There's an ugly burning residue in Joe's chest, like cigarette smoke. His mouth tastes awful, like something died between his teeth, leaving a sickly aftertaste of wire and mold, cemeterial. He shoves the urge to throw up down. He's alive. That's what counts.
Head turned to one side, he opens his eyes. He raises an eyebrow at the IV stand and heart rate monitor with detached interest. Aw, hell, comes to mind, followed shortly by, this is going to be a lot of damn paperwork. He takes a shallow breath – ugh, he needs something strong, a few gallons of coffee, maybe, or just straight-up antifreeze – and sits up.
Someone snuffles.
Joe smiles. He knows that sound.
Getting comfortable, back against the headboard, Joe drinks in the increasingly rare sight of a sleeping Bar. An irrepressible urge to chuck a balled-up piece of paper at him gets crunched under practicality; his reach is limited, and there's no paper in sight. His traditional alternative – a shoulder shake – is equally impractical; he can't get up without taking half the bed with him. He'd settle for a short, sharp, "Barry!" but he knows Barry isn't the only person in earshot and doesn't want to incur bad feelings with the staff. His checkout time depends on their good will (and, he permits, his own health, but besides the whole near-death experience thing he feels just fine. Hungry, maybe. But that's better cured outside these four walls, anyway).
That's what kids are for, Joe thinks, with an amused smile – busting his butt out of involuntary incarceration. He whistles, low enough that the next room over can't hear it. And – shocker – neither can Barry. No surprises there: Barry could sleep through a hurricane.
Pawing around, Joe grins when he finds a fresh tissue box, wadding one up and pitching it at Barry. It barely makes it past the bed. Damn unweighted projectiles. He crumples two up for the next round.
It becomes almost a game, trying to wake Barry up but-not-really. Aforementioned, he could just pull out the big old Dad voice and startle Barry to attention, but he's always been a bit of a frat boy at heart, and the art of a good heist is not getting caught. He's up to five tissues a ball when he makes contact, bouncing off Barry's knee and earning exactly zero response.
He paws around some more and finds his keys, rat-a-tat-a-tattling them between his fingers, like he's choosing which door to open. It's a nice way to pass the time, a kinetic distraction for his immutable discomfort. He should call Iris, let her know everything's okay, but if Barry's here then everything's fine on STAR's end, and if everything's fine on STAR's end, the day's done, and if the day's done, Iris knows. Whatever's keeping her away must be important.
He knows because she once flew three hundred miles on a redeye to see him after Barry, the dummy, called her that night to tell her that everything was fine, really, everything was just great, except, oh, yeah, um, Joe was shot.
"He's fine," Barry insisted, but it was too late.
She was on a flight before Joe could say, She's what now?
It was hard not to bite a bullet when you were a cop. The trick was taking it between the teeth and coming out smiling and not six feet under. As far as Joe was concerned, he'd done a damn good job: he'd only been shot once, back of his right knee, and the most distressing thing about the experience had been Iris breaking down in tears once she arrived from the adrenaline relief. She'd been so scared; Joe never, ever wanted to put her through it again.
Barry hadn't been immune to the shock of it, present for the actual shot, and he hadn't even ducked for cover when he heard Joe's grunt. He scrambled over faster than Chyre, despite being thirty feet farther away, almost tripping over Joe as his knees hit the hardwood. "Joe, Joe, Joe, oh my God," he babbled, out of his element and horrified. Joe had tried to tell him it was fine, he wasn't gonna die, but his mouth was occupied yelling to diffuse the pain, which didn't plead his case convincingly. It was Chyre who handled it, picking Barry up – all six-two of him! Joe would kill to have a photo of it – to displace him so he could triage, already on the phone with an emergency responder, bless him.
Chyre was a damn good man. He was the one who said, "Got your boy" when Barry, being Barry, actually had a good time at a bar and parked himself as a meta-reflective installation at the nearest bus stop, soaked to the skin and throwing up in Chyre's car on the way home. He congratulated Iris with a semester's worth of textbooks when she got accepted into her first-choice college. Chyre had a killer memory – he knew everyone's birthday, memorized coffee orders, took 'em out to dinner and made suggestions based on what they'd ordered last – and a gruff sort of companionability that made him easy to talk to. He wasn't going to win a Nobel – or maybe he would; was memorization a category? – but he was a good man. He didn't have kids, but Joe was pretty sure he saw Iris and Barry as the next closest to his. The idea of kids. A test run.
