Anubis. God of the Underworld.
No. Osiris. Osiris usurps the king and claims his throne.
Still Anubis festers in the dark, a creature of the lore that refuses to be forgotten. Banished from his own land, he snarls and slips into a quiet sort of oblivion in between existence, clinging to legend by his black jackal teeth. The other deities dance across the stories, laughing and languishing, but Anubis lurks alone in the shadows, watchful and ready.
What is it that occupies the golden wolf?
I escort the dead to the land of the living, Anubis murmurs, teeth clicking with each word. At his command, jackals step forward and seize a body, hauling it off. I weigh the hearts and find the monsters. The other jackals disappear, but Anubis lingers, pointed snout always distinct from the ink shadows around him.
Barry watches Anubis, flinching whenever they drag another body down the hall, snuffling and chattering to each other, yipping like dogs. Occasionally, the body kicks, and Anubis growls a low command before the frenzy begins, yanking and beating and forcing back into quiet. The dragging procession proceeds, the burial ceremony underway. Back of the procession, head of the pack, Anubis stands tall, murmuring old words, unfamiliar words that Barry cannot discern.
There is a strange sterile quality to the mummification chamber. Barry twists against the wrappings holding him flat against the preparation table. Occasionally he hears deep sniffing nearby, canid and quiet, whining and pawing at the cage door before it vanishes. Grave-robbers, he thinks, heart pounding.
That's why they chose Anubis, he remembers blearily. Jackals are notorious for digging up corpses, desecrating the dead with their insatiable appetite. It's strategic to place a jackal-headed man at the top of the hierarchy, like-with-like. The others thus fall into place, obedient to a fault. But they wander restlessly down the halls, back and forth, back and forth.
Barry tries to follow them for any sense of time in this timeless space, but quickly loses track of how many times the dogs double back. They move nearly constantly at times and not at all for long periods. In those interludes, prowling Anubis appears between the bars of his chamber door, looking in at his prey, pointed black snout impossible to read. Without a word, he disappears again, wandering down his crypt, each footstep heavy and grave-quiet. Anubis radiates an air of control, like he knows these halls are his own and Osiris is nowhere to be found.
With Osiris away, Anubis reigns. At some indeterminate point in the future, the door to Barry's chamber slides open, and a pair of jackals enter. Ignoring the bands already in place, one pins his shoulders so the other can prick him with a long, slender claw. Within minutes, black smoke oozes across his mind, stealing away the heart-pounding concern arising.
I'm still alive, he wants to tell them, but they don't listen, they don't need to. Slender claws dig into his flesh, extracting his lifeblood. Preparing the body for burial. His skin certainly feels salted, dry and aching.
Anubis presides over the ceremony. The jackals move methodically across Barry's body, searching for something, grumbling ancient Egyptian phrases to each other. With that click-click sound, Anubis rests a heavy hand on his knee. Don't run, a voice whispers, and then something heavy and profoundly solid descends on his kneecap, and it shatters like glass.
Gasping in pain, he strains to sit upright, but he cannot move from his position on the table. The jackals converse, and he longs to know what they are saying, flinching every time their paws land on his skin, cool and sharp. Don't touch me, he whispers, but his mouth is frozen shut. The dead do not speak, and so he does not plead with them. He merely whimpers and whines and lets out a strangled cry when they leave him alone in his misery.
He shivers on the table for a long, long time, curing, preparing. Slender claws stab his arms until there are pinprick blue bruises crowding in the crook of his elbows. He groans in pain whenever they touch the bruises, but the jackals are heavy-handed and brusque, and ignore his requests to be kind. They tape his mouth shut, and he doesn't realize how desperately he needs to speak to the god of the dead until he cannot speak at all, the muted dead lying beneath Anubis' silent gaze.
You have endured for thousands of years, he muses, and feels a strong urge to lower himself to the floor, to bow. But if he exposes his neck, he will surely die, and death in the land of the dead is not a state of being he wishes to embrace. Lead me on, he entreats Anubis, but they won't move him until he is ready.
