Untitled Flash Compassion Project

One of my favorite things about Barry Allen aka The Flash, is that he’s a sort of the emotional intelligence version of a guile hero. He turns enemies into friends and friends into family and wins against much more experienced and stronger villains because, unlike them, he understands the power of love and acceptance.

I started watching The Flash TV show and I was sad about how Barry holds himself back from love and loving in the first few seasons. While I appreciate the power of a character arc, I also wanted to write a world where Barry Allen could be a man who understood the power of love and compassion even before he got struck by lightening and flooded with dark matter.

So I made my Barry Allen non-binary and femme and I gave him a backstory where instead of going to prison, Henry Allen found love with Joe West and remarried. That way, I didn’t spare my little gabie Barry all the tragedy of the original character, but I also gave him more opportunities to get that amazing Joe/Henry co-dad action we can see peaking through during the extremely rare times Barry’s two dads get to team up on the show.

For being arguably the most touchy-feely of the Arrowverse shows, I didn’t think The Flash TV show was touchy-feely enough and obviously I added sex, but I also wanted to go deeper into the friend dynamics than the show has time for. Plus, I don’t really care about fighting big bads unless it advances characters or their relationships, so I won’t be focusing on the fighting.

This is the first piece of fan fiction I’ve ever written that has anything like a cohesive plot outline, so that’s going to be very interesting. I doubt the plot will ever over-shadow the sex and relationship talk, but stranger things have happened.

As of this writing, the first three chapters are up on Archive of Our Own, you can read them there. I’m already really proud of them.