Chapter Text
Prologue
Oh, one more minute, it all burns down
They're all tellin' us to get out
But you and I, and I
We keep livin' in a burnin' house
( Siren sounds - Tata McRae)
What does Barry Allen — the Scarlet Speedster, the Flash — do in an ideal world?
Let me tell you what he doesn’t do.
In an ideal world, Barry Allen doesn’t get outsmarted by the Weather Wizard.
He doesn’t find himself sprawled in the wreckage of a storm, lungs filling with smoke and water, watching helplessly as another villain escapes.
In an ideal world, his boots do not skid across wet sand, his mask does not sag with exhaustion, and his mind is never clouded with the creeping realization of failure.
In an ideal world, Barry Allen doesn’t leave Iris West stranded on the coast.
He doesn’t feel the salt air whip against his skin while her silhouette stands small and lonely against the horizon.
He doesn’t taste regret on his tongue, acrid and sharp, when the ocean swallows his words before he can force them into the air.
In an ideal world, Barry Allen doesn’t waste precious seconds confessing his feelings to Iris West when the clock is ticking and lives hang in the balance.
He doesn’t let his heart override the physics of velocity, doesn’t stumble over emotions when the world needs speed, not sentiment.
He doesn’t close his eyes in hesitation when the wind could already be screaming past him.
In an ideal world, Barry Allen never makes the mistake of ripping through time.
He doesn’t see the skyline dissolve, doesn’t hear the crack of thunder that isn’t thunder at all, doesn’t feel the ground yawning open beneath him as the timeline fractures.
He doesn’t strand himself in the past a day back, doesn’t unleash consequences that crawl forward into every corner of his life.
In an ideal world, Barry Allen stays in his timeline and saves everyone.
But Barry Allen does not live in an ideal world.
And neither does Eobard Thawne.
In an ideal world, Eobard Thawne does not go back in time.
He doesn’t feel the primal terror of being stranded in a century not his own.
He doesn’t let rage sharpen into obsession.
He doesn’t stand over a child’s bed and watch a boy cry out for a mother who will never come back.
In an ideal world, he doesn’t kill Nora Allen.
He doesn’t sever Barry Allen’s world in half with a knife.
In an ideal world, he doesn’t lose his speed.
Doesn’t feel it drain out of him like blood from a wound, leaving him hollow, stranded, dependent.
In an ideal world, he doesn’t kill Harrison Wells and his wife.
He doesn’t slip into Wells's stolen skin like a parasite, wearing his smiles and his memories like a costume stitched too tight.
He doesn’t build a life upon bones, doesn’t teach a team of bright-eyed scientists to trust him even as he calculates their ruin.
In an ideal world, he doesn’t create the Flash.
Doesn’t shape Barry Allen’s destiny with manipulative hands, pressing him closer and closer to the very man who destroyed him.
In an ideal world, he doesn’t kill to keep the truth buried deep.
Doesn’t silence suspicion with violence.
Doesn’t let blood drip into the spaces between his carefully constructed lies.
In an ideal world, Cisco Ramon never dies at his hand.
But Eobard Thawne does not live in an ideal world either.
What he does manage to do is all of the above — and more.
What he does manage to do is stand in the middle of a city trembling with chaos, locked in a face-off against Barry Allen, the Green Arrow, and Firestorm. Eobard holds the ground, every breath sharp with exhilaration and hate.
What he does end up witnessing is Barry Allen — his Flash, his paradox — slowly lowering to his knees. Not out of surrender, not by choice, but by the cruel betrayal of his own body.
What Eobard Thawne sees is Barry Allen coughing afte he arrives at the particle accelerator, convulsing as if his lungs themselves have turned traitor. Each cough is jagged, tearing through him, wet and raw. It sounds like he is trying to hack out pieces of himself, fragments of lung tissue spat onto the cold floor. Blood spatters. Petals follow. It is grotesque. It is fascinating.
What Eobard Thawne stares at is a miracle. A horror. A grotesque, blooming sight. Lungs riddled with roots and blossoms, a chest cavity overrun by beauty that kills.
