Even as he said the words, Barry doubted himself. Without a doubt, Bivolo was the only one with the power to force anger onto somebody. At the same time, there was no way that Bivolo was a metahuman at this point in time.

Unless…

It was so obvious. The solution was so simple. Anyone who had taken sixth grade science technically had the answer. Unfortunately, until his body could recover enough to roll out of bed, there was nothing he could do about it. Even worse were the implications.

Joe's, "I will cut you," cop-voice broke his train of thought. "You were saying, Mr…?"

Barry spat out the first name that came to mind. He certainly wasn't going to say his real name. "Uhhhh...Oliver."

Joe gave him The Look. "Try again."

Barry shrugged unapologetically. He couldn't even go by his middle name, under the circumstances, and there was no amount of money in the world that could make him say Bartholomew. "Can I tell you the name I used on my fake I.D in college?"

The seemingly regular-sounding statement seemed to relax Henry at least a little bit. Him knowing what college was and admitting to breaking the rules ruled out alien on the list of possibilities regarding what he could be.

For a moment, Joe seemed torn. He couldn't decide what he wanted to question him on first. Finally he solved the internal debate by making a "by all means," gesture towards him.

"Wally was the name on the I.D. I didn't choose it," he said a bit defensively.

"Wally it is," said Henry, who was just glad to be making headway. "Better question. How-or why-did you fall out of a small lightning cloud above my table?"

Barry decided a very edited version of the truth was the best answer. "It was sort of an accident."

Seeing that broad questions were not going to work, Joe asked about the other thing he wanted to know about. "What do you know about this Bivolo character," he asked, pulling out a notebook.

Barry pushed down a small smile. Once a cop, always a cop. "Twenties, cropped light brown hair, brown eyes, usually wears glasses. Average height, skinny and carries around a light brown knapsack," he recited as Joe started scribbling. "He mainly targets banks, but doesn't exactly hesitate to use his..um..talents on anyone who tries to take him in."

Joe raised a single eyebrow. "Care to expand on your definition of the word talents?"

Barry winced. He had known that question would be coming. "I really don't think you would believe me."

Henry huffed a little bit. "Kid, if you want him to believe the impossible, you did a mighty fine job demonstrating that the impossible exists."

Feeling strong enough to sit up, Barry moved his back up against the headboard, feeling a little irrationally hurt when both men jumped at him moving. "Bivolo is a metahuman." Sensing the question before it came, Barry started again, unknowing echoing Joe from the future. "Metahumans are individuals with very powerful abilities. Bivolo, he can just look at somebody and force them go off on an angry rampage. He can force a gentle mother to pick up a gun to shoot at somebody, he can cause friends to engage in a fight to the death."

Joe just looked like he wanted to fold up this entire day and put it into a coffin.

Henry addressed the elephant that had suddenly popped up in the room. "Are you one of these...metahumans?"

The question gave Barry pause. He never cared when the term was applied to him by his friends at Star Labs, it was just a statement of fact. However, he had to wonder. The minute he said yes, he would be mentally placed in the category of, "not human," by two of the people that he valued most in the world. he knew that they were fine with it in the future, but would they be fine with it when it was somebody they didn't know?

The conflict on his face was all the answer that Joe needed.

And the look on both men's faces broke Barry's heart.

He knew that both men cared about him deeply in normal time. He had never harbored any doubts about it. Suddenly, however, the thing that made him more of who he was set him apart. To know that the knee-jerk reaction to his abilities was wariness and fear from some of the best people he knew...there wasn't really a word for it. A wave of pity and depression didn't quite describe it. He honestly wasn't sure if his feelings were so damaged that he just couldn't feel anything, or if his body was delaying his emotional reaction because his own body knew he wouldn't be able to handle it. Or if he just wasn't physically able to process that much pure despair.

He was done talking. He couldn't even if he wanted too. He just turned over and stared at the wall in abject misery. He had went from crying tears of almost-joy to holding back a wall of pain in a matter of minutes. He was spent. Done.

Sensing that they had touched a sore spot, Henry and Joe looked at each other and left without another word. It was clear that they wouldn't be getting anything further out of him.

Outside the door, Henry and Joe just looked at each other.

"You believe him?" asked Joe carefully.

Henry, in the exact same manner as his son, waited a beat before answering. He scanned the place he called home around him. The staircase, Barry's room, the living room with his mother's mirror...all of this would no longer be a safe haven on certainty if he said yes. Yet, as Sherlock Holmes once said, Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.

"Yes."

Joe sighed. "I was kind of hoping you would be able to make an argument that would convince me otherwise." He rubbed his forehead. "Look. I'll go down to the station and see what I can dig up. Did you get it?"

Henry nodded, handing him the spoon that the metahuman had gulped soup out of. "I took it out of the bowl as Nora was leaving. Should have a good DNA sample on it. Maybe we can get something out of it."

Joe nodded and carefully placed the all-telling spoon in his pocket. "I'll ask one of the techies to look at it. I can tell them it was from a lab that got robbed or something to explain anything weird."

Henry nodded, suddenly exhausted. "I'm going to help Nora clean up the dining table..or something," he said, suddenly feeling torn between finding something menial to do to keep his mind busy or run back in the room to try to take back whatever he had said that made the young man so unhappy. The second he started talking, something about him made Henry lower his defenses and want to make the kid as comfortable as possible.

As both men walked off, two little sets of eyes watched them go.

"They gone?" asked Iris.

"Yeah. Doorway is clear. I repeat, doorway is clear."

Sliding across the wooden floors of the second level of the house in their socks, Barry and Iris crept up to the room of the unknown visitor and pushed the door open, inch by inch, feeling like rebels.

The man inside looked as dejected as a person could possibly be, even as his body was practically smashed into the bed in a very non-intimidating fashion.

