THE WORST WAY TO GO

"TONIGHT, THE FUTURE BEGINS."

The garage was dark, save for the flickering light of a battered television at its back corner. Harsh hues bounced off overused pop-out tables and scuffed beakers, shattered glass glinted on the scorched concrete floor, casting long and warped shadows. Hundreds of numbers, equations, crawled up the water-stained walls like spiders, seeming to move about under the dim light, slithering and shifting over tarped windows.

Dilapidated. Abandoned. Lifeless, save for the young man sitting before the television. The recliner he resided in was moth-eaten with white boxes of Chinese takeout in precarious piles on either side. His hand fumbled for a box of chow mien on the armrest, his gray eyes locked on the television. His face was thin and gaunt, clothes hanging off of a wiry frame. His body was dying, starved, neglected, but his mind had never felt more alive.

The television sparked and fizzled, and the man leaned forward and smacked the television as Harrison Wells' face distorted, merging with static. The TV seemed to hiss in exertion before the view returned to normal, the speech continuing in earnest.

"The work my team and I will do here will change our understanding of physics." Wells' eyes were like neutron stars, barely contained by his dark-rimmed glasses. The man in the chair was captivated by them, a small smile gracing his hunger-panged features in a way that brought youth back into his cheeks.

'It's turning on tonight,' Cisco had told him, his voice giddy over the phone. 'You've gotta come see it, dude. It's gonna blow your mind.'

"It will bring about advancements in power, advancements in medicine, advancements in the way every human being carries out every day of their life. But I dare not say I've done all of this alone. Tonight, I'd like to thank each and every person who works at STAR Labs, and their families, whom I've potentially robbed of many a holiday or birthday celebration with the hours they stay."

The crowd laughed at the man's self-awareness. The man thought he'd be happy to miss every single birthday for the rest of his life if it meant he'd get to work there.

"A very special thank you goes to Caitlin Snow, Ronnie Raymond, and Cisco Ramon, who have contributed greatly both to the accelerator, and to my life. Tonight, we bear the fruits of our labor with the promise of change, not just for Central City, but for the world."

Wells clasped his hands together and gave the reporters a heartfelt smile, before straightening his shoulders and looking directly into the camera, directly into the eyes of the hundreds of people watching.

For some inexplicable reason, the man felt that Wells was looking at him. Frustration pricked at the back of his neck, and a hissing exhale escaped his nose as he failed to maintain eye contact with the man in the screen.

"This is the future," Wells said finally. "And trust me. It will be here faster than you think."

Applause ripped through the crowd, but the man didn't move a muscle. He grabbed the long-cold takeout from the armrest and took a rather vindictive bite of chow mien as Wells began to answer questions from spiffy, front-row reporters.

The man turned away from the screen, listening to the sound, playing his own little game.

"What's the first thing you'll do once the accelerator is online?" The voice was feminine. White, the man guessed after a moment of thought. And blonde.

He looked back at the television. He was right. He checked the cracked face of his watch, shaking it a couple times to get the hands to work properly. Only ten minutes until the activation.

"Open an expensive bottle of Dom Perignon with my staff, because I ride them very hard and they deserve it." Wells was smiling, the man could tell. But not a real smile — one of the ones you give when you want to leave, when you have better things to do.

"Those protesting this accelerator believe it could open a black hole in Central City." Another woman's voice, thick with a clipped, elegant accent. The man tilted his head at the sound of it, cold noodles halfway to his mouth. College professor, and a skeptic. "But is it not more likely to cause a malevolent phenomenon, such as a Higgs-Boson Bridge?"

That gave both Wells and the man further pause, though the former was far better at hiding it from the cameras locked onto every angle of his face. The man turned to look at the beakers scattered across the table, makeshift paperweights for crumpled blueprints.

Most of them were near identical: coffee-stained sheets of printer paper with messy, uneven sketches of his quantum bridge, his lifelong project and current object of all his enmity. But scattered among them were others of high-quality — deep blue, smooth paper with white outlines of a creation that wasn't his own. At least, not entirely.

He swept the flasks to the side and picked up a blueprint of the STAR Labs particle accelerator, examining the date printed on the bottom right corner. He flicked on a lamp and spread it out on the table. This was the most recent one, from three months ago. Hundreds of changes could have been implemented since Cisco suddenly stopped sending him blueprints.

