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It's New Year's Eve. It'll be 2015 in a few hours. Harrison is in the lab with a report in front of him, his pen turning and turning in his hand, the clock on the wall that tonight seems to tick more and more slowly.
He practically counts down in his head to the moment when the lab doors slide open, when Barry Allen steps inside with a bottle of whiskey topped with a bow.
“Hey, Dr. Wells,” he says. He has a smile on his face, crooked and sweet. “Nice party you've got here.”
Harrison cocks an eyebrow at him. Around them the lab is unadorned and dimly lit, except for the blink of monitors. “I know you were already informed that these days I don't exactly get into the spirit of the season.” He watches, with a distant coil of pleasure, the slight shameful flush that rises on Barry's neck, and then he smiles brightly and sets his pen down. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Barry steps further inside and shrugs. “Cisco said you'd be working on something tonight, a schematic for an enhancement to my suit. I kind of wanted a sneak peek.”
“Is that all?”
He nods his head up and down in the affirmative, but when Harrison meets him with more silent appraisal his whole body slumps. “Eddie and Iris are having a New Year's Eve get-together at ... their place,” he says wearily. Between one sentence and the next his breath comes out in an irate huff. The speed makes him anxious in some ways, makes every problem look like fight or flight. “It's, uh. Not really my scene.”
Harrison can't help it, the way the corner of his mouth pulls up a little. “Out of all the New Year's extracurriculars available to a man your age in Central City, you pick the one that most closely resembles work.”
Barry laughs as he meanders over to the desks. “I picked the one that seemed the most like me spending time with someone I care about. And someone I can actually look in the face today.” He sets the whiskey down on the desk, and then his head snaps up. “Wait, does that mean you want me on the treadmill tonight? It's New Year's.”
“I can't say the thought didn't cross my mind,” Harrison says, and this is some manner of private thrill too, the expressions that flicker on Barry's face: the mock alarm, the smile that threatens to spill like daybreak on his face at any given moment. It's difficult not to grin back, so Harrison doesn't fight the impulse as he reaches for the whiskey bottle and wraps his fingers around the bow. “But if you'll get two glasses from the breakroom, I may be inspired to reconsider.”
He's gone in an instant, a blur in a blue cardigan. Harrison takes the moment afterwards to glance down at the bottle. Single-malt, ten years old. It's a good choice for a New Year's celebration. Out with the old, in with the new.
-
In the past he does it with a kitchen knife, just for that theatric touch of domestic danger. He could do it with any implement in the house—if you can run at the speed of light you can run anything through just about anything else—but Nora, lovely Nora, deserves just a little more than her brains all over the Allen family floor and he knows that because he knows how much Barry loves her.
He can tell because it's love that powers that boy's shrill scream in the doorway. Love that makes him spare a nanosecond to move that boy out of the doorway into the street, even though that nanosecond is precious and leads the grown man right to his heels, leads Barry's hand over his shoulder and then almost a touch too close to the knife as he swings it at Nora Allen.
It catches her through the heart, as clean as he can manage but admittedly not as quick. He could kill her in the infinite spaces between one blink and the next, subtle and painless as a spring breeze, but then he supposes it wouldn't be murder.
He stays, a flicker from one doorway to the next, to hear the thud of the body. Then he runs. Barry chases him; Barry always chases him. From miles and then leagues and then minutes and then years away he can hear the boy shriek. He thinks, you'll thank me one day, but it's a little bit of black comedy; he knows that what Barry feels, in the minutes and years behind him, isn't gratitude.
But Harrison Wells knows enough about the future to know. It's not gratitude that Harrison needs, and it's not good fortune that Barry needs either. What they need, the both of them, will always be the Flash.
-
One hour to midnight and they've made a sizeable dent in the whiskey. It's actually Harrison who's been at it more than Barry, since the fact that Barry metabolizes alcohol too fast makes most drinks hardly worth the taste. They have so many similarities unspoken between them. One day Harrison intends to give them voice.
Tonight, though, he has Central City's New Year's Eve countdown on one of the computer monitors and a second with a ten-hour video of a fireplace; he has a third monitor that flips from video to video of relevant holiday music on Tesla coils that Harrison finds droll at best; but most importantly, he has Barry, who tabs out of YouTube after the conclusion of a song to say, “Thanks again for letting me hang out here tonight, Dr. Wells. I really appreciate it.”
Harrison waves a hand dismissively. “Don't worry about it. It's been a pleasure spending time with you.”
He leans back in his seat and pulls up the countdown on the third monitor. “I've been feeling ... stuck lately, since Christmas. It's nice to spend New Year's at the one place where I feel like I can actually move forward instead of backward.” He grins. “You know, symbolically.”
There's a joke to be made here, Harrison is pretty sure, but maybe it takes him a second too long to think of it because Barry glances up at him in the silence that follows. There's an ambiguous flicker on his face that most closely resembles concern—and then Harrison glances sideways at the bottle and realizes Barry thinks he's had too much.
It's a quaint thought. Harrison mulls it over some more, then reaches for the bottle again. “It's a new year. I don't necessarily buy into the symbolism, and I haven't made a resolution since before you were born, but I respect the desire for a change. That said, I believe that people change for one reason and one reason alone—inspiration.”
There's another silence that stretches between them. Harrison swirls his whiskey absently in the interim. Then, in a voice he can barely hear above the commotion on the screens, Barry says, “I think tragedy changes people.” He twists his hands on the tabletop and stares down at his knuckles, like he can picture them wrapped around someone's throat. “I heard you changed after the accident.”
