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elrhiarhodanTitle: What a Day To Go Kite Flying
For: MMOM - Thirty (One) Dirty Words – Day 3 (Prompt: Future)
Author:elrhiarhodan
Fandom: The Flash
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Harrison Wells | Eobard Thawne, Cisco Ramon, Hartley Rathaway,
Pairing: Eventual Barry/Harrison Wells | Eobard Thawne
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: NONE
Word Count: ~2400
Summary: Part Three of Deadmarked. Eobard Thawne, now a resident of Central City, is masquerading as Harrison Wells - founder and CEO of S.T.A.R. Labs. Tonight, the Particle Accelerator goes on line and if everything goes as planned, there will be a small accident, one that releases x-elements into the atmosphere. Elements that will trigger the mutation that creates soul marks.
But Eobard has one tiny problem. His mark, which has been dead for centuries, is now glowing with life.
Author's Notes: Written for Day 3 of the 2017 Edition of Merry Month of Masturbation, for the prompt "Future". As with all of the Deadmarked series, it's inspired by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
kyele, who wanted some achy EoBarry soulmate fic.
Title from The Moody Blues classic, "Another Morning", from Days of Future Past.
__________________
It's three hours until the Particle Accelerator goes on line and Eobard Thawne is not himself.
Instead of behaving like his typical arrogant self, snapping commands and doling out praise in equal measure, Eobard is silent. Questions are met with cold, blank stares. Eobard can't help his behavior. In three hours and forty-five minutes – give or take a few minutes, he supposed to trigger the mechanism that he'd created to for one simple reason – to ensure the revelation of his soul mate.
Once Eobard had unlocked the secrets of time travel, he spends decades hopping from the twenty-third century to various points in time, but never before the middle of the twentieth, trying to find his soul mate. The soul mark phenomena had been a direct result of atmospheric testing of nuclear weaponry, triggering a slow and inexorable mutation of the world's population.
Time travel takes its toll on Eobard. While his connection to the speed force gives him near-immortality, the constant displacement of his psyche in time ruins his memory. At first, he'd barely noticed it – forgetting small things, like the names of colleagues or the bits and pieces of current events that smooth conversation. That hadn't seemed important, as he had little patience for socializing. But then he started losing memories of his childhood, his family, the core of what makes him Eobard Thawne.
Everything has a price. Eobard could keep time traveling, popping in and out of the decades, searching and waiting for his mark to come to life, or he could start traveling into the past at greater intervals. His trips would span not decades, but generations. A feasible plan, except that he fears that his soul mate would be marked and die during a too-lengthy window of time.
And there was still the risk of repeated time travel itself, that he'd be trapped somewhere in time, cut off from his soul mate, with no memory of who he was and too feeble to get home.
Eobard gambles everything on one last trip and it's a carefully calculated risk. He runs through time, to the late twentieth century, just at the point in history when soul marks start to appear in the general population. He is, after all, immortal now. He just had to be patient and wait and watch.
But waiting and watching aren't his strengths. Science is, and Eobard needs his science as much as he needs his soulmate. His plan is simple – create a world-class facility devoted to the advancement of humanity's knowledge of everything but soul marks, and use it as a cover to speed up the appearance of the marks in the population.
It's surprisingly easy to do. Armed with nearly three centuries of research, Eobard finds himself in the middle of his own paradox. In the late twentieth century, a scientist – a man called Harrison Wells – had appeared out of nowhere, taking the scientific community by storm. He'd founded S.T.A.R. Labs, in 2024 he won a Nobel Prize for his work in strange matter theory, and shortly thereafter, retired from the business he'd created and disappeared.
Eobard has to smile at the memory of his reaction of when he'd first seen a picture of Harrison Wells. He had laughed himself stupid. It's a picture of him, Eobard Thawne.
Now, Eobard's in no mood to laugh. The Particle Accelerator will go on-line, the flaw he's designed in the system will release a small quantity of x-elements - not into the atmosphere, but underground where they will concentrate and start an accelerated mutation cycle, revealing soul marks in the percentage of humanity that already has the existing genetic markers and advancing the birthrate of children with soul marks.