Black dahlias and yellow carnations — their petals tinged with blood, edges bruised and curling — sit discarded in a bucket beside Barry Allen’s crumpled figure. Torn, scattered, half-wilted, they stink of iron and salt. The air smells of flowers and decay, sweetness rotting into something unbearable.
So in reality — not in ideals, never in ideals — Barry Allen travels back. And in reality, he finds himself a victim of heartbreak that has turned physical, cruel, inescapable.
In this reality, flowers are both boon and curse. A gift and a penalty. A bouquet fashioned from grief.
And so in reality, Eobard Thawne is left with the grotesque chore of picking through the pieces. Barry Allen’s heart, shattered. His lungs, ruptured. His blood, staining petals that should have belonged in some lover’s vase.
The silence of the Pipeline is heavy, crushing. The air is cool, sterile, vibrating faintly with the hum of electricity in the walls. Across the barrier of reinforced glass, Barry stands — or tries to. His lips are still wet with blood, crimson staining the corner of his mouth, trailing down his chin like some cruel signature. His chest rises shallowly, each breath catching as though the flowers inside him will tear through his ribs.
From the opposite side, Eobard Thawne watches. His reflection glints faintly on the glass, warped and distorted, as though even the walls know better than to show his true face. His eyes narrow.
“Since when?” he asks, his voice steady, almost clinical. But there is something in it — something quieter, deeper, twisted in a place he thought long dead.
Barry Allen doesn’t answer. He looks away, his gaze dragging to the floor, to the clumps of petals that are stuck together with clots of blood. His silence is louder than any scream.
And something in that silence curls tight inside Eobard Thawne’s chest — his dead heart folding in on itself, tightening like a fist around a memory he doesn’t want.
Chapter Text
Weeks before
“So… what you’re saying is I have…” Barry Allen’s voice trails off, his words snagging in his throat. His gaze drifts back to the illuminated X-ray that glows faintly against the sterile wall of S.T.A.R. Labs’ medical bay. His eyes narrow, as though squinting might change what he sees: the intricate shadow of roots spiderwebbing through his lungs, so thin that they looked like thread. the delicate blotches shaped like little buds crowding the airways that should have been clear.
“Floropulmonalis Syndrome,” Caitlin whispers. Her tone is hushed, reverent, as if speaking louder might make it more real, more undeniable. Even standing right in front of her, Barry has to strain to hear her. Her voice seems too fragile for the clinical brightness of the room, too fragile for the weight of what the words mean.
Cisco shifts in the single chair shoved awkwardly against the wall, his arms crossed, his posture defensive. “The Hanahaki disease,” he supplies, filling the silence that hangs between Caitlin’s whisper and Barry’s confusion.
Barry blinks. “The what now?”
Cisco leans forward, elbows braced on his knees. He looks almost eager to explain, like he’s reciting the lore of some obscure comic book that only he’s read, though the gravity in his eyes betrays the seriousness of the moment. “Okay I researched it, so… think of it like this. The Hanahaki disease is this theoretical condition that shows up in folklore, right? It’s been floating around for years in stories, myths, even a few medical conspiracies. The basic idea is—heartbreak kills you. Not metaphorically. Literally. Your feelings… they manifest physically. You love someone who doesn’t love you back, your chest starts filling up with flowers. You suffocate on your own emotions. It’s messy. It’s… tragic. And usually, it’s terminal.”
Barry lets out a dry laugh that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “That sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi magazine from the sixties.”
Cisco shrugs. “Yeah, except now we’re looking at your lungs, dude, and they’re basically a greenhouse.” His attempt at levity falls flat, the words settling heavy in the room.
Caitlin doesn’t laugh. Her gloved hands clench at her sides, her eyes fixed on the glowing image. “The clinical term is Floropulmonalis Syndrome. ‘Floro’ for flowers. ‘Pulmonalis’ for lungs. It’s… it’s consistent with what we’ve been seeing since last week.” Her voice tightens, barely above a whisper again.
Barry swallows hard, his throat dry. He wants to tell them both that it’s absurd, that this is some elaborate practical joke, but how can he when in one hand he holds his X-ray, and in the other…
He stares down. His fist is curled tight around something fragile. When he opens his palm, bright yellow petal clings to the creases of his skin. Thin, delicate, almost translucent in the harsh fluorescent light.
