Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It wasn't Barry's fault he didn't notice for a few hours. Really!

He'd been understandably disoriented, and pleased to just be alive, and he'd let a few things slide while he tried to get himself together after somehow successfully (or so he'd thought) dealing with a world-ending catastrophe. That was all.

Admittedly when he'd realized the year he'd also started dismissing a lot of things as him being unable to remember that time of his life clearly. Those first years as the Flash had been so busy, so full of adjustment to the new metahuman norm. It was perfectly natural that he'd be more preoccupied with avoiding Eobard Thawne still masquerading as Harrison Wells – and hadn't that been a trip and a half, the frantically concerned voice of Dr. Wells joining Cisco and Caitlin in demanding to know if he was all right.

Of course, if Barry was right about being in a different universe, embarrassing as it was not to notice for so long, Dr. Wells might actually be the real Harrison Wells and Barry had run off pretending he wanted to lick his wounds alone over nothing.

Barry was still going to argue that whether Harrison Wells was Eobard Thawne or not his presence at all was the more pressing problem and it was totally understandable that it had overshadowed a lot of things for him. Of course he would think it was just a matter of time travel he had to pay attention to rather than noticing things like...

"You good, Baby Face?" Bellows said, frowning as Barry nearly tripped over his feet trying to hurry to his lab without actually rushing. "You smell a little weird."

Discreetly Barry tried to sniff himself even though speedsters didn't sweat, not from just running – it simply wasn't efficient for them. He used to, when he was very new to his powers, and Doctor Wells had quietly worried over his biological data late one night when he knew Barry would run in to check on him and see and pointed out the danger in losing so much fluid so often for no longer viable reasons, and hypothesized that it was another subconscious mental block of Barry's – that he expected to sweat from running like an ordinary person so he did. Nowhere near as much as he 'should' if it was actually something his body needed to do but far more than was good for him.

Cisco had given him a special antiperspirant soon after and Barry pretended he didn't know which awkward talk was more responsible for his changed hygiene. He used it religiously anyway because it smelled nice. It had been pretty much the second sign that he was back in time, actually, the stash of sticks and aerosols organized as seriously as medication. They smelled a little different, a little weirdly smothering, like they were for more than just sweat, but like a lot of other things Barry chalked that up to being something he misremembered. Cisco and Caitlin had refined the formula over the years, that was all.

Bellows had some nerve saying Barry smelled weird when he'd clearly overdone the cologne himself like that could hope to hide the fact he was obviously smoking again.

"You forget your scent-patches? Don't forget to put 'em on before you get back to work, Cap'll be furious if we have to throw out any cases because of potential contamination."

"Uh. Sure," Barry said.

"And I'm not being mean or anything, kid, but..." Bellows grimaced, looking away as if desperate to find someone else – probably Joe – to step in. "I know it's not your fault, the lightning messed you up—"

Barry froze. Did he know?

"—but the ozone's just a little much, okay?"

"Okay," Barry said faintly. What did that even mean?

"The station's used to it, yeah? But you're not gonna get an alpha with a scent like that. If you want one! Or a beta, or hell, even another O, nobody cares, it's the twenty-first century, right?"

"Right," Barry said, baffled. Bellows had always been a little patronizing to Barry, one of those officers who thought Barry was just a little too obsessed with his weird cases without caring for his reasons, but that sounded more like the kind of 'teasing' he'd give a female recruit before he got another warning from Captain Singh and complained that he was just trying to be nice and helpful, it was tough out there for ladies who wanted to be cops, you know? "Excuse me--"

"Maybe ask your friends at S.T.A.R Labs if they can at least do something for that? You know we all just want you to be happy, right, kid?" Bellows said. "Yeah you're a good CSI, but that ain't all there is to life, you know?"

"I know," Barry said tightly, slipping past him and up the stairs to his lab, which looked just like his except for all the ways it didn't, and it was no use pretending otherwise. There was a box by the door filled with wrapped sterile patches, and he stared at them blankly without actually seeing them. He wasn't in the past. It wasn't even a past, not one of his. He'd put it off as long as he could but it was time to accept that he'd messed up more than he knew, that he was in an entirely different universe and nothing he could do would change that when he didn't know how he'd even got there.

He could try and run anyway, of course, even if his whole body still ached strangely, bone-deep in a way he was pretty sure he hadn't felt since he'd become a speedster – or maybe never? He found it difficult to remember what it had been like before, and usually healed too fast to really be reminded. Even if it was agony in the moment, the moment was soon gone. Pain wouldn't stop him and was no reason not to try... but if he started just running without an idea of when he was even aiming for, never mind what universe, who knew what could happen.

It could be an even bigger disaster than the one he'd escaped and all he could remember of that now was fragments. He wasn't even sure they were all his – pain, the Speed Force twisting and screaming, an outraged rattling hum he could feel in his bones that he associated with Thawne the moment before he struck, his own lightning feeling like it was trying to tear him apart.

It wasn't worth the risk, he'd learned that much over the years. It really, really wasn't, even if that meant...

"Oh man," he told the empty lab with a despairing kind of incredulity. "I really am just gonna run to him, aren't I."

It wasn't a question and didn't need an answer, but he somehow felt like he was being judged anyway. Hell with that, he decided, squaring his shoulders and taking a deep breath. He wanted answers about things connected to his abilities, there had always been really only one place for him to go, hadn't there? It had practically been trained into him –

Oh. Of course. Thawne absolutely would.

He skidded to a stop in the cortex of S.T.A.R. Labs, taking what felt like a long minute just to stare. Dr. Wells sat perfectly still, hand hovering over the controls of his wheelchair, the corner of his mouth just beginning to twitch up into a sardonic smile. Barry shuddered in place, torn between turning right around and running back out, trying to deal with the weirdness outside himself and just –

"I know you can see and hear me right now," he blurted. Cisco's mouth was open, his hand just unfolding at his side, arm about to move in one of his expressive gestures. Caitlin's eyes were caught mid-blink, her annoyed expression turned absurd –

And he was certain he'd just seen Dr. Wells' eyes open as he ran in, the tail-end of a blink that should have been as slow as Caitlin's and was instead just as fast as if Barry was trying to register a reflex blink at what anyone else would consider 'normal' speed.

Cisco's hand started to rise, the movement as slow as a mountain's growth, Caitlin's eyes continued to close with the certainty of the sun going down, and Dr. Wells stayed perfectly frozen, staring straight through Barry like anyone and everyone else when he was moving so fast. How stupid would he feel if the Dr. Wells of this timeline – this universe it seemed safe to say – wasn't even –

"Eobard Thawne," Barry said and the man's eyes opened wide and narrowed just as fast, the approaching smile frozen on his face twisting into something Barry didn't recognize.

"Barry," he said, his voice odd and wary and Barry suddenly realized that he thought Barry had gained the upper hand, had the faintest clue what he was doing, and he had to laugh.

"Don'truneedttalk," he said quickly before Thawne could make up his mind if he should, the words shapeless and merging even in his own ears. "Thnkimwrngunivers? Timeline?"

"One moment," Thawne said and Barry blinked and let the world catch them up.

"-rous – whoa, dude," Cisco said, his excited gesture ruined by the instinctive recoil that overtook him at Barry appearing even more out of nowhere than usual.

"Mr. Allen," Dr. Wells acknowledged, eyes glittering, and Barry had to swallow hard, an uncertain knot of emotions he had no idea how to unravel rising up to choke him. "So good to see you again."

Thawne, Barry reminded himself, trying to shove back the image of long gone happier times, Caitlin and Cisco and Dr. Wells in the cortex, on the comms in his ear, ready to help him. He had to shake off the urge to just sink back into the easy camaraderie, the blissful ignorance –

"Are you really okay?" Caitlin said uncertainly. "Barry? You don't smell quite right, and you forgot the scent mask Cisco made for you –"

Barry felt the wistfulness shatter, forcibly reminded that it might have looked like he'd only gone back in time but there was far more trouble going on that.

"Fine," he managed. Dr. Wells' eyes weren't the only ones to narrow at the obvious lie but Barry couldn't bring himself to look away, paranoid that if he took his eyes off him for a second... "Fine," he repeated, a little steadier, assuring himself that it would be. The more convinced he was that he was telling the truth, the more everybody else relaxed, and holy mother of God, could people in this universe smell lies?

...Did he even have a secret identity here? Not that he had much of one on his own earth, to be honest.

He shook his head for a moment. Not important, he wasn't going to be stuck here for long anyway. (Right? Right.)

"A word, Mr. Allen?" Dr. Wells said, and Barry found himself moving instinctively to follow him because everything was right about doing so: Cisco sing-songing 'someone's in trouble~', Caitlin making shooing motions with her hands – he wondered if he should compliment her on her perfume given it had to be slightly overdone to be wafted towards him by the motion – and his own feet falling naturally into the stride he used to take to keep pace with the wheelchair.

"I don't know why you bother calling me that," Barry muttered as he started forward into the wheelchair's wake. "Just call me Barry. You know you want to."

Thawne loved saying his name, loved to drag the syllables out, seemed to savor the sound as he let them fall from his lips like a bomb, a revelation: Barry. Allen. He'd taken such joy in shaping each part like a dagger Barry was a little startled to remember there had never been a clue how important knowing it was to him until the mask had finally dropped with Hannibal Bates' death.

There was a stifled noise from either Cisco or Caitlin – Barry's money was on Cisco – and Dr. Wells gave him another of those sharp little looks Barry had always wondered at the intensity of.

"That would hardly be appropriate," Dr. Wells said smoothly and Barry snorted.

"'Appropriate'," he mimicked, then remembered they were still within hearing distance of Caitlin and Cisco and added, "I'm not your subordinate."

"That wasn't what I was referring to," Dr. Wells said, and there was a new quality to the way he glanced at Barry then, a puzzled kind of inquiry, as if Barry was missing something obvious. Barry kept his mouth firmly shut in case he was.

He'd forgotten how quiet the wheelchair could be. The silence as they walked – and rolled, Dr. Wells would joke – was uncomfortable, but that discomfort was less than a fraction of what Barry suspected he should have been feeling. He'd walked like this beside Dr. Wells too often, silence or no silence, terrible world-changing revelations or no.

They stopped at the office Dr. Wells had rarely left before the particle accelerator exploded and rarely saw after. It smelled faintly like him, something Barry had never really noticed before – not in a bad way, it was just obviously Dr. Wells' space even if he no longer used it much. Barry shot him a puzzled look, having almost expected the Time Vault, and then remembered that Cisco and Caitlin were no longer in the loop and – (probably) safe in their ignorance – they might need to find 'Dr. Wells' for some reason. It would better for all involved if nobody disappeared from the map.

"Are there cameras in here?" Barry asked, meaning the hidden ones Thawne was so fond of, then remembered he hadn't needed hidden ones in the labs and winced at the idiocy of the question.

"Of course there are," Dr. Wells said, staring at his desk, emptied of all the paperwork that probably hadn't kept him up during the nights before the accelerator went online but had made it look like it. "This was – and remains – a billion dollar facility, Barry. Everywhere is monitored. However –" he didn't blur even to Barry's eyes, but Barry knew he had to have done something because he casually stepped out of the wheelchair, drawing himself up to his full height. "You don't have to worry about Cisco or Caitlin accessing the footage, even if they weren't expecting us to have our little chat in the treadmill room."

Barry sucked in a breath and forced himself very consciously not to react further. "Right," he said tightly and watched Thawne tilt his head, staring at him as if he could take him apart with his eyes.

"Well?" Thawne said at last. "Go on, Barry. You need help?"

"Right," Barry said again. "Yes. I – uh – you know I'm not your – um – your timeline's Barry, right?"

"My timeline's Barry," Thawne echoed, and smiled that thin, grimly amused smile that had been difficult to like for everyone who wasn't Barry, Cisco or Caitlin, apparently. "You think too linearly. You are not and will never be the Barry of 'my' timeline."

Barry shook his head. "I know you know what I meant," he said and preferred to think of his tone as 'irritated' rather than 'plaintive'. From the way Thawne smiled he guessed he was wrong. "I'm not the Barry of this timeline, the timeline that resulted from you –" he stopped and closed his eyes.

"Killing your mother," Thawne said, blunt and matter of fact, and Barry jerked his head up and stared at him, sure the floor had lurched under his feet for a second.

He opened his mouth a couple of times but couldn't get his tongue to work. He stared at the empty chair behind Wells. "Yeah," he croaked at last.

"I suspected baby speedster's first time-travel as the problem," Thawne said lightly. "I had a little speech prepared."

Barry felt his lips twitch into a reluctant smile despite himself and caught Thawne taking note of it, an even briefer grin, only noticeable to another speedster, crossing his face before he smoothly continued: "But you're certain –"

"I've time-traveled before," Barry said indignantly.

"Without attracting time wraiths or altering anything you didn't mean to?"

Barry opened his mouth then paused as he considered his previous experiences and thought better of it. "Technically," he muttered.

"Are you sure?" Dr. Wells said. Barry bristled a little at the condescension he could almost hear, the arrogance the man was famed for but Barry had never had directed at him in any form harsher than mentorship.

"I know things can change when you time travel," Barry said. "But this is – it's pretty obvious this has got to be another earth to mine. I just don't know how I got here or what I did wrong or why I can't just..." he trailed off, frustrated.

Thawne laughed, honest but joyless, and sat back in the wheelchair. "How obvious?"

Barry stared at him helplessly, unsure how to even begin. "Obvious," he said. He thought about the ridiculously strong but weird colognes and perfumes, the interactions between everybody at the station, the nostril-flaring, the remarks about his 'scent', the way one suspect was 'he' and another wasn't, the forms where instead of the M/F option he was expecting he got A and B and Ω Type I/Type II boxes instead.

"Seriously it's – what the hell?" Barry threw up his hands, then the realized that the gesture had more than a little of his own Doctor Wells' occasional moments of theatricality in it and had to suppress a wince.

The Dr. Wells of this strange universe leaned forward in his chair, mouth twitching in a way Barry was familiar with as 'if I were anybody else I wouldn't bother suppressing my laughter here'. He used to like that look. It had made Dr. Wells more... approachable, more human in a way the wheelchair never had. The wheelchair had made him look vulnerable, brought down to earth, Icarus if he had survived his flight, but it hadn't really made him any less distant. For Barry, it had only increased the sense of 'admire, but at a respectable distance' he'd felt around him.

And then of course it had turned out the Dr. Wells Barry had so admired – your nerdy little science crush, Iris used to call it before everything with the particle accelerator – hadn't really been Dr. Wells at all.

Barry grimaced and wondered why the man was bothering now. He knew – they both knew – what was the point any more?

"Because it makes you comfortable," Thawne said and Barry jumped a little. "And less likely to try and punch me in the face in front of company. This may take some time to figure out, Barry."

"Wouldn't want to ruin your nice stolen life," Barry said acidly and the amused twitching at the corner of the man's mouth turned to out and out laughter, the unrestrained sort that he'd never heard from Dr. Wells, although it had apparently been something the real man did easily.

(Like he became a completely different person, Dr. McGee had said. Funny. He bet Thawne had laughed to himself watching that in the time vault.)

"Oh, Barry," Thawne said and the fond amusement in his voice burned.

"Shut up," Barry said. "Don't –" Call me that? What else was he supposed to call him? It was his name! It was just… the way he said it.

(He used to like that too.)

He took a deep breath that didn't really do much to calm him. "I just – I don't know where to start," he said helplessly.

"Mmhm," Wells – Thawne said. It was so hard to look at him in his chair, looking at Barry with such fondness and exasperation and not call him Dr. Wells, not see him as the man who had mentored him, helped and supported... and been the exact opposite of the one who had looked him in the eye and said simply and easily, 'I hate you', as if that was enough reason for – for everything he'd done.

"I don't – this universe, it's crazy, I don't know – I don't understand –"

"What's so hard to understand?"

"Everything!" Barry said, throwing up his hands again. "I can't even fill out basic paperwork, I – what the hell does A/B/O mean? I don't get why 'he' and 'she' are only used sometimes? 'Cause sometimes it's 'he', and then another guy is 'a-he'? Or it's 'she' for someone and than another woman is 'o-she' or… I'm sure I heard something else too but then they said they preferred neutral pronouns?"

"Wait," Thawne said, straightening up. "You don't understand – basic biology? Culture?"

"Yes! No! This isn't right, I don't get it –"

"Barry. May I ask –" Thawne stopped and shook his head a little, looking a little bemused and a lot fascinated at the idea that seemed to have occurred to him. "In your universe, on your world, humanity is... there are no alpha/beta/omega dynamics?"

"No! Unless we're talking outdated bullshit about 'alpha males' I guess, but I don't think we are, so I don't know what you mean? There's – male and female, XX and XY, she, he, his, hers – people like to think it's pretty binary? Most of the time?"

"Binary," Thawne said, staring, looking as if the very idea was a revelation. "Male and female? That's the division of sexes for you?"

"Uh, yeah?" Barry said. "I mean, it's a bit – a lot, actually – more complicated than that, but generally speaking that's what most people tend to think, yeah."

"Barry. There are six basic sexes."

"What."

"If you want to be contentious – and wrong – three sexes and six genders."

"I – no – what?"

"Alpha types one and two, beta types one and two, and omega types one and two," Thawne recited as if imparting basic knowledge, a little rhythm to his words like a teacher in kindergarten. "...Perhaps it would be best to find you a biology textbook?"

"Six," Barry said blankly. "So, like... an alpha male and female? Literally? And there's...” He shook his head at himself and snorted a little at his own idiocy. “Obviously there's physical differences between the sexes, but I mean, there's physical differences between the types too? So a... beta male isn't the same as an alpha male or... whatever?"

"Quite different," Thawne said, with that dry undertone that had often confused Barry, made him half-suspect he was the butt of a joke only Dr. Wells seemed to be in on. (And he had been. So there was that, he guessed.)

"How?" Barry blurted out, then spent a generous half-second asking himself if he was really sure he wanted to know before inevitably concluding that of course he did – it was an entirely different world out there. He had to know. "...I think I need that biology textbook. Or maybe 'my first book of the human body' or something."

"I'll find one with nice simple illustrations," Thawne said and had a brightly colored hardcover book in his hand before Barry could finish deciding to be insulted.

"'Key Issues: The A, B, and O of Understanding Puberty'...?"

"You have to start somewhere," Thawne said. "We can discuss genetics and reproductive systems in greater and more accurate detail once you have the basics." He smiled, looking far too anticipatory for Barry's peace of mind. "I suspect your response is going to be fascinating," he said.

Barry shot him a filthy look before turning the same suspicious glare onto the book. Nothing that bright and geometric could be trusted.

"There are worse," Thawne said. "Would you prefer something even simpler? There could be some crossover into cultural issues. Always helpful. 'Daddy has a new Alphafriend' is apparently very good for your average pre-schooler, given that you can still find a copy a century from now. 'My Step-Omega Is An Alien' too."

Barry stared at him. He took the book cautiously and transferred his stare to it. "This is gonna be weirder than I thought, isn't it."

"Yours is the weird perspective here, Barry."

He flipped through the book, then went back and read it again half a second slower. It still didn't help. He glanced at Thawne and found him staring at him, looking fascinated.

"Okay," Barry said slowly. "Omega definitely not the same thing as beta or alpha, then."

He read the book again.

Thawne hummed as he waited, fingers tapping against the chair's controls. He straightened as Barry dropped the book and vibrated in place for a moment as he tried to work out if he wanted to run immediately for more information or not.

"I have so many questions," Barry said, head swimming with new information that suddenly made it very difficult to keep his gaze on Thawne's face. Like being told not to look at something just made you whip your head round to stare, the knowledge that was now in his head – entirely different subsets of genitalia, oh God, was that going to make his job in forensics difficult, and he had a possible example right in front of him – stop it, brain! "So many."

"Such as?"

"How does sex determination work? Why did a trinary sex determination system develop alongside a binary sex determination system –"

"Because it didn't. You're bringing your own cultural and social context to bear on it. Let me guess – you think something like 'alpha male' or 'omega female' or 'beta female' when you try to divide the sexes?"

"Yes?" Barry offered uncertainly.

"There are some cultures that do so, but generally speaking terms such as male or female are applied to animals of dimorphic appearances. They serve no purpose for humans, obviously."

"Obviously," Barry echoed. He found his eyes drifting downwards and forced them up again because no. There was no new biological science completely out of his sphere of reference strange enough to excuse that.

"What would be the point? You are alpha, beta or omega and of those you may be type one or two."

"One or two?"

"For reference, you, according the medical records I have on file, are a type II omega."

Barry wrestled with the ridiculously strong feeling of disorientation and somehow managed to keep himself perfectly still.

"Miss West is a type I alpha, if you were wondering."

"Not really," Barry said faintly. "Give me a moment. Uh. Why that order? I mean... You know what, I don't know what I mean."

"The oldest hominid fossils on record are... female, I think you'd say? It's always been assumed that they were the first type. Ademina in the Bible is generally portrayed as what you would call an alpha 'female' and their omega 'male', for example. 'First the alpha, then the omega, the Lord created them'." Thawne made a face. "I think you can probably guess the kind of bigotry that one line has managed to produce across history."

"Probably," Barry agreed weakly, then gave up on keeping himself upright and sat on the floor to be a little more grounded literally if not figuratively. "That's... cool. Interesting."

Thawne raised his eyebrows, staring at him patiently. He always did know when Barry was working himself up to ask something.

"Uh. Stupid question maybe but... It's not possible to... overwrite another universe's version of yourself like you can when you time travel, is it?"

Thawne's eyes widened and Barry felt him tapping into the Speed Force, stretching his senses out, seeking -

"You had best hope not," he said. "Or we're in a great deal of trouble."

"Okay," Barry said after a moment, nodding to himself as he watched his nemesis lunge out of the wheelchair, afterimages darting back and forth as he ran across the city seeking confirmation for what he already knew. "Yeah. I think we're in a great deal of trouble."

