A/N: Guess who's back with another potential season ending?
Yup. That's right. It's me.
If you liked my story After Zoom, or if you've never heard of it and you're just panicking because BARRY'S DEAD, OR IS HE, AND WALLY AND JESSE ARE METAS NOW MAYBE, welcome. I have no idea what I'm doing yet but this'll be a fun ride.
Rupture.
It's classifiably ironic sometimes, the meta names. Trickster when they were all learning that the man they'd known as Harrison Wells was tricking them. Peek-A-Boo when a drunk Caitlin had questioned Barry about peeking.
Rupture.
Now that everything they've trusted, everything they thought they knew, has been broken. Maybe beyond repair.
Zoom doesn't even bother to spend time gloating. He's gone. Probably off to torment Caitlin some more.
Leaving the team to process, slowly, painfully, what just happened.
Barry's gone.
Cisco stumbles down to the base of the machine, reaching for the fragments of Barry's suit.
"I loved that suit," he murmurs, the words choked out around sobs. He doesn't know how to cope with this, outside of humor.
Iris crouches beside him and pulls him away from the wreckage. "We shouldn't look… we should go."
She has no idea where she means. But she can't stay in this room. Not now. And Cisco shouldn't either. The two of them get to their feet and leave, walking as fast as possible, out of there.
The three men—"all three of you care about me, in your own way"—are left alone, staring blankly ahead at the failure they've created, they've allowed.
Henry is the first to recover even a bit of his mental processing power.
"This is your fault." He's said it already, but he repeats it anyway, and now his grief turns shockingly into anger and he turns on Wells with a passion. "If you hadn't—" He takes a step forward, grips Wells by the shoulder, spins him around. "You killed him."
Wells can't defend himself, doesn't have the words, can't even muster the will to duck when Henry aims a punch at his face.
The blow lands, and Wells staggers into the wall. Still does nothing to defend himself when Henry moves at him again.
Joe rushes in between them and shoves Henry away from Wells. "Hey! Stop it!"
"He killed my son!"
Joe has no idea how to respond, he almost says "mine too", in a sudden surge of grief really wants to hurt Wells just as much, but then—
Iris screams from upstairs.
"Iris!" Joe shouts. He throws a frantic glance at Henry, then Wells, and then runs from the room.
Henry grits his teeth, doesn't look at Wells, and follows.
Gathering himself, Wells is only a few steps behind. Jesse. He has to make sure she's all right. Not that anything could have happened. She was in the time vault.
Nothing else could have gone so catastrophically wrong in so short a time.
Upstairs, Cisco is already racing around the Cortex, gathering various devices and monitors. He thinks solely about Jesse and Wally. No time to focus on anything else. Not when they're in danger. No. He's not going to consider anything else.
"Wally," Joe whispers brokenly. He sinks to the floor next to Iris, who's already holding Wally's hand. "He's not dead. He can't be dead."
"They both have a pulse," Cisco says before Iris can even open her mouth to say anything. He returns to the floor in between Wally and Jesse, arms full of metal objects. A few clatter to the floor and he ignores them, no time, he's got to start working if he's going to save them. Caitlin would be better but she's not here, he can't think about that—
"Jesse."
Joe and Wells have never gotten along well, but when Wells says his daughter's name, it's exactly the same way that Joe said his son's.
"How could this happen? I thought they were safe!" Henry can't process this. Not now. Not with everything else that has just happened, it's all too fast, too many cataclysms in so short a time.
"Cisco, what can you do?" Wells demands, completely ignoring Henry's question.
"We should move them to the beds," Iris says. She stands, swaying a little, and hurries into Caitlin's med bay.
Cisco is already attaching vital monitors, the kind adapted for Barry and Ronnie and other metas, to the two unconscious bodies. "Um. I don't know. I don't know anything. I can do what we did with Barry, but that's all I can promise. Without—" Without who, without Caitlin? Without evil Dr. Wells?
He's acutely aware that he's now the only remaining member of the original Team Flash.
Iris returns, wheeling a bed with each hand, good luck that they put them on wheels, terrible luck that they need them.
Joe lifts his son. Wells lifts his daughter. They place them in the beds.
As they look up, they make eye contact.
Joe, who had only a minute ago wanted nothing more than to blame Wells for everything, tear him apart, can't find that anger anywhere within him.
Wells, who had only a minute ago been unable to feel anything but simple shock, finds tears rolling uncontrollably down his face.
Henry, at the entrance to the room, can't find anger, does find tears. He knows, more than anyone else could, what they're going through.
The rupture that's cracked S.T.A.R. Labs apart shears just a little more damage into their lives, expanding the slightest bit.
Then ceases its growth.
The break is still there. Doesn't heal. Can't begin to.
But, with one meta gone and two more comatose, the fragmentation has already occurred.
Post-rupture, S.T.A.R. Labs takes a collective breath.
Time to fix this new breach.