***PETER***

Watching someone die in front of your eyes, as I've done with Uncle Ben and Captain Stacy, is never something I'll be able to get used to. But seeing someone I know to be dead stumble out of a wormhole in front of me and my friends, alive and reasonably well? That'll really make a guy almost drop his coffee. I actually do, but I hit the deck and grab it with only a foot to go before it hits the lawn. A little bit of it hits me in the face, but it's nothing to write home about, and with Gwen's help, I'm able to clean it all off.

Grayson's the one who finds him - today, he's using his and Olivia's phones as infrasonic wormhole scanners. This particular wormhole appears in a less populated section of campus - we're very lucky to have spotted it when it comes.

"Who's that?" Olivia asks. "He doesn't exactly scream 'supervillain.'"

"He's a friend of Barry's," I say after getting back to my feet, my coffee cup held in shaking hands. "But...I saw him dead yesterday, after..."

My voice trails off as I make eye contact with the blond guy, whose name I still don't know. He automatically reaches for his hip, like he's about to grab a gun. When he realizes his muscle memory has failed him, he projects authority into his voice as he calls, "Who are you?"

Gwen steps forward and asks, "By any chance do you know the Flash?"

"Uh...yeah. Yeah, I do. Can you get me to him? He needs to know something - something important."

"What's your name?" I ask.

He reaches into his jacket pocket - he must have come from a colder time, because today's too warm and dry for this kind of raincoat - and extracts a leather wallet. This, he flips open to reveal a badge. "Detective Eddie Thawne, CCPD. And you are?"

"Did you say 'Thawne?'" That's the true name of the villain who, according to Barry, was responsible for the black hole yesterday. But this guy's going by a more normal name - not the Viking-sounding "Eobard" Barry told me about.

"I swear to God, I'm not my great-great...hell if I know how many 'greats' are in there," Eddie says. "Just...I'm sure by now you saw me dead, right? The so-called 'real me?' Hey, what are you doing?"

"Just being the judge of this piece of tin," Grayson says, plucking the badge from Eddie's hand, wallet and all.

"What do you-"

"I'm a cop too," Grayson says, producing his own badge and handing it to Eddie for inspection. "Officer Dick Grayson, Gotham PD."

"Little out of your jurisdiction, aren't you, Officer?" Eddie looks over Grayson's badge, then they both return each other's badges to their rightful carriers. "We are in Central City, right? Unless we're on some other campus with blue-and-silver flags?"

"Yeah, that's right," Grayson says. "Central City. Home of the Rush and the Flash. And I'm kind of in super-duper undercover mode today, but if you're really a friend of the Flash-"

"Which I am-"

"Then that means you're trustworthy."

"What do you need to say to the Flash?" asks Olivia.

"Just call Barry and let me talk to him, please."

"You know who he is?" I ask, surprised.

"If you guys keep asking me questions," Eddie says, "the wormhole might swallow me up again before I can arrest you for obstruction."

"'Obstruction?'" Gwen snorts.

I, however, quickly call Barry and tell him we've got a new friend here to talk to him. "Go ahead," I tell Eddie as I put the phone on speaker and lay it on a tabletop - the same one, I believe, where Grayson confessed to being Nightwing.

"Barry? Are you there?" Eddie asks. "What the hell is going on?"

Silence. Then a female voice stutters out Eddie's name. He responds by saying hers. "Iris! Iris, it's me!"

It's a mystery to me at first who Iris is, but then I realize she's the black girl I met after saving Barry yesterday. I guess I might have been right in my supposition that she and Eddie were lovers.

"What the...how...?" Poor Iris, she's completely lost for words. I don't blame her one bit.

"I don't have time to explain," Eddie says, "but Barry, you need to hear this."

"Okay," Barry says, dragging out the second syllable a tad bit. "I'm, uh, I'm listening."

"Good," says Eddie. "By now I'm sure you saw me kill myself to wipe Eobard from existence, right? No more me, no more him, no more Reverse Flash."

"Yeah, that was yesterday," Barry says. "But how'd you know that?"

"Because the wormhole got me before I could do it," Eddie says. "Good thing too, 'cause there are so many other ways I could've prevented Eobard from existing. Like getting a vasectomy, not that they'd let me 'cause I'm so young and healthy...okay, but when the wormhole got me, I saw...I saw some things."

"What kind of things?" asks another woman, one with a higher and clearer voice than that of Iris. "Your entire life flashing before your eyes?"

"Who's that?" I ask.

"New team member," Barry says. "She's a zombie named Liv Moore."

I can barely stop snickering at that name, and neither can Gwen. Same goes with Grayson. Eddie, however, only allows himself a couple of seconds' worth of chuckling before elucidating further. "I saw what would've happened if I'd done it - if I'd eaten my gun," he says, using his thumb to crack the other knuckles on one hand. "Eobard would be wiped out, and then a black hole gets to appear in the sky, and only the Flash stops it from eating the city."

"Which he's now done," I say.

"Anything else?" Barry asks. "'Cause if what happened for you was the same as I remember it - with me going back in time through the particle accelerator-"

"I remember that," Eddie says.

