The red lightning crossed the room in an instant.
Henry Allen collapsed. A fruit knife appeared in the Reverse Flash's hand—lifted from the kitchen counter, an ordinary object doing an extraordinary and terrible thing—and he walked toward Nora.
"No—please—don't—"
Jude pushed against the void. Nothing. No leverage, no purchase, no way to generate force without something to push against. He hung in the timestream like a man treading water in the open ocean, watching the scene through the membrane of the timeline, completely unable to reach through.
The knife went in.
Nora Allen fell.
Her eyes didn't close immediately. They moved to the doorway—the doorway where Barry had just been, where the golden lightning had carried her son away seconds ago—and the last thing in her expression wasn't pain. It was the , unguarded worry of a mother who hadn't yet confirmed that her child was safe.
Silence settled over the wrecked room.
And then something hit Jude from behind—hard, deliberate, not like turbulence. Like a shove. Something in the current of the timestream reached out and pushed him through.
He landed in the room.
What do I do. What can I—
The answer came before the question finished forming.
He moved. He crossed the room in three steps and knelt beside her. One hand, as light as he could make it, against the side of her head.
Smuggling. The system skill that he'd used and refined and never fully understood the scope of—the ability to move something from one place to another in ways that the material universe didn't technically permit. He'd used it for goods, for objects, for small conveniences. He'd never tried it on a soul.
He tried it now.
The seconds stretched. The room around him was cold and motionless—time frozen in the wake of everything that had just happened. Nora Allen's body lay still. Her face was at rest, the worry finally gone out of it, leaving something quieter behind.
But in the place Jude's system could perceive that most systems couldn't, something was moving. A transfer, quiet and stable and—as best he could tell—working. The system processed without protest. No error. No rejection.
There, he thought. Somewhere else. Another world. You'll be there.
She'll be reborn.
The golden lightning found him again before he could do anything else. He was swept back into the current—back into the timestream—the Allen house dissolving behind him as the wormhole carried him forward once more.
He saw the Reverse Flash on a street. Running.
And then slowing.
And then stopping.
The electric light on the yellow suit was guttering—flickering at the edges, losing cohesion, draining away like a candle in the wind. The Reverse Flash stumbled to a halt on a sidewalk under ordinary streetlights, staring at his hands. The Speed Force was leaving him in real time, visibly, and he couldn't stop it.
"Why—" The voice was wrong suddenly, stripped of its vibrational distortion, sounding almost human. "Why is the Speed Force gone?"
He tore the hood back.
Not Wells. A stranger's face—younger, angular, the expression moving through shock and rage before arriving, finally, at something much rawer.
A holographic projection materialized in the air beside him. Gideon's voice, precise and uninflected, chimed in the quiet night:
"Eobard Thawne: due to alterations to Barry Allen's circumstances at the point of origin, the Flash ceased to exist. As a result, you were unable to replicate the Speed Force from his suit, and therefore you no longer possess it. You cannot travel through time again."
A pause.
"You cannot return to your own era."
Eobard Thawne stood on the sidewalk in a dead speedster's suit and absorbed that. His face went through several things in rapid succession. Then it went very, very still.
The timeline didn't adjust itself to his feelings. It moved on.
A car on a dark road. Rain. A spike strip laid across both lanes—placed there deliberately, with the unhurried competence of someone who had done the calculation in advance.
The car hit it at speed. The tires blew. The vehicle rolled twice before coming to rest on its side, steam rising from the crumpled hood.
Thawne watched it come to a stop, then walked over and removed the spike strip from the road with the methodical calm of a man cleaning up after a project. He could hear the sounds from the wreckage—one person moving, one person not.
"Please—" Harrison Wells's voice, wet and desperate, drifted from inside the car. "Please, my wife... help her—"
Thawne crouched beside the wreckage and looked through the broken window at Tess Morgan. At what remained of her.
"She's been gone for over a century," he said, quietly. "To me."
