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 gave 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, but 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, equal to Barry's own. "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.

"Ms. 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, though. “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. Even if anybody else could smell something other than a lightning strike, 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 Detective West 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 it 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 nobody 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 wheelchair 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 or amma 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. 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 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 because even his scent wasn’t giving him away, as if he really was telling the truth about looking, “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 added to appease him.

“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 by your shared desperation. 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 bewildered 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 manage 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 was 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, clearly 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 start to 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. He was blurred again, 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, leaning away as Barry slumped into a chair between him and Caitlin. “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 ever 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 wrist 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 ahis 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.

“– and in fact there’s actually more in periodically renewing the bites as a shared intimacy to reaffirm commitment –”

“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 erotic 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? 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 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. Joe was fiercely protective of his kids.

“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. If Barry had been an alpha Thawne would still be as obsessed as he was in Barry’s universe, Barry was pretty sure. He just wouldn’t have to put up with Joe thinking it was about something it wasn’t.

“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 on the back seat?” 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 world 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. This time he wasn't.

“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.

Chapter Text

“Rough night?” Cisco asked.

Barry squinted at him, trying to pretend he’d only arrived a little before and hadn’t spent a sleepless night curled up under a blanket in the main – defunct, with everything concentrated in the Cortex – employee lounge, trying to pretend he was only sheltering there temporarily so there was no point finding an actual cot or bed to sleep on.

He’d only run a little way before he’d realized he couldn’t knock on Iris-and-maybe-Eddie’s door – first, if they were living together, it wasn’t in the same place he remembered, and second, he just didn’t want to know if Iris would have the same reaction as Joe.

He desperately wanted to think that she wouldn’t, but he’d never have thought Joe would react so badly either.

He told himself it was something about the way the world he was in worked, the different biological processes and cultural priorities. Maybe Joe couldn’t help reacting the way he did. Maybe he just needed a little time. A little distance. Maybe...

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

He’d tried to patrol – stopped a mugging or two, fixed a couple of potholes, helped put out a fire, rescued an unappreciative cat from a tree – and only when he was sure that even Thawne had probably gone home did he go back to S.T.A.R. Labs.

He’d spent plenty of late nights in the building, slept there before, but maybe because it hadn’t exactly been the most secure building in his world, maybe because it was still Thawne’s in this one, it had felt wrong being there alone. Not quite like trespassing, but like he was vulnerable in a way he shouldn’t have been. It was something to do with the building explicitly being ‘territory’, Barry thought – pack territory, since ‘Wells’ shared it with Caitlin and Cisco just as much he sheltered them in it. That was probably why some part of Barry felt like he was going against some unwritten rule trying to hide away inside without Thawne's knowledge or approval.

The faint light through the windows was wrong, where he was lying was wrong, the blanket was wrong – he couldn’t get comfortable no matter how he rearranged the furniture, kept twisting and turning in whatever easily defended spot he tried to make to curl up in and hide, jerking his head towards imagined sounds to stare blindly into the dark, constantly waking from the pathetic half-sleep that was the best he could manage expecting to see Thawne staring at him, judging him. There was no way he didn’t know Barry was there, that he wasn’t waiting for the perfect moment to rub Barry’s misery in.

He’d given up on pretending to sleep long before the sun rose, was sat in the Cortex looking through the metahuman files when the rest of the team started arriving.

He should have left for the precinct before anyone else arrived. It would be the sensible thing to do if he really didn’t want anyone to know he’d spent the night. Something had made him stay anyway. He didn’t know what it was that he needed but he did know he had no chance of getting it if he ran away from the team.

“What are you even doing here so early?” Caitlin wondered, eyeing the haphazard pile of crossword puzzles on the desk Barry had tried to entertain himself with after cleaning. “Was there a meta last night? Is there something wrong with your powers? Do you feel okay?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Barry lied. “I just… felt like seeing you guys, that’s all.”

Dr. Wells handed him a coffee with a perfectly blank expression, his scent already faded to similar blankness under freshly applied blockers.

For just a moment something made Barry want to reach out and scrub his wrist over his hair again, re-mark him and ruin the carefully reinforced distance. Not that it would work – Barry was wearing his own scent-blockers, Ω patches marked extra strength applied after a long shower spent scrubbing absolutely everywhere with those scent-neutral washes. In a fit of paranoia he’d also cleaned the lounge and every corridor he could remember running down, worried he might have left some kind of lingering miasma of misery anywhere he’d paused for longer than a second.

Scent-marking him wouldn’t really make Barry feel better, whatever that momentary impulse said. He was feeling spiteful, that was all. Thawne could count himself lucky Barry felt the need to cover his own distress more than he wanted to mess with him.

Besides, he was holding coffee now.

“How did your talk with Detective West go?” Wells asked, his voice so neutral that Caitlin and Cisco exchanged concerned glances behind his back.

You know damn well how it went, Barry thought sourly, then shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Hm,” Wells said, and Cisco and Caitlin looked even more alarmed.

“You don’t usually come here before work,” Caitlin said fretfully. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” Her eyes widened as something occurred to her and she asked in a rush: “Are you experiencing a heightened sensitivity to certain scents? Either attraction or repulsion? Oh no, wait, that’s useless for you… Are you feeling paranoid or defensive when alone? You don’t look flushed but does your skin feel hot? Is your heart rate elevated? Are you experiencing a lack of appetite or—”

“I’m fine!” Barry said. “Seriously. I just felt like seeing everybody, okay.”

Strangely, that didn’t seem to soothe anyone. Cisco looked apprehensive while Caitlin glanced over at Wells, her expression questioning, and he shook his head slightly in response.

“Okay,” she said uneasily, turning back to Barry. “It’s just – unusual. Doesn’t it make it easier for you to be late for work, coming here beforehand?”

“You have superspeed, how do you even manage that?” Cisco said. “I mean, we know how, but still. Impresses me every time.”

“Thanks, it’s a talent,” Barry said, watching Wells set up before he finally tried sipping his coffee. Damn him, it was exactly the way Barry liked it, even if the caffeine no longer did anything for him.

“A talent that’s going to be exercised soon if you don’t start moving,” Wells said, and Barry dropped into the nearest chair instead of heading to the door as Wells was clearly hinting he should do.

“I’ve got plenty of time,” he said stubbornly.

“Not if you want to avoid having to reapply your scent-blockers,” Wells said, looking over at him – finally – and shaking his head. “Too fast and you’ll overwhelm them. If you keep your pace relatively slow – for a speedster – and wait a minute or two before you enter the precinct you should be fine and won’t be late replacing them. There’ll still be some extrinsic scent transfer, but that’s to be expected. The blockers are for you, not everything around you.”

“So learn time management is what you’re saying,” Barry said, scowling.

“Learn the speedster equivalent of time management,” Wells agreed, raising his own mug in a toast to Barry’s grumpy expression. Barry drained his coffee and made sure to meet his eyes as he set it on top of some stacked reports.

“Mission level impossible,” Cisco said, shaking his head sadly. Neither he nor Caitlin were wearing scent-blockers but Barry pretended to believe the joke was all there was anyway. There wasn’t something off in Cisco’s scent that gave away how worried he really was and had been from the moment the team had found Barry already in the Cortex when they entered. It was just the contrast between Dr. Wells wearing scent-blockers – presumably from the moment he arrived – and Cisco and Caitlin choosing not to. That was all.

“I can be on time,” Barry protested.

“Sorry, Barry, but I’ve got to agree with Cisco,” Caitlin said, shrugging off his betrayed look. “But since you’re here and determined to be late anyway…”

“No,” Barry said quickly, skittering backwards as she grabbed his coffee cup and lifted it away to reveal the pile of reports was suspiciously familiar, much of it marked with her handwriting rather than Wells’. “Actually, you’re right, I should be leaving – right now –”

He didn’t turn and run though, still wasn’t ready for what might be waiting at the precinct – or what might not.

“Just give in,” Cisco advised. “Caitlin’s worked really hard on those reports, she’s not going to let them go to waste.”

“It’s important information!” Caitlin said. “Extremely! More than ever! We can’t keep putting this off!”

“Nope,” Barry said, taking a few blurred steps away. “Can’t do this today, gotta be on time for work for once!”

“Oh, wait, Barry!” Caitlin blurted, and Barry hesitated, just in case. “Your collar--”

Barry blinked and didn’t shy away as Caitlin hurriedly rushed towards him and fussed with it, somehow managing to button it to his chin without also making him feel like he was choking. She held his shoulders for a moment afterwards, eyes scanning him up and down, then brushed them off – pointlessly, Barry was pretty sure – with quick nervous movements before stepping back.

“All good,” she said, smiling a little too brightly for how worried her eyes were.

“No, hang on,” Cisco said quickly, stepping in and grabbing Barry’s wrist, checking his shirt sleeves were buttoned, then circling around him, tugging his jacket down for the proper hang, undoing one button at his neck – “so ohe doesn’t look like a complete prude, Caitlin!” – and slapping his back lightly when he was done as if the overcompensating masculinity of the gesture in any way canceled out how he’d been fussing like a mother hen over his appearance.

“Cisco…”

“Just checking! Want my best friend to look good for ohis actual job, you know?”

“I thought I was your best friend?” Caitlin said, mock-offended.

“My best beta friend! Barry’s my best omega friend!”

Cisco did tend to fuss about the fit of the Flash suit too, Barry supposed. He decided to let it go, whatever was happening. He looked over at Wells to catch him watching him rather than Caitlin and Cisco arguing lightheartedly over friendship levels – “Keep up like that and you’ll be saying I’m your best 1B friend!”

“What, you don’t want to fix my outfit too?” Barry asked sarcastically, and Wells smiled.

“I think Caitlin and Cisco have you covered,” he said mildly, and Barry frowned suspiciously at him and then at himself, wondering if he was missing something. He’d done his best with the spare clothing kept at the labs to find something that resembled what he’d usually wear to work – plus or minus some weird quirks that were probably perfectly normal to the universe he was in. He thought he’d done a pretty good job?

“You’re fine,” Wells said, strangely indulgent – pleased, like something had been corrected. Barry had been wearing something wrong, then. They could have just said! “But it’s time for you to run, Barry.”

Barry looked over at the clock and swore. He could cover the distance to the precinct in seconds but was that slow enough? Should he give it minutes instead? He didn’t want to have to scrub down and re-apply the stupid blockers – he wasn’t sure exactly how long it took them to start working, the instructions said they could vary by individual. He’d just be hoping that by the time he ran into someone – almost immediately, with his luck – they’d already be doing their job, and what if they weren’t? What if he turned out to be broadcasting the Flash’s scent all over the place and couldn’t tell?

“Damn,” he said. “Damn, damn, damn—”

He started moving away in the speedster equivalent of a jog, slow enough to still get to hear Cisco say “Every time,” in an amused tone of voice. Which was unfair, superspeed obviously made it easier to be late, not less, Barry was sure. He always thought he had more time than he did, enough to do everything, enough that even if he inevitably got distracted along the way it wouldn’t matter… Except that it always did, because Barry’s luck was the worst.

He was going to ignore that ‘Wells’ had probably never been late for anything he didn’t mean to be. That didn’t count. Thawne probably did it on purpose, he probably tried to be early for everything, Barry’s reverse in every way he could be.

Barry wasn’t going to let him be right this time. Barry was going to be on time. Barry was going to be early, even. He was going to find Joe and talk to him and –

And Barry was late.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, rocking on his heels, eyeing the precinct’s doors anxiously, trying to count a minute properly before he went inside, just in case.

He wouldn’t be confronting Joe, then.

Not confronting, actually, that sounded antagonistic – talk. He needed to talk to Joe, and not have it turn into an argument, somehow, and he needed… He needed…

If he had been asked in the middle of his miserable night at the lab he probably would have said a hug, embarrassingly. But everything looked better in daylight and without the dark pressing in he didn’t feel so alone and rejected any more.

Now what he felt he needed was less reassurance from someone else and more comfort for himself. To be honest – maybe because he’d been reminded of it recently – he really wanted to crawl inside a blanket fort like he was eleven again and pretend nothing could get to him. It wouldn’t actually help at all but if he was going to be wallowing in misery anyway he could at least be allowed to be comfortable while doing it.

He took a deep breath, reminded himself that Thawne was always watching – he gave the nearest security camera a half-hearted wave – and straightened his back, mentally preparing himself for whatever might be waiting inside in.

Which wasn’t Joe.

Obviously.

Because Barry was late. And Joe was already busy. Not avoiding Barry at all.

...He might have been able to believe that, if he’d managed to catch even a glimpse of Joe just once.

Barry had tried avoiding Joe at work once or twice before, when they were arguing or he was feeling guilty about something he didn’t want Joe to know about – he knew it took effort. The precinct wasn’t that big.

Sometimes Joe was on patrol, sure, sometimes Barry was busy in his lab, fine, sometimes their schedules just didn’t line up, but when one was making a concerted effort to find the other…

For a moment it made him wish he had creepy invasive cameras everywhere in the city and could just ask a captive A.I. to tell him where the hell Joe was. It must be so nice to always be able to find someone when you wanted them—

Thawne was not going to make him appreciate mass surveillance voyeurism. Even if Barry had to concede that he would be willing to use it first and think about the ethics never when it came to saving lives as the Flash. Personal use was different.

It was time for desperate measures. Barry went to the bullpen.

In the long list of mistakes Barry had made in his life, the decision definitely wasn’t in the top ten. It might have been in the top twenty, however.

He hadn’t been intending to scent for Joe. He’d meant to ask, like a normal person, where Joe was. But the moment he’d stepped inside the whole thing had hit him like the fist of Grodd – dozens of clashing personal scents of varying intensities made even worse by a miserable background radiation of stress, paper, ink and stale coffee in unpleasant quantities. There was gun oil, and leather from the holsters, cheap detergent and cheaper aftershave, perfumes and deodorants and someone was tired and someone was furious and someone was chewing mints--

Barry backed himself away until he was in an empty hallway, hunching over and trying not to heave. He covered his face with his hand, tried to pretend that what he was doing wasn’t desperately seeking the faint scent Cisco had left on his cuffs when he checked his sleeves in the morning, to focus on it to exclude everything else.

“Barry! There you are!”

“Eddie,” Barry breathed, straightening up automatically, trying not to look sick. He swallowed hard, forced the bile back down. Eddie was here. Eddie was alive.

Of course Eddie was alive and well, he had to be, and yet – Barry hadn’t known it until he actually saw him.

“Heard you were late again this morning,” Eddie said, clapping his hand on Barry’s arm. Barry swayed a little, strangely dazed. Eddie was alive. Eddie was in front of him. Smiling, warm, alive. The world wasn’t so bad after all. “What was the excuse this time?”

“Uh,” Barry said, trying to blink away a suspicious dampness from his eyes. “I… overslept?”

“No, don’t go with that,” Eddie advised, shaking his head. “You look like you didn’t sleep at all.” He made a face. “Wanna talk about it?”

“You are such a – such a good guy,” Barry said helplessly. He'd forgotten, somehow, all the reasons Eddie had been Iris' first choice. “Could you maybe try to be a little less perfect?”

