Chapter Text
If Barry Allen had gotten the power to stop time instead of incredible speed, this was the moment he would have chosen to live in forever.
As it was, all he could do was enjoy the few precious seconds that Iris’ lips pressed against his, feel out the corners of her smile, brush the hair back from her cheeks. This was everything he’d waited years for, and as soon as he pulled away, the world reminded him that he should have waited longer. The tsumani, crap, he should have called Caitlin right away. His hand fell away from Iris’ face as she turned to watch the wave headed toward them.
“Where did that even come from?” he heard her say as the phone rang. He watched her hair whipping in the wind, growing stronger every second as Mardon’s power built, as Caitlin didn’t answer her phone. Why wasn’t she picking up?
Was he speeding up without noticing? Maybe he hadn’t given her enough time to answer— But, no, there was her voicemail. Barry dialed again.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered under his breath. The wave was getting closer. Even with his speed, he needed to get going now. Joe might already be — no don’t think about that.
“Barry?”
“Caitlin.” Finally. She sounded odd over the phone, distorted. Was she in a tunnel? No, focus.
“I’m. I can’t—”
“No time for that now, there’s a tsunami headed for—”
“Barry.” There was a sharp crackling across the line, and Barry paused, listening more carefully, before: “Barry, Cisco’s dead.”
The noise came again, this time clearly a sob. Barry hardly heard it, couldn’t force his ears or anything else to work properly. His voice, when it came, was too quiet. “What?”
“At the lab,” Caitlin continued, as if Barry had asked for details. She was drawing in shaky breaths between every other word. “He was here alone, he was— looking into Dr. Wells. Oh, God, I shouldn’t have left him alone.”
Somewhere in the background, what felt like a great distance away, Iris had noticed his call, and was tugging frantically on his arm to try to get his attention. “Barry, what is it? Is it Dad?” He wasn’t sure what she saw on his face to make her look so terrified, but he couldn’t worry about it right now. He took an impossible step back, away from her grasping fingers.
“What happened?” he repeated, or maybe he said it for the first time. Had he said that, yet?
“There’s no wound, there’s no—” A clatter, as Caitlin’s voice faded out, and then some fumbling. She must have dropped the phone; maybe her hands were shaking as badly as her voice. “No head trauma. I don’t know what could’ve— A tsunami?”
Barry couldn’t process the last part of that for several seconds. The what? Oh, right, the giant wave, the one that was going to kill people, an awful lot of people. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “It’s big. I have to stop it.” Save who you can, wasn’t that the line?
“A vortex barrier. Um.” She drew in a deep breath. “A wall of wind, to zap the energy, but I don’t know if you can run that fast. I don’t know…”
“I can do it,” he said. He would. “I’m coming. After.”
“I’ll stay with him.”
He hung up the phone. Or dropped it, maybe. He wasn’t sure. Either way, he wasn’t using it anymore.
“Barry, God, what was…”
“I have to go,” he said, hating how Iris looked even more panicked at his words. He wanted to go back, to be kissing her again, kissing her and smiling while his friend was dead on the floor of the lab. Jesus, no. He couldn’t do this all at once. The tsunami, first. “I’m sorry.”
If there was one lucky thing about today (just the one, he was sure, out of everything else that had gone spectacularly wrong), it was that he’d thought ahead, had guessed he’d need quick access to the suit. He spared a moment to tell Iris to run, unwilling to look closely at her reaction as he sped away.
A wall of wind. He could do it, he could definitely do it. He just had to run faster.
Back and forth, up and down the coastline, everywhere the rising curl of water would impact the shore. Faster, he thought. Must go faster. Even though Cisco was already dead and Joe might be dead and Iris, God, would she hate him? If her father were killed by a metahuman, almost certainly yes. He was losing track of what direction he was going; he must have passed that bench already this time around. Must go faster.
He thought maybe he screamed, and then it was night, and he was running by buildings, and he was sure he saw himself. What...
Barry skidded to a stop. Where was he? Had he taken a wrong turn? He needed to get back to the coastline, but it was night already, he’d missed it somehow and the city was still here. Cars passed. A man flipped a neon sign too fast to see what it advertised. A familiar-looking woman tried in vain to hail a taxi, shouting that she was going to be late.
Wait.