He produced a small device from his coat. Compact, precise—built for exactly this. He waited for Wells to drag himself free of the car, bloody and half-destroyed, and then he crouched in front of him and looked at his face for a long moment. Committing it to memory. Or perhaps saying a kind of goodbye to his own.
"In your timeline, you and Tess were going to launch the particle accelerator in 2020," Thawne said. "I need it to happen sooner. I'm sorry, Dr. Wells. I am."
He placed one end of the device against Wells's chest and the other against his own arm.
What followed was not something Jude wanted to watch for long. It was thorough. At the end of it, Eobard Thawne had a different face—a face the world knew as one of the most brilliant scientists alive—and the real Harrison Wells was a husk on the roadside, already becoming indistinguishable from the rain-soaked earth around him.
The timestream carried Jude forward again—past the particle accelerator, past the night of the explosion, past the months he had already lived through—and he let it take him, because the current knew where it was going even if he didn't.
He caught fragments. Glimpses of what was coming.
Mark Mardon—Clyde's brother, the surviving half of that particular disaster—materializing a massive wall of water offshore, Central City in his crosshairs. Lisa Snart seated across from a pale and unhappy Cisco, the codename 'Golden Glider' being extracted from him along with blueprints for a weapon he very much did not want to build. A hacker moving mechanical bees through a city's electrical grid like a general moving pieces. A shape that kept changing faces, wearing identities the way other people wear clothes. Someone calling himself the Trickster, along with bombs, and the kind of theatrical menace that suggested this wasn't his first time doing this.
Barry will handle it, Jude thought, watching the fragments blow past. He'll have to. That's what Flashes do.
And then, deeper in the stream, a fragment appeared that resolved into something larger and slower and more deliberate than the rest.
A room. Two figures.
One was Wells—Thawne—and the other was Barry, wearing a yellow suit he'd clearly built to match. They faced each other with the quality of two people who have been building toward this conversation for a long time and have finally run out of reasons to postpone it.
"Your real name is Eobard Thawne," Barry said.
"That's right." No inflection. No shame. "The name I was born with."
"How far into the future?"
"One hundred and thirty-six years." Thawne looked at Barry with the same brightness Jude had seen before in different eyes—the Joker's eyes, when he finally had Batman exactly where he wanted him. The brightness of someone who has arrived at the only moment that has ever mattered to them. "No need to work up to it. Ask what you actually want to know."
Barry asked it.
Thawne laughed—not cruelly, not theatrically. It was almost genuine, the laugh of a man who has finally been asked the question he's been carrying for decades and finds the answer, even now, remarkable.
"Because I hate the Flash."
He let that sit.
"I idolized you. Your future self—the legend, the myth. I devoted my entire life to understanding you and building the same power for myself. Found a fragment of your Speed Force on a preserved suit in a museum. Mastered it." A pause. "And then I met you. The real you. And you didn't like me. So I became the other thing. The opposite. Reverse-Flash—your mirror image, your adversary, your matched and equal enemy."
He folded his hands.
"Until I found out your name. Where you came from. That a child existed in the past who was going to become you. I went back. I planned to end it at the source. Kill you before you ever became the Flash."
"Your future self followed me. Stopped me from reaching you." The brightness in his eyes shifted slightly—something almost like respect, or its inverse. "So I killed your mother instead. Framed your father. Gave you the kind of wound that reshapes a person—the kind that changes what you become. I thought if the wound was large enough, you'd never become the Flash at all."
The room was very quiet.
"And here is the funniest part," Thawne said.
Barry said nothing. Thawne answered his own question.
"When the Flash ceased to exist, I lost the Speed Force. Because my Speed Force had always come from you. I was stranded—trapped in an era a hundred and thirty-six years before my birth, in a world full of people who have been dead longer than I've been alive, with no way home."
He looked at Barry with something that was too complicated to name.
"So I had no choice. I had to create my enemy again. Had to build the conditions that would produce the Flash. Had to make you." A long exhale. "After everything I did to stop you from existing, I spent fifteen years making sure you would."
He let the silence do its work.
"Destiny," he said softly. "Isn't it a strange thing?"
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