The version pinned under his palm had a relatively high chance of exploding — some five-percent, which was more than enough in the world of science — a fact that he had relayed to Cisco less than an hour after he'd received it, in a laminated folder hidden in a pizza box.

He had no doubt the improvements he'd suggested had been installed, despite the moral conundrum Cisco faced of sending someone who didn't work at STAR Labs private information on the biggest scientific advancement of the century.

But he did it anyway, because he thought that the man he was sending them to was a genius. And more than that, he was his best friend.

The man had Cisco's notes pinned up on the wall, and he smiled at them fondly as he looked at them. They were short, concise, and really quite funny. A science-based rendition of Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas is You' was at the very top of the wall, like a star atop a tree.

He didn't ask why Cisco stopped sending him the blueprints. Frankly, he was grateful to be a part of the process even in the smallest bit, to know that in some way, his mind was one of many that had created the particle accelerator. That if the accelerator succeeded tonight, his scientific career wouldn't be totally worthless.

But that college professor. The skeptic. Her words were needles, popping the balloon of excitement and anticipation that had been rising in the man's heart. He swerved around his table and took his phone down from the wall, where it had been pinned inside a plastic bag to keep him from losing it. He opened the back, checked the battery, and dialed Cisco, running a hand through his dark hair.

Halfway through the second ring, the man held the phone away from his ear and grimaced. This was stupid. His anxiety was stupid. He was stupid. Cisco wasn't. The team at STAR Labs wasn't. He needn't be worried. It would all go off without a hitch, because it had to.

If it didn't… he might not be alive to consider it.

He turned to the center table, eyes scanning over the dark and formless lump before him. Beneath the black tarp was his quantum bridge, the thing he'd been working on since his senior year of high school… five years ago. Had it really been so long? So long without a single successful prototype? He could see the bridge without even lifting the tarp, its steel frame, its lifeless core that would probably glow with energy if he'd been anyone else.

At some point, it stopped being bad luck and financial debt and became a matter of his own lack of intelligence. None of the improvements he conjured up seemed to work, and his electricity bill was racking up to the point that his father's trust wouldn't be able to pay it off.

All that to say that if this prototype failed… it was all over.

And for that reason, the tarp had gathered a thin layer of dust atop it. He brushed it away gently, leaving trails and sending particles floating into the air.

"Earth to Elias Grey!" His name snapped him from his musings, head jerking to the source of the sound like it was a gunshot. Cisco's profile picture smiled up at him over a bowl of hotpot.

"Cisco, hey," Eli breathed. He'd got distracted, forgot to end the call. Shit. He picked up the phone and held it to his ear, attention shifting to the accelerator blueprint.

"What's up, man?" Cisco didn't sound half as excited as he did a few days ago. In fact, he seemed a little hurried. The sound of a drill echoed in the background, whirring.

"Busy?" Eli walked over and turned the TV off, listening closely to Cisco's voice, trying to put an expression to his tone, a scene to the sounds.

"Nope! I'm taking a nice little catnap right now. Who cares about activating the particle accelerator and making sure it doesn't blow the city to bits? Not me, that's for sure."

Hearing Cisco's borderline hysterical tone, Eli corrected himself. "Not busy, stressed. Or maybe both?"

Cisco let out a high-pitched groan, one of agreement and anxiety.

"It'll be fine, Cisco," Eli said placatingly, imagining the furrow in Cisco's brow, the downturn of his lips. "I believe in you."

"That makes one of us!" Cisco barely got the joke out before there was a loud clang, followed by a string of curses. "Sorry. I'm patching a hole in the atrium right now."

"The activation is in five minutes."

Cisco shrieked. "Don't remind me!" He took a couple deep breaths, and the drilling resumed. "It's just a quick last-minute fix. Don't worry. I'm not worried."

He sounded very worried.

"It's not going to explode," Eli said, despite that being the reason that he'd called Cisco in the first place. "You'll be fine," he repeated. "I'm going to hang up now. I don't want to bother you."

"Wait!" Cisco yelled, and Eli froze in place. "Don't hang up. I want to talk. It'll distract me from all of this. Being stressed. About the accelerator. Exploding. And causing a black hole."