“Okay,” Eddie said, eyebrows going up, “what’s going on? Is Joe still mad about me and Iris? Is he making you feel like a bad guy for not telling him or is it just uncomfortable in the house right now because he’s annoyed or--”

Barry shook his head and said, honestly, “Iris is lucky to have you.”

Eddie's shoulders relaxed a little, his smile widening into something Barry would have once jealously called dopey without any of the affection he felt now looking at it. “I’m lucky to have aher,” he said. "And I really appreciate, you know… I kinda thought you didn't like it. Us. Not that I thought you have a problem with AB relationships! I just, I mean, you always acted a little -"

“Jealous?” Barry said. He studied the way Eddie's eyes crinkled at the corners, the cheerful smile that took him from blandly handsome to something worthy of the double-take he used to sometimes catch women doing. “Iris is my best friend. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t like someone that made, ah – her happy?”

Nowhere near the friend she deserved. Barry exhaled, and admitted in a rush, “I was, though. I don’t know why I expected to wake up from a nine month coma to find that nothing had changed but I kinda did. I was jealous of all the time I’d lost, and I didn’t know how to handle the two of you because for me it was like something out of nowhere. It was really petty.”

“Aw, buddy,” Eddie said after a moment spent digesting that, blinking rapidly. He threw his arms around Barry, hugging him tightly. “It’s okay, Barry.”

“Ugh!” Barry blurted, screwing his face up and trying to turn his head away. Eddie smelled – not terrible, not wrong, nowhere near as bad as the bullpen all by himself, but… Barry hated it, whatever it was. What was Eddie was fine, he guessed, and what was Iris – well he knew he liked that, even if it also made him feel a little weird and wrong to like it – but the combination of the two that should have been perfectly nice and inoffensive somehow made him want to gag.

“Sorry!” Eddie said quickly, hastily letting go and stepping back. “Sorry! I forgot! I didn’t think –”

“Did you…” Bond? Mate? Was there a difference between those things? Was it a significant difference?

“I should have applied blockers. It’s just, you know. New. I didn’t think it would affect you so badly? I know you’re an unmated omega and everything, but it’s not like you’d want to challenge me for Iris.” Eddie laughed, quick and nervous, hand rubbing his neck, presumably where Iris had bitten him. “Gross, right? I wasn’t suggesting – I know you don’t – you can’t help how your nose takes something sometimes.”

“Uh-huh,” Barry said faintly, trying to work out just what was so objectionable about Eddie’s scent.

“Is it because you don’t see me as family?” Eddie asked uncertainly, looking a little wounded at the idea. “I know things can be slightly more awkward with alpha and omega siblings when they start dating people and forming new familial packs… Not that we’re there yet!”

“I don’t think that’s it?” Barry said, just as lost for an idea as Eddie – more so. He covered his nose with his hands, tried to block Eddie’s scent out completely. Too strong, too much, too Iris-and-Eddie in a way that made his non-existent hackles rise. Maybe if he were an actual omega he’d know what it was that he was reacting badly to, if it was normal or not. If it wasn’t normal… He could work it out by himself, surely.

“Please don’t throw up,” Eddie said worriedly, hands hovering near Barry’s elbows like he didn’t dare to actually touch him – worried he might actually throw up on his shoes in response, presumably. He was right to worry, Barry thought queasily. “That’d be a really bad sign for Iris and me, if you can’t stand our mixed scent.”

“It’s fine,” Barry lied, reasonably sure his scent blockers were still effective and he could get away with it. “You’re fine. I just – I’ve been having a little trouble lately, with scents.”

Technically true, the best kind of lie. Or so Thawne would probably say.

“That’s good,” Eddie said, relieved, then hastily added, “I mean, that’s bad! You should get that checked out. But it’s good it’s not me and Iris?”

“It’s not you and Iris,” Barry said, pretty sure that it was and that he didn’t know what to do about it except avoid Eddie when he wasn’t wearing scent blockers. “I had the same trouble in the pen, I don’t know, it’s just…”

He waved his hand airily, trying to dismiss it, but Eddie frowned.

“I don’t know, Barry, I really think you should get that checked out. It could be a pretty bad sign--”

“Allen! My office.”

Barry winced, whirling to look at Captain Singh.

“I didn’t do anything!” he blurted.

“Barry, no,” Eddie groaned.

“Now, Allen,” Singh said, even less impressed, starting to walk off in its direction, and Barry sent Eddie a pleading look.

“It might not be anything bad?” Eddie said hopefully. “I’ll wait for you –”

“No, you won’t,” Captain Singh called back. “You have job to do, Thawne. Get to it.”

“Okay, after work – no wait, Iris is working late… Meet up at Jitters tomorrow, you, me, and Iris? If Singh doesn’t fire you,” he added, making the man turn round and scowl at him, unimpressed.

“Allen’s not getting fired. You might be if you don’t get back to work.”

“Yes Captain!” Eddie said, throwing Barry one last sympathetic look before he rushed off – in the opposite direction, Barry was unimpressed to note, even though the chances of there being anything he needed down that corridor were very, very low.

Singh grumbled under his breath, irritated, and Barry hurried to catch up, slipping into the office just in time to avoid having the door close in his face.

He grimaced automatically the moment it clicked shut behind him, trapping him inside the room. Like the office at S.T.A.R. Labs the place smelled like its owner in a way Barry wouldn’t really have registered before, but Singh’s scent was a lot stronger, more… invasive was the wrong word, since Barry was the one temporarily invading the space. Domineering? Obvious. It was more obvious, which made sense since the room was still in constant use.

“You’re not in trouble,” Singh said firmly, sinking into the chair behind his desk, tilting his head back to see Barry’s face.

Make the interviewee feel at ease psychologically by placing yourself in a lower position, Barry thought wryly, staying near the door anyway. It wasn’t like Wells being constantly seated made any difference to his ability to dominate people when he wanted to. And he wasn’t Barry’s boss.

“Great,” Barry said. “So. Uh. What’s the problem?”

Singh sighed, rubbed awkwardly at his chin. “You’re not subtle,” he said. “About a lot of things.”

He gave Barry a sardonic look, somewhere between exasperated and almost fond. Barry wondered if he was talking about Barry’s pitiful excuses for being late. Car troubles when he didn’t own car, he’d just been asking to get a disciplinary for that one.

“It’s not exactly difficult to miss that you’re having trouble with scents when you bolt out of the bullpen like your feet are on fire.”

Oh, that was… better than he was expecting. Singh could have noticed something way worse than Barry struggling with a level of sensory input alien to him. Even if it shouldn’t have been alien to him – he could probably get away with saying he’d been hit by a meta that overwhelmed people by dialing their senses up.

“Look. I normally wouldn’t ask this, you know that, Allen,” Singh said. “And I only ask because it could potentially affect your ability to be at crime scenes. If you need to be put on lab-only duties for a bit, that’s fine, I’m happy to accommodate. But if it’s something that could reoccur, a temporary fix isn’t going to help anybody in the long run.”

“Okay?” Barry said uneasily.

Singh took a deep breath. “Hyperosmia is a common symptom for both pre-rut and pre-heat. I know it didn’t used to be yours, but is it possible the lightning changed that? You haven’t had a heat since your coma, if this is a sign you might be recovering we need to start looking into getting cover–”

“No!” Barry yelped. “No – it – it’s not that.”

“I’m happy to let you have the time off. Even if it turns out to be a false heat or something like that. That’s still a sign of improvement, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“It’s definitely not that,” Barry insisted. His face felt like it was on fire. It hadn’t occurred to him but of course Singh would have to consider things like… like a recurring medical issue that might impact the work availability of one of his people. Heats. Barry apparently being occasionally so horny he couldn’t work and that was expected and compensated for and everybody knew about it, oh god, how did anybody get anything done without spontaneously combusting in embarrassment? Barry was going to claw his face off.

“Normally I’d say you know your body best,” Singh said, looking nowhere near as uncomfortable with the topic as Barry, “but being struck by lightning isn’t an occurrence you just bounce back from completely unscathed, even without the whole…” he waved a hand, “particle accelerator mess. You still getting those check-ups at S.T.A.R. Labs?”

“Yes,” Barry said immediately, assuming it was a common excuse for when some metahuman messed him up – or he was just stupidly impulsive all by himself. Even worse, a combination of the two. He was never going to live the lightning psychosis down, even if he was the only one to remember it any more. Hopefully he was the only one to remember it.

“Good. I’m assuming pre-heat has a similar effect on decision-making capabilities as pre-rut, so let me assure you, I get it – you might think you’re coping fine, you might think you’re not being as impulsive or short-sighted as you actually are. You might be convinced you’re being perfectly rational – I’ve known some alphas like that.” He rolled his eyes, the fond irritation in the action telling Barry he was actually talking about his husband.

Right, so that was why his scent was so strong – double the alpha – but didn’t put Barry on edge like that of Iris or Wells – he was married or mated or whatever, so not a threat. Not that Singh was in any way a threat to Barry, just to some weird alien instincts.

“It can take a while to notice you’re not actually acting normal. If those check-ups find anything out of the ordinary for you – take the damn time off.”

“Uh. Will do? I guess?” Barry said. “It’s really not—”

“Get that scent sensitivity checked out,” Singh said. “I have enough to deal with, I don’t need you running out in the middle of processing a crime scene. Unless it’s an attacking meta thing you have to deal with,” he added grudgingly. “Try and remember this is your actual job.”

“Sure,” Barry said, nodding obediently. “I’ll… do that. I’m free to go?”

“You’re free to go,” Singh said, dragging a file towards him with an exhausted sigh.

“Great,” Barry said blankly, turning and fumbling with the door handle until it let him out into a blessedly less enclosed space. The air wasn’t any fresher, but it wasn’t all his irritated Captain’s scent either.

“Great,” he repeated to himself, somewhere between Singh’s office and the stairs. “So he knows? And Wells didn’t warn me.”

Because Wells wouldn’t know to warn Barry, had no idea what was and wasn’t shared between their universes when it came to things unrelated to the big differences.

“Great. This is fine,” Barry said. He wheeled his chair into the center of his lab, dropped into it and stared out of the window. The rooftop opposite was empty no matter how long he stared at it. Puddles formed, but no blurred yellowed figure appeared. Not even the faintest flicker of red lightning. “No big deal.”

It wasn’t, really. He liked Captain Singh, and he trusted him. It just wasn’t what Barry remembered. There was so much Barry was missing, and it was the things completely unrelated to the strange new biology and evolution that were somehow even more disorienting. He’d been clinging to whatever similarities he could find and it turned out there weren’t as many as he thought.

You’re a stranger wearing my kid’s body. Pretending to be him, acting like you have any right to be here--

Barry shook his head wildly, stood up. It was getting dark outside.

He wanted to go home. He wanted Joe to hug him. He wanted to sleep in his own bed.

He wanted to go to Iris. He wanted her to pull him inside her home and tell him it was okay to stay the night without asking any of the questions he knew she would. He wanted to think he wouldn’t recoil at her scent, that he would be okay if she hugged him. He wanted to think she would be okay with hugging him even if he told her the truth about who he was.

He had nowhere to go but S.T.A.R. Labs.

Chapter Text

S.T.A.R. Labs had new rooms.

Really, they were old rooms, had obviously been there from the moment the building was designed and built, but they were new to Barry.

Barry had been trailing through the empty building, trying to find some corner he might get more than five minutes unbroken sleep in, even though he should have been able to manage it in the lounge just fine – he’d always been able to sleep just about anywhere when exhausted, and he was exhausted now – only to stumble across one. Backtracking, he’d come to realize there were multiple unfamiliar rooms with cleverly hidden shortcuts to – from, he guessed – the Cortex and other areas that would once have had the highest foot traffic when S.T.A.R. Labs was active.

He wouldn’t have known those paths were there if it hadn’t been for the faintest of unfamiliar scents that still marked them – janitors, he guessed, before Thawne decided they were too much a security risk given how Snart had gained access to steal the cold gun. The doors were marked with A or Ω or sometimes a combination, and all locked, whatever keys or access cards required kept somewhere else – maybe forgotten in a desk drawer in the Cortex.

He thought about phasing through a door and checking out what was inside, but it was a passing impulse and he managed to shrug it off. If they were still important they wouldn’t be sealed off and abandoned.

He cocked his head to one side, still staring at the ‘Α’ door, wrapping his borrowed blanket around his shoulders to keep off an imaginary chill, the only cape he’d ever wear because that was a deadly and/or hilarious accident waiting to happen. It wasn’t the first time the layout of S.T.A.R Labs had changed on him, but it was the first time the change had been inherent, not a later remodeling he’d missed by changing timelines.

The door, the corridor, the area – it didn’t smell like Wells. Thawne. It didn’t smell like anything much, just like it wouldn’t on Barry’s Earth. Somehow that was disquieting now – being able to tell how disused a place was.

He moved on, bothered by a constant gnawing feeling of not safe here.

It was stupid, and he knew it was stupid, that if he just curled up in the lounge and stayed still he’d eventually drift off to sleep, however uneasy…

But he couldn’t fight against his own brain stubbornly insisting he was somehow out in the open when he wasn’t, that he needed somewhere safer, somewhere he could see every entrance and exit, somewhere that was his. Or if not his personally – since nowhere in the building was – then he guessed the next best thing would be somewhere the rest of the team knew about and spent time in – somewhere their scents lingered enough to trick his messed up subconscious into thinking he wasn’t alone and would be protected.

Stupid subconscious. Stupid weird new instincts that he didn’t even know for sure he was reading right. Suppose he curled up under a desk in the Cortex and that didn’t help? Then he’d have a terrible night’s sleep and the humiliation of everybody knowing he’d been sulking there all night like an abandoned puppy if he didn’t clean up and clear out quickly enough in the morning.

He needed a better blanket, Barry decided. There had to be something wrong with the one he had now. It was too thin, or the wrong texture, or – something. Something that made it impossible to sleep.

And a pillow. There had to be one that still smelled a little like him now, even after cleaning. He’d slept nine months away here.

The other Barry had. They both –

Blanket. Pillow. Something he could fix.

“Found you,” he announced to nobody at all when he stumbled across them, then cringed at the sound of his own voice, too loud in the empty dark. They smelled clean, but off – the detergent used, he guessed. He couldn’t stop noticing the faint chemical wrongness to the scent and desperately wished he’d accidentally ended up in a normal universe with ordinary senses. Or that whatever automatic scent-filtering people clearly had to be capable of would just kick in for him already.

He looked between the folded blankets and sheets for the bed he’d lost nine months of his life to and the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, which suddenly didn’t seem quite as inadequate as it had before. It was exactly the same as any of them, nothing would change. It wasn’t the blanket’s fault he didn’t feel right.

He shut the cupboard they were stored in and turned around.

Somewhere safe. Somewhere small and safe and hidden that he could trust nobody else would find –

The Time Vault would be secure, wouldn’t it? It would stink like the Reverse Flash but there was no place safer at this point in time, probably. Thawne had changed the access allowances when he knew Barry was already certain of his identity as the Reverse Flash, Gideon had once admitted – he’d wanted Barry to know, to walk in and see that suit and feel like the world was collapsing around him even as the puzzle pieces he’d always wanted to make sense started to fall into place. But before then there had been more defenses and fail-safes than first seemed – Wells could hardly risk an employee accidentally stumbling across it just by happening to rest their hand a second too long against the wrong spot of corridor wall.

