Chapter Text
Barry's in the middle of prepping for dinner when the doorbell rings. It rings again as he's washing his hands, and once more as he's scrambling down the hall with a muttered curse on his lips.
"I'm coming!" he yells loudly. "Just a minute!"
The bell chimes again, just to tease him, he's sure, and he groans in annoyance.
Reaching the door, he cringes at the voices of the uninvited interlopers, clearly audible even from the other side. One, deep and booming, rattles the wood and Barry's teeth along with it as it reaches an impossible, excited crescendo. The other, firmer and slightly more restrained, still rings high despite the wooden barrier. With a sharp exhalation of breath, he plasters on his best "welcome (but please leave now)" face before turning the lock and yanking open the door.
He falters on the inhale at his first sight of the pair crowding his stoop.
"Hello, we're looking for Jason. Is he here?"
Both the question and the woman asking it appear innocent enough on the surface, but even sporting low-riding jeans, an innocuous black tank top, sneakers, and a (too sharp) smile, she makes Barry's danger sense flare bright. Deceptively well-muscled despite her lithe form, a fiery trail of red hair flows behind her in a neat ponytail, somehow held aloft from the ground despite being several feet longer than the woman is tall. Her whole demeanor is a horrible attempt at causal-normal, and Barry knows immediately and with bone-deep certainty that she could effortlessly cause him bodily harm.
That is, if her companion doesn't get to him first.
He being the hulking, deathly white monster of a man at her side. Even shrouded in a tan trench coat with the collar upturned, a baseball cap yanked down low on his head, there's no disguising the man's sheer size. Over six feet tall and several inches wider than the door frame, his meaty hands clench and unclench making the muscles in his arms bulge through his coat as the shadowed smile on his face stretches like putty.
"Where am Red Him? Am Red Him here?" The man is practically bouncing on his feet, head ducking and weaving to peer around the blond and into the depths of the house behind him.
"Holy shit," Barry rasps out, shaking off his shock enough to stumble a few steps back inside. "Holy...!"
"You should not swear. Red Him said swearing am bad." The voice rumbles out of the man like a dump truck tearing through a quiet neighborhood on a sleepy weekend. The finger he wags in admonishment in front of the speedster's face could singularly pop his skull like a ripe tomato.
"Bizarro, please," the woman interjects, holding up a hand to stave off further comment from her friend. Turning to Barry she adds, "I am sorry, we did not mean to scare you, but we are friends of Jason's. We were told we could find him here. Is that true?" Her icy-blue gaze narrows as the focus of her attention gapes like a beached guppy.
And then it clicks.
"You're Artemis." Barry breathes the words like he fears he's dreaming.
"And me am Bizarro," Bizarro offers helpfully, bending over nearly in half to put himself face to face with Barry, extending one massive hand in greeting.
It takes a moment before the scientist works up the courage to grasp the pro-offered limb, but when he does he finds the handshake is gentle and almost child-like.
"But you am not Red Him," Bizarro continues, canting his head as he assesses the stranger before him. "Not-Red Him knows where Red Him am?"
His own brow furrowing in confusion, Barry's eyes cut to the red head in search of clarity.
"He means Jason," Artemis translates with an amused twist of her lips. "You know who we are, which means you know Jason," she adds, hope and anticipation creeping into her voice.
The speedster nods, fighting to get his tongue unstuck from the roof his mouth. "Yeah. Yes. I mean, you're in the right place. He lives here. He's not here, though, he's at work. At the shop. He owns a bookstore. He...."
Tracking Artemis's left eyebrow as it lifts upwards towards her hairline, Barry forces himself to choke off the rest of the verbal diarrhea. "Sorry," he mumbles sheepishly, his hand rubbing at the back of his neck. "Kind of got carried away. It's just...Jason's going to freak out. He missed you both so much. He...I mean he thought...,"
...You were dead. Although the rest of the sentence dies unvoiced in his throat, it nonetheless rings in Barry's brain. He feels himself go cold with dread, because he knows Jason, and yeah, the younger man will undoubtedly freak out with joy...right before being crushed with guilt at knowing his friends were alive and he didn't try to save them.
"He thought we were dead," the red head offers into the silence, reading Barry's expression easily and without a trace of judgment. "It was certainly a fair assumption. We disappeared into a tear in reality as our base of operations crumbled around us and eventually vanished. We, ourselves, were surprised to still be alive."
The matter-of-fact way she makes the declaration has Barry breathing slightly easier at the thought of Jason's reunion with his former teammates. "He missed you both – so much. He's going to be over the moon to see you."
"Red Him am going to jump over the moon? Me thought that am dangerous," Bizarro interjects, one finger scratching at his cheek thoughtfully as he ponders Jason catapulting over the hunk of rock out in orbit. He smiles toothily at the mental image.
For his part, Barry smothers his laugh behind one hand as he holds the door open wider with the other and stands aside. "Please, come in. I'm being rude. Please. I'll go call Jason." He presses himself flush against the wall to let Bizarro step past, the clone needing to turn sideways and hold his arms tightly against his sides to fit through the doorway.
With a nod of gratitude, Artemis adds a "thank you" as she enters behind her friend.
Closing the door behind her, Barry slips in front of Bizarro and takes a few steps down the hall. "Come on, you can wait in the living room."
The blond tries not to cringe too badly as the house shakes and the floor creaks with each of Bizarro's plodding steps. When they reach the living room, the hulking man eyes the furniture critically, opting instead for the safety of sitting on the floor. Barry's already digging his phone out of his pocket and punching in Jason's number before Artemis, having waited for her friend to settle in, takes a seat on the sofa above him.
