Stunned, clearly more than a little disoriented, and showing way too many half-healed, sluggishly bleeding wounds, The Flash was easy prey. He lay on the ground of a derelict warehouse, fingers twitching, his whole body trembling in irregular intervals. He was clearly fighting to stay conscious, maybe even trying to get up if those tiny twitches could be interpreted as that. His fingers weakly dug into the ground, but there was no strength left.

Len had arrived on the scene as the meta of the week had tossed The Flash aside like he was nothing but a rag-doll. That he had thrown him through a partially crumbled wall hadn't helped. That it had been accompanied by a massive electrical discharge hadn't be good either.

Barry hadn't gotten back up.

Snart cursed himself for not responding sooner.

Because it was what he had been doing lately. Monitoring Team Flash and keeping an eye on Scarlet.

He still told himself it was to protect his own interests, to keep on top of the game. It had become a rather weak argument as of late. He couldn't rationalize his ongoing fascination. He knew everything there was to know about Barry Allen, but he still kept tracking him, watching him, and sometimes Barry even saw him.

"You get into the worst situations, Barry," he growled as he climbed over the rubble and loose stone. Dust welled up all around him.

He wasn't so sure the kid was even aware that he was next to him. The new meta was unconscious, out cold. For all that he had been able to evade a speedster, he had reacted rather badly to getting frozen in a block of ice. Figure that.

The meta had looked like a very twisted version of Robocop and Alien, with too many metal protrusions sticking out all over his body, and those protrusions had turned out to be stingers and needles he had been able to fling around. Not to mention the electricity.

The cold gun had been set on full and it had cracked the metal, breaking those spikes, and while part of Len had felt a dark, almost vicious pleasure at the sight, another couldn't have been less interested in the meta's fate. For all he cared, he could be dead. He didn't care.

Now he approached the motionless speedster, assessing the full extent of the damage..

Barry was covered by a layer of dust and dirt. His face was ashen and Len had no idea whether it was only the dust or his general condition. There were cuts on his cheekbones, his chin, and one very close to the eye where the suit had been slashed. Something was sticking out of the suit and he hoped it wasn't also sticking in the kid.

"I thought you were faster, Scarlet," he sighed as he holstered the gun. "Or had finally gotten it into your head to think first and then rush in. Plans, Barry. Plans are your friend."

The Flash's eyes suddenly shot open and he drew in a desperate breath of air, then groaned in obvious pain. He rolled onto the side and whimpered. Lightning sparked around him, like a misfiring electrical coil, arcing off the slender form and dissipating into nothingness. The speedster tried to push himself up, but fell back with a soft exhalation of pain.

"Whoa, Scarlet, calm down," Snart said, slowly closing the last distance with measured steps and an unabating tension in his whole body. "You're making everything just worse than it is. And it's pretty bad already."

Barry stared at him, eyes trying to focus. "Snart…?" He swallowed hard. "What…?" He tried to get up once more, but it was nothing but a trembling twitch. "How…?"

"Hey, hey, easy. I'm currently on your side. Remember?" He spread his hands, a smile playing over his features, though inside he was strung tight. "I didn't save your sorry ass to kill you. Quite messy and the stains are hard to get out of the carpeting."

"I… what…" He winced again, pressing a hand against his forehead. "Hurts. So bad," he wheezed.

His head but not the place where Snart could clearly see the metal spike? Because his hopes that it had been held up by the suit, not penetrating the more vulnerable skin, had quickly evaporated. There was blood. Lots of blood.

That was about the same time Barry discovered the metal spike and his eyes widened. "No…"

"No!" Len snapped sharply. "Do not remove it!"

"Have to… has to go… can't heal without it," Barry mumbled and pulled.

He gave a cry of pain as it came out and Snart cursed him nine times to Sunday for the reckless behavior. A broken moan escaped the hurt man and he fell back onto the ground, staring at the ceiling, panting harder now. Breathing through the pain as blood leaked in a steady stream from the gut wound.

"Fuck, Scarlet! What were you thinking?" Len cursed as he knelt next to the other man. "Scratch that! You never think, do you?"

