Hello, and welcome back! If you haven't read Book 1, I highly recommend going back, so that you understand what's happening here. I'll be updating sporadically as I can while I work on Book 2.

Without further ado, let's begin, several months after we last left our friend:

Time: August 2006

Place: STAR Labs, Central City

"See you tomorrow, Doctor Wells!"

Harrison Wells turned and waved to Cisco Ramone as his young protege left the building at the end of another day.

Lot of potential there. If only he'd stop doubting himself.

He smiled and waved to various employees as he headed upstairs, the route by now so familiar he didn't even have to think about it.

At a certain point in the corridor outside the Cortex, he glanced both ways to make sure he was unobserved, then placed his hand against a section of the wall. Said section, seemingly utterly ordinary, melted away into a doorway, and he stepped through into the Time Vault.

"Good afternoon, Gideon."

"Good afternoon, Eobard," his computer's mechanized voice greeted him.

"Show me Barry Allen."

A hologram sprang up above Gideon's pedestal: That of a familiar-and hated-young man in his classic red suit and golden boots, running in circles around an active volcano. His momentum drove a rut into the sand, which rapidly became a trench into which lava flowed. A blue-and-red blur shot back and forth, forming a pressure wave to counter an incoming tidal wave. The image wavered, no doubt the result of someone's webcam, and the Flash and Supergirl waved at the screen.

"You're safe now!" they announced, to the accompaniment of cheering. "Have a nice day!"

"Cut it off."

"Of course."

Eobard brooded. He'd been doing a lot of that in the last three months, ever since Barry Allen had come back from Cambridge, skin more weathered than could be accounted for by nine months in the English near-constant drizzle, with a greater confidence in his step, oh yes, and with super speed about fifteen years early.

Thanks to the spy cameras he'd planted in Allen's house, he'd learned something of his travels in time with a Time Lord known as the Doctor. There had been nothing about Time Lords in the Flash Museum in the future, but Gideon's records had shown various individuals code-named "the Doctor" scattered across history. Records of destruction and creation, the rise and fall of empires, countless alien invasions...it was enough for Eobard to know that he did not want to mess with the time traveller if he could avoid it.

I knew I should have found a way to follow the boy to England to plant cameras in his dorm. I knew it.

Eobard shook his head. "I couldn't risk using up what little speed I have left halfway across the Atlantic. What's done is done. If I try to face him directly…"

He shivered slightly. At one point, he had been a master hand-to-hand combatant, trained in the dark and savage fighting arts by some of the best in the business. But that had been before he'd spent the last ten years as mild-mannered Harrison Wells, who would have raised no small amount of public scrutiny if he'd gone to join a martial arts school and started showing off his expertise. And the thought of being lectured about "self-defence" and "control" by some well-meaning, credulous fool was more than he could stand. His skills just weren't enough any more.

The boy, meanwhile, had been sparring regularly with a variety of his fellow superheroes. While he hadn't been able to get a camera into UNIT (the Manhunter had set up impressive defences to counter White Martians), he'd seen enough of the boy's movements and his matches with fellow heroes to know that he was no beginner. And Supergirl, his endlessly cheerful, endlessly annoying companion, was even better. Much as it rankled him to admit it, he just didn't have the speed or the skill to compete with the Flash anymore. Acquiring Kryptonite, or synthesising some of his own, would be difficult, but not impossible. But as for the Crimson Brat...

I will get my speed back, he swore, and I will pound his face INTO THE DUST!

"So," he mused. "How do I get back home? If I activate the particle accelerator early, then...oh. Oh, this is going to be fun."

A wicked smirk crossed his face as he bade Gideon open a new diary entry, into which he spoke his plans. They'd need to be adjusted and fine-tuned a little, and it would take time to implement them, but they would do very, very well for a start.

Central City will be mine. And the Flash will pay.

In this chapter, I wanted to make it clear that while Barry has quite a leg up on his canon self (plus he already knows Eobard's identity, not that Eobard himself knows that), but Thawne is still going to be more than just a one-shot villain.

I also wanted to address something that bugs me hugely in movies and TV: Combat skills, like playing the piano or any other physical skill, need to be practiced regularly and often. If you want to be good at playing a musical instrument at an expert level, you need constant, regular instruction and practice. If you want to be an expert hand-to-hand combatant, same thing. You don't just go back to being an expert fighter after a decade of letting your skills wither, any more than a pianist who hasn't practiced for a decade would be asked to play at Carnegie Hall. Eobard may be good enough still to crush an untrained Barry, but one who's spent the last several months training with a variety of fellow heroes? Whole different ball game.

As always, reviews and constructive criticism are gratefully appreciated, questions will be politely answered, and flames will be ignored.