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When Barry Allen awakes from his coma, Tommy Wells watches as his father shows more compassion and attentiveness to a man he’d never known than he had to his own son.
Even in his coma, his father doted at his side religiously, checking his vitals, consoling his family, making sure he got the best care he possibly could.
And Tommy seethed with envy for a man he’s never even met. A man who laid motionless and unspeaking for the many months under his father and STAR Lab’s care.
Barry Allen is overwhelmed when he wakes, but he’s starstruck by the great Harrison Wells, and Tommy watches silently with a tight jaw as his father leads Barry through the lab for a tour.
Tommy doesn’t look like his father.
His blonde hair and blue eyes incomparable to his father’s brown ones. The shape of his face, his tall stature, they’re nothing like him. The only thing that he inherited from Harrison Wells was his intellect.
Tommy always felt like he was growing up under unattainable expectations. Fighting for his father’s attention, to be enough to warrant even a moment of his time. He was always second to something, his work, his current project, his current equation.
And of course there were the impossible expectations from the public, waiting to see if he would be as intelligent as his father, to see if he would be as great as him. And even with his perfect marks in school, with the many innovations he made even as a teen, they still wanted more.
Tommy was never the priority in his life.
He knows that his father was devastated when Tommy’s mother died, leaving him to be a single father to Tommy, and maybe he never truly healed from that grief or maybe he just was never meant to be a father. And it’s an awful thing to think, but Harrison Wells is an awful father.
He was always disappointed in Tommy. He was never enough, never what he wanted. Tommy doesn’t know what he wants from him, but if he did, he would become it in an instant.
Tommy spent most of his childhood at a British boarding school, only spending his summers in the states for the six weeks they got off in summer and the two they got off for winter holiday. The other sporadic one week breaks throughout the years didn’t warrant a trip back to the US.
His time back in Central City were spent at STAR Labs.
Hartley was his favorite of his father’s employees, the others too plastic, too overly-kind. Hartley didn’t pretend with Tommy, didn’t treat him like a kid, and didn’t underestimate him.
He hated Cisco Ramone on principle, his ridiculous rivalry with Hartley enough for Tommy to choose a side between the two.
Tommy caught a redeye to Central as soon as he got out of classes for winter holiday to make it in time to see his father’s particle accelerator be debuted.
As he enters his lab, a thick layer of dust covering everything he left, he smiles softly. His father is probably running around, stressed beyond belief and barking orders at everyone who makes the mistake of being in his presence. Tommy knows better than to get in his way at times like these.
While his father was an engineer, Tommy has always been more of a chemist, his greatest achievements to date his night vision eyedrops, fire resistant liquid that can be applied to clothes, and a medication he collaborated with Dr. Snow on that had become known as the “Potion of Healing.”
And yet, despite being a renowned scientist at just 17 years old, Tommy still wasn’t enough to capture his father’s pride.
The skylight in his lab pounds with rain and the soothing sound of it has Tommy getting lost in his thoughts, tinkering with a chemical compound that decays organic matter, Wither as Tommy has called it in his mind, but is broken out of his focus when he goes to grab another beaker, slipping on a puddle in the middle of his lab.
Broken out of his stupor, he finally checks his watch and curses quietly to himself as he realizes that he’s late.
He pulls himself up but knows that he can’t go out in wet slacks and a dirty t-shirt, can’t embarrass his father more than he already does, and starts to go to his bag that sits in the corner to find something to change into, but realizes he needs to take care of the mess.
He puts an empty trash can beneath where the leak is and grabs a ladder to patch up the broken window as best he can.
But as he grips the metal rungs, a burst of lightning strikes and Tommy falls to the ground…
…and is shaken awake by Hartley who stands over him with panic.
“Tommy! Tommy, please, you have to wake up. You can’t—” His words are hard to decipher from the ringing in his ears.
Tommy lets out a sharp groan and Hartley lets out a sob of relief.
“Oh, thank God. You’re alright. You’re alive. You’re…”
“Hartley?” Tommy croaks. “What happened?”
“The particle accelerator exploded.”
Tommy’s stomach drops. His father’s life’s work, not only failed but left behind a trail of destruction.
His father is not going to be happy.
Hartley continues to check him over until Tommy properly convinces him that he’s alright.
Tommy thinks that he should remember what he was doing before the accelerator exploded but all that was left was a fuzzy blank.
“Father. Where is he?”
Hartley’s face falls. “Tommy, I’m so sorry, but your dad got hurt during the explosion.”
Dread pools in Tommy’s stomach. “Where is he?”