Which all looked the goddamned same.

Barry scowled, trailing his hand down the walls. Here? No. There? No. Had he really gotten that turned around hunting those new-old rooms? He was sure this was the spot. Had Thawne locked the touchpad or whatever the opening mechanism was?

A faint growl escaped his mouth without meaning to, and Barry grimaced. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to go home. He wanted to still have a home. He wanted –

“What are you doing here, Barry?”

Barry recoiled, glaring. The sight of Harrison Wells standing casually in the middle of the corridor, wheelchair nowhere in sight, shouldn’t have been a shock after so long. It was just – disconcerting, Barry decided, when he was so dedicated to keeping up the act during the day.

“What are you doing here?”

“This is my building,” Thawne said flatly, unimpressed, watching him with his hands still in his pockets, like he couldn’t throw a punch in the time it took to blink. “I’m fairly certain I told you that while you are excluded from the speedster-specific security measures I would still be alerted when you entered the premises.”

“What took you then?” Barry snapped. He’d been wandering around the place for hours – or what felt like hours, at least. He’d spent the entire night before. And Thawne was only bothering to show up now?

“Barry,” Thawne said. Nothing more.

Barry rubbed at his face. His eyes were prickling for no reason. No reason at all. “You knew. You had to know Joe would – that he would react… the way he did.”

“Most people don’t move in our dimensions,” Thawne said, carefully not admitting to anything, as always. “It doesn’t excuse him –”

“No, he’s right to be upset,” Barry insisted.

Thawne made a sharp noise, teeth clicking as he snapped them in some instinctive display of irritation, then exhaled.

“Detective West is particularly… unadventurous with his thinking, I grant you,” he said, so calm and flat Barry didn’t need his scent to know he was anything but. It was there anyway, unmissable, acrid contempt turning it bitter and burned.

“Don’t,” Barry snapped.

“But humans can become used to anything if you give them enough time,” Thawne said, eyes flickering red. Barry wondered if he was even aware of it. Surely he was. Secrecy and control would be far too ingrained in him after fourteen years not to notice when he let them slip. “And you and I have all of the time in the universe. Detective West will come around.”

He has no choice, hissed a voice in the back of Barry’s head. Joe is Joe. He’ll convince himself to let it go because you look the same, because he’ll convince himself any Barry is better than none, because he’ll never want to accept he couldn’t protect his kid even though there was absolutely nothing he could have done.

“He’ll come around,” Barry echoed, and hated the resignation in his voice.

“Come on,” Thawne said, indicating that Barry should follow him with a jerk of his head. “You looked like you were trying for the Vault. I’m not letting you stay there, however temporarily you might hope or intend it to be, I don’t trust you and Gideon not to get up to mischief.”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to Barry, sadly, and now that he’d been given it he knew Thawne would never let it happen.

“Where--”

“Home,” Thawne said, then made a face. “My house. I have a guest room that’ll probably suit you. Though anything has got to be better than skulking around here at night, hm?”

“You have guests?”

“Just you,” Thawne said, ignoring Barry’s unflattering but accurate estimation of his sociability. “Gone are the days when a wealthy alpha would be expected to host friends or family for weeks or months on end, but the idea that an alpha should be able to provide shelter for a pack member lingers, even if the best they can offer is a couch to sleep on. Give me that.”

He nodded at the blanket Barry startled to remember he was still wrapped in, and he whipped it off his shoulders in a rush, hoping his face wasn’t as red as it felt.

“You don’t have blankets?” Barry asked, balling it up as best he could and tossing it to him.

“You seem attached,” Thawne said with a carefully careless shrug, taking a moment to fold it neat and small so that he could hold it close as he ran – awkward, but less likely to let it catch fire. Which Barry’s distraction would probably have guaranteed if he’d started running with it flapping loose in the wind. Sure, he hadn’t set things on fire in ages but accidents happened, especially when a speedster lost focus.

“I could leave it,” Barry insisted, feeling ridiculous that he’d been caught wandering around with it like a child in need of comfort. It was just because he didn’t know if the Time Vault actually had a bed or not, that was all.

“Hm,” Thawne said, his voice neutral and his scent amused. “If you say so.”

He ran off without another word – another of his little speedster tests, Barry decided after a moment spent blinking at the empty space he’d occupied before exploding into motion himself: he wanted to see if Barry would follow his trail or if he already knew where to go. Whatever choice Barry made he would learn something from it.

Thawne wasn’t going to learn he knew the way to his house, Barry decided. Who knew what conclusions he might draw from that. Better that he feel smug about teaching Barry to speedster-track.

Not that he’d actually taught Barry so much as pointed out he already knew how to do it and just needed to pay attention. It wasn’t like phasing –

Maybe Barry didn’t need to be thinking about how he’d learned to phase. He needed to concentrate on following Thawne’s trail, obviously. Concentrate very hard. Difficult new skill, tracking.

How had Barry ever managed to lose him? It was so obvious, he felt like he should be ashamed of himself, no matter how young and inexperienced he had been.

He drew up beside Thawne as he approached the long drive to the house he’d left to Barry in his will, as if anything could offer compensation for what he’d done. Thawne glanced over at him, then tossed the blanket into his face.

Sputtering, Barry clawed himself free to find Thawne had returned from scouting the boundaries of the house and (presumably) tidying away anything inside that he didn’t want Barry to see.

Not scouting – or not just scouting, Barry realized, inhaling only to cough a little at the sheer force of this is my territory and everything in it will be defended with force that hit like a particularly unsubtle brick.

S.T.A.R. Labs didn’t smell like that. It was unmistakably Thawne’s, even more than the house he owned – which was clearly somewhere he stayed rather than lived – but it was also Cisco’s and Caitlin’s and Barry’s to some extent. It had other people, professional defenses, it wasn’t solely reliant on Thawne to guard it because it was a place they gathered in – pack territory.

Maybe that difference was why Thawne felt the need to aggressively reassert his ownership upon inviting someone into his actual house. The house was personal, a private but mostly temporary den he usually wasn’t concerned with.

He was concerned now, his scent sharp and acidic with something Barry mentally translated as mine, my place, my things, everything here is mine. Maybe only Barry could actually get the undertone of I’ll kill you if you cross me that was pure Thawne instead of Harrison Wells – would that count as a threat in a court of law? – but he thought the general sense of warning away was pretty clear.

Far stranger than being able to literally sense Thawne’s aggression was knowing it wasn’t aimed at Barry – that it was turned outwards against the rest of the world beyond the house and grounds. It was likely suddenly being sheltered in the eye of a storm he had previously only felt the edge of.

“Your nearest neighbor has got to be miles away,” Barry pointed out, rolling his eyes, and Thawne looked at him, exasperated, like he was once again missing something obvious.

“Get inside,” he sighed, then snatched the blanket back from Barry when he stubbornly refused to move. He started jogging away with it, making Barry lurch after him almost instinctively though he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like the blanket was important or anything. Hell, it was technically Thawne’s to begin with.

“You ever run into those?” Barry asked, eyeing the floor-to-ceiling windows curiously as he was guided past a fireplace – did they have that sort of affectation in the future? Barry kind of figured they didn’t. Not with real fire, anyway.

“What am I, an idiot without complete control of my molecular activity?” Thawne said testily.

“So you have, you just phased through them.”

“I know where my damn windows are, Barry.”

“That’s because they’re everywhere,” Barry said, just to see him scowl with irritation.

He wondered how much of the house’s design was Thawne projecting affluence and 'austerity' as Harrison Wells in a way that fit with the era and the understanding of rich people who had to believe he was one of them, and how much of it hinted to how the future might look, sleek and shiny and hollow. So much glass, already wide empty rooms made bigger still by the illusion of space curtailed by cold clear barriers.

Barry would absolutely run into the windows accidentally at least once if it was his place, there was no question.

Still, it was an impressive space. Just… lonely. Void of any real personality beyond what was designed to be seen.

“You know, if I didn’t know you weren’t disabled the fact that none of your counters have been lowered to wheelchair height might have been a hint something was up.”

“Would they?” Thawne said, glancing at him. “Maybe I don’t cook so I don’t see the point in remodeling a kitchen I barely use. Everywhere else in the house, maybe I’m coping badly with my disability and keep putting off making the necessary changes in a futile attempt at denial, telling myself I’m not struggling enough to really need them yet. Maybe I have another place in town I stay at more often that’s closer to work and more adapted to my needs. Maybe I just don’t invite people here. Count the lies.”

Barry paused, blinked, then very reluctantly sniffed. “Are you kidding?” he complained when he couldn’t find anything off in Thawne’s scent – not that he knew exactly what a lie would smell like to him just yet, but he knew there had to be something that gave it away. On Thawne… it would be a faint tinge of fermenting fruit, Barry suspected. A subtle rot that could be dismissed if you didn’t pay attention. “How do you do that?”

“By not telling a lie.”

“You’re lying just standing there! Everything about you is a lie!”

“My name is Harrison Wells,” he said. His scent was warm with amusement but there was no underlying rot to the ripeness, no falsehood. Of course he was Harrison Wells, he'd been Harrison Wells for years, achieved so many things under that name. “My name is Eobard Thawne.” Suddenly stronger, purer – the truth, more the truth than before, without which Barry would never know the previous statement had been in any way untrue at all. “You see?”

“Ughhh.”

Thawne laughed, leading Barry deeper into the house, away from the accident waiting to happen that was the mix of Barry’s speed combined with an unfamiliar place with giant windows.

“Your room,” he said, gesturing for Barry to enter but staying on the other side of the door himself, watching Barry walk inside warily.

Barry glanced back at him, noticed the lock on the door, and blinked at it for a moment.

The only sense of safety a lock could offer was psychological – he was literally in enemy territory, Thawne could just phase through the door if he wanted, there was no way he'd speedster-proof his own house against himself. Hell, he could phase through the wall. And yet… Barry found he appreciated it despite himself, even with the obvious newness giving away that it had been installed during Thawne’s quick tidy up solely for that very reason. Just the attempt to offer a sense of safety said a lot.

He gave the lock a filthy look. How dare you trick me.

“Sleep,” Thawne said, tossing the blanket in after Barry, still without entering. “Lock the door or don’t, this room is yours, I won’t enter it. Worry about what you want to do next in the morning.”

As if Barry had any expectation of privacy when Thawne already watched him through every damn camera in Central City, never mind when he was in Thawne’s own house. He rolled his eyes.

“I mean it,” Thawne said. “I won’t.”

“Sure,” Barry said, turning back to examine the room. He’d seen more inviting hotel rooms, it was even more impersonal than the rest of the house. Just about the only thing out of place was the blanket, the one thing that didn’t smell freshly cleaned and entirely neutral. Even as he thought that, Thawne ran off and returned with a pile of extra bedding, some patterned, some soft and fluffy, some cool and silky and some very familiar – Barry picked through it, bewildered, as Thawne watched from the doorway, his scent faintly agitated.

“Did you break into Joe’s to steal my sheets?” he said incredulously.

“Your sheets, some clothing, items you’ll need or prefer to have… He can’t smell the difference, he’ll just think you ran in to collect some of your things.”

Barry wasn't sure he liked that – the impression it might give Joe that he accepted their estrangement, was trying to move on more than just temporarily. He pulled his S.T.A.R. Labs sweater out of the pile and hoped Thawne had kept his thieving solely to his wardrobe.

“Thanks, I guess?”

The rest of the collection, though – that was all new, smelled clean in a ‘nobody has ever used this’ way. Thawne hadn’t picked those out of Barry’s closet or even his own. He’d gone out to get them – buy them, Barry hoped – just to give other options in case what he’d taken wasn’t enough.

Barry burst out laughing, suddenly realizing what Thawne’s behavior made him think of. He imagined a nature documentary, the narrator solemnly declaiming, and here we see the red-eyed speedster bird trying to impress a potential mate. He will offer the finest nesting materials he can steal in the hopes they may begin building a nest with them, potentially indicating acceptance of his overtures, and couldn’t stop giggling.

Thawne scowled at the blankets Barry was sorting through like they’d betrayed him by making Barry laugh and Barry smothered his grin as best he could. He wondered how annoyed Thawne would be with his misdirected instincts if he ever realized he'd subconsciously tried to prove he would be a good provider for Barry.

It was much more entertaining going through the pile pretending he was a bird – this won’t keep the heat for the eggs, that’s too bright it’ll give the nest away, this is too soft to offer support, that’s too rough to lie on for long – and Barry tossed more choices than he would have originally made towards the bed, laughing inwardly at himself.

Laughing at Thawne, too, the way he vibrated in place for a moment once the selection was done, his ominous rattle sounding more like a growling purr.

“Though we call it nesting for omegas it’s not really,” Thawne said, and Barry turned to look at him, still keeping very deliberately to the other side of the door. “‘Nesting’ is used to try and give a sense of homeliness and domesticity but it’s solely a matter of language. An omega’s nest is exactly the same as an alpha’s den and it should be understood that they have as much right as an alpha to defend that den with violence. It doesn’t matter if they’re the sole occupant. While you’re here, this room is yours. If I enter, it’s with your permission.”

“Whatever,” Barry said dismissively. Like that would ever stop Thawne, who had never met a boundary of Barry’s he didn’t want to break.

“This is separate from us,” Thawne said, strangely insistent, hand touching the center of his chest and then gesturing to Barry’s – where their lightning symbols would be – to indicate he was talking about the Flash and Reverse Flash. “It’s – I don’t think I can explain it in a way you’ll truly understand. In many ways you and I are speedsters before we are human, Flash and Reverse Flash before omega or alpha. But there are some instincts even we are still bound to.”

“Pretty sure you had cameras in my bedroom?” Barry said dryly.

“The Flash I could watch anywhere, they were my enemy first and foremost. An unmated omega I am offering the protection of my territory to is an entirely different thing.”

“The weirdest thing is that I think I sort of get what you’re saying,” Barry said. Thawne’s shoulders relaxed. “And I’d like not to, thanks.” Thawne’s shoulders tensed again.

“Barry--” he sighed with exasperation.

“I want that statement to be as strange and impenetrable as it would have been when I first got here.”

“I swear you do this on purpose,” Thawne muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. He eyed Barry like he was already plotting how to get the speedster-proof cuffs on him to force him to stay still and actually listen. “And that’s too bad, because you are going to have to learn eventually.”

“I’m still going to tear this place apart looking for cameras,” Barry informed him and he shrugged.

“Do what you want, it’s yours now.”

“I will,” Barry insisted, just to see – but no, Thawne took a step back as if to physically verify what he’d already conceded verbally, affirm that he’d given the space over to Barry and whatever Barry did with it was nothing to him any more.

“Eobard,” Barry said before he could run off completely, and he stopped.

“That’s a dangerous habit to get into,” Thawne said, though more as if he was trying to warn himself than Barry.

“You said not anywhere in public,” Barry pointed out immediately, though he hadn’t actually been intending to use Thawne’s name more than the once needed to catch his attention and make sure he stayed still long enough for Barry to get what he needed to say out. “Here’s definitely not public. Eobard.”