“I changed after I met you, Barry,” Harrison says brusquely. “It may have been the farthest thing from a tragedy I've ever experienced.”
On screen, at the downtown celebration, there's a cacophony of shouts that almost crowds out the stiffness of the silence that follows. Out of the corner of his eye he watches Barry watch him as he takes another sip from his tumbler.
-
There's a time in the not-too-distant future, when the farce of his disability ends with a metahuman who can heal with her hands, and the night ends with Harrison standing—standing—at the door of Barry's shoebox apartment.
Barry says, “You didn't have to let her do that, you know that, right?”
“I know.”
“You were fine before.”
“Maybe.” Yes.
Barry pauses, then. He bites the inside of his cheek and looks Harrison over up and down, and then he says, “You wanted this?”
Harrison puts his hand on the door. “I want a lot of things,” he says. “Like most people, you'll find. May I ...”
He can.
-
“Ten! Nine! Eight!”
Earlier Barry zipped out and came back with two pairs of 2015 New Year's glasses and noisemakers. Harrison picks up a noisemaker in the spirit of the season. In the seat next to him Barry has a pair of glasses nested on his head and a shotglass pyramid at his elbow. They're huddled over one monitor, even though all of them have the countdown on.
“Seven! Six! Five! Four!”
“Three,” Barry says. “Two. One.”
Fireworks, explosive on the computer screen. The sound of cheers filter through the speakers. Harrison taps his tumbler to Barry's and then tosses it back over the course of seconds, as if he can't see Barry's eyes bright on him over the rim of the glass as Barry downs his own.
“Happy New Year, Dr. Wells,” he says.
Harrison, who's never been easily moved by calendar transitions, switches hands to blow the noisemaker. Barry startles, then laughs, a sound that's all sweet, weary joy.
-
Barry will find out someday, of course. Harrison has seen it.
“Everything,” Barry says. His voice trembles and booms. The boy has always been a lightning storm. “Everything in my life, everything that I worked for, everything I've done—with you—was built on a lie—”
He's tense and limp all at once. Easy enough for Harrison to toss him against the wall and step in close. “Please let me assure you that's not the case.”
“You did this to me,” he says. His breath is warm and shallow and he shakes like a leaf. Harrison puts his yellow-gloved hands on Barry's upper arms to hold him up: he knows what it's like, to be drunk on the truth.
“Barry. Don't you see?”
Beneath his hands Barry's trembling picks up in speed. The wall behind him starts to shiver, hairline fractures where the very tremors of his back start to threaten the concrete.
“I did this for you,” he says, and one of his hand skirts up over Barry's jawline with exquisite tenderness. Mostly to follow the stretch of it when Barry opens his mouth again to scream.
-
But that's someday, and today, on the first day of the new year, he wakes up with Barry—the both of them fully clothed—in one of the overnight cots in the back of the labs. They're beds for physicists who used to pull all-nighters, buried up to their necks in S.T.A.R. Labs deadlines.
There are no deadlines anymore. Harrison's on his own timetable now. The bed is just a bed.
“Dr. Wells?” comes the sleep-heavy voice from beside him. Then: “Oh, God, I'm in so much trouble.”
Harrison tries not to smile into his forearm, and fails. “You're twenty-five, Barry,” he says, over the gentle rustle of sheets. “You're only in trouble if you run.”
After a moment there's a soft chuckle, touched with helplessness. When Harrison turns his head at last to look he's greeted by Barry Allen, in his sleep-rumpled sweater from yesterday, a pair of 2015 New Year's glasses nested in his hair and a sheepish look on his face.
“Hey,” he says.
“Good morning. Happy New Year.”
“You too.” There's another pause, in which Barry's eyes can't decide where they want to be. They seem to settle for the bridge of Harrison's nose. “Um. Sorry about all this.”
“All what?”
“I should have gone home. After—you know.”
After Harrison nodded off last night at his desk and Barry pushed him to the back cots, scooped him up, laid him down. Laid down next to him, by all accounts, and didn't get up.
“Probably,” he says. A shadow passes over Barry's face. “But I did enjoy your company.”
“Good. Great.”
Harrison glances over his shoulder, then, at a digital wall clock. He scrubs his face with one hand—but this too is a mental countdown, down to the moment when Barry yanks his wrist aside and presses in.
Their mouths touch. He can feel the anticipatory tremble of Barry's lips, how it matches the shiver of his body before a scream, and Harrison realizes for the hundredth, maybe the thousandth time that Barry Allen is a fount of delights.
He reaches up to fist his hand loosely in Barry's hair and licks his way deep into Barry's mouth, drinks in the sound of his soft morning moan. The taste of him is vibrant, alive, like the prickle of air before a storm. Harrison wants to devour it, devour him. One taste and he's already dizzy with it. Barry scrambles on top of him to crush their mouths together harder, messy and wet, still too mindful of the legs he thinks can't feel pain, and when Harrison's hand tightens in his hair he actually whimpers.
“Barry,” Harrison murmurs. “I'm not sure this is ...”
Barry's hands are like hummingbirds, flitting down to the catches on his shirt. “I can take it,” he breathes. “Anything you've got. Whatever you've got.”
He's touch-starved, beautiful. The sight of his surrender forces Harrison to pull in a breath, low and steady.
“I sincerely doubt that,” he says, and smiles.