move on. "You did that and then decided to just drop into my lair because we allegedly know each other in the future?"

"Like I said, I met you in the future shortly before I even got my powers, and I came here to warn you about the Undertaking."

"Which involves Malcolm Merlyn?" Oliver said, making his scepticism clear as he looked at Allen. "Why would he be part of all of this?"

"Because he's… I think I was told you call him 'the Dark Archer'?"

The only reason Oliver didn't drop his beer at that statement was his training having helped him to prepare for almost anything.

The notion that Malcolm Merlyn was even capable of being as dangerous as the Dark Archer… he knew that Tommy and his father had some problems, but there was a difference between having problems and being capable of fighting on that level…

"And what is the 'Undertaking'?" Diggle added, once again beating Oliver to the bigger question he should be asking right now.

"Basically he's been working with your mom and a bunch of other people over the last few years with the goal of destroying the Glades with a couple of earthquake machines."

Oliver could only stare in silence at that revelation, struck by the notion that he had just been told this many impossible things in such short notice.

He'd experienced some strange encounters during his five years away, but the notion that Malcolm Merlyn was capable of… that there was even such a thing as…

And the idea that his mother was a part of all this… he'd had some concerns about Diggle's discoveries, but he'd been telling himself that she was just going along with it all to keep Thea safe; the idea that she was capable of just agreeing to something that terrible…

"I need to think," he said, putting down the beer and heading for the door, pausing only to look back at Allen with his hardest possible glare. "Don't leave Diggle's side."

"Where else am I going to go right now?" Allen called after him as Oliver walked up the stairs and left the lair. Relieved that Tommy had already left for the night, Oliver grabbed his civilian helmet, got on his motorbike, and tore off into the night, knowing even as he set off that he would never be able to 'outrace' the dark thoughts buzzing through his mind.

As much as he wanted to dismiss Barry Allen as some nutcase, the mere fact that he knew about mirakuru meant that Oliver couldn't just disbelieve everything he was telling them… but what did that mean for everything Allen had revealed about his mother and Malcolm's apparent plans?