Interrupting normal When the Bough Breaks posting to bring you this little one-shot, which I wanted to write before tonight's episode. It's just a little "what-if" tag to last week's episode, "Trajectory." Spoiler-ish through that episode, although it deviates from the actual plot slightly (you know how I love my slight AU "what-if" scenarios).
Excuse the medical guesswork and kind of trippy nature of parts of this.
Enjoy!
It happens so fast, at first he's not sure it's real.
One minute he's looking Trajectory—no, Eliza—in the eye, begging her to stop. I also know what it feels like to want to be the best.
And this is killing you.
No, he hears her respond. It's killing you.
And the next moment there's a needle jammed into his leg, and a fire in his blood, and a keen, keen, sense that he is no longer part of the world.
He sees Eliza's lips moving, but they're moving too slowly for him to make out any sound, or maybe his ears are ringing too acutely to hear anything else. Either way, he knows exactly what she's saying anyway, knows it's nothing but taunts from a desperate woman who knows this drug will likely drive Barry mad, if it doesn't kill him first.
He knows she's right. So he takes off.
Sure, he's been the Flash for a year now, but he realizes now that he's never really felt speed. Not speed in its pure form, the kind of speed that transforms his very bones and blood into electricity, which makes the world dissolve into stardust and silver fibrils instead of buildings and trees. He moves through the world as easily as a hot knife through hot oil, unstoppable.
The first time, he's going so fast that he overshoots STAR by thirty miles and winds up leaving scorch marks in an empty field. It takes him a moment to register that he's not in the place he expected to be. When he does register, when he does realize, he wonders if perhaps he should stay out here until the drug wears off.
A tremor runs through him, accompanied by a snap of lightning, and he decides no, no, he needs to get help now.
He takes off again, backtracking now. The lightning courses through him again, turning the world into streaks, and it melts him into a liquid state of dread. The last time he went this fast, he was being towed along by his neck.
This time he doesn't overshoot, but he still leaves a smoldering trail in his wake. Cisco, Caitlin, Joe, Iris, Wells—they all jump backward in surprise when he stops in the middle of the cortex.
"She hit me with the V9," he says. "She knew it would hurt me and she was right, I think it's destabilizing me or something…"
He trails off when he realizes that none of them can actually hear him, because he's talking so fast that his words blur together for non-speedster listeners. He takes a deep breath and forces boiling oxygen into his brain. With great effort he slows down his speech enough to get out two words.
"Help me."
Caitlin and Cisco, the most used to this kind of urgency, act first, grabbing a movable examination bed and rolling it into the cortex. Barry spends the time shaking, sweating, wondering when clock seconds became so long, or so loud.
His friends look up at him expectantly. He makes a move for the bed—and collides face-first with the wall ten feet past it.
It might have been funny, if it wasn't so goddamn terrifying.
"Overshot it," he mumbles on the floor, his nose now gushing warm blood.
"Just a little. You're going pretty fast." Cisco and Joe are there to pick him up off of the floor, to guide him toward the examination bed. Iris is there to take his hand as he lays there. Caitlin is there to come forward with an IV to take his blood. And Wells is there to stand by and watch, watch a scene with dim recognition and dim disappointment.
"I can't get this needle in," Caitlin is saying. "You're vibrating, Barry. Can you take a few deep breaths for me?"
A wild emptiness distorts him. "Water. Please. Water."
Iris obliges instantly, which is, of course, too long. When she returns with the glass he has lived out an eternity. Still, he pretends to smile at her when the water is passed to him. He reaches up to take it. His hand goes too fast and the glass goes sailing across the room, smashing against the desk in the middle of the room with the force of a bullet.
"Okay, slowing down," Caitlin says, pressing a hand firmly to his arm and drawing back sharply when the electricity shocks her.
"Sorrysorrysorry," Barry is saying. He hears himself saying it, but it's coming from his body, not from him. Iris, too, has relinquished her hold on his hand, and the loss of contact helps him float away, far away, from the bodies that constrain him. They are not people around him, or maybe they are just people. Just bodies. He is something more; he is speed.