His father, lying on that bed, paralyzed and wounded, both physically and his pride.
Tommy expects him to be furious. He expects him to let out his frustrations on him.
Instead, his father seems uncharacteristically… giddy.
The usual disappointment that he feels towards Tommy is still there, but there’s something that has raised his father’s spirits somehow.
It scares Tommy more than the anger ever did.
Which is why he finds himself leaving the hospital when his father falls asleep and just runs. Runs away from that hospital. Runs away from his father. Runs away from the expectations and the disappointment and—
And suddenly something shifts within him. The world slows as his feet take him impossibly fast.
He runs and runs and captures the feeling of being free and then collapses as his body can’t take it anymore.
Tommy wakes up in an unfamiliar flat.
He shoots up, prepared for anything from a fanatic fan to a vengeant STAR Labs employee.
Instead, he is met by a man with a long pink braid, polishing a sword.
“Uhm,” Tommy says, “my father doesn’t pay ransom.”
The man cocks a brow. “Am I supposed to know who you are?”
Tommy lets out a sigh of relief. “I guess not.”
“I found you in my garbage. Like a raccoon.”
“I’m not a raccoon!”
He snorts. “If that’s what you have to tell yourself.” He crosses his arms, leaning against the bookshelf. “So, who are you? And why were you in my garbage?”
“I’m… Tommy.”
“Tommy?”
“Just Tommy.”
He eyes him curiously. “Alright, Just Tommy. You still haven’t answered my other question.”
“I… was running.”
“Running,” he says flatly.
“I’m not lying!”
“Didn’t say you were.” The man pulls out his phone and turns it to Tommy. “Before you showed up in my garbage, there was this… lightning. My Ring camera didn’t catch it well but I saw it. Saw you. So… you a superhero or something?”
“A superh— no!”
He scoffs. “Waste of a superpower.”
“I don’t have superpowers,” Tommy insists.
“Yeah? Then how’d I see you moving faster than my eye could literally perceive?” Tommy didn’t have an answer for that. “Wait. Did you just get these powers?”
Tommy shuffles awkwardly. “Maybe.”
“That,” a man in a dark green bucket hat and kimono says as he enters, “means we’re part of your backstory and are obligated to serve the narrative and push you towards your character development.”
“Well, unless we want to die and become motive for you to pursue heroism, I guess we gotta become your guys in the chair,” the pink haired man says.
“...What?!”
“What do you say?”
“I… this is ridiculous. I don’t have superpowers and I’m certainly no hero—”
“But you could be,” the man in green says. “Hell, where are my manners? I’m Philza, but you can call me Phil.”
“And I’m Technoblade. And you didn’t answer his question, kid. What do you say?”
“I’m not a kid,” Tommy grumbles. “Do you really think I could do something with these abilities? That I could be a… a hero?”
Philza smiles. “I think you can be even more.”
“I need to… think.”
“Here,” Technoblade holds his phone out. “Add your number in case you change your mind.”
Tommy does as he’s told and he leaves in a run.
He does a few laps around the city before stopping a block away from his house, walking the normal speed the rest of the way.
His father lies in bed just where Tommy had left him, his body recovering from the explosion.
“Father,” Tommy says. “I… I’m going to stay here. With you. In Central City.”
His father’s eyes darken. “Thomas,” he says warningly. “You have obligations. You can’t just drop everything because I’m a little bruised up—”
“You— you’re not just a little—” He tamps his anger. “You’re paralyzed. Your life is never going to be the same. And I… I want to be here for your recovery. And to help you at the Labs. I’ll go to Central Prep, I’ll maintain my studies, I passed my exams with flying colors, and I’ve just got this last semester—”
“Exactly,” his father says firmly. “You have one more semester. You haven’t even taken your GCSEs. You can’t just abandon your entire school career to play nurse for me. I can afford my one and I certainly don’t need you suffocating me at every hour.”
“But—”
When his father shifts, Tommy almost expects a blow, even though his father has never laid a hand on him before. But the man is stopped, his lower half of his body stuck on the bed.
“You are going back to England. You are finishing your studies. And you will not argue with me on this.”
Tommy’s fists shakes at his side. “Understood.”
“Now, let me get my rest. You’ve interrupted my evening enough.”
Tommy, steaming, goes to his room and types furiously to Technoblade. “When do we start?”
.-~*~-.
Tommy does return to England to finish his last semester. Once his anger died down, he did have enough clarity to realize that he worked too hard on his schooling to give it all up now. Especially when he was a shoe-in at an uni that he set his mind to.
Which is why he chooses a university in the states.
