"I can't do this anymore!"
Caitlin looked up from her screen. "Wally?"
He speedster-paced around the cortex, zip-zip-zip from one side to the other, babbling something so fast it sounded like chipmunk sounds dopplering past her. Papers flew in a miniature blizzard.
She took in a breath and yelled, "Stop!"
She didn't know if he actually heard it the way she delivered it. But he responded to something, skidding across the cortex and coming to a halt an inch from the wall. Which was an improvement. They'd been doing a lot of drywall patching lately.
The papers settled quietly, carpeting the floor.
She pointed. "Walk over here. Sit down."
He followed directions, plopping down into Cisco's usual chair at the work station.
"Now talk," she said.
"My feet hurt," he said. "I'm hungry all the time. When I break a bone, yeah it heals in like half an hour, but it still hurts like a mother. I got shin splints at three hundred miles an hour this morning and I thought I was gonna die. Everyone is so slow. I used to love driving and now all I can think is how much faster I could go, by myself. You know how many times I ate breakfast today? Four. Four breakfasts! I'm worried I'm gonna bankrupt my dad with the food bill. I have to lie to so many people now. About the weirdest stuff. Like why I don't have a car, and why I take off whenever something's going down, and why I can eat enough for a football team. And damn. Those calorie bars are nasty."
She waited for a moment to see if anything else would spew forth. "Are you done?"
He sniffed a little and wiped his nose. "Yeah."
"Sounds like that's been building."
He picked at his nails. "I tried to talk to Iris and my dad about it, and all they could talk about was how many people I could help. I tried to talk to Barry, and he just says it's not so bad, all those things. I tried to talk to Cisco even, and he only wants to talk about how awesome my powers are." There were tears in his eyes. "And I know all that stuff. I wanna help people. And none of those things are, like, world-ending. They're just annoying. And my powers are cool. But - "
"But your feet hurt," she said.
He sniffed, ducking his head. She studied the top of his head for a moment.
"You're right," she said. "It sucks."
He looked up. "It's not that it's bad. My life."
"No. But it's not all good either. And it's never going to go back to the way things were. It never can. Even if it did, trust me, you'd hate it."
"Yeah," he said. "So - what? Man up, buttercup?"
"Your whole life is different now. You're different. And that's happened twice in the past year. You're allowed to be unhappy about that."
"And?"
"What?"
"Are you going to start saying comforting things now?"
"I'm sorry," she said. "Have we met?"
It made him laugh. When he was done laughing, he sighed.
"I could be comforting," she said. "Positive. But everybody tried that already. Clearly, you don't need that."
"Not everything's bad, honest. Just … some stuff sucks. I don't need anyone to tell me it's not so bad. I just want someone to listen and say, 'yep. That sucks, all right.'"
She nodded. "Anytime you need to say that or hear that, you can come to me. Trust me, I'm kind of an expert in, 'sometimes things just suck.'"
He smiled. "Okay. I'll do that."
"Good. Now, as for the problem with your feet, we can fix that. What shoes are you wearing?"
He stuck his feet out in front of him like a little kid. "Uh, my sneaks. With Cisco's special soles on them."
"Ugh, god, Wally, how old are those? Don't answer that." She got to her feet and rummaged for her purse. "Come on. We're going to the shoe store."
"I got shoes," he objected.
"If they're all like that, you don't have good ones," she called over her shoulder, striding out of the cortex.
He whooshed up next to her and fell into step.
She pushed her wind-tossed hair out of her face and continued, "I've been wearing high heels ten hours a day, five days a week, for most of my professional life. I know good shoes, and bad shoes, and the difference is often pain. We're going to get you shoes with proper support and precise fit, and Cisco's going to put his special soles on them." She jabbed the button for the elevator and glanced at him. "Then hopefully that's one thing that's going to suck a little less."
FINIS