Here it is! Part 3 to The First Cut is the Deepest and Picking up the Pieces. Before reading this, I recommend that you at least read part 2 of this series first or it might not make sense.

WARNING: Like the first two parts, this story is going to be pretty dark and will contain some violence, graphic medical flashbacks, and other elements that some people may find unsettling.

Sorry if the ending of part 2 was misleading. I had Barry say the same thing he said in the season 2 finale ("That's why I'm so sorry…but I have to do this"), but I'm not going to have him time traveling. I just wanted to incorporate that dialogue into the story.

This first chapter is pretty short because it's just an intro chapter, but future ones will be longer.

Only Just Getting Started

Love is hard. It's messy and complicated. But hate. Hate is so clean. So simple.

Barry had been trying so hard to love, to be the same loving person he had always been, but it was difficult. Loving his family wasn't hard. No, what was hard was what came with that love. Those relationships were messy and complicated. Their concern for him was suffocating, and it only led to him lying to them to avoid even more concern. Their protectiveness of him only led to them lying to him in order to keep him safe. They had both kept things from each other, not out of hate or deceit, but out of love.

Hate was easier. It was easier for Barry to hate the scientists than it was for him to love his friends and family. Hate wasn't complicated. It was simple. It was clean and pure. There wasn't the same mess of complicated emotions that came with love. Love could easily turn into resentment under the right circumstances, but when it came to hate, there was not much else to it. It was simply hate, and he could choose how to channel that hate. He could bottle it in like he had been doing for months or he could let himself finally unleash it.

It wasn't hard to stay hidden from his friends and family. All he had to do was keep moving. Even if Cisco vibed him or they caught him on facial recognition software, Barry was simply too fast for them to ever get to him. He never stayed in one city for more than one night. He was always moving, always running. It would have been exhausting, if there hadn't been a purpose to it.

But Barry had a purpose. He wasn't just running away. He was running for something now. He had a purpose, and that purpose was to find them. His months of research and meticulously keeping tabs on the scientists had paid off. He knew exactly where to find them. He watched them, kept notes on them, learned their habits, their routines.

He wanted so badly to just do it already, to hurt them in the ways they had hurt him, but it was too soon. He had waited this long. He could be patient and wait a little longer. He couldn't hurt them yet. To do so would only turn them into martyrs, into victims in the world's eyes. No, he couldn't hurt them yet. First he had to expose them.

…..

"It's been two weeks since Barry's phone call, a full month since he ran away, and we still haven't found him?!" Joe asked incredulously.

"We're trying, Joe," Caitlin assured him, "Trust me, we want to find Barry just as much as you do."

"I can't believe this," Iris said in frustration, "This is STAR Labs. Of all the people you've managed to track down, you can't find Barry?"

"Barry doesn't want to be found," Cisco said sadly, "And he might be a bit confused emotionally now, but Barry's still smart. He knows how to disappear. I doubt we'd be able to track him even without his powers, but with them? We don't stand a chance. We have no clue where he could be."

"That's not true," Joe said suddenly, "We know exactly where Barry's going to go. We don't need to find Barry, we need to find the scientists. We find them, and we might be able to find Barry and stop him before he does something he'll regret."

"You don't think Barry will…kill them. Do you?" Iris asked tearfully.

"Barry would never do that," Henry said firmly, "He isn't capable of that."

"We don't know what Barry's capable of now," Joe said sadly.

"He didn't kill Dr. Holland," Caitlin pointed out, "Something stopped him, and it definitely wasn't us. To him, it was as if we weren't even in the room. Something else stopped him from going through with it."

"I guess that's something," Joe said quietly.

"I got a hit!" Cisco said suddenly. All of them looked back to him where he had been working on his computer. They all looked at the article he had found.

Ashwaubenon Doctor Imprisoned for Illegal Organ Trafficking

Earlier this week, Dr. James Coffman was found guilty of selling human organs on the black market. Organs in his possession included a kidney, portions of liver tissue, a spleen, several lymph nodes, over fourteen pints of blood, several skin graft segments, and, perhaps most disturbing, a human finger. DNA evidence reveals that all parts belong to one person, but the identity of said victim remains unknown, and DNA evidence has thus far been inconclusive, yielding no match to any persons within the APD's database. Whether or not the victim is still alive is unclear, although the excessive amounts of blood taken suggests that the samples were taken over an extended period of time. The organs were no longer viable for medical use, and investigators are unsure as to the buyer's intentions with the parts. Although he has been found guilty for his crimes, Doctor Coffman still adamantly refuses to reveal where he obtained the organs, leaving many only able to speculate the origin of the disturbing collection of body parts. For now, it seems, the source remains a mystery. Cont. P3.

No one said anything for a moment after they finished reading the article.

"Where was this?" Iris asked quietly after a moment.

"This happened in Wisconsin," Cisco told them, "And remember last week we had a facial recognition hit for Barry in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin? That's no coincidence. Barry did this."

"So basically, this guy, this Dr. Coffman," Joe said, "He was trying to sell Barry's organs?"

"We don't know for sure that they're Barry's," Caitlin said, "But it's likely considering how Barry was missing a kidney, parts of his liver, his spleen, and nine of his lymph nodes. Not to mention, the missing finger. They have to be Barry's."

"That's sick," Henry said angrily, his hands curling into fists, "It's bad enough that they removed all of those parts from my son, but now this guy was trying to make a quick buck by selling them?! He deserves a lot worse than to just go to prison."