In the meantime, he keeps connected with Technoblade and Phil who help him hone his powers. It’s difficult at first, doing it virtually, but they find ways for it to work.
Which is why when Tommy returns to Central City and discovers the uptick in crime, specifically odd crimes with evidence that couldn’t be explained, Tommy realizes that he was not alone in receiving powers during the particle accelerator explosion.
Which is how Mach is born.
Mach is everything Tommy is not. Loud and crass where Tommy is quiet and polite. Cocky and confident where Tommy is self-loathing and insecure. Quick-witted and talkative where Tommy is analytical and succinct.
It’s… freeing. It’s something Tommy never imagined himself having.
Tubbo, Tommy’s best friend from boarding school, had quickly learned Tommy’s secret, the boy not as good at hiding his training in the beginning as he thought, and so he joined Tommy’s GITC (guys in the chair).
Tubbo now the long distance one, focuses more on surveillance for Tommy, hacking into the CCPD channels to point Tommy towards crime.
Technoblade and Phil handle more of the physical aspects of his training and backup. He discovers his fire resistance chemical can combat the super friction from his running, and collaborates with Hartley, whose career had been tanked because of Tommy’s father and his own personal betrayal from the man who didn’t listen to him about the accelerator’s instability giving him ample motivation to send a big fuck you to the man, helped Tommy make his suit, red and white with a helmet for both safety and to hide his identity.
When Tommy is in the states, he carefully puts on an American accent so that he doesn’t stick out as too different from his father, and to pull away prying eyes to the fact that he spends so little time in the US.
But as Mach, he can finally let his natural accent he had picked up from the years in England free.
All in all, his team is solid and so is his identity.
To all of their surprise, Phil discovers that he had gained a low level power to speak with his crows and Technoblade uncovered the ability to communicate with those recently passed. They can’t exactly persuade either much though, so it turns into background noise for the both of them.
Tommy’s first villain he faces off is a mind control meta, BadBoyHalo, who was deluded into thinking that an egg had gifted him his powers.
Tommy quickly realized that he couldn’t just send these powered people to a normal jail and went on a search for someone who could help.
Which is how he got in contact with Awesamdude, one of his father’s structural engineers who he fired brutally and hasn’t been able to find solid work since, to discuss making a power proof prison.
“You realize what you’re asking me to build?” Sam says flatly.
“I do,” Tommy says. “And I’ll pay you accordingly.”
“No offense, kid, but I don’t think you have the types of funds to—” His phone pings. He pulls it out and his eyes go wide.
“There’s more where that comes from. But how’s that for a down payment?”
Sam meets where his eyes are hidden by his helmet. “How big are we talking?”
Pandora’s Vault was built in expedited construction (AKA: Tommy utilized his superspeed to help Sam build it. Sure, he’s more of a chemist, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t follow engineering) and Mach had a place to take the people he arrested.
Sam was personally the warden of this new prison, knowing it inside and out, but Tommy had hopes that if its prisoner count grew, it would have a staff to tend to all of their needs.
For now, Phil, Technoblade and Sam worked together to create power dampeners so that the prisoners didn’t have to be confined to their cells.
While working with Sam on the prison, Tommy discovered an aspect to his powers that went beyond logic just as much as the rest of it: speedbridging. Because of the way his speed interacts with time itself, it means that he is able to momentarily defy gravity as he builds. He just has to be cognizant of what happens to those supplies when gravity catches up.
That’s why he creates building material that is both compact that can be expanded 100x its size when exposed to air, can build upon itself, and will dissolve into a non-harmful vapor after just a few minutes, meaning that it leaves behind no trail to be followed but can get him to impossible heights.
He also works with Technoblade to be able to listen to music as he runs, something that soothes his always moving mind, being able to get lost in the melodies of Cat or Mellohi.
He discovers that there is a power great and unseen where his powers derive from. He calls her Prime, not quite a deity, but a concept beyond current human understanding.
And along the way, he starts to make a name for himself.
But then, of course, Barry Allen just had to fuck everything up.
The first time Mach meets The Flash is when he corners him after taking down some dumbass with weather powers trying to steal a car. He gets him to Pandora’s Vault and returns to the scene to make sure no one got hurt and finds himself followed by none other than Barry Allen, stupidly attempting to use his powers to conceal his identity.
“You do realize we both have superspeed, right, mate? That does nothing. And I already know you’re Barry Allen.”
Barry stills, eyes wide with fear and poorly concealed rage. But as he looks the boy up and down, he realizes that he can’t be the man he’s looking for, or at the very least, isn’t him yet.
“The night my mother was murdered—”
“Oh shit.”