And so they break his right kneecap, a matching set, and leave him alone again.
Anubis speaks his name, The Flash, but it's impossible for Barry to pick out what else he is saying. Every word sounds wrong, like it belongs to a different, higher reality. Or maybe a lower one, he muses, wondering if he is the one who has transcended, and the living are clinging to his departing soul.
Let me go, he wants to tell them, but he cannot do much else but let the preparators work. His skin cools; his heart rate slows down; his tentative grasp on consciousness becomes precipitous, until he can barely open his eyes. Anubis muses nearby, soft, smooth, indecipherable sounds. Barry wants to ask him what he's saying, but his jaw aches where they broke it, so he holds his peace.
Peace. This room, this chamber, is a place of peace for the deceased, a waystation between two lives. Thrown into the afterlife without this critical intermediary, the soul is condemned forever; prepared, the soul may experience the grandness of the second life. It is a beautiful notion, the living escorting the dead, just as the gods escort the dead to new life. No pharaoh was buried elsewise, and many commoners besides. It brings Barry a modicum of comfort to know that he will be sent off properly.
I'm still alive, he thinks, pulling against the restraints on the table. He knows that the jackals will tear him apart. Presumptuously, unquestioningly, they will dismantle his cadaver, extracting and sewing and creating a new vessel for the soul to inhabit. Little sparks of fire crackle around his knees, reminders of their efforts so far; he tries and fails to suppress a scream whenever he twitches a leg. It doesn't matter; in these hallowed halls, the cries of the dead are commonplace, and no one comes to him.
Even Anubis merely passes by him, his muzzle unadorned with either smile or frown. Barry finds the detachment immensely disconcerting. What soul wishes to place their eternal happiness or suffering in the hands of such a dispassionate deity?
Barry longs to implore, to bargain with, to even worship the story-less god whose image is emblazoned across miles of hieroglyphics. Anubis' name is so ubiquitous that even small children know it, but the gods themselves do not share their stories with Anubis. Perhaps, perhaps, even they did not live to tell their tales. The energy radiating from the beast is immense, fatalistic; Barry can see why even the others would not wish to cavort with death.
But the jackals nuzzle up to him, fearless in the presence of their overseer. They embalm him, digging those sender claws into his skin. His arms are easy targets, strapped down and weak, but then they turn him onto his stomach and slide a claw deep into his spine. He screams, but the pressure and pain don't leave as a pair of jackals pin him down and a third finally retracts that deep, narrow claw. They turn him onto his back again, heedless of the discomfort, and leave him once again. So he inhales, exhales, and tries not to let his pain turn hysteric.
In this dark, windowless chamber, his body lies in suspension, instinctive urges suppressed. A sore coolness in his veins replaces the crisp waters that his parched tongue aches for. Egypt is largely a desert, a place that preserved its own rulers for thousands of years; it is only fitting that the chamber, too, is desiccated. His eyes, stuck open at times, stop watering, so the jackals with their clever claws drop sharp little points of moisture onto them periodically. He wants to flinch from them, but his eyes are on fire, and even the uncomfortable reprieve is welcome in this space.
His stomach hungers noisily, and they feed him shavings of crackers and eyedrops of pungent water. The taste and texture are that of dust and oil, but he doesn't spit them out, because together they untwist the pain in his abdomen. He's almost grateful to his captors, then, because they do not force-feed him, permitting him to eat, albeit next to nothing. He hears the jackals chattering about him and knows that his vitals are low, but they are where Anubis wants them. Compliant. Less than alive, but barely deceased. A fresh kill.
Still capable of feeling pain and discomfort, intentional and unintentional, he hisses and snarls whenever they replace the catheter. It's a necessary evil to keep the chamber clean even in death. On some subconscious level he appreciates not pissing himself. Consciously, he is pissed off and in pain, an experience heightened each time the jackals take care of it, because they do not regard him as a living creature and have not the same finesse as licensed professionals.
