Prompt from Eddies Spaghetti. Eddie and his task force capture a very injured Flash (probably because of Captain Cold) and bring him down to the station and unmask him. Barry is dying and coming in and out of consciousness.

I have a rather depressing idea of what's going to happen when he time travels, and I'm including it. This turned out really long because of it.

Our favorite hero just can't seem to catch a break. Oh well, I get another chance to make you cry. This'll be fun, for me.

Dying was not on his to do list that day. But, is it really on anyone's? Well, technically if they're suicidal-never mind, it's not important-well, it's actually really important especially to those people's families and everyone around them, but it doesn't really relate to the story.

Anyway, it wasn't his idea to even come up against Captain Cold again. He wasn't planning on any confrontation. Barry wasn't expecting Eddie's task force to show up. Nothing about today had gone how Barry thought it should. Not like things had really gone according to plan for a while, but Fate didn't really seem to care.

Sorry, back to the beginning.

"Barry." Caitlyn guided him over to a chair, looking serious. Barry was not looking forward to this conversation.

Three days ago he had finally managed to travel back in time to when the Reverse Flash had murdered his mother, and he had not been acting right since. He still went out of his way to save people, running into burning buildings, chasing bad metahumans, even getting a trapped cat out of a tree for a crying little girl, but he still hadn't said a word about what had happened. Obviously, they all knew he had failed to save his mother as they hadn't seen her, and their reality had not changed at all.

"Hey, Bear."

Great Joe's here too. Is this an intervention or something? Barry thought to himself, looking around the room filled with his friends, everyone in Central City who knew who he really was.

"Barry," Dr. Wells started. "We," He gestured to everyone, "think that you need to take a break."

"Son, you've been through something terrible. You need to take a short break, you need to relax, and Bear, you need to be able to-to grieve." Joe's eyes were filled sadness on behalf of his son.

"You guys, you don't know what happened. I-I need to be out there. I need to be doing something." Barry couldn't met the eyes of any of his friends, so he kept looking down.

"Then tell us Barry. Let us in." Caitlyn said softly.

Barry opened his mouth ready to tell them, but he couldn't do it. How could he?

"Barry, we're here for you. We're your friends." Cisco looked unsure of whether or not he should say anything.

"He's right Barry." Caitlyn's words put both Cisco and Barry slightly more at ease.

"You all think I failed, but I didn't. I saved her." Barry didn't even get the first word out before he started crying again. He could see the confused looks on all of his friends' faces, but they stayed respectfully silent. "But-But then I came back to the future, expecting everything to be even better than before, but it wasn't. I came here first, but here didn't exist. STAR Labs had been torn down after the explosion. I went looking for you three trying to figure out why, but . . . I found obituaries for Caitlyn and Cisco. Dr. Wells, it was like you had disappeared off the face of the Earth. I ran home and found strangers. I went to the precinct, and I saw your picture on the wall. I tried to find Eddie to ask what had happened, but I couldn't find him. Then I went to the news station to talk to Iris, and no one had even heard of her. I ended up Google-ing her too, and-and" Barry was sobbing at this point. "She had passed away too." He glanced up at the others briefly, but he couldn't handle the looks on their faces. "Saving my mom had someone killed everyone else that I care about. I-I went back in time and stopped myself from changing the past the first time. I saved my mom, but in the end I had to let her die. I let my own mother die."

There was not a dry eye in the room, though no one was in as bad of shape as the man who had had to live through it.

Barry felt his foster dad's strong arms wrap around him in a comforting embrace. "I'm so sorry, son. I'm so sorry." He had no idea what to say. There was no real comfort for what his son had just gone through, and no one could really give him advice because there was no one else in the world that had gone through that.

That was how Barry found himself confined to the house with hot chocolate, even though it was the middle of the summer, and home movies some from before he had moved in and some from after. It was hard to tell the difference between the ones that were the Allen's and the Wests' because Barry and Iris were both in almost all of them. This had been Joe's idea of 'good grieving time.' After Barry had told them all the story they got him to agree to take a few days off from work and from saving people.

