Paralyzer || Barry Allen (The Flash) Fanfiction

Chapter 19: Piecing It Together

The next day or so I worked on pulling myself back together. So much had gone on while I'd been away, and I felt as if, once again, part of my life had been stolen from me. It may not have been nine months like the previous lapse, but two months was still no minor amount of time to have lost. All because I was cursed with these powers.

Cisco, Caitlin, and Barry tried their best to fill me in on what had happened during my absence. I felt like the kid who'd missed a day of school, and it just so happened that everything took place the one time I wasn't there. It was actually almost unbelievable how much had gone on back here on Earth.

The two people I hadn't known the previous day were apparently two parts of a single metahuman, Firestorm. During the particle accelerator explosion, Dr. Martin Stein -- the older gentleman with white hair I'd seen yesterday -- had brought a device to STAR Labs that he'd spent the past few months working on. It was supposed to achieve some process known as transmutation, the conversion or transformation of two individuals of one species into a single and entirely new species. The force of the matter from the explosion from the particle accelerator was strong enough to initiate the transmutational device, and, thus, Firestorm was created. As if that wasn't strange enough, the other half of Firestorm just happened to be Ronnie Raymond, Caitlin's fiancée who was formerly believed to have died in the explosion.

Then there was the discussion of Dr. Harrison Wells. Barry explained how his original notions of who Dr. Wells was as a person had changed after it was discovered that Mason Bridge, one of Iris' coworkers at Central City Picture News, had gone missing while he was working late one night on an article which supposedly contained evidence that Dr. Wells had killed Simon Stagg. This, in turn, led Barry to delve more into Wells' history until Barry ultimately came to the conclusion that Wells was the Reverse-Flash. The very man who had killed Barry's mother.

Of course, Barry had eventually shared his finding with Cisco and Caitlin after he'd gotten Joe and Eddie in on the matter. Now, the entire crew was forced to keep the whole discovery a secret and act as if nothing was different as we continued to work around the scientist. To my surprise, I wasn't particularly shocked by the news. I always had a feeling that there was something slightly off with Wells, and this information only confirmed my prior assumptions. It just hurt to see Barry struggling to cope with the idea that the person who had seemed to only want to help him and whom he looked up to for so long was the same individual who had caused so much pain and tragedy in the boy's life.

And then, of course, there was mention of the Shadow, who continued to terrorize the city and cause mayhem along with the other villainous metahumans. Yay for me.

Although I had been eager initially to share the findings of my rather unusual journey with the team, I decided to keep it all a secret for the time being. Now that I knew the truth about Harrison Wells, I wasn't sure if I could entrust with him the reality of the Light Force and my connection to it. If he really was the Reverse-Flash -- which I wholeheartedly believed -- then who knew who else he was working with and what his true intentions were. For all I knew he could be working with the Shadow somehow and was planning my demise. It was a stretch, but nothing was out of the question anymore.

In addition to everything else, Joe had somehow been able to get me a job as Barry's lab assistant at the Central City Police Department. While it wasn't necessarily an official position, the role worked just fine for me. I only needed the title so that it wouldn't look suspicious when I came into Barry's lab nearly every day for hours on end. With Wells occupying STAR Labs on a constant basis, Barry's lab had sort of become a refuge that gave us a legitimate excuse to be away from STAR Labs. Cisco and Caitlin also frequented the lab, though not nearly as much as Barry and I considering they had real jobs and a list of duties to attend to back at Wells' lab.