Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was just Barry’s luck to have been struck by lightning, fallen into a coma for nine months and slept through not only the entire summer, but also the first two months of his freshman year. While his classmates had been acclimating to their new schedules and learning to navigate the crowded hallways, Barry had lain unconscious in a hospital bed.

Worst of all was that everybody seemed to know about it. Kids he’d never even met nudged each other and whispered as he walked past, and he felt curious stares boring into him from all directions during every single class. He’d hoped that high school might be a fresh start, a chance to forge a new identity for himself, without the label of “freak” that had hung over his head for his last few years of middle school. Small chance of that, Barry thought grimly, as he caught the eye of a girl who was openly gawping at him from across the hallway. The girl suddenly became very interested in the contents of her locker. Barry suppressed a sigh.

Still, things could have been worse. He still had Iris at his side; she had leapt into action immediately, shepherding him between classes, making sure he knew which teachers were hardasses and not to eat the tater tots in the cafeteria (“They’re gross, trust me”), and, most importantly, bringing him up to speed on nine months of school gossip. In addition to weeks of schoolwork, he’d also missed out on months of petty drama, which Iris recounted in minute detail as they wove through the crowded hallways to Physics class.

“…And then after that, Jess and Tom started dating,” said Iris. “Then they broke up. Then they got back together, and then he cheated on her with this horse girl in my gym class. James split his pants at the formal at the end of the dance last year—so embarrassing. And oh my god, do you remember Sarah P? She’s pregnant.” She seemed both thrilled and scandalized by this salacious gossip. (“Salacious” was one of the vocab words assigned by Barry’s new English teacher.)

Barry didn’t respond. He was busy studying his schedule with a furrow in his brow, trying to make sense of all the different names and room numbers. As convoluted as his classmates’ romantic entanglements were, they had nothing on the packed, near-identical hallways of Central City High School, which would have given Theseus a run for his money. Barry had no idea how anyone was supposed to find their way to class.

Iris nudged him gently. “Barr. Are you okay?”

“Huh? Yeah, sorry. I’m kinda spaced out. I’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

“No kidding. Just wait until I tell you about Sarah H.”

“Uh, I was kinda thinking more like homework?”

Iris shoved him playfully. Barry staggered, caught off-balance, and his elbow crunched off the lockers that lined the hallways. Eyes watering, Barry rubbed the injury furiously. The past nine months of unconsciousness had not helped his coordination issues. He’d come out of his coma almost seven inches taller and was having some trouble figuring out what to do with the extra height. His gangly limbs seemed to have a mind of their own.

“Dude,” said Iris, apparently oblivious to his predicament. “You just got out of a freaking coma. They can’t make you do homework.”

“Tell that to Mr. Mullins,” muttered Barry. “Sadistic” was another one of the vocab words Mullins had given him. Barry wondered if “irony” was on the list somewhere.

The bell rang its final warning to get to class, and Iris picked up the pace, squeezing neatly through a knot of seniors. Kids were already filing into the Physics classroom when they arrived, but before Barry could follow them, Iris tugged him to one side, her eyes soft with concern.

“Are you sure you’re okay? I know it’s a lot to take in. If you need to take a breather, we can go sit in the school guidance counsellor’s office for a while. Or we can go to the office and see if my dad can pick us up early.”

Barry couldn’t see Joe going for that, somehow. He’d tried pulling the coma card a few times already, without success. Just the night before, he had tried (and failed) to convince Joe to write him a note excusing him from Gym class on account of coma-related muscle atrophy, which, Joe had pointed out, he did not have. His attempts to get out of doing laundry and washing the dishes had also been shot down. Joe was of the view that after a nine-month-long nap, more rest was the last thing Barry needed.

Besides which, Barry suspected that Iris’s motives weren’t entirely altruistic. He hadn’t missed the fact that she’d said “us” and not “you”. “This wouldn’t happen to have something to do with that quiz you didn’t study for?”

“What? No!” Iris said unconvincingly. Barry looked sceptical. After a moment, she relented. “Okay, maybe, but for real—if you need a time out, you should take it. You’ve been through a lot, you know?”

Small chance he could forget, Barry thought. To tell the truth, the lack of special treatment from Joe had been kind of a relief—a small glimmer of normalcy in the whirlwind that he’d been caught in since waking up. Everyone else was treating him like he was made of glass.

“It’s fine,” he said, flattening himself against the doorframe as a few more kids squeezed past him. “Really. I don’t wanna make a big deal out of it, you know? I just wanna get back to normal.”  

