Lex is perched on a table in a corner of this party, methodically removing the wrappers from the Jolly Ranchers in his plastic jar and putting them in his mouth. His fingers tap out a complex pattern on the table.
Then he'll probably hear the voice before he sees its owner, as a little gaggle of socialites wanders in his direction. It's a voice he might recognize, attached to a familiar face.
Not because they've encountered each other at one of these things, of course -- he'll have seen the interviews, most likely. (Mr. Wayne, will you be taking over from the board of directors? Mr. Wayne, how are you planning to juggle Wayne Enterprises with your higher education? Mr. Wayne, how does it feel to be voted Gotham's most eligible bachelor this year? Mr. Wayne, everyone's wondering just what you've been up to abroad...)
Apparently some of what he's been up to abroad is getting into cultural misunderstandings with a woman he met in Delhi! He's having a great time telling his little audience about his mishaps. They seem thoroughly charmed. None of them seem to have quite noticed him yet, except for possibly Bruce himself, who glances briefly in his direction before pushing forward with gusto to the punchline of his current anecdote. His friends laugh.
Bruce's anecdotes reach a natural stopping point; his listeners turn more towards each other, and he wanders off to the next conversation.
The nearest unoccupied person, as it happens, is Lex.
"Those any good?" he asks, still casually cheerful, nodding vaguely at the Jolly Ranchers. (He's having to angle himself a little awkwardly to avoid cornering him or ending up with his back to the rest of the party. Possibly this is by design.)
Lex's fingers continue to tap; his legs start to jiggle.
"Mm. Do you know about the chicks of herring gulls?" he remarks. "Some, ah, particularly cruel scientist painted a knitting needle red with three white circles. The chicks begged far more enthusiastically from that than from their parents. Truly a shocking lack of filial piety."
"You don't think they would go for feather dye, if they could use it? And bower-building didn't fit the metaphor as well." --He notices that he's been slowly slipping out of character and subtly corrects, raising his hands in a mildly self-deprecating manner. "In any case, you could hardly accuse me of not filling my home with pretty trinkets to impress the ladies."
He smiles; it's unclear whether it's meant to be conspiratorial or condescending or just deeply tired. "You caught me. I was once a little boy who used to play at being doctor in the outbuilding off the back garden. But if you think the man I've become is just a smokescreen for an awkward bookish child, that he'll somehow reappear if you just strip enough away, I'm sorry to disappoint -- I stopped being a child over a decade ago."
"A man's got to do something with his life." He's made it all the way back to safe territory again, back to being gregarious and cheerful and a little bit ridiculous (though somewhat subdued now, which is natural, considering). "You should come see the Kusama I had brought back sometime, it gives the sun room a distinctly modern flair."
A few days later--
Barry Allen is having a good day.
He has a few dozen deliveries to make across Central City off various gig economy apps. He has a couple of TaskRabbit tasks from people who don't expect to actually watch him do it; he assembles furniture, cleans a house, fetches someone's dry cleaning, and fixes a toilet. And about ten minutes after he begins work, he's done for the day and can go back to his apartment and read comics.
If he's still in super-speed mode when night falls, he'll get a few dozen more chances than most people to look up and notice there's something amiss. An open window he didn't open. Shadows falling oddly, shifting when they shouldn't. It takes a relative eternity to cross this room; if at any point he were to just turn around, he might catch his intruder mid-skulk.
Instead, of course, he's going to have a mild heart attack.
"You stopped that robbery," says a voice behind him, deep and raspy and inhuman. It waits until he's finished the issue he's on to say this. It's a considerate nightmare voice.
When you're sped up, it's hard to understand human speech, but the deep raspy nightmare voice is not less startling for that. He accidentally speeds up to country-crossing speed and then slows down to normal human and catches all of the horrible nightmare voice's sentence.
"Why the fuck are you in my house?"
(Barry talks fast, even when he's not sped up.)