Jesse can't get the question out of her head.
Is he in pain?
Knees to her chest, she huddles in the corridor and presses her face against Wally's sweater. She sobs into it like he isn't gone, like at any moment he'll prance out of the Speed Force with a smile and a flourish, and she'll punch him on the shoulder hard enough that he'll feel it even through that unshatterable suit, and then she'll hug him until she forgets what the lines between them feel like. It'll be okay, she tells herself, holding onto the last living memory of him preserved in the fading warmth of his shirt. It will be okay.
She hears Barry before she sees him. With expiring urgency, he staggers to her side and sits down, a little gasp of pain punching out of him. He doesn't speak for a moment, rallying his strength, and his lightning feels sick, weak and hard to find, nothing near the warm, ever-present animal she has come to associate with it. He says, "Jesse." It sounds like a last breath. "We'll get him back."
She doesn't respond, sobbing until the sick animal stirs and presses against her with brokenhearted determination, and when Barry rests a hand on her shoulder it's like a flashpoint, instantaneous relief. It's a contact that once pulled her back from that Great Void, volcanic heat that purges the pain from her. Her fingers relax on Wally's shirt; her jaw unclenches. For the first time in hours, the tightness in her chest abates.
With a deep, relieved exhale, she scolds softly, "Barry." He doesn't have Speed to give, not with the damage from Savitar's claw. Jesse didn't need to see the X-rays to know his shoulder was badly crushed, pulverized into a splintered tangle of bone. When metal met flesh, metal won, and it claimed its prize completely. Barry's breathing is shallow, his voice faint, but he speaks relentlessly, and she can only listen.
"About a year ago, I gave up my Speed to Zoom because he ... kidnapped Wally. My Speed was the ransom. I paid it. And I tried to live a normal life again, but I couldn't. Zoom killed eight people, six of them … six were cops I knew. Harry … your dad … said we could recreate the particle accelerator explosion. And that would give me back my Speed. He was wrong."
Goosebumps rise on Jesse's arms. "Barry?" I don't want to hear the rest of this story, she thinks, but he pauses long enough for her to make the request and she cannot bring herself to stop him. She presses a knee against his, a silent go-on.
At last he clears his throat quietly and continues. "It hurt. A lot. I can't lie to you, Jesse. Then I woke up in my childhood bedroom. I found Joe downstairs analyzing the crime scene. Where my mother was murdered.
"I didn't know what was going on. It felt like I was back at that night. I looked at Joe and I knew it wasn't Joe, but it felt like Joe. Before I could figure it out, he took a seat and told me that he was the Speed Force."
He pauses for so long she half-thinks he won't continue, breathing slowly.
"The Speed Force is alive and I knew that on some level … I've always known it … but it didn't click until I had a conversation with it." He looks right at her and he's almost ghostly, he's so pale, but his rueful smile is still alive and sincerely Barry. "It was exactly as absurd as it sounds. Like talking to gravity. It felt like that, too, like gravity … something big and diffuse and too hard to define. There are no adequate ways to describe what it is like to stand in the presence of the Speed Force.
"But I can say this." He sits up a little more and grimaces, the importance of his message overriding his pain. "Speed Force is on our side. We're its family. Its closest kin. It doesn't have anyone other than speedsters. It's not ... malevolent. It won't hurt its family. Not intentionally."
Jesse's blood runs cold.
"What does that mean?" she asks, her own voice mimicking his hush.
"It means Speed Force is like a child, cradling a very delicate bird." Barry's expression softens when he looks at her, compassion prompting him to add, "It's incurious, too, because it has seen all there is. All there was. All there will be. So it may not make contact at all, may simply let Wally … drift. Whatever that means."
She doesn't know how she feels about "drifting." So she asks.
Barry sighs. "Do you remember anything from your coma?"
Darkness, and silence, and a sense of timelessness.