“Carnation petal,” Caitlin had identified it, her voice shaking with horror and something that looked like pity. He remembers the way she’d looked at him a week ago when it first happened — when he’d staggered into the medical bay, coughing so hard he thought his ribs would splinter. When he doubled over, hacking and retching until a small clump of something red and yellow had slod out of this throat , into his mouth and then onto the tray. Caitlin had knelt beside him, latex fingers trembling as she picked apart the clump and then she whispered the name of the flower. Disgust and disbelief had colored her tone.
And Barry? He’d just stared at the petals in his bloodied tray, unable to comprehend how something so bright, so alive, could feel like death inside him.
It had started after Lacuna Floris.
The memory claws back into his mind, sharp and suffocating.
She’d been a come-and-go metahuman, fleeting as the plants she adored. Come and go, because like a flower, she’d bloomed overnight in the heart of the city. Barry had only found her after CCPD flagged a series of deaths that defied logic. Victims sprawled in their homes, offices, cars — mouths choked with petals, chests caved in under the weight of stalks and blossoms that had no place in human anatomy. Suffocation by flowers.
She’d been a botanist once. Brilliant, by all accounts. Specializing in hybrids, with a reputation for innovations that skirted the edge of what nature itself would allow. She had loved her creations with the obsession of an artist — too much, perhaps. And then, suddenly, her flowers loved her back.
Barry remembers the smell of her lab: damp soil and fertilizer, sharp chemicals mingled with the sweet rot of pollen. Glass panes fogged with condensation, ivy crawling like veins across the walls, blossoms pressing against every surface as though desperate to escape. It had felt less like a laboratory and more like the inside of some vast, breathing organism.
When he cornered her there, it had been less of a fight and more of a collapse. She’d broken down in front of him, her knees buckling on the tile. Her hands had trembled as she clutched at her chest, eyes wide with panic and resignation all at once.
“As much as I love them,” she rasped, voice hoarse, raw, “they love me back.”
And then it happened.
Barry had lunged forward, instincts kicking in, catching her before she hit the floor. Her body convulsed in his arms. Her breath rattled like brittle paper. And then —
The sound. The sight. He could never unsee it.
She hacked violently, each cough tearing something loose from deep inside her. Red spilled first and with a sick feeling Barry realises that they were petals. Red rose petals, their thorns scraping cruelly against her throat. Then sunflowers, bright and grotesquely cheerful, tangling in her mouth as blood streaked her lips. Stalks followed, entire vines unfurling like serpents. The air filled with the scent of pollen and iron, cloying and unbearable.
Barry had held her, helpless, as her own creations smothered her from the inside out. The weight of her collapsed against him, her voice dwindling into nothing, her chest finally still.
And when it was over, all that remained was silence — and the flowers.
A week later, Barry Allen coughed up his first carnation.
Barry blinks away the memory, the medical bay swimming back into focus. The harsh hum of fluorescent lights. The sterile chill that seeps into his skin. The quiet that seems to press against his ears until even his heartbeat feels too loud.
He looks between Caitlin and Cisco, then down again at the petals in his hand.
It feels absurd.
It feels like a nightmare.
And yet the petals are real. The X-ray is real. The hollow ache in his chest every time he breathes is real.
Barry Allen wants to laugh it off. Wants to tell them it’s ridiculous, that he’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll all have been some surreal dream. But his throat burns with the memory of Lacuna’s roses, of her sunflowers, of her blood mixing with her blooms.
He curls his fist around the petals until they crumple into dust.
“Okay,” he says at last, his voice quieter than he intends. His eyes remain on the X-ray, on the invasive garden blooming where his lungs should be. “What happens next?”
Neither Caitlin nor Cisco answers right away.
The silence says enough.
Miizzllaneous on Chapter 2 Tue 09 Sep 2025 05:24PM UTC
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ch_a000s on Chapter 2 Tue 09 Sep 2025 06:17PM UTC
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Miizzllaneous on Chapter 2 Wed 10 Sep 2025 11:38AM UTC
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