Chapter Text
There was once a world where words didn't mark Barry Allen's skin on a cold March night when his life was torn apart in streaks of impossible lightning.
In that world, the words don't write themselves on his skin until months later, a bright July morning, already hot and hazy despite the still early hour. The only reason Barry is even awake to notice is because it's Saturday, and that means cartoons, but all thoughts of TV are wiped from his head when he looks down at his suddenly too-itchy arm and sees letters there. Written in grey, written in the sort of script that suggests someone very creative, who writes quickly because it's the only way to get all the ideas out before they're forgotten in favour of new ones.
The way the periods are more like little diagonal dashes. The way some of the lowercase letters are more like smudges suggesting the proper forms than anything else. The way the lines of the R don't fully connect with the ascender, the way the A is written not with a proper cross-bar but with a swoop that suggests the beginning of a star -which is really cool, because of what the words say. Every little detail is like a peek into his soulmate's mind.
He runs to get his mom -Dad is at the hospital by now, the end of a week of morning shifts-, jumping on her bed and bouncing excitedly, barely able to hold still at the thrill of finally knowing he has a soulmate.
The words are kind of mysterious, though. It's awesome that they reveal where he'll meet his soulmate, but he's never heard of the place before in his life. He doesn't think it even exists.
It's not until Monday when that mystery is finally solved, the headline of the newspaper declaring that there will be a new scientific laboratory coming to Central City. Barry doesn't usually care much for the news, but this time he devours the article. The article itself is boring, because it's about contracts being signed over some land ownership, but the exciting part is the name of the lab. The exciting part is that the lab will be owned by Drs Harrison Wells and Tess Morgan.
It's exciting because he recognises Dr Wells' name, has seen him interviewed in two documentaries now, and both times the man is alert and engaging, enthusiastic about science in a way no one Barry knows is. He really wants to meet him one day, wonders if he's just as cool in person, and if he's going to be working in Central City… He grins from ear to ear.
And he decides then and there, when the article mentions that the site was chosen because it's an ideal location for a particle accelerator, that he's going to focus more on physics than anything -even though he adores chemistry, and biology is really cool too- because he has to work there. He's not going to settle for just meeting his soulmate while he's visiting the place for some other reason. And he'd love to work with Dr Wells.
That night, he drifts off to sleep with a grin, touching the grey words on his skin.
'Welcome to S.T.A.R. Labs.'
He's spent thirty-five (or was it thirty-seven?) years without a mark on his arm, but that couldn't hardly bother him less. Sure, sure, there are all the common ideas about how people without soulmates must be dark, twisted individuals, but he's never let anything as silly as that get to him. Harrison knows who he is, and if the universe has decided that he is a single, solitary creature? Well, then it probably knows better than he does about these things. It's infinite and omnipresent, after all.
Maybe if he'd been colder, rougher around the edges -which is a ridiculous thought, but there you have it- then the rest of the world might have tried to box him into the category of 'villain' more than it already does. But he fights back against that stereotype with the same effusive idealism he applies to everything else in his life. In the end, no one who actually knows him can claim he's an evil man.
Actually, the common joke is that his soulmate is physics, because he could go on endlessly about the wonders hidden in something as small as a quark, the joy in the vibration of a string that could resolve itself into something as weak as a graviton, the beauty in the trails left when two particles are smashed together at a tremendously high speed.
The other one, teasingly spoken most often by his Tess -his miracle in human form- and her soulmate Tina -who is equally miraculous because she was the one who introduced him to Tess-, is that the world is his soulmate. Because, really, all he wants to do is explore its mysteries and give back to it ten times what it has already given him. He wants to make the world a better place. His love of science is equalled only by his love of humanity, his unfailing belief that they can all be better versions of themselves. (Admittedly, all of this is outclassed by his love for Tess, but he's only human.)
So it comes as a complete shock to him the day they finally get the contracts signed that make the large, open expanse of fields just on the edge of Central City theirs. The future site of the flagship office of S.T.A.R. Labs. (He still kind of prefers T.E.S.S., but he's easily convinced by his wife that, no, S.T.A.R. is a much better name. And since it's their child, the only one they will ever have for many reasons… Well, his dad always said you should let the mother have her way when it came to naming the babies, and while he could argue with that endlessly, the fact is that S.T.A.R. makes Tess happier than having the labs named after her and he can't argue with that.)
It's not until they're in the car, ready to head home to celebrate, when Harrison finally tugs up his sleeve to really scratch the odd itch that has been bothering him for the past while. Tess looks over then, and gasps loud enough to startle him.
"What? What is it?" he asks, brows furrowed because she's looking at him like she's seen a ghost or something.
She blinks, and comes back to herself with a radiant grin, and who is really the star here because she's luminous enough that the harsh July sun seems dim in compare. "Oh, Harrison," Tess says with all the love and amused fondness in the world, "Look at your arm."
That makes him blink, confused, but he does as she says anyways because she's hardly ever been wrong when she tells him he needs to do something, and-
Oh.
Harrison hesitantly touches the words he sees there, words that look like a child has taken a pencil to his skin with how the letters are formed, ill-practised yet neatly placed. It's a little unsettling, in a certain way, to think that his… his soulmate is still a child. He has to have at least two decades on them! Not that platonic relationships aren't a thing -he's married to a woman who isn't his soulmate, who has one of her own, after all-, but it's still strange. And yet.
He can't help the grin that spreads across his face.
'Oh, oh wow.' indeed.