It's a clumsy solution, but a necessary one. When he'd started on the project, Eobard thought he'd go mad if he has to live for centuries, waiting for his soulmate to be revealed.
But this morning, Eobard is faced with the unexpected. His soul mark, dead for so many centuries, is now brimming with life. It's still a tangled line of unresolved nonsense, but it's glowing, color pulsating along the length of the mark. He stares at it, not willing the believe the evidence of his eyes, that everything he's dreamed of has just come true and everything he's worked for, has just become completely unnecessary.
So he locks himself in his office, three hours before the launch. He paces and continues to weigh his options, something he's been doing constantly since this morning's discovery.
He could go ahead as planned, releasing the x-elements and creating a world filled with people destined for true love and happiness or he could delay the launch and spend the foreseeable future (and isn't that a joke?), searching for his soulmate, now alive in this timeline. Of course, that would likely destroy his reputation and make his financial backers more than a little nervous.
Or he could go ahead with the launch, but activate the failsafe, and let the world know that S.T.A.R. Labs is still at the pinnacle of scientific advancement.
The third choice is the easy one. But it also means that his days and nights won't be his own for a very long time. He's the very public face of this company and expectations – the ones he's so carefully nurtured – are running high. He won't have time to search for his soul-mate. But he actually has time - if Eobard's mark is just becoming alive now, his soulmate is only now reaching physical maturity.
And then Eobard's hit with a horrible thought. Perhaps his soulmate has just been born? His soulmate is an infant.
Ironic, he's waited for this moment for centuries and still he's no closer to achieving his life's goal. And yet, if he's learned anything in his sojourn here in the twenty-first century, he's learned patience. His soul mate is out there, nearby, just waiting to be discovered… and far too young for Eobard to even think about approaching.
A knock interrupts his thoughts and he opens the door, there's no point to hiding. He's made his decision.
Feeling more centered than he's been all day, Eobard opens his office door. Hartley Rathaway and Cisco Ramon, his lead physicist and senior mechanical engineer – both theoretically far too young for such high level positions, but both geniuses – wearing twin expressions of concern.
Cisco asks, "Doctor Wells – is everything okay?"
Eobard smiles and nods. "Everything's find – this is a momentous occasion. I just had a little bit of a … freakout."
Hartley stares at him. "But everything's okay now?"
Eobard supposes his admission of such a human emotion is a bit out of character, given his carefully cultivated reputation.
"Yes, Doctor Rathaway. I just want to physically check on the switches in the accelerator ring – one last look before we turn this thing on."
Cisco and Hartley start to follow him, but he gently dissuades them. "Let me do this alone. I appreciate your contributions to the project, but at the end of the day, this is my … baby."
Cisco and Hartley, well-conditioned to obedience, nod in agreement. "We'll see you soon?"
"Certainly. I'm not going to be late for my own party, now, am I?"
The failsafe is a physical switch, because there's simply no way he could build it into the Accelerator's programming without regulators and even his own people noticing the extra lines of code. It's buried deep in the ring, deliberately so, so Eobard would have to make a very concerted effort to get to it.
But once he does, he doesn't think twice about it. He turns off the device that will cause the "accident" and then ensures that the energy from the matter collision will be captured as planned. As he closes the access panel, Eobard feels like he's just avoided a catastrophe. Although no one would have known about this but him, it never felt quite like the right thing to do.
He might have created monsters instead of soulmates.
Eobard heads up to the Cortex - the central control room for the Accelerator - and gathers his staff for a brief pep talk.
"We've all worked long and hard for this moment." Eobard's gaze mets everyone's. "And no one will be prouder than me to have all of you standing with me as I tell the world of the future that awaits."
They follow him up and out into the damp December evening. There are the inevitable protesters, too many members of the news media - Eobard pauses and gives a print journalist a brief quote - and crowds of people eager to witness history as it's being made.
As comfortable in the twenty-first century's limelight as he'd been in the twenty-fifth's, Eobard bounds up and onto the stage.
"My name is Harrison Wells, and tonight, the future begins."
