The Reverse Flash smiles coldly. "This is unexpected."
Without hesitation, Barry pins the Reverse Flash against a wall hard enough to crack ribs. Victory doesn't last long: Barry gasps with pain when a knife slots neatly between his ribs, wielded by a cool, unshaking hand.
"Did you really think you could stop me?" the Reverse Flash demands in a caustic whisper, holding the knife in place, making sure its damage is complete as Barry chokes and loses his grip, struggling to stay upright, to do anything to counteract the surreal pain in his chest. "You can't."
He lets Barry fall, crashing onto the concrete. Warning, a small, inexplicable voice intrudes, critical.
Barry shuts his eyes and the scene dissolves.
. o .
Breathing through a stitch in his side, Barry slows to a jog on the treadmill. He's got a burgeoning headache at how often he's heard that same warning, frustration occluding all other thoughts.
It's been four weeks since the singularity, but he can't let it go.
He's gone through those same ten seconds eighty two times. In the first thirty attempts, like some crude glitch in a video game, the Reverse Flash didn't even let him catch his breath. He anticipated Barry's future's arrival a trillionth of a second before it happened.
Before Barry could do anything, it was over.
Barry tries to be faster each time, incrementally pushing himself to reach the Reverse Flash's top speeds. The weight pushing back against him is astounding, keeping his progress slow. Over hours, he gains fractions of seconds.
By the eightieth attempt, it's barely real to him. He's so desensitized that he can treat it less like combat and more like a training session, where game over isn't death, it's disarmament. A need to try again, Barry. Get back on your feet. Surrender is not an option.
Except Barry's side burns and his vision is dotted with black spots, threatening to force him gracelessly off his perch. His mind can set one standard, but his body ultimately dictates its actions. Stumbling off the treadmill, he roots out his stash, tucked behind a metal panel along the wall, and wolfs down three of Cisco's high-calorie bars.
It doesn't revive him, but it gives him enough energy to climb back onto the treadmill and run. He doesn't have to run to Speed-think, but it makes it easier. The physical exertion helps ground his mental images. Virtual reality for speedsters.
When he closes his eyes, a sea of stars unfolds in front of him. There are more than a hundred billion options to choose from; Barry's head spins to think of it all. Not all of them belong to the night Eddie died, but it's that night that haunts him.
He has to figure it out. He has to find the answer.
Needing but not wanting a mental break, he sifts through the worlds of other Flashes.
It's easy to sink into the broken up realms of reality; it's challenging to interact with them. They're echoes of his world, soft-edged and frustratingly unclear. They're mirrors, not portals. He can't feel the energy in the room, the subtle, silent cues he's come to rely on to predict everything from how to move at super speed to how many breaths he has before asphyxiation when the Reverse Flash's hand closes around his throat like a vice. It's the reason he's never able to get a clear look at the Reverse Flash before he's on top of Barry.
They're incomplete windows into other worlds, other timelines, other universes. Somewhere among them Barry knows the solution lies. He just has to find it.
With inexhaustible optimism, he zeroes in on another world.
It's like slipping into a mirror: one moment there are stars, the next silence. Then the core of the particle accelerator materializes around him. The Reverse Flash has a hand poised over Barry's chest, already in motion to kill him, but Barry doesn't slow down. He vibrates in place, remaining intangible, virtually impossible to kill. He can't sustain it for long: the moment his concentration breaks, he'll be vulnerable. But it's a stalemate, which is more than can be said of the dozens of attempts before it that ended in his own untimely demise.
The Reverse Flash's eyes glow red, the muffled crackle of electricity shivering loudly. Evidently, even he has limits; he doesn't have the power for speech. His arm shakes visibly as he strives to break their stalemate, to back Barry into an inescapable corner.
Barry feels the warning intonation, Critical! in the last billionth of a second before his concentration slips and the Reverse Flash's hand crushes his heart.
There is no sensation, so he can't actually feel his heart being torn apart, but the suddenness of his own virtual death still brings Barry to a hard stop on the treadmill.
Physics dictates that it has punch: the treadmill flings him off. Luckily, he doesn't smash into a sheet of metal. Unluckily, protective cushions line the wall, breaking his fall – and his arm.
"Gah-hah," he snarls, hunching inward and resisting the urge to clutch the center point of pain, holding his left shoulder instead. The treadmill slowly comes to a halt, detecting a flat-line from the built-in heartrate monitor and recognizing the danger to Barry's person. A little too late, he thinks, climbing laboriously to his feet.
It hurts like hell, but it doesn't look bad. He considers calling Caitlin, trying to think about what he would tell her, before he abandons the idea.
Instead, he digs out a sling from one of the drawers and very, very carefully tucks his arm in it, downing an entire bottle of ibuprofen to take the edge off.
There are stars imprinted on the backs of his eyelids for more than one reason, but the pain in his left arm keeps him grounded.
Besides, Caitlin and Cisco will be there soon. Time to Flash.
. o .
As long as Barry gets to his lab before anyone sees him, then he doesn't have to worry about a cover story.
Which is exactly why Captain Singh corners him at the door.
"Allen, what happened?"
It would almost be moving, how immediately Singh's focus on his work shifts to Barry's well-being, if he didn't look ready to tell Barry off for having the audacity to possess breakable bones.
You're not bulletproof, are you?
No.
"Barry was helping me move furniture," Joe interjects sternly, coming up on his right side and giving Barry a pointed agree-with-me look.
Barry obliges. "Yeah! We – moved lots of furniture." Explanatorily, he waves at the sling and adds, "I – dropped the couch."
Joe's mouth is so expressionless Barry wonders if he hasn't been frozen in time before Singh says simply, "Next time, try not to break any limbs doing it. Did you get the Renegan report finished?"
