It's been six hours since the singularity disappeared.
Barry is exhausted – beyond exhausted – and he has yet to warm up again, his heart beat slow, precipitously so. He feels the silence, cataclysmic, halting, as the city limps back to life. As darkness descends.
Every responder in the city is active, entire streets cordoned off, and civilians advised to stay indoors while emergency crews take care of mitigating hazardous zones and triaging as many people as they can. Keystone City crews are already converging with Central City services; Starling sent out a full complement to help as much as they can. (It'll be another three hours before they arrive, but Barry knows their presence will help once the first responders start to flag, once a shift needs to occur or collapse will surely follow.) No one has ever dealt with a disaster like this before, and the magnitude of it is breathtaking.
The Flash has to be a part of the recovery process – he's fast, he can help find struggling survivors in torn open buildings, put out spontaneous fires, generate electricity during power failures – but Barry's legs have not stopped shaking and he feels asthmatic, breathless, struggling to draw in air as he crosses the city. His body balks at the thought of doing actual work, scarcely rising above a jog as he touches base with as many people as he can across the city.
He asks them, "What can I do?" and they put him to work. He can move beams and retrieve victims in hard-to-reach places, put out fires with vacuums instead of preciously scarce water (even if his arms are so sore he can feel the bruising to the bone), and he can help move critical patients to the hospital fast enough to save them.
Somehow, he finds the strength to push past his own debilitating fatigue and run, moving back and forth across the city he loves, the city he destroyed, doing everything and anything he can to help. He drapes warm blankets over shock victims, gives schoolchildren lifts home, and generates electricity to jumpstart machines, to restore order.
He's so tired by the time he drops off the eightieth and eighty-first charges at their parents' doorstep that he actually collapses to his knees, momentarily caught off guard, and he can see black spots but he forces himself to his feet again, staggers towards the streets before taking off at a run.
Barry makes it back home – barely.
He's wheezing, doubled over, struggling to keep his feet underneath him. Every heartbeat is agony, a thick, intermittent throb, hard and punchy, like it has to make up for its slowness with strength. He sinks to his knees and feels someone crouch beside him, and he's sparking electricity, a defense mechanism, an overworked response to stress. So they don't touch him, silently waiting for him to calm down.
Once he finally stops throwing off waves of energy, they finally thread an arm under his shoulders, helping him slowly to his feet.
There's no shock left in him, it's just gone, and he knows it's still there, as certain as the breath in his lungs, but he could not access it if the ground collapsed beneath him and running was the only way to survive.
His companion doesn't speak, isn't even visible, his eyes aren't working right. He's effectively blind and it's making his head split open, it hurts, so he shuts his eyes and trusts them as they lead the way.
It's been hours since he last touched base with the Star Labs team. He tells himself it's because he was too busy, but he knows the truth. He can't face them, can't speak to them, can't look at Eddie's body. He had to run.
He had to run.
The cool night is replaced with warm, refreshingly crisp Star Labs air. Barry can't see them, but he can feel their presence: it's flooded with people. It's a hub for police, an extra facility for medics. There must be hundreds of people scattered throughout the facility, huddled together along corridors, nursing wounds, listening to the stream of piano music someone has hooked up over the PA system.
It's an endless, comforting metronome, soft enough to underlie conversations, heady enough to infuse the metallic hallways with warmth. It brings a wave of calm to Barry in the midst of the disaster, and he can feel the dissolving panicked energy around him, listens as people talk on phones, as parents talk to their kids, as countless voices pause when he passes.
And occasionally there's a whisper, almost like a prayer:
It's him.
The Flash.
Barry tries to project calm, tries to do more, to be more, to be what they deserve. He can feel the heat he's putting off, feel the arm supporting him relax. It's something more, like an aura, tangibly reducing the stress in the room. He doesn't feel warm and he knows that it's the equal-and-opposite reaction effect: for every particle of warmth he projects, he loses a little more, and he can feel himself turning icy cold, only able to stay alive because the suit insulates him so well. But it's worth it. They need someone, and he's responsible for this. He has to be there. He has to make things right again.
Barry knows that a singularity isn't an earthquake, but it feels like one: everyone is unsteady, everyone is scared, and everyone is affected. Still, he quietly makes them a promise with every passing step.
It's gone now, it's over. You're going to be okay. Help is coming. Help is here.
It's going to be okay.
They veer away from the main lab, and then they're underground, inside the body of the particle accelerator and he knows it must be Cisco because only Cisco would take him here.
Caitlin is there, too, talking quietly with him, and Barry thinks, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.
He can't speak, and there are tears frozen to his cheeks, but he still manages to squeeze Cisco's shoulders hard in gratitude before letting go, sliding to the floor, sitting against the wall.
Then he quietly loses track of time.
. o .
When Barry wakes up, it's quiet. And there's something very warm beside him.
Iris is sitting on the floor next to him, head on his shoulder, asleep, and he doesn't move even though he's a little stiff because he can't bring himself to disturb her. Not when he knows what being awake will mean.
It doesn't feel real, any of it. In a way all he is really aware of is Iris' breathing, the way her body feels pressed against his side, and the way he can finally feel his fingertips again. He lets out a slow breath, feels the steadiness of it, and he's grateful for the lightning in his veins, the thunder in his blood, the forces that keep him alive and put him back together no matter how much he falls apart.
He can tell by the silence that things have finally settled down upstairs, and he wants to check it out but he also doesn't want to move, wants to stay here and pretend that everything is the same, that he could just walk upstairs and grin and Cisco will hug him and Caitlin will congratulate him and Joe will tell him how much he scared him but damn if he isn't good at catching meta-humans. It's easier to swallow than the reality.
