Catching Up || Barry Allen [2]

45| All A Lie

***

Thankfully Cisco came around to accepting his powers and the fact that just because he possessed these great powers it didn't mean that they would make him go rogue. Now we were trying to figure out our best strategy to defeat Zoom, and although Barry was able to successfully increase his speed we need something else against Zoom to ensure that we would be able to take him down without any unexpected complications. 

"You're all set. He won't even know it's there."

"Cause whoever said aesthetics aren't important." Cisco commented. "Not me."

"Hey, Cait, I know how hard this is gonna be for you, but we have to stop him." Barry tried to assure Caitlin who had been quiet throughout all of our planning.

"I know, and I want to be supportive. I just I can't face Jay." Caitlin explained, and although we all felt the deception it was much more personal for Caitlin. She was just beginning to love again when she found out that the man she was moving on with was also the man that had been terrorizing and taunting us for the past couple of months. "Or whatever his real name is."

"What does that mean?" I asked her knowing that there had to be more behind her words. 

"Well, you  guys remember when I was looking for his doppelganger, right?" 

Barry nodded remembering what she had told us that she was researching ways to save Jay from the V-9 that was slowly killing him. "Yeah. And you couldn't find him."

"Because there is no Jay Garrick on this Earth. His doppelganger's name is Hunter Zolomon."

"Hunter Zolomon?"Harrison questioned in disbelief as he looked up from his work. "Are you sure?" 

"Yeah, why?" 

"Well, because on my Earth, Hunter Zolomon was a convicted serial killer." He explained as he began to pull up some files on the computer screen in front of us. A criminal record appeared along with a photo of a man that looked nothing like the one that we had known for the past couple of months.

Harrison went on to tell us that Hunter Zolomon was a serial killer on his Earth convicted on 23 counts of murders. Apparently Hunter witnessed his father kill his mother forcing him to grow up in the foster system. Discovering that the man we knew as Jay was Zoom was enough of a betrayal, but learning everything was a lie was angering. Caitlin had a blank look in her eyes as she took all this information in. I couldn't imagine how she was feeling.

"23?" Cisco repeated in disbelief. "That's, like, some real Hannibal Lecter type level."

"After the trial, Hunter was sent to the Saint Perez Mental Asylum for the Criminally Insane given daily electroshock therapy." Harrison continued to explain, and there was an underlying guilt in his voice. This was clearly very personal for him and not only because this was the man that took away his daughter. "Cure him of his urges and then faded from view." 

"Until the night your particle accelerator exploded." Barry concluded.

"That's right. The dark matter crept into the mental asylum. I had thought piping the explosion underground would limit exposure. I was wrong. All it did was create an unstoppable monster."

"He's not unstoppable." Barry muttered and from the look on his face I could already see that he was already coming up with a plan. "Jay doesn't know that we know who he really is. He thinks that his past is a secret. And I think I have an idea of how we can stop him."

***

"Are you sure Jay can't get in here?" Joe asked us as we all walked into the time vault. This was the only safe space we knew, and the only place we were sure that Hunter didn't know about. At least that was what we were all hoping for. but for some reason it always felt that Zoom was always one step ahead of us.