"Well at least Barry didn't do anything else," Iris said reasonably, "All he did was expose the guy and get him put away. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have a problem with that."

"I agree," Caitlin said, "I thought Barry was going to do a lot worse."

"Well, this isn't over yet," Joe said darkly, "There are still plenty of other scientists out there. We still don't know what Barry might do yet."

…..

Barry watched with satisfaction as they loaded Dr. Coffman into the truck to take him to Winnebago Prison. He wasn't done with the doctor. Not by a long shot. But for the time being, he was satisfied. At least for now, the world knew him for the scum that he was.

Barry was worried about other things at the moment though. He had a visit to pay. A visit to a certain lab assistant he had grown to know all too well over the last two weeks.

…

"How has Barry been doing?" the captain asked him curiously before Joe could leave the office after dropping off a file, "He can take off as much time as he needs, but he knows that there's nothing to be ashamed of, right? No one here is judging him for what happened."

Joe sighed and looked back at the captain with a pained look on his face. Slowly, he closed the door, and walked back over to the captain's desk.

"I suppose you deserve to know what's really going on," Joe said quietly, taking a deep breath, "Barry hasn't just been taking time off because of what happened in the bathroom here."

"What do mean?" Singh asked, furrowing his eyebrows in confusion.

"Barry's gone," Joe said in a strained voice, "He took off. We haven't seen him for weeks."

Singh's eyes widened.

"But, why?" he asked incredulously, "Why would Barry do that? Why would he just take off like that?"

Joe sighed.

"He found out we were working with Dr. Holland," he told him.

"Oh no," the captain said quietly, understanding now.

"I think a part of Barry still feels betrayed by us," Joe said, "We told him that we were doing it to help him, but Barry didn't give us much of a chance to explain before he left."

"Where did he go?" Singh asked, "Do you guys know?"

"We've been tracking him, but he's too fast for us to ever make contact with him," Joe said painfully, "He's…he's going after them. He's going after the scientists."

Singh paled.

"Don't say anymore," he said abruptly.

"What?" Joe said, taken aback, "Why?"

"Because, as chief of police, if I found out that one of my employees was…No," he said, shaking his head, "No. You haven't told me anything yet. For all I know, Barry's searching for them to ask them to share an iced tea with him. You haven't said anything about Barry's activities yet, so legally, I'm not required to do anything."

Joe nodded, understanding. So far, Barry actually hadn't done anything illegal (that they know of), but that didn't mean that he wouldn't. They still had no idea what Barry was planning to do.

…..

"What is it?" Iris asked urgently as she and her father entered the cortex, "What did you find?"

"Felicity found it actually," Caitlin said, "She just sent us this."

Looking at the computer screen, they all could see that yet another doctor had been arrested in Maine. Iris recognized his face instantly from when she had seen it on Barry's computer. It was the one who Barry had said had a knack for breaking fingers, the one who Barry thought of every time he tried to write. He had been arrested for several counts of malpractice and unethical experimentation. Apparently, he had been continuing similar experiments in his own lab in Maine. That is, until Barry got to him.

"Both cases have something in common," Joe pointed out, "They were both exposed anonymously."

"Strange," Cisco said.

"Not really," Iris said, "Of course Barry would remain anonymous."

"I know," Cisco said quickly, "That makes sense, I guess. I just meant it's strange. I know if I were Barry, I would want them to know it was me who exposed them. There's something really unsatisfying about just sending them off to prison, never knowing that he was behind it."

"Personally, I kind of support what Barry's doing," Iris said, "I mean, I hate the circumstances under which he's doing it, but I think it's a good thing he's making sure they get arrested for their crimes. I just wish he would have let us help him. I don't know why he felt the need to hide it from us if he plan was simply to expose them."

"Maybe that's not all Barry's doing though," Caitlin said darkly, "Maybe there's more to it than that."

"You're right," Cisco said, staring at the new article he had just found, "He's not getting all of them arrested, just some of them."

They all looked at the article he had pulled up on the screen.

Former Lab Assistant has Nervous Breakdown

Dennis Barnes, a lab tech from Kingsport, Tennessee, was admitted to St. James Psychiatric Hospital after turning himself in to local police. Barnes frantically claimed that he needed to turn himself in for his crimes, although he would not state what those crimes were. All he would say was that he needed to be in police custody for his own protection, claiming that he was being haunted by a red demon at all hours of the day and night. According to Barnes, this being was a ghost sent to torment him for the wrongs he had committed. After spending three days being hospitalized for severe chronic sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and various injuries that are assumed to be self-inflicted, Barnes was admitted into St. James Asylum for further psychiatric monitoring.

They all looked around at each other in shock.

"That's pretty dark," Henry said, "Are we sure Barry is really even capable of doing something like that? I mean, tormenting somebody into insanity? I don't know if Barry would ever do such a thing."

"With all due respect, Henry, you weren't there," Joe said seriously, "In the lab. You didn't see what was done to Barry. Things like that stay with a person and can make them do some pretty dark things in retaliation."

"But driving someone insane?" Henry said in disbelief.

"Barry was there," Cisco said sadly, "We've had several hits for him in that county over the last two weeks. He was there."

"I can't believe my son would do this," Henry said brokenly.

"Me neither," Caitlin said sadly, "And Barry's only just getting started."