"All right," Barry said, pulling down a sheet on his investigation board. "This is everything we know about Harrison Wells, which is admittedly not a lot."
"Didn't you read a whole book about him?" Joe asked, puzzled.
"Yeah," Barry confirmed. "Six hundred pages, and the big takeaway is that he's enigmatic."
"A speedster tried to kill you when you were a kid," Joe pointed out, unnecessarily. "Wells' machine turned you into a speedster. That's way too many coincidences for this old cop." Barry buried his face in his hands for a moment. After Mason Bridge had disappeared right after he'd started investigating Wells, he had been forced to accept that the latter was not all that he seemed, but the lack of information was making things difficult, to say nothing of the fact that some part of Barry kept fighting the idea that, after all Wells had done to help him, he could be anything but good.
"Do you think that he wanted me to become the Flash?" he asked, lifting his head to look at Joe once more.
"Everything he's done since the night you got struck by lightning- bringing you to STAR Labs, giving you the suit, training you- it's all been to keep you safe," Joe replied. Ordinarily that would have sounded like a point in Wells' favor, but Joe's tone of voice made it clear that he thought there was some ulterior motive at play.
"And to make me faster," Barry added. "Wells said once that he needed more speed from me." He paused for a moment, thinking, then asked "Why?"
"I don't know," Joe replied, shaking his head. "But he wants something from you, Barry. We just need to figure out what it is."
"Well, let's go get him," Barry said insistently, leaning forward in his chair. "Let's get some answers."
"We can't do that now, as much as we might want to," Joe cautioned.
"Joe, you had your suspicions about Wells from the beginning," Barry countered. "You thought he might be the man in yellow."
"Except the blood from your house didn't match him," Joe pointed out.
"All tight, so maybe he's not the Reverse Flash," Barry said, "but you think he knows what happened that night."
"Whatever Wells wants from you, it started fifteen years ago," Joe replied. "He's been patient. Scary patient. You have to listen to me on this- we need to be just as patient."
"Yeah," Barry mumbled in agreement, and rolled the sheet on his investigation board back up.
Suddenly, there came the sound of explosions, muffled by distance and the walls of the building. Barry ran to the window and saw plumes of smoke rising into the sky in the distance, in the space beyond the rows of buildings that bordered the precinct.
"Kara," he said, getting ahold of her on the phone as he turned away from the window and headed for the door of his lab. "We have a situation." He waited only long enough for her to respond, "I know. I'm on my way." before he was off.
Later, once they'd taken care of the bombs, which turned out to be floating down from the sky attached to miniature parachutes- thankfully with no casualties- they reconvened in STAR Labs after the perpetrator of the bombing revealed himself in a crazed video message that he broadcast all over the city- someone calling himself the Trickster, who as it turned out was a mere copycat of the original Trickster, a psychopath who had terrorized Central City twenty years ago. However, it seemed unlikely, at least for the moment, that the two Tricksters were working together- when Barry went with Joe to Iron Heights to talk to the original Trickster, he was so enraged by the very idea of the copycat that it seemed highly unlikely that he would have been willing to ally himself with him. Then, after dead ends in their investigation and another message from the copycat Trickster, the person in question set off a diversion to distract Barry, Kara, and the police while he broke the original Trickster out of Iron Heights. It was then that they all realized, too late, that the latter's outrage at the actions of the former had been nothing but an act. They'd been working together from the beginning.
When next they heard from them, it was via a clever subversion from Iris and Kara, who were both attending the mayor's fundraiser at City Hall for work and, by calling Joe and Barry, respectively, were able to get word of the Tricksters ransoming the guests at the fundraiser for the antidote to a poison they'd slipped them to them and the rest of the team at STAR Labs. Barry felt his heart against his ribcage with fear. Kara's Kryptonian physiology meant she was immune to Earthly toxins, but Iris had no such advantage. If he didn't act quickly, she could die. Thankfully, he wasn't lacking for speed.