They don't saw off hanks of flesh or tear out his fingernails, sensations he almost expects whenever cool rubber hands graze over his skin. Obtrusively but without overt malice, they prod him and check his vitals, access eased by his clothes piled in a corner. When they leave, they drape a thin white sheet over him or leave him exposed on the table. Either way, it is freezing cold, and he shivers occasionally in full-body tremors.
He doesn't have the energy to keep it up. Shivering is the body's way of increasing blood-flow and subsequently warmth to numb regions, but it's a consuming task. Hypothermic victims have passed the stage of shivering by the time they reach Anubis' door, prying off any remaining clothes, overheating in the mind and freezing in the body. When the cold desert begins to feel hot, Barry knows that he is in danger, but he is so grateful for the change that he doesn't voice a protest.
The jackals are watchful. They notice the change. He does not blink when they put a heavy, warm blanket over him, smothering him in heat, but after they are gone he twitches his hands to try and slide it off him. He fails and loses strength before he comes close to success, so he cooks in the inferno and tries to stay under the veil of darkness as much as he can. Sleep through it, his mind suggests. All of it. His body is weak and tired enough that the thought appeals to him, but he has no control over when consciousness arises. It is a finicky guest, refusing to leave easily.
And then like a puff of smoke, it disappears.
When he awakens, there is something plastic lodged deep into his throat, cutting off his air supply. Strangling, clawing at the table, he tries to move, to do anything at all, but the tube in his throat is taped to his mouth, and without his hands he can't hope to remove it. He still screams, a weak, voiceless sound trapped in his chest. He twists until he is exhausted, and then he whines thinly in frustration and pain as the pressure in his chest rises, and falls, rises, and falls, rhythmic, mechanical, breathing for him.
Anubis visits him, then, once he is unmoving on the table. Elegantly, Anubis props a hip on the table, so human-like but for the black jackal head. He explains something in words Barry doesn't understand, phrases trickling in, "Hauh breek" and "Clu syne." Barry wants to tell him that he has no idea what the god of old is saying, that he can't understand him, that the speech of the ancient Egyptians is beyond him. But he senses that it is not Anubis speaking nonsensically: it is his dead, distorted ears refusing to process the messages. He tries to listen, tries because he senses there is value in knowing what Anubis says.
Then Anubis departs, leaving him with the tube lodged in his throat and more questions than answers.
At some point, the jackals remove the tube. His body only half-remembers how to breathe, alternating between deep, wheezing inhales and thin, gasping breaths. It's hard, but he knows what will happen if he stops, that they will replace the tube and leave him in the screaming silence again, so he forces his chest to rise, and fall, far from rhythmic and courting catastrophe but obliging, nonetheless. They strap something cool and plastic around his face, and he lets it lie there even though panic tightens in his chest.
It brings no pain, but he still itches to remove it. He knows he can barely think straight around the jackals, that his thoughts tumble like weeds into oblivion the moment he gathers the intuition to know that he has to get out, but there is nothing he can do for the mask. That's all it is – a mask. The fresh, cool scent of oxygen would be comforting in any other circumstance, but here it just feels like another part of the embalmment. After all, he knows the stories: the pharaohs wear masks unto death.
And the gods? The gods never take off theirs.
Anubis, god of the underworld. Usurped by Osiris. Deposed but not forgotten, Anubis took upon himself the hearts and hands of the dead.
His image is emplaced on the walls of holy temples. It appears in countless scrolls of ancient Egyptian text. It even adorns the coffins of children. I will show them the way, Anubis promises the grieving parents, hand outstretched towards the child. He is the last friend of the living and the first friend of the dead, an intermediary between the two spaces. None want to meet Anubis, for he is a painful truth in life and in death, but all must someday encounter this god of old, and have their heart weighed.
But Barry isn't dead. And Anubis isn't there for the living, only the deceased. For the mortal, Anubis is a specter of the end, a haunting reminder that there is no permanence in life. Among the gods who play with the sun and the sea, who cavort on land and stake claim to the stars, Anubis stands, afforded a seat at the table, a place of worship in the halls.
