Running Over Water

[34 - Fatal Flaw]

Barry

As I walk around the corner, Thawne greets me with a sly smile. "What? No Big Belly Burger? Shame. It's one of the few perks of living in this timeline. We're out of cows where I come from. Anyways, you don't care about that. You have questions. Go ahead."

I look at him, hesitant to reply. "I'm not sure where to start. . . Thawne. That is your real name, Eobard Thawne, right?"

"Since the day I was born," he begins to pace around his cell with his hands clutched behind his back.

"And when was that?"

He sighs, "136 years from now. Come on, Barry, this isn't the stuff you want to know." He stops moving at turns to me, taking a step closer to the glass of the cell. "Go ahead. You know you want to."

I stare back at him, slowly gulping down. I look down before realizing I was being a coward. "Why? Why did you kill my mother?"

Without a seconds hesitation, he said, "Because I hate you."

I take a step back, shocked at his answer.

"Not you now. You years from now."

"In the future."

"Yes, in the future," he nods his head. "We're enemies, rivals, opposites. Reverses of one another."

I take a step towards him, too curious for my good. "Wh-why were we enemies?"

"That doesn't matter," he waves a hand dismissively at me and turns around." It doesn't matter any more. What matters is that neither of us was strong enough to defeat the other. That is. . . until I learned your secret. I learned your name. Barry Allen." He laughs and turns back at me. "And then, I knew how to defeat you once and for all. Travel back in time, kill you as a child,  and wipe you from the face of the earth."

"But that didn't work, now did it?"

"Yes, because you, future you, that is, followed me back in time and we fought. We both landed some pretty solid shots. But then future you got younger you out of the house. And you can't imagine the anger I was feeling," he laughs at himself. "So I thought, what if you were to suffer a tragedy? What if you were to suffer something so horrible, so traumatic that your child self could never recover to become the Flash?"

I was unable to move. I was unable to speak. I felt last nights dinner churn in my stomach. But he kept on talking. "So I stabbed your mother in the heart, and I was free, finally able to return to a future with no Flash, only to realize that in traveling back, I lost my way home. Because of you, I lost my ability to harness the speed force. And without it, I was stuck here."

His demeanor begins to change. He sneers at me, "Because of you, I was stranded in this time, unable to return back to mine. And want to know the only way back?"

He doesn't wait for me to reply before saying, "You. You were the only way I could get back home. But you see, the Flash was gone, so I had to create him."

And suddenly, everything began to fall into place. He made the Particle Accelerator so I could get my super-speed. No other reason besides that. "So why train me? Why help me save so many people?"

He steps closer to the glass to the point where we were barely three inches apart, the only thing separating the two of us was his cell. "Because I needed you to get fast. Just fast enough to rupture the space-time barrier and create a stable wormhole through which I could finally return home!"

"And why in the world would I do that?" I ask, astonished that he'd expect me to help him, the enemy.

"Because, Barry Allen, if you give me what I want, I'm going to give you what you want. You can go back and save your mother. You can prevent your father from going to prison. You can reunite the Allen family."