"Almost," Barry admits. Does haven't started it count as almost?
(In another universe, he's done it. That counts.)
"Make that a 'yes' before the day is over," Captain Singh says, passing him a stack of papers with less force than usual.
Joe waits until Singh moves farther into the office, out of earshot, before putting a hand on Barry's good shoulder. "What happened?" he asks, voice barely audible.
"I'll tell you later," Barry lies, already feeling a little high from all of the ibuprofen and knowing that his best bet is to sleep it off. "Let me go, Joe," he adds gently.
"You can't just show up with a broken arm and no explanation," Joe adds, keeping his voice quiet, but there's iron in his tone and grip.
"Joe."
"Bar."
Barry sighs, slipping out of his grip when it loosens and saying seriously, "I will tell you. Later." Then, softly, he adds, "Please."
Joe looks at him hard and Barry thinks, he knows you're lying, but Joe doesn't say anything, just nods once before Barry retreats to the safety of his own lab.
Turning to lock the door behind him, resolving to answer it only if Captain Singh threatens to break it down, he staggers over to his desk, thoughtlessly typing in his work ID to log into his files, sifting. Sorting. No emergencies, and he really is almost finished with the Renegan casework.
Looking out the window at the city, already coming to life with the morning rush, he turns in his chair, resolving to find a quiet, undisturbed corner to nap in, and almost falls out of it when Iris appears, arms folded and brow furrowed thoughtfully.
"What happened?"
Barry reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose with his free hand for a moment, staving off the worst of the headache. "I tripped on a run," he says. It isn't a lie.
"That isn't like you."
Barry offers her a humorless smirk. None of us have been much of ourselves lately. With a lenient shrug, shoulder barely twitching, he says, "Accidents happen."
Iris steps forward, looking down at his arm, and then meeting his eyes. She doesn't like what she sees. "This wasn't just an accident."
"Iris—"
"I'm not my dad. You're not going to talk your way out of this," she interrupts firmly. Drawing up a chair opposite him, she puts her hands on his knees and tells him seriously, "If you don't tell me what happened, I'm calling Caitlin and Cisco and asking them."
"They don't know," Barry rasps without meaning to, biting his tongue and looking skyward immediately after, cheeks flushed with shame and annoyance. "Can we just – not do this?"
"Do you have any idea how worried we've been?" Iris presses, relentless. This is why he stayed in the Speed Force. Lightning doesn't judge. "We lost you for nine months, Barry, and now you're barely here."
Defense leaps automatically to his tongue, extinguished before it ever passes his lips.
"I know this has been really hard for you," Iris says, her expression softening a little as she releases his knees, putting enough distance between them Barry can almost tune her out entirely. Chooses not to, keeping his focus on her. Letting her have that much of him. "No one expects you to be whoever you were before that night happened. But you can't just disappear."
Fiercely, she repeats, "You cannot abandon my dad and me, or your friends, or your life because of what happened. They didn't die so you could give up everything, too."
He can see how much it hurts her to say it, to try not to scream his name, to not shove Barry back again like she did at the funeral because a hug was too much, a hug was a stamp of reality and she just needed to believe it was a lie for a few more hours.
(And he would give anything, anything to erase her pain. To undo what had happened.)
The hug she captured him in five hours later lasted for what felt like centuries. Barry didn't leave her side all night, didn't sleep at all, just let her hurt and tried not to contribute further to it.
He dry-swallows, trying to come up with an adequate response, because his chest aches almost as bad as his arm and there's a lump in his throat. "I'm sorry," he says, like it'll make any difference, any difference at all. And because it'll kill him if he doesn't, he finishes, "No one should have died because of me."
Iris gets up and sits on the desk beside him instead. Says into the sun-lit city in front of them, "They didn't die because of you."
Barry watches the Reverse Flash kill him again and again and again, quick succession, and wonders what Iris would think if she knew how weak he really was.
Did you think you could stop me?
You can't.
A hero fails once. A hero doesn't fail a thousand times.
"I can't hurt anyone else," he tells her, trying to justify his isolation. To justify why he needs to stay in that dark place, scanning the scans in perpetuity for answers he won't find.
"You can't just disappear," Iris echoes. It's hard to read her. They've been apart for too long.
But when she looks down at him and he has nothing to say, he understands why she pushed him away the first time at the funeral. Why she walked away even though they were both hurting and solidarity had always been the solution.
She needed time. To think, to process, to try and stay alive in her own new hell. To cope with the new reality.
To accept what it meant, and take comfort in what was still there.
And there's an instant of clarity where Barry doesn't see the Reverse Flash in his full, gladiatorial form, invincible. He seems him losing strength, dissolving, becoming nothing, and how in that scenario – in their life – it ended:
I've controlled your life for so long, Barry.
How will you get along without me?
Barry thinks of all those stars. Even in death the Reverse Flash owns him, taunts him with a future he can't have, because no matter how fast he runs, he knows he can never replicate that moment.
It's gone.
For them, it's always been over. He cannot change the outcome of that fight.
Chasing the lie will only make it worse.
Sliding out of his chair, he finds space on the desk beside her, wrapping his right arm around her waist and feeling her lean against him, head on his shoulder.
They don't speak, but it's almost like healing, getting each other even if their new reality will take more time to understand.
It's not why are you hurting because they both know why. It's not it's okay because it's not.
It's I am here.
"I'm not going anywhere," he promises her softly.
And a quiet corner of his consciousness takes all of those stars and forgets them, focusing instead on what's his: the way Iris's breathing is even, the way the office has a familiarly woodsy smell to it, the way sunlight pours over the city below.
It's not perfect, and it never will be, but it's theirs.
And that will be enough.