Summoned, he is every bit as awesome as the stories. In bleary-eyed wonder, Barry watches Anubis, just as Anubis watches him. At times, he sees the impression of a feather in Anubis' hand and recoils instinctively.
Through the mists of memory, he wanders down the halls of an ancient Egyptian exhibit at the museum, seeking out that hint of a feather. Even sterilized by imitation, the weighing of the heart ceremony brings chills to him. Assembled, the gods of the underworld, Osiris and Anubis, determine what happens to the recently departed. Osiris watches as Anubis places the heart of the dead on a scale against the feather of truth. If the heart is heavier than the feather, weighed down by worldly wrongs, it is devoured by a demon, waiting at the foot of the scale. If the heart is lighter, then it is passed on to Osiris, and the soul proceeds to the joyous afterlife.
He knows, with stomach-sinking certainty, that the feather will rise, and his heart will fall, when measured against each other. Anubis seems to sense it, regarding him without heat or warmth. Barry thinks he should be grateful for this painful intermedium between life and death, for one last opportunity to be regarded as human. It is one last chance to exist before being cut out from the story altogether, vanquished as though he never was.
He wonders if the heavy-hearted Egyptians on their deathbeds felt a similar sense of resigned amazement. Their loved ones went through such efforts to prolong their life, but their exquisite efforts were in vain. The mummy would never take the journey; the heart would be devoured.
For a time, he aches for those lost souls and knows he aches for himself, too.
Then he hears the whispers. I'm not alone here, he thinks. It startles him, the realization that there are others – others in the same dire straits as him – and he strains to hear them. He strains to shout to the others who are not dead yet, cry out! live again!, but his voice is gone. The jackals move restlessly, and Anubis presides over it all.
When he grows daring, he dislocates his right thumb and slides his hand free. Biting back a groan of pain, he fumbles at the remaining strap for several long seconds, heart thumping hard in his chest. Removing the accoutrements – of which there are many, straps and tubes and wires he only half-remembers being put on him, eyes burning as he blinks deliberately, teeth threatening to chatter with cold – he succeeds in sitting up on his table, and stays there, trembling and breathing shallowly, until Anubis returns.
With smooth, easy steps, Anubis approaches him alone. In any state of disrepair, he could have fought the god if he had his own speed, but crippled as he is, he can only stare at Anubis' eyes. Jackals arrive without a word, and Barry has no strength to fight them. With indifferent skill, they strap him down again, fixing their handiwork with the patience of preparators who have done so ten thousand times, and then they fall back to the edges of his vision.
Gazing up at the ceiling, he groans softly, hands throbbing in tandem. Anubis murmurs something indecipherable, and then they disappear.
Alone in the dark, Barry feels more trapped than ever before. There is no escape, he thinks. He closes hot, tired eyes and knows it is true. There is no way back to the living.
Then in a dream someone pries the straps from his wrists. The same person moves across him, undoing the jackal's handiwork. Finally, they remove the mask from his face. More curious than tired, Barry opens his eyes to half-mast to regard the rogue. They're shaking him a little, urgent and distracted, but they don't look like a jackal, and they tremble whenever they touch him, unlike the steady-handed jackals. Slowly, he dares to sit up.
His weight comes down on his hands and he cries out, but the not-jackal shoves a hand over his mouth to quiet him. He shuts up, heart pounding in his chest as the person removes their hand. They fetch his clothes, then, and he wants to ask why, because the dead don't need them, only the dressings of the mummy, but doesn't question it as they help him maneuver back into them, shirt and pants alone.
This is a person, he muses, and it feels strange to think about a mortal sneaking around here in this place of the dead. Why would you come here? he wants to ask, but already knows the answer. His hands are almost completely numb and non-functional, but the person merely slings his left arm around their shoulders and helps him take a few stumbling steps towards the door.
The blood rushes from his head and he has to pause or pass out, shaking on his feet, on immeasurably sore knees. The person at his side whispers, and other voices respond. What are you doing here? Barry wants to ask them, leaning heavily against his savior. Where is Anubis?