The part of him still trapped in his body realizes that his muscles are seizing, and that the other bodies around him are panicking, and that the more agitated he gets the more his yellow lightning starts transforming. It shifts from yellow, to white, to blue. Like flames getting hotter. Blue flame—3000 degrees Farenheit. That color snaps his awareness back to the present: it triggers something, some terrified, primal part of him, and he gasps like he is drowning.
"His lightning, it's turning blue!" It's Cisco, he thinks. The names are coming back to him, the panic sharpening them.
He knows what blue lightning means.
In a half-heartbeat, he is off of the table and rushing down the hallway like a madman, with fear at his heels.
The run takes him just as far as the pipeline. It compels him forward. He shuts the lock button on his way in and slowly, agonizingly so, the door drops behind him.
A lifetime, maybe two lifetimes, passes as he waits, as his body vibrates so violently it threatens to disintegrate, as blue lightning sparks and pops from his skin. When Cisco and Caitlin and Joe and Iris and Wells finally sprint into view at the other end of the hall, he feels as though he as withered.
"Barry," Cisco barks, running through molasses to the side panel. "Let's get you out of there."
It's the second time Barry has been locked in the pipeline in the past twenty-four hours, but this time when he slams the glass, his open palms radiate an explosion of cobalt. Adrenaline crawls up his throat and awakens the fear, the sick exhilaration that fizzles under his skin.
"Don't," he cries desperately. "Cisco, don't you dare unlock this."
"You need to let us help you," Caitlin says. "You're going too fast—we need to flush the V9 out of your system."
"I'm too dangerous," Barry says. "Don't you see?" He holds up his hand, feels that same thrill of euphoria and terror at the sight of the blue. "I'm not in control. I'm becoming…I'm becoming…I mean, he has the blue lightning too, right? I can't stop it, please, I'm dangerous, please, don't unlock this door, I'm turning into a monster and please don't let me out Idon'twanttohurtyouplease."
He collapses to his knees and tries to hold in his collapsing brain. Iris pushes her way to the front of the group, toward him. "You're not hurting anyone."
He trembles and tries desperately to get a grip on his physical body again, instead of this speed, this nothingness, these white-hot filaments of energy.
"This drug," she continues. "It's not turning you into Zoom. Because you're Barry, you're the Flash, and I know you would never let that happen. Okay? There's no way you could become like him."
"But this—this is killing you," Joe chimes in. Barry chokes on a wave of manufactured emotion, and the fear is draining away fast, but it's leaving everything else in its place. "You've got to trust yourself enough for us to help you. And you've got to trust us."
Zoom is in front of him, holding him by the throat, and he doesn't know how he can possibly survive—he is staring death in the face. Goodbye, Flash.
It flickers in his nightmares. Not white-hot, but blue-hot. Not hot enough to burn him. No, hot enough to erase him instantly from the face of the earth.
Barry takes an eternity, which translates into a moment or two of real time. Then he bends to the crackling and presses his forehead to his knees and concedes.
He comes to his senses some time later, back on the examination bed. Cisco grins at him from a nearby chair, where he is connected to Barry via a blood transfusion line. Barry manages a grimace in response and hopes it looks natural.
"You scared us for a while there," Cisco says, which seems like an understatement to Barry. But what does he know; he is still getting used to the feeling of being solidly back in his body. He grunts and settles back into the pillows, not quite ready to socialize yet.
As he lies there, he listens. Caitlin complains about the number of blood transfusions she's had to administer in the last five hours. Joe and Iris converse quietly in a corner. Wells stands a ways away with arms crossed, staring quietly at Barry.
Barry knows, or he thinks he knows, what is in that man's eyes. Some twinge of anger, some shred of I told you so, some fragment of unexplainable guilt.
But there is guilt enough already, Barry thinks as he turns away. Because while the ecstasy of speed is gone, he remembers it. He remembers the maddening bloodlust of joy for which his very cells were willing to tear themselves apart. Joy like fire, joy like freedom.
And in its absence, in that hole that it left, is nothing but craving.
He closes his eyes and swallows the guilt and knows, knows with cold certainty, that he will never speak about it to anyone.
Thanks for reading! I'll be back to normal posting tomorrow, but I hope you enjoyed this little one-shot. I know it's a bit of a long-shot, but I was half-expecting something like this to happen during that last confrontation.
If you liked what you saw, please leave a comment on your way out.
Till next time,
Penn