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Hartley Rathaway is a difficult person. He prides himself on that fact—time is money, and his is expensive. Why suffer fools? A lifetime of being the smartest man in the room has whittled down his patience, and 18 formative years under the thumbs of Osgood and Rachel Rathaway has bred in him a smoldering disgust for both the one-percent and the legal system protecting them. So if the options are “Team Flash” or “supervillainy,” he’s pulled out his best evil laughs and mustache twirls every time. No matter how many sermons a scarlet speedster might give.
Still. Maybe, at forty-one, he’s going soft.
Hartley shakes his head and lets out a quiet chuckle. Around him, streaks of red and gold trickle lazily, over his head, under his feet. Marbleized lightning. This place is a scientific wonder. It’s also a prison, he reminds himself. Like his cell in the pipeline over a decade ago, it’s a place where The Flash dumps the evil, the wicked. Shuts the door and throws away the key, because who needs to wonder about the lives of villains? As if solitary confinement weren’t classified by the UN as torture; no, he’s good, and they are wicked.
(The speed force is also really fucking cool. But scientific wonder later; righteous anger now.)
Had Barry Allen himself asked Hartley to come here, he’d have doubled over laughing and thrown a stapler at the man’s head for good measure. But Cisco always had a knack for saying just the right thing, getting under his skin. Some things don’t change over fourteen years.
“I’m not above admitting we’ve wronged people,” Ramon had said. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a man thinking he’s in the right.”
“You’re only realizing that now, Cisquito?”
Perhaps Hartley had been too harsh with his former coworker.
He walks. Whether for minutes or hours, he isn’t sure (temporal dynamics in a realm made for time-travelling speedsters, fascinating), but there’s a figure. Sitting, arms around his bent knees, curled in on himself. Brown hair. Gaunt, waxy skin.
“Allen.”
Jesus Christ. That face.
Cisco’s files on Savitar had been…colorful. Ramon had clearly edited his notes before emailing the files to Hartley, but it was simple work to extract the metadata and sift the original text from the modified one. (What was this, a freshman year hackathon? Please.) “Pizza-face evil clone Barry,” indeed.
“The fuck are you doing here?”
“I brought Jitters. A peace offering.”
Savitar takes the offered cup silently.
They sit together a while, eyes locked in an unspoken battle of wills, sips of coffee like some sort of sabre-rattling as a prelude to warfare. If Bartholomew Henry Allen, any version of him, thinks he can win a battle of attrition, he’s sorely mistaken. Hartley is a supervillain, with a long record of heists and a Legion of Doom membership. Patience, dedication, huntsmanship—they’re essential traits for the job.
Allen eventually cracks. (Of course he does.)
“What do you want.”
“Evil partnership, rule the world, whole nine yards. And a pony.”
“Not funny.”
“Says you.”
“Fine. Har har Hartley. You look old as balls.”
“If the files I read were telling the truth, you’re centuries older than I am. Refer me to your plastic surgeon. But not the one who did your face.”
“Asshole. Do you always go for low blows?”
“I’m a supervillain, Allen. You want a hug and singalong duet, go find your super-friends.”
“…”
“Out of witty comebacks? That means I win the round, Allen.”
“…”
“Ugh. Seriously? I came to gloat and drink coffee, and I’m all out of coffee. If you keep sulking, I’m going to have to monologue, and I hate monologuing. Barely passed Intro to Monologue in villain school.”
Credit to Savitar-Allen where due, he’s learned to speak with his eyebrows. (The “real” Barry Allen has not.) You’re a bitch.
Hartley eyebrows back. Don’t dish out what you can’t take.
They keep at the staring game a while longer, coffee cups mercilessly empty. Slowly, Allen breaks eye contact, staring at the ground. He curls into a somehow even tighter ball.
“You mean well,” he says in a small voice. “But I…there’s nothing left for me. Not here, not anywhere. You wouldn’t get it.”
“Cisquito, why did you send me these files, exactly?” Hartley moved the call to his earbuds, taking Moon out of her cage and into a temporary cardboard box. Contrary to popular belief, rats were actually tidy, fastidious creatures, but everyone had to have the home cleaned regularly.