At least until he saw something that shouldn't have been possible. Snart had found himself a new cold gun, and he was in the neighborhood. Where in the world had he gotten a new one? Hadn't Cisco destroyed the last one? It didn't matter. Snart has it, and it's a problem.

Knowing that everyone would be mad at him for not staying put but wouldn't really be able to argue because the last time he had ignored Snart a lot of people had been hurt, he took off in the direction he had seen Captain Cold going.

"So soon, Flash?" He sneered. "I thought I was going to have to kidnap another one of your little friends again."

"Where'd you get the new gun?"

"I memorize the inner workings of my weapons, and I do it well enough to build new ones as needed." His smile lacked light and amusement, leaving it empty.

Snart raised the gun, and Barry ran to dodge it. Unfortunately Snart had learned more than one thing about fighting the Flash. The gun had never been aimed straight at Barry. It had been aimed slightly to the right, so when he ran to dodge the cold, he actually ran straight into it.

"Gaahh!" He yelled as the pain surged through him, effectively slowing him down.

Barry ran to try to get on the offensive. He only managed to get in a few weaker than usual hits before the cold was aimed his face, and he found himself crying out in pain again. He collapsed on the ground, struggling to breathe. Captain Cold shot him again while he laid on the ground. Barry managed to get to his feet and run at Snart. He fought like a dying man, which, he finally realized, he was. If he was going to die, he was going to take Snart down. Barry was going to make absolute sure that he would be the last person Snart ever had a chance to hurt.

He found new strength in his resolve and got an advantage. Snart had to devote more energy to defending himself, but Barry was already a dead man. He could afford a weaker defense even if he couldn't afford to not have one. Barry zipped around the other man throwing punch after punch. He knew he had broken several of Snart's ribs and probably caused internal bleeding because Snart had to shoot and fight back with only one hand as the other held his middle where the ribs were the weakest.

The cops arrived near the end of the fight. Eddie was there but not Joe. They found Leonard Snart, a criminal who had long alluded them, lying next to the unconscious body of the Flash.

"You do realize that we have to bring in both of them, thanks to your task force." One of the officers jabbed at Eddie.

"The task force was made after the Flash attacked him and Iris. We still don't know why that happened." Another defended him.

"I remember it a bit differently. He left Iris alone, and he went after Eddie because Eddie was already trying to form the task force against him."

"Either way, now we know that he's on our side. Would we really press charges? There must be some kind of reason for what he did beyond Eddie trying to organize a task force."

Eddie just stared at the scene in front of him in shock as the officers bickered. He had heard similar arguments since the police had fought alongside the Flash against the same man who was now lying beaten on the ground.

The Flash began to stir, and Eddie knelt by his side.

"Hey-hey there Flash. You beat him. You won, but we've got to get you to the hospital or something." Eddie tried to sooth the fallen hero, but the words in vain.

"I'm dying, Eddie but thanks." The Flash still vibrated his voice, but even that was weak.

"No, don't talk like that. You're going to be fine. We'll get you the help you need. It's really the least we can do."

Eddie was surprised at how much he was choking up and the tears desperately trying to escape from his eyes. He knew the Flash was dying just as well as Barry did. Eddie had hunted this man, but even after he had stopped hunting him, he never realized just how much his perspective of the man beside him had changed. No one cries over a man they hunted, but it's not unreasonable to cry over a comrade. No, that was not what this was, and Eddie knew it even if he didn't want to admit it. He was near tears over the body of a friend whose name he didn't even know. It was strange, Eddie didn't even know when he had started considering the masked hero a friend, and now he was losing him. How did this happen? Why did this happen?

"I heal pretty darn fast, Eddie, but these wounds aren't healing at all. The cold from the gun didn't just slow me down while running, it slowed my healing as well. Slowed it to a stop." The Flash appeared to be only on the brink of consciousness. Eddie shook his head. "I need you to promise me something."

Eddie nodded.

"I know that you have to take me in and unmask me and everything like that, but you cannot, cannot let Iris see me for any reason."

Eddie looked like he wanted to protest about taking him in, but he knew he would have to. Hero or not, the Flash was a vigilante, Eddie's a cop, the cop who requested the task force against said hero to top it all off.