Barry didn't react, was sucking in huge gulps of air, and his eyes were bright with the agony he was in.

This was bad, a part of Len decided. And where hell was his team? Barry had once mentioned that they monitored his body functions, so they had to know something was very, very wrong with their hero. But there were no flashing lights or any other kind of cavalry. No other sound but the crackling of dispersing cold around the ice meta and residual lightning.

Len had no idea if or when his team would arrive. He had never seen them come to the rescue before. Usually Barry managed to drag himself back home to heal.

Not today. The Flash was quickly losing his battle with consciousness and Snart knew he couldn't leave him here to hopefully be found. He also couldn't call either the cops or an ambulance. Scarlet's identity would be immediately compromised. As for the team, well, right now they were too far out.

"Damnit," he muttered and made a split-second decision. "You bring out the worst in me. The absolute worst."

Barry made a weak, protesting noise as he was hoisted up, but he had to get him somewhere safe first, then worry about probably making some injuries worse.

He lost consciousness six seconds later and became a limp weight.

'Somewhere safe' was one of the many hiding places he had all over town. Len had chosen the basement apartment underneath an old, low-rise office building. At this time of the night, no one was around aboveground. With the rain that had started to come down no ten minutes earlier, everyone who might be working late was staying inside.

The place was small, but large enough for two people to spend a while laying low. Right now it was enough to keep The Flash safe and warm. Snart listened to the gurgle of water from the pipes that ran behind the ancient stone walls, the rumble of thunder distant and muted.

Whatever the meta had done, it had fried the Flash suit. The power output alone would have been extremely painful already. Snart had seen first hand how electricity could hurt him, incapacitate him, make him vulnerable and an easy target. It explained why there had been no response from the team, but it also complicated matters since Snart had no way to know if and when they would start looking for him.

He might just have to get word to them, tell them where to pick up their fallen hero, but first things first: treating the injuries. He might be on the wrong side of the law, but he wouldn't let the speedster bleed to death. Sure, The Flash had a healing factor and it usually kicked in pretty quickly, but that didn't mean wounds could be left untreated. Especially when stuff had been sticking in them and might have left particles behind.

Len shook his head, trying to shake the image of Barry tearing out the spike from his own flesh. The cry of pain still echoed in his mind. Someone had to sit the guy down and tell him This Isn't A Good Idea! He had the survival instinct of a gnat!

Snart ran a hand through his closely cropped hair. He didn't do worry. He didn't do compassion. He sure as hell didn't do empathy! The thing was, he had started doing all of that with one Barry Allen and it was only getting worse. He felt protective of the kid and it wasn't in a way he was used to. It wasn't to protect an asset. It was more.

The wound would be fine. Still an angry red against the pale skin but already closed, and The Flash was healing. Barry was healing.

"There's something to you, Barry Allen," he murmured, studying the lax features, the matted down hair flopping into the smooth forehead. "Something I can't shake. I can't shake you."

And somehow he didn't want to.

It took him another hour to wake, sixty-three minutes to be precise, and to stagger into the work area. The room Len used as a bedroom couldn't be exited without going through the workshop.

"Back from the dead, I see."

Barry stared at him. He ran a slightly shaky hand through his hair, still looking rather pale, thinner than he actually was. Clad in just a t-shirt and wearing slightly too short jogging pants, he was as far from The Flash as possible. Len had peeled the suit off him in pieces, revealing the bruised and healing skin underneath. He would have liked to admire the long, lean lines, the display of muscle and strength, but worry had him handle the matter with clinical detachment and professionalism. If his touch lingered longer than necessary as he treated the injured skin, no one would ever see it.

Snart had left him some spare clothes to dress in later. Barry was wearing them now. There was some dried blood flaking off his skin, but none staining the clothes.

"Where am I? What did you do?" the speedster demanded, though it sounded shaky and a little faint.

He spread his arms, a mock smile gracing his lips. His outside persona was firmly in place while he kept assessing Scarlet's overall condition. He looked better, but he was clearly still going through recovery from the electrical attack and getting shot by shrapnel.