The first thing you did when you went back in time, Barry knew, was find the people you loved. But he was the (second) fastest man alive, and he could get a lot done in the first few seconds. So the first thing he did was check the date and time, and then he took a little time to himself to think, this isn’t possible.
And even if it was, then where was he? The other him. Barry had seen him, himself, running, and then he’d stopped in the square, just like he had two nights ago, and there was only one of him. It hadn’t taken long to get to the morgue after that; he should be hearing voices over the comm. “What’s going on? What do you see?” “A dead body.”
Barry swallowed. There was nothing. He tagged the earpiece gently; maybe it had gotten disconnected somehow? Who knew what time travel could mess up. He cleared his throat, and tried, quietly: “Cisco?”
“Barry?” The voice came strong and sure over the mic, and Barry felt all the breath rush out of his body at once. “What’s up, dude. Still on your way to the morgue?” All of a sudden, Barry was sure he was going to fall over. He had to steady himself against a light-post just to keep his feet underneath him. He’d only been told a few minutes ago that Cisco was dead, and now there he was again, talking in his ear like it had never even…
It never happened.
A sharp, desperate laugh punched out of Barry’s chest. Captain Singh unconscious in a hospital bed? Never happened. Joe missing, alive only on Mardon’s word? Never happened. Caitlin finding Cisco’s body in the lab? Never. Happened.
“Uh, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Barry said, high and breathy. “Yeah.”
“Okay…” Cisco said uncertainly. “‘Cause, you kind of stopped in the middle of the city, and you’re heart rate’s pretty fast right now, even for you.”
“Dude, it is so messed up that you just know my heart rate all the time, y’know?” Barry grinned wider with every word, unable to stop himself, but when he really started to think about it… Cisco could see his heart rate, Cisco could tell where he was, that he’d stopped, because the suit had a locator on it. “Hey, I have a question for you,” he said, interrupting Cisco’s grumpy reply that no, he didn’t know Barry’s heart rate all the time, just when he was in the suit, and it was a perfectly practical—
“What?”
“Is there more than one dot on your map? I mean, am I in two places right now?”
“Um, what?”
“Come on, seriously. What does the screen say?”
There was a long pause on the other end. “It says you’re standing on the corner of Fifth and Clinton, same place you’ve been for the last minute or so of this, and I have to say, really weird conversation, Barry. And yeah, there’s just the one of you. But you’d let us know if you’d suddenly spawned the ability to split in two, right?”
“‘Course.” Barry shifted himself back up and off the post, feeling new energy rushing through him, like he’d just eaten about twenty of those gross high-calorie power bars. “Hey, I’m headed back now, kay?”
“But I thought you were going to— You know what, scratch that. Maybe you should come back in.”
“Be right there.” Barry took off, running back the way he came. This was perfect; he was the only one of him around, and he could fix this.
Cisco was waiting with his arms crossed and Dr. Wells at his heels. The fact that he was waiting at all meant Barry had taken a little too long coming back in, running around the city to make sure everything was as it had been.
“Just so you know,” Cisco said, “Caitlin’s coming in.”
Barry nodded. “Good, good.” That’d be easier, if they were all in the same place at once. Speaking of taking care of everything at once… “Uh, I gotta make a call. One sec.” He grabbed his phone; he’d almost forgotten that he had somewhere to be. “Hey, Joe?”
Joe sounded stressed over the phone, but he would cover for him, Barry knew he would. And damn, but it was good to hear his voice. He gave a generic excuse — metahuman related issues, he’d be in to go over the evidence later — and tried to act surprised when Joe dropped the bomb: that it looked like they were dealing with the other Mardon, and he was pissed.
“Just be careful, Joe, and watch out for any weird-looking weather, yeah?”
Joe didn’t seem to know what he meant by that, and Barry had to stop, drag himself back a few steps.
“Uh, I mean, you said the room was wet, right? Mardon was in the same crash as his brother, the accident probably affected him the same way. So I’m thinking weather powers. Anyway, just. Like I said, be careful.” Not that he needed to be just yet; Mardon wouldn’t strike until tomorrow.
Barry hung up and turned to face Dr. Wells and Cisco. "Oh, right." He cleared his throat. "So, there's a second Mardon, now. More weather manipulation, which is always fun."
Dr. Wells furrowed his brow. "You found something at the morgue?"