From their words alone, he gathers that Anubis is gone, conferring with Osiris, but his jackals are still around. He hears his own name and someone inhales sharply. Idly, half-conscious, he wonders what about The Flash makes his heart so visibly heavy, but they don't drop him to the floor and run. They should, but they don't, and he feels a profound ache of gratitude and despair at their charity. I can't be saved.
Ignoring the silent damnation, a second person gets under his right arm, and together the pair escorts him down the hall. Two smaller shadows move quickly in front of them. He hears jackals growling in the distance, hairs on the back of his neck rising. They'll tear us apart without Anubis here to stop them, he wants to warn his companions. He knows that they won't stop even for threat of death, and he admires their courage even as it makes his stomach sick.
Closing his eyes doesn't help the nausea – if anything it intensifies it – but he cannot bring himself to open them again. He wants to sleep, to die peacefully. Would it be so terrible, to simply disappear? Surely nothingness could not hurt. No ache in every bone and soreness in his stomach, skin tender and brittle, eyes burning and chest almost too heavy to draw breath. No more slender claws or cold tables. No more pain beyond Anubis' chambers, either: no more shocks, burns, stabs, serrations, or fractures. No more suffocation or dislocation (his hands throb again but do not twitch when he moves them), no more pain, no more grief, no more – no more.
I always wanted to … do more. Be more.
What would it be like, to be less, to be nothing?
He doesn't know, and he hears the voices whispering again, and then there is a low sound as something heavy is moved on the floor. He forces his eyes open to slits and gazes at the hole in the ground. I cannot climb, he thinks, as first one and then another smaller person descends. Distantly, he hears jackals, but they do not sound alarmed, and he wonders what misfortune distracts them.
Is there another? he thinks, recalling the way the jackals descended en masse when he dared to try this on his own. Does their freedom come at another's loss? He tries to pull away, but he is too weak to even stand on his own, and his captor-saviors do not even notice the feeble attempt, distracted as they are. One releases him, descending into the darkness. He expects the other to release him and knows he will fall.
Maybe this is what they need, he muses, a distraction for the jackals to sink their teeth into while the others escape. He relaxes a little, relieved that he can be more help than burden to them. There is no escape from the dead, he thinks. His partner lowers him to the floor. Peace washes over him. Go on. Go, and try, and be free if you can.
But instead of vanishing, his partner is talking, and pushing him towards the edge of that abyss. What are you doing?
As they dangle over the hole in the ground, hands grab his feet. He stares uncomprehendingly as the animal – person – on the other side drags him into the abyss, down, down, down. The person above him holds onto his arms underneath the shoulders, balancing him out, and it hurts, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't make a sound as he is transferred from one person's arms to another. The person above finally releases him, and he grunts as he lands on the person below. Built like a bear, they catch him, setting him down immediately and dragging him away from the circle into darkness.
Dazed and uncertain about their surroundings, Barry lifts burning eyes to watch the last person enter the abyss. They drag the circular grate behind themselves as much as they can, until the darkness is absolute, and then they drop maybe eight feet to the floor. The bear-of-a-person grabs Barry by the collar and lifts him back onto his feet. His partner settles underneath Barry's opposite arm, speaking incomprehensibly but for one word.
Flash.
It rings out siren-clear in the fog of his mind, but he drops his chin to his collarbone, and for a time he loses them.
When he awakes, the first thing he notices is that he is upright and somehow moving. His feet drag on the ground. He knows he must be weighing down the jackals – no, people, and what are they doing here? – but they don't let him go. He tries to put weight on his feet and groans. His companions pause. More indiscernible words fill the space, punctuated by that breath of clarity: Flash.
Again, and again, and again. It's the only word that makes sense to him, the only one that sounds like actual speech and not garbled, alien chatter. "Flash," he breathes aloud, throat so dry it hurts, mouth full of the taste of metal and ashes, but there is a fire under his skin. As it grows, he realizes that it's the Speed Force, straining to live.
