Henry Allen hadn't moved from the position he was in since he put the phone down. He just kept staring at Barry, trying to reconcile the young man who had recently been lying unconscious on the bed to the nine year old staring innocently up at him.

There was no way it was possible. Sure, there were a few things in common, but anybody could have brown hair and green eyes. Sure, they had similar ticks and manner of speaking now that he thought about it, but there was a very good chance that the only reason he could see anything in common was because he was actively looking for things in common.

The young man from earlier and Barry being the same person was simply out of the question.

The polite man on the phone, a Dr. Wells, had been adamant about the entire thing. One hundred percent on the DNA match. There were several inconsistencies, though. He would be able to get more answers with a blood sample from both subjects, but the sample on the spoon was not normal human DNA. It had been twisted out of recognition. He had very lightly broached the subject of a possibility of Barry being exposed to illegal substances or tests, but a firm word from Henry had shut him up about the subject. Then he had asked if it would be okay to come over and examine Barry.

Henry, with only a beat of hesitation, said yes. He wanted this mystery, this mystery that was dangerously close to his family, gone. And if he could keep it all under the table, well, even better.

Nora, who had been silent in the corner of the room since the phone call, finally approached him.

"What's going on, Henry?"

Henry blinked himself out of his stunned stupor, then turned to Barry and Iris. "Can you two go to the living room and sit there? Maybe play Go Fish or something?"

Barry and Iris, sensing that this was not a time to argue, made two identical little 90 degree turns and hurried into the living room.

He had no idea how to phrase this. He gently took his wife's hands, then said in a low voice, "Joe and I sent a DNA sample of the young man to a scientist who was doing a bit of consultant work at the station. He just called back to wonder why we had sent him a copy of our own son's DNA."

He waited for the penny to drop. He didn't have to wait long. Nora was as smart as she was nurturing, and her eyes widened to almost a comical level. "But, that's…"

Henry nodded, interrupting. "Impossible? I know. What's more, the DNA sample had a lot of errors in it, like something was really messed up about it. He asked to come over to see Barry personally to make certain that he was looking at DNA from the same person.

Nora nodded. She would have suggested the exact same thing herself. "When is he supposed to be here?"

As if in answer, the doorbell rang. Nora got to the door and opened it as if she were inviting a close family friend in.

Standing inside the doorway was a tall thin man with a shock of black hair with blue eyes. He seemed to have a youthfulness about him, an energy that displayed itself with the slightly nervous way that he touched his glasses to the almost perky way that he practically jumped forward to shake Nora's hand.

"Hello," he said, extending his hand out for a handshake. "My name is Harrison Wells, and this," he gestured to a woman that came out from behind him, "Is my wife Tess Morgan. Can we come in?"

…

Present time.

Cisco shoved a stack of papers to the side of the table. "Nope. Nothing. Nada. Noodle."

Caitlyn shook her head. "There has to be more."

Test after test had been run on the entire treadmill room to see if they could get any readings at all from where Barry has disappeared. LED, Ultraviolet, even scans using lenses meant for astronomy had yielded nothing.

It was by complete accident that they had found anything.

Being a research lab with many confidential projects, Star Labs had always had good security, including a closed WiFi. It also had its own satellite that sent private updates to the lab. Including weather scans.

After detecting several abnormalities, the satellite sent an update to Cisco's phone. At first, he ignored it. Central City was in the midwest, meaning anything less than an F-4 tornado wasn't anything to get excited over. After the third update, he finally looked closely at the updates.

Every single one of the "storms" that the satellite was finding coincided directly with one of the time storms.

Which meant going through pages and pages of satellite readings. Every time they found a reading that looked like a mini hurricane, they circled it in red ink and laid it out in a timeline.

At least the work was going faster than it normally would. During one of the time storms, they hadn't been able to shove one of the poor figures who came through fast enough, so they were getting help from a Roman soldier, who was taking the future surprisingly well.

