Chapter Text
December 10th, 2008
Barry narrowed his eyes.
No room for mistakes, he thought. All eyes on me. Not sure how I’m gonna make it out of this one.
Beyond, spectators watched in breathless awe as a pair of figures blurred across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Moving at hundreds of miles an hour, they struck, parried, dodged, countered. The combatants spun across the room, phasing through one another’s blows, leaping over one another’s heads. Barry’s eyes narrowed in anticipation; his opponent’s crimson eyes were wide with a savage delight.
Like high-speed chess players, every attack, every block and kick, every strike and counter-strike, built upon each other, countering and re-countering as each fighter strove for advantage, until at last, as they always did, age and experience overcame youth and energy.
Exhaling, Barry’s opponent spun him over onto the floor, and moments later was straddling him with a hand against the back of his throat.
“Not bad. But not good enough.”
“You’re getting a lot better though, Barry,” J’onn complimented him, and offered him a hand up.
Accepting the hand, Barry smiled as he rubbed his chest ruefully. The UNIT personnel, seeing that the match was over, began to drift away.
“I’m pretty sure they’re betting on us,” the speedster muttered, pitching his voice just loud enough to be heard by the alien.
“Oh, they are,” J’onn agreed. “I’ve had to close down three separate betting pools in the last four months.”
“What’d you do with the money?”
“Chocos.”
Barry sniggered.
“You still going to see the particle accelerator?”
“Yeah,” Barry nodded.
“Be careful. Don’t engage him in public.”
“Yes, boss.”
J’onn clapped a hand on Barry’s shoulder. “I know it’s been a long three years. But we will get him.”
Barry reflected on his mentor’s words on his way back to his lab. At first, upon returning to life on Earth, he’d been eager to hunt down the speedster who’d murdered his mom.
When J’onn had first recruited him for UNIT, he’d planned on using the organization’s resources to capture the yellow-suited speedster. J’onn, however, had provided a swift and unsparing demonstration of what was likely to happen were he to rush in to fight someone who, it galled Barry to admit, had been faster and more experienced than him, on his home court, no less. After three years of sparring with J’onn and Oliver, running through the Speed Force to train with the Avengers, and experience gained in adventures of all kinds, he was confident that their next confrontation would be quite different. But first…
“Paperwork.”
Grumbling, Barry sat down on his desk and pulled a pen out of the mug that doubled as a pencil holder on his desk. It had been a present from his colleague General Jack O’Neill, and suggested that though insanity was not conditional to employment, it could be of assistance. “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!”
He filed a report with UNIT Command in Geneva about the recent black-market alien weapons dealer he’d played a part in arresting, brought the confiscated Sontaran blaster down to the relevant department, whipped up a chemical mixture to test the scale that had come loose at that morning’s crime scene, put ten dollars in the office betting pool over the next stage of Diggle and Lyla’s on-again-off-again romance (currently they were in an “off-again” stage, but Barry had seen her gazing longingly as he walked away), stretched his legs and ran out to Wyoming to check out the most recent reports of an alien invasion (turned out it was just a kid putting lights on a drone), had lunch with a UNIT associate and former companion of the Doctor named MacGyver, and endured a seventeen-minute (he timed it) lecture from Pam the quartermaster on reckless usage of UNIT funds and equipment for what he and Kara had done with the tank during the Drahvin incursion the other day.
He’d tried complaining to the commander about Pam’s fussiness, but he got the impression J’onn thought it was funny.
“So that was my day,” he recounted to Kara as they stretched out on the couch together at her apartment in Central City. “You do anything fun?”
“Mmm…” she pondered. “Winn and Nia are still making eyes at each other when the other one isn’t looking and driving the rest of us crazy. Snapper’s being his usual self. James just got back from an assignment in Port Oswego, Oregon. Something about a super-battle there. He was telling me about it. Thinks there’s a new superhero, but whoever they are, they’re keeping on the low-down. I’m going to try and investigate at some point.”
“Huh,” Barry nodded. “I’ll take a look at our records, see if UNIT knows anything about it. Anything else?”
“Not much,” Kara shrugged. “Allegra—you remember the intern I’m mentoring? The one who’s a wizard--just got back from an assignment, we’re going to catch up over lunch tomorrow. Apparently, there was some kind of incident at the Crossings. Stopped a robbery. Oh, and I rescued a kitten named Fluffy from a tree. Well…I thought it was a kitten at first…it was a snake.”
“Who names a snake Fluffy?” Barry exclaimed, raising his eyebrows.
“I know! And then it bit me!”
Her boyfriend gave her a skeptical look.
“Kara, I’ve seen you tank a full spread from an assault rifle without getting your hair mussed.”
“It hurt!”
“Whinger,” he smiled.
“Maybe you should kiss it better.”
“Maybe I should,” he agreed seriously.
“You do remember we’re having dinner with Alex, Clark, and Lois, right?” Kara murmured lazily against his shoulder some time later.
“Not a problem,” Barry whispered back, both of them shifting into a speed state where they moved so fast that the universe outside seemed almost to stand still.
“We have all the time in the world.”