With Kid Flash patrolling the streets beside his adoring uncle, Barry had found that life had gotten a little bit easier. Barry had come to notice a pattern. He liked patterns. You could make a hypothesis out of a pattern, and he was in desperate need of a hypothesis. He'd found for a long time that being with people helped decrease the effects of the… spells… of weakness that were becoming more and more frequent. The closer a relationship he had with someone, the more pronounced the effect, and Wally's status as a speedster seemed to help all the more.
Still, Barry continued to deteriorate.
The spells increased in frequency and intensity. The intangibility came and went, and several times at work he'd had to hide his hands to prevent Patty, his lab partner, from seeing their semi-translucent state.
It was a strange feeling, this being half-there. Though he hadn't thrown up, he was often in a perpetual state of nausea, and even stranger, his caloric intake had dropped to less than half his usual. As a speedster, Barry would eat anything and everything, but the more often these spells struck, the less hungry he got. Food almost felt too… solid for him to ingest sometimes.
It got worse when he was alone. If it weren't for how much the company of others helped, Barry was sure that he would've blown his cover long ago, regardless of how suspicious Iris and Hal were already.
At least Wally hadn't noticed that anything was wrong. For that much, Barry was eternally grateful. He couldn't bear the thought of causing his family distress, especially when he possessed so few facts himself, and every scientific method of diagnosing his strange illness had failed him. It felt like that time he'd faked a fever when he was 9 to avoid going to school - the same guilt and paranoia gripped him constantly. Except this time he wasn't faking… and he had to keep repeating it to himself, even as his mind tried to convince him that clearly this must be a figment of his imagination: it couldn't be proven, couldn't be verified…
But with every passing day Barry grew more and more certain that unexplained as this ailment may be, it was as real as it was deadly. And even the dissenting voice in his head was slowly forced to come to terms with the burgeoning reality of the situation.
Barry didn't have a hypothesis yet. Only patterns with an indiscernible cause that lead to an emotional conclusion. But he still found himself buying Iris flowers every chance he saw, and he taught Wally how to make a hand turkey even though it wasn't near Thanksgiving yet, and he found himself making a decades worth of Valentines Day cards for Iris as tears blurred his eyes.
He felt like a ghost, trying to settle his affairs before his own death.