It was eerily silent in the bullpen of the Central City Sentinel without the usual constant background noise of TV news programs playing and computer fans humming and the clatter of keyboard keys. The particle accelerator explosion had knocked out power across the city, and work at the Sentinel had ground to halt. Now they were all just waiting for the power to come back on and to hear if an evacuation would be necessary or not. With her super sensitive hearing, Kara could hear the pounding heartbeats of the other people in the bullpen, but to them she imagined it was utterly and totally silent.
Kara's phone rang, shattering the quiet. She flinched, startled. She hadn't realized that any of the local cell towers were still working.
"Hello?" she asked, lifting her phone to her ear with hands gone suddenly shaky and unsteady, fearing the worst.
"Kara," Iris said breathlessly on the other end. "Something's happened. You need to get to the hospital. It's-it's Barry." Her voice broke on the last sentence. Kara felt the world drop out from under her. She hung up her phone and ran to her editor's office.
"I need to go," she said in a rush, leaning into the doorway, clinging to its edge with a white-knuckled grip. "It's my brother. He's in the hospital. I need to go see him." Her editor looked a little startled by her sudden appearance, but recovered quickly.
"Of course," she said. "Go." Kara blinked, caught off guard. For some reason, she'd been expecting more resistance, but she realized that her editor had prepared herself for requests like Kara's in the wake of what had just happened at STAR Labs. Plus, Kara would never ask to duck out of work early under normal circumstances, so she had that going for her. Realizing that she was wasting time, she swung herself out of the doorway of her editor's office and raced for the front entrance of the building.
A short time later, Kara went racing into the hospital, her footsteps clattering against its linoleum floor. She'd run here as she could from the Sentinel. She'd wanted to fly- it would have gotten her here faster- but the risk of being seen was too great. Even just on foot, she'd managed to cover the distance fairly quickly- her Kryptonian physiology was such that her top running speed was faster than anything an ordinary human could manage, especially her brother. She'd never met a person who ran more slowly than her brother. The thought of him made her falter, given the circumstances, and she hastily shoved it aside.
After being directed to Barry's hospital room, Kara arrived there to find her way inside blocked by bodies- Joe, Iris, Henry, and Nora were all crowded inside. In other words, everyone Barry considered family, except for her. A cry of distress escaped her at the thought that she hadn't been there for her brother when he'd needed her, just like she hadn't been there for her cousin when he'd needed her. So far, her track record was terrible.
Iris, who had been standing closest to the door, turned at the sound Kara had made and immediately pulled her into a hug.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Kara mumbled into her shoulder in a desperate, trembling voice. "I should have been there-"
"It's not your fault," Iris interjected gently. "There was nothing you could have done." Iris didn't know the truth about her, didn't know that there were things she could have done if only she had been there, so Kara refused to allow herself to take comfort in her words.
The moment Iris released her and she finally gained entrance into the room, Kara ran straight to Barry's bedside, slipping between her parents, who were standing there looking down on their son with expressions of worry so intense that it bordered on terror. She looked back and forth between them and her brother for a moment before dragging the unoccupied chair sitting in the corner over to the side of the bed and dropping into it like a stone. She took Barry's hand in hers and gave it a squeeze, hoping that, somewhere in the depths of his coma, he would feel it and know that even if she had been late, she was here with and for him now.
The next thing Kara knew, someone was shaking her awake. She didn't know when she'd fallen asleep, or how long she'd been out, but a quick glance around the room told her that it had been long enough for it to have emptied of everyone but her, her brother, and her parents. Then she realized that her mother was standing over her, one hand on her shoulder, studying her face with gentle concern.
"We need to go, honey," she said, voice soft, regret tinging her words. "Visiting hours are ending soon."
"No," Kara said, leaning away from Nora as much as she could manage without moving away from Barry or letting go of his hand. "I need to be here for Barry. He needs to know that I'm here. Please don't make me leave him."
"If we don't leave, they're going to kick us out," Nora explained, the regret that tinged her voice turning into sympathy and something that sounded like sorrow. She didn't want to leave Barry any more than Kara did, but somehow that didn't change her stance.
"Please," Kara whispered. She glanced frantically back and forth between Henry and Nora, silently begging just one of them to budge, to change their minds and let her stay with Barry. Neither of them did, and the next thing she knew they each had a hand on one of her arms and were gently and carefully guiding her up out of her chair. Kara knew that she could resist, that if she planted herself and simply refused to move, there'd be nothing Henry or Nora could do to make her, and nothing anyone on the hospital staff could do either, but she found that all the fight had gone out of her.
"Let's go, sweetie," Nora said, draping an arm across her shoulders and walking her out of the room. "We can come back tomorrow. I promise."