Barry felt like he'd been stuffed into an industrial centrifuge and spun for hours before being violently ejected. The world snapped from a dizzying blur of color and light back into familiar reality. He didn't stick the landing, his feet hit the pavement wrong, and he stumbled forward several steps. The soles of his shoes scraped against asphalt, kicking up thin wisps of smoke before he finally caught his balance.
"Whoa..."
He bent over, hands on his knees. His heart hammered in his chest. He looked around, getting his bearings. He was standing in a quiet back alley in Central City. Not far away stood a building he knew all too well: the S.T.A.R. Labs facility where the accident had happened.
That night had changed everything.
Lightning had torn through the air. From deep inside the particle accelerator came the groan of twisting metal. Bottles and beakers on the reagent racks had fallen, shattering on impact. One of the had splashed over him, head to toe, soaking him completely.
It wasn't a simple electric shock.
The sensation had been indescribable. Like every cell in his body was being ripped apart at the molecular level, injected with wild, inexhaustible energy, and then instantly reassembled. The pain had been absolute. And then, after the agony, came clarity.
And speed.
The world slowed to a crawl. He could see bullets carving their paths through the air in slow motion. He could read an entire library in the time it took someone to blink. And he could catch a falling glass of water a hundred times before it hit the ground.
From that day forward, he became lightning.
And with that speed came access to something beyond normal reality: the Speed Force.
It was the source of all velocity. The wellspring of power for every speedster who'd ever existed. Inside it, time wasn't a one-way river, it was an ocean you could swim through in any direction.
At least, that's how it was supposed to work.
Barry straightened up. He took a breath, focused his mind, and launched himself forward. Red lightning crackled around him as he tore through the barrier between dimensions and dove back into the Speed Force.
The world exploded into color.
Energy roared past him. He focused his will, no longer running forward into the future but turning back, reaching for the past. The colors around him began to shift. Time's threads seemed to flow in reverse. He caught glimpses of fragmented images flickering past.
Old cars. Vintage billboards. Clothing styles from decades ago. And then... there. A house he knew better than anywhere in the world.
Home.
The house where his mother had died.
He didn't hesitate. He ran straight for it. Through the window, he could see his mother. She was in the kitchen, moving around. He reached for the door.
His hand touched the handle... And something shoved him backward. It wasn't a wall or barrier. It was a force that rejected him completely. He felt himself getting pushed out of the Speed Force like a wave washing someone back to shore. The house, his mother, the past... all of it dissolved into streaks of color as he was forcibly ejected back into the present.
Barry materialized in the alley again. He slammed his fist against the brick wall.
"Damn it!"
He'd tried this so many times. Every attempt ended the same way. The Speed Force let him make small changes, rewinding a few seconds to catch a falling object, arriving somewhere a moment before he'd left. But the instant he tried to alter a major event, it kicked him out.
It didn't make sense.
The Speed Force wasn't a person. It wasn't sentient. It was a fundamental force of the universe, a dimension of pure speed. So why did it feel like something was deliberately stopping him?
Navigating the Speed Force was hard enough on its own. Time's paths weren't clear highways, they were narrow trails shrouded in fog. The future was fractured. The past was like a videotape left underwater, its images blurred and distorted. He often got lost in there, burning through massive amounts of mental energy just to find his way back to the present.
But there was one coordinate that was always clear.
No matter where he ran inside the Speed Force, no matter how distant a past he reached for or how hazy a future he glimpsed, he could always sense one specific point. It wasn't a visual signal. It was more like... gravity. An anchor pulling at him from a fixed location. That anchor was locked in the present... in Central City. On the timeline where that cop from Gotham existed.
He couldn't explain it.
The cop's presence inside the Speed Force dimension was like a beacon that never flickered. He didn't even have to search for it, the moment he entered the Speed Force, he could feel it instinctively, like a compass needle pointing north.
Before last night, it had just been a vague awareness. But after their encounter in the alley, he swore he could feel that gaze following him even inside the Speed Force.
He shivered.
This was bad.
The cop was just a cop. Maybe he was perceptive. Maybe he'd developed sharp instincts working Gotham's streets. But he should not be forming this kind of connection with something as fundamental to the universe as the Speed Force. That didn't make sense. Nothing about this made sense.
Barry ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. He needed answers. But he had no idea where to even start looking.
---
"Hey, Barry. You okay?"
Barry blinked and looked up. Cisco was standing a few feet away, holding a tablet and giving him a concerned look.
"Yeah. I'm fine." Barry forced a smile. "Probably just didn't get enough sleep."
"No kidding. You went out and caught a gang of bank robbers at dawn." Cisco raised an eyebrow. "Don't run yourself into the ground, man. Speed's great and all, but burning out isn't."
Barry nodded, but his mind was still elsewhere. He didn't have answers yet. But he would find them.
---
"That was fast."
Marco stared at the freshly printed morning newspaper in his hands. The headline screamed in bold letters:
"RED LIGHTNING! BANK ROBBERS' DREAMS SHATTERED IN AN INSTANT!"
He shook his head.
This was insanely fast.
Sure, the Flash was supposed to be fast, that was the whole point. But these robbers? They'd recruited people at noon, prepared in the afternoon, executed the job in the evening, got arrested before dawn, and made the front page of the newspaper first thing in the morning.
With that level of coordination, and execution speed, why the hell were they robbing banks? They should've been running a Fortune 500 company. Or at least a really efficient crime syndicate.
Marco couldn't help but compare them to Gotham's own criminal element. Back home, bank jobs were exercises in dysfunction. Crews spent more time arguing about the split before the heist than planning it. The second the job was done, someone would flip on their partners. Half the time, arrests came because one crew member anonymously tipped off the cops out of spite.
He let out a long sigh.
For a moment, he felt inferior on behalf of his city.
Gotham criminals were world-class when it came to brutality and chaos, but efficiency? Organization? Apparently, Central City's villains had them beat.
He folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the bed.
"Whatever. I'll check out another place tomorrow."