Chapter Text
When Barry Allen is eleven years old, a man in yellow lightning stabs his mother and puts the knife in his father’s hand. This is a story everyone knows.
Poor little Barry, the cops had whispered. So traumatized by what happened he made up a man made of lightning just to avoid blaming his clearly guilty father. Not even Joe West believed the boy, they muttered, and he’s practically the kid’s uncle. Such a sad story, did you hear West wants to foster the boy? Yeah, it’ll do him good to stay with a familiar face, especially after all that.
This is a story everyone knows. But stories, like all things, can be twisted by time until there’s nothing left of what the tale once was.
In one version of history, Detective Joseph West petitions for custody of Bartholomew Allen and wins. The caseworker assigned to the Allen case has three other ongoing ones and given how close of a friend the detective was to the family, it’ll be a good fit, right? And little Barry Allen grows up amongst cops, men and women who teach him how the justice system works and impress upon him rigid structures of right and wrong, good and evil, and that sad little boy grows into a man with lightning in his veins and his feet planted firmly on the side of the law.
That is one version of history.
It is not this story’s history.
For in this story, a different caseworker is assigned to the Allen case and she remembers a case from years ago: a brother and sister who had been abused by their father for years and were only free now because the man got caught red-handed during a robbery. Neighbors had called the police multiple times, only for the officers to brush them off as they knew the father and he couldn’t possibly do that to his own children, right?
This caseworker had come across the file only a few hours before she was called to the police station to meet Allen comma Bartholomew. She saw the fear in the little girl's’ eyes anytime someone dressed in dark blue ventured too close, heard the desperation in the teen’s - and he wasn’t really a teenager, not anymore - voice when he quietly asked her to stay in the room while the cops questioned them. She knew that, while the police meant well, they were human just like everyone else and humans made mistakes.
Only their mistakes could cost people their lives, and children their childhoods.
With that in mind, she sat down with young Barry Allen and listened to the whole sad and sorry tale, including how every cop had said they didn’t believe him, that he was lying or delusional. She didn’t believe him either, but she knew better than to tell him that and instead asked what he wanted.
He said that he wanted his mom. That he wanted to wake up from this whole nightmare and go back to the way things were before, and another caseworker in another time decided that meant he should stay with the West's. But this worker, haunted by a sister’s fear and a brother’s desperation, made a different decision that night.
She placed Barry with an emergency family at the edges of Central City and advised that Barry never be placed with the West’s as their presence might cause him to relive the trauma of seeing his mother murdered and his father taken away in handcuffs.
Eventually Barry’s caseworker received more files and had more children to look out for, and with Barry in stable condition he was moved to a group home once a week had passed.
And just like that, history changed.
(On a lonely stretch of road a man from the future who became trapped in the past is attacked by a snarling creature made of bone and smoke, the timeline having been changed too much for him to be allowed to live. The spikes he set on the road are still there though, and a car crash still happens and a woman still dies and though a man dies that night too, it is not Harrison Wells. Years from now, his wife’s death will drive him to nearly kill himself trying to achieve their dream, but not yet. The future is far away, and for now a man crawls out of the car and brings his wife with him and begs her to live while they both leak blood onto the asphalt.)
Barry went from group home to foster home and back again, his genius and obsession with the supernatural unnerving even the most experienced foster parents. He never knew physical abuse, but by the time he was a teen neglect and apathy had left their own kind of scars, and he had seen dozens of others like him with the physical ones to match. He knew he had been lucky so far, and that it might be a matter of time before he was sent to one of those “homes” too.
So, Barry adapted.
He had always absorbed information like a sponge, and he accepted whatever lessons the older kids managed to pass onto him between their stays. His long fingers made him a good pickpocket, his babyface and green eyes let him walk out of a store with half his jacket stuffed with merchandise, and though he would never be a hulking mass of muscle that could intimidate through sheer presence alone he had a mean right hook and fast feet. He knew how to disappear in a crowd and what prison tats looked like, including which ones meant he should run in the other direction as fast as possible.
The one lesson that no one had to teach him though, was that he should never trust a cop (he never forgot the whispers of liar and unstable and delusional and crazy, some of them uttered by a cop he had once considered an uncle). And given how familiar the precinct had been during his and Iris’ tenure as best friends, he recognized every cop in Central City.
(When he was seventeen, two months away from aging out, he spotted three cops in a bar where a former foster sister worked and had smuggled him into. He had warned her, and she had warned the rest of the staff, and they had warned the patrons, who cleared out a full half hour before a planned raid was meant to begin. The cops spent months investigating a potential leak while Barry gained three drug dealers and a Darbinyan hitman who owed him a favor.)
Against all odds, his luck holds until he turns eighteen, and Barry Allen is released into the world with no one by his side but others like him. Just as jaded, just as cautious, just as broken and morally ambiguous and self-preserving as he is.
(The speedforce shudders, but it does not break. Little Barry Allen is the first, will always be the first, and though he may not be a hero in this timeline it will choose him regardless. It cares not for good or evil, black or white; it cares not for whether Central City will idolize the Flash or fear the Shadow. All it cares about is Barry Allen, and if he is satisfied, it will be too.)