"I promise. But I have to ask, why don't you want her to see you? She would want to know what you have done. Eventually she would know something was up or give up on you or something when you stop showing up. Don't you want her to know that you died saving the city, keeping her and everyone else in it safe as well?" Eddie was at a loss.

"It will make sense once you know who I am. I want her to know that I'm gone to keep her form looking for me, but I don't want her to see me. Either way she'll figure out who I am, but just don't let her see me." With those words out of his mouth, Barry faded into unconsciousness once again.

Eddie scooped up his limp body and carried it toward his police cruiser. Placing the body gently in the backseat, Eddie drove to the precinct without bothering to look at whether or not the other officers had followed suit. They had.

A commotion arose as Eddie carried the still unconscious form of the Flash into Captain Singh's office. It was a bit more private than outside, still a crowd had gathered around the window into the office.

Eddie took the liberty of closing the blinds in the captain's office.

When Joe began to cry and scooped the body out of his tiring arms, Eddie realized who the Flash was and why it was so easy to call him a friend. Knowing it was the goofy, science-loving, best friend of his girlfriend who was dying, made the pain he felt triple.

Tears were streaming down Joe's face.

"Let him pass on as himself rather than just a man behind a mask." The Captain said looking at the mourning faces of those around him. He had barely even seen the Flash.

Eddie did as Captain Singh said. Carefully he drew the mask away from the nearly dead man in Joe's arms. His partner's tears only increased at the sight of his son's face. Minutes passed in silence until Joe's tears became sobs as Barry's life began to drift away from his body, and he breathed his last shallow breath.

It had been days since Iris had heard from Barry. She had even deigned to ask Linda, his new girlfriend, if she knew where he was or what he had been up to. The only response she had gotten was 'I was just about to ask you, you're his best friend.' That had not only made her feel like a bad best friend, but also filled her with a sense of dread that would not go away, and she couldn't even talk to Eddie about it because, well it felt awkward to talk to him about anything Barry related, and Eddie had been acting odd for a while.

Just to pile onto her troubles, her boss had been asking why she hadn't written anything Flash related, and that just reminded her that he too had disappeared. Would Eddie and her dad go missing as well?

When Joe walked into the news building wearing a devastated face, Iris's mind immediately started running through worst possible cases, but never once did she think Barry and the Flash were dead. That was something that could only be in the nightmares she had on the darkest possible nights.

Barry could have slipped back into his coma, he might have been kidnapped, he might have some serious disease, he might have amnesia, or he might have gotten into an accident. Her mind continued to run through the possibilities as her father slowly walked towards her.

"Hey baby girl." Her father wrapped her in a hug, and she finally let herself believe what she knew to be true.

"How?"

"Honey, what I'm about to tell you it-it isn't something that's going to be easy to hear." Joe drew himself out of the hug and led Iris to a staircase out of anyone else's earshot and made her sit down. "This will only really make sense if you first know that Barry is . . . was the Flash." Joe watched as his daughter's eyes widened then filled with realization. "He was fighting Leonard Snart, or Captain Cold as Cisco named him. He fought bravely, a-and he took Snart down, but Barry . . . " Joe had to stop. His eyes had once again filled with tears and he found it nearly impossible to speak. "Barry didn't make it, baby. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

Joe sat himself down next to his little girl and held her as they both cried.

Barry. Barry loveable, goofy, smart Allen. How could the world go on normally and still be full of color when he was gone? The world should be shrouded in black. Barry Allen had been ripped from the world far too soon, and yet the world did nothing to even acknowledge it.

She didn't even get a chance to say goodbye. She didn't get a chance to ask him if he really meant what he said about not loving her anymore. She didn't get to find out what it felt like to finally have the right person's lips crash onto hers. What was life without Barry? Even when he was in a coma for nine months she could at least talk to him, see him, and touch him. Iris could at least hold onto the hope of him waking up and coming back to her. Now there was no hope. Iris didn't think that she would ever feel hope again or joy for that matter. Barry brought light into her life, and now that he was gone, she was left in darkness. Darkness with a sickening amount of color.

Life was nothing without him.