Eobard scans the crowd and wonders what his soulmate will think about this moment - twenty or so years into the future.
"The work my team and I will do here will change our understanding of physics. Will bring about advancements in power, advancements in medicine, and trust me that future will be here faster than you think."
There's a shout from some young woman in the audience, not directed at him - but at a thief - and the crowd parts as first one man, and then another runs off.
Eobard gestures for security to investigate and he's about to continue his speech, when he's interrupted by a searing pain in his forearm.
My soul mark.
Dreading any sort of public exposure, Eobard does his best to ignore the agony and he finishes his speech, bidding everyone goodnight.
A few minutes later, back in the Cortex, the pain has receded to a dull throb. Eobard grins - a strange euphoria has filled his veins - and he quips "I feel like I've waited for this day for centuries". He presses his fingers against the control screen and initiates particle injection.
It all feels anticlimactic - everything is functioning normally. Eobard pops a bottle of Champagne and passes it around, all the while keeping an eye on the timer. If he hadn't engaged the failsafe, the x-elements would be released at the forty-fifth minute, fifteen minutes before the first experiment of the S.T.A.R. Labs Particle Accelerator ends.
The minutes tick by; Eobard feels like he's caught in a time dilation, but eventually, the timer reaches the forty-fourth minute, passes through the forty-fifth, then the forty-sixth. The next fourteen minutes pass without any incident and the Accelerator powers down as programmed.
The team cheers, Eobard lets out a tiny sigh of relief, and reminds everyone to enjoy their weekend. "Monday is the future and it'll be here faster than anyone wants. Monday is when the real work begins, analyzing the terabytes of new data produced by this inaugural experiment."
The Cortex empties out and Eobard locks everything down before leaving, himself.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
He could have used his speed and sprinted home in the time it takes to get his car out of the S.T.A.R. Labs parking lot. But he was afraid of what his speed would to to his mark. He's also afraid to look at it, to see that it's unchanged.
Or worse, that it's gone dead again.
Eobard's only concession to impatience is pushing his car to nearly twice the speed limit, and he just about makes it through the front door before ripping off his jacket and pushing up his sleeve.
To his relief - and then elation - the mark is not just alive, it's started to resolve, the ugly scrawl forming not words, but numbers and letters.
3x2(9yz)4A
He looks at it and starts to laugh. It's a speed equation, one of the more unorthodox ones he'd developed four centuries in the future.
The relief makes him lightheaded, dizzy. Eobard can't explain it but he knows now that his soulmate isn't a child or even a youth on the cusp of physical maturity. His soulmate had been in the audience this evening, an adult with a questing mind and a strong intellect. An adult who might be - right now - looking for his soulmate, wondering if he had been close enough to touch.
Conscious of the toll the day's hard work - physical and emotional - has left on him, Eobard strips to the skin and heads to the shower.
Under the pounding water, Eobard indulges in a fantasy he's never allowed himself to have - not until now.
The first moment he meets his soulmate.
It shouldn't be sexual, it's supposed to be profound. The moment when they realize that their whole lives have been a prelude to this. But his body, still thrumming with adrenaline, with the residual excitement of the launch, the awareness that he'd done the right thing for everyone, wants more than a deeply spiritual encounter.
His body wants sex. His body wants skin and heat and lust. It wants to feel the other - the one that Eobard's been searching for for centuries.
Eobard can't give his body that - not just yet - but he can give himself physical relief, momentary satisfaction.
As Eobard strokes his cock, he imagines his soulmate, his kiss - at first tentative, unsure, maybe a little submissive, but then growing stronger and more certain. Eobard devours him, but his soulmate gives back in equal measure. It's like the moment Eobard had transformed himself into a speedster, the first time he'd broken the laws of physics. It's like experiencing the birth of the universe.
The pain on Eobard's arm is a slow, syncopated pulse to his heartbeat, a steady reminder that tonight, he'd seen his soulmate, he'd seen the man that he'd fought against time itself to find.
His orgasm is like a long, slow roll, rather than a momentous eruption of sensation. The pleasure is deep, an echo of the profundity of Eobard's eventual meeting with his soulmate.
