"I'm still iffy on whether bowling is an actual sport," Linda quipped in response to Barry's suggestion that she write a piece on the bowling alley they dat on a date. It was one of Barry's favorite places in the world, but the owner had fallen on financial hardship lately and was thinking of selling it. He hated the thought that he might lose the place where he had made so many great memories.
"I wonder the same," Eddie said in response to Linda's words. It had been a random coincidence that they had run into him and Iris and that they'd ended up joining them, but Barry was glad that it had happened. He was having fun, and Linda at least seemed to be enjoying herself.
"Well, sport or hobby, I am still better than you," Iris teased, reaching up, apparently unthinkingly, to wipe a bit of ketchup from the corner of Barry's mouth. He saw Linda's expression darken at the gesture, and he wondered what was wrong.
"All right, well, I'm serious," he said, shaking it off, resolving to talk to her about it later. "A little bit of press and the lanes could be designated as, like, a landmark or something."
"Yeah," Iris agreed.
"Oh, Eddie," Barry said, noticing that the screen above their heads was displaying his name. "You're up, man."
"Oh," Eddie said, not particularly enthusiastically. All the fun seemed to have suddenly gone out of the evening for him. "Right."
"Woo!" Iris exclaimed as he got up from his chair, giving him a playful shove forward. "Go get 'em babe!" Barry resisted the urge to roll his eyes at her antics, and before long he had shoved the matter of whatever was going on with Linda to the back of his mind. There'd be plenty of time to deal with it later, and right now he was having too much fun to let it interfere.
Before too long, however, Barry's night was cut short by reports of strange goings on at the morgue. He made his excuses to Linda and raced off, conferring with Cisco via comms on the way and eventually deciding not to call Kara for this one. He was pretty sure he could handle it on his own.
Then something strange happened. As he ran, he saw a flash of blue-white light out of the corner of his eye, and he looked to his left to see a copy of himself running along beside him, easily keeping pace with him, shimmering and flickering a mirage. He skidded to a sudden halt in the middle of a busy street and looked around frantically, but the copy or mirage or whateve it was had disappeared the moment he'd stopped running. Convinced that he must have been seeing things, Barry shook his head to clear it and continued on his way to the morgue.
"What's going on?" Cisco asked when he arrived. "What do you see?"
"A dead body," Barry replied distractedly, staring at the motionless form of the coroner lying on the floor a short distance away.
"Barry, you're in a morgue," Cisco pointed out in an exasperated tone. "You're going to have to be a little more specific than that."
"It's the coroner," Barry clarified. "He's dead."
A short time later, when the official call about the crime scene came in from the CCPD, Barry returned to the crime scene and set immediately to the work of his regular day job. Preoccupied, his mind wrapped up in work and the problem with Linda and what he'd seen- or thought he'd seen while out as the Flash, he crossed the room without watching where he was going and ran straight into Captain Singh, spilling the coffee in his hand all over him.
"Allen, my fiance just bought me this!" Singh exclaimed irritably, rather futiley attempting to wipe latte foam off of his admittedly rather nice coat.
"Yeah," Barry said, because he didn't know what else to say, grimacing awkardly. "I'm so sorry, Cap-"
"Just help Joe figure out who did this!" Singh interjected, gesturing in Joe's direction before walking off in a huff.
"Mhmm," Barry mumbled, nodding, though Singh was already out of earshot.
"What's with all the water?" Joe asked as he approached him. "Did the sprinkler system go off or something?"
"No, I checked all the sprinklers," Barry replied. "They're all intact. But look at this." He crouched down and picked up a piece of ice from the floor with a forceps, holding it up for Joe to see.
"What is that?" he asked. "Ice?" Barry nodded.
"Mmhmm," he confirmed. "The coroner has multiple impact bruises on his torso, all the size of a tennis ball." He pulled up the coroner's shirt to Joe the bruises in question.
"Judging by the amount of ice and water on the ground," he went on, "I'm guessing he was killed by hail."
"Hail?" Joe asked incredulously. "In here?"
"Yeah," Barry replied.
"Do you think this was Snart?" Joe asked.
"No, his cold gun couldn't have done this," Barry replied, shaking his head.
"Joe, we got something," Eddie announced, cutting their conversation short. He was holding an audio recorder in one hand. "The coroner's office just installed an automated dictation system. Listen to this." He hit a button on the recorder, and they heard the coroner's voice beg, "Please. No more."
"I'll stop when you tell me," a second voice growled.
"Stop" the coroner pleaded.
"Who killed him?" the second voice demanded. "I want a name."
"I know that voice," Joe said. "That's Mardon."
"Clyde Mardon is dead," Eddie said disbelievingly.
"It's not Clyde Mardon, it's his brother," Joe explained. "Mark."
"It was Detective West," the coroner said on the recording. "He shot him. Joe West killed your brother."
"He'll pay for what he did," Mardon promised, and then there was nothing but the crackling of ice and screaming for the rest of the recording.
"So Clyde Mardon has a brother?" Caitlin asked after Barry had filled the team in a while later. Kara wasn't present, as Barry still hadn't called her in. He just didn't think he'd reached a point where he needed her help yet.
"And both brothers survived the plane crash and then the dark matter from the particle accelerator explosion affected them both in virtually the same way," Wells said.
"Yeah, only Mark's powers seem to be a lot more precise," Barry put in. "To be able to control the weather like that? Indoors?"
"You'd have to be a weather wizard," Cisco said. "Oooh, I've been waiting since week one to use that one."