Chapter Text

The thing about having a stalker for a nemesis, Barry thought resentfully, was that when you tried to claim you could do something they couldn’t just call you out on it, they could also pull receipts you didn’t know they had. So when he tried to suggest that maybe he could just bumble his way through the majority of social interactions of a very unfamiliar world before hopefully figuring out a way back to his own universe, Eobard Thawne instantly nixed the idea.

“Remember that time you tried to tell Joe West you had no idea who sneaked that puppy into the house?”

“No because that was a different Barry!”

“Exactly!” Thawne said, following it up with such a look of contempt Barry winced. “Now consider that you don’t even know the most basic knowledge of the world around you, let alone your own history.”

“It can’t be that different,” Barry suggested with what he already knew was wildly misplaced and delusional hope. He was very much not over the ‘A, B and O of Understanding Puberty’ book he’d be given, even after reading it three times in a desperate attempt to reach the ‘understanding’ part. Maybe a fourth or fifth would do it. “I’m still the Flash in this time, that’s a pretty big one considering –”

“The Flash of ‘my’ timeline was created in 2020, yes,” Thawne said impatiently. “One extremely small mark in your favor.”

“And you said you killed my,” he grimaced, remembering he was talking to her murderer, “my mother so presumably—”

“Do you know why everyone was so eager to believe Henry Allen killed Nora that night?” Thawne asked abruptly, and Barry froze. Of course he knew why, he’d spent a whole childhood being told over and over again that he didn’t know what he’d seen that night because –

“Because before the particle accelerator explosion a man that could move faster than lightning was a crazy idea,” he said tightly.

“No,” Thawne said. “Although Detective West’s continuous dismissal of you and what you saw that night hardly helped, I’m sure—”

“Hey, Joe did his best!” Barry protested.

“I’m sure you think so,” Thawne said mildly. The milder the voice the more cutting a thing Harrison Wells was generally saying, and somehow Barry hadn’t forgotten that at all. “He loves you, that’s enough to count, I suppose.”

“What would you know about it?” Barry said, and instantly felt just a little stupid. All those damn cameras, why did he keep forgetting just how many cameras Eobard Thawne had hidden around Central City to watch him?

“Detective West has no patience for other people’s lies. And anything that doesn’t fit his understanding of reality is a lie. From the way you reacted I’m guessing that’s something applicable to your world too. You grew up feeling like you were the problem for believing so strongly in the truth. He might have hugged you after a nightmare but you couldn’t talk honestly to him about it because one word of your ‘man in the lightning’ and he would shut you down, send you to another therapist to try and fix your delusion.” Thawne’s smile was unpleasant even on Harrison Wells’ face.

The worst part was probably that he was telling the truth. Barry had felt like a problem, knew he’d been considered difficult as a teen, even more than teens usually were. He had learned not to talk about that part of the nightmares involving his mother’s death because the man in the lightning would then take another thing from Barry – the comfort he desperately needed from his guardian. Joe had just wanted Barry to heal and move on as best he could, he couldn’t be blamed for not knowing impossible things would become commonplace in the future…

Joe had become one of Barry’s staunchest supporters as the Flash but it had still been lonely carrying the truth on his own as a child, learning not to talk about it too often, just enough to remind but not enough to tip exasperation over into true annoyance.

“But that’s not important, is it, we're here for the differences not the similarities, let’s put it aside – the reason he, other officers, the judge and the jury, were so willing to believe Henry Allen might kill your mother is in the name you give her.”

Puzzled, Barry scowled at him. What did that even mean?

“‘Mother’,” Thawne quoted in Dr. Wells’ patient voice of instruction. “Because Nora was a beta, and Henry an alpha, and it was easy for the prosecution and press to argue such couplings are at their core unhappy and unsatisfied, that maybe Henry tired of a mate who wasn’t a perfect biological match, that a discontent alpha might naturally snap one night—”

“Shut up,” Barry snarled, hands clenching automatically into fists, and Thawne grinned up at him, sat in his wheelchair just daring him to break the face of poor disabled Harrison Wells. It was extremely tempting, regardless of how much Barry had liked that face before it turned out his brilliant scientific mentor was a murdering psychopath. Sociopath. Whatever Thawne’s problem was, which definitely couldn’t be summed up in one word or even a library of textbooks.

Barry took a few deep breaths, counted to ten really, really slowly – as slow as he vaguely remembered a non-speedster would – before sighing deeply. “I get it,” he grumbled, deliberately ignoring the way Thawne shook his head with an amused smile as if he doubted it. “So there are different terms for parents, big deal. I guess that makes sense for this world…”

“I’m going to stop you right there – you shouldn’t need to ‘guess’.” Thawne sighed deeply, and a part of Barry cringed a little, hating to remember just how much he’d once wanted to avoid disappointing Dr. Wells.

“You’d think—” Barry started, then cut himself off.

Thawne, because he was a stalker to the nth degree and not at all because he understood Barry in the slightest beyond the superficial, tilted his head and followed the line of thought Barry didn’t express: “That I would want to isolate you, keep you to myself by encouraging your dependence upon me for information and support in a world entirely strange to you?”

He absolutely did not have to phrase it like that and Barry made a face that he was sure Thawne was smart to enough to understand telling him so.

Thawne smiled, eyes bright red for a nanosecond.

“Certainly appealing, Barry, but very unlikely to last. And the suspicion you bring to yourself by not admitting your circumstances would then fall on me for assisting you.” On Harrison Wells, he meant, currently smiling kindly with only a mild air of disappointment at Barry thinking he had the right to make things difficult for him. “You can try, of course, but I guarantee you won’t succeed for so many reasons.”

“You could help you know,” Barry said irritably. “I kind of –” totally “– expected you to help. You’ve sort of got experience too—”

“Harrison Wells might have had different cultural norms, a different scientific understanding of the world, but at the very least still understood what heats are!” Thawne dragged a hand over his – well, Harrison’s – face. “Harrison still knew how to interpret scents, how to be non-threatening to omegas, how to face off with alphas, what gestures are rude, what clothing is appropriate to each sex, the differences between a partner and a rut-match and a mate. Basic knowledge you should know, should have grown up with, information that should have permeated your life in a thousand little unnoticed ways. What do you call a partner, Barry?”

What did that have to do with anything? “My partner?” Barry suggested sarcastically. He was rewarded with a deeply unimpressed look. Dr. Wells had an excellent face for those.

“Cute,” Thawne said, his tone indicating that he did not in fact find Barry's sarcasm very cute at all.

“I try,” Barry said, batting his eyelashes obnoxiously at him, only to startle when Thawne made a sort of growling grunt that somehow conveyed irritation (but not serious), amusement (but not good humor) and a sharp urge to focus.

It was safe to say Thawne had a lot more auditory tricks than Barry – he cared about obscuring his voice, messing with soundwaves, playing with some of the side-effects of their powers that Barry just didn’t find important or interesting – but as far as Barry could remember he’d always been extremely careful not to use them as Harrison Wells. The Reverse Flash growled like a demon, Harrison Wells preferred to intimidate verbally, and never should the two meet. Yet he’d made the noise as if it was perfectly natural and would be understood, just another part of Harrison Wells’ vocabulary. “A… girlfriend?” Barry said, strangely uncertain, wrong-footed by Thawne’s weird growl. “Boyfriend?”

“Wrong,” Thawne said, and then didn’t bother to elaborate. “Have you even noticed your shirt collar?”

“My shirt collar? What about my shirt collar?” Barry looked down. “Oh, that’s… different,” he said.

“I thought it might be. It’s meant to be buttoned,” Thawne said, his eyes perfectly level with Barry’s. Somehow that made Barry ten times more aware that he was committing some kind of fashion faux pas than if Thawne had let his eyes drop or linger over Barry’s neck like it was bared cleavage or something. “I imagine that’s why you haven’t noticed how high it’s supposed to be. To cover your throat.”

“Oh,” Barry said. He stubbornly decided not to do it up. It was just his neck. Thawne could deal.

“Fortunately everybody here is used to seeing you in various states of undress,” Thawne said wryly, and Barry shot him a mock-scandalized look that he wasn’t sure was really as mock as he pretended. He’d been shirtless in front of a lot of people on various occasions on his earth, but it felt like something to care about a lot more for the one he was now on. “By which I mean such things as collars undone to allow a scent-blocker to be applied, or shirtless to allow the placement of EKG lead wires.”

“Nice save,” Barry said suspiciously. Thawne gave him Harrison Wells’ most pleasant and innocuous smile, which was as close as he could manage to looking innocent, Barry guessed.

“It’s a hundred little things like that, Barry, that means you’re going to have to come up with something a little better than just avoiding everyone you can and bluffing through interaction you can’t. That’s not sustainable.”

“It doesn’t have to be sustainable for long,” Barry insisted, and Thawne pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

“Barry. How often do you run back to a future timeline after you’ve replaced yourself?”

“Uh.”

Never, really. He tried not to think about it.

“Similar restrictions and reasons apply here, and to a greater degree. And should you decide to try and run off and leave me without a Flash in this world at all I will have to do something highly regrettable to re-augment my speed and it’s very likely neither of us is going to be in a timeline or world we recognize when I catch up and break your legs for trying to strand me even more in this time.”

“You stranded yourself, Thawne!”

“Dr. Wells,” Thawne corrected instantly and firmly. “Anywhere in S.T.A.R. Labs, anywhere in the precinct, in your home, out in the city, anywhere you could possibly be overheard, it’s ‘Doctor Wells’. Even ‘Harrison’ I’ll grant you if it stops you slipping up.”

Oh really?

“‘Harrison’,” Barry said, and ‘Dr. Wells’ went very still, somehow taken aback even though he’d literally just given Barry permission to call him that. “That’s a little rude, right?” Barry wasn’t going to say ‘inappropriate’, even if he suspected it was the more accurate word. After all, as Thawne was so busy complaining, Barry had only the faintest clue what the social norms of this world even were.

“Not so much rude as perhaps a little... fast,” Wells said, unable as ever to refrain from joking about their powers whenever he could. Barry rolled his eyes, despite making just as many jokes himself. At least he wasn’t just joking to himself most of the time.

“Good thing one of us is the fastest man alive then,” Barry said, only a little pointedly, and Wells shook his head as if he couldn’t help himself, marveling.

“Person,” he corrected, mouth twitching. “The Flash is the fastest person alive. It’s unknown what sex they are.”

Barry looked down at himself. He looked at ‘Harrison Wells’. He waved his arms incredulously.

Thawne cracked, hunching over to try and fail to smother his snort of laughter. Barry wondered if Dr. McGee would recognize it if she saw him, would see for the first time in years the Harrison Wells buried by the road outside Star City. Starling. Whichever it was in this world at that time.

“Please,” Thawne said, breathless with laughter. “Please, do you think secondary sex characteristics mean anything to what sex you are? Really?”

“No but—”

“The Flash’s sex isn’t a mystery to the general public because of how they present,” Thawne said, still struggling to keep a straight face. “Most would guess type 2 if you stayed still long enough.”

“Then—”

“It’s –” Thawne looked incredulous at having to explain something that was clearly supposed to be obvious. “Do you really not – it’s the Flash’s scent, their pheromones, the lack of comprehensibility.”

“My… what?” Barry asked, wondering if it was time to throw his hands up and his attempt at playing nice out the window. His scent, could Thawne get any creepier?

...Given his low, low standards, probably.

“Your scent,” Thawne repeated, as if added emphasis helped in any way. “Barry, don’t you – smell is one of the primary perceptions, how can you not…” he shook his head, then frowned. “Are you ansomic?”

“No,” Barry said, baffled. He’d met a witness who was, once – she hadn’t been able to smell the gas leak that had nearly killed her and her two small children. Her husband had argued it meant she wasn’t fit to have primary custody, and it had only gotten uglier from there. “I can smell just fine, thanks. I mean, normal sort of fine.”

“‘Normal sort of…’ Normal. Normal.”

“Did I break you?” Barry asked, only a little hopefully. It was looking difficult enough to operate in an unfamiliar world, he didn’t need his currently only guide and tentative ally being completely unable to offer any kind of assistance at all.

“Ha,” Thawne said, inhaling deeply. “Normal sort of fine. Right. One moment, I need to—” there was a crackle of red lightning, the Reverse Flash darting out of the room as Barry tensed and back before he took more than a step towards the door. Barry spun around to scowl at Harrison Wells, re-seated and offering – his hand?

“What?” Barry said, staring at it. Did he want to shake hands for some reason? Why was his sleeve rolled back?

“I had to wash off the scent-blocker on my wrist, I’ll reapply it when we’re done – try scenting it, Barry.”

“Scent – no! What? Seriously?”

For pretty much the first time he could remember since meeting Eobard Thawne as Harrison Wells – on both his original earth and the new one – the man looked genuinely discomfited, embarrassed by the offer he was making.

“Just – do as I ask, please. Engage your scientific curiosity for a moment, I know you have some.” His tone suggested it was actually more of a hope on his part than a genuine statement of fact. Barry tried not to be offended.

“There’s scientific curiosity and there’s – fine,” Barry said, and grabbed the proffered arm where it was still covered by the man’s sleeve, slightly too hard – Thawne grimaced, a faint snarl of warning escaping as if he was a dog Barry was testing the limits of. Good thing he was a speedster and healed fast, then.

“Scent and pheromones are a huge part of social interaction,” Thawne said, eyes fixed on some point over Barry’s head as he leaned in to sniff awkwardly at his wrist, like a Victorian chaperone determined to overlook some scandalous breach of propriety being committed in front of him. “You should be able to tell what sex I am—”

I know you’re male though? was Barry’s first thought, even though that apparently didn’t apply; he was just having a little difficulty making it sink in. He knew, somehow, that what he was smelling translated to a lot more than just ‘damn it, he should smell like blood or something, why does he smell nice’ but he just didn’t know how. Something about it probably could tell him if Harrison Wells was an alpha or beta or omega, but how was he supposed to know what it was beyond an apparently instinctive sense of ‘not like me’? …So not ‘omega’, he guessed.

“—my – or Harrison Wells’ – physical age, if I am healthy or ill, that I am the owner of the territory we’re in, what our relationship to each other is, how I feel about our current interaction–”

Territory. Not ‘the lab’ or ‘this facility’, but ‘territory’. “Right, okay,” Barry said quickly, dropping his arm and backing up a step. He wasn’t embarrassed, even if the way Dr. Wells didn’t look at him while applying some weird gel to his wrist and waiting for it to dry a little made him feel like he should be.

“I thought, uh, ‘scent-blockers’ came in these… patches?”

“They can,” Thawne said, seeming relieved to be able to slip into Dr. Wells’ familiar lecturing tone. “There are multiple forms available. Think of it along the lines of the difference between washing your hands thoroughly and scrubbing for surgery, different intensities for different purposes. Patches are much quicker and easier to apply but take slightly longer to actually work, whereas a gel can offer more coverage as required and so neutralizes to a greater degree, if properly applied.”

That definitely had the same sort of vibe as ‘condoms are 98% effective when used correctly’ and Barry couldn’t even hope to imagine the horror stories that might be involved in ‘properly applied’ in a world of crazy reproductive urges. He was definitely going to find the no doubt extensively idiot-proofed application instructions the moment he had some free time.

Just imagining the things people could apparently get from how he smelled, of all things…

What our relationship to each other is, how I feel about our current interaction – and no doubt a ton of other things besides that he wouldn’t let Barry know unless he had to. Not to mention things like… well. The whole reason for scents and pheromones being such a big deal.

Which Barry was not going to think about until he had to. Which he never would. Because he was definitely getting out of this universe before a ‘heat’ or ‘rut’ became an issue.

...Besides, the book he’d been given said an omega under significant mental or physical stress would likely skip one or more heats. Barry was pretty sure the state he was in counted as ‘significant stress’.

How good or bad Harrison Wells – it had to be Dr. Wells’ scent rather than Eobard Thawne’s, because Thawne was Wells down to the DNA currently and people would presumably find it very weird if it changed – might smell was irrelevant and would stay as irrelevant as it was to Barry in his own universe.

“Bellows, at the station,” Barry said abruptly, trying to distract himself, “does he smell like cigarettes because he’s smoking or is it just part of his scent? Because he used to smoke, on my earth, and quit – two, three years ago? My time? Has he just been smoking so long it’s part of him now?”

“Never met them,” Thawne said, shrugging. He obviously didn’t care to either – Barry’s work colleagues weren’t his problem, though Dr. Wells would undoubtedly have listened with every appearance of interest if Barry ever wanted to complain about them. “But scent interpretation is… let’s say highly individual. For example…”

He hummed thoughtfully, and Barry tried to impart with his eyes alone that he would stab him with one of his cowl’s lightning bolts if he tried to use Barry’s as his example, he was not ready for whatever Thawne’s ‘highly individual interpretation’ might be. Thawne raised his eyebrows in response, smiling as if he understood Barry’s mental threat but just found it extremely endearing, like a puffed up kitten trying to hiss.

“To me, the most prominent note in Doctor Snow’s scent is mint,” Thawne decided to say, and Barry might have sagged a little with relief, nobody could prove anything. “Pleasant, but not appealing to the biological imperative.”

“That sounds like an in-joke,” Barry said, squinting a little at his suspiciously bland expression. “Are you making fun nobody else is going to get until 2300?”

“I was born in 2151,” Thawne sniffed, pretending to be offended. “Back to the point – to me Caitlin smells most like mint, perhaps because I associate it with stubbornness – and she can be very stubborn when her Hippocratic ire is roused, as I’m sure you’re aware. But Ronnie would have said Caitlin’s most prominent scent-note is galanthus, a winter flower, and probably something along the lines of it making ohim think of love being stubborn and able to flower any time, even when least expected. If you asked Cisco he would probably agree those things are present but neither are what he associates with Caitlin because her scent to him is a friend, not an employee or a lover. Do you understand?”

“I just thought she was wearing a new perfume,” Barry said blankly.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Thawne said.

Let him be disappointed. If Barry was ever adapted enough to start categorizing people by scent it would be all over because the only way he was getting such a skill was by conceding that he needed it, that he really was as trapped in this strange universe as Thawne wanted him to accept.

Not happening.

But… Barry hesitated, weighing up the apparently revealing nature of scent recognition against the need for information. “What does a speedster smell like?” he asked eventually.

“Very good question,” Thawne murmured, and there was absolutely no good reason for the little flutter of pride Barry felt and squashed the moment Thawne tilted his head and examined him from head to toe as he considered his answer – how uncomfortable to make it, most likely. “To a non-meta, all speedsters smell the same. The Flash smells like a lightning strike. Overwhelming, unpleasant, and inhuman at best. There’s absolutely no chance of the Flash being recognized as ‘Barry Allen’ by scent.”

“Oh good,” Barry sighed with relief, then frowned a little as a thought occurred: “Then why the… the scent mask thing?”

“Because there is a chance of recognizing the Flash from Barry Allen’s scent. Ozone is not really what they’re scenting but it’s close enough, and a very distinct and unusual thing to smell like in daily life. Saying it’s an after-effect of being struck by lightning only covers so much when the intensity can vary wildly depending on the use of your powers. You can only claim to have been too near the Flash so many times before someone gets suspicious. The scent mask is to enhance what’s left of ‘Barry Allen’ pre-lightning and diminish that similarity to the Flash as best as possible. You are still using it?”

“I didn’t know it was a scent mask or whatever, but you’ve got to know I am,” Barry said indignantly. “With your stupid enhanced nose or whatever.”

“You’re not applying it correctly then,” Thawne said. “Consider where a beta applies perfume and why – you want it behind the ears, at the nape of the neck, and the insides of wrists, elbows and knees in addition to under your arms, just to start.”

And a few other places besides. Thawne’s eyes darted to Barry’s open collar, tracing the muscles in his neck, the hollow of his throat. That would definitely be one of them, but maybe that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to an omega? Who knew, definitely not Barry.

“Right,” he said, and Thawne jerked his gaze away as if he hadn’t been eyeing his Adam's apple like he wanted to take a bite. Thawne always ended up looking at Barry like he wanted to rip his throat out with his teeth, it was fine. Totally normal way to look at your nemesis. “I’ll do that.”

“Please do,” Dr. Wells said politely, Thawne and his rabid neck-hating suddenly hidden away as easily as putting on a Halloween mask. ...Would his scent change too if he wasn’t wearing scent-blockers? Was that possible? Was he that paranoid – what was Barry saying, if anyone could act on that sort of level it was definitely Eobard Thawne.

“Ugh this is complicated,” Barry muttered to himself, and ignored a soft snort of amusement from Thawne. “Why don’t I just use those scent-blocker things? Actually, why don’t people use those all the time?”

He looked over at Thawne after a moment, surprised by his silence – he always had an answer for Barry even if it was ‘I’m not telling you the answer’. He was staring with a look of utter incomprehension, as if Barry had said something so unbelievable he was finally short of words to describe the idiocy. It was a feat Barry had never managed before... though not for lack of trying Thawne would probably say.

“What?” Surely it wasn't that weird a question? The value in hiding something so apparently revealing as scent should be obvious to Eobard Thawne of all people.

“‘What’?” Thawne echoed incredulously. “Scent underpins everything! You might as well ask why people don’t walk around half-deaf and blind! Blockers are necessary in certain professions and contexts, but you’re not getting the full spectrum of communication without scent.”

“People on my world manage fine,” Barry muttered, then winced, thinking of Iris complaining about so many guys mistaking professional friendliness for flirtation at Jitters, never mind Dr. Wells and his false smiles. Thinking of the awkwardness he could have been spared in his life if he’d been able to smell when someone was getting irritated with him talking too much made him scowl. “Stupid enhanced noses,” he said sourly.

“My nose isn’t considered enhanced,” Dr. Wells said patiently – implying Thawne’s was, Barry realized, because he could tell it was ‘Harrison Wells’ speaking. “It’s barely above baseline, in fact. Which reminds me – it’s not possible for a non-meta to distinguish one speedster from another by scent. Or even for a lot of metahumans. But it’s possible for another speedster.”