“—there was someone else like me. Someone who had these powers too. I thought maybe you…” He looks at him longer. “But you’re not.”
“Well, sorry to hear that, dude. That fucking sucks. I haven’t got a mum either. She died. RIP. And it sucks. I didn’t know her like you knew yours but… still. My condolences and shit.” Tommy pauses. “Wait. There’s someone else like us out there?”
“Maybe,” Barry says. “I think… I think maybe there’s a reason I have these powers. Like I should be helping people like you.”
“I didn’t do this to be a trendsetter. I did it because I wanted to do the right thing.”
“And I want to too.”
“...with me?” Tommy blinks.
“I, uh, I’ve actually got a team of my own. But we can collaborate—”
“No,” Tommy says immediately, voice hard. “I won’t work with STAR Labs.”
“Did they…” Barry leans in, whispering conspiratorily. “Should I not work with them?”
“You do what you want, man. But… me and Harrison Wells have beef.”
“Beef?”
“Like generational beef type shit. I don’t want to be in the same room as him let alone work with him.”
It’s like watching Barry’s worldview being shattered in real time. “What did he do to you?”
Tommy crosses his arms around his middle, looking away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Right, yeah, of course.” Barry nods. “It’s just— if it’s about the particle accelerator, you have to know it’s not his fault—”
“But it is!” Tommy snaps. “He knew that the particle accelerator was going to explode but he did nothing about it.”
“He knew?” Barry whispers.
“An employee warned him. Showed him the calculations, told him it could explode, but was blackmailed into staying silent about it all.”
“I… I don’t understand.”
“Harrison Wells isn’t a good guy. He’s a liar and manipulator and he—”
“He what?”
Tommy’s fists clench at his side. “There’s a reason his kid left the moment he turned 18.”
The implications sink in and Barry goes quiet. “Thank you for telling me all of this. But… I’m still going to work with him.”
Hurt pangs in his chest.
“Not because I trust his word over yours. But because if he knew, if he is the man you say he is, then there’s a reason why he wants me to use these powers. Maybe there’s a reason he wanted me to have these powers, and I need to figure out why.” Barry starts to walk away but Tommy calls after him.
“I hope you do figure it out. And when you do… I hope he gets what he deserves.”
.-~*~-.
That night, on Tommy’s run back to his place, he’s knocked off course by a man in yellow, lightning red and white glowing eyes.
Tommy immediately tries to flee, but the man pummels him into the concrete, holding a vibrating hand over his heart.
“Tell me one reason that I shouldn’t put this through your chest and kill you right now?”
And even with the distorted voice, Tommy knows. He just knows.
“Father?”
The hand stills, but the man doesn’t pull away.
“Thomas?” He laughs bitterly. “Of course. Fuck! Of course! Of course it would’ve activated the meta gene in you too. Absolutely fucking worthless the moment you were born but finally given a purpose when I remade you just like I remade him.”
Tommy tries to pull away but his father’s grip is too strong. “Father, you’re scaring me.”
“Oh, am I?” He grins. “Good. You should be scared.” He caresses Tommy’s cheek almost reverently. “All this time, and I could’ve gotten home. I wasted nine months on Barry Allen when I could’ve used you.”
“Home?” Tommy asks, voice trembling.
Without responding, his father runs them to the ruins of where the particle accelerator once was.
“With my genes, surely you’ve gotta be strong enough.”
“Strong enough for what?” Tommy realizes now that his father had been lying about his paralysis. Seeing him standing, grinning manically at him, sends a chill down his spine.
“You better start running, Thomas.” He straps some sort of metal contraption to Tommy’s chest. “Wouldn’t want to find out what would happen if I caught you.”
And with that the race began. Tommy’s thoughts go blank, his focus just zeroing in on survival and embracing Prime and her power.
She flows within him, his speed charged and her motivation pulsing through his veins.
Something opens in the corner of his eye, something that feels distantly familiar, but he has no capability to focus on it, too focused on running, running, running.
“Yes!” his father shouts. “Yes!” Tommy sees in his peripherals as his father runs towards the strange rift but is knocked off course by a blur of yellow lightning. “NO!” his father roars before getting into brutal combat with Barry Allen.
Tommy rushes to try and save the man from his father’s rage, but just gets caught in the crossfire, their blows crossing onto him.
Tommy didn’t think Barry Allen to be an angry man, but to see the visceral hatred behind his hits he aims at his father are startling and though a part of Tommy wants to protect the man who raised him, he knows that this is what his father deserves.
There’s a sickening crack and his father falls limply to the ground.