"Yeah." Barry winced. "Or, well, Joe did. Makes sense, right? They were in the same place when it happened, and they're brothers, so it probably affected them the same way."
“I suppose…”
“Barry, what happened out there?” Cisco interrupted. Barry felt his breathing pause for a moment. Had Cisco noticed something after all? Had one of his sensors noticed that, what, Barry was a day and a half older than he should have been? “You were talking about two points on the map? Two of you?”
Oh, yeah. Now that one, Barry actually had a good excuse for. He smiled, relieved, then remembered he hadn’t been smiling the first time he’d asked this question and dropped it. “Right, that… was weird. Actually, Dr. Wells, I wanted to ask you about that. I was running and I saw, well, I think it was like another me. It was running right next to me but it was gone a couple seconds later.”
“Another you?” Dr. Wells hummed, wheeling himself closer. “Like a mirror image?”
“Kind of,” Barry said, running a hand through his hair. “But not just a reflection in the glass, you know? What do you think it was?”
“Could’ve been an illusion. Not all projections are based on reflective surfaces. Sufficient wind shear and light at the right angle? A speed mirage, would perhaps be the right term.”
Barry swallowed. He’d argued with it before; the image had seemed so real, but of course, now he knew it was. And if he wanted then to forget about it, then he’d have to take a different stance. “Yeah, could be. Had to be, right? Cisco would've noticed if I’d multiplied.”
He’d tell them, Barry thought, to calm the guilty conscience that reared up when the two of them shot him a last look of concern before it faded into acceptance. Eventually, he’d tell them. But time travel was a tricky thing, Back to the Future and Terminator and a thousand other movies had taught him as much, and even if they got some things wrong, there were still some basic lessons to be learned. The first of which was: you couldn’t meddle too much with time, and you couldn’t tell people their futures.
Barry intended to meddle. Maybe that would screw some things up, but what use was it going back if he didn’t try to fix what he could? If he didn’t try to save the Captain, and Joe, and Cisco. Besides, if it was just his mind that jumped back into his slightly-older body, then he wasn’t even in the wrong time, he wasn’t messing up the timestream. It was like he’d just gotten a sneak-peak of one possible future, that wasn’t going to happen now that he knew how to do it right.
But he couldn’t tell his friends anything, not if he wanted to play it safe. Not until after he’d made the changes that were needed to set things on the right track. They couldn’t know their future until he was sure it wouldn’t be their future at all.
While Barry was mulling over the informed consent of time travel, Cisco and Dr. Wells had taken a moment to backtrack to the problem of another souped-up Mardon brother in town. Cisco was mentioning his wand-thing, the one that soaked up the energy Mardon needed to control the weather. That could be useful, though Barry wasn’t sure it’d be ready in time. He’d need to act quickly, before Mardon had the chance to do any kind of damage...
Caitlin chose that moment of introspection to enter the room. (Oh, yeah, he’d definitely taken too long to get here, if he’d only beaten Caitlin by a few minutes.) She didn’t ask why she’d been dragged out of her apartment less than an hour shy of midnight, so she must have been filled in over the phone, at least the part of it they’d known when they called her. Barry listened as Dr. Wells told her about the phenomena that they believed explained Barry’s odd behavior, filling in a blank or two with a comment of ‘weird, right?’ and ‘yeah, well, it was freaky when it happened, but...’
“Well, I’d like to check you out, anyway, just to be sure,” Caitlin said casually, like that hadn’t been their plan all along. “Cisco said your vitals were off, too, and you were going considerably faster than usual.”
“I wanted to get there fast,” Barry defended.
“What, you had to speed to the morgue?” Cisco raised an eyebrow. “No one speeds on their way to the morgue, dude. Not even dead people. You gotta take your time like normal folks.”
Barry couldn’t quite manage a frown, not when he was enjoying listening to his friend tease him so damn much. “There was crime going on, Cisco. Crime. People speed toward crime.”
“Actually, most people speed away from crime,” Cisco reminded him. He was reaching into a nearby drawer and pulling out a sucker, though, which meant he was feeling calmer, at least. “But I guess everyone has quirks.”
“True.” Barry waited until Cisco had the sucker just unwrapped, then darted over and snatched it out of his hands, zipping back to his original position before Cisco noticed the moment. He grinned triumphantly and stuck the sucker in his own mouth just as Cisco noticed he was holding nothing but empty air.