“Oh,” Barry said, suddenly very wary for no particular reason.

“A speedster smells like the Speed Force,” Thawne said. There was reverence in his voice the way there always was – the Speed Force, negative or not, was practically his religion. “And just as the Speed Force presents itself differently to each speedster, so each speedster is as uniquely identifiable by scent to one another as non-metas are.”

The Speed Force did? He’d sort of assumed so, but now he had to wonder what Thawne saw as the face of a cosmic entity. He had a strange feeling he wouldn’t like the answer.

“So if you use your powers...” Barry said slowly.

“Mhm.”

“That wouldn’t help prove anything at all, would it,” Barry realized. The Reverse Flash wasn’t Harrison Wells, his scent would just be Eobard Thawne’s true one, like the Flash’s was apparently Barry’s. Whatever that smelled like, and he was never, ever going to ask.

Thawne’s blood had been on the walls of his childhood home along with his own and it hadn’t been enough – and damn was that a terrible failure of evidence retrieval on the original CSI team’s part, and even sloppier cleaning. Useful to Barry fifteen years later, but really, really sloppy. ...Both the cleaning and detecting was probably much better in a world where everybody was a bloodhound. Wait--

“No,” Harrison Wells said, smiling. “It wouldn’t. Does that matter? Given your current state?”

Okay, maybe the wild and weird new human biology and if he was stuck with it was the bigger problem at the moment. Maybe.

“I was having an epiphany there,” Barry complained, and chose to pretend Dr. Wells really was just coughing.

“Oh? Do tell.”

What was it? Something about Thawne’s scent, something about that night, something about this world…

“Wait! Wait, if everybody’s sense of smell is so great, how come people couldn't tell there was someone else in the house when my mom—”

“There’s no scent evidence connected to the murder of Nora Allen. The scene was naturally contaminated, there was a freak lightning storm that night, apparently.”

Barry could just about ignore the visible mirth on his face but if Thawne even thought about winking he was going to snap. And he was tempted to, Barry knew it, he just loved that kind of joke about their powers and other people’s ignorance of them.

“It covered anything of the intruder that might have been of use for both prosecution and defense.”

“Damn,” Barry muttered.

“Barry. It’s a little much to ask for my help and then try to pin an unsolved murder on me while you’re at it.”

“Wait. Unsolved? Intruder? I thought everybody thought…”

“The standards of policework in every era and this one in particular are low, but this isn’t Gotham, the officers here generally aren’t incompetent enough to miss a stranger’s blood spattered on the walls, or corrupt enough to throw such evidence out for no reason.” Thawne cocked his head to one side and smiled grimly. “Maybe that’s different on your Earth.”

Barry stared at him. “But – my dad... I thought you said Joe raised–”

“The wheels of justice are incredibly slow, even by ordinary human standards, and lies are much more stubborn than the truth. You’ll find more people still believe the rumors printed in the first few months after your mother’s murder than remember Henry was eventually acquitted.”

Acquitted. Everything Barry had wanted, earlier than he’d managed on his own Earth, so why--

“You were raised by Joe because there were… concerns–” the word was so disgusted Barry half-expected him to retch like a cat after saying it, mortally offended by its presence in his mouth, “– about a traumatized broken-bond alpha being solely responsible for an equally traumatized newly pubescent omega.”

Barry stared at him blankly, uncomprehending, and he laughed.

“Oh good, you don’t get it,” he said wryly. “When you do, remember I was just the messenger, this era’s idea of social care is the real villain. In any case Henry Allen--” His eyes flickered, darted to one of the cameras – to Gideon watching, maybe – and he reassessed what he was going to say. Corrected course to something slightly milder, Barry suspected, something less disdainful of Henry just in case Barry really did hit him like he deserved. “Your sire had ahis own issues to deal with, was in and out of mental health facilities – using the term loosely as this time deserves – throughout your adolescence. The reasons differed from the court’s but ahe also felt you would be better served growing up under more stable care.”

“My dad,” Barry said quietly. “Not my sire.” Did every little victory always have to be so hollow? So his father was free here – but still destroyed by that night and what followed. His mother’s death was accepted as a strange homicide, but it would only ever be solved by Thawne’s confession, and nothing Barry could do would get that from him if he didn’t want to give it.

And if Thawne did confess, as he’d done ‘posthumously’ for Barry for… some reason Barry wasn’t going to look into, all it would do with his father already free was defame the real Harrison Wells (again), who’d done nothing to deserve it.

“Okay, you win,” he admitted and didn’t need to have even the most basic understanding of so-called scent interpretation to know just what Thawne’s would be saying without the scent-blockers. What triumph would even smell like Barry didn’t know, but whatever it was from Thawne would definitely be strong enough to choke him. “I definitely don’t know enough about this world to bluff. What’s the plan.”

“Research. For you, cultural. For me, evidence of multiversity to show Caitlin and Cisco and begin experiments to prove or disprove what we suspect about your appearance here.”

That it might be permanent, leading to researching what might have happened to Barry’s original universe to make that the case if so. What happened to prompt him to cross over entirely by instinctual accident, how, and if that how was also replicable.

Barry swallowed. If it wasn’t... Dr. Wells looked at him sharply, nose wrinkling slightly. That had to be some sort of instinctive response to a distressed omega in general, like the puberty book had claimed was a thing, because it didn't make sense for Thawne to dislike Barry's frustrated fear or anger. And if he didn’t enjoy the smell of Barry despairing over his life maybe he should just stop sniffing, Barry thought, striding to the door to yank it open and gesture Dr. Wells in his wheelchair through like the grumpiest of doormen.

“Cultural, huh,” he said as they neared the Cortex, tension headache already forming at the thought of the tests he was going to have to sit through, the lies he was going to have to tell, trying to remember what he should know and what he didn’t, if either was even relevant, given… everything else. Maybe he just needed to keep it really, really simple: if he wanted Eobard Thawne’s help he wouldn’t say anything about Harrison Wells. At least he could be sure that was definitely the same and supposed to be secret.

“We’ll do some proper tests later,” Dr. Wells reassured as they entered, completely focused on Barry as if they’d been deep in discussion as they walked. “Maybe you should take the rest of the day off, Barry.”

He was making a point by using Barry’s first name in front of Cisco and Caitlin but what it was supposed to be Barry didn’t know. He frowned a little. Distracting them? Giving himself breathing room to fake the information he needed with Gideon’s help, time he'd later claim they were using to work out how to break the news about Barry’s inter-dimensional problem to them?

“Have you been to the Gedde Natural History Museum recently?” Dr. Wells asked curiously, and Barry caught the faintest twitching at the corners of his mouth. Definitely distracting. “They have a new exhibit about early civilization I think you’ll find fascinating.”

He knew damn well every exhibit in any history museum on this Earth would be new and probably strange and horrifying to Barry, and Barry slowed his perception of time just to roll his eyes at him.

“I don’t think I have,” he said lightly, determinedly not looking at either Cisco or Caitlin. “Maybe we should go together, when was the last time you went out into the city somewhere?”

“Last week,” Dr. Wells said mildly, as if oblivious to the poison in Barry pointing out his pariah status, but there was something amused and satisfied in the way he glanced up at Barry. It probably was a good idea not to let Barry go anywhere on his own, frankly. “But why not? It’s always a delight to be able to watch you learn.”

Chapter Text

The Gedde Natural History Museum was the largest museum in Central City in Barry’s universe. The one Dr. Wells – because Barry was trying his best not to slip up on the identity thing – led him around was larger, Barry was sure of it. He thought it might also be a few streets off from where he remembered too, but at least it was still in Mounds View.

Iris usually had a lot of things to say about Central’s largest museum being built in the part of the city named for the number of Native American burial mounds in the area every time she reported on an attempted heist, most of them unimpressed. Barry mostly just wished it wasn’t so close to the airport, which made it more tempting for thieves of questionable intelligence trying for a quick getaway.

He wasn’t sure if the building was taller or wider or just made better use of space but he definitely did not remember feeling small and lost in it before, even when he really had gotten lost inside once as a child, and sent his parents into a frenzy only to find him scribbling notes in the dinosaur exhibit.

It didn’t help that there were a lot more people than he was expecting, and they all smelled. Not bad, usually, but strong. It was as if Thawne pointing out a whole smell-based understanding of humanity had made it impossible to ignore and it had barely been five minutes before Barry started to get a splitting headache.

“What’s wrong?” Dr. Wells asked as if he didn’t know, watching him rub at his nose again, not even bothering to try and be discreet after the third or fourth time.

“Nothing,” Barry said stubbornly, to a disbelieving little hum.

“Nothing, huh,” Dr. Wells said.

“Why are there so many people?” Barry said, taking a step closer to the wheelchair because it tended to make everybody else keep a step further back. Dr. Wells didn’t smell like anything – or at least, nothing Barry could detect without shoving his nose uncomfortably close, and that was the way it should be. Not like a grapefruit to the face or a sudden burst of pine or leather or whatever scent whenever they passed someone, sometimes going sour or making his nose itch when the owner realized who was in the wheelchair they were avoiding.

“I think perhaps they want to be reminded of how long the world has been around and how beautiful the things it contains are. It’s a fairly common response after a near-miss disaster,” Dr. Wells said, watching Barry out of the corner of his eye as if Barry didn’t know he was examining his reaction. It was a little annoying actually – he might as well be honest about watching, it was a nice change that Barry knew it was happening.

“Near-miss?”

“Huh,” Dr. Wells murmured, and Barry tensed at the realization that he’d given the wrong response somehow.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Dr. Wells returned instantly, and Barry scowled.

“No, come on, what am I missing here?”

“You miss a great deal I’m guessing,” Dr. Wells said mildly, and Barry wanted to bite him suddenly, wanted to sink his teeth into his throat and shake and feel blood well up –

No, wait. He wanted to punch him in the face and see how amused he looked with a bloody nose. That was it, the correct understanding of that visceral irritation. Bite him? As if Barry was some sort of angry toddler running on instinct? Way to make it weird, brain. He didn’t want to bite anyone, he was getting mixed up, he obviously meant to say that Thawne could just –

“Bite me,” Barry said irritably, scowling at Dr. Wells, and his eyebrows shot up, look of mocking amusement replaced by unnecessary and exaggerated incredulity – it couldn’t possibly be the first time anyone had told him to get lost.

And the loud tutting from the lady in the furs passing by was even more unnecessary, making Barry turn and glower at her defiantly. She sniffed at him – a gesture he was rapidly beginning to pick up had a very different connotations depending on when, where and how it was used – and turned away, dragging her friend with her at the rapid clip of an offended society matron who did not expect slumming it among the day-visiting commoners to actually involve being faced with any of them.

Dr. Wells cleared his throat and Barry turned back to him, making a face he expected to be reciprocated only for Dr. Wells to blink at him, clearly not interested in making fun of some easily offended passerby when there were more important matters at hand. “Perhaps don’t make such an offer in a public space,” he suggested carefully, and it was Barry’s turn to blink. He hadn’t known he was making an offer.

…Had he made an offer? He rubbed at his forehead irritably. It would be easier to work out what the hell Th– Wells was talking about if the headache from all the clashing smells wasn’t so bad, hadn’t turned into a kind of persistent throbbing ache. How did people in this universe handle all the smells all the time?

“This way,” Dr. Wells decided, and it was just easier to fall in step beside him, to keep his eyes just open enough to track the wheelchair’s movement as he was led away to an almost empty room, the few visitors inside already moving on to another as they entered. The exhibit they were supposedly there to see was on the other side of the building, Barry remembered vaguely. And a different floor, maybe? Everything in the place was so distracting, no special exhibit required.

There was a collection of armors from around the world on the first floor, for instance, and there had been an extensive subsection dedicated entirely to gorgets and their evolution from absolutely essential practical armor to sexy ornament. Barry had wanted to make fun of it but had his brain broken a little by Dr. Wells pointing out offhand that the Flash suit could be included – all around the neck was heavily reinforced with an armored mesh underneath, sacrificing a little flexibility for the sake of safety. Safety that was not about preventing garroting or strangulation. Cisco was working on getting the correct balance, he was assured, and Barry had stared at a jeweled piece halfway between armor and art and rubbed self-consciously at his neck.

He’d thought the cowl’s neck was a little stiffer, the brief time he’d been wearing the suit when he first… arrived, but the suit was slowly improving all the time as he and Cisco found out in the field what things worked and what didn’t. Of course an old suit wouldn’t be as comfortable to wear.

There had been a sign outside the room they’d entered but Barry had no idea what it had said, and keeping his eyes half-closed hardly helped him to work out what the collection around them might be. The painting they were in front of, pretending to examine, was a vague impression of flesh tones and white-gray that might have been clouds or cloth as far as Barry was concerned.

“Rossetti’s Hyacinthus and Apollon,” Dr. Wells said from somewhere near Barry’s elbow, and Barry nodded as if any of the words made sense. Everything would surely come together in a moment – the painting, the words, the room in general. Not the world, he was giving up hope on that one.

Was Barry’s sense of smell enhanced even for here or was it just that he wasn’t used to being able to smell so much? He could still smell the couple that had just left, a lingering impression of conflicting scents that somehow made him assume their date was not going well, that one had been bored, maybe, and the other sad about it. Did he have to actually learn what all the different smells meant to be able to disregard them?

“You’re overwhelmed right now because you’re not used to using your senses the way you should be capable of. You’ll adapt,” Wells said, and it was stupidly comforting. Harrison Wells was always sure of what Barry could do because Eobard Thawne knew what they could do – anything one of them was capable of so was the other. ...Except maybe empathy.

If he said Barry wouldn’t be walking around with a 24/7 scent-induced migraine then that was what would happen.

“Great,” Barry said, and risked opening his eyes a little.

There was no one else in the room any more – no strong unwelcome smells. There was just Dr. Wells at his side, staring at him rather than the canvas, and the canvas made more sense the more he looked at it.

Unfortunately.

“Is this porn?” he asked Dr. Wells, eyes darting between Wells’ suddenly extremely amused expression and the painting, constantly finding another aspect of it to look away from. The way the limbs were entwined. The teasing folds and drape of inaccurate Greco-Roman clothing somehow covering everything in a way that made it more sexual than if the subjects had actually been nude. The expression of religious ecstasy in the eyes of one painted face pressed to a bared shoulder. The hands of the person being held grasping the arm of the other, bringing the wrist up to their face as if to kiss – or, Barry suddenly realized, face feeling hot for no particular reason, as if to ‘scent’ it the same way Thawne had allowed Barry.

“It’s art,” Dr. Wells said, mouth twitching as if he really was making an effort to hide how entertaining he found Barry’s reaction.

To be fair to Barry’s not very artistically educated eyes it really did look like something like one of the pre-Raphaelites might have painted in another universe. And apparently had in this one.

He didn’t really look at art much unless robbery was involved, so he wasn’t sure if the paintings he remembered had really been quite so… horny was not good art criticism, but it was the only word he could think of.

“Everybody’s dressed but somehow this is definitely porn,” Barry decided, turning away from the painting entirely only to find himself faced with another on the opposite wall that had even less pretensions about artistic merit. “Is that one – is he licking her wrist?”

Wells turned the chair slightly, gave a dismissive glance at the painting. “Ah, The Scent. Yes,” he said, as if it was perfectly natural and common pose to be found in art. Maybe it was, Barry realized suddenly, eyes darting – in the little painting in the corner two women had their heads bent together over each other’s proffered wrists, and on the cracked red plates in a display case black-figured adolescents held their wrists coquettishly out of reach of grasping bearded men, and the less said about the statue in the center of the room the better.

“Why?”

“I know, it’s a ridiculously common title,” Dr. Wells tutted, disappointed with the lack of creativity. “Almost as much as ‘The Kiss’. Artists,” he said, shrugging.

“You know what I meant,” Barry said, glaring at him, and Wells dropped the mask of mild disinterest instantly to grin at him.

“Your face, Barry. It’s not uncommon imagery, The Scent just takes the idea, the pose, to the eroticized extreme. Very scandalous at the time.”

“So scenting wrists is a… sex thing?” Barry said, hoping the judgment in his voice was clear because he was judging really, really hard and it would be a shame if it went to waste. He couldn’t believe Thawne would trick him into – okay, no, he could absolutely believe it.

“No,” Wells said, and looked even more amused at Barry’s attempt to project judgment at him even harder. “Context is important, look –” he pointed at something to Barry’s left, directing him to turn, and Barry frowned, walking closer to see –

“Our Lady of Tears?” he said, peering at the title on the little information card beside it.

It looked like any one of a hundred images of Mary holding Jesus as a baby except that above her typically beatific smile tears were sliding down Mary’s cheeks, and the pudgy-faced child in her arms wasn’t suckling or asleep or pointing to an angel over her shoulder but pressing his face to her languidly offered wrist.

“Scenting the wrist – before anything else it’s how you teach a young child,” Dr. Wells said. He put on a high ‘cooing to babies’ voice, “‘This is ommy, what does ommy smell like?’”

“Don’t do that,” Barry said with a shudder.

“They already know what their parent smells like, of course, but the purpose is to get them to understand how that scent makes up ‘ommy’ to them. Once they understand that, it’s ‘how does adad or mama smell’ – is their sire happy, is their mother playful, or tired or distracted or determined – so they learn what scents they associate with certain feelings. Then it’s things like ‘where has daddy been?’, so as to learn the difference between innate and external influences upon scent. And so on and so forth.”

As if Barry had any idea what that dismissive everybody knows this 'so on and so forth' was supposed to cover.

“Why do you even know anything about toddler development,” Barry said blankly. He was pretty sure that his brain had stopped processing the moment Dr. Wells had brought out the baby talk. It was probably stuck hitting two brain cells together in the hopes of a making a spark.

“It’s unfortunately a stage everyone goes through,” Wells said dryly. “So you understand how scenting that way obviously comes across very differently between two unrelated adults?”

“Because they know how to scent and don’t need to do it up close and personal?” That probably made some kind of sense. As much as anything in this world did. Dr. Wells nodded his approval of the theory and Barry definitely wasn’t proud of getting the answer right at all. Not even a little. “So between adults it’s a sex thing?”

“Eh,” Wells said, holding up his hand and waggling it a little from side to side, a gesture he’d clearly picked up from Cisco. “A better word might be intimate. You wouldn’t do it with a heat-match. You might with your partner or mate. It’s a bit more hit and miss between teenagers. At that stage it can still be something ‘for babies’ or it can start to take on more… intimate connotations depending on their development.”

Wait a minute.

“...Were you treating me like a baby?” Barry demanded, unsure if he was insulted or relieved. “Did you think it would bring up some sort of instinctive memory or something?”

“Perhaps,” Dr. Wells said. Barry decided for the sake of his sanity, the room, and his intact knuckles to assume he was answering the second question. He was not getting kicked out for wrecking the place, and punching Thawne would only end up with them brawling throughout the museum.

At the rate they were going that might be a relief, actually. It would be great if Barry could at least feel certain about one thing in this weird new world, and if that was punching Thawne in the face so much the better. Fist meets face was universally understandable, there couldn't be any confusion there, surely?

Unfortunately he then remembered that one of the first rooms they’d wandered through after the armor collection had been full of paintings that probably would have prompted Cisco to instigate a game of ‘is that supposed to be fighting or fucking’, and how at least one of them had forcibly reminded him of the Reverse Flash kneeling over him as he shoved his face into the grass of a football field, keeping him pinned with a heavy hand on his shoulder as he growled delightedly about it being the Flash’s destiny to lose.

Barry’s intentions might be pure(ly violent) but how Thawne’s weird unknown instincts might perceive and respond to that violence was another matter.

And the Flash wasn’t supposed to fight in a museum unless it was actively being robbed, of course. There was that too. No matter how much better it would have made Barry feel to have something normal from his old – his own world.

“Well obviously it didn’t,” Barry said, staring at the baby’s happy expression, at the chubby cheeks and dimpled little hands gripping his mother’s arm.

He wondered if his mother – if the Nora Allen of this Earth had held an infant Barry Allen that way, had cooed over his attempts to begin understanding the world the way Wells claimed was normal.

He thought of Dr. Wells holding out his arm and letting Barry get close enough to take in the scent he hid inside the Labs, how absurdly intimate it had felt to lean in over his wrist, as if he’d been about to give an old-fashioned kiss.

...Did hand-kissing exist with scenting the wrist so heavily associated with intimacy? Maybe that sort of thing would count as – what was it, ‘marking’? Like when a cat rubbed its cheek against a hand, Barry thought, and smothered an involuntary grin at the thought of the Reverse Flash’s distinctive warning rattle of a noise actually being a defective purr.

Would it work, to try and teach Barry the same way as a toddler? If it was necessary? He looked down at Dr. Wells, whose voice he still heard answer sometimes when he asked himself ‘what do I do here? How can I counter this ability with my speed?’

“I need to learn, don’t I,” he said reluctantly, and Dr. Wells nodded once, just as focused as he was when they came up against a new metahuman and had to work out how to stretch Barry’s one skill in every direction to make it the answer to every problem.

Barry licked his lips, made a feeble little gesture towards the crying Mary. “Like this?”

Dr. Wells frowned, brow creasing a little with confusion, then his expression abruptly cleared, went as blank as the Flash suit’s display mannequin. “That might work,” he said, staring at the baby’s half-hidden happy smile. “Not here,” he added quickly, incredulous, when Barry took a step towards him. “What did we just talk about?”

“I don’t actually know how to scent though,” Barry pointed out, and he shook his head with a huff of impatience.

“Nobody else knows that,” he said. “It would look—” he cut himself off as a group entered, chattering loudly.

Barry grimaced, pinching his nose shut, but it was worse after a reprieve to have to deal with all the new smells. The headache was suddenly back with a vengeance, the faint pulse it had subsided to turned to a heavy rhythmic pounding like Grodd was trying to break his skull from the inside out. He hated to show weakness in front of Thawne, really wanted to prove that he’d learned he could handle things without Dr. Wells constantly assisting him, even something so small as visiting a museum rather than fighting a meta, but –

“Can we go back to the labs? This is–”

“A lot more people for a more sustained time than you were ready to deal with,” Dr. Wells said.

