Time froze.
Not in the literal sense, which considering recent events, was a very distinct possibility. But for a single moment that, everything around Joe froze. Noise faded and unimportant objects blurred into insignificant little patches of color as he tried to process the latest revelation. After the day's marathon of surprises, twists, emotional rollercoasters, and revelations about the nature of the world, he should have been purged of the emotion to feel surprise. "Should" being the key term.
Up until this point, he had been delaying the acceptance that time travel was a thing, and was putting off processing what he didn't have time to think about. He had concentrated on the things he could fix and tucked away everything irrelevant to drool over at a later time. His ability to only concentrate on what was important at the time was one of the qualities that made him such an effective cop.
Suddenly, the strange young man in front of him was no longer someone to be dealt with later.
This was an adult Barry Allen. He didn't even doubt it for a minute.
All those little details that he had tucked away came rushing to the surface. Normally, he lived for these moments - moments when all the evidence came together in a blinding rush and all the little pieces morphed into a whole in his mind and a mystery came together. This time, every detail that dropped into place felt like a punch in gut.
"My mother was murdered."
"The police arrested my father."
"Nobody believed me when I told them it was someone else."
"I moved in with the cop who arrested my dad."
"The name I used on my fake college I.D was Wally West."
He ignored everyone else around him. He ignored the sputtering coming from little Barry and Iris from the living room. The frantic eye movements being made by a slim unfamiliar man with glasses who just couldn't decide who to look at, normal Barry or older Barry. The slight woman next to him, her mouth curved in a shocked, "O," presumably his wife. He ignored the trembling of Henry Allen - poor man - and Nora.
As he started to process everything again, time slowly started moving forward. In front on him the young man - Barry - was barely able to get out a word.
"Huh?" Barry rasped in a small, disbelieving tone.
For a minute, everyone wrestled with the question that wanted to ask, then spent another minute trying to figure out how they wanted to ask it.
Finally, Henry did what he did to every guest in the Allen household. He invited them into the living room to sit.
Glad of something to do, Barry shuffled into the living room and sat down gingerly on the couch farthest away from the group hanging out in the doorway.
Barry honestly could not remember a more awkward situation in his entire life, and buried his head in his hands, refusing to look at anybody.
Finally, Dr. Wells broke the silence in a desperate attempt to regulate the situation. "Well, this got awkward fast."
Not managing to stop a small smile from gracing his face at the very un-Wells-like comment, Barry noticed the VeggieTales bandaid on his younger self's arm where needles generally went in to draw blood. Being a scientist himself, it didn't take much thought to figure out what Dr. Wells would want. With the practice of one who has done something over and over, Barry rolled up his sleeve and extended his long arm like he had done so many times for Caitlyn.
Dr. Wells started, a little surprised that Mr. Allen would know what he was going to ask for without being prompted, pulled out a second syringe, drew the blood and passed the syringe off to his wife who mouthed a thank you to Barry.
Barry took a second to compose himself, then mustered up all the courage he had. He looked up at his mother for the first time in years. "Hello mother," he said, softly, his eyes welling up with tears.
Nora strode across the room. She and Barry had always had a close bond from the moment he was born, and it didn't matter where Barry had been or what time he had come from, she had always known exactly what Barry needed. Right now…
Right now he needed a hug.
Before he even knew what was happening, he was caught up in a warm hug that seemed to envelop his entire body. His mom was shorter than him now, but he was too caught up in the long-forgotten scent of cinnamon perfume to really take notice of the fact.
For someone who had cried at pretty much everything else that night, Barry couldn't find it within himself to cry anymore. In that moment, he had a feeling that everything was going to be all right.
Everyone else in the room was consciously looking at pretty much anything else, except for little Barry, who was staring at his older self with his mouth dropped open.
Finally, Nora gently pulled herself out of the hug when it became clear Barry wasn't letting go anytime soon, then walked him over back to the couch and sat him down, analyzing every bit of him as she did so. Same hair color, combed neatly. Tucked in clothes, tall, lanky, but the same inquisitiveness present in his eyes.
Seeing that all the touchy-feely stuff was pretty much over, Joe gave a little cough. Instinctively, Older Barry looked up and instantly regretted it, knowing the many looks of Joe West, and not liking the one he saw.
It was the interrogation face. Barry cracked under it every time.
…..
Star Labs. The Present.