A sigh on the other end of the line. “I need your help, Rathaway.”
“I’m sorry, my metahuman super-hearing must be failing me. What was that?”
“You. Fucking. Dick. There’s a great evil waiting to be awakened, and A.R.G.U.S. needs your specific skills. It’s your time. Happy, Hartley?”
“Mmmm. See, Moon and I are having a gay old time over here. Emphasis on gay, with extra rainbows. It’s cage-cleaning day. And obstacle-course enrichment day. I’m sure whatever government agency you need saved can survive losing a few million.”
Somewhere, Hartley knew that Cisquito was banging his head against a wall.
“Rathaway. Please. You know I wouldn’t go to you unless I had no other choice.”
“Yeah, not really selling your case, vibey-boy. Get one of your capes to do it, oh I don’t know, someone with laser eyes and a big ‘S’ splashed across their chest? Or the Big F himself. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m one of your baddies, so ‘the greater good’ pitch isn’t going to work on me.”
“$2 million each to the Trevor Project, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and UNICEF say otherwise.”
“Hearsay. Lies. And those donations were anonymous.”
“Hartley.”
“Cisquito.”
“Savitar was…is Barry Allen. And the Barry Allen I know is a good man, a good friend—”
“Hold on, I need to barf.”
“Can you not be a dick for two seconds? Look, I’m not above admitting we’ve wronged people. The fact that Savitar exists at all is because, well, we were trying to do the best we could, ok? Barry fucked up. I fucked up. And in our work, innocent people get caught in the crossfire and there’s always another disaster coming and we don’t have a chance to set things right, not properly. There’s nothing more dangerous than a man thinking he’s in the right.”
“You’re just realizing this now, Cisquito?”
“Hart. Somewhere out there is person trapped in a Speed Force prison. Someone who has been personally wronged by Team Flash and would never accept help from me, Barry, or any ‘normie’ who’s lived a cushy, heroic life. This guy’s been tortured, he’s been shot in the back by the love of his life, he’s been tossed aside and forgotten by the ‘proper’ Barry Allen. This is your chance to…to…well, Diana Prince says we have to become the people we needed when we were kids. Qui aliorum problemata non attendunt, certa merces est infelicitas.”
“…fuck you, Cisco.”
“Hart? Are you…crying?”
“You’re such a dick.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
His first reaction is shocked disbelief. His mouth hangs open, cartoonishly. The grand locomotive of his brain comes to a screeching halt. “Wha…ha…what the fuck?”
Then, like a perverse version of the stages of grief, his brain turns on again, fueled by the embers of rage that never quit burned out even after so many years. Hartley Rathaway sees red. He sees his parents. (“One hour. You get one hour to pack your things. I have no son.”) In fuzzy silhouette, he sees Earl Povich. (“You’re soft, Hart. You need me because you can’t make it on the streets on your own.) He sees himself, locked in a pipeline cell for weeks, slowly losing his grasp of time and hearing voices—they’re not real, they’re not real—filling his skull to exploding, whispering increasingly unhinged schemes for escape and revenge. He sees Harrison, no, “Eobard.” (“You’re my guy, Hart.” Strong arms pulling him in, soft lips…no. No, he’s not going there today.)
Hartley grabs Allen (Savitar) (what’s the difference?) by the collar and only his last vestiges of control keep him from sonic-screaming the other man to shreds. “I, of all people,” he spits, “don’t get it? What part do I not get, Allen? The ‘thrown out like yesterday’s garbage’ part? The ‘locked in an illegal prison and forgotten about’ part? And you know what the funny part is?” He’s cry-laughing, ugly crying, oh if Mark Mardon could see him now, the faggot slurs he would make. “You! You did that to me! Pre any time clone fuckery! And the tables turn, the tables fucking turn, and you want the world to feel sorry for you?” Snot runs down his face. Pathetic.
Hart throws Allen across the netherspace. Or tries to. The former hero merely stumbles a few steps before catching his balance. (Weak. Barely a man, much less a proper villain. No wonder Flash never saw you as a threat.)