“I thought I could handle it,” Barry admitted. “The precinct was okay.”

“The precinct doesn’t get hundreds of visitors, and your lab is fairly isolated,” Dr. Wells said, leading him to the door in a wide arc around the visiting group, their phones constantly clicking as they took pictures of the paintings, each other, and themselves with the paintings.

“Hey, we never reached that exhibition,” Barry said as they reached the street outside and Dr. Wells gave him a look.

“Perhaps next time,” he said. “It’s not permanent but since most of the pieces aren’t on loan the majority of the collection should still be available to view no matter how long it takes you to be comfortable inside the building.”

“If a toddler can learn—”

“I was talking about your fascinated discomfort with all the nudes,” Dr. Wells said. “You looked like a nun being shepherded through a brothel when you couldn’t avoid them.”

“Human penises aren’t supposed to do that!” Barry hissed.

“True, depicting the knot as fully swollen does miss the point of the thing, but you have to accept artistic license in such matters.”

“Oh my god,” Barry muttered.

“Which aspect? Alpha, beta, omega? Or full trinity?”

“Oh my god,” Barry said, even more tormented, and gave Wells the silent treatment all the way back to S.T.A.R. Labs, only half of it from the persistent headache, which Cisco immediately worsened by slyly asking “sooo, how was your date,” the moment they entered.

“Not a date,” Barry said, and almost missed the disbelieving look Cisco gave Dr. Wells, who waved it off with a shrug of dismissal that somehow read less like an agreement with Barry about the obvious truth of the matter and more as ‘well if Barry says it wasn’t’.

“It wasn’t,” Barry insisted.

“Sure, sure,” Cisco said breezily, and he smelled like – whatever it was made Barry think of ice cream melting on a sunny day, somehow translated in his head as cheerful childish delight with the world. The whole 'scenting' thing was so weird.

“That thing we talked about before,” Barry asked Dr. Wells, rubbing his temple. “About how to deal with…” he waved his hand vaguely.

“Aw, no way, you actually spent the whole time talking about work?” Cisco said, slumping in his chair with fake disappointment at Barry’s priorities. “No wonder you can’t recognize courting when you’re in the middle of it, Barry –”

“Not a date, Cisco,” Barry repeated tiredly, ignoring the completely wrong term. “Is it a date when you guys watch old movies together?”

“No, that’s emotionally stunted pack bonding,” Cisco informed him seriously. “I’m not a single omega in want of an alpha with a big…”

“Don’tyoudare,” Barry squeaked, eyes darting over to Dr. Wells to see him put his head in his hands with a sigh of blatant exasperation that did nothing to offset the faint tremble in his shoulders, beginning to shake as he tried to suppress his laughter.

“Brain,” Cisco finished, giving him an innocent look. “Barry! I didn’t know you were so shallow!”

“You’re the worst,” Barry complained. “Dr. Wells, come on, let’s go, I need a break from Cisco already.”

“That’s so sad,” Cisco said, shaking his head. “You’re going to make everyone think an omega can’t handle a little teasing, get it together, Barry, you’re supposed to be a hero.”

“I can handle anything,” Barry said without thinking – he was handling being in an entirely different universe pretty well so far – and Cisco’s eyes gleamed.

“Except calling a date a date,” he said. “Which also means you don’t get to handle—” he made a gesture similar to stroking an invisible penis, only the fake grip widened at the bottom instead of going straight up and down. Barry whirled away, halfway down the corridor in the time it took to blink and still able to hear Cisco cackling.

He was half-convinced he could still hear it in Dr. Wells’ office too, even with the door shut. If he went to the Time Vault, that would probably block him out. That thing was definitely soundproof. None of the former employees of S.T.A.R. Labs had ever talked about having a villainous ghost in the walls that liked to monologue their evil plan to a tired robot, after all.

“He does it to make you feel accepted,” Thawne said as he entered, dropping Dr. Wells like a mask the moment the door shut again. It was impossible to say what about him changed – his posture, his expression, the look in his eyes – but something did. One day Barry was going to have to work it out. “If he would make the joke with a beta friend, he’ll make it with you, socio-cultural expectations be damned.”

“What took you?” Barry asked, rolling his eyes.

“I have to stick to the wheelchair’s speed,” Thawne said dryly. “And I thought you might like a moment to recover while I removed the scent-blockers.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Barry said. “I’m not that precious, I can take a joke.”

Thawne laughed, a sudden noise that looked like it startled him even more than it did Barry. He cleared his throat and asked politely, “Is your head feeling better?”

“Uh,” Barry said, still staring. “Yes? It’s not so bad if it’s –” he almost said ‘you’, realized how that would sound, and corrected: “not so many people.”

“Good,” Thawne said, but then didn’t say anything else, keeping his eyes just slightly averted from where Barry’s hands rested on his desk, having given up on trying to draw a basic timeline on old reports with an empty pen.

Barry waited until he realized that for all his toddler-level ignorance bothered Thawne, the man apparently couldn’t get himself to actually make what to him was an offer of intimacy. It was Barry who eventually had to ask, “So. Can I try scenting you?”

Thawne jerked slightly, eyes widening before he managed to get himself under control, locking whatever the brief expression on his face meant away.

“Again?” Barry asked, to remind him that he’d done it before, no big deal, didn’t he know Barry was an ignorant stranger from another universe, exempt from whatever weird societal expectations Thawne occasionally deigned to operate under.

“Again,” Thawne repeated, laughing quietly to himself as if Barry had told him a joke without knowing it. “Sure, Barry. Try.”

He held his hand out, and Barry dragged the chair around the desk so he could sit in front of him and roll his sleeve back.

“You can scent through clothing, you know,” Thawne said, but didn’t try to pull his wrist back or anything.

“Easier, though, right?”

“Hmm.”

Barry took that as a ‘yes’, lowering his head close enough to almost brush skin, frowning with concentration.

His first thought was that Thawne smelled of something that made Barry think he was amused – more like sun-warmed earth than Cisco’s summer day ice cream but there was definitely a similarity, and Barry glanced up at him and said, “Is ‘warm’ a smell or is it just how my brain is trying to interpret amusement? You think this is funny, right?”

“Hilarious,” Thawne said, his scent… ripening was the only word Barry could think of, becoming stronger and fuller.

“Be angry,” Barry blurted, and the warm earthy smell abruptly soured and vanished, something unpleasant rising up to replace it, an edge to it like chlorine – no, ozone, an instinctive reach for their power because ‘Dr. Wells’ could never hope to reach the depths of anger Eobard Thawne was capable of.

Barry grimaced, almost pulled away, and only stuck it out because the scent quickly smoothed out, whatever thought Thawne had used to make himself angry promptly stashed away again in the back of his twisted head.

“Huh,” Barry said, and inhaled again. There really was a difference between the scent that was Thawne, the ones that indicated his emotions, and smells that just layered him – he’d had a glass of whiskey before he entered the office, for instance, Barry could smell traces of it. If he could just work out how to untangle it all –

“Dr. Wells have you seen – oh my gosh,” Caitlin blurted as she came through the door, whirling around the moment she looked up from the printouts she was checking and saw them.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Barry protested instinctively, then slapped a hand to his face, groaning, because way to say the most cliché thing on all possible earths.

Thawne sighed deeply, and honestly Barry couldn’t even blame him.

“It’s exactly what it looks like, Dr. Snow, but not for the reasons you’re thinking.”

“You should lock the door!” Caitlin said, still not looking at either of them, the tips of her ears bright red.

“Barry was—”

“I don’t want to know, thank you! Not that I have a problem with – I’m happy if you’re happy –”

“Dr. Snow,” Dr. Wells said loudly and clearly, asserting himself as her boss instead of her friend – there was a difference, not just in his voice but in his scent, Barry realized, fascinated. “Barry is from a different universe.”

“I just think in the lab is a little unprof-- what?”

“One that doesn’t have alpha, beta or omega dynamics.”

“What?!” Caitlin repeated, startled enough to turn and look at them – Barry probably still looking guilty as hell, Thawne obviously as cool and unperturbed as Dr. Wells ever was.

“You remember the incident,” Dr. Wells said, staring at her meaningfully.

“With the red sky,” Caitlin said a tone of realization, glancing rapidly from Dr. Wells to Barry and back again as she ventured further into the room despite her still obvious discomfort. “When Barry ran off instead of coming back for testing—”

Red sky? It had been red in Barry’s universe. He’d assured himself it couldn’t be the Crisis of Thawne’s future newspaper because the date was wrong but the thought had stayed in the back of his head, a whisper of doubt that threatened to undo him if he listened too long. Had the sky been red here too? Had the Flash that tried to fix it been just as scared, even without knowing for sure it could be the end?

“Barry here appears to have…” Dr. Wells turned to look at Barry and raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Is ‘merged’ the word we’re going with here?”

“Good as any,” Barry shrugged, still watching Caitlin struggle to reboot from her shock. “That makes it sound permanent though?”

Dr. Wells hummed noncommittally, looking back at Caitlin. “We’ll go with merged for now. I’ve been looking at what data I can gather –” It was incredible how smoothly he lied, Barry thought, unwillingly impressed, “and I’m reasonably sure that ohe isn’t lying.”

“Hey!” Barry complained.

“It’s not a case of amnesia or similar, Barry here is genuinely a different person.”

“I’m not a different person,” Barry protested. “I’m still Barry Allen. And ‘he’ is fine.”

“I worded that poorly,” Dr. Wells acknowledged. “You’re still Barry –”

Barry caught Caitlin mouthing ‘Barry’ to herself, looking at Dr. Wells as if that verified his words more than any number of charts or examples of tachyonic resonance or whatever else Thawne was going to use to bullshit Caitlin and Cisco into believing him. What was the deal there? Cisco called him Barry and nobody thought that was odd.

“Is ohe… sharing Barry’s body then? Is it like Ronnie and Stein?”

“Uh,” Barry said, looking down at himself. He’d forgotten when that had happened, hadn’t realized they had an example to work with. “No? It’s like when you time travel—”

“When you time travel?” Caitlin said incredulously, and Barry looked helplessly at Thawne.

“Have I not even time-traveled yet?”

“Dr. Wells hypothesized but – you just say it so casually! ‘When you time travel’, like when you visit Jitters!”

“It’s a side-effect,” Barry said, and didn’t miss Thawne taking off Dr. Wells’ glasses with a sigh, pressing his knuckles to his forehead. “Anyway, when you time travel you’re either a guest in your previous or alternate timeline or you replace… That makes it sound bad, it’s not, really. What I mean is, it’s my body, except, you know, not. But that’s why I thought at first it was just time travel –”

“Just!”

“And I could just…” he shrugged helplessly. “Run back?”

Thawne sighed again, sounding profoundly exhausted with everything, but Barry most of all.

“Dr. Wells is pretty sure I can’t,” Barry said.

“I’m almost certain you can’t,” Dr. Wells said in the tone Thawne used when he was forced to pretend his hypotheses weren’t actually theories. “But Barry wanted more tests to be sure before he told you and Cisco. And his family.”

Barry froze. When had Iris found out he was the Flash? How long had Joe managed to convince him not to tell her? If she didn’t even know he was the Flash, how was he supposed to explain? Or maybe that bit of personal history was different too?

“Ohe really doesn’t… know anything?” Caitlin said, staring at Barry again, intellectual curiosity taking over shock.

“I read a book?” Barry offered.

“The A, B, and O of Understanding Puberty,” Dr. Wells confirmed, completely straight-faced.

“And Dr. Wells was just trying to teach me how to make sense of the… enhanced sense of smell thing.”

“Enhanced?” Caitlin repeated, looking wildly at Dr. Wells, begging with her eyes for an answer different to the one her pessimism was expecting him to give. “Ohe doesn’t know how to scent?!”

“He doesn’t know how to scent,” Dr. Wells confirmed.

“Oh my god,” Caitlin murmured, horrified. “I think I need to sit down.”

Barry was behind her an instant, shoving his chair in place to catch her before her legs could even finish buckling and was perched on Dr. Wells’ desk by the time she was fully seated, a poleaxed look of shock on her face.

“I can smell things, you know,” Barry said. “Way too much, actually. I just... can’t work out what they mean, I guess?”

“You guess,” Caitlin said faintly, then straightened suddenly, looking at Dr. Wells with alarm. “Oh, oh no.”

“What?” Barry demanded, looking between them, because the expression on Dr. Wells' face said he knew exactly what Caitlin was thinking, had probably thought of it the moment Barry had first explained his problem and had been waiting for someone else to commiserate with him.

“It might not happen before Barry leaves,” Dr. Wells said with no confidence in his own words, convinced as he was that Barry wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, if ever.

“What might not happen?” Barry asked, more concerned by how pale Caitlin was than how resigned Thawne sounded. He’d prove him wrong eventually, so that wasn’t important.

“This Barry knows – knows what being an omega means?”

Dr. Wells coughed. “He knows, ah, intellectually, I’m sure. I don’t think it… registers. As something relevant to him.”

“It’s not though?” Barry said, scowling at him.

“Ohe knows about heats? And ruts?” Caitlin asked urgently.

“He knows,” Dr. Wells said. “Whether or not he thinks it’s something that can involve him is another matter.”

“Oh, I need to get some studies,” Caitlin said, shooting to her feet. “And diagrams. And the complete chemical breakdown of the hormones involved in the four phases, and why it is a terrible idea to just try and completely ignore your estrus cycle – oh, we still haven’t figured out the safe levels of hormones required for a speedster—”

“Good luck with that,” Dr. Wells said sympathetically as Barry spluttered his outraged confusion and denial. “I’ll gather everything I have so far on the multiversal side of things and bring it to the Cortex to go over with you all. I’d like a second and third set of eyes to verify my conclusions, and maybe you or Cisco might have some ideas I haven’t considered.”

“I could have some,” Barry muttered resentfully. “Like not being stuck here.”

“Good idea,” Caitlin said to Dr. Wells, nodding, looking far less shaky with an immediate goal to focus on. She stopped at the door, turning back to look at them with an awkward expression. “Um. Maybe don’t… uh, let Barry scent you like that too much, Dr. Wells?”

“Can’t scenting be a family thing?” Barry asked, narrowing his eyes at Thawne.

“Yes,” Caitlin said slowly. “It’s just, uh. The pheromone production incited by the presence of family and platonic friends is entirely different from that incited by the presence of a potential or claimed mate? If you weren’t a speedster this would probably be the time you’d be in proestrus, so the constant scenting of someone available might… confuse your instincts.”

“I’m not confused,” Barry lied, and waved away her doubtful look. “It’s fine, I just need to learn how to do this whole scenting business. Dr. Wells isn’t ‘available’, he’s helping, that’s all.”

“Yet another service I provide,” Dr. Wells said with a mocking smile Caitlin probably thought he was directing inwards at himself, laughing at his supposed altruism, rather than Barry. “I’m sure it won’t take long. Barry is a fast learner after all.”

“You just can’t help yourself,” Barry grumbled to him as Caitlin hurried away.

“Oh please, it’s funny,” Thawne said, the smile twitching the corner of his lips verified by the pleasure in his scent. It made something in Barry’s chest loosen, a little knot of stress abruptly unraveled because some contrary part of his brain seemed to think that if his... former mentor, sort of ally, whatever Thawne was – if he wasn’t concerned why should Barry be?

“It’s a little funny,” he grudgingly agreed.

“You do know scenting isn’t all you have to learn? It’s a prominent issue but—”

“I know, Eobard,” Barry interrupted him, and the use of his first name worked exactly the way he’d hoped it would – Thawne froze, lips parting slightly, eyes closing for a half-second to reopen with pupils wide enough to darken the blue of his borrowed eyes, completely distracted from nagging Barry about adapting to a world he intended to leave as soon as possible.

“Don’t use my name here,” he said after a moment, an order somewhat undermined by how long it had taken him to give it, a whole two seconds after he’d heard his first name from Barry.

“Whatever you say,” Barry said, whistling as they started to make their way to Time Vault to pick up Gideon’s forged – or maybe even real – reports. He’d take all the reprieves he could get, he suspected he wasn’t going to get many.

Chapter Text

Science had always fascinated Barry. It didn’t offer certainty – the whole point was that new information changed a paradigm. It was about learning. It was about discovery. It was about wonder. With more information came more knowledge and a better understanding of the world.

Things that were impossible in the middle ages, like curing a deadly disease, discovering the depths of the ocean or flying through the sky, became possible with time and technology and the drive to know, to understand. Science advanced. Things that didn’t fit the current understanding of science weren’t really impossibilities – they were simply things science didn’t understand yet.

Like a man moving fast as lightning circling his screaming mother one night.

Science would always have an answer eventually. Sometimes more than one, and maybe none of them entirely full or satisfying, but there would be an answer. Science would never let Barry down.

“I can’t believe science would let me down like this,” Barry said, flipping a color-coded paper file – Dr. Wells liked hardcopy for sensitive information, harder to steal and easier to permanently destroy once discussed to death – towards Cisco.

“The math doesn’t lie,” Cisco said, sliding another right back across the table. “Okay. So you’re not another Barry – well, you are, but I mean you’re not a separate Barry – Doctor Wells, do you have…”

Wells passed him a new folder without a word, massaging his temple with obvious exasperation.

“Thanks,” Cisco chirped. “See, here are your current biological records, every little scrap of data we can get from the suit, every blood test Caitlin could think to run, yadda yadda—”

Barry glanced at them, grimaced at all the body scans, and looked away.

“Oh, wait, I have another one!” Caitlin said, perking up as she shuffled her own papers yet again, as if any order she put them in would make sense to Barry. “We should have checked—”

“Ah bup bup bup!” Cisco cut her off, wagging his finger at her. “We promised he’d get a break.”

Cisco was the best in every universe.

...Maybe not a universe where he was a serial killer or something.

Cisco was the best in almost every universe, then.

“Don’t sulk, Dr. Snow,” Dr. Wells said, a joking smile on his face – even his scent faintly warmed with amusement, since he hadn't re-applied his blockers in a gesture of apparent openness. “You’ll have plenty of occasions to do more tests if Barry is willing.”

“Barry is willing,” Barry put in, kicking Wells in the ankle when Caitlin and Cisco weren’t looking because he knew he couldn’t react. “Especially if it proves I can get back to my Earth.”

Cisco ignored all the byplay, putting a new folder side by side with the other one in front of Barry.

“And here are the ones from the very first time you – or uh, Barry put the suit on. Functionally identical, right?”

Wrong. But Barry couldn’t tell if he actually heard Thawne’s amused whisper or just imagined he did in time with his own thought.

“Everything we can get from you says that biologically you belong here, you’re the same Barry, two-O, prime of your life, all that.”

Barry didn’t whine. He didn’t. Dr. Wells looked at him sharply for some other reason. Or no reason at all. He did that sometimes.

“You’re definitely an omega,” Caitlin confirmed, placing her own set of impenetrable charts and medical info in front of him. “As you can see in the imaging and in the heightened levels of estratetraenol and copulins typical of an omega type II.”

She frowned a little, tapping a spiky little chart. “In fact, just a little higher than we’d probably like, but since they depend on your estrus cycle it’s difficult to say whether or not they might be normal? You haven’t gone into heat since the lightning strike so it’s hard to determine what stage you might be in comparatively.”

“Please let me be infertile,” Barry muttered, then winced because no, that would be cruel to the actual Barry who belonged here if he wanted children some day. Although if Caitlin’s unnecessarily detailed notes were to be believed, semen production in omega males was typically low in both volume and sperm motility and halted entirely during estrus anyway, since production of… other fluid took precedence.

He was not going to think about the other option.

“Is there… uh… heat… I don’t know, suppressors?”

...He did have to think about the other option to avoid the other option.

“Oh yes, of course,” Caitlin said, only a brief little raised eyebrow giving away her surprise that it should even be a question. “There are number of progestogens like Altrenogest available in multiple forms. Depending on the type most have both suppressant and contraceptive properties.”

“Used safely,” Dr. Wells interjected mildly with a sharp look at Barry – who held his hands up innocently as if he didn’t know what he could possibly be suggesting – and Caitlin winced.

“Oooh, yes. There are a lot of studies on misuse, you wouldn’t believe what some people do, hang on –”

“No thanks,” Barry said quickly. “Do they need prescribing or…?”

“It’s irrelevant in your case,” Wells pointed out, and Barry groaned because he just knew it wasn’t about overdosing on suppressants and wrecking his fertility or messing with hormones or whatever idiots said about birth control.

“Same deal as healing too fast for painkillers?”

“Right,” Dr. Wells said, and nobody else saw the tiniest flicker of an understanding grimace that crossed his face at the thought of healing too fast. Thawne had undoubtedly had just as many awkward broken bones as Barry after all. Hopefully future alternate Barry had done the breaking but regardless, those were the worst. Especially if they started healing wrong before they could be reset.

“Right,” Barry echoed sadly, even as he listened with half an ear to Caitlin running through the side-effects – weight gain, depression, headaches, nausea, mood changes, sore breasts, etc, etc – and on to all the difficulties they’d had trying to work out the appropriate amount and form to give a speedster and how it had slipped in their priorities pretty much immediately with so many metahumans starting to appear and – more often than not – cause trouble.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cisco said, patting his elbow – why not his shoulder, Barry wondered, then considered that maybe it was too close to the neck to be polite in mixed company or something. The neck was a ridiculously big deal. Something about a bonding gland, Barry wasn’t exactly sure where and didn’t intend to find out. “A, your body’s whack.”

Was that supposed to make Barry feel better? That he was weird even by this world’s standards? Thanks Cisco. Barry was rescinding that mental ‘best in almost every universe’ award.

“Like, still adapting to superspeed and stuff. Which means it’s super stressed which means no heats.”

“So far,” Caitlin pointed out.

“So far,” Cisco amended. “Which leads to B, you’ll probably have super short heats anyway.”