"I scraped your sorry hide off the road. Mi casa es tu casa, Barry."

"Why?" He was starting to hold up the door frame, looking shakier by the second.

Len forced himself not to move. Not because it would spook his favorite speedster, but because it spooked him how strongly that need rose.

"You make really bad roadkill, Scarlet. Rather unsightly." There was an almost wolfish smile on his lips now. "And I needed to do my good deed of the day. No old ladies to help across the street, so you were the next best thing."

Barry blinked owlishly. "The meta…"

The kid really had weird priorities. He woke up in a criminal's den, out of his suit, clearly not in the best of physical conditions, still had traces of his own blood staining his skin, and he asked about the metahuman who had tried to kill him.

"On ice," Snart drawled.

The confusion was almost endearing. If not for the fact that the kid had suffered such severe hits that he had blacked out twice, Len would be teasing him mercilessly right now.

"Oh. Uhm, thanks."

Barry stumbled over to a bench and almost fell down on it, looking very much like he should still be recovering in bed, preferably with a doctor to keep an eye on him. He slumped against the wall, still fighting off whatever it was that the freakish meta had done, aside from throwing him through a wall.

Len studied him as Barry buried his face in his hands, fingers digging into his scalp, wincing a little. He looked like a breeze could topple him, still too haggard, still too out of it.

The younger man closed his eyes, breathing deeply, slowly. He massaged his temples, wincing again, and something inside Len sat up and took notice. All of a sudden, there was something, a whisper, almost like energy crackling unseen in the air. It was focused around Barry, surrounding him, like a wildfire and a roaring vortex of water in one. It was loud and unfocused, dragging at the man, pulling him into too many directions at once.

Snart blinked, stunned. Barry seemed to force himself to relax, to smooth the waves, and while Len couldn't really say he was seeing it, he did feel it. It was an immense power pressing down on the slender form, pushing and pulling at every cell. Just a whiff of the speed energy, just a fraction of what this unassuming young man could access. All spiking dangerously. And with each spike, Barry breathed through it.

He blinked again.

Well, fuck. Puzzles pieces slid together seamlessly and Len was momentarily stunned out of his own mind. All the signs were there. He knew them. He had been around enough Sentinels to recognize the signs. He had learned to recognize them, use those hypersenses against police, guards and agents. He knew the tells, could almost feel them.

He never had with Barry Allen. Not until today.

Sentinel. The kid was a Sentinel. The Flash was a fucking Sentinel! How did no one know this?! Was it a meta thing? Had he become some kind of Sentinel speedster? He was spiking, though not in a conventional way, and it affected the Speed Force. Or was the Speed Force affecting the Sentinel?

And why hadn't Len seen it before?

Because there had never been a zone. No hesitation, no sudden reactions to light, sound or the pain of an injury. Anything that would have sent even the best-trained Sentinel into a spike so bad they would zone on that sensation.

Snart forced himself to breathe, to stay absolutely calm. Cold and logical, thinking this through. Get the facts, gather the intel, look at it from all angles, make the plan, execute the plan.

He had an injured Flash who was also a Sentinel. The kid was experiencing some form of backlash from either the meta attack or something else. The whole thing looked far from a zone, but also not like he was spiking like crazy. Something was wrong, he mused. Very, very wrong, but it wasn't really Sentinel-related in a way he knew.

Barry made a soft, probably very involuntary noise, alerting Len to the rise of another spike. He could almost taste the ozone in the air and his eyes had to be playing tricks on him as he watched the looming energy force swirl around the younger man.

Maybe he shouldn't have brought him here. Maybe he should have placed an anonymous call to the team. Maybe he shouldn't have moved the kid to begin with, but hindsight was 20/20, as usual.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Sometimes even Leonard Snart made really bad decisions, mostly related to a certain scarlet speedster. Thinking about it, all his bad decisions had been connected to The Flash, so what did that tell him?

"Barry," Len said, voice pitched low and even. Guide voice, someone might taunt him. He couldn't care less. "Breathe."

"I… yeah, breathing." The kid slumped more. "Trying. So hard."