So much therapy. So many hours with his head in Rod’s lap, his boyfriend-then-husband’s hand carding through his hair, whispering “I know everything that’s happened to you and I still love you, stupid.” And yet. One never quite makes all their trauma go away, do they? Hartley turns his back on his old nemesis, shaking. Raises his wristwatch to his face and whimpers states firmly, “Ramon. Take me back. I can’t do this.”
The message will travel across time-space to get back to Cisco eventually. (He was too rattled to even use the old nickname “Cisquito.” God.) Hartley spins on his heel with all the dramatic flair befitting a Lex Luthor level villain and marches off into the infinite realm of marbleized lightning. Fuck this.
“Hart.” The voice is so small, fragile like glass.
He stops, but does not turn around. (If he wipes his eyes, no, he didn’t.)
“Hartley, I’m sorry. You gotta know that. You gotta. Please.” (If Allen sniffles, no, he didn’t.)
The powers that be are testing him.
“Well,” he sighs. “Thawne is dead. Sort of. And you know, when I was trapped in your fucked up pipeline jail, I kept telling myself, ‘man, I hope Flash knows how this feels, one day.”
“Ah.” (Allen is crying. Don’t turn around, don’t turn around.) “Well, I got my just desserts. I hear revenge tastes good, served cold.”
“13 years in the freezer.”
“Um. Well over six hundred for me.”
Oh…shit. Hm. The files had said that Savitar had been sent into a time loop, living over and over again. That’s…quite the prison sentence. (Stupid, stupid, never feel bad for anyone named Bartholomew Allen, never ever. Stupid.)
Allen speaks up again.
“You seem to know everything about me.”
“I got the high points. From Ramon. Time remnant, god of speed, killed your wife, wife killed you, shunted back into the Speed Force as a fixed point. Sexiest face alive.”
Allen laughs wetly. “That’s all there is to know, I guess.”
“Hardly. Favorite color?”
“It used to be red. You probably already know that.”
“Didn’t ask what it used to be, asked what it is now.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to. Um. Be a person. For a long time now.”
(Don’t feel bad don’t feel bad don’t feel bad.)
“Hart?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Mr. Rathaway.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hartley. You seem to know everything about me, but I don’t know the first thing about you. At least, not since splitting off from other me. You look, um, you look good. Like put together good.”
He turns around. “Thanks.”
Allen looks the way Hartley feels. Any shreds of dignity left on the man have been buried under tears and snot. At this point, kicking him while he’s down is just cruel, even for Pied Piper.
“How’d you do it? Rebuild your life.”
He sighs, the latest instance in so many minutes. “Clumsily. You probably remember a different series of events, because timey-wimey ball. In the version I remember, the Flash blasted my boyfriend with lightning. I mean, I was trying to kill the guy, but still. Put Roderick in a coma, I called in one last favor with Mercury Labs to keep him alive, then laid low for a while. Robbed a bank or four—you know, they don’t actually keep much currency in the physical building anymore? You want to hack the accounts of specific individuals, then make wire transfers to accounts in the Canary Islands. Don’t even have to leave your living room if you know what you’re doing. Which I do.”
Hartley knows he’s going on a tangent to dodge the question. God help him, this is hard.
“Worked with the Big F to handle some random speedster baddie, I don’t fucking know. Don’t really care. Ramon and Wells, the sorta-real Wells, pulled a deus-ex-machina out of the baddie’s blood and fixed my man. And then, y’know. Life. Ran a nightclub. Bought groceries. Helped the Big F out again with some treadmill drama. Got married, donated to charity, rainbows ever after.”
The slightest ghost of a smile flickers across Allen’s eyes. “And no crime, ever ever ever.”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Allen.”
“I’m scared, Hartley. I can live at the bottom of the well, so long the rope is there; the rope means that there’s hope of getting out. But if I actually try to climb the rope and it breaks? If I have to live in the well forever? I…I don’t think I can do that.”
“Oh. Oh god. No, no feelings. I’m breaking out in hives. Don’t you fucking hug me, don’t you fucking dare, I will sonic fry your ass, HEY!”