“Is he—?” Tommy asks, voice shaking.
His father groans weakly and a part of Tommy is relieved and the other is petrified.
“You killed my mother,” Barry says. “Why?”
“Because I hate you!” The words are ripped out of his throat, guttural and loathing.
Barry takes a step back. “You were trying to kill me.” His brows furrow with confusion. “I was just a kid!”
“You weren’t from where I came from.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You never did.”
“I didn’t know you!”
“But I knew you. You were my hero. You were everyone’s hero.”
“You’re from the future,” Tommy says, the realization making him sick.
“Ah, you were always a clever one, weren’t you, Thomas?”
Barry does a double take of Tommy, realizing who he is, and his relation with the man lying in front of them, broken spine but still holding the power over the two of them.
“We’re enemies,” he tells Barry. “Rivals. Opposites. Reverses of one another.”
“Why? Why were we enemies?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. What matters is neither of us was strong enough to defeat the other. That is, until I learned your secret. Your name. Barry Allen. And I finally knew how to defeat you once and for all. Travel back in time, kill you as a child,” he smiles with a dark giddy. “Wipe you from the face of the earth.” His smile falls. “But then you, future you, followed me back and we fought. We both landed some pretty solid shots, but then you, future you, got your younger self out. I was furious. But then I thought… what if you were to suffer a tragedy? Something so horrible, so traumatic, that your child self would never recover, and you would never become the Flash. So I stabbed your mother in the heart and I was free.”
“But you weren’t,” Tommy says. “Because you’re still here.”
“I lost my way home. I lost my ability to harness the Speed Force.”
The Speed Force? Prime… is called the Speed Force?”
“Which is why you had me,” Tommy says, the realization making him nauseous.
“I thought surely my power would be inherited. That you’d be graced with the power of the Speed Force and I could raise you to be perfect. You would get me home. But you weren’t born with it. So I waited. I waited and I raised you and I dealt with this burden I brought into existence but your speed never developed and I realized I wasted years on nothing! You were nothing but a disappointment and a failure!”
Tears well in Tommy’s eyes.
“You know it was so funny. You look so much like me. I thought people would notice how much you weren’t Harrison Wells son.”
“Whose son am I?”
He chuckles darkly. “Eobard Thawne. You’re a Thawne, Thomas. Not a Wells.”
“I am not your son,” Tommy says. “You were never my father. Not in the ways that mattered.”
Eobard scoffs. “And that’s the one thing I could never get out of you. Your defiance. No matter how compliant you’d pretend to be, so polite, so obedient, you were always so defiant.”
“So what now?” Tommy says. “You go home to the future and what? We can keep changing the future. We can make sure that you never are born.”
“Time works in mysterious ways. As does the Speed Force.”
“Stop being cryptic and just tell me what the fuck it is you want.”
“I just want to go home,” Eobard says. He turns to Barry with a grin. “And I can give you what you want, Barry, if you help me. You can go back and save your mother. You can prevent your father from going to prison. You can reunite the Allen family—”
Before Tommy can process what’s happening, Barry is snapping the man’s neck and he falls silent and dead to the ground.
Tommy howls out a scream of terror and stares with tears streaming down his cheeks.
His father was a horrible man. He neglected him. He hurt him. He hated him.
But despite it all, Tommy still loved him. He loved him and now he’s…
But he was always going to leave, wasn’t he? And he didn’t give a single shit about Tommy through it all.
Worthless. Disappointment. Failure.
Barry stares at Tommy with fear and guilt. “Thomas—”
“It’s Tommy,” he says through a sob. “He never bothered to know my own fucking name.”
His father’s killer pulls Tommy into his arms and he cries. He cries and cries for the father he lost and the father he never had and the childhood he had and the childhood he didn’t and cried for whatever the future is going to be.
.-~*~-.
A lab accident.
That’s Harrison Wells’s reported death.
And Tommy, of age, inherits everything his father built under the guise of Harrison Wells. Inherits his house, his fortune, STAR Labs and everything that comes with it.
Together with Tommy’s team and Barry’s two friends he had found in Caitlin and Cisco, they become the saviors of Central City, working together to put away those who use their powers for crime and help give voices to those like them who have powers but just want to live.
Barry’s father gets out of prison, Harrison Wells’s videoed confession more than enough to set him free.
Hartley becomes the co-owner of STAR Labs with Tommy and reconciles with his past colleagues.
Techno and Phil move in with him in his father’s old house because, hey, it’s a nice place and they don’t have to pay for it.
And Tommy… he learns how to live without his father, still shadowed by his legacy but creating one of his own.