“A dangerous habit,” Thawne repeated, like Barry could have missed the bitten off hum of pleasure he gave at the repetition of his name. His eyes were bright with a desperate kind of hunger – how long it had been since anyone knew his real name, since he’d been seen and known and understood to be Eobard Thawne, not Harrison Wells? Gideon called him Doctor Wells. Even alone with an AI from the future he insisted on giving himself no mercy and reinforcing his fake identity to himself.

“All right,” Thawne said, like he was trying to reassure himself that he wasn’t conceding anything important – just one of the fundamental building blocks he used to remind himself to keep his identities entirely separate. “Here – only here in this house – you can use my name.”

He was going to be sorely disappointed by how little Barry intended to use it, but getting permission felt like some kind of victory anyway.

Barry thought about how adrift he’d felt wandering through S.T.A.R. Labs, homeless and unprotected in some way deeper than the hopefully temporary falling out with Joe should have made him feel. He thought about how certain he was that Thawne would tear an intruder apart and how he could trust that territorial defensiveness to inadvertently protect Barry too.

It was a temporary fix but Barry still needed to tell him – “Thanks,” he said reluctantly.

Eobard smiled, a flash of sharp white teeth, and retreated as if he knew Barry couldn’t take anything he might say just then, leaving Barry to his empty room and unwilling gratitude.

“Okay,” Barry said to himself. “Let’s check it out.”

He set to work examining every inch from top to bottom trying to find any cameras or microphones, conceding only after the third time he’d set the room to rights again that there really were none.

There was no way it would last. Barry didn’t know if he would be relieved or disappointed when Thawne inevitably lost the battle of his warring impulses and installed them, but he was at least reasonably sure that he would be able to tell when it happened – taking the room apart and repeatedly examining every inch had the side effect of making the whole room smell like it really was Barry’s. He wouldn’t be able to miss Thawne’s scent if he entered; the only places it even remained any more was on the blankets and sheets where he’d held them, but that would fade soon enough.

Barry crawled on to the bed and wrapped himself tightly in the blanket from S.T.A.R. Labs – it was the only one he really felt like he needed just then. The whole thing was infused with Thawne’s scent over Barry’s where he’d held it close as he ran, obviously Barry had to correct that as soon as possible.

Thawne had been pleased to run, as always – Barry inhaled sleepily, registered vaguely warmth, amusement blurred with sweetness, satisfaction and threaded with an underlying sharpness, hunger that he imagined was always part of Thawne’s scent whenever he saw the chance to let loose.

There was more, there was always more to everything where Eobard Thawne was concerned. It didn’t matter so much as the heavy feeling of something that was almost like relief sinking into Barry’s limbs, the restlessness that had been plaguing him finally draining away the longer he stared at the unlocked door and saw that it remained closed regardless.

He’d worry about what to do next in the morning.

Chapter Text

Barry jerked awake, bucking instinctively to try and throw Eobard off his back. His blanket slid away and with it went the imaginary weight, the dream-press of another body revealed by the morning light to be nothing more than an overly warm piece of cloth. He kicked it away anyway, panting, scrambling to the edge of the bed before it fully sank in that he wasn’t outside, wasn’t being pinned, wasn’t hearing anything but his own gasping breath. Thawne’s scent was still there, still as strong as it had been in his dream – but it obviously wasn’t fresh, just from the blanket, and the sharp hunger was barely detectable, nowhere near enough to choke him.

It wasn’t even entirely Thawne’s scent any more, it was a mix of Thawne’s and Barry’s own and not the kind it had started to become in the dream near the end, though now that he was awake Barry couldn’t describe what the difference was at all. It was missing something only one of them was producing because of course the other wasn’t there to provide a match.

Adrenaline, maybe? He had the confused impression they’d been fighting, or it had started as fighting – no, the fighting had come after running, as it always did. He had run and Thawne had chased, excitement-amusement-hunger in his scent. Barry couldn’t remember how he had ended up pinned, only that Eobard used his entire body pressing him down.

All it had taken to keep him on the ground the first time they met again after the death of Barry’s mother was a hand on his shoulder, the Reverse Flash kneeling beside him instead of on, that was how little he had to worry about Barry getting up again.

There had been no chest pressed to his back, no hot breath against his nape, no arm hooked around him to pull him closer, hold him still.

No voice in Barry’s ear saying –

Barry couldn’t remember.

He frowned, picking up the blanket and holding it to his nose for a second – weird enhanced senses aside the olfactory bulb was directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, smell and memory were deeply linked. All it gave him was the his and Eobard’s mingled scents, though, absent of whatever dream element it was that would trigger any recollection. Thawne’s response to whatever the hell had changed in his own, he guessed.

He let the blanket drop into his lap and ran his fingers over one edge. He supposed it didn’t work for dreams anyway, required a real memory and scent to associate with.

He had been… running? That sounded right. Running, enough to make the muscles in his legs ache, for his sleeping brain to trick his body into sweating a little, even – his old t-shirt turned sleep shirt sticking slightly to his back and chest, his thighs damp. Running, and then –

Blank. Just warmth that was already fading. Heaviness that no longer had any weight. Something ripening that hadn’t managed to bear fruit. He could no longer remember what had woken him, if the jolt had come from something happening inside the dream or outside of it.

Speaking of out of it… Barry rolled over and reached for his phone. He squinted at the clock, grimaced at the battery level, and tossed it onto his pillow, flopping beside it. What little he could still recall of the dream continued to fragment and fade away until all he could remember was the startled racing of his heart upon waking. Must have been a nightmare.

He pulled the blanket back over himself, uncomfortable and chilled by the almost forgotten sensation of sweat gone cold. The whole lot would have to be cleaned anyway, it smelled… well. It smelled.

He grabbed his phone again as something occurred to him, staring in horror at the time. Later than he’d first thought, brain too addled by his dream, whatever it was, to fully take in the hour – much later.

“Singh is going to kill me,” he moaned, stripping even as he flung himself out of the bed and threw himself through the door to the bathroom, cleaning himself with brutally efficient haste before tripping back into the bedroom again, toothbrush still stuck in his mouth as he pulled out every piece of clothing Thawne had brought him the night before and scrambled through them.

He sniffed one of the last shirts quickly, got mostly Thawne and himself and the slightest hint of not really ozone, like all the rest, and decided it would have to do. Maybe if he was lucky nobody at the precinct knew what Dr. Wells smelled like. He didn’t visit often and he hopefully wore scent-blockers when he did. Barry could be lucky, right?

Maybe it didn’t even mean anything, Barry wearing something that smelled like his supposed mentor. Everybody knew he visited S.T.A.R. Labs. Nobody had made any remarks about Cisco’s or Caitlin’s scents on his sleeves or shoulders.

Okay, Bellows had given a him a mock-disappointed huff and ‘casually’ slung his arm over Barry’s shoulders while talking to him after they ran into each other, like he was trying to cover any lingering impression Caitlin had left, but there had been no suggestion of it being anything more than a casual attempt at something like pack one-upping. If that was a thing?

Barry pulled the shirt on, set the rooms to rights – enough that it didn’t look like it was inhabited by a complete slob at least, for when Thawne inevitably installed those cameras – and managed about five steps away from his borrowed room before he sheepishly doubled back to put the toothbrush away.

He could just run out… but Thawne had given him a place to sleep for the night and if he were Harrison Wells Barry would feel obliged to tell him he was running out on him, and old habits and hero worship apparently died hard. Damn it.

He made a quick detour to blurt “Late!” in the general direction of Thawne’s presence before running for the door again.

He only just stopped himself from slamming into Thawne when the man suddenly appeared in front of him in a crackle of red lightning, blocking his way.

“You’re not late,” he said, grabbing Barry’s shoulders and turning him around, marching him back into the living room – or whatever it’s rich person equivalent was, ‘living room’ was probably too casual. “You called up to take advantage of that offer of temporary leave. Captain Singh agreed. You’re fine.”

“I did?” Barry said blankly. It was hardly the first time they’d ever manhandled one another, even if it was usually done in fits of anger, but he was finding Thawne’s hands on his shoulders strangely distracting for some reason. The lack of violence, probably.

“I’m really sorry about this, Captain,” Thawne said apologetically, and Barry jumped at the perfect imitation of his own voice, growing slightly hoarse as he spoke like he was on the verge of sickness, “but I think I might need to take some leave after all.”

“Have you always been able to do that?” Barry demanded as Thawne spun him around to face him again, pushing on his shoulders to try and force him to sit down on a low couch. Met with resistance, he forced the matter by kicking Barry’s ankle out to one side and unbalancing him enough to make him drop, scowling up at him resentfully.

“If you actually practiced obscuring your voice you might remember you have complete control of your vocal cords too,” Thawne said dryly. “Humans are already excellent mimics, you should be a perfect one.”

“How many times have you done that?!”

“Imitated your voice? Barry, I am not usually in the business of making your life easier.”

“That’s exactly why I asked!”

“I’m also not stupid enough to use it to make trouble for you when the deception could be easily solved and immediately backfire with simple communication. Although I suppose I don’t really have to worry about that with you.”

“Hey!”

“It’s a party trick. Try and focus.”

“On what?” Barry said suspiciously.

“Oh, where to begin,” Thawne said, eyes rolling upwards in a mock prayer for patience. The gesture lost something without his glasses, obviously left behind somewhere since there was no point keeping up the facade of ‘Harrison Wells’ in his own home with the one other person in the world that knew it was a lie. “Perhaps with territory and packs, given your current status.”

“What’s my current status?” Barry asked, frowning.

“It honestly reassures me that you don’t know,” Thawne said, running off briefly before returning with a plate of pancakes. “It’s something that would affect you a great deal otherwise.”

He held the plate in front of Barry, waiting for him to take it.

Food is an important courting gesture, piped up Barry’s new inner naturalist, and Barry shut it up with an internal eye roll – feeding a guest was also a perfectly normal polite human gesture.

Although, even with Thawne’s damaged connection to the source of his speed he should still have been capable of going out and bringing back food from anywhere in the world. It was perfectly reasonable Barry stared suspiciously at the obviously homemade pancakes and asked, half-joking only because he knew Thawne needed him alive until he had his full speed back, “Are they poisoned?”

“Maybe if you tried my first attempts,” Thawne said, shrugging. Barry leaned around him in order to get a better look at the distant kitchen and immediately changed his previously disinterested opinion on open plan interior design – Thawne having no way of hiding the disaster he’d made of it was gold.

“I hope your cleaning lady is getting an impressive tip,” he said, struggling to keep a straight face as something on the counter lost the battle with gravity and fell onto the floor, loud enough to splatter audibly even at their distance.

“One – I’m very curious about the biases of your world implicit in ‘cleaning lady’. Two – I am insulted you think I would pay so little a tip would be required to ensure good service. Three – I value my privacy a great deal more than I do convenience. I have to be on guard everywhere else, I want to be able to move about here as I please without having to constantly think about concealing my scent. I do all the cleaning. Four – are you going to eat or not?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“…You’re a speedster.”

“You didn’t have to say it like that,” Barry muttered, taking the plate from him. It had been a ridiculous thing to say, admittedly. “I thought you said you didn’t cook?”

“I don’t,” Thawne said. “Obviously.” He jerked his head at the kitchen.

To be fair – and Barry hated to be fair to Eobard Thawne – even if Thawne had known or cared about cooking to begin with, the twenty-first century version was probably wildly different from the tools down to the ingredients.

Still. It was an impressive mess.

Barry gave up on hiding his smile. Thawne grimaced and offered him a fork, practically dropping it into his hand and off tidying up the kitchen in a put-out whirlwind of activity before Barry even had a proper grip on it.

Barry poked the pancakes meditatively, then started teasing them apart with the side of his fork as he watched the kitchen return to its original gleaming showroom state, ready to probably never be used again.

“About packs, Barry – what have you picked up?”

“Uh,” Barry said, glancing up at Thawne’s expectant face and then back at the pancakes again. “I don’t – they just seem like a catch-all name for social groups, to be honest. Your family’s a pack, your work is a pack, your friends are a pack?”

“Okay,” Thawne said neutrally, his expression giving absolutely nothing away, no matter how Barry tried to study his face. Even his scent managed to be neutral somehow, leaving Barry completely in the dark about how right – or wrong, he was probably wrong – he might be.

“It’s… important that you have a place? ‘Territory’. Somewhere you feel safe? And you can split off from a pack – and territory? Pack territory? – and make your own. Eddie and Iris are, I think.” Barry paused. “Aren’t you worried about that?”

“About what?” Thawne said, bemused. “Detective Thawne and Ms. West?”

Had he always called Iris that? ‘Miss West’ Barry remembered, but surely he must have used her name casually at some point? …Not that he wanted Thawne to be familiar with, to or about Iris. ‘Ms. West’ was fine, actually.

“Well, yeah. Aren’t you worried? About being erased from time or something if Iris and Eddie stay together?”

“Why should I be?”

“You know,” Barry said, waving his hand. Thawne’s expression remained blank. “Eddie’s your ancestor, right? And Iris… isn’t?”

Thawne laughed, but it was less at Barry for once and more as if he was about to share a joke with him. “Sweet of you to worry.”

He carried on over Barry’s protests that he wasn’t worried at all, how dare he even suggest such a thing: “Time will always seek the path of least resistance when it comes to keeping itself intact. The simplest way to ensure the Thawne line proceeds as it did originally is obvious – Ms. West is an alpha. Despite all the advances in so-called modern medicine it’s almost certain that ashe and Detective Thawne will find they cannot conceive, or if they can, that ashe cannot carry to term, as some type one alphas cannot. Therefore Eddie’s offspring will have to come from their original source. I have nothing to fear.”

Barry jumped up, outraged, unable to sit still – “You think he’ll cheat on Iris?!”

“No,” Thawne said instantly, holding up his hand in a placating gesture, the other catching Barry’s plate before it could tip pancake and syrup all over the floor. “The Thawne family values monogamy – not for reasons of sentiment, of course,” he added, as if he knew Barry would doubt the assertion otherwise. “It’s purely dynastic concern… but I suppose the inclination must have started somewhere. A Thawne is supposed to be loyal to their mate until death – and yes, members of the family have kept to the letter of that axiom by arranging ‘accidents’ when compelled to take another.”

“Your family is messed up,” Barry said, blinking, slowly sitting back down again and taking back his plate of thoroughly mangled pancakes. “I mean, I guess I knew that since they had to produce you, but wow.”

“I’m flattered by the implication that you think I must be the pinnacle of the Thawne family’s villainy,” Eobard said. He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead in theatrical anguish. “My relatives will be devastated.”

“Are you saying you’re not?” Barry demanded and he laughed, instantly dropping the pose.

“You could ask any of them – I’ve been wasting my talents for years,” he said cheerfully.

“How is Eddie your ancestor?” Barry said, despairing. “What did he do to deserve that? Are you sure there wasn’t a mix-up at the hospital or something?”

“That’s a very funny joke in another universe,” Thawne said slyly, grinning, before shrugging off Barry’s concern. “Every family has their white sheep, as the saying goes. Eddie happens to be ours.”

“That’s not how the saying – no, never mind. So what you’re saying is that if Eddie and Iris choose a surrogate or something, it’ll somehow be whoever Eddie would have originally married? Is that it?”