She nods. Barry reaches up to rub his right shoulder idly, like it's paining him. "It's like that. You're not really aware of your own existence, or time passing. You simply are. And someday you hope to wake up again. In the coma, though ... you don't know you're asleep. You just think you're fully present. Like Plato's cave."
Jesse knows the story. "Shadows become your reality," she summarizes. "You start to think what you see is all there is." This is what she knows, what she's good at, what she can do: science, and art, and somewhere in between.
"Precisely." Barry's face somehow pales a little more and he climbs laboriously to his feet. "Sorry. I –"
He Flashes off.
Jesse waits, imagining herself in that cave, dangling from the ceiling and watching life unfold on the wall in front of her. The shadows dance, and morph, and grow, appearing at random, at predicted intervals, and in ways she can't anticipate. She watches them like they are all that is, the world beyond the mouth of the cave a nonexistent realm that she cannot fathom. And then the chains fall, and she is free, free to turn around, to leave the cave, to see the makers of the shadows at last.
She thinks about Wally chained and aches to set him free.
Barry returns, and he all but crashes into her, clumsily retaking his seat, and he shivers, residual nausea bleeding across that indefinable bond. She tries to press peace back upon him, settlement and contentment, and feels him relax a little.
They sit in silence for a time, attempting to communicate across that Speed Force barrier neither have mastered. Whereas Wally she reads with effortless simplicity – sad, hurting, joyful, restless, excited, relieved – she struggles to name the emotions Barry transmits. For Wally, sadness is soft and orchid blue; for Barry, it's colorless and loud, like an ache in her teeth. For Wally, joy dances and leaps like flames in a fire, crackling, growling playfully, an uncapturable thing that she watches with pleasure; for Barry, joy is subtle and low, a nightingale singing in the woods, calling to her to spend more time wandering through the sunlit green.
When she looks in Barry's eyes she can see what he means by The Speed Force is alive. She wonders what he sees in hers. Is it dead in mine?
It's eerie to think, but their lightning, so different in some ways, still mingles affectionately between them, like a hug that never breaks contact, and she knows that whatever he sees, it is far from repulsive. They're leaning against each other, she realizes, and when he rests a hand on Wally's shirt, she knows it's for his own benefit, his own peace of mind. His own need to reclaim what they've lost.
"The Speed Force won't hurt its own," he says, each word costing him a little, "but it's not possible to carry who we are into the Speed Force. You have to give up yourself. You have to give up everything." He lets go of the shirt and leans his head back against the wall, closing his eyes. When he speaks, it sounds heavy. "Death is the only way to crossover. And then the Speed Force ... When you return, it remakes you. When I came back, I came back stronger."
He opens his eyes and they're glowing gold. "He's not alive," he says, and it doesn't hurt like Jesse expects it to, and she knows why when he finishes, "and he's not in pain. He's in-between. I'm going to bring him back here. And Speed Force …" He closes his eyes and when he opens them again they're human hazel. "The Speed Force will let me," he asserts, like he's telling it directly, Heel, and she can almost feel the warning rumble of thunder in the distance.
If you want it, fight for it.
She doesn't envy him. But still she says, "Let me help."
Barry nods. "I don't know how long it'll take me to find Wally," he explains, "but once I do, he needs to see you. To know that this is where he needs to be."
She wants to enter the Speed Force with him, to find Wally, but she thinks of that immutable, unalterable Void, the darkness and silence and timelessness, and can't bring herself to reach for it. The martyr who walks to the hill, she admires, but cannot bring herself to follow.
"Be careful," she tells him.
He smiles a little at that. "You know I can't do that," he teases.
She rolls her eyes, because underneath all that Speed is a dork of a human being, and pushes herself to her feet. She holds out a hand and helps him to his own. "Let's go get Wally," she says, mission-statement, and he squeezes her hand tightly.
"Let's go get Wally," he echoes, and lets her go to lead the way.
. o .
It takes almost three weeks for Barry to find him.