Looking at the suspicious stains on the guys's armor, Cisco was only too glad that Dr. Wells was fluent in Latin.

Joe came around at lunchtime with Subway for the crew and saw Dr. Wells and a rather rough looking man dressed in a tunic conversing softly in Latin while everyone was silently circling different readings on weather maps. He was tempted to just ding dong ditch the sandwiches and run before his day got any worse.

Caitlyn saw him, smiled and came to relieve him of the sandwiches. "You are a saint," she muttered softly.

Joe just gestured with his forehead toward the roman chatting with Dr. Wells with a red permie in his hand.

Caitlyn understood. "Oh. Claudius. He came through the timestream and we weren't able to shove him back in, so until we fix the timestream, he's staying with us." She shrugged.

Joe rolled his eyes. "Remind me when this became normal."

Cisco came up and grabbed his meatball sandwich. "I just don't think about it anymore, or I might explode from happiness. Anyway, down to business. We pulled, well, we...acquired...readings from other satellites to supplement our own data. At first, it looked like there wasn't a pattern to the storms. Then, we noticed something. We are getting readings consistently in Central. Like, on the hour consistent. everywhere else is scattered. Different times, different places. No pattern there. However, the consistent timestorms-which is totally what we are calling them-started about 16 years ago. I know I'm about to run around in theory land now, but I would bet my last dollar that consistent damage is being done to the timestream 16 years ago. Everything else is the timestream trying to fix itself."

Joe tried to concentrate of Cisco's words without snatching too many glances at the young roman. "Have any idea how long it will take before any real damage is done?"

Cisco shook his head. "No idea. I wouldn't know where to start."

Lowering his voice, Joe talked while staring at Claudius and his struggle with sticky notes. "Anything else?"

Cisco looked uneasily at Caitlyn, who sighed, then squared herself up to tell Joe the bad news. "Barry needs to stop messing with time. The more damage is done, the harder it will be for Barry to get back."

The Past.

Joe kept his gun trained on Bivolo. "Hands on your head."

Bivolo didn't even bother. He just turned around and looked a little over their heads. "I asked how you found me."

Joe ignored him. "Hands. On. Your. Head."

Bivolo melodramatically shrugged, then looked both of them directly in the eyes.

Nothing happened.

Bivolo looked surprised, then strained his eyes again. It was hilarious to Barry and irritating to Joe.

Barry tapped the lenses covering his eyes. "Mirrored sunglasses, dude."

In that instant, Bivolo looked like he was going to start letting out an unstoppable stream of expletives, but before his ears could be abused, Joe stepped forward and started cuffing Bivolo, who stood unresisting, stunned.

After bundling him into the back of the car, both men climbed into each side of the patrol car and just looked at each other.

"We can't just turn him over to the police. Not with what he can do," said Barry.

Joe sighed deeply. "What do you want to do with him, then?"

Barry had an answer prepared. "I bring him back with me to my own time, where I can put him back into a prison built specially for metahumans."

With a nod, Joe acquiesced. It was the best he was going to get.

For a few moments, there was blissful silence.

Then a small storm of lightning opened right in front of them. Barry's eyes, out of habit, began to process the images going to his brain at super speed and was able to put together an image of a room at Star labs.

He had a way home.

Without warning, he threw himself sideways out of the car, ignoring Joe's cry of alarm. He sped into the back of the car, grabbed Bivolo and zoomed toward the opening in time. Now a dark figure started to cover up his view of the lab. With a cry of desperation, Barry tossed Bivolo in ahead of him, but even the fastest man alive was too late. The hole had closed, taking Bivolo and any chance that Barry had of getting home.

Too frustrated to do much more that act like a child, Barry punched the air, gave the ground a good hearty kick, and let out a good old fashioned yell.

Joe, who had nearly given up the ghost when he saw "Wally" disappear next to him and move quicker than the eye could see, had decided enough was enough. He climbed out of his cruiser and gave the young man a hard stare. "Done?"