“Most likely. Assuming their relationship lasts long enough to discover such issues, of course. Regardless, down the line the Thawne family will go as it did before to eventually produce me to come back and create this timeline. Sorry but you’re not getting rid of me.”

“Like I ever could,” Barry mumbled, remembered a flash of – Eobard, his original face, how will you get along without me? and the answer Barry knew even then: that he wouldn’t, that his enemy would be back somehow, both impossible and inevitable at the same time. He looked up to find Harrison Wells watching him, eerily intent, Eobard Thawne’s obsessive interest in his eyes.

He stuffed a giant forkful of pancakes in his mouth to avoid saying anything else but Thawne just seemed pleased he was eating however obnoxiously he went about it. He smelled pleased under the still lingering smell of smoke mingled with under and overcooked ingredients from his kitchen misadventure. Satisfied.

Barry wrinkled his nose deliberately. He didn't want Thawne to think he liked it. It reminded him of something, that syrupy slow boiling fruit-sugar smell, but more importantly – why hadn’t Thawne applied scent-blockers? They had to be routine for him, something he did more often than not, even in his own home, if only to be prepared before he left it. Barry was invading his space, why didn’t he feel any need to conceal his scent if he really cared about privacy so much? Did he not care what Barry might get from it?

…Admittedly he was probably right not to be worried. There was some kind of difference between Thawne’s pleased-satisfied scent watching Barry eat compared to the kind he would produce watching him fall flat on his face, Barry was sure of it, but damned if he could actually say what it was. He just knew there was one, somehow.

More tart, maybe. Heavier on the fruit than the sugars it produced – callous pleasure rather than contentment.

No, that was the wrong word. Thawne had never been content a day in his life.

The tines of the fork scraped the empty plate and jarred him out of his thoughts. Barry winced, casting a quick look at Thawne. He was willing to bet it wasn’t cheap somehow, despite looking plain.

Thawne took the empty plate with one hand and handed another full one – the pancakes slightly more evenly shaped and a little less brown at the edges – to Barry. He didn’t say anything but his expression managed to be very eloquent.

“I know you eat,” Barry said defensively around another mouthful of pancakes. Maybe not pancakes but definitely burgers. Although that might have just been the novelty of real meat from a cow. And there had never been any indication that ‘Harrison Wells’ could eat in the same sort of quantities Barry had needed as a new speedster or when recovering from exhaustion or injury… which was the most impressive example of his dedication to maintaining his identity, if Barry was honest. He had to have some other way of getting his energy.

“You don’t see me clearing out an all you can eat buffet, do you.”

“That was once,” Barry muttered. Or twice. Maybe more. He raised his voice slightly: “Only because it would look suspicious for Harrison Wells. Anyway, I don’t eat anywhere near as much as I used to have to.” So there, he thought but didn’t say.

“Ah. That does explain something.” Thawne didn’t sound like he appreciated whatever had been mysteriously explained to him.

Barry waited for him to elaborate, then impatiently asked, “Are you going to share, or…?”

Thawne grimaced, shaking his head briefly, but did start talking. Unfortunately. “You remember Caitlin telling you that heat is physically demanding?”

“Yeah?” Barry said warily, wondering at the sudden swerve in topic.

“Prior to heat – about a month beforehand, more or less – omegas will deliberately put on weight to prepare. Heat may not even occur if they are lacking a certain percentage of body fat but that’s a big risk to take – if it does still happen and they don’t have the excess to burn heat isn’t just demanding, it’s debilitating.”

“Okay…?” Barry then realized something that had him almost light-headed: “Wait, if all my calories go to fueling superheroics –”

“That would be why your other self would have been very unlikely to have a heat again until… hmm, at least two or three years post-lightning, I should think.”

“Why are you saying ‘would have been’?” Barry said suspiciously, heart dropping back down from the ecstatic high it had reached at the realization that he might not actually have to worry about heats at all.

“Because you are not a new speedster, are you?” Thawne said, and waited patiently for Barry to connect to the dots.

“You think because I eat less I’m better adapted? Somehow?”

“You’re getting the energy you need for your ‘superheroics’ without the excessive calorie consumption that should be required at this stage to compensate. A normal doctor – not Caitlin, one unaware of your circumstances – would certainly tell you to gain weight before risking a heat, but taking into account your specific biology--”

“I still eat tons!” Barry protested, waving a forkful of pancakes in protest. He caught a piece that fell off before it could hit the floor, grimacing apologetically on automatic before remembering he didn’t actually care if Thawne’s floor got dirty. “It’s getting burned off running around!”

“You’re not eating as much as Mr. Allen would at this stage of ohis development,” Thawne pointed out. “Every single calorie ohe consumed would go entirely into basic functioning as a speedster but you… you no longer need that, do you?”

He didn’t, and he didn’t really know when that had changed. He remembered mountains of emptied burger wrappers, towering stacks of pizza boxes, all of it once upon a time just barely enough to quieten the constant growling ache in his stomach, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d really needed to eat that much instead of just enjoying it. He couldn’t blame it all on Cisco’s calorie bars.

He gave his stomach a paranoid glance. Was the body fat percentage required for a heat above or below what his Caitlin had originally worked out he needed to maintain to be a healthy speedster? Was a healthy omega speedster somehow different? If he was somehow subconsciously managing his body and energy the way Thawne implied…

He gingerly set his half-emptied plate to one side. Thawne frowned and reached for the plate, clearing intending to put it back in Barry’s hands –

“Why ‘Mr. Allen’? Is it so you don’t get mixed up between me and him?”

“No,” Thawne said, drawing his hand back, startled as if the very idea of confusing Barry with his alternate self was somehow ludicrous. “It’s just impolite.”

“Impolite,” Barry echoed blankly. “Impolite?” No matter how he said it he couldn’t get it to make sense.

“Yes? Surely you’ve noticed that some dynamics will address you differently to others?”

Captain Singh had called him Allen, but that was just professionalism, same as it would be in his universe. Eddie had called him Barry, but they were friends, Eddie was dating Iris, they were probably ‘pack’ in at least two different ways. Caitlin and Cisco called him Barry, but they were friends too, no doubt he’d given them permission without even thinking about it. ‘Dr. Wells’… Wells used titles – Ms. West, Detective West, Captain Singh – but he’d always been more formal anyway, he was – or Thawne’s imitation of him was – that sort of person. And he dropped them too sometimes – Detective Thawne became Eddie, but was that because Eddie was a beta or because he was matching the way Barry referred to him or what? Maybe it didn’t matter as much speaking privately – no, he still used ‘Ms. West’ for Iris…

“Ah,” Thawne said with resignation, watching him work through information. He looked like he was questioning all the things he’d done wrong in his life for this to be where he was and what he was faced with. Barry hoped he was self-aware enough to know the list should probably start with being born.

“This world is a lot!” Barry protested. “Something like that’s pretty small with all the… everything else. I noticed!”

“For clarity’s sake, then,” Thawne said, dragging a hand through his hair instead of ripping it out as he was probably considering. “Just in case.”

He took a deep breath as Barry debated throwing the pancakes he’d obviously forgotten about into his face in protest at the sheer level of doubt he managed to imply about Barry actually having noticed anything regarding the different forms of address.

“Between betas it’s a matter of personal preference more than anything – some will be formal, some won’t – but it’s best practice when interacting with alphas and omegas to err towards courtesy and the majority of betas will. Omegas may address and refer to each other by their given names without issue, though it’s polite to check, of course. It’s often considered indicative of some kind of fundamental personality conflict when two omegas refuse to use each other’s first names when interacting socially, in fact.”

“Just because they’re omegas they’re supposed to be friends? Come on.”

“Not friends, but… hm. Share a sense of solidarity, perhaps? I wouldn’t particularly know the nuances myself.” Thawne shrugged. “I can only tell you what I can observe as an outsider to that kind of interaction.”

“What, alphas don’t have a ‘sense of solidarity’?” Barry mocked.

“For an alpha to use an unfamiliar or unfriendly alpha’s first name casually is an act of disrespect. It could be taken as a challenge – a century or two back it would start duels.”

“Is it going to start a duel if an alpha uses an omega’s name?” Barry asked with a curious frown.

“Not for the same reason. An unrelated alpha addressing an omega by their given name without explicit permission is being dismissive of them, yes, but the connotations are, ah, different. Between an alpha and omega.”

Okay, but…

“No way is everybody that stuffy about names in the modern day though--”

“You may not think it important personally but this isn’t your Earth,” Thawne interrupted, staring at Barry intently as if trying to impress what he was saying into his skull by the sheer force of his gaze. “If an alpha calls you ‘Barry’ and you didn’t tell them they could, don’t let it go because ‘it doesn’t matter’ or it would be awkward or you think they’re just being friendly and you don’t want to make a fuss. It’s an intimacy you can always grant later if you want to and if anyone complains about that they aren’t worthy to have it.”

So it was like a manager using a woman’s first name while giving male colleagues the respect of a title or last name? Or was that too mild a comparison?

“You call me Barry,” he pointed out, and wanted to explain that he didn’t care and it didn’t matter only for Thawne to hold up his forefinger, wagging it slightly to cut him off.

“And you gave me permission. It was the second thing you said to me after you first appeared asking for help, in fact.”

Barry was willing to take his word for it, since he didn’t really remember and didn’t actually care about Thawne using his name – the thought of objecting for some weird alternate universe etiquette reason just didn’t compute. Objecting because it was Thawne was also pointless, of course, so why bother? Thawne using his name was familiar, it was normal, it was… right, in a way. It was what he did with their masks down, with no need to pretend: say ‘Barry Allen’ like it was a cornerstone of the universe.

Maybe it was like the wrist-scenting thing? Fine in some contexts between some people and not in others? Was it just a little unusual to hear or was it something that was supposed to be hugely embarrassing or inappropriate?

“Technically there’s a ritual song and dance to it,” Thawne said. It didn’t sound quite like an admittance, more a concession. Barry crossed his arms and leaned back with a sharp ‘hah!’ of annoyed triumph – so he knew perfectly well what he’d done, even if Barry didn’t. “You’re supposed to offer at least three times, usually over an extended period of time; an alpha is supposed to demur twice before actually taking up the offer. Taking the first chance you get to call an omega by name is…”

He shook his head and pulled a face as if tasting something sour, his scent spiking briefly with something Barry had no hope of interpreting but was pure Eobard Thawne, nothing Harrison Wells. “My mother would have said vulgar, but I think Cisco would say ‘tacky’.”

“Are you calling yourself tacky?” Barry said, unable to keep a delighted smile from spreading across his face.

Thawne rolled his eyes. “You don’t know how many times Barry Allen may have previously asked me to use ohis name,” he pointed out.

“It was the first time I asked you,” Barry argued, and he grinned, bowing his head in exaggerated acknowledgment of a conceded point.

“True,” he said, before shrugging. “It’s not a hard rule. It’s not even one most people even realize they observe. It’s that an alpha just accepting that first polite offer would be presumptuous, of course. Nothing to do with actual etiquette. If you asked they’d probably tell you that kind of thing went out of style in the early 1900s.”

“Except not really, huh,” Barry said. So if it was… unusual for an alpha to address an omega by first name – what about the reverse? It probably wouldn’t start a duel, Barry was guessing.

“What about when an omega uses an alpha’s first name?” Barry asked. “You haven’t said. That as big a deal?”

“Yes,” Thawne said after a strange pause, clearing his throat slightly. “Don’t do that either. Unless mated or related is the rule in public, generally speaking.”

“Mated or related,” Barry echoed doubtfully. “What degree of relation? What, uh… stage? Stage of ‘mated’? There’s got to be stages, right? Like courtship or whatever? You don’t go straight from just dating casually to biting? I hope.”

“You can go from strangers to biting if you like,” Thawne said, suspiciously straight-faced.

“Not that sort of biting—”

“I know the sort of biting you meant.”

For some reason Barry tried to elaborate anyway. “You know, the one with the – uh, the fangs? Not normal biting.”

“Normal biting,” Thawne repeated, looking delighted. “Why, Barry, tell me more.”

Barry grabbed the closest thing to a weapon he had to hand – his fork – and threw it at his head. “Be serious!”

Thawne dodged it of course, laughing.

“I’m very serious about wanting to know your normal biting standards,” he promised, still grinning despite the fork now sticking out of the far wall, scent too full of amusement for Barry to tell if he actually was. “But fine, all right – where were we?”

Bite you, grumbled some intrusive little thought living in the back of Barry’s head, violent impulse presumably getting mixed up by the most recent topic of conversation. Bite you and bite you and bite you. Sink teeth in and shake. See if you laugh then.

“Stupid dynamic name rules,” Barry said through gritted teeth. “What if an alpha and omega are best friends, huh? They can’t use each other’s names in public without people thinking it’s weird?”

“Why would you think they can’t? That’s covered under ‘related’ – friendship is a relationship of choice just as valid as any blood ties.”

“And people can just… tell? That they consider each other best friends or siblings and not…?”

“Of course,” Thawne said, as if the idea of not knowing how someone related to another at a glance – or a sniff, Barry supposed – was incomprehensible.

Caitlin had said something about that hadn’t she? That omegas produced different pheromones with platonic friends and family. Barry scratched absently at an itchy spot on his neck near his collarbone as he thought, vaguely noticing the way Eobard’s gaze dropped to follow the movement for a moment before closing his eyes briefly as if in pain.

“Are you sure it’s not just a you thing? A play-acting Harrison Wells thing, I mean. The whole using titles and last names because it sounds politer and more professional and like something he’d do?”

It could explain why Cisco and Caitlin seemed so surprised he would use Barry’s name if Wells was just more reserved usually.

Thawne of course had to crush his nascent hopes: “You haven’t been out in public much. I assure you it’s a common thing you could observe easily.”

Barry didn’t particularly want to go out in public if it was anything like the time they’d spent in the History Museum. Or even just like the busier areas of the precinct. Except –

“Right,” Barry realized suddenly, straightening up. “That reminds me: Eddie – do you call him Eddie because he’s a beta? – asked me to meet him and Iris at Jitters today.”

“I call him Eddie when speaking with you because he’s family, disappointingly. As Wells, he’s Detective Thawne.”

“Does that ever get weird?” Barry wondered.

It was a good thing he didn’t actually expect an answer because Thawne pointedly ignored him.

“And you think you can handle Jitters? A coffee shop is going to be a lot busier than either the precinct or the museum.”

Barry could only imagine. “Maybe the smell of coffee will overwhelm everything else,” he suggested, hopeful despite all previous experience suggesting he should know better.

“Without somehow overwhelming you,” Thawne said dryly and Barry let his shoulders slump.

“They’ll be expecting me though,” he said glumly. Just the thought of walking into Jitters with his ridiculous new sense of smell threatened to make his head ache, his stomach churning with dread. Of course he was going to have to be able to do it eventually, but even at the place’s emptiest… He had to be objective – he absolutely couldn’t handle it presently.

Thawne watched him for a moment more, then sighed. “Call Detective Thawne. Tell him you’re getting that scent sensitivity checked out – that’s what your time off is supposed to be for anyway – at the lab. If he and Ms. West still insist on meeting with you temporary access can be arranged and you can have whatever discussion you need to there.”