"Hey, babe," the speedster says when the call connects, steamrolling over Jason's answering greeting, "you need to come home." He tries valiantly to keep his voice even, like nothing exceptional is going on and it's just a normal, boring day in the quiet, boring paradise that is Central City when the Rogues aren't out causing mayhem. He figures Jason will probably just think he wants to get laid. Because that's a thing that happens on such boring days.
"No, it's nothing bad, I promise." Barry's eyes go to the ceiling as he tamps down his impatience. "You just really need to come home. Now." A pause. "Yes, 'now' now." Another pause. "I love you, too." With a tap he ends the call, a sudden rush of adrenaline and enthusiasm turning him as giddy as Bizarro. "He's not that far away; he'll be home in a few minutes."
His declaration is met with two mirrored looks of intrigue.
"'Babe?'"
"Why am you not tell him we am here?"
The questions jumble atop of each other, and Barry flounders for a moment before electing to answer Bizarro's less complicated one first. "Ah, I want him to be surprised. He's not going to believe me if I tell him anyway, and he should enjoy the moment."
"And 'babe?'" the Amazon prods, clearly not going to forgo a response.
The blond's face flushes as red as the woman's hair, and his hand once more goes to his neck. "Ah, yeah. 'Babe.' Jason is my...I mean, I'm his...." And oh, shit, Barry has no idea if Artemis and Bizarro even know which way Jason swings. "Do you...? I mean, did he ever...?"
"Jason likes men," Artemis finishes, again in that matter-of-fact tone that Barry is starting to appreciate. "We are aware." A small grin tugs at the corners of her lips and happiness crinkles the corners of her eyes. "You are together."
Barry nods, unable to keep his own smile at bay. He opens his mouth to say more but is cut off by the sound of Jason's bike tearing into the driveway, the engine roaring before the younger man screeches to a halt and cuts the motor. The speedster doesn't even need to check his watch to realize there's no way the man was driving anywhere near the legal limit.
Well, what did you expect, he chides himself, he probably wanted sex, too.
The front door slams open, and Barry doesn't bother holding back the giggle bubbling in his throat as he side-eyes Bizarro and Artemis.
The clone is up on his feet faster than should be possible for a being of his size. The Amazon doesn't move from her place on her sofa, opting instead for feigned disinterest and failing miserably.
"Barr!" Jason calls out, footsteps loud in the hallway. "Babe, I'm here! Where are you?"
With a conspiratorial glance at the others, Barry replies, "In the living room!" trying his hardest not to give anything away from the tone of his voice alone.
Jason's answering bootsteps are quick and determined. "Jeez, Barr, I totally appreciate how much you want my cock...,"
The speedster's eyes go wide as twin gazes, pinned just seconds prior on the doorway in rapt anticipation of the raven-haired man's arrival, swing from the direction of the hall to fix on his face.
"...but the employees are going to start talking...," Jason continues, unwitting of his partner's plight.
Barry has seconds to worry that this partner might in fact be leaving a trail of discarded clothes behind him before the younger man rounds the corner...,
"...so we probably should wait at least two weeks before we...."
...and freezes.
Captain-Cold-transforms-Central-City's-residents-into-living-ice-sculptures freezes.
Thankfully he's still clothed.
The speedster, however, is flaming redder than the Amazon's fiery tresses, his hands plastered over his mouth to hold back what he knows is a totally unflattering sound of complete and utter embarrassment. "Hey, babe," he finally squeaks out after several attempts to clear his throat, "you have visitors."
The younger man takes one leaden step and then another into the room. A staccato breath escapes his lungs that leaves his mouth hanging open. "Barr...," he croaks weakly, eyes never straying from the impossible sight before him.
"They're real." The blond's lips tremble even as his smile stretches wide. "They're alive. They're here."
That's all the reassurance Jason needs to lurch forward, staggering to his friends on shaking legs, collapsing into the web of intertwined arms.
"Oh my god, oh my god, ohmygod," he murmurs over and over again. Pulling back, his hands trace Bizarro's face, dropping down to grip the man's arms with a ferocity that turns his knuckles as white as the clone's skin and would have hurt anyone else, but instead just makes the bigger man smile broadly with all his teeth on display.
"Me am glad to see Red Him," the clone says, carefully wrapping the raven-haired man in a hug. "Me am miss Red Him."
And yeah, Barry thinks there's an honest-to-god tear glistening in Bizarro's eye.
"I missed you, too, B. God I missed you, too." Jason words are muffled against the fabric of his friend's coat, and absolutely no one comments on the obvious tear stains he leaves behind as he pulls away. "And you, too, Red Her," he says, twisting around, still encased in Bizarro's hug, to hold out his arms to Artemis. "I missed you, too."
The Amazon goes willingly, her own hug bruising. "We are here, Jason." Her words are soft, but they're edged in steel, as if daring the universe to prove her wrong.
Jason buries his face in the crook of her neck and holds on like he still expects her to disappear. "I thought...I mean, how...?"
"It does not matter," she replies, her hand going to the back of the man's head, fingers tangling in his hair. "We are here."
"Red Her am right," Bizarro says, his arms long enough that he can encompass both his friends together. "Bizarro am here, Red Her am here, and Red Him am here. Details am not important."
Jason yelps as Bizarro emphasizes the declaration by hoisting him several inches off the ground and crushing him to his chest.
And yeah, there might be traces of pain in his eyes, but Jason's laughter is easily the purest, happiest thing any of them has heard in a long, long time.