That's exactly what Eli was thinking. "Nobody's thinking that, Cisco," Eli said reassuringly, folding up the old blueprint and sliding it into a plastic drawer. "You, Wells, Snow, Raymond, even Rathaway… you've put everything into this accelerator. You know better than anyone that it's going to work."

For a moment, it was just the rhythmic sound of Cisco's drill and a scratching noise coming from beneath the garage floor. A rat, quite determined to claw its way into the last few square feet of Eli's residence that hadn't been severely damaged in the rainstorms of this past year.

"You helped, too, Eli," Cisco said. "I don't think we would've been able to do this without you. Honestly… maybe you should be here instead of me; it's my fault the atrium needs to be fixed, I forgot the core needed a second paneling layer to completely seal the chamber —"

"Everyone makes mistakes."

"Not everyone makes mistakes that could blow up a city!"

"You know a missing paneling layer would not blow up the city," Eli said, staring at the tarp over his quantum bridge. "If anything, it would keep the particles from colliding. Nothing would happen."

'Though, in my book, that's worse than an explosion. At least a big bang is proof of concept. That's how the universe started, after all.'

Cisco's voice was barely louder than the drill. "Wells should have hired you. If you were here…"

"God, Cisco," Eli said softly, his entire body seeming to slump at his friend's disappointment. "I know I made a fuss about it when I wasn't hired but… you don't need me. Your team doesn't need me, and as much as I hate to admit that, it's the truth. Not only are you the third-smartest person I know, you're also the second-kindest person I know."

Cisco snorted. "Who am I second to?"

"Me," Eli said blatantly, and Cisco actually laughed aloud, a sound and cadence so familiar to Eli, and yet so far away, that it brought him back to the late nights they shared in a dorm room, cracking jokes about what Sebastian Ollins was doing late at night.

Cisco's laugh eventually tapered off, and the drilling sound stopped. "You know, I asked Wells why he didn't hire you. Before you say anything — I know it's unprofessional, but I just couldn't believe… I mean, your resume was so good, too."

Eli's smile faded, alongside the warm feeling of nostalgia. "There's more to me than just my resume. If we make it through the night, I'll tell you all about it."

"That's not funny," Cisco said sternly. "Not a good joke. Three out of ten." There was a loud hiss, and Cisco dusted off his hands in satisfaction. At least, that's what Eli thought he was doing. "There. All done. City saved. Speaking of…"

Eli knew where this was going. He didn't want to go there.

"How's your quantum bridge going?"

Eli brushed the tarp and rubbed his fingers together, feeling the dust between them. "It's going great. I tested it yesterday and made some ground-breaking progress. Just a couple more tweaks and I'll have this thing working for sure."

"That's awesome, dude!" He felt pure shame roiling in his gut at Cisco's unfettered positivity. "After you've got that under your belt, you should reapply to STAR Labs. There's no way Wells doesn't hire you. Hell, you could make your own company." Cisco's voice took on a weird, muffled quality, like he was holding a screwdriver between his teeth. "That's the tech of the future, you know. Dimensional travel, theoretically. Did you know?"

"What?" Eli drew the word out in mock sarcasm. "I had no idea."

Cisco blew a raspberry, and Eli laughed himself into silence as he stared at the tarp again. His hand shot forward and yanked the tarp away, through it to the ground with a sudden fury.

"If the accelerator does explode," Eli said thoughtfully, ignoring Cisco's groan of disbelief. "This isn't the worst way to go. Talking to a good friend." Lying to a good friend. "Not that it's going to blow, of course."

"You're actually the worst!"

"I really am," Eli said with a grim smile. "Now, shoo. Go drink Dom Perignon with your coworkers and tease Ronnie for staring at Caitlin instead of doing his work."

"Fine, fine!" Cisco said, and Eli could see him flourishing his hand, twirling it as his finger homed in on the end call button. "See you tomorrow!"

"Probably!" Eli said in the same jolly tone, before the call ended and with it, any sense of clarity that he'd managed to scrounge together for the night.

Paranoia was a lot like the rat beneath the floor. Always present, always gnawing, always clawing to the forefront of the mind and the second you focus on it, it gets loud and overbearing.

Eli was scared. The accelerator could explode. What if he'd fumbled? What if his calculations were wrong? His failure of a quantum bridge certainly spoke to his own competency within his field.

