Sometimes you need to run to clear your head- to escape, to release everything else, and just be one with the Speed Force. Except for Barry, that decompression method was doing nothing to shake the feeling of being watched, of presence hovering around him. There was nothing to indicate there was another meta-human behind it as everything was running smoothly. In fact, the city had been exceptionally quiet lately. Despite this, he still felt jumpy, uneasy. Not once but twice had someone startled him so badly he'd had to clutch his chest in reflex, trying to laugh off the jumpiness as having watched too scary of a movie the night before. But it wasn't the memory of a movie that was sticking with him. But something was, he could feel it. There was quite literally something , just not something he could see, or hear.

Against his better judgment, he decided he might be better off if he tried to use some of his gear to help him investigate. Maybe it was a meta, just some new one. One that was on the voyeuristic, and stalkerish side at that, if that was the case. But the infrared picked up nothing, the night vision as well, and he wasn't sure what else it could be. The thing he was not about to do was to tell Cisco, or Caity only to have them start going on about stress, or some attack. Maybe he was just being paranoid from not dealing with a big bad in a while; the stress of waiting for the next shoe to drop giving him the need to check over his shoulder, looking for something coming for him, for the city. Nothing was there though, investigate though he might. Always nothing.

He run up a building and came to an abrupt halt, standing in the quiet as he surveyed Central City with a mixture of frustration and confusion furrowing his brow, the worry line that Iris always teased was going to stick if he didn't watch out more prominent than usual.

Barry stood there for a good minute, the darkness and isolation allowing him to dare to remove the cowl and sigh, a heavy sound for no one but himself to hear. Only there was a chill creeping into the air, one that wasn't due to some seasonal change in weather, the shorter daylight hours bringing with them cooler nights, some of them downright chilly. No, this was localized, he could sense that much.

Straightening up, he turned around, only to dart back a good foot in surprise. There before him...was Len. Or, what seemed to be Len. There was definitely a non-human, ethereal quality to him; not quite tangible. Maybe it was a really good hologram, and Cisco was pulling some elaborate Halloween trick on him.

"Hello, Scarlet."

Barry looked, quite literally agape, at what {was it a what, a who?} was standing before him. He paced back and forth along the side of the roof as he continued staring at the-

"Len? What- I, what are you? Are- are you really here? Do I need to chew Cisco out, is there a camera set up?"

The smile at his confusion and inability to keep that tongue up with his speedy brain, which had to be running a million thoughts per second brought one of those playful smirks to the corner of his mouth, but there was a distant look about him, one that hadn't been there before when he was alive. Or was he?

"Yes. And no. I'm not alive , Barry. Not in the way you're thinking." He waved his hand in the air vaguely, the movement containing the same artistic precision even for a 'careless' motion that Barry had always found intriguing about Snart. "No, I'm more, shall we say...a ghost. Or whatever is the proper term for having your very essence scattered through time and space, all with your consciousness intact."

The brilliant, sunshine-filled smile that had come from the 'yes' quickly fell, Barry's brow once more furrowed, this time with worry, and disappointment. "It's not, like, somehow a meta thing?"

A small twitch in the corner of Len's mouth, one that maybe someone that wasn't a speedster, or familiar with him would notice, but Barry did, and that pained him more than he knew something that small could.

"Sorry to disappoint, not a meta. The veil, as it were, does exist...at least for me. Just so happens it's far thinner during Halloween. Stars, alignment, whatever you want to attribute it to." He followed up the words with a spread of intangible arms and a slight bow of the head. Crossing the distance between them, he stopped directly in front of Barry, but kept a small buffer between them, as though not to encourage the disappointment of attempting to touch a ghost- the cold, inexplicable gathering of energy into an echo of the man who was Leonard Snart. "But it's not exactly easy to break through, even partially. Not until dark, anyways. Can't make it last either. I doubt even I can slip through the cracks for longer than a few minutes or so. Though not for lack of trying."

Barry's head came up jerkily. "Hang on, that's been you all day?!"

The shrug Len gave was accompanied by a quiet chuckle. "You didn't already figure that out? Keep up, Scarlet. It's harder to break through in the day. The closer to midnight, the easier it was. Don't get me to try to science it further than that for you, not my forte. But I've been here a long time. A...long time."

Now Barry was frowning, a hesitant half-step closer taken as though worried that if he got any closer he expected Len to blink out of existence; all the while unable to stop himself from closing the gap further. "How do you mean?"

"From what I can tell, there was an anchor for a larger portion of my...mind." His finger reached out as though to tap Barry's chest the way he had a year before, but there was no impact to be felt, a mockery of the closeness between them.

"I never got to ask. When I"—Barry's words caught in his throat as he stared into blue eyes that weren't quite there, but the affection that they had once held wasn't missing, and that's what was starting to kill him—"when I pulled you out of the Legends that day...you knew. Why did you even let me? Why didn't you tell me to fuck off? Or, uh, I don't know, try to stop me from bringing you back?"

Len gave a small scoff, giving Barry that lowered face head tilt that he knew so well. "Why? I hadn't spent the better part of a year working to fix time, only to undo that by running the timeline off the rails. You know as well as I how well that works out." He sighed and looked at Barry with a wry mixture of fondness and what was probably best described as wistful, even though the word being applied to him would at any other time be almost certainly dubious.

"And when the people you care for call...you go to them. So I went with you."

Barry cut his eyes away, looking up to the sky, fighting tears that he refused to allow fall. Then he felt a chill on the back of his neck, and while it wasn't a hand, it was enveloping enough he knew there was a 'hand' on the back of his neck. He looked back to Len and gave a forced, thin smile, the tiny headshake of frustration speaking in more words than he could find the apology, the wish that Len was here in a better way than an ephemeral All Hallow's Eve visit.

" I'm with you, you know that ."