After learning their lesson via saber-toothed tiger, weapons were kept close to hand. Cisco and Caitlyn placed tasers in their work areas, under the assumption that firing one took no more skill than aiming a Nerf gun. His gun was Joe's weapon of choice, and he waved off all offers from Cisco to make him something cooler, operating under the secret fear that Cisco would one day blow them all to tiny pieces. Dr. Wells just mumbled something about sticking close to Claudius, whose sword never left his side anyway. Claudius was of the opinion that if the future was filled with random lightning storms, footlong sandwiches and tiny handheld cannons called "Guns," then the future was in good hands.
After the Rainbow Raider was forcibly thrust out of the timestream, he skidded across the slick floor and miraculously landed in a couch. Without properly looking at his surroundings, he threw up his hands to shield his head as Joe clicked off the safety as everyone exploded into a flurry of motion. They had one chance to get this right before Bivolo forced them to turn on each other.
Cisco fired first. His taser would have hit home had Bivolo not thrown himself out of the way. He was trying to bolt for the door to freedom, while STAR Labs was simultaneously trying to keep him from leaving and getting close enough to use his powers at the same time. Caitlyn rolled over to the computer console after ducking behind her desk and smacked the panic button established after the whole Blackout incident. Every door in the facility started to close, heavy duty locks clicked into place, and glass partitioned areas had a bulletproof layer slide down over the normal glass.
Claudius looked ready to charge, and already had his sword out until Dr. Wells shouted a string of Latin phrases indicating a better plan. Used to following orders with question, Claudius changed direction on his heel, leaped onto the desk, and jumped two meters forward without hesitation, swinging his roman pilus into the light.
Instantly, the room was plunged into abject darkness. Nobody moved. For a second, there was nothing but silence, the shadows swallowing up everything in sight, even sound.
Then a loud thump reverberated throughout the room, followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor.
After a minute more of nothing, Harrison felt around the area until he found a blowtorch that Cisco had been using to set Gummi Bears on fire the previous week used a pocket match to turn the much bigger light source on, illuminating sections of the room with jumping flares of light.
Bivolo was out cold after Claudius had landed on him. Joe was still aiming his gun at the prone form, and Caitlyn and Cisco were underneath the desk.
Nobody was dead. Crisis averted.
Without a word, Cisco started dragging off Bivolo's prone form toward the pipeline. Before he left the room, he paused. "How much more time do we have now that Bivolo is back?"
After running through a few calculations in his head, Dr. Wells pursed his lips. "Definitely at least four more hours. If Mardon was returned, we might have enough temporal wiggle room to try set this entire mess straight."
The Past.
Barry knew he was a horrible liar under good circumstances. He was, if at all possible, a worse liar under emotional circumstances.
This definitely qualified as an emotional circumstance.
Joe was asking him probing questions about his real reason for being there, without bringing up the elephant in the room that only him and Joe were aware of. The elephant being the tragedy coming for the Allens in the uncomfortably close future. His dad was asking unanswerable questions. He ended up sticking to a variation of two answers; "I can't tell you," and "Long story." After nearly an hour of getting nowhere, Joe took the silent cues that Henry had been sending him and took Iris upstairs to try to have her get a little shuteye, much to Iris's protests.
Tess Morgan and Harrison Wells had been silent through most of it. At one point, Little Barry had come closer to look at the blood sample that had been taken, and had been shown what each of the markers meant while the repetitive interrogation had taken place. He was currently being bounced on Dr. Well's leg while Tess was alternately smiling at the way Harrison was dealing with the child and scanning the room.
In the small hamper where Barry stuffed the STAR Labs sweatshirt he had arrived in, ready to be put back on in an effort to avoid leaving anything from the future in the past, she saw it. A sweatshirt emblazoned with the words STAR LABS.
She raised her eyebrow, a small smile playing around her lips. "STAR Labs?"
Adult Barry smiled shyly back, the first one all night. "Congratulations."
Dr. Wells looked up, and earlier conversation about dream names for their future companies replaying through his head. "Do we know each other in the future?"
Figuring it was useless to lie, Barry nodded. "I sort of do a little work on the side with STAR Labs alongside my job as a forensic scientist."
"What kind of work?" piped up his younger self.
Racking his brain for normal sounding examples, he soon gave up. "Everything really. STAR Labs has sort of given me a crash course in everything science related."
Sensing that there were fond memories attached to the story, Nora leaned forward a bit. "Any friends?"