Barry, struck by the rebuke, looked down at his feet and saw the trench caused by his foot and the pile of dirt next to it. He ashamedly felt like a kid again, one who couldn't control his emotion. "Yeah."

Joe pointed to the passenger seat.

Barry climbed in silently.

As he started up the car, Joe looked Barry in the eye. "You are going to start talking. Now."

For a moment, Barry thought about running. Then he thought about lying through his teeth. Then he realized that Joe was good at ferreting the truth out of good liars, let alone horrible ones like him. So, he decided that a very condensed generic story with little detail would serve his cause the best.

"When I was eleven, my mother was murdered."

Joe stopped himself from showing any reaction, but only just. For as many years as he had been at the police department, he could never just "get used" to the horror stories that came through.

"The police arrested my father for the crime, and they didn't believe me when I told them the real story about what happened that night. A man in yellow, moving as fast as lightning stabbed my mother. But when the police came, all they saw was my fathers fingerprints on the dagger and the blood on his hands from when from when he tried to save her. I moved in with the cop who put my innocent dad away. Then, about nine months ago, a scientific experiment went wrong. Central city was the site of a massive explosion of dark matter. I became a metahuman, possessing the exact same abilities of the man who murdered mom. I've seen him a few times-he likes to taunt me. One day," Barry said, with venomous conviction, "He will mess up. And I'll be waiting. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he were somehow responsible for getting me into this," he made a gesture to everything around him, "mess. I'm stuck in the past with no easy answer for how to get home."

Joe didn't say anything for the rest of the car ride.

Present Time.

"Well at least Bivolo is back in his proper time, which makes one less thing we have to worry about," commented Dr. Wells, as if nothing was wrong.

Everyone in the room kept staring at him.

"What?"

A few minutes earlier, Bivolo had been thrown through a time storm, accompanied by whatever was originally going to come through.

The, "whatever was going to come through," turned out to be a few animals.

From the ice age.

The Gkyptodontidae, or as more accurately described by Cisco, "The armadillo the size of a freaking car," didn't do much. It landed in the lab, then moved to the left a little bit and began chewing on the leftover Subway sandwiches, unconcerned with everything else around it.

The sabertoothed tiger was another story.

It landed with a hiss, then leaped directly at Cisco. Joe whipped off a few shots, but they were next to useless. Cisco leapt behind his desk in one wild leap, trying to make himself a moving target. Claudius hit the ground, taking Caitlyn with him, then slowly reached for his blade.

Surprising everyone, Dr. Wells picked up a syringe that had been laying around as a possible Barry sedative, held it in his hands for a few seconds, then whipped it through the air like a dagger.

The needlepoint end found its mark in the side of the tigers neck, and within a few feet of Cisco, dropped to the floor unconscious.

Cisco sharply let out a terrified squeak, then turned to stare at Wells, as did the rest of the room.

"Well at least Bivolo is back in his proper time, which makes one less thing we have to worry about."

The Past.

Barry and Joe walked slowly up to the door of the Allen house, not quite sure what to do next. Until further notice, Henry would just have to deal with his house acting as headquarters.

Joe rang the doorbell.

Nora opened the door, but stood frozen looking at Barry.

Feeling a surge of protectiveness for the boy after hearing his story, Joe ushered Barry inside so he didn't have to be stared at.

When they both entered the living room, every occupant of the house turned to look at him.

Barry couldn't believe his eyes. "Dr. Wells? What are you doing here?" he sputtered.

Joe looked a little confused. "You know this guy?"

Henry's lips were pressed together in a thin line. "More importantly, we all know him," said Henry with a deadly calmness, staring directly at Barry.

Barry's blood went cold. They know.

And I just told Joe everything.

Henry could barely get two words out. "Hello Barry."

A/N: So, this chapter is attempt two. The first version...well..Its kind of like fight club. We don't talk about it. Thank goodness Mumble knocked sense into my sleep deprived brain.

-2whitie

You did the thing... The syringe thing. You did it. Yessssss...

-Mumble