“And that’s bad,” Caitlin interjected hastily. “Overly long heats are bad too, of course, but… Heats are stressful on the body, not least because you’ll naturally lose your appetite up to two days in advance of your heat, be disinclined to eat during, and engaged in strenuous physical activities with a reduced ability to register pain or exhaustion. All of that, compressed into a very short time frame? It would be devastating in every sense, I imagine – physically, emotionally, mentally – the rapid hormonal changes alone…” she shuddered. “Probably as debilitating as popular culture would like to believe normal heats are.”

Barry slumped in his chair, putting his head in his hands to block out Dr. Wells looking sympathetic. He was laughing inside really, Barry just knew it.

“Yeahhhh,” Cisco said reluctantly. “Okay, maybe that’s not a good thing. I’ve only ever really heard friends complain how long heats can feel, I didn’t think about that.”

“Half of that’s probably delirium,” Caitlin said matter-of-factly, like that wasn’t terrifying. “It’s especially bad in non-partnered heats and ruts because without someone to provide or at least remind them about hydration alphas and omegas tend to forget. If they have to provide for a partner it’s a different matter.”

Well. At least that meant non-partnered heats were an option because as much as the books piled up around the Cortex said so it was a little difficult to believe when they also put so much emphasis on safe sexual practices as if it was understood that having a partner for heat or rut would to be the primary choice.

Caitlin had even included references for ‘heat service alphas’, whatever those were. Barry could guess; he preferred not to.

“Moving on,” Dr. Wells decided for them. Barry thought about giving him a thumbs up but decided on balance that having his head in his hands was working just fine for him. Anyway, he didn’t want to give any visible sign of approval for anything Eobard Thawne did.

“Barry really needs –” Caitlin tried to say, and Wells cut her off.

“No, I know, and I’m sure you’ll give him the full ins and outs of human biology later, Dr. Snow. But we have another side to this that we have to deal with as well.”

“Right,” Cisco said, and Barry heard him sifting through what sounded like a lot of loose papers. “Like if Barry here is an omega even though ohe – he shouldn’t be, what happened to put him here, how do we get him back where he should be, and where’s our Barry?”

“I already – not that folder,” Dr. Wells said impatiently. “The other one, with half an equation on the bottom right corner –”

“Why hardcopy,” Cisco complained, throwing something aside. “Why so paranoid, nobody’s going to break my systems –”

“A very sure statement when the full scope of potential metahuman abilities is still unknown,” Dr. Wells said evenly.

“Ehhh,” Cisco said dismissively. “Just say you want to keep the whole of Central City’s paperweight business in operation, Dr. Wells, it’s cool. Appreciate that you think it’d take a techno-meta to beat my skills, though.”

Wells sighed, and Barry huffed quietly into his hands picturing his patiently exasperated face. He’d certainly seen it enough times.

“We can’t test a lot of things given that Barry is for all intents and purposes our Mr. Allen… which is in fact how we prove others.”

“Huh?” Cisco said, puzzled. “Oh! Ohhh! Like, even if Barry was originally an omega from a really close universe there would still be differences between them, right? Maybe genetically, maybe different on the atomic level –”

“Vibrational frequency,” Barry muttered into his hands.

“– that kind of thing? And because there aren’t even though he’s from a wildly different one, we can pretty conclusively say it wasn’t a physical transfer–”

“Exactly,” Dr. Wells said, sounding pleased. It probably made Cisco happy, and Barry exhaled slowly. Dr. Wells had given Cisco a job, a chance to change his life, mentored him and watched movies with him and was his friend as well as his boss. Thawne had never put a fist through his chest in an alternate timeline and Cisco had yet to start developing the powers to be haunted by it.

Being (sort of) back in time sucked.

“Barry,” Dr. Wells said, tapping his shoulder, and Barry dropped his hands and looked over at him with a start. “How far along was the… red sky incident on your earth?”

“Uh,” Barry said, looking over at Cisco and Caitlin to find them exchanging a strange unreadable look between them. “I don’t know, I don’t… I don’t really remember. It’s…” he shrugged helplessly. “Sort of fragmentary. I think maybe my brain’s trying to protect itself.”

“If you had to guess?” Dr. Wells pressed, thankfully not making any remark on how terribly it must have managed if his current use of brain cells was indicative of anything.

“I think… I felt desperate,” Barry said slowly. “Like someone on a cliff watching it erode.”

He tried to remember, brow furrowing with concentration. The sky had been so wrong. Not just red, but unnatural in a way that defied description, as if reality was unraveling at the seams. ‘Red’ was just an easy shorthand that couldn’t hope to express the true nature of it.

He’d been afraid. It had started as a chill down his spine and a lump in his throat, making it difficult to get the air he needed as he ran, and it had grown and grown until he could barely think for terror.

More fragments: Cisco’s voice cracking as he tried to justify another plan, another false hope. Caitlin’s face, her eyes huge and frightened as she wished him luck in a trembling voice. Joe running out of the precinct without looking back to try and help the people outside. Iris.

His mother’s voice calling him home.

“I’m sure we tried lots of things,” Barry said at last. Even as he thought about them the images faded like a bad dream, became harder and harder to focus on, to remember. “I think lots of them failed. It must have been pretty far, I guess.”

Dr. Wells hummed, considering. “Here, the incident ended almost as quickly as it began. The only real difference that we know of between before and after…”

“Is me,” Barry said. Dr. Wells had an answer. He always did. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking, given the absence of any evidence of your earth, that perhaps it doesn’t exist any more. Or maybe now never did.”

Barry froze. His ears felt like they were ringing.

“I’m thinking that – from what you described to me before – you attempted to enter the Speed Force to try and get as much power as possible to save your world, and by virtue of not being in your universe when… whatever happened, you were preserved.”

Wells took a deep breath and Barry imitated the action only half-aware he was even doing so.

Don’t say it, he wanted to say, but his tongue felt clumsy and useless and like he couldn’t move it at all.

“I think our Barry Allen tried the same entirely instinctively but had no idea what ohe was doing and became connected to you accidentally. I think between you your actions helped save our earth rather than yours because it was less… eroded. There was simply more to survive. And I’m thinking that between two Flashes suddenly trying to exist in the same space, the same body, the more experienced one was likely to be successful whether they understood what was happening or not.”

Barry backed up a step.

“I could be wrong,” Thawne said, his pitiless voice the clearest thing in the world, even with everything else muffled and far away, obscured by the gray noise filling Barry’s head. “But I think it’s a good guess.” Don’t you? said the tilt of his head, the humorless smile because there was nothing funny about this, nothing funny at all.

Cisco and Caitlin’s mouths were moving but Barry couldn’t hear them. They were starting to reach towards him, expressions concerned, but so slowly he was half the Cortex away before their fingers had even started to unfold. Thawne remained exactly where he was, watching him with a patient expression, as if he knew what Barry was about to do and knew it didn’t matter.

Barry backed his way into the corridor, keeping Thawne in sight until the last possible microsecond, then turned and ran.

He ran through a motionless landscape of frozen people and equally still vehicles until the streets and buildings of Central gave way to dirt and grass, until he was standing in a forest with the tops of his shoes stained by dried sea-salt and desert sand still occasionally being shaken from the treads, an arctic chill lingering in his fingers and face. He had no idea how long he’d been running and even less as to where exactly he was.

Nor would anybody back in S.T.A.R. Labs without his suit and all its trackers on. It didn’t matter. Thawne would talk Caitlin and Cisco out of worrying, tell them Barry would run back when he was ready.

And he would. He didn’t have anywhere else to go anyway. He just wasn’t ready to go back yet.

A bee was flying past – or would when he slowed down – legs laden with pollen. Barry wandered over the flowers it might have left, little bell-shaped things. They looked perfectly normal. Like something he’d seen somewhere before, flowers he’d probably know the name of if he cared about that kind of thing. Not some strange plant of another world. He inhaled, then shuddered violently. It was like sniffing directly from a perfume bottle.

Grimacing, he reared backwards. The bee swerved to avoid him, the buzz a high-pitched whine in his ears as he tried to ignore the influx of sensory information – the earthiness of worms eating through the soil beneath his feet, the stink of an old fox trail through the undergrowth, the green sap of chewed and split saplings eaten by deer, sour unripe fruit in bushes and on trees, rabbit droppings scattered nearby, a hint of ozone –

He whirled, hands clenching automatically in readiness, to stare at the Reverse Flash. He looked wildly out of place among the trees, out in dappled sunlight – the Reverse Flash was an urban predator, nature didn’t suit him at all, had nothing to interest him.

They were the same height. He often forgot that, but they were. Barry wasn’t a child any more, he could look him straight in the glowing red eyes.

They wore the same suit, mostly. The Reverse Flash’s was bulkier – reinforced in ways Barry’s wasn’t because for Thawne the important thing was that it survive extensive time travel. Barry’s suit had to be versatile, had to be good enough for a range of situations and if it was only just good enough for them that was fine, Cisco had more than one and was always improving them. Thawne sacrificed a little maneuverability to be able to move through the timestream as many times as possible with no more protection than the suit could offer and clearly considered it an adequate trade. Just because the Reverse Flash looked bigger didn’t make it true, didn’t mean Barry had to feel intimidated, even if seeing him appear in a forest was like seeing a polar bear hunting in the desert. The sudden spike of adrenaline and fear was probably on a similar level.

People normally wouldn’t respond to that adrenaline by running up and punching a hunting polar bear in the face, though.

The bear probably didn’t snarl an insulted ‘what the fuck’ as it turned its head with the blow either, mostly because it wouldn’t need to roll with a hit before trying to bite the offending hand clean off.

Honestly, Thawne only had his own teaching to blame. He’d always encouraged Barry to go against his fight or flight reflex for the Reverse Flash, chase him down to stop him first and worry about his intentions later. The different method of identifying his enemy’s arrival wasn’t disconcerting enough to disrupt that training.

He’d thought Thawne’s distinctive speedster vibrato – the ‘angry helicopter noises’, as Cisco had once called it, trying to make enough fun to cover his trauma and fear – would always be the first sure warning for his presence, even over the flicker of his lightning. He had never imagined smelling him first.

He’d also definitely never considered how much it would disorient him in a fight – the smell of him everywhere, overpowering everything, smothering. Every turn Barry made it smelled like the Reverse Flash was on top of him, like he was close enough to strike, even when Barry had already looked over his shoulder a nanosecond before and confirmed he wasn’t – just to be knocked off his feet, the distraction slowing him enough for Thawne to catch him off-guard.

He rolled across the ground one more time than the initial impact propelled him and used the momentum to spring to his feet and dart between a gap just slightly too narrow for Thawne’s broader shoulders to risk following him directly, forcing his opponent to take a millisecond to divert his course and move around to catch up.

Some small part of him always insisted he should feel as helpless as the first time he ever saw his nemesis but even when he snagged his foot in the undergrowth, a potentially fatal mistake, he wasn't really afraid. Although he did accidentally managed to take Thawne down with him while flailing to try and keep his balance – to the Reverse Flash’s unmistakable irritated surprise, his scent spiking as they hit the ground together.

There was something about it that made Barry think of spices or cloves, made him understand that for all his aggression Thawne wasn’t actually angry at all. There was pride and pleasure in his physical prowess, satisfaction in being able to use his body and abilities to the full extent Thawne was constantly denying himself for the sake of his cover. There was joy in testing Barry, and almost more delight in his scent when he found Barry equal to the challenge than when he managed to get past his guard and land a blow. But there was no fury, for all he almost looked like he had fangs his blurred grin was so wide and full of teeth.

Barry didn’t even need his scent, really, to know the difference between the Reverse Flash trying to hurt or intimidate and Eobard Thawne toying with him.

Playing.

Thawne could hit like a jackhammer, his fists breaking the sound barrier with every punch, but he wasn’t breaking anything, sound barrier or bone. He seemed more inclined to get in close to trip and grapple and throw, moves he could pull and correct easier than his punches if Barry didn’t move the way he expected – he wasn’t used to holding those back.

Instead of twisting the minimal amount required to dodge a blow he would spin his entire body away, the sort of unnecessary movement Barry sometimes did to amuse himself when fighting normal metas, having all the time in the world and knowing nobody would ever see it.

He wasn’t using afterimages to conceal his next angle of attack, he wasn’t keeping his movements minimal and efficient the way he would if he was taking a fight seriously – he was doing the opposite almost, extending them unnecessarily, making sure Barry could see them. If Barry had been as new to his powers as he should have been he probably would have needed it. Since he wasn’t it came across as unnecessarily showy, a demonstration of playful arrogance.

Barry scowled, tried to shake his head. He felt like he should be sweating, body strangely heated in a way running wasn’t supposed to make him any more. Maybe it was the omnipresence of Eobard’s scent, increased by the constant use of their powers and beginning to muddle all his other senses along with his nose, leaving him off-balanced.

He threw himself out of the way and watched the Reverse Flash skid past him, his left foot tearing the earth as he tried to turn and adjust in the same movement. His leg was shaking ever so slightly out of sync with the rest of him –

And gave out along with Thawne’s connection to his speed, dropping him to one knee, red eyes clearing to blue, blinking in shock at the sudden switch in time perception. He hunched over, worked his jaw for a moment, then spat out the blood Barry had seen bubbling between his teeth, though the probable source cut to the inside of his cheek had no doubt long since healed.

Thawne considered the red spatter for a moment, then leaned down to cover it with his hand. Red lightning crackled precisely over his fingers, boiling away the blood beneath, leaving an ashy smear when he lifted his hand again.

“You think someone’s going to care enough to find out about this and come get your blood or something? Here?” Barry panted, finally conceding to the adrenaline crash now that he was sure Thawne wouldn’t be running again any time soon and letting himself sink to ground. He kind of wanted to flop over backwards, just lie down and stare up and think of nothing. “Really? Nobody’s going to bother.”

“Maybe not,” Thawne said, raking his gloved fingers through the ash and dirt to combine them so the only sign of something off was the lingering smell of something charred. “But I don’t have to make life easier for anyone.”

Eobard Thawne in a nutshell right there. Barry snorted, watching him curse under his breath as he phased one hand through his leg to poke a potential break, the lunatic – and suddenly found himself blinking back tears.

It was starting to hit him all over again, the idea that had driven him out of Central and into some distant wilderness. Fighting with Thawne had been a potent distraction but they weren’t running any more, Barry didn’t have to think of about how to evade the next hit – there was no longer anything else to think about.

His world was gone.

He was gone, really.

If he ran, pushed himself hard and far and selfishly enough to break dimensional barriers trying to get home, he couldn’t escape what was now his own body. He might as well stay where being an ‘omega’ and all that entailed at least made sense to everyone else, if not to him.

Stay and admit that he’d failed completely and utterly and lost everything.

“You’ve done this before, you know,” the Reverse Flash said, suddenly crouching beside Barry and reaching out as if to brush the tears from his face. He jerked back sharply when Barry snarled at him, looking somehow offended as if his hands weren’t his favorite weapons. It made Barry feel a little less embarrassed about the fact that he’d just snarled like some kind of animal, but only a little.

“Every time you’ve changed a timeline you’ve lost everybody you’ve ever known, no matter how similar their counterparts were. You’ve just been telling yourself you haven’t.”

“That’s not true,” Barry snapped, scrubbing at his own face roughly. “I’ve gone back sometimes and told people I was going back and they remembered when I came back—”

“It’s still a different timeline, Barry. A very close splinter, but still altered by your actions in a million little ways between the past you diverted and the time you ‘returned’. To the people ‘waiting’ for you what you changed was what always happened. How could they truly be the same people you left?”

“I’ve been called out for bad time travel by others,” Barry admitted, hunching over his knees so Thawne couldn’t see his face. It wasn’t like he didn’t know Barry was an ugly crier but whatever.

“Pffft.” The distortion of the Reverse Flash’s voice made even that incredulous noise into something intimidating. “Unless it was another speedster—”

“Maybe it was,” Barry scowled into his knees. “You don’t know.”

“Even so,” the Reverse Flash said, standing from his crouch and shifting about – stretching his legs, most likely – before circling Barry and abruptly dropping down to sit behind him, pressing his back to Barry’s. It would be impossible to miss if he moved to attack and the tension slowly drained from Barry’s shoulders as he realized that.

When Thawne spoke again his voice was just Harrison Wells, clear and undistorted. “A lot of speedsters fall into the trap you do. They have to stay sane somehow.”

“Is that your idea of comfort?” Barry demanded, jerking his head up and craning to look over his shoulder but Thawne didn’t reciprocate the movement, kept his back perfectly centered against Barry’s. Barry looked forward again, scowling. “Great job. Love to hear that I’ve repeatedly failed to save everyone in my life even when I thought I had.”

“Someone’s got to tell you the truth,” Eobard said slyly. He clearly expected the elbow Barry shoved backwards at him, grunting softly when it connected, but didn’t move away.

“I don’t believe you,” Barry decided. “If you really saw things that way you wouldn’t care so much about getting back to your own time.”

“On the contrary,” Thawne said, warmth creeping back into the forest of his scent, sunny and obvious and no wonder the thought of relying solely on words and expressions was ridiculous to him, “it’s because I see it that way that it’s a viable goal. No matter what changes in the future I’ll be able to make it home.”

If Eobard ever actually managed to get back Barry would give it five minutes before he realized he was bored out of his mind and ran off again. His problem with the twenty-first century was being stuck in it against his will, he loved messing with Barry’s life far too much to actually stay in his own time period.

That was if it even counted as his own time period any more. For someone so intelligent Thawne could be remarkably blind when he wanted to be.

As was Barry himself. Hadn’t he outgrown trusting Doctor Wells’ every word about his – their – powers? Just because the world was strange and unfamiliar didn’t mean he had to fall back on what was familiar about the time. Thawne could claim what he liked, Barry didn’t see time travel the way he did and never would. When he went back in time, when he came back, when he saved Central City – it was still his world, his place, his friends and family alive and well.

The world he was in wasn’t his, but he would do his best for it anyway.

More settled, Barry looked up. For some reason he’d felt like they were sheltering under a tree, but the shadow offered by the nearest one’s canopy barely reached his knees. He thought it might be an apple tree, though he couldn’t actually see any of the fading blossoms he was smelling, or the ripening fruit. Eobard’s scent was still so heady and heavy it contaminated everything, made it hard to tell what was the natural world breaking through and what was Thawne’s own nature revealed.

The charred smell of his lightning-struck blood was gone at least, blown away by a faint breeze.

Maybe Barry should try and do something for the trees they’d damaged running around at high speed, when he had his strength back. He should at least clear the evidence of their fight up a little, or some lost hiker might wonder when a very localized tornado had torn through. They might be somewhere that didn’t get those.

Wherever that might be. Actually…

“How did you find me?”

“Easily,” Thawne said glibly, lurching to his feet to avoid Barry elbowing him again by mere inches. He’d let Barry have his one free shot, apparently.

“I’m not wearing the suit though?”

“I don’t know why you’d think I’d need the trackers in it?” Thawne said, tilting his head to one side, forgetting he was no long blurred and his expression perfectly readable despite the mask. “I have other means. Caitlin and Cisco were quite concerned about you not wearing it, though. They thought you might set your civilian clothes on fire. Again.”

“I haven’t done that in forever!” Barry complained.

“For them it was a couple of weeks ago.”

“Forever,” Barry insisted, cheeks feeling hot. He caught Eobard’s expression going heavy-lidded and indulgent, like someone enjoying a good wine, and wondered what embarrassment smelled like –

No, no, no he didn’t.

“What other means?”

“I’d compare it to scent-tracking but since you lack that basis for comparison it wouldn’t help you much.”

“I don’t know, even I could probably track you right now,” Barry muttered. “You stink.”

“So do you,” Thawne informed him, shrugging off the insult. “No perfume, blocker or neutralizer is going to hold up against Speed Force enhanced pheromones for long.”

How many times did Barry have to shower and/or reapply scent blockers or Cisco’s antiperspirant a day? No wonder he kept them strictly organized.

“Can you really track someone by smell?” Barry asked. “Like a dog?”

“Woof,” Eobard said, deadpan, and Barry’s mouth twitched despite himself.

“Pretty sure I crossed an ocean and a couple of lakes, isn’t that supposed to wash away scent? You always see it when someone’s running away from cops with dogs.”

“I did wonder if that’s what you were trying,” Thawne said, rolling his shoulders and going through a series of careful stretches, testing for any injury he couldn't ignore. “But since I didn’t track you by scent, it’s irrelevant.”

“But how—”

“I think you already know the trick. Think about it – how easily you can stay on another speedster’s trail in a chase when an ordinary meta just has to turn a corner and lose themselves in a crowd. Why is that?”

“Huh,” Barry said, brow furrowing. He’d never thought about it but it wasn’t just that typically one of them wanted to be followed in the first place, it was – “The lightning, the… the instinct? I was way ahead of you though…”

“Just because you usually only tap into the ability at short range doesn’t mean I have to limit myself.”

“It’s like a scent trail but just for speedsters?” Because Barry was thinking about it now, chasing the Reverse Flash through Central City, how any turn could have let him pull away but the sense of hot-cold-near-far kept Barry on his heels anyway. Nothing he noticed or would call supernatural or anything, just subconscious – he must have actually seen the Reverse Flash turn beforehand, he must have noticed something in the way he moved that had given his direction away, he must have caught a flicker of red in the corner of his eye.

Except maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been using this ability, whatever it was, all along.

“That’s how I thought about it at first,” Thawne said, then laughed. “Maybe you can learn to scent-track from it. Just reverse the comparison.”

“Must you?” Barry complained. “Really?”

“Yes,” the Reverse Flash said, satisfied, blurred and ready to run once more. “I have to be back before you. If you don’t want to take even longer about it, this would be a good time for you to learn.”

He sped away without a word, and Barry thought he could have followed him easily, could almost see the trail he left, a confused impression of apple-red-lightning-yellow-negative that wasn’t something he saw or heard and smelled but all of them at once.