I'm still alive, he thinks, and the hum becomes a roar, loud and personal. He is more ragdoll than person between his companions, but his feet flatten against the floor. I am still alive. His companions don't let go, but he puts his full weight on them, and everything hurts, everything, but his legs hold steady.
He doesn't know where they are, but turning back is not an option. He sucks in the deepest breath he can. Then he lets the occluding haze of reality blur as the world slows down.
Everything around him is inverted colors and mystifying blind spots, like someone disconnected the cord between his vision and his brain, making the result nearly incomprehensible. The details do not matter, he tells his panicking animal mind as it tries to orient itself.
He steps out of his companions' arms, uplifted by the Speed Force. He seizes the first shadow with an arm around their waist. As light as a kite on a string, his companion is easy to carry as he moves in great, loping strides down the tunnel. He nearly crashes several times, averting disaster at the last moment. At last, buzzing with energy, he halts underneath an opening in the ceiling. Setting his companion down on the floor, he looks up at the grate, identical to the first.
It is only four feet above his head, an easy climb, especially at speed, but – he tries to grab the grooves on the wall, but his numb hands won't catch properly. Pain lances down his wrist, and he holds onto consciousness with a great effort, the world stuttering back into real time. His companion gasps, and rights themselves in the dark. They say something he doesn't hear, ears ringing now, vision going grey, and he takes off the way he came out of sheer desperation, terrified that if he takes even another breath he will pass out.
So he holds it in the great underwater realm that is the Speed Force and finds his companions after a small eternity of mazing his way through the labyrinth. He thinks about stopping for them and knows he can't, he can't, so he does the only thing he can. He rushes back towards that portal that led them to this underground world. At the base, he sees the big shadows of a handful of jackals, in pursuit.
Without hesitation, he crashes into them.
In the melee of real time, he lies on top of a jackal. They scream in surprise and pain, knocked aside and knocked out. Some are stirring; others do not move.
Before he can act, unconsciousness yanks him back down.
. o .
Strapped to the table, burning with pain and exhaustion and shame at his failure, Barry does not open his eyes, does not confront the reality.
Anubis speaks nearby, and Barry knows him only by the rhythmic cantor of his words. A jackal works nearby; a slender claw slides into his wrist. Within seconds, consciousness trickles away from him, like sand sifting through his fingers.
He thinks about fighting it, about trying to fight it, for he knows he cannot succeed, not before, and certainly not know.
He sinks under again without a word.
. o .
He is never truly awake anymore, always caught in an undertow of silence and stillness, cold and cadaverous. He barely registers the jackals' hands on him. He cannot even make out the individual croon of words in Anubis' mouth. He wonders what they hope to achieve, why they bother to keep him alive when they know he will not be kept in the afterlife, but he has no voice to question them.
Instead, he lies on the preparators' table, half-alive.
In his mind, he runs through the tunnel again, embracing that single boundless moment of strength and joy. He knew he could not save them all, but to save even one – to give them the opportunity to survive – was worth the misery of recapture. He doesn't know if the other three are like him, slowly slipping away in their own chambers. He can't ask.
Instead he lingers in his mind, his own constructed reality, and watches the scene unfold again, and again, and again. Each time, the jackals descend upon him and drag him back to the chamber. Each time, he gets less and less distance from his own chamber, until he is barely out of it when the jackals descends. The only thing he feels, amid the myriad sufferings his body will not let him escape from, is a profound sadness. You failed.
Again, and again, and again.
His Speed will not come to him in this chamber of the dead, but he still hears his name clearly. Anubis sounds thunderous, terrible. He is saying something Barry does not understand, frenzied and furious. A hand slaps him full across the face, and Barry groans in pain, prying his eyes open to look at the god of old. Then the dim light vanishes, plunging them into true darkness.
He expects to feel pain, earth-shattering, world-ending pain as Anubis finally rips the heart from his body, but instead he hears chaos, roaring and yelping and deep boom, boom, booms. Anubis' footsteps are nearly silent, but Barry still hears them vanishing. Surrendering his prized quarry to save himself, the god of old vanishes into the ether.