Iris didn’t look convinced. “If you’re sure…”

He was saved from having to reply by the arrival of the teacher, an older woman who paused by the open doorway and cleared her throat, giving them a stern look over her glasses. Iris took the hint and headed into the classroom, but when Barry attempted to follow, Iris stopped him with a frown.

“I thought you were in Honours Physics.”

“I am,” said Barry.

“This is regular physics. The honours class is in Lab 2 on the other side of the building.”

Barry’s heart sank. “For real?”

The teacher was looking more unimpressed by the second. Iris managed to give him a few hasty directions—“Go to the end of the hallway, take a left, then another left, and then it’s the third door on the right, I think. Good luck!”—before the teacher closed the door very firmly in Barry’s face, leaving him standing alone in the empty hallway, just as the final bell rang out.

He was officially late to class. Cursing, Barry took off at a run.

The sole advantage of being so late was that the hallways were clear, so he had a straight shot to the end of the hallway, and he covered the distance far more quickly than he’d expected. Longer legs had their uses. The rest of the corridor was a blur as he ran, the fliers on the bulletin boards on the walls and notes stuck to the outside of people’s lockers rustling as he sprinted past. He was starting to feel hopeful that maybe he wouldn’t be as atrociously late as he’d feared after all, when something hooked his ankle, and Barry tripped and went flying—

And as he fell, the world around him slowed to a crawl.

His surroundings took on a sharp, startling clarity, like when he first opened his eyes when he awoke from his coma, and everything was a little too bright, every texture and colour turned up too high, so he could hardly stand to look. The fall itself took an age, the slipstream whispering, ribbonlike, over his skin, and the ground slowly rose to meet him with such slow ease that he almost expected it to catch him, his fall broken as gently as if he’d tumbled into a featherbed—

And then the world sped up again and he crashed to the ground, skidding several feet along the polished floor. His backpack burst open and his textbooks and half-eaten lunch scattered in every direction. His hands blazed with the sting of the impact.

“Touchdooooooown!”

A familiar face loomed over him, grinning around a mouthful of braces. Of course, Barry thought grimly, it had been too much to hope for that Tony would have been held back another year.

“Miss me, Allen?”

“Like a hole in the head,” Barry said sarcastically.

He attempted to push himself upright, but before he’d risen more than a few inches from the floor, Tony planted a muddy foot on his back and applied pressure, forcing him back to the floor.

Barry fought, but despite his best efforts, he was unable to free himself, and after several aborted attempts to rise, it became clear that he was doing little more than humiliating himself further. He went limp, trembling with barely suppressed anger, and waited for Tony to get bored of his little game.

“Heard you were in the hospital,” Tony said conversationally, as if his foot wasn’t crushing Barry’s coccyx. “What for? Loseritis?”

“Something like that.”

Tony sneered. “You know what I think?”

“Honestly, it’s news to me that you think at all,” Barry said, which earned him an angry jab in the ribs with Tony’s heel. He subsided with a hiss of pain.

“I think you finally cracked,” Tony said, leaning in closer, his foot still pinning Barry to the floor. “And they threw you in the loony bin and locked you up, just like your dad.”

Barry’s stinging hands bunched into fists. “Don’t talk about my dad.”

“Or what?” Tony taunted. “You’ll kill me like he killed your mom?”

Barry’s answering rush of fury almost choked him. Energy crackled through him, electrifying, so intense and all-consuming that he felt he might explode. His furious quivering intensified with the effort of keeping it contained.

Breathe, said a familiar voice in his head—a therapist he’d seen in the months after his mom died, who, seeing how quick he was to fly off the handle during their sessions, had taught him to control his temper with breathing exercises. He sucked a sliver of breath through his gritted teeth, then let it out. Then again.

After a few more cycles of breath, the pressure that had lingered in the air, concussive and heavy as a summer storm, eased off, and the trembling in Barry’s limbs subsided. He closed his eyes.

“That’s what I thought. You don’t have it in you.”

The pressure on his lower back vanished, but Barry lay where he’d fallen, staring off into the distance. He could just about make out the apple Joe had packed for his lunch, which had fallen from his backpack and rolled down the corridor, and he stared at it until it blurred.

He was still staring dully at the apple when Tony squatted beside him. “Face it, Allen. Some of us were born to kick ass. And some of us were born to be kicked. That’s you,” he added helpfully.

“Yeah. Got it.”

