Barry Allen's eyes snapped open in the darkness of his bedroom.
His heart pounded against his chest like a drum.
Sweat soaked through his shirt.
For several long seconds, he just lay there on his back, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, trying to remember where he was.
The apartment.
Right. His new apartment. The one he'd moved into three weeks ago after finally saving enough from his CSI salary to afford his own place.
Except that wasn't quite right either.
Memories crashed through his mind like competing tidal waves. Two sets. Two complete lives trying to occupy the same mental space.
Barry Allen, twenty-three years old, fresh out of college with a degree in forensic science. Six months into his first real job at the Central City Police Department.
Orphaned at eight when a car accident on a rainy night took both parents and left him the sole survivor.
Raised by Detective Joe West and his daughter Iris in a home that never quite felt like his own, no matter how much they tried.
That was one set of memories.
The other set belonged to someone else entirely. Someone from a world where Central City was fiction. Where Barry Allen was a character in TV shows and comic books.
Where the Flash's origin story, his villains, his future, his fate were all mapped out in painful detail across multiple universes and timelines.
A DC fanboy who'd spent years consuming every piece of DC Comics, especially every Flash content he could find.
And now that person was him. Or he was that person.
The distinction felt meaningless as the two sets of memories finished merging into a single, coherent whole.
Barry sat up slowly, pressing his palms against his eyes. The apartment was small. One bedroom, barely furnished.
He'd bought the cheapest couch he could find, a used table, a mattress on the floor.
The salary of a junior CSI didn't stretch far in Central City, and he'd been saving every penny he could to get out of Joe's house. To have his own space. His own life.
How ironic that he'd finally gotten independence right before everything changed.
He reached for his phone on the floor beside the mattress. The screen lit up, showing the time and date.
2:47 AM. September 23rd.
His fingers tightened around the device as the significance of that date hit him fully.
Two weeks.
In two weeks, the Queen's Gambit would sink somewhere in the North China Sea. Billionaire playboy Oliver Queen would disappear, presumed dead.
Queen Consolidated's stock would crash. Robert Queen's death would send shockwaves through the business world. And five years later, a very different Oliver Queen would return to Starling City with a hood and a bow.
Barry knew all of this because he'd watched it happen on a TV screen in another life.
His mind raced, processing implications at a speed that felt strange.
Enhanced.
He'd always been smart in the memories of Barry Allen's original life. Quick thinking, good at puzzles, detail-oriented enough to excel in forensic work.
But this was different. Ideas connected faster. Patterns emerged from chaos with startling clarity. Variables lined up in his head like a mathematical equation solving itself.
Was this part of the transmigration? Some benefit from merging two minds?
He stood up, pacing the small bedroom. The floorboards creaked under his bare feet.
Through the thin walls, he could hear a neighbor's TV playing softly.
Normal sounds. A normal night in a normal apartment in a city that was anything but normal.
This timeline was different from what he remembered. His parents hadn't been murdered by a time-traveling speedster.
There was no Reverse-Flash. No Harrison Wells hiding a dark secret. Just a car accident on a rainy night that took two lives and shattered a third.
Joe West had stepped in because he was a good man who didn't let a traumatized eight-year-old fall through the cracks of the system.
No great conspiracy. No time travel paradox. Just tragedy and kindness.
Which meant this was a clean timeline. Natural.
Without the temporal corruption that had defined the version he remembered from TV shows and comics.
Barry stopped pacing, staring at his reflection in the dark window. A young face looked back at him. Twenty-three years old. Lean, untrained, still carrying the soft edges of someone who'd never pushed their body to its limits.
Brown hair slightly too long. Green eyes that currently looked slightly wild with the realization of what he'd become.
He had knowledge. Years of it. He knew when Oliver Queen would return. He knew about the particle accelerator that Harrison Wells would eventually build at S.T.A.R. Labs. He knew about meta-humans, about the Rogues, about the threats that would emerge in the coming years.
He knew identities, weaknesses, origins.
He knew the future.
And he had time.
The particle accelerator was still years away from being built. S.T.A.R. Labs was currently just another research facility working on theoretical physics.
Harrison Wells was probably somewhere giving lectures or working on his designs.
The lightning strike that would create the Flash in the original timeline hadn't happened yet.
Which meant Barry Allen wasn't the Flash yet.
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