The cortex is wired, a guitar string pulled too tight. Between shutting off the metahuman alert app – Jesse takes care of it before Cisco finishes announcing the crime-in-progress – and occasionally entertaining the idea of food, they're restless. Caitlin sorts drawers compulsively; Cisco invents new songs with pens, rapping percussively against the main console, a-tappity-tappity-tappa-tappa-tap; HR practices a piccolo until Cisco gets up and snaps it in half, and then he produces a second piccolo and plays that instead; Iris stops by every afternoon around three to see for herself the empty suit rack, and then she leaves without a word; and Joe avoids them in person but calls every thirteen minutes to ask, "Anything?" To which someone takes one for the team and answers, "Nope, will call if it changes" and prepares to rinse-and-repeat thirteen minutes later.
Jesse is out of her mind with a mixture of boredom and stress-fatigue, like finals' week but several orders of magnitude more harrowing, because failure isn't retaking a class or not graduating, failure is Barry and Wally are dead and never ever ever coming back and they won't even know it until they grow old and die themselves and the universe maybe unveils its secrets.
Sick to her stomach with the thought, she puts on the history channel, hoping to learn something vaguely interesting enough to draw her mind away from the speedsters for an hour, when there's a crackle and an unmistakable voice. "Cis… Cisco. Cisco. I have him."
They freeze, all of them, even HR, who plays a beat longer before realization whacks him in the middle of the forehead. Then they're scrambling, Cisco all but kicking over a chair in his haste and he snags the comms and presses the wrong button before finding the right one and Jesse's heart is going to beat out of her chest. With trembling, tremendous hope, Cisco blurts out, "Barry?"
There's a deep, relieved exhale, and Jesse cups a hand over her mouth because oh-my-God. "Cisco," Barry repeats joyously, "Cisco, we're here. We made it."
The first landing on Mars couldn't be more exciting; HR snaps his own piccolo in half with a shout and Jesse takes off, flying across Central City, and she has no idea where they are but she will find them, and she searches and Cisco catches on and instructs, "East side, twenty miles out," and then she flies.
It happens in a blink, two speedsters emerging in the grass ahead. Wally kneels and Barry looks ready to keel over, but Jesse doesn't give pause, barely hesitates as she closes the gap and skates to a halt on her knees right in front of him, kicking up dust.
"Wally," she breathes, hugging him, and he doesn't do anything, hovering dazedly in her arms. She sits back enough to cradle his face, looking in his eyes and insisting, "Wally."
He blinks and there's a flicker of orange in his eyes. When he repeats it, his own name sounds thick on his tongue, like he's forgotten what it's like to speak, but she presses her forehead against his and feels his hands rise on her back to hold her close.
"Jesse," he sighs, and she laughs, because her relief is so intense it is pure, exultant joy.
When Cisco and Co. arrive with the STAR Labs van, they pile in.
Jesse doesn't make a sound, but she still sobs against Wally as he holds her. He's still somewhat dazed, like he's been whammied, but there's tenderness, too, a gentleness that she knows is proof-of-life. Barry is passed out on the floor in the back of the van, Wally looking ready to join him, but he keeps his eyes on her, low-burning and soft with relief.
"Jesse," Wally repeats, like it's the only word he knows, and she presses a kiss against his cheek before peeling the mask so she can look at him. He blinks and says, "Hi."
"Hi," Jesse echoes.
"I'm home," he announces, surprised and satisfied, closing his arms around her more tightly. "How did I—?"
Educationally, Barry – still passed out – thunks against the back door as Cisco comes to an ungentle halt at a red light. There's a tiny grunt of discomfort, but no acknowledgment besides, and Wally says, "Oh," and Jesse laughs.
"That's how," she says succinctly, and it amazes her that of all the things she imagined her life would be – majoring in five subjects, ready to take the world by storm – she became a speedster instead.
Looking at Wally, she smiles at the remonstrative growl of Cisco from the back when they hit a pothole, prompting a retaliatory, "You wanna drive?" as Barry, chastised, falls silent.
Despite its dangers, she knows she wouldn't trade this life for anything.