Just for that, Barry was going to clean up what he could of the more obvious damage they'd left through the woods and find his way back the slow way, looking at signs and everything.

Chapter Text

“Detective West called,” Caitlin said as Barry walked into the Cortex, and all the equilibrium Barry had managed to achieve over his journey back to Central City vanished. (He had in fact followed Eobard’s trail. Just a little. It was just… too obvious to ignore sometimes.) “Barry, you can’t avoid him forever.”

“I’m not,” Barry said, only lying a little. “I’ll call him back – I just… don’t want to see him right now.”

Seeing would mean no chance of avoiding explaining what had happened any longer. Telling Joe over the phone that he was getting checked out at S.T.A.R Labs for anything wrong was just… putting off the inevitable a little more. Barry didn’t think he could explain it right when he was still adjusting and trying to convince himself.

He guessed, because Caitlin had said ‘him’, that Joe was a beta, but that was still something wildly different to Barry’s Joe West, and Barry didn’t actually know how that translated. Was Joe still his dad, did he relate to Barry the same when Barry was supposedly an omega? Would Joe trust Barry to know he was safe and would talk when he was ready? Would he think he knew better, not because he was a cop and Barry a new vigilante, but because he was a beta father and Barry his omega child?

How had Barry felt growing up in the West household with Henry Allen free but unavailable? He couldn’t imagine how he’d have reacted to that as a kid, to having his father kept from him not by prison walls he could blame but by his mental health.

There were too many differences, there was no hope of convincing Joe he was the same Barry he’d raised, and he just wasn’t ready for the fallout of that.

“Just how much did you run?” Cisco complained as Barry slumped into a chair between him and Caitlin, leaning away. “You stink, like, twice the normal amount of ozone, you’re practically burning my nose away.”

“Sorry,” Barry said automatically. He made a face at Wells, looking smug and amused, like he hadn’t showered and slapped his scent blockers on maybe ten minutes before Barry got back.

“You don’t have to bother with scent blockers here if you don’t want to,” Cisco said, covering his nose, “but I know you know there are showers here, come on.”

“And if you use the scent-neutral washes, the ones in there aren’t industrial grade so you’ll have to prioritize,” Caitlin said.

“Bits, pits, neck and wrists,” Cisco recited, sing-song, then leaned in towards Barry, despite his watering eyes, and whispered loudly, “Dr. Wells won’t mind if you don’t bother with the blockers.”

Obviously, since Cisco had literally just said everyone was okay with him not wearing them around the labs? Barry frowned, puzzled, but got up and dutifully headed to the showers anyway, resting his hand on Thawne’s shoulder briefly as he passed him, digging his nails in to warn him that if Barry saw any footage of it in the Time Vault he was going to punch him to the other side of the world.

It would be good to feel clean, he had to admit. Cisco had a point there.

He hesitated at the neat array of plain bottles marked ‘scent-neutralizing’ before deciding he was fine with the normal soaps and washes, and didn’t apply the blockers afterwards – though he stared at them for a long moment, a selection of boxes of patches, each with label on the lid that marked them as specially formulated for ‘Α’, ‘Β’ or ‘Ω’, as opposed to the ones at the precinct, which were presumably more generic and worked for any and all, if not as well.

Cisco’s not so antiperspirant ‘scent mask’ was sitting on the shelf too, an echo of the lost Barry, who had washed up there before, used the neutral gels and washes, treated it all as routine.

You’re not getting the full spectrum of communication without scent, and Barry was lying so much all the time by omission if nothing else, and there was just… He just wanted to feel like himself for a moment. He didn’t need them in his world, so he was going to pretend he didn’t need them here.

He walked back to the Cortex, overly aware that running would bring back that ozone edge only Thawne knew how to interpret, then stopped at the room’s entrance for a moment, watching.

Caitlin was scribbling something on the pile of notes she hadn’t gotten the chance to talk Barry through, looking incredibly focused. There were a lot of diagrams. Barry had a sinking feeling about those.

Cisco seemed to be teasing Dr. Wells about something, had acquired a packet of microwave popcorn and appeared to be throwing some into his mouth obnoxiously whenever Dr. Wells tried to protest something.

Dr. Wells… his eyes flickered to Barry the moment he appeared, fast enough nobody else would know, assessed him, decided he was fine, and returned to focus on Cisco as if nothing had occurred.

“Hey!” Cisco said, catching sight – and newly cleaned smell, probably – of Barry and hastily shoving the popcorn in a desk drawer, like Barry would object to him making Thawne’s life difficult. “Much better!”

“Thanks,” Barry said wryly.

“You should probably get into the habit of using either blockers or your scent mask though,” Wells remarked. It wasn’t scolding, merely a statement of fact. Barry knew he was saying it to remind Barry that it was a different world out there that he still wasn’t used to, that he should start making it a habit to spritz his fake scent after every run just in case, until it was automatic routine to him and Thawne didn’t have to worry so much about Barry’s identity being revealed…

He was somehow a little offended anyway.

“You don’t think I smell clean?” Barry asked, mock-scowling, then perked up. There were secondary scent glands in the wrist, right, that was how family and friends marked each other –

He darted over, deliberately slowed down upon reaching him just enough that Wells had no choice but to try and bat him away at normal speed – then dragged his wrist over Dr. Wells’ head, through his hair, since it was easiest to reach and Barry did at least know better than to go for his neck. He made a winded noise like Barry had actually gone and hit him in the solar plexus instead.

“Holy shit,” Cisco said blankly while Barry was trying to work out if he’d heard Eobard make that exact noise before or if it was more like the one he’d make when he hit the ground backwards, mouth open because he’d been monologuing.

Wait – his mouth. There was something different about the way it looked with his lips parted in shock in response to Barry’s action.

“Hey, no – open your mouth,” Barry said, leaning in as Wells reared back as far as the wheelchair allowed. “Do you have fangs?”

They didn’t look like vampire fangs or anything, but both pairs of canines definitely looked sharper than he remembered.

“Barry!” Caitlin yelped, sounding as if he’d asked if he dressed to the left or something else wildly inappropriate.

“You do!” Barry said, fascinated, and for some godforsaken reason reached towards them as if intending to press his finger to the tip to test how sharp they were or something. He knew it was insane as he was doing it and still couldn’t help himself.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Cisco protested, lunging forward to catch Barry’s wrist, yanking it down. “Dude!”

“I can’t look,” Caitlin said, her voice muffled by her hands pressed tightly over her face. “Is Barry done being incredibly inappropriate?”

“I’m done, I’m done,” Barry said, holding his hands up, Cisco refusing to drop his hold just in case. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that – seriously though,” he tried to look, but Wells had his lips pressed firmly together. “Why are your teeth so sharp? How come I never noticed before?”

Thinking back, he realized that though he’d seen Wells smiling a lot, it was generally closed-mouthed. To hide them? But when he spoke they’d always looked normal… not that Barry was paying any particular attention to his mouth. Lips. Teeth. Any of that.

“Barry,” Caitlin scolded. “It’s not nice to – you shouldn’t point out –”

“Locker room etiquette, Barry, c’mon,” Cisco said.

Barry turned his head to stare at him. Then back at Wells.

“What? How is that – no way are fangs the equivalent to a random boner.”

“Of course they’re not equivalent,” Caitlin said, still flushed. “Erections can happen for a variety of reasons, or no reason at all, and be completely unrelated to sexual arousal, whereas an alpha’s fangs are only for mating to prevent them from being blunted by everyday wear and tear so... um.”

Caitlin clearly didn’t know they also showed for fighting because Barry was sure now the Reverse Flash had been sporting them. Which made sense! They were a natural weapon at his disposal! Still…

“How embarrassing for you,” he told Wells, grinning. Imagine everyone mistaking your hateboner for the genuine article. He wondered if the man was regretting his scent blockers now – even Barry might have mistaken the enraged flush on his cheeks for embarrassment if he didn’t know Thawne was utterly shameless.

“Very,” Wells said tightly, keeping his head turned away but watching Barry from the corner of his eye.

“I can’t believe Barry’s scent does that for you,” Cisco said, wincing in sympathy even as he shook his head with disbelief. “Even if he did just scent mark you. I guess that’s what did it? ‘cause all I get from his scent is ozone right after a burst of speed like that. Alpha noses must be something else.”

“I just assumed all the talk about mating bites was exaggeration?” Barry said, not quite apologetically. “I didn’t think fangs were involved.”

“All his teeth are generally sharper. Yours are too. Imagine biting someone’s neck or shoulder hard enough to scar with regular blunt teeth,” Caitlin said, incredulous. “A true mating bite? The amount of effort you’d need to break skin at all, the tissue trauma that would be involved in doing so, the pain, the damage – the amount of endorphins would have to be sky-high to let the average person get through that without reconsidering.”

“How about you don’t bite people that hard anyway?” Barry said, looking from Wells to her to Cisco.

“You have to though?” Cisco said, shrugging helplessly. “You can’t scent-mix without it. The scent-mixing is really the thing more than the biting.”

Barry could have sworn he heard Wells scoff quietly in disagreement but a quick look at Caitlin and Cisco suggested they hadn’t heard anything so he decided he’d probably imagined it.

“It’s not the done thing to actually bite hard enough to permanently scar in modern times,” Wells said with a sigh, which was a bold claim from someone who would absolutely try and bite Barry that hard in a regular fight out of pure animal savagery, forget any supposed ‘mating instinct’. At least he was looking at Barry again. Barry made a mental note not to jokingly scent mark him again. Unless he was being really annoying.

“But for scent-mixing to actually occur between mated individuals there does need to be a limited DNA transfer, so skin does have to be broken to ‘count’.”

“It’s really interesting, because the exact mechanism has only been really explained in the last few decades,” Caitlin put in excitedly, Cisco sighing fondly in the background. “A small percentage of buccal cells are haploid, strictly regulated by a meiotic feedback loop so it only becomes relevant during the bonding process – and so are the cells in primary scent glands. A bite facilitates the contact between haploid buccal cells and the soft subcutaneous tissue of primary scent glands, allowing potential fusion which creates the stronger blended scent post-mating that signals unavailability.”

She waved her hands a little, fingers splayed, and Cisco gave a little snicker.

“She’s excited because it also took years of pushing to even allow research in the first place,” he confided to Barry. “So many groups invested against it – who cares so long as it works? How dare science try and explain something sacred? It’s something private, who would let someone study them, blah blah blah.”

“Permanent mating bites were already falling out of favor but we now know scientifically that there’s no benefit to them beyond tradition –”

“Oh boy, not in certain communities,” Cisco said, making a face.

“What if you’re just not into biting?” Barry interrupted, and received three looks of varying bemusement.

“It’s instinct,” Cisco said, clapping his hand on Barry’s arm. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried?”

“You’ve never wanted to mark a partner?” Caitlin asked, looking two seconds away from taking out a pen and making notes. “Ever? That is fascinating, what a wildly divergent evolutionary path your world must have had in so many ways –”

“I didn’t say – wait, both partners have to…?” Barry looked over at Wells without really thinking, scanning his neck curiously. No scarring, though Barry had seen some on a few older couples when they visited the museum, and thinking about it, in some in the paintings too, just never the focus of any of the pieces he’d seen. Dr. Morgan might have been a beta, though. Or maybe, if everybody had a weirdly sharp set just for sex biting, they just didn’t believe in permanently scarring each other, like Caitlin said.

…Barry was suddenly getting a real understanding and appreciation for the gorget exhibit. There was definitely a room full of artistic biting in that museum somewhere and Barry was never going back.

“I don’t think Barry needs to be concerned about mating bites just yet,” Wells said. He somehow managed to keep his blandly professional expression even when Cisco coughed something into his fist that Barry pretended not to hear, turning to Barry to add, “They are supposed to be reciprocal, though.”

“An alpha that doesn’t want to be marked by their partner while still marking them is trying to keep a harem and you can do better,” Cisco said firmly. “Like, maybe they have a real reason, but generally speaking: bad sign.”

“Because if they don’t share bites they still smell... single?” Barry asked, disliking every word out of his own mouth, only for Cisco to nod vigorously.

“Right! Sort of. You can still tell they're sexually active, obviously, but it would come across as being non-exclusive for them, you know? Absolute knotbrain behavior.”

“And you’d know all about that,” Caitlin muttered, to Barry’s surprise.

“What? I thought Cisco was a beta?” Barry turned to look at Cisco, frowning a little, then sniffed. He hated that he did it, hated that it was his best idea for getting an answer, but it sort of worked – he was sure Cisco definitely wasn’t an alpha. Not that Barry had much experience of any scents other than Thawne’s, which could sour, sharpen or sweeten in response to his mood, but still. It was never as… light as Cisco’s.

Barry vaguely remembered a soothing little info box in one of the puberty books that consoled the reader that whatever the general opinion of their scent was someone was bound to find it perfect anyway. Implied had been the suggestion that omegas were supposed to be –

“Sweet?” Barry said, puzzled, and Cisco flushed.

“Yeah, that was the problem,” Caitlin said, patting Cisco’s shoulder briefly in commiseration. “I didn’t mean Cisco was the source of the knotbrained behavior, just the recipient of it.”

“It’s actually how movie-watching became our pack bonding thing,” Cisco said, rallying a little, gesturing between himself and Dr. Wells and Barry was pretty sure his eyebrows left orbit.

“No, not like that!” Cisco said quickly. “It definitely wasn’t Dr. Wells being – ahe was the one who helped me out with it.”

“Oh… kay,” Barry said, sending Wells a narrow-eyed stare, met with perfect equanimity.

“Cisco met this alpha a few years back,” Caitlin said quickly, as if hoping to stave off some misunderstanding, “and ashe was convinced – you know, because Cisco does generally smell a little sweeter than most betas, like you noticed, Barry – that Cisco was an omega using fake pheromones to pass for a beta.” She shook her head, looking exasperated. “Absolutely couldn’t be persuaded otherwise.”

“It’s been long enough now I can kinda laugh at it,” Cisco said, as if just claiming that made it true when his scent gave away how conflicted he was about it – Barry pinched his nose shut.

“Can you?” Caitlin asked, turning to peer at Cisco’s expression and frowning a little.

“Well yeah,” Cisco said with blithe determination. “It’s been ages, right? Barry, you want to hear how movie night became a thing?”

“Sure?” Barry said, dropping his hand back as Cisco turned to look at him, before Cisco could register the movement. He looked from him to Dr. Wells and back. He had a feeling the story was not going to match anything Cisco might have told him on his own Earth.

“Cool!” Cisco said. The way Caitlin twitched told Barry that she disagreed entirely with that assessment of the situation. “Okay, so there’s this movie theater in University Town that only shows movies bare minimum twenty years old, usually way older – I don’t know if you know it?”

Barry shrugged. Given the number of students living in the very literally named area of the city the existence of a hipster movie place didn’t surprise him much, even taking the STEM focus of most of Central City University’s courses into account. It wasn’t as highly rated for its humanities but Barry was pretty sure they were good – if half his rogues hadn’t attended at least one acting class he’d be surprised. There was an art to a good villainous monologue. There had to be somewhere for them to unwind.

“I used to go pretty regularly pre-particle accelerator,” Cisco said wistfully. “Good times.”

“And then this alpha turned up,” Caitlin said.

“And then this alpha turned up,” Cisco agreed, nodding to her in thanks for getting them back on track. “Gorgeous, obviously new there – you know how it is, when you see someone clearly out of place and looking for help but not wanting to actually bother the staff, even though it’s their job? Like that.”

“So Cisco stepped up,” Caitlin said, sounding very disapproving for some reason. “A regular hero.”

“I didn’t know ashe’d been watching me for a while before then!” Cisco complained. “I thought it was – well, not exactly a meet-cute, because I’m not really into alphas, you know? Too much drama for me – no offense, Dr. Wells.”

“None taken,” said Eobard Thawne, pettiest man in an entire multiverse. “I can understand your complicated feelings about Hartley may have colored your perception.”

“There are no complicated feelings about Hartley,” Cisco said. “My feelings about Hartley are very simple: ahe’s a dick. It doesn’t give alphas a bad name because it is obviously a Hartley thing and ahe just happens to be an alpha.”

Caitlin shook her head behind his back, rolling her eyes obviously.

“Hold up,” Barry interrupted, although he did kind of wonder what counted as ‘gay’ in a world with a minimum of six sexes. “Can we go back to that person stalking you?”

“It wasn’t stalking stalking,” Cisco said, and Barry was gratified that his incredulous expression was at least matched by Caitlin and Dr. Wells. “Ashe saw me around the area, realized I went there pretty regularly and thought ‘hey, if I want to talk to him chances are I can meet him there’.”

“That… you told him that was stalking, right?” Barry said, turning to Caitlin, holder of the one brain cell in S.T.A.R. Labs – Dr. Wells was excluded because Eobard Thawne might have been as brilliant if not more than the man he pretended to be but he was undeniably insane with it – and hoping she could translate it into something Cisco could comprehend.

“Oh believe me, we all told him,” she said, long-suffering. “Well, Hartley may have phrased it as ‘who would be obsessed with you’ but still.”

“Anyway,” Cisco said loudly, “we get to talking – ashe doesn’t know as many old movies as you’d think, to be interested in going to that kind of theater –”

“Because ashe was there just for you, idiot,” Caitlin sighed.

“I know that now,” Cisco said, throwing his hands up in the air. “At the time I just think ashe’s new to the area, looking for a new hobby, trying to make a friend, nothing nefarious. Other than being gorgeous and friendly to me.”

“Hey,” Caitlin said sharply. “There’s nothing weird about someone good-looking wanting to know you, you’re not exactly a troll, Cisco. Being crazy had nothing to do with it.”

“That’s nice,” Cisco said, clearly not agreeing for a second. “But ashe was totally out of my league, you know?”

“Crazy is excluded from everyone’s league by default,” Barry said, staring meaningfully at Eobard Thawne pretending to be Harrison Wells. He grinned.

“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Cisco said, and Barry focused on him again. “Anyway, I think we’re becoming friends, right? I give movie recs, ashe tells me what ashe thought of them, we get coffee sometimes. It didn’t even occur to me ashe would think it was courting on aher part – when you get better at scents you’ll understand,” he told Barry, like he could tell he didn’t quite get it. “Beta, not interested in alphas –” he waved his hands expressively. “I’d get an interested scent from aher now and then, but there was a big omega community around there, it made way more sense that ashe would occasionally get aher nose caught, you know?”

“No,” Barry said, baffled, as Caitlin said “Yes” in obviously familiar affirmation, then shrugged at the betrayed look Cisco gave him. “New here, remember?”

Wells smothered a noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh and Cisco transferred the betrayed look to him, looking embarrassed.

“Right. Of course. Again, you’ll get it when you get better at scents,” Cisco said, then looked between Barry and Dr. Wells for some reason before suggesting overly casually, “Maybe you already do.”

“No,” Barry said, but suspected nobody actually believed the answer.

“I think we’re just friends,” Cisco said after a moment spent shaking his head pityingly at Dr. Wells – Barry wasn’t sure why – and picking up his story again. “Which is why it really knocks me for a loop when ashe tells me after a showing that ashe knows I’m trying to pass as a beta and everything but ashe would really like to try and see where it took us.”

“I just don’t –” Caitlin sighed and shook her head, bewildered. “Sure, there are artificial scents out there, but it’s very difficult for the general public to get access to ones that are formulated in such a way that they’ll cover a scent entirely without seeming artificial. You usually get one or the other, even with the most expensive and personalized. Your scent mask works, Barry, because S.T.A.R. Labs is the cutting edge of technology and also because all we’re doing is trying to enhance your original relatively simple scent, not replace it entirely.”

Barry caught Dr. Wells mouthing ‘relatively simple’ to himself looking like he didn’t know whether to laugh at Barry or be offended on his behalf, and decided that whatever feelings he had about that statement he was going to let it go because Thawne absolutely wouldn’t.

“Yeah,” Cisco said, nodding to her. “I try and laugh it off, right? I say I’m flattered but it wouldn’t work between us – not because I’m not an omega, I know plenty of alpha-beta pairings work out, whatever TV says. Just because alphas just aren’t my type, sorry.”

“Too much drama,” Dr. Wells said mildly, and Cisco looked embarrassed.

“I mean…”

“Well in this particular case…” Caitlin said, trailing off meaningfully.

“In this particular case, agreed,” Dr. Wells said, nodding to her. “It was a joke, carry on, Cisco.”

It didn’t seem like a joke to Barry. It felt like Cisco’s casual dismissal had irritated him, reminded Thawne of something. Maybe the future wasn’t all that for alphas. Or maybe he just resented the idea that he wouldn’t be considered dramatic if he wasn’t an alpha? Because he was probably right to be offended about that. Eobard Thawne would be just as dramatic if he was a beta or omega, Barry was sure. Possibly more, to compensate.

...If alphas were supposed to be dramatic, was it the kind that meant they showed off like male birds? Was that what the yellow was about, rather than aposematism?

Wait, Barry’s brain had gone wildly off track.

“Right,” Cisco said. “Right – I think ashe takes it well and I guess that’ll be it, no more chatting about movies together. Except I go the next weekend and ashe’s there saying sorry about the mix-up, ashe’d still like to be friends. Which would be great!”

“Would it,” Caitlin said, long-suffering. “Would it.”

“Except ashe kept hinting that it was okay to be my ‘real’ self around aher. The more I tell aher I’m really not an omega the more ashe doubles down. Starts using the wrong pronouns sometimes 'accidentally’. Tells me of course ashe believes I want to be a beta, but there’s nothing wrong with being an omega. Ashe wants to help me deal with whatever trauma makes me want to pretend so hard, I’ll feel so much better once I accept my ‘true’ self –”

“Creep,” Caitlin muttered, scowling heavily.

“I didn’t want to give up the theater, it was my place first, but I noped out at that, stopped going for a few weeks thinking ashe’d get tired of waiting for me and go away. But then there was this showing of the de-specialized edition Star Wars.”

“Ah,” Barry said knowingly. No way could any Cisco could resist that.