“No, you don’t. Not yet,” Tony said. “But you’ll figure it out.” Almost wistfully, he added, “I’m glad you’re back, Allen. No one takes a beating like you.” He thumped Barry between the shoulder blades in a way that might almost have passed for friendly, if it hadn’t knocked the wind out of him and made him hit his chin off the floor hard enough to make his teeth clack. “I’ll see you around.”

Cackling, Tony sloped off to third-grade math, or whatever kind of class it was a bonehead like him took, while Barry slowly started gathering up his stuff. By now, he was so late, and so exhausted from the altercation with Tony, that it seemed pointless to rush.

It took Barry several more minutes of wandering the halls before he finally located Lab 2, and he was so relieved to have finally found the right room that he forgot to knock and walked right into the middle of an ongoing lecture.

The silence that followed was agonizing. Every head in the room had swivelled in Barry’s direction, thirty pairs of eyes lingering curiously on him. Barry’s shoulders rose up around his ears as he cringed, wishing that he could pass straight through the floor and disappear.

His new teacher, a blond man with a yellow tie, folded his arms. He did not look pleased by the interruption. “Can I help you?”

“Um, is this Honours Physics?”

“It is. And you are?”

“I’m Barry. Allen. I’m, um, supposed to be in this class, so…”

“I see. You do realize, of course, that class started almost fifteen minutes ago.”

“I got lost,” Barry said weakly.

The teacher—Professor Thawne, according to the schedule crumpled in Barry’s sweaty fist—surveyed him, cool blue eyes sliding up and down Barry’s body. Sweat prickled in his armpits. He swallowed.

“Well,” said Thawne, “I trust you won’t have too much difficulty finding your way to your seat.” He inclined his head at the only empty seat… which was right in front of the teacher’s desk. Great.

Barry ducked his head and quickly wove between the other students to get to his desk. He bumped and jostled several people on the way, much to their annoyance. His cheeks flamed.

“Sorry, sorry!”

Finally, he made it to his seat. As he rummaged through the chaos in his backpack for a notebook, Professor Thawne finally looked away. “As I was saying,” he began, settling back into his speech.

Barry found himself staring down at his new textbook without really seeing it. His stomach felt heavy and twisted into knots. Physics had been one of the classes he’d been looking forward to the most, and he’d already pissed off the teacher and embarrassed himself in front of the whole class. The memory kept playing on a painful loop: Thawne’s disgusted expression; his classmates stares; the way he’d managed to walk into every single obstacle on the way to his seat…

Lost in his thoughts, he failed to realize that once again, Thawne had stopped talking—until a large hand landed palm down on his open textbook, flattening it against the desk. Swallowing, Barry looked up. Cool blue eyes met his.

“Lost again, it seems,” said Professor Thawne. “I believe I said chapter four, did I not?”

Barry looked down at his book, which was splayed open to a random page. Hastily, he went to flip to the correct chapter, but Thawne’s hand stayed firmly down on the book, preventing him from turning the page. The thick gold ring on his middle finger glinted in the light.

“Since you’re so many steps ahead,” Thawne said, “Why don’t you explain Newton’s second law of motion to the class.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Barry licked his lips. He knew this one. “Newton’s second law says that the acceleration of an object is in proportion to the resultant force. The bigger that force is, the larger the acceleration.” But how to explain it? His classmates’ faces looked blank. “…It’s like baseball,” he said.

“Baseball,” Thawne repeated.

Barry sensed danger. He talked faster. “The baseball itself experiences a larger resultant force from the bat, so when it’s hit, it accelerates quickly. But the greater the object's mass, the smaller the acceleration experienced. That means you could hit a basketball with the same bat using the exact same amount of force, and you wouldn’t get as much acceleration.”

Another awful silence followed. Thawne’s expression was unreadable. Sweat prickled in Barry’s armpits. It occurred to him that perhaps the correct answer wasn’t the one Thawne had wanted. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d gotten into trouble for coming up with the right answer at the wrong time.

“Impressive,” Thawne said eventually. His hand slid off of Barry’s book.

Barry exhaled in a rush of relief.

Thawne’s eyes looked faraway. He rubbed his hands together, pushing the heavy gold ring around his finger. “Very impressive,” he repeated. He seemed to come back to himself all of a sudden. “You’re a quick thinker, it seems. But perhaps you wouldn’t mind slowing down for long enough for the rest of us to catch up, hm?” His tone was light.

Quickly, Barry nodded. An almost smile flickered at the corner of Thawne’s mouth, so quickly that Barry wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it, before Thawne turned his back on him and walked toward the whiteboard, saying, “Now that brings us to Newton’s third law.”

And, to Barry’s relief, class continued.