The water cascades over Eobard, washing him clean, renewing him.
FIN
For: MMOM - Thirty (One) Dirty Words – Day 3 (Prompt: Future)
Author:
elrhiarhodan Fandom: The Flash
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Harrison Wells | Eobard Thawne, Cisco Ramon, Hartley Rathaway,
Pairing: Eventual Barry/Harrison Wells | Eobard Thawne
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: NONE
Word Count: ~2400
Summary: Part Three of Deadmarked. Eobard Thawne, now a resident of Central City, is masquerading as Harrison Wells - founder and CEO of S.T.A.R. Labs. Tonight, the Particle Accelerator goes on line and if everything goes as planned, there will be a small accident, one that releases x-elements into the atmosphere. Elements that will trigger the mutation that creates soul marks.
But Eobard has one tiny problem. His mark, which has been dead for centuries, is now glowing with life.
Author's Notes: Written for Day 3 of the 2017 Edition of Merry Month of Masturbation, for the prompt "Future". As with all of the Deadmarked series, it's inspired by
Title from The Moody Blues classic, "Another Morning", from Days of Future Past.
It's three hours until the Particle Accelerator goes on line and Eobard Thawne is not himself.
Instead of behaving like his typical arrogant self, snapping commands and doling out praise in equal measure, Eobard is silent. Questions are met with cold, blank stares. Eobard can't help his behavior. In three hours and forty-five minutes – give or take a few minutes, he supposed to trigger the mechanism that he'd created to for one simple reason – to ensure the revelation of his soul mate.
Once Eobard had unlocked the secrets of time travel, he spends decades hopping from the twenty-third century to various points in time, but never before the middle of the twentieth, trying to find his soul mate. The soul mark phenomena had been a direct result of atmospheric testing of nuclear weaponry, triggering a slow and inexorable mutation of the world's population.
Time travel takes its toll on Eobard. While his connection to the speed force gives him near-immortality, the constant displacement of his psyche in time ruins his memory. At first, he'd barely noticed it – forgetting small things, like the names of colleagues or the bits and pieces of current events that smooth conversation. That hadn't seemed important, as he had little patience for socializing. But then he started losing memories of his childhood, his family, the core of what makes him Eobard Thawne.
Everything has a price. Eobard could keep time traveling, popping in and out of the decades, searching and waiting for his mark to come to life, or he could start traveling into the past at greater intervals. His trips would span not decades, but generations. A feasible plan, except that he fears that his soul mate would be marked and die during a too-lengthy window of time.
And there was still the risk of repeated time travel itself, that he'd be trapped somewhere in time, cut off from his soul mate, with no memory of who he was and too feeble to get home.
Eobard gambles everything on one last trip and it's a carefully calculated risk. He runs through time, to the late twentieth century, just at the point in history when soul marks start to appear in the general population. He is, after all, immortal now. He just had to be patient and wait and watch.
But waiting and watching aren't his strengths. Science is, and Eobard needs his science as much as he needs his soulmate. His plan is simple – create a world-class facility devoted to the advancement of humanity's knowledge of everything but soul marks, and use it as a cover to speed up the appearance of the marks in the population.
It's surprisingly easy to do. Armed with nearly three centuries of research, Eobard finds himself in the middle of his own paradox. In the late twentieth century, a scientist – a man called Harrison Wells – had appeared out of nowhere, taking the scientific community by storm. He'd founded S.T.A.R. Labs, in 2024 he won a Nobel Prize for his work in strange matter theory, and shortly thereafter, retired from the business he'd created and disappeared.
Eobard has to smile at the memory of his reaction of when he'd first seen a picture of Harrison Wells. He had laughed himself stupid. It's a picture of him, Eobard Thawne.
Now, Eobard's in no mood to laugh. The Particle Accelerator will go on-line, the flaw he's designed in the system will release a small quantity of x-elements - not into the atmosphere, but underground where they will concentrate and start an accelerated mutation cycle, revealing soul marks in the percentage of humanity that already has the existing genetic markers and advancing the birthrate of children with soul marks.