Breathing wasn't a hyper-sense. He should be blind, deaf or tearing his clothes off as his skin crawled from overloaded nerve endings. That Len might have been able to work with. That was normal. It would require he find a Guide to ease Barry's senses. The Flash would have a Guide on his team for that. As it was, Leonard Snart was out of luck for normal, though. The Speed Force had no Guides.

"Barry!" he repeated more firmly. "You're not losing control. You can dial it down."

"Can't. Never… have," he whispered.

Never? Snart felt a new wave of surprise. Never have what? Never lost control? Never had to dial down? Never managed to dial it down?

"You're not making sense, Scarlet. As usual. You can't dial it down?"

"No," Barry sounded pained, the energy force around him arcing again. "Just… too much… pressure…"

"Still not making any sense. Though that's not news."

The younger man made a weird, hiccupping sounding. He was still trying to slow his breathing.

"Breathe," Len cajoled. "In, out. Slow. Tell me what's happening, Scarlet. While breathing."

Another flicker of lightning and Allen buried his face in his hands, fingers digging into his skull like he was trying to tear his brain out.

How the hell could a Sentinel spike on a concept like the Speed Force? he thought furiously.

Because The Flash was a metahuman. He was different. Everything about him was different.

So the plan was to treat this differently, too.

"Remember the breathing," Snart murmured. "There's a good speedster," he teased gently as he closed the last distance. "In, out. There you go. Good."

Len had no idea why he was so drawn to the younger man, would hang around, but he was. He crouched down and did what he had never done before: he reached out and placed a light hand on the closest knee.

It wasn't some kind of spark or a total rush of emotions, but there was a reaction. Snart froze for a whole second as something chittered over his senses, aware of the power, the very energy contained in the deceptively slender and so young looking form. He could almost taste the lightning, sense the warmth and limitless power, and it was heady. It made him want to laugh, had him briefly giddy and almost happy.

It was Barry. Purely Barry.

And in a way it reminded him of his existence within the Time Stream, all that power washing around him, through him. A power that had become unmoored and logged onto him, using him to gather all the frayed edges, healing. Yes, it was eerily familiar.

Barry himself suddenly relaxed. There was a soft sigh and all his tension leaked out of him. Snart's cool, rational mind had wrapped itself around the high energy, that coil of sparks and lightning, and it was quiet now. He had siphoned it off the slender form. It was still there, still strong and insanely powerful, but it was… calmer.

Huh.

It had felt almost like his time in the Time Stream with Time. And wasn't that a confusing sentence, not to mention idea. Time had treated him the same way, passing through him, easing, streamlining, calming again.

His mind raced, filing away fact after fact.

Barry wasn't some metaphysical concept. He was a human being. Sure, a Sentinel, but still only human. That was a fact. Snart hadn't pecked him to be a Sentinel or a Guide, for that matter. Another fact. Barry Allen was a metahuman, had been changed by the particle accelerator. Fact number three.

He had never displayed any form of Sentinel behavior throughout their encounters or when Snart had reviewed footage of the Flash as he had studied his new opponent. He also couldn't have been triggered by the lightning strike and the following explosion that had put him into a coma. No one came out of a coma a Sentinel or Guide. A metahuman, sure. It had been happening all over the place. So new fact: he had been a Sentinel from birth, triggered one day, and he had had his abilities before the coma.

Barry suddenly fell over and Snart caught him. He managed to haul him over to the couch and deposited him on his back in a much more gentle manner than people would give him credit for.

Len studied the now very much unconscious speedster, no emotions displayed on his face, but inside he was furiously calculating the odds. Everything he knew went against what lay as proof before him.

What he had felt… it actually terrified him. It had broken through the unflappable facade and left cracks, because he had felt something inside him respond to the kid. Strongly. So very strongly.

Well, fuck.

It wasn't some form of spiritual bond. There was no empathic connection between them, he wasn't aware of Scarlet's emotions, but he had seen how Barry had quieted down, had given in to the gentle suggestion to relax and sleep. He had felt the tremor, had soothed it instinctively, and… nothing else had happened. No bond.

Because he wasn't empathic. He wasn't any sort of Guide.