Glad you all are open to this darker Barry! Placing this story at this point of the show was delilberate, because I think in the wake of everything Zoom has done, the realization that Zoom is this man that Barry knows and trusts is the tipping point. Zoom is not a monster, but a man who is fallible (and terrible!) and that first hit of V9 really showed Barry that there was a power within his grasp to make him good enough to save the people he loves and transcend the "weak" part of him that was unable to stand up against that man.

That was a lot longer than I intended! All of that just to say thanks for the open mind, and it's going to keep getting worse! Buckle up!

Enjoy!

Halfway back to STAR, Barry paused for breath. It was hard to tell, now, how long the break was—one minute, or two seconds?—but it was just enough for him to feel the gap where pure power had been just minutes before. Dread of loss, so thick it momentarily choked him, welled up in its place. He hefted the unconscious meta over his shoulder and sped the rest of the way to the lab.

His arrival was so swift that Caitlin and Cisco both shrieked. However, he took no heed, depositing the meta roughly on the floor.

"Here's Sonic Boom," he said dully. His heart still raced, but, thankfully, the lightning along his arms had faded. Traces of panic laced his thoughts; could they tell that the drug was still in his system?

Caitlin frowned, but her concern, thankfully, was directed at the meta on the floor. "He looks pretty roughed up," she said. "What did you do to him?"

Barry shrugged. "Super sonic punch."

"His ears are bleeding," Caitlin said. She kneeled down next to him, checked his pulse, furrowed her brow.

"What about the other one?" Cisco said. "The metal-melty one?"

The sounds of the building collapsing rang in Barry's ears. "I don't think he made it. The building fell on top of him."

Cisco flinched. Caitlin looked up. "You couldn't get him out of the way?"

Again, a shrug. "I can't save everyone." It was something the slower Barry would say. It felt rehearsed.

At the computer bank, Cisco tapped a few times. "Jeez, Barry…reports are coming in now that almost 400 people were rescued from that building. That was all you?"

Barry nodded.

"Wow." Cisco rubbed at his brow, eyes fixed on the computer screen, dumbfounded. "You feeling alright? You were going a lot faster than usual."

"Fine. Just a little winded." It was true. The weightlessness he had felt before was crashing down, and the buzzing in his bones that had once comforted him now made him feel unstable. The extreme output of energy from rescuing the people from the building had burned away most of the drug, he knew, and he felt short of breath from either panic or exertion.

"That's probably normal," Caitlin said, rising and moving toward him. "Like Cisco said, you were going exceptionally fast, even for you."

"Could it be a side effect of…?" Cisco swallowed his own words, cautious.

"A side effect of the V9 a few days ago?" Caitlin said coolly. "Could be. There could still be traces, like we said. It should wear off soon." She reached up and placed the back of her hand on Barry's forehead. Electricity popped, and she drew back her hand at the shock.

"I'll take this guy downstairs." Barry pulled away from her before she could comment and took deliberately slow steps toward the fallen meta. "You two should get home. It's been a long day."

Down the hallway he could feel every footfall, each one rattling up through him, radiating a dull ache that originated somewhere in his legs. Everything was falling back into solidity, and it hurt.

He dropped the meta in a pipeline cell and closed it. The door shut with a squeal and a hiss. Grating.

On his way out, he passed Eliza's cell. They made eye contact, and she blinked at him. An empty syringe lay at her side.

A rush of anger, then of shame, then of need. He broke eye contact and broke away.

He was too fast for Cisco and Caitlin to see him in the cortex again, skimming more V9 from the last vial into a new syringe. Even if they did notice the missing amount, they would never catch him. That was the beauty of it.

And, again, with burning in his veins, he was running.

"Just so we're clear, after I kill you, I'm going to kill them. And then I'm going to kill your father. I always win, Flash."

"You like to fish with bait. I do too."

"Goodbye, Flash. You, too, weren't fast enough."

Linda, Joe, Iris, Cisco, Caitlin, Eddie, Ronnie. They all lay around him with holes in their chests, holes made by vibrating fists, more devastating than knives or guns. The bodies were the only things that remained in a crumbling city. Central City, brought to ashes. The debris choked Barry, congealed in his own chest.