Racing into City Hall moments later, he charged past the new Trickster and grabbed the first.
"Where's the antidote?" he demanded, slamming him against a wall. The Trickster smiled wickedly, and Barry found himself wishing that criminals here were as afraid of the Flash as the ones in Starling City were of the Arrow.
"It's where you'll be soon," the Trickster cackled. "Heaven!" At that moment, the second Trickster stepped forward and fit something around Barry's wrist.
"Are you familiar with the movie Speed?" the first Trickster went on. "Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock? See, you're the bus and that's the bomb. A kinetic bomb, actually, and if you go below 600 miles per hour, it'll explode. The same thing happens if you try to remove it." The bomb on Barry's wrist started beeping, and the Trickster added, "Oooh, it's active! Run, run, run, run!" With no other option, Barry turned and ran from the building.
"Cisco!" he shouted over his comm as he went.
"He wasn't lying," Cisco said immediately. "The thing's linked to a speedometer, and it will blow if you stop moving."
"Well, I can't run forever," Barry pointed out. There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then Wells spoke. "Barry, do you see any walls nearby?"
"Why?" Barry asked.
"Because I need you to run into one," Wells replied. "Or, more accurately, through one."
"What?" Barry heard Cisco and Caitlin exclaim in the background, but he was silent. Surely Wells would explain what he intended to happen here.
"If you vibrate at the natural frequency of air, your cells will be in a state of excitement that should allow you to phase right through that wall, leaving the bomb on the other side," Wells said after a moment.
"Should?" Barry asked worriedly, but it was too late. He'd already changed his trajectory, and a tanker truck parked in the street was in the distance, bearing down on him at impossible speed.
"You can do this," Wells reassured him. "I believe in you."
"I can't do it!" Barry cried, sure that he was about to run headlong into that tanker truck.
"Listen to me, Barry," Wells said. "Breathe. Breathe. Feel the air, feel that wind on your face. Feel the ground, your feet lifting you up, pushing you forward, and the lightning. Barry, feel the lightning. Feel its power, its electricity pumping through your veins, coursing through you, traveling to every nerve in your body like a shock. You're no longer you now. You're part of something greater. You're part of a speed force. It's yours. Now do it!" As Wells spoke, Barry felt a deep calm steal over him, and then he was running through the tanker truck, leaving the bomb to explode harmlessly behind him.
"Barry?" Caitlin asked in his comm.
"That felt weird," were the only words Barry could manage to get out in reply at first. Then, a moment later, he added, "I'm good," knowing that the team needed the reassurance. Finally, remembering that he still had work to do, he ran back to City Hall and administered the anitdote to the Tricksters' poison to the people gathered there, including Kara, though that last had mostly been for the sake of keeping up appearances.
Later, after the Tricksters had been apprehended, he met Joe and Eddie at his lab, still dressed in his suit. Revealing his identity to the latter, he helped Joe convince him to keep Iris from investigating Mason Bridge's disappearance, as such actions would likely cause her to become Wells' next target. However, that still left one last loose end to be tied up- the realization Barry had had about Wells, which, in all the activity of the last few hours, he hadn't gotten a chance to tell anyone about yet. That chance came during dinner at the West house later that night.
"Keeping her in the dark, it's for her protection," Joe warned Eddie once Iris had left the room, evidently sensing that he was feeling disagreeable about lying to her.
"That's debatable, and we will have that debate," Eddie replied, "but for now, what's our next move? How do we figure out what Wells is up to?"
"When Wells was talking me through phasing so I could get the Trickster's bomb off my wrist," Barry spoke up, seeing his opportunity to reveal what he'd realized, "the way he described my being the Flash, running, feel the wind and the power… it's like he was speaking from experience."
"What are you saying?" Joe asked.
"I don't know how, but he's the man in yellow," Barry answered. "Harrison Wells is the Reverse Flash."