Then in the perfect darkness Barry feels hands on him and flinches, a thin whine of despair sliding out of his throat. Faint blue light illuminates the space, and he closes his eyes. The scene from before repeats itself, hands freeing the straps, but the hands are more real against him than any dream. He does not react, almost dares to believe that it will be fine if he does not move at all. Don't move. Don't speak. Don't breathe.
They're quick and careful as they untangle him. He senses that there are at least two people in the room. In a parody of normalcy, they pull his limbs through his shirt and pants. He huffs softly to himself to think of what he must look like, husked out and hurting, but he doesn't have much time to wonder peacefully before a single person draws him over their shoulders.
It's easier, in a way, because he does not even have to try to lift his own weight or walk, but agonizing at the same time, for he rattles with every step. There are a lot of voices shouting in the hall, many more than the jackals he has accounted for. He hears sharp, explosive cracks before his companion steps through a portal and into a different world.
The bright light is blinding, his half-mast eyes bowing closed. He whimpers once in pain when his companion settles him on a table. An urge to escape nudges him, but he does not move to rise again, because it's already over.
The expected disappointment is sharper this time, but he doesn't have to bear it long: in mere seconds, everything vanishes.
. o .
Barry awakes in a mummified state.
Both hands are held tightly in vices; his knees are similarly bound. He cannot open his eyes, and every shallow breath feels confined, unbearably heavy. His heart's weak, pounding pulse confirms what he almost dreads. I'm still alive. His back aches. His head throbs. Everything hurts, a global pain without reprieve. He moans softly, and a hand settles on his forearm, avoiding the tender crook of his elbow as it strokes up and down, soft and warm.
He hears someone speaking to him, but the words are still incomprehensible to him. The voice itself is familiar, soothing. Despite his uncertainty, the tensed muscles in his shoulders relax infinitesimally, comforted by their presence. He knows that voice. He aches to open his eyes, to confirm his intuition, but everything is so heavy, and he is so tired, and he thinks he might die of heartbreak if he sees the blue ceiling again.
So he lets himself lie and lies to himself that everything is going to be all right, this time, as the person beside him strokes his arm comfortingly. It's so gentle that it almost hurts, his chest tightening with emotion. He can't remember the last time someone touched him like this. Certainly, none of the jackals were this kind, and even his companions were desperate and efficient. Prison was not a comforting environment. And seemingly every moment he had, he was either working for the CCPD or working as The Flash, always running, running, running…
It's then that he realizes who it is, and his eyelids open to slits to confirm it. "'ris…" he breathes, barely a word, but she still smiles. His vision is blurry, unclear, but he loves that smile even so, his own lips twitching upwards faintly. She lifts her hand and cradles his head in both, leaning forward and pressing a kiss to his forehead. "'ris…" he repeats, voice rasping and painful. He aches to touch her, to cup her face or hold her in his arms or even just intertwine their fingers, but his own hands are bound, and he cannot lift his arms at all.
He doesn't need to hear her words to understand her tone, soft and soothing, and his eyelids slide shut as he listens to her. One hand retreats, settling on his abdomen lightly, while the other cards through his hair. He knows it must be well-past dirty, grimy and sweat-spiked and unwashed, but she doesn't hesitate, gently scratching the base of his neck. He hums deeply, even though it hurts, because he aches to express his contentment in some way that she might know.
Thank you, he murmurs in his mind, to her and the universe both, for offering one last kindness. Thank you…
. o .
Consciousness washes ashore in waves, there and gone. Sometimes it is a violent thing, tumbling him forward, and Barry arches upright with a scream because he cannot be back on the table again. Other times it is gentler, lolling him onto the sand before tugging him back into the vast silence of the deep, dark ocean. He doesn't fight it, going with the back-and-forth motion of it, awake and then gone, present and then nowhere.
He wakes at odd intervals, too, stirring when someone gently brushes his hair with a damp, warm cloth but falling back under before he can thank them for the simplest comfort. He wakes with varying states of audible recognition, deep, muffled speech finally tuning into focus until he can make out words again. Even then, their messages elude his tired mind, unimportant in the wake of everything.
