Origin

Barry Allen was working late.

This was not unusual. Barry almost always worked late, because being a forensic scientist at the Central City Police Department meant there was always one more sample to analyze, one more piece of evidence to cross-reference, one more question to ask of the instruments that lined the shelves of his laboratory on the third floor of the CCPD building. Barry liked questions. He liked the particular satisfaction of following evidence until it told you the truth, the way a good story follows its thread until it finds its ending.

He had a coffee going cold on his desk. He had three cases open simultaneously. The rain outside had been building all evening, and now it was doing what Central City rain sometimes did — really committing to the endeavor, drumming on the windows in sheets, lightning starting to fork in the distance over the river.

Barry didn't notice. He was looking at a gas chromatograph printout with a magnifying glass and thinking hard.

The lightning came through the window first.

Not the thunder — the lightning. A bolt that seemed, later, to have made a decision about where it was going, forking through the night sky and coming straight through the laboratory window in a CRACK and a FLASH that was too bright to be just electricity, too purposeful to be just weather. It hit the bank of chemical shelves above Barry's workstation. Glass broke. Compounds fell. Everything turned white.

Barry Allen woke up on the laboratory floor.

The room smelled like ozone and spilled chemicals. The rain was still drumming on the windows. The coffee had not gotten any warmer. Barry lay there for a moment looking at the ceiling and tried to figure out if he was all right.

He was, it turned out, more than all right.

He stood up. He reached for the coffee. He blinked.

The coffee was not on his desk. His hand, which had reached for it, was now three feet to the left of where he had reached. He stood very still and tried reaching for the coffee again. And again his hand arrived somewhere other than where his brain had sent it.

He moved carefully to the window.

Outside, in the rain, a taxi was in the process of splashing through a puddle. The water rising around its tires was moving, Barry thought, very slowly. He blinked. He looked again. The water was frozen in the air — not frozen, but moving so slowly that it might as well be, each droplet hanging in its arc as if time had become thick and reluctant.

Barry Allen looked at his hands. He looked at the room. He looked at the rain hanging outside the window like decorations.

Then he ran to the end of the street and back.

The trip took about four tenths of a second.

There is a force that underlies all motion in the universe — ancient, cosmic, present everywhere that anything moves, from the orbit of a planet to the turning of a wheel to the falling of a raindrop. The Amazons had their old magic. The Kryptonians had their yellow sun. The Speed Force was Barry Allen's connection to something that had always been there, that no one had been able to touch — until a very specific lightning bolt, on a very specific rainy night, found its way to a very specific forensic scientist.

He designed his own suit. This took several weeks and a great deal of trial and error, because the main problem was that at high speeds, friction heated fabric to temperatures that most fabric found very disagreeable. He solved this with a polymer compound of his own invention, and he added a lightning bolt emblem on the chest because he felt that it accurately communicated the spirit of the thing.

He became the Flash.

Central City had been waiting for something like this, though it hadn't known so. The city had problems — the kind that moved faster than the police could respond, that required someone who could be in two places before one of them had finished happening. The Flash filled this gap with cheerful efficiency and occasional sonic booms as he broke the sound barrier above the midtown bridges.

Barry Allen still works late at the CCPD. He still has coffee going cold on his desk. He still has three cases open simultaneously. But now, when the night calls for something faster than thought, he reaches into his ring — a compressed suit inside a cleverly engineered compartment — and in the time it takes you to blink, the mild-mannered forensic scientist is gone, and the Flash is already there.

Central City doesn't know how lucky it is. But it runs toward danger instead of away from it, and that is enough.