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It took quite a lot to even begin to faze Barry Allen. After all, he’d grown up in the streets of Central City during the Great Depression, been rejected from enlistment about a dozen times after the War broke out due to his poor physique, finally been allowed into an experimental military program that led to him being injected with a serum that granted him the ability to run faster than the speed of sound, fought against Nazis who were trying to nuke New York, sacrificed himself in order to crash a plane and foil said Nazis, lost his best friend/love of his life in the process, woken up more than seventy years later after being frozen in ice, and then immediately recruited to help fend off a literal alien invasion only days later.
So yeah, Barry could handle whatever was thrown at him. Or that’s what he had thought, at least.
The first time he saw the yellow speedster was when the man had murdered Lyla Michaels, the Director of ARGUS, right in front of him. Barry had come back to his apartment to find the Director dying on his floor riddled with bullet holes. She’d pressed a data drive into his hand and told him not to trust anyone. They’re everywhere, she had said.
He barely had a chance to ask what the fuck was going on before the other man appeared in a blinding flash and phased his hand through her chest. Barry had taken off running after him, only to find that the man wasn’t just as fast as him-- he was faster. He was left panting for breath on a rooftop having given up chase, clutching a data drive given to him by a dead woman and wondering who the hell would send a speedster assassin to kill the Director of ARGUS.
Sara Lance had cornered him later when they were both in the hospital to identify Director Michaels’ body. She told Barry that this guy was a ghost, a legend to most of the intelligence community. The woman who would one day be known as the White Canary had first heard whispers of a speedster assassin during her time with the League, although all she was really able to surmise was that he wasn’t one of theirs.
But he wasn’t a myth, and both she and Barry knew it.
“He has many names,” she recalled, eyes stony cold and distant. “The Man in Yellow, the Dark Speedster, Zoom. But for those who know, people like you and me who have seen him, he’s called the Reverse Flash.”
The Reverse Flash. That stings Barry, deep. There’s some crazy assassin out there murdering his way across the world through the decades, and he shares Barry’s powers. He exists because of Barry’s legacy.
“There were a lot of people that tried to replicate the serum Dr. Wells dosed you with after you disappeared, Flash. It’s just that whomever created the Reverse Flash came the closest.”
“How did you meet him?”
Sara’s eyes grew misty.
“I was working a mission for ARGUS several years back in Corto Maltese. There was this drug lord I was assigned to protect-- terrible guy, but he had intel we needed. I’m transporting him to an safehouse when out of nowhere there’s this burst of red lightning. I jump on the man to protect him and I’ve got him laying down with my whole body over him. That doesn’t stop the Reverse Flash. He phases his hand into the drug lord’s heart, right through my shoulder. And that was it. Can’t really feel anything there anymore, because most of the nerves got out of sync. I lived, though.”
Barry hadn’t had much chance to give thought to the other speedster after that, as he and Sara went to go chase down the data port that would allow access to the drive from Director Michaels. They follow the drive’s point of origin to a secret bunker built beneath Merlyn Mansion in Star City, where on top of having the building collapse on top of them and nearly dying, they learn yet one more horrible truth that would haunt Barry’s nightmares. ARGUS, the same ARGUS that employs both him and Sara and assembled the Justice League to save the world from the Dominators, has secretly been infiltrated by HIVE since the very beginning.
HIVE, the fascist organisation funded by the Nazis (although they had been around a good while before that) that Barry and the Justice Society of America had fought against during World War Two. Who Barry had sacrificed his life to stop. But now it seemed that his death, although it hadn’t been permanent, had all been for nothing. All of it was a lie.
And to top it all off, the new HIVE/ARGUS was in the middle of executing a plot that, if allowed to succeed, would kill billions. They’d constructed an underground city beneath Keystone as a safe haven for those deemed “worthy” while they planned to boil the rest of the world in nuclear fire. HIVE had control of most of the world’s nuclear arsenal through ARGUS, and as for the ones they didn’t have, it wouldn’t matter once the bombing began anyways.
So yes, it was bad.
“Who can we call?” Barry had asked as he sped Sara away from the ruins of Merlyn Mansion. The house had exploded around them not long after they’d activated the drive, due to some sort of self-destruct mechanism.
“I don’t know.”
“What about Oliver? He works for ARGUS, but he’s on our side, right?”
Sara shook her head.
“Ollie is deep undercover. By the time we’re able to contact him it will be too late.”
“Palmer?”
“Destroyed his suit to keep Brie Larvan from getting her hands on it. What about Supergirl? Aren’t you two close?”
“Kara’s offworld. Family stuff, apparently.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” Barry agreed.
Then he’d remembered Cisco, the metahuman scientist he’d met when he had gone by Star Labs one day, for old times’ sake. Fast forward a couple hours to one Cisco Ramone opening his door to find the White Canary and the Flash standing on his porch covered in rubble and blood.
“I guess I did say ‘feel free to stop by anytime’,” he remarked while quickly ushering them in the door.
Cisco is no Felicity Smoak, but even so it takes him only a few minutes to hack into the ARGUS mainframe and determine who has access code to HIVE’s ark beneath Keystone. It doesn’t take long for Barry to see a name he recognizes-- Sebastian Blood, one of his liasons with ARGUS after he’d just been woken up from the ice.
Kidnapping him is a simple matter for a super-soldier speedster, a master assassin, and a guy capable of vibing exactly where Blood will be. It’s only after they have the prisoner captive in Cisco’s minivan and are driving over the bridge from Central City to Keystone that shit really hits the fan.
Their only warning is a bolt of yellow and red in the rearview mirror before the tires come careening off of the car and they’re grinding across the pavement. A second later there’s another flash of red and Blood is hurtling out of the window, cracking his head on the ground and tumbling off the edge of the bridge. Barry bolts into action and speeds Cisco and Sara out of the car and deposits them on the sidewalk. Cisco’s screaming an imaginative collection of expletives while Sara’s being a little more productive and has readied her deadly steel batons for battle.
It’s not much use, however. Barry barely has time to react before the red and yellow streak returns and throws her across the pavement. Barry snarls and lunges after the Reverse Flash. This time he’s fast enough to catch up and slams his fists into the assassin at superspeed. The yellow-clad, red-eyed demon hisses in pain and tries to tackle him, but Barry throws him off and continues their chase.
Red and gold lightning crackle dangerously in the streets and over the bridge. Barry is furious that evil speedster exists, furious that he’s hurt and killed Barry’s friends, and furious that he was unable to stop any of it. Hadn’t there been enough people he couldn’t save? Hadn’t losing Eo been enough for a lifetime?
Barry screams and throws his whole body at the Reverse Flash, smashing them both to the ground and bringing them back to normal speed. He’s able to land a kick on the assassin but receives a particularly nasty punch in return. Barry isn’t deterred. He grabs fiercely at the other speedster again and nearly misses, but hooks his fingers around one of the red bolts on the yellow cowl at the last second. Barry pulls and the Reverse Flash’s mask falls off in his hand. And then--
“Eobard?”
The one thing he can’t handle. Barry thinks his heart stops in his chest. It seems that there are things worse than waking up to find that everyone you’ve ever known is dead after all.
Icy blue eyes framed by messy blonde hair blink at him in confusion.
“Who the hell is Eobard?”
He was always good at breaking Barry’s heart.