"I saw flashes of things that haven't even happened yet," Barry says. "I'm not sure if these premonitions are supposed to come true or what, but..."

Eddie keeps cracking his knuckles as he thinks about it. "I saw something like that. Something I don't think has happened yet. You were fighting those three Rogues - Captain Cold, Heat Wave, and Golden Glider - in Kreisberg Stadium. But you weren't alone - you had a couple of other heroes with you."

"Let me guess," I say. "Spider-Man and Nightwing?"

"How'd you know?" Eddie asks.

Grayson takes his mask out of his pocket and puts it on. My mask would take longer for that because it covers my whole face instead of just the upper half, so I instead settle for tugging down the neck of my T-shirt and revealing my uniform underneath. "Yes," I say, raising an imaginary glass with my other hand. "I am a nerd."

"Should've known," Eddie mutters.

"Look, you're still at CCU, right?" Barry asks.

"Yeah...why?"

"Be right there," Barry says. He hangs up (prompting me to take my phone and put it back in my pocket), and five seconds later, he appears in the middle of the lawn with three other, windswept-looking people in tow. A black girl, whom I recognize as Iris. A blonde girl with raccoon-like dark circles around her eyes (she must be the zombie named Liv Moore), very visible despite her being a hundred feet away. And an Indian-looking guy in an argyle sweater-vest, even taller than Barry.

"Finally," Eddie says, "we're not keeping Iris in the dark anymore." He stands up and calls her and Barry's names, and they come over to us, along with their quote-unquote "new team members." Ironically, the fastest one is Iris, but that's because she's so overjoyed to see Eddie alive again. She runs into his arms, sobbing unashamedly. Barry's eyes darken as he tears up a bit as well.

During this reunion, Barry takes the time to introduce Liv and her friend, Ravi. We're all a bit surprised to hear his English accent - even though it's really not all that posh, it still sounds classy by American standards. Gwen and Olivia, in particular, love to hear it - and Gwen nudges me and asks, "How come you can't do an accent like that, Peter?"

"'I dunno,'" I say in an accent that sounds like Scottish and Cockney had a deformed love child, which I picked up from something I saw on TV - a pretty girl with a Scottish traveling companion, failing miserably at copying his accent. "'You tell me how great it is, lad!'"

Clearly trying not to fall over laughing, Ravi says, "Good try, mate. It's better than my American, anyway. The only American accent I can do right is, like, a Valley Girl."

"And you do a very good job," I say, nodding. "You sound like the real thing, almost."

"Or Lumpy Space Princess," Grayson laughs.

"So," Liv says, smiling at her namesake, "where do you guys keep the sriracha?"

"Zombies love spicy food?" Olivia asks.

"Mm-hmm. So much. You know, you guys are surprisingly accepting of what I am," Liv says, her bloodless, marble-colored face glowing with pride.

"We're surrounded by the impossible on a daily basis," I say. "Comes with the territory. And hey, maybe we'll get to see your zombie abilities in action sometime, huh?"

Smiling crookedly, Liv says, "Get me some good brains and then we'll talk. Not yours, of course. From what I hear, yours are too valuable to leave your skull."

"Which of us are you talking to?" Grayson asks.

"Why not all of you?"

Barry clears his throat. "Okay, guys...would it be possible for some of us to break away from this place? If what Eddie said about Kreisberg Stadium is true, then we should probably go and check it out."

"I agree," Iris says. "One thing I remember from my paranormal research - the stadium's got a major ley line convergence point underneath it."

"That explains a lot," Ravi says. "Like why so few teams ever beat the Rush on their home turf. You've got magic on your side."

"I thought you didn't care about our American football?" Liv laughs.

"At least they don't have speed force," Barry says, pointing to himself and winking. "But...yeah. Peter? Gwen?"

"I say let's do it," Gwen says. "Most of the stuff we were here for happened yesterday anyway."

"Good point," I say.

Grayson and Olivia nod. "I almost wanna say we'll stay behind and take good notes, but..."

"But you don't wanna pass up the chance at making this guy's premonitions come true?" Olivia says, jerking her thumb at Eddie.

"If there's any action to be had," Grayson says, "then far be it from me to miss it."

"It's as good an idea as any," Eddie says. "And if we don't get anywhere, well, you guys can always buy souvenir shirts at the gift shop."

"Do we really scream 'out-of-towner' that much?" I ask.

"Your accents do," he laughs. "I mean, you're not over-the-top 'Noo Yawk,' but nobody around here talks quite like that."

"I bet you'd love one of their plushies," I say to Gwen. Some might think it's childish of her to keep on collecting them when she's just a few months shy of turning eighteen, but I don't, because it just makes her that much more adorable. "Isn't the Rush mascot a cheetah?"

"It used to be," Barry says, "until they decided he was too close a match to Chester Cheetah from Cheetos, so they made him a jaguar instead."

"Not that most fans could tell the difference at a glance, yeah?" Ravi asks.

I clap my hands together and point somewhere down the hill into the heart of Central City. "Okay, guys. Kreisberg Stadium or bust! Barry, you lead the way!"