It's a clumsy solution, but a necessary one. When he'd started on the project, Eobard thought he'd go mad if he has to live for centuries, waiting for his soulmate to be revealed.
But this morning, Eobard is faced with the unexpected. His soul mark, dead for so many centuries, is now brimming with life. It's still a tangled line of unresolved nonsense, but it's glowing, color pulsating along the length of the mark. He stares at it, not willing the believe the evidence of his eyes, that everything he's dreamed of has just come true and everything he's worked for, has just become completely unnecessary.
So he locks himself in his office, three hours before the launch. He paces and continues to weigh his options, something he's been doing constantly since this morning's discovery.
He could go ahead as planned, releasing the x-elements and creating a world filled with people destined for true love and happiness or he could delay the launch and spend the foreseeable future (and isn't that a joke?), searching for his soulmate, now alive in this timeline. Of course, that would likely destroy his reputation and make his financial backers more than a little nervous.
Or he could go ahead with the launch, but activate the failsafe, and let the world know that S.T.A.R. Labs is still at the pinnacle of scientific advancement.
The third choice is the easy one. But it also means that his days and nights won't be his own for a very long time. He's the very public face of this company and expectations – the ones he's so carefully nurtured – are running high. He won't have time to search for his soul-mate. But he actually has time - if Eobard's mark is just becoming alive now, his soulmate is only now reaching physical maturity.
And then Eobard's hit with a horrible thought. Perhaps his soulmate has just been born? His soulmate is an infant.
Ironic, he's waited for this moment for centuries and still he's no closer to achieving his life's goal. And yet, if he's learned anything in his sojourn here in the twenty-first century, he's learned patience. His soul mate is out there, nearby, just waiting to be discovered… and far too young for Eobard to even think about approaching.
A knock interrupts his thoughts and he opens the door, there's no point to hiding. He's made his decision.
Feeling more centered than he's been all day, Eobard opens his office door. Hartley Rathaway and Cisco Ramon, his lead physicist and senior mechanical engineer – both theoretically far too young for such high level positions, but both geniuses – wearing twin expressions of concern.
Cisco asks, "Doctor Wells – is everything okay?"
Eobard smiles and nods. "Everything's find – this is a momentous occasion. I just had a little bit of a … freakout."
Hartley stares at him. "But everything's okay now?"
Eobard supposes his admission of such a human emotion is a bit out of character, given his carefully cultivated reputation.
"Yes, Doctor Rathaway. I just want to physically check on the switches in the accelerator ring – one last look before we turn this thing on."
Cisco and Hartley start to follow him, but he gently dissuades them. "Let me do this alone. I appreciate your contributions to the project, but at the end of the day, this is my … baby."
Cisco and Hartley, well-conditioned to obedience, nod in agreement. "We'll see you soon?"
"Certainly. I'm not going to be late for my own party, now, am I?"
The failsafe is a physical switch, because there's simply no way he could build it into the Accelerator's programming without regulators and even his own people noticing the extra lines of code. It's buried deep in the ring, deliberately so, so Eobard would have to make a very concerted effort to get to it.
But once he does, he doesn't think twice about it. He turns off the device that will cause the "accident" and then ensures that the energy from the matter collision will be captured as planned. As he closes the access panel, Eobard feels like he's just avoided a catastrophe. Although no one would have known about this but him, it never felt quite like the right thing to do.
He might have created monsters instead of soulmates.
Eobard heads up to the Cortex - the central control room for the Accelerator - and gathers his staff for a brief pep talk.
"We've all worked long and hard for this moment." Eobard's gaze mets everyone's. "And no one will be prouder than me to have all of you standing with me as I tell the world of the future that awaits."
They follow him up and out into the damp December evening. There are the inevitable protesters, too many members of the news media - Eobard pauses and gives a print journalist a brief quote - and crowds of people eager to witness history as it's being made.
As comfortable in the twenty-first century's limelight as he'd been in the twenty-fifth's, Eobard bounds up and onto the stage.
"My name is Harrison Wells, and tonight, the future begins."
Eobard scans the crowd and wonders what his soulmate will think about this moment - twenty or so years into the future.