Cisco pointed an accusing finger in his direction, the one the had just barely missed going into his mouth in place of the missing treat. “See? Crime.”
Barry laughed. “I know, I’m terrible. I’m sorry. You want it back?” He made a point of pulling the sucker out of his mouth with a sharp smack and offering it out, but Cisco just made a face and held his hands up in defense.
“Ew, no thanks. You can just owe me the twenty cents.”
Twenty cents was probably a gross overestimate, given the bulk size of the bag in the drawer from which Cisco pulled out a second piece of candy, but Barry figured he’d let it slide.
“If you’re done?” Caitlin said, arms crossed and head tilted to the side expectantly. Reaching into the drawer for the third time, Cisco tossed her another sucker, which she caught with a small smile. “Alright, come on, Barry. Time for a check-up, I’m serious.”
“Okay, okay.” He turned, ready to let himself be led out of the room, but then faltered.
‘No wound,’ Caitlin had said over the phone, the words brittle and uncertain. ‘No head trauma.’ That could have meant anything, could even have meant there was a wound that she just didn’t see in the first minute or two. Barry had been assuming that it, like everything else that had seemed to go horribly wrong that day, could somehow be traced back to Mardon (if he could control the wind, why couldn’t he, say, steal the breath from someone’s lungs), but what if that wasn’t it? There were a hundred thousand things that could go wrong inside a person’s own body.
“But, uh.” Barry stopped near the door, and Caitlin turned to look back at him. “Maybe… Maybe we should all get check-ups?”
The silence felt oppressive. Shit, he hadn’t prepared for this, not at all. Say something, Barry. Say anything.
“I mean, who actually goes to the doctor as often as they’re supposed to, right?” Anything that made sense, damn. He was so not smooth.
Dr. Wells had taken an interest in the conversation once more. “Barry, are you sure you’re alright?”
“Sure,” Barry said quickly, trying his best to look nonchalant while also insistent enough to get his way. “I was just thinking, you know, for the sake of general health, and there’s gotta be a lot of chemicals and… dust... floating around in here?” He floundered, trying to grab onto any semi-reasonable explanation for his request. “And, Cisco has a cough!”
“What? No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” Barry said, shooting him a look and totally abusing the follow-along-now-ask-later eyebrow-raise.
“I…” Cisco paused. “Might have had a cough last week?”
Caitlin was now looking back and forth between the two of them, as if trying to figure out what kind of joke they were playing on her.
In the continued silence, Cisco raised his hand to his mouth and coughed, once.
“Well,” Caitlin said slowly, expression still caught somewhere between bafflement and suspicion, “I guess it couldn’t hurt to do a couple more exams.”
“Great!” Barry grinned, already moving toward the doorway, where he hovered until all three of them had passed through ahead of him. He’d sweep them right along in a rush of energy. It didn’t matter if they stopped to wonder afterward, what mattered was getting it done in the first place. And Cisco was going first.
As it happened, Cisco did not go first. Dr. Wells begged off early, insisting that he wanted to go have a look at the device Cisco had mentioned. He got a quick check of temperature and breath sounds before waving off the blood pressure cuff, reminding them that he was perfectly healthy and had other things to take care of. Barry barely bothered putting up a token resistance; after all, it wasn’t Wells he was worried about.
It wasn’t Caitlin, either, who naturally couldn’t give herself much of a check-up, though she clipped on a monitor or two to check her heart rate and oxygen levels and swore to check for any odd lumps or moles the next time she took a shower, in the interest of general awareness. At this point, she insisted that Barry lay down on the table, and he found it difficult to argue since it had, after all, been him who had prompted this round of medical overviews in the first place. When everything came up normal, or normal enough for his case, it was finally Cisco’s turn.
So instead of first, Cisco was last, but that just meant Barry was able to make sure the check-up was thorough. He even managed to sweet-talk his way into getting Caitlin to give Cisco an EKG, since the leads had already been taken out for his own benefit. To Barry’s matching relief and exasperation, everything was extremely regular.
It must have been Mardon after all, then, though Barry wasn’t sure why the man would have bothered going after Cisco when he was busy with Joe and his actual revenge plot. Maybe he’d come down to the lab to try to find that wand, take it out of the picture? He had seemed pretty freaked out when he’d realized it could stop his powers cold. Maybe Cisco had just been a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. Barry shuddered; it seemed wrong that something like that could be attributed to an accident.
