When I wrote my Flash series, I was in the enviable position of being tied to the TV show, but not beholden to it. My series was set in an alternate timeline in which Barry never went back in time at the end of Season 2 to create Flashpoint. Which meant that I didn’t have to hew to the show’s continuity.
One thing this meant was that I could use the character of H.R. Wells, who’d been killed in Season 3 on the show in a sequence of events that never happened in my own personal “Barryverse.” I liked H.R., so this seemed pretty cool to me, and I wrote a couple of scenes with him in Green Arrow’s Perfect Shot.
And then the showrunners asked me not to use H.R. I’m not sure why, but they made so few demands of me and let me get away with so much that it seemed pointless to fight this very minor request. I pulled H.R. from the book, with the exception of a quick flashback.
Here is an early scene from Green Arrow’s Perfect Shot as originally written, with H.R. front and center. I think H.R.’s reflection/comment at the end is some very fine superhero universe writing!
“What’s up, buttercups?” a new voice said just then. Coming through the doorway was H.R. Wells, the Earth 19 version of Harrison Wells, who’d been with the team for a couple of years now. As always, he clutched in one hand a large mug of coffee, this one with the words PAPA’S TREASURE emblazoned on it. Earth 19 had no coffee; H.R. was sort of addicted.
“Help me move her,” Barry said. After a split second’s hesitation, H.R. put down his mug on the control board and helped Barry lift and carry Madame Xanadu into the medical bay, then lay her gently on a bed. She still wasn’t asleep, but she was much more calm.
“Is it Mardi Gras already?” H.R. asked, taking in Madame Xanadu’s brocaded skirt and brightly patterned head scarf.
“No,” Barry told him as they went back into the Cortex. “She just…has flair.”
“Flamboyance!” H.R. crowed, snatching up his mug and taking a drink. “I appreciate it. We could use some more color around here.”
“The super-hero costumes aren’t enough?” Iris asked drily.
Before H.R. could respond, Caitlin interjected. “I’m going to go set her up on a monitor and run some more tests,” she said, and vanished into the medical bay.
“Where’s Cisco?” Barry asked Iris. He couldn’t forget that Madame Xanadu had — while talking and breathing — said that she herself was already dead. Sounded like delusion, yes, but in Barry’s world it could also be time travel, dimension-hopping, or just plain weird science. And when it came to weird science, Cisco was his first call.
“Downstairs,” Iris said. “Still…communing.” Her face clouded over as she said it. Barry knew why.
“None of it is about us,” he told her, taking her hands. “None of it is your fault—”
“Mis amigos!” Cisco strolled into the Cortex. His hair, long and lustrous, was tied back in a ponytail, a look that made his face seem more mature somehow. “How goes it?”
“You tell us,” Barry replied. “What’s up in TV land?”
A year or so ago, Cisco had stumbled upon a shocking and existentially fraught secret — there was another timeline, nearly identical to their own.
It wasn’t a parallel Earth — it was an entire timeline with a multiverse of its own, a slightly twisted mirror image of their reality, “an identical twin with a different haircut,” as Joe had once described it. It was so big a discovery that they’d had to invent some new terminology. After much debate, Cisco (of course) came up with “transmultiversal version,” which they often just shortened to “TV” for convenience’s sake.
There were as many similarities between their world and the TV world as there were differences. In each reality, there’d been an invasion of super-Nazis from Earth-X that had been turned back. In each reality, Barry and Iris had wed, as had their friends Oliver and Felicity. They’d fought similar villains, though at different times and in different ways.
But the biggest difference was that TV-Barry’s creation and negation of Flashpoint had had a ripple effect. Cisco’s brother Dante was dead “over there.” Caitlin had a Killer Frost split personality. H.R. had sacrificed his life to save Iris. And so on.
Every few months, the two Ciscos used their vibe powers to make contact with each other and catch each other up on happenings in the different timelines. It was so far the only way they’d discovered to communicate between the two realities.
“Any news on my doppelgänger?” H.R. asked hopefully.
Cisco’s good mood melted away. “Sorry, buddy. Nothing. Still dead.”
H.R. nodded thoughtfully and ambled away from the Cortex, muttering, “Sometimes it doesn’t stick,” as he went.
A pall hung over the Cortex. The TV H.R.’s death hit Iris particularly hard, since it had been to protect her. Barry kept reminding her that what happened in the other timeline didn’t impact them here in theirs…and that the opposite was true. Nothing she had done here had caused the other H.R.’s death.
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