Listening to Iris' breathing, he tries to keep his own under control, to do anything not to wake her, to keep himself under control—
To cry very, very quietly.
. o .
In the morning – when everything is a little less sharp and a little more normal, less like chaos and more like home – Barry brings them coffee. Hugs them hard. Asks what they need. Gets back to work. He makes Cisco take a break, lets Caitlin cry against his shoulder, and he doesn't know how he's supposed to be the strong one but he has to be, projecting the same comforting aura in the hopes that maybe it can ease their suffering a little.
Ronnie was their best friend. Caitlin's husband. The real hero.
Ronnie should be here. Not Barry.
But he's all they have, so he does what he can to honor that. To be enough. To sort through the rubble and pick up the pieces.
To help them breathe again.
. o .
Barry doesn't make it to Joe and Iris' place for three days.
He lives at Star Labs, lives on the streets, snatching sleep when he has to, eating Cisco's protein bars by the pound and doing whatever he can to fix what he's broken.
But when the dust finally settles and there's nothing more for him to do, when things are finally under control, he goes home.
Iris isn't there and Barry's almost relieved because he doesn't know how he's going to look at her, how she'll ever forgive him for what he's done, but Joe is, and Barry makes it three steps inside the house before Joe just hugs him, hard, and it's the first thing he's actually felt since he raced into the sky to stop the singularity.
It's the first time he's felt anything other than pain in days.
"I got you," Joe tells him softly, one hand cradling the back of Barry's head, protecting him, grounding him. "I've got you, son."
Barry can't cry, can't do anything other than shake, anguish and relief intermingling as he thinks about all he has, all he's lost.
Joe doesn't tell him it's going to be okay. He doesn't even tell him that it's over because they're going to have to live with this for the rest of their lives.
He just holds him, reminds him that he can be strong without always being the strongest.
And in that moment Barry knows that the world will survive without its Atlas for a while.
. o .
It's been a month and things are slowly quieting. Life in Central City is finally what Barry might even call "normal."
Amid the debris, Barry finds something he isn't expecting.
Gratitude.
Iris' follower count increases tenfold overnight, her inbox flooded with hundreds of messages all addressed in some way to The Flash. She posts them all and Barry's phone alerts him to a new message every other second for hours, and it's so distracting at work that he almost disables the feature except he can't stop reading them, can't stop pausing to scroll through a five paragraph story, a six word thank you for everything you do, a drawing submitted by parents with grateful kids.
Symbols start appearing across the streets – a familiar lightning bolt emblazoned across the wreckage, infecting the night with lightning, with hope – and he sees people with lightning bolt tattoos, lightning bolt bracelets, lightning bolt shirts.
Flash art, glimpses of the Flash, pictures, videos, a hashtag ThankYouFlash.
A reporter calls him "The Man Who Saved Central City," and it sticks, and suddenly they're lauding him as a hero and Barry does not deserve it so he lets the Flash handle it, detaches when he puts the red suit on, when he saves people, deliberately keeping himself as nameless and faceless as possible.
It's easier to pretend that maybe the Flash is someone better, someone more capable, the person they think he is.
Because Barry isn't. Barry is the one who has to walk into the precinct every day and see the places where Eddie should be, grinning and saying hello, catching him up on a case, inviting him to box, teaching him things about life he never asked for but treasures now.
Barry is the one who can't walk into Star Labs without thinking of Ronnie and the singularity, who can't quite meet Caitlin's eyes, who struggles to speak to Cisco without feeling like he's broken some promise between them, failed to save Ronnie, put Ronnie in danger, took Ronnie away from them again.
Except Barry is the one who Iris eats lunch with, Barry is the one who Cisco shoots soft foam darts at because Barry hasn't actually smiled in two weeks and Cisco's purpose in life is to fix that, and Barry is the one who Caitlin coaches through rescues and patches him up when he snaps a wrist, smacks his head into an iron pole, trips.
He's not a bad person.
But it's the nagging you have to be so much better that forms a hollow ache inside him.
So he works harder, longer, in secrecy, repairing the city, rebuilding lives. He changes things. He makes it better.
He endures.
And their support endures, too.
He may be the one physically dragging people out from under shattered buildings, but they're the ones who save him.
And it's not okay, Barry doesn't know if it'll ever be okay again, but he has to hope it will be.
Every night he sees that hope reflected tenfold.
He's not an outsider working above and beyond their grasp: he's with them, a part of them, and Barry thinks he can forgive the part of himself that doesn't deserve to be the Flash because he is the Flash, this is what he's done with his powers, and the Flash would not exist without him.
They're rebuilding their lives together, and the disaster knocked him down, too, but it isn't going to keep him there.
They're going to endure, and they're going to learn to live with their new reality.
And one amazing, incomprehensible, humbling part of that is the fact that he is their Flash.
He will protect them with everything he has to give. And they'll protect him in their own way, fend off the emotions threatening to haul him under.
They'll make him smile and laugh and cry, they'll make him stay up late reading their messages, they'll make him feel like he belongs in their city.
They'll make him feel loved.
And he loves them, too – loves them as much as he loves running, as much as he loves being able to help them, as much as he loves being the Flash.
It's that love, he knows, that'll keep them going, that will keep them strong, and find a new normal they can live with.
When he runs into burning buildings, he doesn't do so because he has to. He does it because he can, and because they need him, and this is what he can do for them.
Captain Singh calls his name because it's been an hour and he hasn't gotten his work done, he's still staring at the messages, but he pulls himself back, shouts, "Coming."
He knows that Captain Singh doesn't understand his life, that no one really does, but there's a breathtaking simplicity to just letting it be, to learning to cope in his own time, and knowing there will be people standing beside him no matter how long it takes.
He's not an Atlas. He can't solve everything.
But he is the Flash. And some things, he can.