“Yeah,” Cisco agreed, snapping his fingers and pointing at Barry. “I couldn’t not, right? But ashe knew that too, so I was worried–”

“Ronnie and I offered to go with him,” Caitlin said, “but another beta and an omega wouldn’t really make an alpha back off. Provide a buffer for a single outing, sure, but depending on the alpha…” She grimaced.

“Yeah,” Cisco said, nodding in agreement. “I absolutely didn’t want to ask Dante, and I’d never ask Hartley in a million years, even if I didn’t think ahe’d laugh to death first. Ahe couldn’t pull off what I needed anyway. So I ended up asking Dr. Wells to come along just in case.”

Barry frowned. “To make her think you were dating another alpha since she couldn’t be convinced you really were a beta?”

That would… It made sense. There was no reason he should dislike the thought so intensely. It was protectiveness over Cisco, probably. The thought that he’d had to rely on someone willing to kill him without a second thought in another timeline, another universe. Nothing to do with Wells, except as a threat to Cisco.

“No way,” Cisco said, making a giant ‘X’ with his arms. “Not dating – I didn’t want things to get violent, and they were totally the kind of alpha that would if they thought they were suddenly in competition for an omega. I needed it to look like I was calling on family, y’know? Dr. Wells got it immediately – took one sniff of aher and one look at me and started putting out the protective back-the-hell-off pheromones like nobody’s business.”

“The same sort I’d give if, say, someone from Mercury Labs was trying to poach him,” Dr. Wells explained to Barry, which obviously read to Cisco and Caitlin as a cover for his own sentimentality. “Which is the closest comparative situation I can think of requiring them. But to a traditionalist…”

“Yeah, ashe read it as much more personally invested and paternal,” Cisco agreed. “Started doing the whole ‘oh fancy meeting you here! Cisco I’m so glad you’ve decided to introduce me to your foster sire’ – like it was something we’d arranged together, like I was a proper omega introducing my parents.” Cisco shuddered.

“Dr. Wells skewered aher on every single way ashe hadn’t done the traditionalist thing ashe should have done if Cisco was the type of omega ashe thought he was,” Caitlin put in, satisfied, clearly something Cisco had described to her in detail after the fact. “Approached him alone, repeatedly. Kept pressing aher suit after he rejected it. Never requested to be introduced to and vetted by any of his packs – family, friends or work. Which meant ashe had never asked for permission to court him – not that an omega needs permission, but a traditionalist would ask at least one of their parents anyway, for the look of the thing.”

“Just kept going and going until I was convinced ashe would melt into the floor just to get Dr. Wells to stop,” Cisco agreed. “I know it was the whole point but it was so thorough and so public I actually felt sorry for aher.”

“Really?” Caitlin demanded, turning to look at him incredulously. “That knotbrain made you so insecure you started wearing beta-pheromone boosters.”

“You told me I smelled good,” Cisco said, hurt.

“I said you smelled fine the way you were but to wear them if it made you feel better,” Caitlin said, making a face. “If you hadn’t stopped after a few months when the whole thing was sorted I’m pretty sure the whole lab would have held an intervention. They didn’t work with your real scent at all. You smelled so fake I’m surprised you didn’t get even more alphas convinced you were an overcompensating omega.”

“Okay, wow,” Cisco said. “I mean, I know Hartley made a face every time ahe looked at me but ahe was already doing that, I can’t trust that!”

Barry leaned down to Dr. Wells, watching Cisco and Caitlin bicker, and asked quietly, “That actually made them back off? Public humiliation?”

“Alphas,” Dr. Wells said, tilting his head to look up at Barry, inhaling as he did so, “especially the kind that hold themselves to that kind of traditionalism… image is very important. It was about the destruction of image; less about the public and more aher own sense of identity. Ashe failed every one of aher own misguided standards of alphahood, that was the disgrace ashe couldn’t stand.”

“I mean, if I were an alpha and Dr. Wells publicly roasted me on every aspect of my personality and behavior like that? I definitely wouldn’t leave the house for at least a month,” Cisco called over, distracted from debating with Caitlin for a moment.

“You wouldn’t be the sort of alpha to require shaming or hold those kind of views in the first place, Cisco,” Dr. Wells said, and Cisco’s scent suffused with embarrassed pleasure in tandem to the flush spreading across his face. He ducked his head, grinning to himself.

“She left Cisco alone?” Barry asked, insisted on getting an actual answer, glancing about as if some random woman could appear out of nowhere – Thawne had run through S.T.A.R. Labs security with him and he hated to say it but it was much better than in his universe. Not that he told him that, of course.

“I went with him to the theater occasionally until it got too close to the particle accelerator’s launch to have the spare time,” Wells assured him. “I never caught aher scent there.”

Barry looked at him, caught the faint smirk, the glint in his eyes. “Right,” he said. Everyone of this time, to Eobard Thawne, was already long dead. What was one person disappearing, especially if they threatened the well-being or stability of someone Thawne needed to be focused on working well for him? “You kept going?”

“It made him feel safer,” Wells said. “And it turned out I liked watching movies with him. After –” he gestured at his wheelchair, and Barry remembered that in all likelihood the initial injury had been real, enough to fool medical professionals. “For all the place’s inclusiveness in other areas, it wasn’t the most wheelchair accessible. Historical building.”

“And Dr. Wells didn’t like going out any more, especially when you were still in a coma and needed monitoring just in case,” Cisco said. “So we started watching movies at the lab instead. Ta-da! Tradition acquired!”

“...Yeah, I don’t think it went anything like that in my universe,” Barry said after a long moment.

“But it was still a thing? So your world still has pack bonding?” Caitlin asked curiously.

“N… maybe?” Barry said, after a confused moment. He wouldn’t have called it that, ever, but from Caitlin and Cisco’s perspective it probably was the right term.

“That’s kind of cool,” Cisco said, grinning at Dr. Wells. “You know, that we do the same things in a crazy different universe.”

Barry made sure to catch Dr. Wells’ eyes, then drew his finger across his throat so fast neither Cisco or Caitlin could see it, just in case shoving a hand through Cisco's chest was another one of those same things he might be tempted to repeat in a crazy different universe.

Wells rolled his eyes, mouthed ‘fine’ back, and Barry knew he’d understood the threat if not the exact reasoning. He was smart enough to work it out. He didn’t have to know he’d actually killed Cisco once to understand that Barry wouldn’t let him do it again.

“I’m glad to hear it too,” he told Cisco mildly, then frowned as something caught his attention on one of the screens.

“Is that an alert?” Barry asked, peering over his shoulder. Not one for a metahuman – far too subdued. Wells swatted at him absently and Barry switched to his other shoulder, grinning at his irritated little grunt.

“I can’t stand this,” Cisco told Caitlin despairingly, but when Barry looked over at him all he was doing was gesturing at Barry.

“What?” He asked Cisco, but it was Dr. Wells who responded.

“Detective West would like entry,” Wells said, and Barry leaned in again. Yeah, that was Joe on the entrance's security camera feed, looking decidedly irritated.

“I’m not ready,” Barry blurted instinctively, and Wells turned to look at him.

“You can’t put it off forever.”

“Uhhh… you sure you want to let him in when you’re still scent-marked like that?” Cisco asked Dr. Wells, who paused, eyes widening, as if he’d managed to forget about it, become so accustomed to the marking it no longer registered.

“On second thought,” he said, “maybe it would be better if you took your inevitable conversation with Detective West elsewhere, Barry. The West house, for instance.”

“I hate you,” Barry told him. He meant every word, he didn’t know why Cisco snorted so loudly.

Chapter Text

The West family home had always been a place of warmth to Barry. Even after the murder of his mother, resentful, displaced, and lashing out because he had nowhere to direct his anger except at a man who wore the same badge as those who took his father away even as he offered him shelter, Barry still thought that.

Much like his lab, the house looked mostly the same – there was the piano, Joe’s glove and signed baseballs sat on top of it. The scattered cushions and throws Iris had picked out were there, though her favorites – the ones she would take when she moved in with Eddie – were absent. There were familiar pictures of a young Iris (later joined with an awkward Barry) scattered around, though he realized after a moment that the ones he recognized were just a little off to how he remembered them – as if they’d been taken a second later or earlier than the moment he remembered, or maybe he’d looked left instead of right or Iris had grinned instead of smiled. Nothing he’d register at a glance, that he would notice if he wasn’t specifically looking out for differences.

There was a huge difference though, and it was in the smell of the place. Home was the first thought, only to quickly unravel as he started to notice the parts that made the whole. Joe’s scent was strongest, layered almost every surface, but it wasn’t really what Barry remembered it to be. He could smell a lot more than he used to, obviously, but he didn’t think the difference was entirely explained by that. It didn’t… it didn’t make Barry feel safe the way he knew it should, the way his Joe’s would. He thought smothering before protective, felt like he had to hold himself smaller, fit himself into a shape he’d outgrown, and he didn’t think it was just that he didn’t live with Joe any more in his own universe.

He could smell Iris – richer and far more complex than the perfumes he’d thought he associated with her – but the scent was faded, as if she hadn’t been around recently. He wondered if she had moved in with Eddie already or if it was too early for that. He felt strangely grateful, whatever the reason, because something about Iris’ scent made his skin prickle – prompted some strange self-awareness in response that he half-recognized. It was similar to the way Thawne’s made him tense, though obviously the reasons had to be different. Thawne would always make Barry hyper-aware of both himself and his enemy, there was nothing strange about that. Iris on the other hand... if Barry wasn’t so new to the whole scenting thing he had to assume it wouldn’t bother him as much. Her scent, that was. Something about the way it affected him made him feel weirdly guilty, like noticing… whatever it was – that was natural, but Barry’s reaction to it wasn’t.

It was awkward and he didn’t like it, even preferred the odd shiver Thawne’s sometimes provoked for no reason Barry could understand.

Stronger than the scent of Iris was what had to be, by process of elimination, Barry himself – and that was weird as hell. After a moment he realized he could sort of trace the paths frequently made through the house, knew somehow that the last time he had been there he had been annoyed with Joe, frustrated and defensive, and spent most of his time ensuring their paths didn’t cross enough for their scents to mix. There was no smell of fear though, so he must have been at work – at the precinct or as the Flash – when the sky turned red. He hadn’t run out of Joe’s house one morning or night never to return.

Barry gave in to curiosity and darted up the stairs as Joe tossed his keys towards the table, pausing in confusion when the scent trail carried on where Barry would have turned to reach his room. In his universe the room it led to had been Joe’s office.

Unless the rearrangement had been relatively recent there could have been no midnight ‘talks’ with Iris in this world, no learning Morse code to distract them both from how often she had to tap on their shared wall to wake him from nightmares in the early days of his fostering. No sneaking in to each other’s room to sneak out together as teenagers when they – well, Iris, but she invited Barry along – went to a party. Their rooms here were the farthest apart they could be, given the house’s layout, Joe’s bedroom – with the creakiest floorboard in the house just outside it – an obstacle to cross.

He definitely didn’t remember a second lock on Iris’ room, no matter how much she tested Joe’s ‘obliviousness’, or – Barry dodged the creaky floorboard outside Joe’s bedroom despite knowing he would be back downstairs before the sound traveled, and went inside the not-office – the one inside his own.

Not that he didn’t deserve privacy but a closed door had always been enough to grant it. Barry knew what he was like when he was sick – he was an idiot. He’d probably lock the door to try and avoid infecting anyone else in the house and forget how to open it until he was feeling better, he couldn’t be trusted.

He might even have thought that had been tested recently if it weren’t for the lack of any lingering smell of sickness – the bed had way more blankets than necessary piled on it for the time of year. Apparently Barry abandoning piles of laundry the moment he realized he was late for work – or an appointment or meeting friends – was a multiversal trait.

He spotted a familiar sleeve and tugged his S.T.A.R. Labs sweatshirt out of a nested pile of defensive pillows, shaking his head with a reluctant smile. He’d almost forgotten how much he used to wear it. It had been sun-faded and ragged when he finally gave it up, with more than one hole where he had picked at the stitching on the sleeves while Dr. Wells lectured him on being more careful and Caitlin enumerated all the ways he could be in even more pain as they waited for him to heal. It looked better cared for than Barry remembered, except for obviously not being cleaned enough – the scent of Harrison Wells lingered faintly on the shoulders and sleeves, places he might occasionally touch Barry to emphasize a point or make sure he had his attention.

Barry paused, pulled his face away from where he’d been pressing it curiously against the fabric – in no particular area for no particular reason – and quickly tossed it back on the bed. Definitely needed cleaning. There were a ton lying around S.T.A.R. Labs he could wear if he wanted to be nostalgic.

He paused, taking in the bed again, and frowned. Somehow he’d ruined something in what he hadn’t realized was an arrangement, turned it into an actual mess that revealed a strangely organized chaos had been present before. Suddenly he remembered trying to hide himself away in something similar when he was first taken in by Joe, trying to pretend nothing could reach him – not the monster in the lightning, not Joe, not even his own grief – if he just put enough layers between himself and the world. He'd outgrown it, but he could see himself doing it again if he was feeling vulnerable.

He leaned down, tried to fix it somehow – it just felt like the thing to do – but no matter what he did it stubbornly refused to be anything any more but an uninviting jumble of clothing and bedding.

Giving up, he fidgeted for a moment, then started looking closer. If the clothing was the stuff he favored most – which it might be, a lot of it soft and comfortable in a worn-in and well-loved way – he couldn’t see much difference between it and his normal clothing. But the formalwear in the closet had ridiculously high collars, and some of the stuff that smelled faintly of the precinct also seemed to cover the neck more. Maybe it was considered more professional?

He paused, then looked back at his sweatshirt. It still had a normal crew neck collar. He obviously wore it around Wells all the time. …Did that count as being a tease or something?

Shaking his head, Barry opened a drawer on an unfamiliar bedside table, half expecting to find a least one extra aerosol or stick of his supposed scent mask in there – he seemed to keep some quick-application spares everywhere: at the lab in the precinct, in the Cortex, by the door for when he ran in and out – and slammed it shut again.

Nope. Nope. Play invasive games, win embarrassing prizes.

He ran back downstairs as Joe’s keys hit the table, rattling as they slid across the surface.

“I heard you ran out of the lab,” Joe said, and Barry jerked his gaze away from a picture of Iris he’d never seen before on the mantel to look at him. He was still scowling, had been from the moment Barry had emerged from the S.T.A.R. Labs building to greet him instead of letting him in, and it only gotten worse when Barry had dodged his hug – his attempt to scent mark him, Barry had finally clocked on about halfway back to the house. “Caitlin sounded stressed when I called. Said you’d got some bad news and run off.”

He raised an eyebrow, waited for Barry to fill in the gaps. Barry shifted from foot to foot awkwardly. He wished he’d just let Joe hug him even though it wasn’t a typical greeting between them, was reserved for moments more emotional or desperate. For Barry the moment he had seen Joe again had been emotional and desperate, the urge to let himself sink into those open arms overwhelming… and the knowledge that it had been entirely devoid of the same meaning for Joe made him shy away instead. He’d been suddenly very aware that Joe wasn’t reaching for him for the reasons he wanted, that he wasn’t the Joe West Barry wanted.

Joe had looked offended more than hurt but still, it pricked at Barry’s conscience. Maybe hugging each other was more common and casual in the universe he was now in, something Joe and Barry did often. Maybe it would have calmed Joe down a little, reassured him of something. Barry didn’t know what, exactly, but he guessed maybe it was a pack bonding thing.

Caitlin had said packs could be friends and family and work colleagues, so Joe was definitely part of Barry’s family pack, and Cisco and Caitlin – and yes, probably Dr. Wells – counted as another, and maybe Joe just wanted to reassure himself and Barry that they were family? That their ‘pack’ was priority? Barry was probably missing a whole bunch of context and subtleties, but he thought that might at least be part of it.

“She didn’t say what, just that she was worried and I should keep an eye out for you,” Joe said, his frown deepening when Barry didn’t answer. “Least, she was before Wells talked her down, told me you were fine. Didn’t bother explaining anything, of course, just said you’d be back soon.”

“I am fine,” Barry said, straightening up purely because he felt like hunching his shoulders. He wasn’t a child waiting for fussing to turn to scolding. He was grown man, a superhero, even. It had been a long time since Joe had treated him like he wasn’t.

“Did Wells –” Joe started, then sighed and shook his head at himself as if berating himself for asking something he knew wouldn’t get the answer he wanted.

“Did Wells what?” Barry asked curiously.

“Nothing,” Joe said, and Barry scowled. He was beginning to understand why he – why the other Barry had been annoyed with Joe. He didn’t like to remember it, but he knew it had taken him a long time to suspect Harrison Wells. He’d been convinced of the man’s goodness, that for all his brusque, arrogant, prickly demeanor – or maybe because of it, since it meant he went out of his way to help – he was genuine about assisting Barry.

Which. He kind of was? Thawne had truly, sincerely wanted Barry to succeed as the Flash. For his own reasons, naturally, but he had helped Barry. It made it hurt so much more in the end.

He knew Joe had always been suspicious of Wells, but… intuition didn’t count in a court of law. Suspicion wasn’t proof, wasn’t evidence, wasn’t a confession.

Joe had been right, of course, was right that there was something wrong with Wells – but a hunch was nothing more than a corrupting data set, could turn a good cop into a bad cop depending on how hard they followed it. He didn’t like to think of Joe being a bad cop.

Barry could easily imagine the stumbling new hero he had been getting frustrated with his foster father’s insistence that there was something off about his mentor despite having no proof and getting more defensive about Wells in response, dismissing those suspicions as overprotective paranoia – particularly in a world where they apparently had… what was the ridiculous, suspiciously fundamentalist sounding phrase from that one pamphlet… complementary sexual dynamics.

An idea Barry was never going to waste another thought on again, but he could understand why Joe would think it might be something to worry about, even if he was completely wrong.

“Dr. Wells didn’t do anything,” Barry said, which was technically true. He had said something.

“I don’t trust ahim,” Joe said plainly, like Barry wasn’t well aware he’d resented ‘Dr. Wells’ from the moment the lightning struck and even more when he offered to help Barry at the hospital and Joe couldn’t do anything but say yes.

“Yeah, well, you don’t have to,” Barry said. He meant it as Joe should continue to keep an eye on Wells, but he had a feeling Joe took it instead as Barry implying that he did trust him. The way Joe bristled certainly suggested it, as did the growing oppressiveness of his scent. Barry didn’t understand what it was trying to tell him but he did know that he didn’t like it. It made him want to run, to prove there was nothing Joe could do to stop him if Barry wanted to leave. The choice to stay, to listen, to put up with Joe’s overbearing protectiveness, it was all Barry’s, so Joe should respect that. Respect him.

It should have been validating that Joe was wary about ‘Wells’, Barry knowing what he did. It was, in part. But something more in Barry was just mad about it because he suspected it wasn’t actually about Wells being who he was – the ‘right’ and real reason to be suspicious of him – and was instead just about what he was. And what Barry supposedly was.

Which was completely irrelevant, a false lead taking Joe down the right trail for the wrong reasons, and Barry resented that Joe thought it was important at all.

“Wells didn’t do anything,” Barry repeated.

“Ahe’s too cunning for that,” Joe muttered, and Barry rolled his eyes. Thawne was cunning. That was exactly why Joe was being ridiculous – he wasn’t going to risk anything for the reasons Joe seemed to have convinced himself were an issue. “I’d never have let ahim take you into S.T.A.R. Labs if I’d thought ahe was interested in any way other than scientifically. And even then, if there had been another option…”

“Seriously?” Barry said, exasperated. Iris used to tease Barry about his ‘nerd crush’ but he doubted Joe had ever fretted about Dr. Wells in relation to him like that. …Barry was not going to think through the implications and nobody could make him. He was irritated and insulted enough already.

“It’s the only reason ahe was allowed to attend you, even with Cisco and Caitlin to chaperone,” Joe said, and Barry couldn’t help his look of disbelief.

Chaperone? What, Barry’s comatose body? …Was it more of an indictment of Barry’s universe or Joe’s that the idea of sexual misconduct probably hadn’t been considered in his?

Great, now he had to scrub that thought from his brain and bury what was left under a mountain of denial, thanks, Joe.

“Ahis last public relationship was with another alpha,” Joe said defensively, like Barry had accused him of something when he just couldn’t follow Joe’s line of thinking at all. “I thought it’d be experimental science to wake you up that I had to keep an eye on.”

It probably said something that Barry’s first thought was a bewildered and annoyed Hartley?! before he remembered Tess Morgan. He needed a remedial course in gender bias or whatever it was called in the current universe. If something like that existed. And if it did he’d definitely be sharing a class with Bellows.

“Doctor Wells isn’t interested in me like that, h- ahis sexuality isn’t relevant,” Barry said impatiently, trying not to feel any particular way about it. If it had been weird with Hartley in his universe he could only imagine what it might have been like here, if Hartley was an alpha only interested in other alphas and Wells had maybe been part of an alpha-alpha relationship himself. And Barry didn’t even know exactly how it had been weird. Was it paternal, was it sexual, was it (un)professional – whatever the thing with Hartley had been Barry was pretending it didn’t exist on principle. In either universe.

“You think because I’m a beta I can’t scent?” Joe demanded. Oh, that sounded far too aggravated not to be some kind of tired stereotyping Joe faced day in and day out. “I’ve caught ahim without those blockers sometimes – hell, you too. I know what interest smells like.”

“Not – not that kind,” Barry insisted, desperately hoping for poor omega Barry’s sake that it wasn’t. He could guarantee Thawne’s wasn’t what Joe was thinking but as embarrassing as it was to remember Barry had been maybe just a little starry-eyed over Doctor Harrison Wells before… everything. He could understand someone – even Joe, who should know better – getting the wrong idea. Maybe.

Joe made a deeply skeptical face and shook his head. “I know better than to get into this with you,” he grumbled, seemingly to remind himself, sighing as if he just had to wait for Barry to eventually come to his senses and understand that Joe knew better.

