Can I ask you a question?" Barry asked, eyeing his sister from across the kitchen table, where they were both working on their homework.

"I mean, you kind of just did," Kara replied, and there was no clumsiness in her speech, no trace of the fact that she'd grown up speaking a - quite literally- alien language the way there had been when she'd first become part of their family. "But sure. Go ahead.

"What were you called back on your planet?" Barry asked. In response to Kara's confused look, he clarified, "Before you became Kara Allen, what was your name?"

"Oh," Kara said in a small, quiet voice, with a sadness to it that was far deeper than her years. "It was Kara Zor-El."

"That's a pretty cool name," Barry said, offering her a smile, trying to cheer his sister up.

"Thanks," Kara replied in a whisper, and they went back to their homework.

Distant music drew Barry out of the memory and toward consciousness. As he neared it, the music grew louder and resolved itself into a particular song- Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" which seemed rather odd and out of place.

"What are you doing?" a woman's voice, not one he recognized, asked.

"He likes this song," a second voice, this one male, insisted.

"How could you possibly know that?" the woman demanded.

"I checked his Facebook page," the man replied. "I mean, he can hear everything, right?"

"Auditory functions are the last sensory faculties to deteriorate," the woman conceded. The man started singing along to the music, cutting himself off with a yelping cry of "Oh my God!" when Barry jerked upright, his full return to consciousness coming on sudden and fast.

"Where am I?" Barry asked.

"He's up," the woman said, ignoring him. That seemed like stating the obvious, but Barry was too confused and disoriented to comment on it. A short distance away, the man was shouting into a speaker- "Doctor Wells, get down to the Cortex like right now."

Doctor Wells? Barry wondered, the words somehow not computing in his brain. As he tried to puzzle them out, he realized that the woman was in the middle of examining him and her words finally filtered into his awareness "...110. Pulse 120. Pupils equally reactive to light." Her tone was brisk and clinical, like an ER doctor's. Maybe that's what she was. Barry couldn't be sure. He tried to get up from the bed he'd awoken in, but she pushed him back.

"Look at me," she said, her tone shifting to something almost calming. "Look at me."

"Hey, hey, hey," the man said urgently when Barry tried to get up again, rushing over to his bedside to help the woman, not push him back again, but ease him slowly and carefully upright. "Woah, relax. Everything's okay, man. You're at STAR Labs."

"STAR Labs…" Barry said, trailing off as he struggled to fit that information into the rush of it that was suddenly flooding his brain. "Who are you?"

"I'm Cisco Ramon," the man replied. "She's Caitlin- Doctor Snow."

"I need you to urinate in this," Doctor Snow proclaimed briskly, holding up a sample cup.

"Not this second," Cisco scolded, taking the cup from her.

"What happened?" Barry asked, still feeling incredibly confused. Nothing about this was making sense. He scrambled out of the bed and backed nervously away from Cisco and Doctor Snow.

"You were struck by lightning, dude," Cisco explained. He sounded oddly excited about it.

"Lighting… gave me abs?" Barry asked, puzzled, spotting himself in a nearby reflective surface.

"Your muscles should be atrophied, but instead they're in a chronic and unexplained state of cellular regeneration," Caitlin- Barry decided to call her Caitlin instead of Doctor Snow- said, still in that brisk, clinical tone.

"Come here, have a seat," Cisco put in, guiding Barry over to one of the rolling office chairs arranged around the room, which reminded him, now that he'd gotten a look at it, of Oliver's crime fighting lair in Starling City. He sat, not seeing any point in resisting.

"You were in a coma," Cisco explained once Barry was seated.

"For how long?" he asked.

"Nine months." The voice, which Barry was surprised to recognize as Harrison Wells', came from the doorway. All three of the people in it turned to see him there, in a wheelchair, smiling a strange, sad smile.

"Welcome back, Mr. Allen," he said. "We have a lot to discuss."

"It's hard to believe I'm here," Barry said in an excited rush as he walked beside Wells through one of STAR Labs' long, curving corridors a few minutes later. "I have always wanted to meet you face to face."

"Yeah?" Wells asked dryly. "Well, you certainly went to great lengths to do it. STAR Labs has not been operational since FEMA declared us as a class four hazardous location. Seventeen people died last night. Many more were injured, myself among them."

"What happened?" Barry asked. It was the second time he'd asked that question in the last fifteen minutes, and he suspected not the last time he'd ask it that day.

"Nine months ago, the particle accelerator went on exactly as planned," Wells answered. "For forty-five minutes, I had achieved my life's dream. And then… there was an anomaly. The electron volts became immeasurable, and the ring under us popped. Energy from that detonation was thrown into the sky, and that, in turn, seeded a storm cloud-"

"That created a lightning bolt, that struck me," Barry interjected.

"That's right," Wells confirmed. "I was recovering myself when I heard about you- the hospital was undergoing unexplainable power outages every time you were going into cardiac arrest, which was actually a misdiagnosis because, you see, you weren't flatlining, Barry. Your heartbeat was simply moving too fast for the EKG to register it."

"Now," Wells went on, "I'm not the most popular person in town right now, but your parents gave me permission to bring you here, where we were able to stabilize you. They were here frequently visiting you, along with your sister and Detective West and his daughter."

"Iris?" Barry asked.

"Iris, yes," Wells replied, with a tone of voice that implied he'd forgotten her name until Barry had brought it up. "She came to see you quite often." By this time, they had returned to the Cortex.

"She talks a lot," Caitlin put in as they entered, overhearing.

"Also, she's hot," Cisco added, apparently absentmindedly.

"I need to go," Barry said urgently. He was overcome with a sudden desire to go see Iris.

"No, you can't," Caitlin protested.

"No, no, no," Wells added. "Caitlin is right. Now that you're awake, we need to do more tests. You're still going through changes even we don't know."

"I'm fine, really," Barry insisted, backing toward doorway. "I feel normal. Thank you for saving my life." At that, he left. Behind him, he heard Caitlin ask "Really?" In the same instant, he realized he was about to walk out the door wearing a STAR Labs sweatshirt that didn't belong to him.

"Can I keep the sweatshirt?" he asked awkwardly, stepping through the doorway to the Cortex one last time.

"Yeah, keep the sweatshirt," Wells replied, only slightly grumpily.

"Okay," Barry said, still feeling awkward, and then he left the Cortex behind once more, heading for the exit and off to find Iris.