Barry peeped his head back around the corner as fast as he could, but the man had already seen him.

"It's okay to come in, you know."

Barry's green eyes about popped out of his skull. "He can speak English!" he whispered to Iris, who couldn't decide which direction to run, into our away from the room.

"He can hear you."

Barry slapped a hand over his mouth. Iris had apparently come to a decision and decided that Barry was coming with her. She grabbed Barry's hand and frogmarched him to the comfortable chair near the desk in the corner of the room, sat them both down, and primly turned to face Barry, clearly trying to act like an adult.

"Are you from outer space?"

Older Barry felt his heart lighten, even just a little bit. He briefly considered not answering, in case he wrecked the time stream even further, but if he was right about his theory for why Rainbow Raider was here, then it might be a good thing to wreck it just a little bit more.

"No."

"So you don't work on the Enterprise?"

"No."

Both kids looked so massively disappointed by this development that the wasteland that was his emotional state right then almost lightened enough to make him want to smile. Almost. He decided to throw them a bone.

"I work as a forensic scientist."

Little Barry's head popped up. "Really?"

"Yep. The detectives find me the evidence and I tell them what it means."

Little Barry looked so pleased by this that he was pretty sure that his younger self had just joined his older self's fanclub. Did that count as narcissism?

"Are you from the future?" asked Iris, who clearly wanted to resume the interrogation.

Older Barry simply whistled a few bars from the classic Doctor Who theme, knowing his younger self would get the reference. The widening of little Barry's eyes confirmed it.

"How far?"

Barry responded by putting a finger to his lips.

Iris pouted. "Nobody tells me anything. Like this morning, when all my Dad's detective friends got all quiet when I went up to them. All I heard was that for some reason, one of the Mardon brothers had been spotted. Clem or something like that."

Full-scale alarm bells started to go off in Barry's head. He was right! He forced himself to shove away all the hurt he felt inside. Joe was in trouble, and soon. He had to hurry. He leaned forward, the weakness leaving his body in a flood of urgency. "I need to get to Joe. He's in trouble."

Iris immediately narrowed her eyes. Before she could object, he cut in. "I'm from the future, so I know this kind of thing, ok? I'm going to need some help."

Iris didn't remove her suspicious look. "Am I being manipulated?" she asked, pronouncing each syllable carefully.

"Yes. That's not the point. I just need you to trust me enough to distract my mo-Mrs. Allen long enough for me to sneak out and help him. Please?"

Iris was still suspicious. Rolling his eyes impatiently, he gestured for little him to come close. Trustingly, little him came without hesitation. Little him was so innocent.

He leaned forward enough to whisper in his ear. "I know about the time you nearly ruined Noah's Ark by slipping a live ferret onto the stage because you felt the set wasn't realistic enough."

Barry looked a little panicked. "I never told anybody about that."

"You trust me enough in the future to tell me. Even the part about the lead actor having an allergic reaction to the ferret when it climbed up his robe."

Barry was suitably convinced. He nodded to Iris. "We can trust him."

Satisfied, Iris went downstairs to pester Nora, while Older Barry threw his legs over the bed, ready to dash out the door the minute he heard the two of them walk away from the door.

Before he left, he took his younger self and looked him in the eye. "Someday, something really bad is going to happen. Just remember to always believe in the impossible? Can you do that?"

Little Barry nodded so hard that his older self feared his headmight fly off.

He smiled at himself, then ran as fast as he could without using his powers down the steps and out the door.

Once he got to the closest ATM, he drew a little bit of money from the Queens' bank account. (He remembered the number from the time Oliver had rented him a suit for the Christmas gala.) He felt bad about it,and resolved to pay Oliver back, rationalizing that Oliver would probably appreciate the money more now that he wan;t a billionaire, and that all the current money sitting in his bank account would eventually become Isabel Rochev's.

After zipping into a clothing store to get a red sweatervest, a black shirt to go under it, and some jeans, he ran to the police station. Seeing no better option, he flashed-yes, that was now a verb-into the part of the station where I.D. cards were made and printed himself off some identification, then pinned said I.D to his shirt.

This was the point in the plan where everything could go wrong.

He walked up to where Joe sat talking to one of the detectives about something, probably the Bivolo case. He caught the end of the conversation.

"-handed the spoon off to one of the consulting lab rats, think his name was Wells. He can probably get something off it."

The detective Joe was talking to finally noticed him. "Who are you?"

Joe turned, saw Barry, and his expression was the oddest mix of surprise, anger, and panic. Barry wanted to burst out laughing just looking at it. He resolved to just not look at him, so he wouldn't start giggling while talking to the detective.

"Wally West. I'm here for the Bivolo case...We have a similar case in Starling City."

Oh how times had changed.

Joe's face was priceless. Being a bit of a troll had its perks.

The Detective looked oddly at him. "West? Are you two…?" he clearly didn't see any relation, but felt obligated to ask.

Before Joe could tackle him, Barry butted in. "Not by blood. Foster." He had learned that when he said that, people stopped asking questions.

The detective nodded with a quiet, "Oh," leaving Joe to have a silent aneurysm. "Well, this is convenient then. Why don't you two collaborate evidence and see what you come up with?"

Barry smiled amiably. "Exactly what I was hoping for, Sir."

A/N Well, this story went a completely different direction that I thought it would. That was fun. And yes, the reason metahumans are i the past will be explained….*teehee.

-2whitie

Love it when that happens... If your characters don't have minds of their own, then you've got sucky characters. In other words, LET THE FUN CONTINUE. And I would certainly hope that you have a nice, shiny cement truck to fill in that gaping plothole in with. Can't wait to see it, I bet its got a sweet paint job and everything. :D

-Mumble

Hint: think Newton's laws of motion, taken completely out of context :)

-2whitie.