Barry felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. He suddenly understood why Iris would hide her relationship with Eddie for as long as she could and then get so annoyed at Joe’s refusal to acknowledge its importance to her or treat her as capable of making her own choices. Not that Barry had been any better for his own selfish reasons but he owed her so many apologies for his obliviousness to her complaints about Joe being patronizing.

Barry wasn’t even in a relationship! Especially not with Wells! Joe was being ridiculous. And he was giving Thawne so much to laugh about, which might be the worst part. Like the man didn’t get enough entertainment from watching Barry already.

“So if it’s not about Wells...” Joe said, sinking down onto the couch with a tired groan – Barry tried not to feel guilty, Joe had clearly had a long shift just to then have to collect Barry from S.T.A.R. Labs like a child refusing to go home because he didn’t want to face the music. “What is it? Can’t have been a new meta, there’s been nothing in the news and no word at the precinct.”

“We found out – we think we found out what happened with, uh, with that… thing. When the sky went red?”

“Yeah?” Joe said, sitting up slightly. “That was weird as hell. Thought I’d been transplanted to Gotham for a minute, you hear all kinds of stories about that place.”

“Weird as hell,” Barry agreed quietly. If time travel was still a hypothetical to Caitlin… How did he explain a multiverse to Joe when last week the biggest problem had probably been something like a metahuman robbing a bank or trying to explode a city block? How did he explain the potential end of a universe? That he wasn’t the Barry Joe thought he knew and he didn’t know how to get that Barry back, or even if he could?

Joe’s scent changed but Barry couldn’t tell what it was supposed to convey until he heard the concern in Joe’s voice and tentatively connected the sour tang to distress, to worry. Even fear, maybe?

“Barry? What’s wrong? What was it?”

“I’m what’s wrong,” Barry muttered, then shook his head. “The sky – it was a symptom, I guess. Of the world ending. That’s what it meant.”

“The world--” Joe started to say, lurching to his feet, staring at Barry in disbelief.

“It didn’t, though, obviously,” Barry said quickly.

“Because you did something,” Joe said, without a shred of doubt, and Barry looked away, unable to cope with that misplaced faith, that belief he was going to take from Joe that everything was fine, everything had turned out all right.

“I guess,” he said. “Sort of.” He buried his hands in his hair, tugged at it slightly as if hoping the slight pain would help focus his thoughts.

“The hell does ‘sort of’ mean, is the world saved or not?” Joe said, then snorted at himself. “‘Is the world saved’, good God, is that where we’re at now?” He laughed as if he didn’t believe his own words. As if he didn’t believe Barry, thought he was exaggerating.

“This one is,” Barry said, felt his shoulders go up and his head down, defensive.

“Okay,” Joe said, still amused, sitting down again. “you’re going to have to explain that.”

“I know, I know, I’m making a real mess of this,” Barry groaned, wishing he could remember exactly where Thawne’s stupid cameras were – he was desperate enough to try and beg a no doubt watching Thawne for help with his eyes. Mouth it, even, if Thawne felt like pretending he couldn’t read Barry’s expression. He might even get some if Thawne was feeling generous or, more likely, thought helping would put Barry in his debt. He was quick on his feet, he could easily come up with some lie to explain the ‘coincidence’ of his random visit to Joe.

Unless he wasn’t watching at all, which Barry didn’t believe for a second.

“Barry,” Joe said. It sounded humoring, but… there was something in his scent, some note that had Barry on edge, made him think of Joe’s expression the first time Barry wouldn’t let it go when he tried to tell him he’d imagined the Man in the Lightning, that fear and trauma confused the mind and made it believe things that weren’t real because they were easier to grasp than the truth.

“It was an accident,” Barry said, just as helplessly as he’d once tried to protest his father’s innocence, the truth of what happened to his mother. “I didn’t mean to do it. I don’t even know if it was something I did.”

“If what was?” Joe asked, and already Barry could hear his patient ‘dealing with witnesses’ tone creeping into his voice, accompanied by what he could only assume were pheromones meant to soothe an agitated interviewee. They weren’t soothing Barry. “What accident, Barry?”

Thawne had just come straight out and told Caitlin Barry was from a different universe and she’d believed him immediately… but Harrison Wells was her boss, a man she respected, someone whose entire career involved physics both known and theoretical and who dealt with crazy metahuman concepts with the ease and calm of a duck faced with water.

Barry couldn’t convince his own foster father that he wasn’t imagining things until Joe had actually seen him unravel a tornado.

“Maybe it would have been better if we’d done this at S.T.A.R. Labs,” Barry said. “I think I need proof.”

If he wanted to throw Joe off completely, kick the conversation back at least a few hours, he could just tell Joe why he hadn’t been allowed in. Disapproval of his kids’ relationships obviously came first, even if Barry had never felt the same edge Iris did.

He felt like an asshole for never noticing, never appreciating that. When Barry dated a girl Joe would shrug and smile and treat her politely – maybe never like he expected it to last, but he wasn’t rude or mean about it and if the girl noticed at all she would simply assume he had to be won over. That he could be won over. When Iris bought a boyfriend home… She hadn’t been hiding her dates with Eddie because she didn’t know exactly how Joe would react.

“Proof like maybe those folders you left in the backseat?” Joe said indulgently, which was fair because Barry often did have to double-back for things, typically making him late by another five minutes. But Barry didn’t remember bringing any folders – no wait, yes he did. Thawne had put them in his hands while Barry was fretting about what to say to Joe, what to do, how he should act, and Barry hadn’t even looked at them, had just taken them without noticing and headed out to meet Joe, tossing them on to the back seat out of sheer habit.

“Right,” Barry said faintly. “Yeah, maybe like those.”

He took a generous two seconds to pick them up and return with them, staring at the sticky note on one of the top ones that said ‘he’s not going to understand enough to care, but here – references’. He snatched it off and crumpled it between his fingers, shoving it into a pocket.

“I gotta wonder why ahe insists on actual paper when you must scatter everything zipping in and out,” Joe said, eyeing the stack with a resigned look of suspicion. “The amount of paperweights I’ve started piling up at the precinct people are going to start suspecting I collect them.”

“Yeah, Mendez’ll get you one as gag gift for Christmas,” Barry said, dropping the files on the coffee table. “Dr. Wells likes the physicality I think. It’s not science if it’s not written down after all, and there’s less risk of suddenly losing work than there is electronically.”

“The physicality,” Joe repeated, scent going sour and suspicious like there was some other meaning to the words.

“Joe,” Barry said abruptly, “Do you – have we talked about –”

“Whoa, cool it,” Joe said as he flicked through the folders with a puzzled look of complete incomprehension before setting them back on the table and looking at Barry again. “Am I going to need a drink for this?”

“Why would you need a drink?” Barry said, baffled.

“Courage,” Joe said, which explained absolutely nothing. He sighed, and said patiently, “Are we talking about your thing for Wells again?”

“Aga-- there is no thing for Wells,” Barry said, convinced now that Joe’s dogged determination to get to the bottom of the wrong track was the reason he and the other Barry had been on the outs. “I was about to ask about time travel!”

“Oh, time travel,” Joe said with a sigh of relief, relaxing. “Yeah, sure, the idea’s started coming up.”

“It has?” Barry said, confused why Joe would be relieved about the idea, given all the potential horrors and pitfalls of time travel. Maybe they hadn’t sunk in for him yet. If Thawne was to be believed Barry hadn’t been giving them enough consideration. Shoving the thought aside he said, more firmly: “It has. Okay. All right. So – so you’re cool with the idea, that it’s possible, I mean.”

“Barry, there’s a beta in Iron Heights who can turn his skin to iron, the idea of what is possible these days is a lot wilder than it used to be.”

Mardon is dead. There is no controlling the weather, Barry. Just like there was no lightning storm in your house that night. It was your brain helping a scared little boy accept what he saw.

“Right,” Barry said, rubbing at his face. Why did he still remember such things so clearly? It had been years since Joe refused to roll with the weirdness of Barry’s life. With metahumans in general. People grew and changed when they had the opportunity, it shouldn’t bother Barry any more, the doubt Joe used to have.

It had just… hurt. At the time. He was over it now, of course.

“So time travel is a thing. Definitely.”

“Goddamn it,” Joe muttered. Practical as ever: “How do you establish motive for a crime in the past when it only exists in the future?”

“And alternate universes are a thing.”

“Kind of figures,” Joe said, with an easy shrug. “So there’s one where your mother wasn’t murdered, right? Or is that just a different timeline? Is there a difference? Maybe there’s one where I’m a mob boss instead of a cop or something, or you work at S.T.A.R. Labs instead – over my dead body, probably,” he said under his breath, like he didn’t think Barry would hear him being insulted at his imaginary other self’s inability to keep Barry out of Dr. Wells’ orbit. “Or Iris is a beta – probably a cop too, other me wouldn’t object so much if ashe wasn’t an alpha…”

Barry very much doubted that. He was kind of confused by it too – what was Joe’s problem with Iris being a cop if she was an alpha? Barry had gotten the vague impression that ‘cop’ was a pretty common ‘alpha’ job, though he didn’t know how he felt about it.

“Or nobody is an alpha,” he said. “Or a beta. Or an omega. Because that’s just not how people evolved.”

Joe laughed as if the idea was even funnier, more ridiculous than him being a mob boss. “Good one,” he said, grinning at Barry, his good humor making all the stress and worry of the job he often brought home with him fall off his face. He looked years younger suddenly. “Man. What would that even be like?” He sounded curious, but in a mild disinterested way that knew something was so far from comprehension it wasn’t really worth thinking about.

“Very different,” Barry said, and spread the files out on the table, plucking the simplest diagrams, the easiest to comprehend pages out. “I guess it’s most like if everybody was a beta? Except not really.”

“A world of betas. Ain’t that something.”

“They’re not really though,” Barry repeated, and tapped an anatomical diagram of a human head. Caitlin was beautiful and brilliant and he could almost let the other anatomical diagrams go. Almost. “They have less highly developed vomeronasal organs than betas so scenting and marking – not a thing.”

“What, everybody in the whole universe is scent-blind?” Joe said, baffled. “Why?”

“Biologically it’s just not as valuable?” Barry said. “Without the whole… mating urge thing?”

“Okay, okay,” Joe said, holding his hand up. “Yeah, I get all the jokes about betas being ready to go whenever –”

“No,” Barry groaned, grimacing at the thought. Who made those jokes around Joe and how could he ensure he never heard them? ...Knowing cops, it was probably everybody in the damn precinct outside of internal affairs.

“—but it isn’t actually the case. We keep our heads better, that’s all.”

Was that true? Scientifically? Or was it cultural? Maybe it was a mix of both, if it really was a thing.

“See, that’s the thing,” Barry said, stressed, “there’s no mating urge at all, you just – sure, you want to have sex with people but it’s not, it’s not a – an overwhelming ‘if I don’t have sex with them I’ll die’ kind of thing?”

“That’s outdated bullshit and you know it,” Joe said sternly, good humor vanishing. “Omegas aren’t going to die if they don’t mate in heat, you know better than that, Barry. And if an alpha becomes violent in rut, enough to force – that can be a medical issue, but it’s no excuse.”

“Okay, but –”

“But nothing,” Joe insisted. “I know you know this, Barry, what the hell.”

“I don’t!” Barry exploded. “Or – I do, kinda, because Caitlin and Cisco and Wells have been giving me a whole crash course about it – but I really, seriously, do not get –” he reined himself in, tried to take a calming breath. “I’m from a different universe, Joe.”

Joe laughed, tension evaporating because of course it was a joke, of course Barry was lying. “What?” he said, still laughing, as if he couldn’t understand what Barry had said.

“I’m not an omega,” Barry said. “That’s not a thing in my universe. You’re not a beta, Iris isn’t an alpha. Nobody is any of those things. There are no heats, no ruts, no scenting or marking, no ‘packs’ or whatever you want to call it instead of family or friends or colleagues—”

“Slow down, I can barely understand you,” Joe said, a strangled note in his voice that told Barry he wished that was actually true, that he couldn’t understand what Barry was saying.

“—and I didn’t mean to, to replace myself? I think, Dr. Wells thinks that’s what happened, that I accidentally…”

“What you’re saying is, you’re not my Barry,” Joe interrupted, and Barry stopped. “You’re… from another universe.”

“Yeah,” Barry said. He felt himself shiver, suddenly tense and wary, and didn’t know why.

“You’re from another universe. Where you’re supposedly not an omega. Because somehow your world doesn’t have them. Or alphas. Or betas. Even though you definitely are an omega.”

“Yeah,” Barry said. Every hair on his body felt like it was on end, like he was facing something terrifying instead of his foster father working through new information.

“Okay,” Joe said. “Okay – say I believe you. If you’re an omega when you supposedly weren’t before – that’s because you’re in Barry’s body, not your own, right? So where’s my Barry? The Barry that belongs here?”

“I don’t – I don’t…” Barry scrambled for a moment, offered a file – one with half an equation scrawled in the bottom right corner in Harrison Wells’ impatient math – and flinched slightly when Joe knocked it from his hands and stood up, stepping closer to Barry.

“You know I don’t care about the science – break it down for me. How long are you going to be here? Where’s Barry? When’s ohe coming back? Does ‘replace’ actually mean what I think?”

“I – Dr. Wells thinks –”

“I don’t care what that miswhelped son of a--” Joe stopped, inhaling sharply, eyes closing as he visibly struggled to control his temper. Maybe it was that Barry could smell his anger that it seemed stronger, so much more frightening – he’d argued with Joe plenty of times before and it had never felt like this.

“Where’s my Barry? What have you done with my kid?”

“I haven’t done – I don’t know,” Barry said, and he could almost hear a faint whine in his own voice, like an anxious dog that knew it had done something wrong but didn’t understand what, just that someone it loved was unhappy.

He cut himself off the moment he heard it, but Joe had obviously registered the sound too. He paused, took another deep breath, slow and calming. The acridity of his scent lessened slightly – not the instant change of emotion Thawne was capable of, but still an example of very deliberate control Barry suspected was something he’d been taught or learned over the course of his career, interacting with victims and perpetrators alike.

“Who are you?” Joe said, slow and deliberate.

“I’m Barry Allen,” Barry said. His throat felt tight, every word a struggle. “Son of Henry and Nora Allen. I was taken in by Joe West after my mother was murdered and my father imprisoned. I’m not – I’m not a stranger, Joe—”

“Detective West,” Joe corrected him as if they were. Barry had seen him put on an expression like the one he was wearing for interviews at the precinct. He hunched slightly, instinctively tried to make himself smaller, more like the child Joe had taken in. “I don’t care that you share a name –”

“I was struck by lightning, was in a coma for nine months and woke up with superspeed –”

“– that doesn’t make you Barry.”

“I am,” Barry insisted, felt a flicker of lightning appear around his ankles, arc between his fingers. He wondered if, halfway across the city, Thawne might have tensed without knowing why.

Probably not. Probably he was already watching and listening to everything, knew exactly why his lightning was sparking in response to Barry’s putting an instinctive call out into the world to remind himself he wasn’t alone.

“I’m a different universe’s Barry but I’m still –”

“You’re a stranger,” Joe said, and Barry recoiled at the revulsion in his scent, “wearing my kid’s body. Pretending to be ohim, acting like you have any right to be here, like you can just, can just –”

He snarled with frustration at his own inability to find the words he wanted. Barry had heard worse noises from much more intimidating things and speedsters but they had never made him feel like he was being eaten alive, that something was rooting around in his chest and tearing his organs out.

“Every time you’ve changed a timeline you’ve lost everybody you’ve ever known, no matter how similar their counterparts are.” Unsaid, because Barry should have been smart enough to know already, should have thought about how others felt as much he pitied himself – they had lost their Barry too. He had just happened to be close enough to pass.

“The team at S.T.A.R. Labs didn’t take it this badly,” Barry said helplessly before he could think it through.

“They barely know Barry,” Joe snapped. “A couple of months, maybe a year if you include the time ohe was in a coma, which I’m not – of course they don’t care much that you’re somebody else, they wouldn’t really know the difference.”

Maybe that had been why Cisco and Caitlin were so accepting, but Thawne knew the Barry Joe was missing, had watched him just as closely for nearly as long as Joe had raised him – maybe even longer, actually – and he’d still instantly accepted Barry as Barry.

But that was a whole different thing, tied up in what he and Thawne were, individually and together, Flash and Reverse.

“A lot of speedsters fall into the trap you do. They have to stay sane somehow.”

Thawne wasn’t sane by any metric, ordinary human or speedster. He could never truly understand a perspective like Joe’s, the human emotion that drove it or the limited understanding of time and space involved in creating it. Thawne knew Barry wasn’t the same person as the one he’d been mentoring, he just didn’t care because Barry was still the Flash and that was good enough for him.

Maybe even better – different enough from the one he despised enough to try and break time to kill that his first response had been curiosity instead of violence. With their wildly different worlds and backgrounds Barry could never become that future Flash either.

In a way, if it really was true that Barry couldn’t get back home, Thawne had won whatever eternal war he thought he was in with the Flash he’d hated.

“When was Barry’s first heat?” Joe said, and Barry blinked at him.

“I don’t know that,” he said uneasily. In his late teens, probably, if the books were any indication – except that there was no such thing as a textbook human when it came to things like biology. There were always exceptions, outliers, even without metahumans involved. It was better not to try and guess.

Was it really such basic information, made such a difference?

“Who was his favorite teacher?”

“Mrs Walker,” Barry said, on steadier ground – she had been Barry’s chemistry teacher, and the first to start nurturing his interest in it. There were broad similarities between the universes regardless of the very different biologies, surely that would be one of them.

Joe’s expression only darkened. “Barry hated oher,” he said. “Oshe was always trying to tell ohim there were plenty of other applications for chemistry outside of forensics, that oshe didn’t think it was a suitable or viable career choice. Maybe I agreed with oher, but Barry hated that.”

“She always encouraged me,” Barry said quietly, and Joe gave him a look.

“Maybe it’s different in a world where you’re not an omega.”

“Why?”

“The fact you don’t know that tells me you don’t belong here,” Joe said, crossing his arms.

Joe had tried to stop Barry from becoming a forensic scientist in his own world, but that had been about Barry’s trauma and trying to divert his attention away from the false hope of his weird cases, not…

Barry wanted to believe Joe’s reasons were the same here, since apparently it was one of those universal similarities that he’d tried to stop Barry, but somehow he didn’t think so. It had probably been part of it, sure, but not the whole reason like it had been in his universe.

He’d forgiven Joe in his own universe when he was old enough to get it because he knew Joe's intentions were good at heart. Now he finally started to wonder how Iris had managed to let it go when Joe had stopped her becoming a cop. It had worked out, but there had to always be some part of her that wondered what her life might have been like if she’d been given the chance to discover for herself if that career choice would have worked for her.

Had Joe stopped her here too because she was an alpha daughter? Did that distinction matter?

No, that probably wasn’t it. Thawne had seemed fascinated by Barry trying to fit the idea on alpha-beta-omega dynamics. Whatever differences there were between types it didn’t seem as important as those between dynamics themselves.

“How many times do you see your sire?”

A week, a month, a year? Was there some kind of arrangement with Joe? Was his dad currently in or out of one of those mental health facilities Thawne disdained? Were there visiting hours like when he was in prison or was it a looser more informal thing?

“I don't know,” Barry said wretchedly. He wanted to, understood something of the shape of what Joe was pointing out – the difference between him and a Barry who had a very different biology he treated as normal, who carried a different world’s cultural expectations, had a father he could see outside of a prison’s bars. He just didn’t know any of it.

“All these things you don’t know, these basic things – and you thought you could, what, just pretend?”

“I thought,” Barry said, “that I could get back, and your Barry could get back, before it became an issue. I’ve crossed timelines, universes, before. It’s never been permanent.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Joe said, nostrils flaring, and Barry winced. Damn the enhanced noses.

“Sometimes there’s no future to go back to, that’s different.”

“No future at all?” Joe asked pointedly.

“No future worth going back to,” Barry corrected. Technically, yes, there would still have been a world after Mardon had drowned Central City, for example, but why would Barry go back to that timeline? Just about everybody he loved was dead.

Joe didn’t seem impressed. “Right. And your first thought when you found yourself here wasn’t to come to me or Iris, explain what was going on –”

“When you’ve taken it so badly?” Barry mumbled to himself, but not quietly enough – he grimaced at the truly venomous look Joe gave him.

“– you went straight to S.T.A.R. Labs instead.” To Wells, Barry got the feeling he meant, like that was important. Joe should know it wasn’t personal, it was purely about getting help, getting information, knowledge that could help Barry. Sure, he could explain himself to Joe – but what help could Joe actually offer?

“To get help, fix things,” Barry said, but Joe’s scent curdled even more instead.

“Because we didn’t deserve to know.”

“No –”

“It’s not about whether or not we could help you, it’s about you valuing our Barry’s relationship with us enough to tell us something was wrong, and you clearly don’t, so there’s got to be something wrong with your own too –”

Barry bared his teeth without thinking. “You’d have just told me to go to S.T.A.R. Labs in the end anyway!”

“Maybe,” Joe said, and Barry took a step back, wished he could cover his nose, look away from Joe’s expression, have no idea what he was thinking. “But we’ll never know, will we?”

“Joe…”

“You can go there now,” Joe said, his tone perfectly even, flat and final, but his scent…

“Joe, I—”

“You’re a stranger in my house and I want you gone,” Joe said. “This is my territory, where my kid rests, where ohe nests – I can’t have you here.”

Barry let time slow for a moment. Examined the expression on Joe’s face even though it made him feel sick, unwelcome. Examined how tall Joe stood, how firmly planted his feet were, the way he would put himself between Iris and danger. He looked for weakness, for any hint of lacking resolve, any sign that Joe might change his mind.

He was turning before he could be absolutely sure there was none. “I’ll see you at the precinct tomorrow,” he said, and ran before he could hear an answer that might destroy him.