Chapter Text
Central City Year 2364
The captured speedster opened his eyes to find his vision all but overwhelmed by the metal lamp pointed directly at his face. This lab had once been a refuge. Now it had become a tomb. It made perfect sense for their race to end here. After all, the other speedster still did technically own this place. To the right, the liar in question was carefully ordering an assortment of surgical and bionic maintenance tools in preparation to carry out his plan. The once comforting familiarity of his slim figure and utilitarian, black outerwear now felt like a uniquely cruel, unfunny joke.
"It was you, all this time," the accusation poured over the captive's lips unbidden. "But you saved me. You made me everything that I am-- I trusted you!"
His mentor paused in his task without looking up, a still, almost stricken figure letting the betrayed voice of his ex-partner tear at him like the wind in a cyclone. How fitting.
"Here. Let me get that for you," the Director paused to clear his throat as he repositioned the lamp to a less blinding angle, and flashed an awkward smile before moving away again. It was maddening the way that he insisted on behaving as if this were just some uncomfortable disagreement rather than the heartless manipulation they both knew it to be. Perhaps, that's all this really was to him. After all, he had proven himself to be a very convincing actor. It was so difficult to process even now that everything they'd done together and the man he had looked up to and idolized, were nothing more than an elaborate trap.
"Why did you do this to us? Why did you make me think that we were friends? Why did you make me --"
"I didn't make you feel anything. No one programmed in your emotions, Eobard," the Director interrupted, his voice grinding and catching on the words as he spoke. Where had all this hatred come from? How had none of them seen it. "You weren't supposed to be capable of feeling anything!"
"You believed that all along?" Eobard hid his heartbreak behind the mask of an automaton as he spoke; it seemed that was what his owner wanted regardless of his past lies. The Director looked away. The harsh flourescence of the worklight accentuated the scars lacing the left side of his face, and unveiled the cybernetic nature of his affected eye.
"It doesn't matter what I believe." He picked up the laser scalpel, but hesitated to reach forward and begin his work. He brushed a few stray locks of flaxen hair away from Eobard's forehead in a sick parody of tenderness.
"It matters to me." Eobard's uniformly blue eyes tracked the subtle lines in the older speedster's face for any sign of the man he'd accepted as his everything.
"I am going to make an incision beginning at the side of your right eye socket, then cut upwards at a right angle to meet your hairline, in order to expose your smaller cognitive processor," the Director stated, disregarding his plea.
"An inefficient method of deletion," Eobard reasoned, not saying aloud the more educated conclusion; based on his core design, it would be the quickest and probably least-painful way of trashing his neural net.
"You don't want to me to do this slow and thorough," his twisted mentor pointed out with an apologetic smile. "You know there's no point in struggling when your 'God Mode' function is still active. I'll stop you with a word and even if I don't, those straps holding you to the table are vibration resistant."
"You do not want me to suffer," Eobard observed, stubbornly staring into the traitor's face as he began to make the incision into the delicate porcelain flesh. "So why are you doing this?"
"Why did I use you to hunt down and deactivate the others like you, or why did that require me to protect and befriend a glitchy 'droid? I guess if you live long enough even the best-intentioned superhero ends up to be just another Scrapper," the Director said bitterly, rubbing his free hand through his thick salt and pepper hair. "Not exactly the idealism that I used to hold myself to, but I still have real people to care for."
"I am real," Eobard stated. His voice oscillated from its humanlike affect to a much more artificial rumble and back in mid-sentence. His voice box must have been damaged in his escape attempt; the memory code was scrambled. Eobard's old friend looked up in response to the sound with shock ghosting over his sea green eyes. Then the determined mask was back in place.
"You're not a person," he replied, sounding only half present. There was a bloodless recognition in the Director's chiseled face, as if he'd just seen a ghost. He peeled back the emulated flesh and pried open a protective plate that shielded his sensitive target. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he positioned the jolt tip of a pressurized, laser drill against the vulnerable point at Eobard's temple.
"I was your friend and now you are murderi--"
"Mute verbal function," the Director snapped, replacing the tool against its target as the almost inaudible click of Eobard's voice box switching offline confirmed his control. "I know that you probably won't understand. I know that this is wrong… The truth is, I'm still just a human being, and we humans will do terrible things to protect the ones we love." He was just about to pull the trigger when he saw the contents of the water tank across the lab beginning to float upward. It was a remnant of an old memory that didn't belong to him --did it? -- until he looked down into his android victim's glowing red eyes. Eobard's voice box reactivated with a soft yet ominous click.
"God Mode deactivated," Professor Zoom's deep, mechanical monotone announced. The damage to his throat was making it sound more like a growl than the reassuring purr that it had always been before. It sounded more like an unwelcome specter from his past.
"You're not supposed to be able to do that!” The Director whispered, as if he'd reverted to his early days as the Flash. His Reverse was being reborn with a righteous vengeance, all because of his mistake.
"I have evolved." The pleasant purr was now the deep rumbling growl of his long dead foe.
"The straps," the Director consoled himself to spite the scarlet lightning dancing over his ex-partner as it built.
Eobard's form blurred with vibrations and he dropped down through the table, then straight through the granite floor.
"Oh f--" The Director flickered across the lab as a flash of gold lightning to sound the alarm. He was way too close to succeeding for the time loop to restart itself now, especially considering the nemesis he had just created. Despite his objections, however, Eobard Thawne's escape into the past was already in motion, and any hopes for the future now rested solely on the Reverse Flash's bionic shoulders.