Mostly, he sleeps.
. o .
Cognition slowly comes back to Barry, groggy at first but then sharper. He gathers, over the next few days, the full story.
The other metas escaped on that first attempt. The kerfuffle of their sudden reappearance aboveground at Iron Heights' gen-pop penitentiary was enough to set into motion the unraveling of the entire inhumane operation. Quickly thereafter, six guards were apprehended as cohorts.
Including Barry, eight metahumans had been held in Anubis's – Wolfe's underground prison. Two others, like he, were in critical condition. The remaining four, shaken but not irreparably harmed, all testified that he was the reason they were still alive. Wolfe himself had not been apprehended, and Amunet Black was still underground. The complicated operation of recovery without releasing the names of the metahumans involved was still underway.
Barry tries to focus on the words, but it's hard with DeVoe's special cocktail of narcotics still coursing through his system. His Speed, already overtaxed trying to cope with the human stresses, can't provide the titanic effort needed to purge it from his veins. Instead, it lingers like sickness, disorienting and discomforting, inducing a full myriad of side effects, including profound exhaustion and aches.
Worst of all, he still sees Anubis' specter at times. He flinches from the image, but in seconds it evaporates like smoke. He knows that it's just the drugs, but it doesn't banish the cold sweat that overtakes him, nor does it make him feel any better, to know that it's not real.
It is real. Even if the hallucinations have no tangible counterparts, the experiences are still real, and the effects are still real, and he is still real despite how disconnected and jarred he feels from his own body. It doesn't matter that Anubis cannot physically strike him; mentally, he looms just as large, and Barry awakes with a nausea so potent it overturns his stomach more than once from fear alone.
Caitlin assures him that, slowly but steadily, his vitals are stabilizing. Unable to stomach more than cracker-sized meals, he can only lie on the soft table and let the world around him dissolve with sleep, hoping to wake up feeling better.
He doesn't, but slowly, steadily, he finds his strength again.
. o .
It's fully a month before he's truly back to Speed, less than a month before he's released on all charges after "new evidence" comes into light. He's back on track. He's back where he was.
But on a rainy day, he comes to a halt in the Cortex and sees the shadow of Anubis. His joy vanishes, completely doused. I'm still alive, he wants to tell the jackal, but he cannot speak at all, panic tightening in his chest. Cisco steps up to him, but he cannot take his eyes off Anubis, not until the jackal-headed god finally disappears. "Hey, hey, hey," Cisco is saying, a hand on his shoulder, and Barry reaches up to tangle both hands in his own hair in despair.
Caitlin tests his blood, but everything is – "normal."
. o .
Nothing is normal.
He lies awake at night; he can't sleep on his back. He sees ghosts in the corner of his eye and front-and-center, hounding him, watching him. At times he feels panic surge in his chest for no reason at all, crippling him in place. Without provocation, he might snap at Caitlin and Cisco; he nearly tears Ralph's head off in a moment of explosive fury. He avoids crowded spaces until even showing up at work is too much.
He can't eat crackers or well-salted food; he throws up the first time he tries coffee again. He doesn't like TV or music or even like people chattering in the background, regardless of where he is. He can't wear short-sleeved shirts or watches. Even a jacket makes him uncomfortable, and The Flash suit is unbearably claustrophobic. In the end, he stops patrolling at night.
And at last, he is going nowhere at all, and still he is afraid, and sick, and far from "normal."
. o .
In the end, he finds a therapist. He doesn't do it because he wants to; he does it because he is afraid that he will become a monster if he doesn't find a way to stop snapping into little tiny pieces over everything, a shattered version of himself. He swallows what tastes like pride and makes the call. He forces himself not to stay at home – Joe's home; Iris and he left their old apartment, unable to spend time in it without remembering – when the day arrives.
Sitting anxiously on the black leather couch, Barry admits in a low voice, "My life is falling apart."
The man across from him is silent for a moment. At last, Archibald Thomson says, "Then let us stop the fall."
And so it begins.