"So, I'm guessing you running around a twister in the opposite direction isn't going to do the trick this time." Joe said grimly. He addressed Barry, but it was Cisco who answered.
"I just remembered," he said, "during our run in with Mardon- Clyde Mardon- I was tinkering with something to help attract atmoshperic electrons."
"Like a grounding mechanism?" Barry asked.
"Yes," Cisco confirmed. "Because the only way that Mardon can control the weather weather is if he can tap into the atmosphere's natural electric circuit, and if we take away that circuit… clear skies."
"Singh's checking in," Joe said suddenly, showing Barry his phone. "I gotta go."
"Yeah, I'll meet you at the station," Barry said.
"Joe, we'll find Mardon," Wells told him as he headed for the door. "Don't worry."
"I'm not worried at all," Joe replied, and then he was gone.
"Well, he's taking being targeted by a revenge seeking metahuman rather well, I must say," Wells said. Glancing over at Barry, he added, "Don't worry, Barry. Joe will be fine, I promise."
"Yeah, no, I know," Barry replied. "I actually wanted to talk to you about something else." He'd decided that whatever he'd seen- or thought he'd seen- on the way to the morgue, Wells was the most likely person to be able to help him understand it. In response to Wells' questioning look, he went on, "Last night, on my way to the morgue, I saw something."
"What did you see?" Wells asked.
"I was running and turned and saw myself," Barry replied. "Or, I don't know, another Flash running beside me."
"Interesting," Wells said.
"Yeah," Barry agreed. "What do you think it was?"
"Could be an optical illusion," Wells replied. "A mirroring effect cause by wind shear and light. A speed mirage, if you will."
"It didn't seem like that," Barry said, shaking his head. "It was… he seemed… real."
"I'll tell you what," Wells said. "Let's focus on finding Mardon, and once he's safely contained in the pipeline, we'll investigate this." Barry nodded, and Wells wheeled himself away, off to attend to other matters.
Things proceeded as normal from that point out- normal police work, normal problems, normal life. Then, it all went wrong. As he was driving back to the police station with Joe after leaving it to get lunch, Mardon attacked them, and Barry barely managed to get them both out of the car before it was blown up by a lightning bolt. Captain Singh confined Joe to the precinct as a result of the attack- for his own protection, he said- and Barry had a hard time convincing him actually follow the captain's orders. Eventually, though, he manage- or thought he did, at least- and returned to STAR Labs to try and find Mardon before he could try anything else.
However, the situation with Mardon turned out to be the least of their problems. Iris asked Barry to meet her at Jitters, where she shared with him her suspicions that Wells had been involved in the disappearance of Simon Stagg. He wasn't sure he believed that Wells was capable of anything like what Iris was describing, but he passed what she'd told him on to Caitlin and Cisco all the same. Soon after, he got a call that Mardon was attacking the precinct, but while he arrived in time to stop his attack and chase him off, he was too late to stop him from putting Captain Singh in the hospital. The next thing he knew, Joe was running off Mardon himself, after extracting a promise from him that he would stay with Iris and keep her safe. Soon, however, the very thing that Barry had feared would happen came to pass- Mark Mardon took Joe prisoner. Barry went with Iris to the waterfront to meet Mardon, just as the person in question had told her to do if she ever wanted to see her father alive again. They arrived to find a massive storm brewing on the horizon, an enormous tidal wave bearing down on the city.
"Iris, you need to get out of here, okay?" Barry said urgently, grabbing her by the arm. "You need to get as far away from here as possible."
"I'm not leaving you!" Iris cried.
"Iris, please-" Barry started to say.
"Listen to me," Iris interjected. "Ever since the night you told me how you feel, I have not been able to stop thinking about you. At first, I was really mad, and then I realized that the reason I couldn't stop thinking about you was because I didn't want to." Barry caught his breath, smiling in spite of himself, in spite of the peril of the situation. This was everything he'd wanted to hear Iris say to him, but why now? Why did it have to happen at such a terrible time?
"I never stopped thinking about you," he told Iris in a murmur. He kissed her then, and tried not to think of it as a goodbye, tried to force the thought from his mind about how it was just like what Felicity had told him had happened when Oliver had gone off to fight Ra's Al Ghul, how he had told her that he loved her as a goodbye, because he hadn't been expecting to make it back. This wasn't that, he told himself. This wouldn't be that. He would stop this, and he would make it back.
Pulling away from Iris at last, he moved to stand beside her and immediately called Caitlin, determind to figure out how to stop what was coming.
"Caitlin," he said when she picked up.
"Barry, I need to talk to you," she said. "Doctor Wells, he's not-"
"Hey, there's no time for that right now, all right?" Barry interjected. "There's a tsunami heading for the city. How do I stop it?"
"Theoretically, if you can create a vortex barrier along the coastline, a wall of wind, that would be able to sap the tidal wave of its energy before it hits the city," Caitlin replied.
"By running back and forth," Barry said. "How fast?"
"I don't know if you can run that fast," Caitlin warned. All Barry knew was that he had to try.
"I'm so sorry," he said, hanging up the phone and turning to Iris. "I didn't want you to find out this way." In the next instant, he had his suit on, and Iris stared at him, smiling in wonderment.
"Go!" he shouted, and then he was running, up and down the coast, faster and faster and faster. Then, suddenly, there was a flash of blue- white light, and he was running alongside himself again. He skidded to a sudden stop and immediately heard and saw the same things he had the night before on his way to the morgue- the dogs barking at each other, the man spinning a sign, the woman screaming for a taxi.
"Oh boy," Barry muttered as it sunk in- somehow, he had traveled back in time to the previous day.