But then again, if the city blew up tonight, it would be a blessing for him. He was one step off rock bottom, and had nowhere else to go but up in flames.

"Fuck it," Eli said to himself, tossing the phone away. It landed next to the shattered mess of a beaker on the ground, still untouched from when he'd chucked it onto the concrete in a fit of anger. "I'm done for either way."

If the accelerator succeeded, he'd be worse off than ever. Economically, the price of the materials he'd need for another prototype would skyrocket as hundreds of amateur scientists rolled their money into dreams they'd abandon in a matter of months.

Cisco would be wealthier, he would be happier, and he'd be less busy. Which meant he'd want to visit Eli more often, and eventually he'd figure out that his friend wasn't living in an apartment, or working inventory at a warehouse. Then, he'd figure out the real reason Harrison Wells probably didn't hire him.

Probably. The man hadn't even bothered to send a rejection email. He'd been ghosted, and by his childhood hero nonetheless. And perhaps for good reason.

He stared at the quantum bridge, his eyes as empty as its core, and there wasn't much of a choice at all. The fate of the world's future was in Wells' hands tonight, but the fate of Elias Grey was only up to one man… Elias Grey.

He cleared the tables, sweeping his arms and sending papers flying into the air. Glass vials of chemicals were returned to their steel shelves and pushed up against the walls. The TV and its rickety table were stacked atop his recliner chair, and Eli walked around with the rest of the noodles, sliding plastic containers and old textbooks and journals away from the center of the room with his feet.

By the end of it all, a dazed routine, he found himself standing alone in the center of the room with nothing but a lone pop-out table and his quantum bridge — his magnum opus.

He tossed the empty food container to the side and slapped on some rubber-insulated gloves and protective goggles, swapping out his house slippers for a pair of rubber boots, his week-old shirt for a chemical-stained lab coat. Certainly not OSHA-certified garb, but it would have to work.

He rummaged through the drawers of a grimy plastic cabinet for a few seconds before producing the trigger remote used to activate the bridge. He picked up one of his old blueprints and made a few quick adjustments to the bridge's compression frame and core distance to the outermost shell.

He wondered, if there was a god out there, if the process of building stars felt something like this.

A gust of wind rippled through the lab, breathing fresh air into the stale atmosphere. Eli turned to see that the tarp covering one of the windows had lifted in the updraft, and for a moment he could see Central City from this abandoned house on the outskirts of town.

Golden lights sparkled, and for a moment, he could think that an audience of thousands was waiting on him to succeed, knowing that he would. That for just a split second, he was Harrison Wells, and this was his moment of glory.

'This is the future. And it'll be here faster than you think.'

Then the tarp fell back down, draping over the window like a curtain call, leaving Elias in near darkness once again.

"Here goes nothing," he said to himself, thumb hovering over the activation button.

On the other side of Central City, a crowd of people sat outside STAR Labs and cheered with excitement. Couples hugged each other, friends held hands. They didn't know what they were watching, didn't know what the accelerator could do in its success... or in its preordained failure.

"Three..." Elias whispered.

Inside STAR Labs, Harrison Wells raised a glass of champagne to the people in the Cortex around him. For the first time in almost fifteen years, a genuine smile split his face. His path home was being paved at this very moment.

Caitlin and Ronnie linked arms, the man resting his head on her shoulder. Cisco found that his mind wasn't on the accelerator at the moment, but on the fact that he wished Eli was here with him to see this moment.

"Two..."

Beyond the whooping and whispering crowds, two men, near worlds apart, sat on either side of STAR Labs. Like electrons floating around the nucleus of an atom, they paced back and forth with an air of impatience, unaware of the others existence and yet both of them waiting for everything to go wrong.

One of them pulled out a camera and took a photo, green eyes glinting underneath a grey hood.

The other one pulled out a bottle of Coca-Cola and unscrewed the cap, watching its rim carefully.

"One..."

Inside CCPD's forensics lab, Barry Allen heard another clap of thunder, rain falling down through the lab's open skylight. He got up from his desk and walked over to the steel chain pulley, intent on pulling the window closed.

He got about halfway before looking around in shock, stopping in his tracks.

Chemicals rose around his lab in a threatening halo of colors. The champagne in Harrison Wells' flute began to lift into the air, defying gravity. The soda clutched in the mans' dark hands flowed freely into the sky, and he watched it with a rueful smile.