Figures that after watching Barry get beat up, chased down, shoved into trash cans, and not even bothering with birthday parties due to lack of friends outside of Iris, his mom wanted to know that everything turned out well
"Very good friends. In Central and beyond."
Before he could continue, his dad got up and went to the fridge and grabbed sodas for everyone. "We might be here more a while," was his explanation. He also distributed the food that hadn't been ruined by Barry's table-belly flop into the past.
After taking a long swig of root beer that he hadn't realized he wanted until that moment, Barry continued, figuring general descriptions couldn't hurt. "There's Dr. Wells here. Then there's an engineer who can literally make anything and keeps everyone laughing. All the time."
He paused, trying to make his descriptions a bit better. "There's a biologist that is also an M.D. She pretty much plays mom to the rest of us, makes sure we don't get ourselves hurt or act excessively stupid around the explosives." With that, he gave his younger self a pointed look. "That's right. Explosives. You have a lot to look forward to."
Finally, he gave a brief explanation on everyone else who had recently entered his life. "Over in Starling there's an archer who is one of the coolest people I have ever met, a computer whiz, and an ex Special Forces bodyguard."
His dad raised an eyebrow. "Archery. That's one you don't hear about everyday."
Barry shrugged. "It's more common than you think."
Generic stories were spilled. Barry gave a few anecdotes about some of the stuff that he'd done, editing out specifics and metahumans. Nobody in the room addressed the topic that Barry had admitted to having abilities earlier in the night, and Joe didn't talk at all. Nobody wanted to address the questions that everyone actually wanted answers to. The calm before the storm.
In the middle of a story about the time Iris and he had hidden in the then Detective Singh's desk trying to pretend they were spies, an incident that resulted in Singh scooting in his chair only to smack Barry in the face, resulting in Singh screaming louder than Barry, his eyelids started to droop. Before he knew it, his mom murmured something to his Dad, who suddenly announced that enough was enough and Barry needed to be put to bed.
As much as he hated to admit it, Barry knew he was right. If the reports Joe had been reading earlier in the station were correct, then Mark Mardon was on the loose, and Barry was no use to anyone passed out from exhaustion. He said the most awkward goodnight ever, then trundled up to the guestroom, but not before being pulled aside by Joe.
"What you said earlier about your mother..." he rumbled threateningly, "I hope you have a plan in mind for fixing it."
Truth be told, Barry had thought about it. He could tell his parents to take a vacation on those days. He could remove all the knives from the house. He had power over his past and future all at the same time. But at the same time, he was a nerd. He had read up on time travel since he was a kid. Iris had halfway listening to his excited ramblings and brought him a spool of thread from home, only for Barry to explain that string theory did not involve actual string. Point is, he had an idea about how the system worked. Mess with time and it messed with you right back.
Barry lowered his voice. "Yes and no. I want to see if it's just a better option to prevent the man in yellow by dealing with him directly instead of laying the seeds here and hoping things work out for the best."
With a nod, Joe let go of his arm. It would have to do.
In the living room, Dr. Wells was shaking hands with Henry and thanking him for his hospitality. After exchanging looks with his wife, he beckoned over Nora and spoke softly.
"We have a theory. If we are wrong, well, your son may have no way to get back to normal time until he opened up more about the future. If we are right however..." His words trailed off, looking desperately at his wife.
Tess took over confidently, as was her way. "If we are right, it's about to get really crazy."
A/N: Sooo..AP courses happened. Among many other things. Including a spider bite that put me out of the writing/typing/moving game for a few days. I know it's sort of a filler chapter, but it sort of set things up for the end. As much as I like this story, I'm eager to work on a true collab with Mumble. We...we have a few ideas. *cackles. It will (hopefully) put a more Flarrowverse spin on a villain from the comics that I honestly don't think the show will either get to for a while or use as a big bad just because of the parallels the ensuing plotline would have to the League of Assassins. If anyone has any tips about writing collabs, I'd love to hear them!
-2whitie
OOOO, WE'RE GONNA ACTUALLY DO THAT ONE?! 8D *drools* You'll have to write the guy's name down for me so I can Google him or something... This should be fun. I need to cut to the song in my fic, too, though... I've been busy with homework, AP, and my monstrous gargantuan annual photoshop commission though, so yeah. I'll get to it. *sheepish grin*
-Mumble
That American identity/innovation research paper tho...
-2whitie