Barry brightened, then frowned at him warily. There was always some kind of trap with Eobard. “We're not really doing tests, though, right?”

“No, you are,” Thawne corrected.

“We know it’s just adapting to new senses though!” Barry complained. “It’s not actually a medical issue–-”

“Then you’ll have no objection to tests to confirm that, will you?”

An irritated little whine of indignation escaped before Barry could stop it and he felt his face heat with embarrassment. Thawne making a mocking little croon of consolation in response didn’t make him feel any better, even if he did look hilariously surprised at himself for a split second.

Speaking of scent sensitivity, Barry supposed he should ask before he had the chance to make a complete fool of himself in front of Eddie again, or worse, Iris…

“Uh. About Eddie and Iris…” he said hesitantly. “Is it… normal that I don’t like their mixed scent? Or that there’s something about Iris’s that just…” He couldn’t think how to explain it and just waved his hand randomly. It didn’t exactly make him uneasy, just aware, somehow. He didn’t even know what he was aware of.

Thawne stared at him long enough for Barry to start fidgeting before exhaling heavily. “Something about Ms. West’s scent…?” He opened his hands, encouraged Barry to keep going. Barry felt like he was being handed a shovel and told to dig.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said helplessly. “I just… notice it, you know?”

“Notice it,” Thawne said flatly, mystified. He frowned, considering, then asked – slowly, as if he wasn’t quite sure of his footing and didn’t want to stumble – “You mean as an omega?”

“Maybe?”

“You find Ms. West’s scent attractive?”

“Maybe?”

Thawne paused, then picked up Barry’s long-forgotten plate of pancakes and retreated to the kitchen, obviously using the excuse of tidying up to let himself think. “Now that’s… interesting,” he said as he returned. “Unfortunate,” he managed to add solemnly while his scent made a mockery of the pretense, a sun-drenched orchard of growing laughter.

“Why?” Barry asked, frowning. “Isn’t that normal? She’s an alpha, right? And I’m…” He waved his hand.

“Certainly if you’re attracted to alphas you’ll generally notice and find their scents pleasing,” Thawne said, still struggling valiantly to try and suppress his smile.

Barry flushed slightly. He thought about saying that he didn’t find Thawne’s scent pleasing but he suspected that would come across as protesting too much. Also, it might be just enough of a falsehood that Thawne would think he was plain lying.

It wasn’t pleasing it was just… It was understandable.

“Then why are you trying not to laugh?”

“I’m sorry, I was so distracted by…” Thawne waved a hand at Barry in an all-encompassing manner. “I genuinely forgot to consider you might…” He shook his head.

“Just laugh if you’re going to laugh,” Barry said, so sourly he could almost taste his own irritation. “Get it over with and tell me what the hell your problem is.”

“It’s not my problem, that’s why it’s funny,” Thawne said slyly, grinning, before he shook his head and affected a more serious mien to explain. “Alphas and omegas raised in the same household prior to puberty will by and large find each other’s scents repulsive as potential mates upon reaching sexual maturity regardless of any biological relationship. It’s why older children are less likely to be adopted and fostered – the older they are the less likely they will develop that aversion to their new siblings or parents and the more organizations will insist upon single dynamic households matching the child to lessen the chance of abuse.”

“It’s like the Westermarck effect?” Barry frowned. “But that only really works with children raised together until about six…”

“I’m assuming that’s a term for reverse sexual imprinting on your Earth? Possibly it’s something similar. Is that aversion backed by social pressures and norms or is it innate?”

“Uh… little of both?”

“Here it’s mostly innate. Packs can be… complex. I thought you said you were raised by Detective West in your universe?”

“Yeah, so?” Barry said defensively. “Iris isn’t my sister, I liked her before I moved in, it’s not that weird—”

“Current circumstances aside, though, you do consider Joe West your father?”

“Yes,” Barry said firmly. The temporary estrangement was just that – temporary. He hoped.

“And you don’t see any issue there? Sharing the same familial pack?”

“Again, she’s not my sister? I was eleven when I moved in, it’s not like we grew up together—”

“Oh no, you just spent some of the most important developmental years of your life in the same household, totally different.”

Since those developmental years in this universe involved first heats and ruts, Barry supposed, it was probably understandable that Thawne sounded so sarcastic. Those were some big and awkward developments.

He wished he had another fork to throw at him.

“You did it on purpose, huh,” Barry realized, suddenly sure Thawne’s future newspaper hadn’t had ‘Iris West-Allen’ as its writer from the moment the timeline first changed. Thawne shook his head at the accusation, abruptly serious.

“You forget,” he said. “I wasn’t there to kill your mother that night. I didn’t have any scheme in mind about making a future you suffer, I didn’t have any long-term plan at all. I meant to kill you. That was it.”

“But—”

“Did I laugh when I found out about that particular change to the timeline, absolutely. But changing an alternate future love life you might have had – do you think Iris West is the only mate you will ever have in the entirety of the multiverse? – it didn’t actually concern me anywhere near as much as that Detective West taking you in meant you were safe and would live to become the Flash at all. Ashe is still your pack, Barry. That ought to mean something.”

“I don’t know how it works!” Barry said. “I can’t help if I’m missing something!”

“You literally can,” Thawne said with a sigh, rubbing at his mouth as if trying to wipe the smile from it. “It might be a temporary complication of your circumstances,” he offered. “Perhaps that awareness will change as you adapt, settle your pack ties? That should also take care of your repulsion to aher and Eddie’s mixed scent – it would be a warning you wouldn’t need if you aren’t interested as a rival.”

“I’m not? It’s not like I’m going to fight Eddie—” he winced, remembering, and Thawne’s eyebrows shot up.

“Oh, your world is something, isn’t it?”

“It was an anger-inducing metahuman,” Barry muttered defensively. Just thinking about it was mortifying – he could have really hurt Eddie and for what? Bivolo’s abilities messing him up was no real excuse. “I like Eddie,” he reminded himself firmly. “Eddie’s great. Great to and for Iris.”

“Try and sound a little more convincing,” Thawne said, almost offended for some reason. Barry couldn’t tell if it was because Eobard thought he’d called Eddie great and didn’t mean it, offending his pride as a Thawne, or because that same pride with its weird villain standards disagreed with the idea of Eddie being considered great at all.

“He’s really nice and deserves a way better descendant,” Barry said, side-eyeing him. “And Iris really likes him,” he added quietly, remembering the way she’d smiled at Eddie sometimes, how happy she had been, how it radiated from her just looking at him – and how devastated she had been with grief.

Well, if there was one thing Barry could do it was definitely prevent that, and all the consequences of that heroic – futile – sacrifice. If it meant this world and timeline was one where he and Iris would always be best friends instead of anything else – that wasn’t a loss. He and Thawne would know it might have been different once, but that was all.

He wasn’t going to mess anything up for Iris, or his alternate self. He was going to be the best… pack-mate. However that worked. And that started, he guessed, with letting Caitlin test his sensitivity to certain scents and working out how to react appropriately to Iris’s.

“Okay,” he said, resigned. “Let’s go get a biology lesson.”

Chapter Text

“Oh good you found him,” Caitlin said, looking up and smiling as Barry and Dr. Wells entered the Cortex, obviously relieved. “I was wondering why you were late,” she teased Wells, clearly implying that she thought it was Barry’s fault.

It was, because he’d gotten distracted halfway through the run to S.T.A.R. Labs and stopped to stare at sculpture outside the Museum of Modern Art that hadn’t been there before and was somehow both completely abstract and very obvious what it was about, and at a giant billboard for a new kind of heat medication, and at some trashy magazines on a newsstand – It's "An Omega Thing" -- How To Find Out If Ohe's Cheating: On YOU! – and eventually Thawne had just started grabbing his jacket by the back of the neck and steering him away whenever it even looked like he was starting to veer off course. They technically had all the time in the world for Barry to look at things!

Admittedly Barry might have started playing it up a little both because he didn’t really want to face Caitlin’s inevitable biology lecture and because the exasperated little growls from Thawne were hilarious, but it really was genuinely bizarre, all the big, little, and almost unnoticeable until you looked closer and they hit like a truck differences.

“Wow, I see how it is,” he said, pretending to be hurt, and Caitlin laughed because of course she could tell he didn’t mean it in the slightest.

“You have to admit, it’s a little funny that the fastest person alive is less punctual than someone in a wheelchair,” she said, then paused, her expression startled as Thawne moved further into the room, approached his desk. “Why aren’t you wearing scent blockers?”

Barry looked over at Thawne – Wells, he was Dr. Wells anywhere Cisco and Caitlin were or might hear. So it wasn’t just Barry wondering, that was good. It had made sense when they were alone in his house – people relaxed their guard in their own spaces, even Thawne, who exploited that habit mercilessly in everyone else – but he’d been expected him to apply them after they’d cleaned up upon entering S.T.A.R. Labs and was a little surprised he hadn’t. Barry had used his stupid scent mask, even if he refused to bother with the patches, annoyed at the thought of getting the placement just right – despite Wells rolling his eyes at him when he said that, telling him the visual guidelines were just that, guidelines, and it didn’t matter if he was an inch or two off from where the pictures indicated. So long as he wasn’t slapping them on randomly it wasn’t a big deal if they weren’t placed exactly center over the glands.

“You and Cisco hardly wear them any more,” Wells pointed out, and Barry looked from him to her, surprised. Did that mean everyone in S.T.A.R. Labs used to wear them? Maybe when it was busy and full of egos – Wells hardly the least of them – it had stopped a lot of potential friction, everybody wearing scent-blockers. Not that it could stop it all – Cisco and Hartley seemed to have had the same sort of antagonistic relationship they’d had in Barry’s universe. But for people who relied a lot more on being able to actually smell things like irritation or dislike…

“Yes, but you’ve always been stubborn about continuing to use them-- oh,” Caitlin said with a note of realization. Her eyes flicked towards Barry, watching them both with a baffled expression, and back to Wells. “Oh, I see.”

What? What did she see?

“It’s not that,” Wells said, presumably confirming for her that it was exactly that, whatever ‘that’ was.

“Of course, Dr. Wells,” Caitlin agreed, nodding as if she believed him, but Barry had to think from the face Wells made that the change in her scent meant she was gently patronizing him.

“What?” he asked. “What’s the deal?”

“It’s not important,” Caitlin said, shaking her head.

“She thinks you’re in proestrus – pre-heat – and I’ve ‘forgotten’ to apply scent blockers subconsciously to allow you to assess me more accurately as a potential mate,” Wells explained, and Caitlin threw her hands up. “You’re doing him no favors trying to avoid the subject,” he told her, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter, watch.”

“Like you’d ever make a mistake like that subconsciously.” Barry snorted at the idea.

“Hm,” Thawne agreed noncommittally. He eyed Barry for a moment as if expecting something else to follow, then sighed and shook his head. “As Caitlin says, it’s not important.”

Because it wasn’t true, obviously.

“Are you serious?” Caitlin demanded, looking between them. “You’re both – agh!”

“What have I walked into?” Cisco asked warily, halting at the entrance with a Jitters cup in each hand and at least one calorie bar sticking out of a pocket. Going by the color of the wrapper, the worst flavor too. Not that any of them were all that good, even if Barry occasionally said so to spare Cisco’s feelings. Some were definitely worse than others though.

Barry made a face. “I don’t know.”

“I’m not going to say it,” Caitlin said as Wells smothered a noise – a laugh, his scent gave him away. “But I want you to know I’m thinking it really, really loudly.”

You never know anything, Wells mouthed behind her back, and Barry scowled at him, offended. It was a whole different world, cut him some slack! He’d like to see Thawne try and handle randomly appearing in Barry’s universe – oh god, no, terrible idea actually, he really, really didn’t.

The things a younger more ignorant Barry could have been convinced to do for Harrison Wells if he only asked…

“Cisco, I need to talk to you,” Caitlin said, unaware of what was going on behind her. “Just quickly. Outside. Now.”

“What now,” Cisco said sadly, handing her one of the coffee cups with a sigh. “Did Barry do something again?”

“Hey!”

Caitlin cleared her throat pointedly, glanced at Wells. Cisco followed her gaze, frowned, then sniffed. His eyes widened in understanding before Caitlin grabbed his wrist, swiftly tugging him along out of the room.

“Careful! The coffee!” Barry heard him complain before they presumably moved too far away to be heard.

He looked at Thawne. Harrison Wells looked back, sardonic little smile on his face, and it could have been one of a dozen little moments Barry remembered, the man seeming fondly exasperated with his employees – technically, no point touching the emotional tripwires – and their antics.

“…What do you think they’re talking about?”

“I suspect Caitlin is sharing her theory regarding my decision not to wear scent-blockers today and asking him to pay closer attention to my actions towards you just in case.”

“You’ll be fine then.” Barry shrugged. “Since her premise is flawed to begin with.”

“...Mm.”

“What difference could it even make?” Barry wandered over to Caitlin’s workstation and sighed at the stack of files, covered in post-its and exclamation marks in red marker that practically screamed frustration.

“Oh, plenty – if you were an omega born and raised. Scent is considered near integral to mate selection.”

“That’s so strange,” Barry said, turning his back to Caitlin’s files and moving closer to him, frowning at his patient expression.

“That’s not to say appearance isn’t a factor, but there’s a wealth of information in someone’s scent when it comes to registering compatibility.” Wells shook his head, baffled. “The idea that you don’t consider it relevant…”

“I mean yeah it’s nice if someone smells nice, but… that’s it.” Barry shrugged.

“Perhaps it was more subconscious on your Earth,” Wells said thoughtfully, as if he couldn’t understand it not being relevant at all. “There’s another element to Caitlin’s concern as well – but maybe it would be best if she explained that.”

“It worries me more that you want to avoid talking about whatever it is,” Barry said suspiciously. “If you know what it is, you do it.”

“I just thought you might doubt the information less coming from another source. She worries that if she’s correct in assessing the state of your estrus cycle that it might come to affect my rut.”

“It can do that?” Barry said after a moment spent blinking at him, trying to make the words make sense as something that applied to real life. “I mean, I thought it was a seasonal thing?” A Fall thing, so Barry had plenty of time to make plans to be somewhere, anywhere else, now that he had to concede it was a thing that could happen and he might be in the same universe when it did.

“Primarily rut is seasonal, yes, characterized by an increase in aggressiveness and territoriality, but similar symptoms can also be triggered by extended close contact with an omega in or nearing heat.” He shook his head at Barry’s presumably horrified expression, his smile a flash of white teeth and flare of red eyes. “Despite popular belief it’s not actually a true rut but it’s far too late for science to convince anyone of that so it often gets called a breeding rut to differentiate whether it’s the alpha’s biology or the omega’s prompting it.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Barry said uncertainly. He didn’t look like he was kidding, but… “That sounds like the worst feedback loop ever. And kind of – victim blaming?”

“It’s supposed to help an alpha meet an omega’s needs in heat, ensure similar sexual capacity and desire for the duration required. Just being around an omega in heat for an hour or two isn’t going to trigger it, you’d need to share space constantly and consistently. But of course there are those who argue it means they can’t control themselves.”

“But they can?” Barry wondered if he would take the opportunity to dismiss personal responsibility when it came to his world’s strange biology –

“They can. Neither rut nor heat is an excuse to force someone, though it was legitimate legal defense until 1997.”

