The next day, Kara returned to the hospital, accompanied by Henry and Nora. Reaching Barry's room, she planted herself in the same chair she'd been sitting in the day before, determined to stay there for as long as humanly- or inhumanly, in her case- possible. Since she'd taken the only chair, it took Henry and Nora a few minutes to find somewhere to situate themselves, but eventually they settled in, Henry seated on the windowsill, his feet flat against the floor, Nora perched on the edge of Barry's bed, across from where Kara sat. No one spoke- Barry's room had the heavy, sacred silence of a temple or a tomb, and none of them dared break it.
Kara, for her part, fell into her work, which she'd brought along with her. She was lucky to have an editor who wasn't much of a stickler about whether or not her reporters came into the office. As far as she was concerned, so long as they met their deadlines, they could work from wherever they wanted. Kara had never been more grateful for that policy than she was right now. Her work gave her something to do, something to focus on besides how worried she was about her brother, and she welcomed the distraction. She soon settled in, and hour after hour passed her by, broken only by brief breaks for meals, until the end of visiting hours came again. Though she didn't want to, this time Kara left without protest, understanding the importance of doing so for both courtesy and appearances' sake.
The pattern repeated itself the next day, and the day after that- Kara came to the hospital at the start of visiting hours and sat with her brother until they were over, sometimes with her parents, sometimes without. Things on as what had become normal in the days since the particle accelerator explosion, with no change in Barry's condition. Then, on the fourth day, things took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse. Kara was on one of her brief trips outside the hospital, getting lunch, when her phone rang.
"You need to get back here as fast as you possibly can," Nora said on the other end when she answered it. Her voice trembled. "It's Barry. Something's- something's happening."
"I'll be right there," Kara said. She hung up the phone and bolted for the door of the restaurant, all thoughts of lunch forgotten. She ducked into a nearby alleyway and glanced around to make sure there was no one nearby before launching herself into the sky. This time, she didn't care about the risk of being seen- her mother had made it clear that she needed to be at the hospital right now. Her brother needed her, and she wasn't going to fail him again.
Kara arrived at Barry's hospital room to find Nora and Henry standing out in the hallway, Nora with a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob, her eyes glimmering with tears, Henry with his arms around her, holding her tightly, clearly trying to offer her comfort in whatever little ways he could. From inside the room came the repeated high pitched whine of a defibrillator charging and the sound of doctors calling out to one another in loud, urgent voices.
"What's going on?" Kara asked. She sounded panicky, even to her own ears, but it couldn't be helped.
"Barry, he-he was fine one moment," Nora replied, her voice wavering, "and the next...he-he-he- went into cardiac arrest. The doctors were able to restart his heart, but then he started to flatline again a minute later, and it keeps happening over and over again. The doctors… they don't know what's wrong. There's nothing in his scans. Other than the fact that he's in a coma, he should be functioning perfectly fine. They can't figure out what's causing this." An agonized expression flashed across Henry's face, and Kara realized that it must be killing him that, as a doctor himself, he didn't know what was happening to Barry any more than the ones working so desperately to keep him alive did, that, for all his medical knowledge, and skill with healing, he couldn't help his son any more than they could.
"They can't save him," a voice behind them said suddenly, a voice that Kara was surprised to recognize as that of Harrison Wells. They turned, and sure enough, there he was, sitting in the motorized wheelchair he'd been put in a result of the accelerator explosion, watching the scene before him with an inscrutable expression.
"They can't save him," he repeated when he saw that he had their attention. "But I can." The Allen family closed ranks, moving to stand shoulder to shoulder, blocking access to Barry's room.
"Why the hell should we believe anything you say?" Henry demanded. "Your accelerator just nearly destroyed the city! How can we possibly trust you?"
"Those doctors in there, they have no idea what's going on," Wells said instead of answering the question, pointing over Henry's shoulder at the room behind him. "But I do. Let me take Barry to STAR Labs. It's the only place with the resources and personnel necessary to save him. If you want your son to make it through this, I'm your only option." He spoke in the smooth, unhurried manner of someone who believed, with absolute conviction, what they were saying. Silence followed his words while he waited for Henry and Nora to make their decision. Kara watched him for a moment, as if somehow her xray vision would allow her to see what his true motives were, before turning her head to study her parents as they mulled over his words. She wasn't sure that they could trust Wells, but as he'd said, they didn't have any other options. Nevertheless, she waited to see what her parents would decide.
"All right," Henry finally said, speaking for both himself and Nora. "Do what you have to do. Save our son, no matter what it takes."