Of course, there was no test run for Joe, who was parent both when he kept Barry from breaking his neck on the stairs and proverbially took him by the neck to shake him out for being an idiot. Discipline, his dad always said, meant to teach. Be kind, but firm. Hug em and scruff em.
Barry, to his credit, was either sufficiently mortified or sobered after the hangover that he actually followed Joe's advice and never got that shit-faced again. And, if his whole super-metabolism was to be believed, his drinking days might be behind him altogether.
Joe huffs softly at the thought, trying to wrap his mind around the whole super thing. Looking at Barry now, head on a hand at an angle only a twenty-five-year-old could tolerate, it's kind of hard to believe he's superhuman. What's Wells call it now? Meta-human? Hard to believe he's that, either. He just looks like a kid in shoes he's finally grown into. Still baby-faced, too.
Quite the nap you took there, baby-face.
And it sobers Joe, shaking him down, a fierce reminder that three weeks ago Barry wasn't going to wake up, and here he was. Somehow still sleeping, even though he'd already accumulated something like twenty-seven months of sleep in nine. Little over two years.
It felt like twenty, waking up every morning with a cold bed in the house. It was a terrible way to start the day, like dumping a bucket of ice water over his head. He missed waking Barry up before work, something as routine as breakfast – skipping it just left him feeling hollow and hungry. He'd come home and go through the same process, the same bitter ritual of empty spaces where someone was supposed to be.
It was better that way, though, he thinks. He doesn't know if he could have stood the sight of Barry all wired-up in his own bed, catatonic. It was much safer to see the freshly pressed sheets, waiting to be disarrayed, and pretend Barry was just away at college than it was to see the ghostly reality.
He visited Barry almost shamefully little when he was comatose: every day for three weeks, and then twice in the remaining eight and a half months. First time, it was Barry's birthday; Joe celebrated by breaking down in tears. Second and last because Joe shut his eyes one utterly normal night and woke up, heart-pounding, with the terrible, parental premonition that told him something was wrong.
He'd rushed over, convinced that he'd find Barry dead on the sheets, already half-entombed, and found his ghostly, but still breathing cadaver instead. "Detective," Wells greeted, looking a little surprised to see him. He didn't ask why Joe was there, what had brought him to Barry's bedside after months away. He'd just wheeled out of the room, leaving a sedate and utterly unchanging Barry in his wake.
Joe stayed guard that whole night, never letting his eyes shut, and only left when sunlight drenched the floors in yellow and Cisco and Caitlin sauntered in for the morning shift did he depart at last.
Two months later, Barry woke up.
Watching him now, Joe feels a tension in his teeth relax when Barry shifts, mumbling something and resting his head at an even more painful angle against his hand. Now it would be a kindness to wake him up, Joe muses, but he can't find it in him to startle Barry, to scare him after everything.
They'd both been through a lot. But the snoozer in front of him looks like the kid still curled up in the sheets, hugging a pillow, minutes before they needed to be at the station and sometimes Joe actually did hate to wake him. When Barry had a miserable day, or they worked a particularly gruesome or just plain awful case, it was hard to watch his shoulders sag and the light dim in his eyes. He was such a light, and in those moments, nothing could touch him that Joe couldn't protect him from.
Barry carried an immutable optimism in his duck-waddling gait that said let's solve the case! He'd click that little briefcase of his open, a feverish, relentless energy propelling him through long nights with relentless fortitude. Singh loved that about him: Allen works hard.
Yeah, he did. He deserved a break.
Joe crumples up another tissue and tosses it at him. It bounces off Barry's nose.
Barry doesn't react, and Joe can't shut the stupid smile on his face down. He loves this kid.
It'll be almost twenty minutes, by his best count, before he wakes up. It's worth the wait.
Barry's head shifts in his hand, lifting sleepily to acknowledge him, and Joe wants to hug him.
When Barry looks at him, all soft-eyed and curious, Joe says, "It's been a while since I watched you sleep."
Barry's tired smile is still stupidly optimistic, still full of that light Joe hopes the world won't ever take from him. "Rescuing you is exhausting," he says in that deep five-more-minutes-Joe voice.
Up and at em, Joe replies silently, but he's still smiling.
Barry stretches those big Bambi limbs and walks over, clasping his hand, and it's still the most reassuring thing in the world to Joe that there's finally, finally warmth there.