“It what!”

“I suppose you’ll tell me now that your world has never struggled with definition of rape, marital or otherwise?”

He had Barry there, even without knowing anything more than what he could reasonably extrapolate from the idea of a world where the human population consisted entirely of something close to betas.

“Joe said it could be a medical issue,” Barry remembered, frowning uncertainly. A medical issue, but no excuse. A hormonal imbalance or overload that altered normal cognitive function beyond even the expected, maybe, damaged impulse control or affected the ability to reason. Probably as badly understood or historically dismissed as any mental health issue relating to hormonal or immune changes, although Barry did have to admit he found it difficult not to judge a little when the possible consequences were so dire. He knew he shouldn’t – it was probably as callous as blaming someone for postpartum psychosis – but he couldn’t help it.

Wells grimaced, something bitter creeping into his scent. No. Thawne was grimacing, the bitterness too tied to an agitated crackling that was his lightning trying to respond to his anger. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. “For a very small subsection of alphas.”

“...like you?” Barry thought that might explain the strange reaction, but saying that just made it worse, Thawne’s scent curdling with furious insult, his jaw clenching before he looked away.

“I don’t have them,” he said, as if that answered Barry’s question at all. “I haven’t had a rut since I became a speedster, never mind Harrison Wells, even if Caitlin and Cisco are under the impression otherwise.”

Well that was a relief Barry wasn’t going to acknowledge, but… Did he pretend to have ruts then? Why? Another appearance thing, like the look of his house or choosing to wear glasses even though he didn’t need them? Would it really look so weird if he didn’t have them? Did people actually care?

Did Barry look weird, not having heats any more? God, if he had people pitying him about it…

Think – he had to get rid of that godawful rancid bitterness, lighten the mood somehow –

“You just used ‘rut’ as an excuse for you to have extra time off, didn’t you. Don’t lie.”

Thawne was startled enough to laugh, turning to look at him again, peer at Barry’s determinedly earnest expression. “No,” he said, bemused, voice and scent both warming again. “I used the correct PTO, it’s hardly my fault my staff made assumptions from the timing and my irritation beforehand about being forced to take time away from the lab.”

“Wait, so time off is different for ruts or heats?”

“Ooh, is he telling you about HR’s headache?” Caitlin asked as she and Cisco walked back in, looking cautiously between them while sipping clearly already half-drained coffee. Cisco reached into his pocket and pulled out the calorie bar to casually throw at Barry the way he’d done a hundred times, then hesitated with a wary look at Wells and gave it to him to toss to Barry instead, who almost fumbled the catch trying to work out what the hell that was about.

“Thanks,” he said, unsure who he was directing it at. He unwrapped the bar, nibbled one corner, and did his best not to make a face. If he’d thought they were bland in the future he’d obviously forgotten how terribly they’d started out. Bland was at least better than mildly unpleasant. Not enough not to eat them, but enough to make it a chore. ...Maybe he should have eaten more pancakes so he’d have an excuse to decline it. “What about HR?”

Cisco grinned, throwing himself into his chair and spinning his way into the center of the room, coffee cup held aloft like a torch

“Okay, so at the beginning of every year, right, HR always sends… sent out an email to everybody – it was really for new starters they just didn’t want to single anyone out – about not using PTO for rut or heat leave. There’s a separate allowance specifically meant to be used for mating leave, you don’t have to use your own vacation days, pretty please, you mess up all our calculations, this isn’t a privilege it’s a right we’re trying to give you, etc.”

“Is it a right?” Barry asked curiously, and distinctly heard Wells mutter, “Well it should be.”

“Sort of yes but also no,” Cisco said, waving the hand not holding coffee dismissively. “Capitalist hellscape and all that. You gotta take leave if you’re in heat or rut, even the worst of the worst gotta admit nobody’s getting work done in that sort of state. But so long as a company technically offers the vacation days to cover it – even if they only offer the minimum number that could cover the yearly average heat or rut – they’re legally in the clear.”

“What if you don’t have the minimum average rut or heat though?” Barry asked, frowning.

“Then the omega or alpha in question will probably end up being fired for unreliability and in all likelihood replaced by a beta that doesn’t need to use those minimal vacation days for a recurring medical issue,” Wells said flatly.

“Wow,” Cisco said after a moment, breaking the awkward silence. “Uh. I mean, maybe? In some shitty places. That’s not supposed to happen though.”

Right, and pregnancy wasn’t supposed to be something an employee got fired for either but it still happened. Barry glanced between them and realized suddenly that Cisco thought Dr. Wells was overly sensitive to such potential discrimination because it supposedly affected him – or had before he became his own boss. It wasn’t a kind Cisco needed to worry about so it didn’t matter as much to him if it was true of other companies.

“Sometimes it’s folded under sick leave instead, if they offer that,” Wells said, obviously unimpressed. “S.T.A.R. Labs policy is – was, to have it as its own separate thing. If all an employee’s days are used covering their heat or rut they’ll feel forced to work when actually sick, which is just as much a productivity loss as someone riling up the department with pheromone shedding. I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand about that.”

“Don’t get him started on Stagg Industries and their subpar statutory leave,” Caitlin advised Barry as if Wells couldn’t hear her perfectly.

“Yeah,” Cisco agreed. “Pretty sure Dr. Wells is still mortally insulted any scientist would choose to work for them and wants to beat their lawyers to death with the global working conditions laws report.”

He’d probably do far worse than just beat them to death but Barry preferred not to think about just how creatively murderous Thawne could get with their powers.

“Mating leave isn’t a difficult concept,” Wells said irritably. “Just about every other country in the world can manage it. One day even this one will catch up.”

“Anyway,” Cisco said loudly. “HR sends the email out at the beginning of the year, and everybody throws, like, ten dollars in the betting pool because there’s inevitably another one at the end of the year because yet again some newbie has forgotten and used their paid vacation days to cover their heat. Or rut. Every single year.”

Barry looked at Wells. Anyone else would have missed the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth, gone in the time it took to blink.

“The betting pool was huge by the end,” Caitlin said, bustling over and dumping files on the table in front of Barry. “But nobody ever came forward to claim it.”

“Yeah, all someone had to do was admit ‘hey, yeah, that was me, my bad’ and they could have collected all the money, as, like, unofficial compensation for the vacation days. They wouldn’t even have been teased that much! By the time the particle accelerator was done everybody mostly just wanted an answer for once, you know? Nobody ever did, though.”

“Huh,” Barry said, still looking at Harrison Wells, who just looked mildly interested as if discovering some gossip he’d previously been excluded from.

“Hey,” Cisco perked up, turning to Wells and saying excitedly, “you’d know who it was, right? Come on, whoever the last one was probably left right after the accident. Solve the mystery for us!”

“I’m sure I couldn’t tell you,” he said blandly, which wasn’t technically a lie and didn’t carry any hint of deceit.

“Am I using up my leave right now?” Barry wondered out loud. “At the precinct?”

“No,” Wells said. He’d know, Barry supposed, since he was the one who’d gone and accepted it for him. “Even aside from the accommodations being made for your particular circumstances, the police are well aware of their alpha-centric history, membership and reputation. They overcompensate.”

“And speaking of you using heat leave…” Caitlin said ominously, planting herself at Barry’s right while Cisco tossed his empty coffee cup in the trash and moved in tandem to his left, blocking him in. She tapped the files she’d placed in front of him with a finger. “Let’s talk about heats, shall we? I’m going to ask you a series of questions and I want you to answer me honestly, all right?”

Barry glanced from her face to Cisco’s, both of them worryingly determined, their bodies braced for any attempt he might make to try and push them aside and make a run for it. He looked over at Wells as Caitlin picked up a clipboard, mentally begging for help. He stared right back at Barry and shook his head deliberately slowly. Bastard.

“I’m not actually here because of heat,” Barry protested, turning to Cisco as the most likely to waver in the face of his most pathetic appealing expression. “That’s just an excuse! I need to work out to handle all the scenting and stuff, that’s it!”

Cisco looked away for a moment, unfortunately in Wells’ direction, then looked back with an expression of new resolve, obviously determined not to waver. Betrayed.

“So, hyperosmia,” Caitlin said, putting a little tick mark on whatever paper was on her clipboard. “Not conclusive, since obviously there’s the added difficulty of you being new to scenting at all. Lack of appetite?”

“No,” Wells said when Barry stubbornly refused to answer, and Caitlin glanced at him, surprised. “He ate this morning, and he’s still hungry enough for one of Cisco’s calorie bars, so.” He shrugged off her little frown.

“Did you get him breakfast before you brought him to the Cortex?” Caitlin asked, then seemed to reconsider if she wanted an answer to the question. “Actually, never mind.” She shook her head and sighed. “I know you can’t help it, but Dr. Wells…”

“It’s just embarrassing,” Cisco said pityingly, shaking his head.

Barry waited for Wells to give an excuse, explain, but he said nothing, just smiled wryly as if accepting the judgment as due. How exactly he was suddenly embarrassing himself by supposedly buying Barry breakfast when Barry definitely remembered him buying food before nobody bothered to explain.

Caitlin turned back to Barry, briskly pressing the back of her hand to his forehead and – with a moment of hesitation, glancing first at his bewildered face and then sideways at Dr. Wells – the side of his neck. “A little warm, but not feverish,” she said, and made a cross. “You run a little hotter than a non-meta anyway.”

“You’re going to give me a heart attack,” Cisco said, pressing his hand to his chest as if to calm the organ down. “Doing that in front of – you’re pack, and a professional, but damn, risky, Caitlin. You couldn’t go get a thermometer?”

“And give him a chance to run?” Caitlin retorted, peering into Barry’s face as if to read it better. “How are you sleeping? Have you been having difficulty falling or staying asleep? Have you noticed a sudden beginning of or uptick in erotic dreams? It doesn’t matter if they involve slick or not, we’ll get to that.”

“Have I – no!” Barry said, feeling his face heat. “Why would you even ask –”

“Do you feel paranoid in unfamiliar spaces – I mean, outside of here, your lab at the precinct, or Joe’s?”

“I’ve barely gone anywhere else, how would I know?” Barry protested. His face still felt hot, flushed by the previous question, and he ducked his head to avoid looking at anyone. Caitlin had been so matter of fact about it, so obviously running through a checklist, but that just made it weirder – that something like that was a standard question to ask someone.

“But are you staying to those places that are familiar to you because you because you don’t feel like you know enough about the rest of the world and it’s easier or because you feel safer in them?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“We’ll put it as ‘maybe’,” Caitlin decided, and there was a little scratching noise of pen moving across paper, presumably squiggling a little question mark. “Have you noticed yourself paying more attention to people’s necks, possibly with an increase in intrusive thoughts about biting?”

“The normal urge to bite people should be zero,” Barry pointed out, looking up to see if she was actually serious. She was. “Any increase is strange.”

Caitlin breathed in through her nose, then exhaled slowly. “Have you noticed an urge to bite, then?”

“No,” Barry said instantly, since she obviously meant the sexy kind. He didn’t remember lingering over any necks except Thawne’s, and that was entirely fantasizing about ripping it out. “Can we please just focus on the scent thing? I need help with the scent thing, preferably before Iris and Eddie get here later on and I throw up on their shoes.”

There was a pause, Caitlin and Cisco exchanging looks before turning to Dr. Wells, watching the proceedings with a patient look.

“Are you sure you’re okay with that?” Cisco asked him cautiously. “I mean, you’re like, one of the chillest alphas I know about having non-affiliated alphas in your territory but…”

“That was before,” Caitlin said with a look at Wells, apologetic but firm. When S.T.A.R. Labs was operational, Barry assumed she meant, and Wells had been at the peak of his career and undisputed master of his scientific kingdom, the idea of challenging him out of the question.

“Ever since the particle accelerator… you have to have noticed you’re more defensive of the lab than before.” Of Cisco and Caitlin too, Barry was guessing, even if Caitlin didn’t mention it. Or maybe it was just assumed to be part of it anyway? Defensive of territory was defensive of the pack inside it by default?

“Yeah, that,” Cisco said, nodding in agreement at her. “Lot harder to be confident about letting others in temporarily when your territory’s in ruins and the number of people in your pack has shrunk to, like, two betas and an omega. Especially if everybody’s unmated. …Even if the omega has a super off-putting scent so nobody’s going to actually challenge for ohim.”

“Um, hey?” Barry said, feeling a little… insulted? Was he actually hurt by Cisco’s blunt assessment of his olfactory attractiveness? What the hell. He glanced over at Wells, frowning a little, then remembered that Cisco wasn’t a speedster and didn’t really know his actual scent. Still. Kind of stung to be so bluntly dismissed, even if Barry didn’t actually want to be considered a prospect by whatever the weird alpha-omega standards of this world were.

“I’m just saying!” Cisco said. “It’s a good thing in this context! God, can you imagine,” he asked Caitlin with a sideways look at Wells. “Think how bad it would have been with Queen if Barry didn’t smell like ozone half the time.”

Caitlin winced.

“Oliver? What about Oliver?” Barry asked, then startled at a low cut-off snarl from Wells’ direction. “Right – no first names for unrelated alphas, I remember,” he assured him, rolling his eyes as Wells blinked as if to pretend he had no idea where that growl could possibly have come from.

“It was just… awkward,” Cisco said uncomfortably, exchanging a look with Caitlin. “I mean, Green Arrow’s an alpha, Dr. Wells is an alpha... Arrow got snappy because ahe was in an another alpha’s territory and not in charge, Dr. Wells got extra snappy because Arrow was in ahis territory and trying to be in charge. Like, ahe knew Queen wasn’t actually challenging ahim for S.T.A.R. Labs, but ahis instincts couldn’t help it, you know? Territory’s a big thing for alphas. And… well. They were also… kinda… not-really-but-sort-of-totally fighting over an omega,” he finished in a rush, wincing at Barry’s look.

“To mentor!” Caitlin put in quickly. “Technically,” she added under her breath. Then, even lower: “One of them.”

“Yeah,” Cisco said, wincing. “It was bad enough when it was obviously just a territorial pack clash, if you actually had a nice scent…”

“Hey??” Barry repeated, even more insulted.

“It just takes getting used to,” Caitlin assured him quickly. “Even Cisco and I used to gag sometimes when you first started running in after saving the day.”

“Right!” Cisco agreed, exaggeratedly miming holding back vomit. “Anyway, it’s just… cross-wired instincts, you know?”

“I don’t,” Barry said irritably, then sighed. “Whatever, they didn’t like each other on my Earth either.”

“Oh good,” Cisco sighed. “Wait – what was it about on your Earth, then?”

Barry thought about it, then shrugged and admitted, “Honestly, pretty much the same deal. Dr. Wells didn’t like how Ol- Green Arrow trained me, Green Arrow didn’t like Dr. Wells arguing against his training methods, they both thought they knew best, so.”

“See, typical alpha dominance battle,” Cisco said, nodding sagely. “It just didn’t get called that.”

Barry opened his mouth to argue, reconsidered, and closed it again without saying anything.

“Anyway, yeah,” Cisco said, turning to Wells again, “– you actually going to be cool with Iris in the lab?” Around Barry in totally not pre-heat, he didn’t say, but Barry assumed he was also asking.