Caitlin pulled the stethoscope away from her ears, draping it back around her neck. “All set. Cut back on the junk food and I’ll see you in a year.”
Cisco rolled his eyes. “You’ll see me tomorrow with a slushie in hand, and maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll bring you one too. Can I put my shirt back on, now?”
“Please do. Barry, I know we went over all of this already, but are you sure you aren’t feeling anything at all… unusual? Even if you think it’s just in your head?”
“I’d tell you, Caitlin.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Like you told us about the dizzy spells?”
Barry winced. “I learned my lesson from that, okay? Cross my heart. I’m fine. I just… I’ve only been doing the speed thing for a few months, you know? I guess there’s still a couple things that can surprise me.”
After a few more sideways looks and lingering a bit over gathering up her things, Caitlin finally left, clearly missing her bed in these wee hours of the morning. Barry hovered around the exam table, thinking to himself. There were things you couldn’t test for in one night, he knew, things that were practically invisible until they caused a problem, but what was it worth worrying about something he couldn’t stop—
A throat cleared behind him, and Barry jerked hard enough to bang his knee against the table edge. Jeez, it wasn’t even like he hadn’t realized he wasn’t alone in the lab, he was just feeling so jumpy, it was ridiculous. “Ow.”
“Sorry.” Cisco shrugged.
“It’s okay. I heal fast. What’s up?”
Cisco shrugged again, edging a little closer and then stopping, as if he’d reached some invisible fence. “Just thought you’d want to know, you were wearing your suit the whole time we talked, earlier. You know, about that speed mirage you saw?”
Barry frowned, unsure why Cisco would be bringing this up. “Yeah. So?”
Nodding, Cisco shuffled another half-inch forward. It was such a small movement that Barry felt inexplicably irritated for a moment, wanted to reach out and drag Cisco into the bubble of space he seemed to be avoiding. “Barry, you know how a polygraph machine works?”
Of course he did; he was CSI, but he worked with the police, after all. Lie detectors were glorified bodily monitors, they worked because the body had a physiological response to lying: heart rate increased, respiration went up, blood pressure could be affected, even sweating could be measured and matched against a baseline to—
Oh. Oh, no.
‘Dude, it is so messed up that you just know my heart rate all the time, y’know?’
Oh, no, no, no.
“I mean, I knew the whole “chemicals in the air” thing was crap — and I think I deserve some major credit for playing along on that one, by the way — but I don’t even know why you would lie to Dr. Wells about what you saw.” The horror must have shown on Barry’s face, because Cisco sighed and continued. “So, you wanna tell me what was really going on?”
Barry took a deep breath. Oh, this was not going to go well. “I, um. Really don’t. I mean, I do!” he added hastily, when Cisco started to look actively hurt by the dismissal. “But, I can’t. Not right now. I have to do something first, but I swear I’ll tell you the truth after that, I just— Not tonight.” Barry took another breath, trying to slow the stream of words. “Is that… okay?”
Cisco released the lip he’d been chewing on and inhaled, shaking his head just a little. “Yeah, it’s okay,” he said, and Barry let out a long sigh of relief. “Just… don’t get smushed or skewered in the meantime, and as soon as you’re done with whatever-it-is, you come right back here to let me know what’s up, got it?”
“Totally,” Barry assured him, with a grin creeping onto his face. “Absolutely. You got it.”
“You can talk to me about stuff, you know,” Cisco continued, almost casually. “I know Caitlin’s got the medical background and I’m just the gear guy, but I can still listen.”
“I know, man. Thanks.” Barry reached out and clapped Cisco on the shoulder, the first time he’d touched him yet tonight, the first time since he’d heard he was dead, and he was suddenly all but overwhelmed by the desire to draw him closer and into a hug. Cisco wouldn’t mind, he was a touchy sorta guy, but Barry would probably hold on a little too tight, and then Cisco would think he was hiding even more, and he’d offer to talk again, and they were in a good place right now. Barry didn’t want to worry him (again). “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, letting his hand slip away.
Cisco pointed at him sternly. “Yes, you will.”
Barry gave him a thumbs up over his shoulder as he went in search of his coat. He would see them tomorrow, and he’d tell them what he hadn’t been able to tonight. He just had to take care of a couple things first.