Eli pressed the activation button, and the various liquids around the garage did just the same. The hairs on the back of his neck stood to attention, fear and confusion coursing through his veins.

But then it happened. The quantum bridge came to life, a star being born, a spiraling core of teal and orange energy illuminating the room, reflecting in Eli's irises behind the goggles.

"It's working," Eli said to himself, in complete disbelief as the blooming concept of success washed away his earlier unease at the chemicals surrounding him.

This was it.

He pressed another button on the remote, one to stabilize the core before activating the bridge fully. The bridge shifted states, expanding itself and surrounding the evanescent core like a cage, and Eli could feel his heart swelling with excitement.

Then, a massive quake shook the ground. The chemicals splattered onto concrete, mixing with one another and dissolving the metal shelves on which they sat, an acrid smell quickly filling the air.

The trance was broken as Eli was also knocked to the ground, the quantum bridge rattling the table as the core began to grow beyond the calculated parameters, pressing against the compression frame. Eli could only pray that it would hold.

He wondered if he'd be the one to destroy the city with a black hole tonight. His face was sallow, more so than usual as he stared at it, the numb fear in his body being replaced by shock and common sense.

He scrambled to his feet and slammed a button on the remote to power down the bridge. Nothing. He pressed it again. Again.

Again. Again-again-again-again-again—

The energy continued to spin outwards, flaring whips of energy lancing out across the room, finding purchase on the walls and leaving searing marks. Eli knew they'd do much worse if they touched him.

His eyes flew to the door, all the way across the room and blocked by acidic, steaming chemicals. The garage door was right behind him, and he backpedaled towards it as the energy got closer. The ground shuddered again, slamming the shelves into the concrete. Wind and heat whipped around the garage, blinding light filling the room as Eli fumbled for the handles at the bottom of the garage door.

He wasn't religious. He wasn't philosophical. Eli believed in cold, objective science and had a hard time being convinced otherwise. But if someone told him at that moment that the very Earth, the very universe itself was rejecting his bridge, his dream and his very existence, he would've believed them.

Another quake. The windows shattered. Eli turned to look as a massive ring of energy surged through the garage like a tidal wave, pushing quantum energy and countless unknown chemicals towards Eli.

There was no time to react. It felt like an explosion. His skin was burning off, his eyes melting out of their sockets, his internal organs being seared like wagyu beef — he'd never had wagyu beef… he promised Cisco he would.

Was he really thinking about that right now?

His fingers slipped away from the garage handles as his body was overwhelmed with agony, sliding down the door to the ground, face-up.

The veins within his arms pulsed with energy, glowing underneath his clothes. Eli spasmed, his clothing falling apart under the chemicals ravaging his skin.

Vaguely, with what coherence he had left, Eli could smell burning flesh. He turned his head, just slightly. His vision was blurred with tears, but he could see that his glove had been melted, probably merging with his flesh and oh, he definitely couldn't pay for that and why was it so red and bloody he could hear it now, too, the sizzling sound, popping, gushing, steaming and —

He couldn't feel it. He could see it, hear it, smell it, practically taste his own death on his tongue, but he couldn't feel anything at all.

He tried to move his arm away from the chemicals, but it didn't even twitch, like it wasn't his own, a lost and terrified spectator to a horror movie with a bad ending.

As unconsciousness took him, another gust of wind blew through the room. The remaining quantum energy from the bridge whirled towards Eli's prone form like iron filings to a magnet, birds to their flock.

His entire body glowed like it was about to go supernova, and outside his house, the shattered windows were suddenly illuminated with near-tangible beams of light. His body began to float, jaw hanging, arms and legs limp, tears burning on his red-hot flesh.

There was a loud clicking noise, and the energy seemed to die out instantly. His body collapsed on the floor, steaming, more dead than alive.

Unbeknownst to the larger world, the impossible had just occurred. Not just in the sense that Barry Allen had become the Flash, or that hundreds of other people across the city had been given powers beyond their wildest dreams, but in the sense that the forces of the universe — of the multiverse, of things beyond that — had been defied.

If a god existed and they made the stars, they made them with their eventual heat deaths in mind.

And yet, Elias Grey, burned, broken, and near-destroyed… was still alive. The course of time had changed forever.

No one would ever know the difference.