"The work my team and I will do here will change our understanding of physics. Will bring about advancements in power, advancements in medicine, and trust me that future will be here faster than you think."
There's a shout from some young woman in the audience, not directed at him - but at a thief - and the crowd parts as first one man, and then another runs off.
Eobard gestures for security to investigate and he's about to continue his speech, when he's interrupted by a searing pain in his forearm.
My soul mark.
Dreading any sort of public exposure, Eobard does his best to ignore the agony and he finishes his speech, bidding everyone goodnight.
A few minutes later, back in the Cortex, the pain has receded to a dull throb. Eobard grins - a strange euphoria has filled his veins - and he quips "I feel like I've waited for this day for centuries". He presses his fingers against the control screen and initiates particle injection.
It all feels anticlimactic - everything is functioning normally. Eobard pops a bottle of Champagne and passes it around, all the while keeping an eye on the timer. If he hadn't engaged the failsafe, the x-elements would be released at the forty-fifth minute, fifteen minutes before the first experiment of the S.T.A.R. Labs Particle Accelerator ends.
The minutes tick by; Eobard feels like he's caught in a time dilation, but eventually, the timer reaches the forty-fourth minute, passes through the forty-fifth, then the forty-sixth. The next fourteen minutes pass without any incident and the Accelerator powers down as programmed.
The team cheers, Eobard lets out a tiny sigh of relief, and reminds everyone to enjoy their weekend. "Monday is the future and it'll be here faster than anyone wants. Monday is when the real work begins, analyzing the terabytes of new data produced by this inaugural experiment."
The Cortex empties out and Eobard locks everything down before leaving, himself.
He could have used his speed and sprinted home in the time it takes to get his car out of the S.T.A.R. Labs parking lot. But he was afraid of what his speed would to to his mark. He's also afraid to look at it, to see that it's unchanged.
Or worse, that it's gone dead again.
Eobard's only concession to impatience is pushing his car to nearly twice the speed limit, and he just about makes it through the front door before ripping off his jacket and pushing up his sleeve.
To his relief - and then elation - the mark is not just alive, it's started to resolve, the ugly scrawl forming not words, but numbers and letters.
He looks at it and starts to laugh. It's a speed equation, one of the more unorthodox ones he'd developed four centuries in the future.
The relief makes him lightheaded, dizzy. Eobard can't explain it but he knows now that his soulmate isn't a child or even a youth on the cusp of physical maturity. His soulmate had been in the audience this evening, an adult with a questing mind and a strong intellect. An adult who might be - right now - looking for his soulmate, wondering if he had been close enough to touch.
Conscious of the toll the day's hard work - physical and emotional - has left on him, Eobard strips to the skin and heads to the shower.
Under the pounding water, Eobard indulges in a fantasy he's never allowed himself to have - not until now.
The first moment he meets his soulmate.
It shouldn't be sexual, it's supposed to be profound. The moment when they realize that their whole lives have been a prelude to this. But his body, still thrumming with adrenaline, with the residual excitement of the launch, the awareness that he'd done the right thing for everyone, wants more than a deeply spiritual encounter.
His body wants sex. His body wants skin and heat and lust. It wants to feel the other - the one that Eobard's been searching for for centuries.
Eobard can't give his body that - not just yet - but he can give himself physical relief, momentary satisfaction.
As Eobard strokes his cock, he imagines his soulmate, his kiss - at first tentative, unsure, maybe a little submissive, but then growing stronger and more certain. Eobard devours him, but his soulmate gives back in equal measure. It's like the moment Eobard had transformed himself into a speedster, the first time he'd broken the laws of physics. It's like experiencing the birth of the universe.
The pain on Eobard's arm is a slow, syncopated pulse to his heartbeat, a steady reminder that tonight, he'd seen his soulmate, he'd seen the man that he'd fought against time itself to find.
His orgasm is like a long, slow roll, rather than a momentous eruption of sensation. The pleasure is deep, an echo of the profundity of Eobard's eventual meeting with his soulmate.
The water cascades over Eobard, washing him clean, renewing him.