“Ms. West is Barry’s pack,” Wells said evenly. It evidently explained a lot more to Cisco and Caitlin than it did to Barry – they exchanged looks and nodded at each other, presumably each taking up an argument:

“Just saying,” Cisco said airily. “When instincts are running high… sometimes my alpha friends forget real basic stuff, you know?” Not Wells, of course, he would never insinuate his boss could be just as volatile. He was just saying.

“We’re not saying Iris would challenge you over Barry,” Caitlin said smoothly, and Barry looked from one face to another wondering if they’d lost the plot or he had. “Although that would be aher right as ohis pack – obviously not as a rival of course, definitely not that,” she added in a rush, blushing bright red. “But I mean… you can’t really know how instincts and hormones are going to affect certain situations until they occur, right?”

“Dr. Wells’ll be fine,” Barry said, making a face at all of them, because what. “It’s just Iris, he knows Iris? Pretty sure she had to be in and out of here all the time when I was in a coma?”

“Mm,” Caitlin agreed, sharing a long look with Cisco and eyeing Wells for even longer, perfectly still and composed in his wheelchair. “We’re just saying…”

“Well, don’t? They’re not animals. Dr. Wells will be fine, Iris will be fine, it’s all going to be fine.”

Cisco waved ten dollars invitingly at Caitlin and with a thoughtful look at Wells she apparently accepted the bet, nodding once.

“It’s going to be fine,” Barry repeated, staring Wells down. If he even thought about threatening Iris –

“It’s going to be fine,” Wells agreed patiently, and Cisco whistled lowly, as if Wells had done something impressive by agreeing to act like a rational human being.

“Good,” Barry said, relieved. “Now what about—”

“Slick,” Caitlin said, and brought all his thoughts to a screeching halt. “I mean, we could use the formal medical designation but I don’t think it’s a good idea to let you try and dismiss it as mere medical jargon with no relevance to you. Only the newest qualified doctors ever use it anyway, ‘slick’ is quicker and easier to say and everybody knows what it means, clarity of communication is important with things like that.”

Okay, so it had definitely just been sweat making Barry sticky and uncomfortable in the morning, but could Barry outrun Thawne, gather up all his bedclothes and get them clean before Thawne could catch any kind of scent on them?

“Don’t,” Wells warned and Barry skidded to a halt beside his wheelchair, scuffing his foot quickly to smother the threat of burning rubber, wondering if Wells had actually started saying something the moment he started moving or if he was mixing up the way they communicated when moving at speed. He considered the distance to the entrance of the room longingly. It might as well have been miles away with Wells’ hand closing tightly around his wrist, holding him in place.

“You promised we’d just be dealing with the scent thing,” he said, and knew he sounded sulky and petulant.

“And part of that is considering your biology in general,” Wells said patiently. “You want to know why your reaction to Ms. West and Detective Thawne’s mingled scent is the way it is? You need to know what the normal responses are and what drives them in the first place.”

“Oooh, Iris and Thawne are mated now?” Caitlin said delightedly, dropping her professional demeanor for a second. “I mean, ashe said ashe was thinking about it,” she told Cisco, tucking a strand of hair back behind her hair, trying to look a little calmer, less excited. “Ashe wanted to know about Ronnie, the sort of difference a claiming bite might make in how people reacted, that sort of thing. You know how people like to dismiss atypical dynamic relations until there’s an actual bond.”

“Look, my mom said she was sorry,” Cisco protested, wincing. “She didn’t mean it, she’s just… a bit traditional,” he said helplessly.

“Your mother’s nice,” Caitlin said, her eyes giving away that her awkward smile had nothing to do with being amused. “That doesn’t make up for how sorry for me she was that Ronnie was inevitably going to leave me for an alpha one day, and it was such a shame that I wasn’t one, then we would know the perfect union of alpha and omega as originally intended by God.”

Cisco winced again. “Yeah, I’m sorry,” he said. “I get why you prefer not to be dragged to dinner with my family unless it's desperate – hell, I don’t want to see my family half the time, you’re in good company!”

“Cisco,” Caitlin sighed sympathetically, giving him a quick hug. “It’s fine, I’ll still come along any time you want me to.”

Barry looked down at Wells and found him watching the interaction with an unreadable expression, his scent distant and distracted, considering. He leaned down and breathed “Don’t,” into his ear.

He inhaled sharply, surprised, shuddering as if Barry had done something other than threaten him, turning his head to study him, scent sharpening with concentration. “What did you think I was thinking?”

“Nothing good,” Barry retorted, straightening up again to face Cisco and Caitlin’s strangely judging expressions. He was being good! He was staying in place for his lecture, he hadn’t shaken off Wells’ hand and run out the door! They definitely couldn’t have heard the original threat! What was the problem? “People don’t like alphas with betas then?”

“Depends,” Cisco said, still staring at him as if trying to work out how to say something, or if he even wanted to say something or not. “1-A and 2-B is… okay? People get a little judgy because an alpha bearing is…”

“Unusual,” Caitlin said with a brittle smile.

“A lot of cultures have an ick about omegas siring, or alphas bearing,” Cisco said with a shrug, like that explained it.

“Because they’re more successful the other way round – it’s mostly a cultural reinforcement of a biological observation,” Caitlin explained, her smile still tight and unhappy. “There’s also an assumption that the relationship can’t possibly be as fulfilling for the alpha because they can’t knot, or because—”

“Wait, why can’t they knot?” Barry asked. He tried to not to think about Wells’ fingers around his wrist, warm against his pulse, his hold slightly loosened enough that Barry could shake it off if he wanted to.

“Well it’s not like it is in porn,” Cisco said, confused, and Barry stared at him, even more lost.

“Porn?” he said blankly.

“You couldn’t think of any other way to say it?” Caitlin asked, turning to Cisco to shake her head at him.

“What?” he complained. “Everybody knows—”

“Barry doesn’t know,” she said, and he stopped, chagrined.

“Oh, no, right, ohe wouldn’t, would ohe?” he said with dawning realization. “And the books would make it sound – yeah, you’re right.”

“Do we really need a discussion about porn in the workplace?” Wells asked, and Cisco jumped.

“It’s relevant, I promise,” Cisco assured him.

Wells considered him for a moment before sighing. “I suppose this might as well happen,” he said wearily. “It’s not as if we have any pretensions about being a professional work environment these days.”

“I swear it makes sense,” Cisco insisted, turning to Barry to explain: “It’s a super common trope – but, uh, you wouldn’t know that, I guess. And a popular misconception? Like it’s really noticeable in porn, but a lot of people also believe it in real life, like virgin omegas—”

“I’m not a virgin,” Barry put in, a little indignant despite himself. He also didn’t consider himself an omega but that was a different thing. Thawne’s fingers tightened briefly around his wrist as if he thought he might be tempted to run, but when Barry didn’t move they relaxed again, returning to the appearance of holding him in place

“You’ve never had sex as an omega, so it’s kinda like you’re a virgin again,” Cisco said, as if that settled the matter.

“No?” Barry said. “Sex is sex it can’t be that different—”

There was a stifled noise of some kind from Wells and Barry broke off to frown down at him suspiciously. His expression was perfectly bland, but his scent…

“Oof, I don’t know,” Cisco said, and Barry glanced at him, distracted from trying to work out what the new edge to Wells’ scent meant.

“Barry’s relative virginity is not the topic at hand, I hope,” Wells said. “The point, Cisco?”

Cisco cleared his throat, appeared to brace himself. “So it’s a really common belief that an alpha knots every single time they have sex.”

“Ummm,” Wells disagreed, seemingly unable to stop himself. He let go of Barry’s wrist, put his hand on the wheelchair’s arm, and Barry tried not to miss the warmth, the excuse to have to stay still. Now he only had himself to blame for having to listen.

“No, no, I’m getting to it,” Cisco promised him quickly before turning to Barry. “You’ll thank me for explaining this, I swear.”

“Doubtful. And I distinctly remember having to read with my own two eyes something about how part of an alpha’s dick ‘swells prior to ejaculation to increase the chance of fertilization’.”

“No, yeah, it does do that,” Cisco agreed. “But here’s where the porn logic comes in, okay—”

“Maybe the person with grounding in the biological sciences should explain this,” Barry said, looking at Caitlin. “Because I’m pretty sure porn is not where anybody should be getting sex education in any universe?”

“Absolutely not,” Caitlin said firmly, looking grim. “I think I know what Cisco is trying to talk about, but also – I see we’re not going to ask the one person in the room with an actual knot.”

“I would prefer to be recused from this conversation actually,” Wells said. “Otherwise I might be forced to remember HR is me, myself, and I, and I don’t know what kind of disciplinary action applies when I’m also involved.”

“Yeah, Caitlin, I was trying to keep some mental distance from discussing knots in general to acknowledging the existence of one in particular,” Cisco said, making a face.

“Fine,” Caitlin sighed. “So what I think Cisco was trying to talk about is the copulatory tie – you read the knot swells prior to ejaculation to lock an alpha inside their partner, right?”

“That’s… what the books said, I guess,” Barry said, not looking at anyone in particular.

“Right. Because that’s what happens when sex occurs with an omega in heat.”

“Does it… not to do that otherwise?” Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look…

“Not in thousands of years, myths and folk tales aside. Sex outside of heat or rut is not as certain to produce offspring, so historically an alpha attacked in those circumstances who could, ah, disengage in an emergency was more likely to survive and sire children in the long run.”

Cisco snickered, then coughed at the look Wells gave him. “Sorry, I was just imagining –”

“Don’t,” Wells said flatly.

“But like, imagine an alpha trying to run one way and their partner the other –”

“Hilarious. Now imagine the ER visit.”

Cisco winced. Even Barry did, and he was pretty sure he was imagining it entirely wrong. He hoped he was imagining it entirely wrong.

“As I was saying,” Caitlin said over them loudly. “Over time alphas would become less and less likely to produce a full knot without heat pheromones involved. And alphas are –” she glanced at Wells, grimaced apologetically, and shrugged. “Well, they’re supposed to make the best studs. The same breeding strategies meant to ensure success with omegas work just as well – if not better – with other dynamics, and those dynamics would also select for alphas that didn’t tie every time: an alpha is already producing a greater volume of high motility sperm, a full knot would just be overkill with a beta or alpha partner.”

“Not to mention uncomfortable,” Cisco said cheerfully. “Who wants to have to use a gallon of lube and make sure they’ve got at least a half hour spare just to have a quickie?”

“You’ve got a high opinion of the average alpha’s stamina,” Barry said, raising his eyebrows.

“The average tie lasts about thirty minutes,” Caitlin said evenly. “Usually less, but sometimes more. It greatly enhances both conception chances and pair bonding, but…”

Don’t look down, don’t look at him at all, absolutely don’t look.

“How are you supposed to have casual sex?” Barry blurted, staring at Wells.

“I don’t,” he said, raising his eyebrows and gesturing at his chair as if to remind him of his assumed disability. Like he couldn’t zoom to the other side of the world and indulge himself somewhere nobody would recognize the founder of S.T.A.R. Labs if he wanted. Barry scowled at him, unimpressed. “But if you were asking about alphas in general – quite easily if they’re inclined.”

“Weren’t you listening?” Caitlin said with a gently exasperated sigh. “The knot is always present to some degree, and it does always swell prior to ejaculation. But if the alpha’s partner is not an omega in heat, it doesn’t, it can’t reach its full size. Heat pheromones are required to prompt it to do so, and then the combination of the internal pressure and heat instinct will make the omega’s internal muscles contract around it. Then it’s a proper tie.”

“Until they have sex with an omega in heat even most alphas may have trouble understanding the difference,” Wells put in, voice carefully modulated for distance, indifference. “It’s one thing to know intellectually and another entirely to experience, and some never do. Hence the persistent misconception.”

“Basically, alphas popping a full knot every time without heat involved is a porn thing,” Cisco said. “And like a really big dick it’s mostly just inconvenient in real life. But that’s why people think they can’t be satisfied with betas, because knotted sex is supposed to be something else and people think they’re missing out.”

“I mean, there are alphas that can produce a full knot every time?” Caitlin said thoughtfully. “They’re a definite minority though. There’s been studies.”

Okay, Barry did look away from Wells’ face for a moment. Briefly. But he did it fast enough that only Eobard would have been able to notice, and he was busy looking attentively at Caitlin, pretending to give his full concentration to what she was saying.

“Does it hurt?” He heard himself wonder, then ducked his head in embarrassment.

“Oh, no, it shouldn’t hurt at all,” Caitlin jumped in quickly. “It should feel quite pleasurable actually-”

“No I mean…”

Wells laughed suddenly and Barry looked at him with mingled embarrassment and relief because he just knew he’d understood exactly what Barry was trying to ask and was going to give an answer. “It’s just a different kind of erectile tissue, so no, the knot itself doesn’t hurt.” He looked at Caitlin and Cisco’s baffled expressions and grinned. “You’re forgetting that Barry’s universe seems to associate type and sex to a greater degree. Obviously he’s going to consider things from the perspective of a shared type rather than a different dynamic.”

“What he said,” Barry said weakly, waving a hand in his direction, and Caitlin winced.

“Barry… do you think maybe it might be time to try and focus a little more in regards to pronouns? At least in public.”

“Yeah, uh, using ‘he’ for an alpha who doesn’t use beta pronouns…” Cisco grimaced as Barry transferred his baffled look from Caitlin to him. “Look, you’re pretty much calling ahim knotless. I mean, we know what your deal is—” he waved at Wells and Caitlin and then jerked his thumb to point at his own chest “—but from an outside perspective… especially with Dr. Wells in a wheelchair…?”

“It looks ableist, frankly,” Caitlin said bluntly. “Like you’re saying ahe’s desexed, like ahe’s no longer an alpha or less of one because of it. Of course we know that’s not what you’re doing, but it’s what a lot of people would assume if they heard you.”

“Oh,” Barry said. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried so hard when talking to Joe. It might have disarmed him, made him less likely to jump immediately to resentment and annoyance if he’d heard Barry ‘dismiss’ Wells like he was apparently doing entirely by accident.

Back before he’d found out ‘Wells’ was the Reverse Flash he’d have been completely mortified at the idea of insulting his idol the way Caitlin implied, and even knowing what he did now…

“You know I don’t mean that, though?” If he was going to insult Thawne he’d do it deliberately, and about things he chose to be and do. There was a wealth of material to work with.

“I know you don’t mean any insult,” Wells said, looking amused as if he knew exactly what Barry was thinking. “I’m sure you—” he broke off as an alarm blared, turning to one of the computers to quickly bring up a map of Central City on the monitor, with a pulsing red warning dot in the city center.

“Meta alert?” Barry said, brightening, because he would take absolutely any excuse to leave, get away from dealing with any more thoughts about heats or knots or –

“Meta alert,” Cisco agreed, rolling his chair over to his own workstation.

“Barry—” Caitlin tried to say, but too late. Barry had already grabbed his suit – remembering at the last second to actually put it on outside the Cortex instead of inside as he used to, previously unaware of the other speedster in the room – and was out of the building hearing the last syllable oh his name through the audio equipment in his cowl instead of just his ears.