Zoom, demon-like, stood opposite Barry across the sea of bodies. If he didn't have the mask on, the monster might have been grinning. Perhaps there was a grin beneath the mask, on Jay's face.

"You did this," Barry choked. "You killed them."

Zoom laughed. "You—you were never fast enough, were you?"

Barry sank to his knees, his throat dry in the fiery world he had tried so hard to protect, eyes burning as he stared at the bloody, fist-shaped holes.

When he looked down at his hands, they were the ones that were vibrating.

He awoke shaking so violently that he rattled the couch. He shot upright and panicked, feeling inexplicably constricted, before realizing that he'd gotten tangled up in a blanket. When he'd passed out on the couch near one in the morning, he hadn't even thought about a blanket, but Joe must have found him lying there and provided him one. There was also a large glass of water and several stacks of pancakes sitting on the coffee table, another signature Joe move when Barry would pass out haphazardly on the couch after a night of crimefighting. Usually he was eager to accept the offering, but this morning he looked at it and felt sick.

The blanket was damp with sweat, along with the suit—Barry hadn't even bothered to take it off, which might have been disastrous had Wally chosen that morning to visit. The shivers that wracked his body certainly weren't from cold, for a feverish kind of heat crawled up his back, up his throat.

Above all, the dream clawed into him. His mind was in a singular place, ringing alarm bells, blinding him with terror.

You can save them. The voice in the back of his head had grown louder with each dose of V9, and now he could practically visualize it in front of him. The fast Barry. The better Barry. The cold, calculating, monstrous Barry. You know now how to save them.

He tugged the sticky mask over his head and ran out the door so fast it busted its hinges.

The anxiety only built as he sprinted to the lab, and by the time he flew into the cortex it had manifested itself as a piercing ringing in his ears, so shrill it was actually painful. The cortex was empty, though it looked as if Caitlin or Cisco had been there recently, judging by the not-quite-warm computers and the bag slung over the back of one of the chairs. Better that they weren't there. Barry went instantly to the rack where the V9 tubes had been stored. When he saw that all of the vials were now empty, his heart plummeted to his stomach.

"No, no, no, no…" he muttered to himself, inspecting each one in turn for any miraculous drop of the red liquid, his distress growing with each failure. "Please…"

He was dying; he was sure of it. His muscles were on fire, his body ripping itself to pieces with shivers, sweat making his eyes burn. His stomach curled with nausea.

Then: rage.

He was down to the pipeline in an instant. Caitlin and Cisco were absent from there as well, but the signs of their recent visit were also present. In Eliza's cell, deposited along with an early lunch, was a syringe with the last bit of V9.

Eliza saw him at the other end of the hallway, glanced at the syringe, and went for it.

Barry got there first.

Even with the time it took to open the cell, the speed was incomparable. He was inside the cell and wrenching the syringe from her hand, driving it into his skin, before she could make a move. The familiar warmth rushed through him, immediately dispelling the anxiety and the shuddering, leaving only that fire in its place.

"You're sick," Eliza said, and in the initial haze of the drug, he couldn't tell whether it was a concerned or an fighting comment. Instead of responding, he dropped the syringe and sank against the back wall. He waited for the bliss, the power, to sink in, but Eliza's presence kept the rage simmering.

"I'm serious," she said.

"You're one to talk," he snapped. "You're the one who's been taking these doses religiously since you got here."

"You're sick," Eliza said, and this time it was definitively a spit. "I'm getting out of here."

Right. The door to the cell was still open. She stepped over the threshold, and Barry tackled her back to the ground.

"We've locked you here for a reason," he said. "You're dangerous."

"You're the one who's dangerous," Eliza said, squirming beneath him. "You think I don't know the signs of V9 addiction when I see them? Look at you. That was the last of it, I gather. Where are you going to get your next fix? Think stealing that last one from me is going to be the end of it?"

Though that thought had been lurking, untouched, in the back of his mind, it surfaced with full intensity now, and the weight of it seared behind his eyes. For an instant he was Barry Allen once more, and the thought of being trapped, of enduring the anxiety and the nausea and the powerlessness, overwhelmed him.

"Why did you do this to me?" he said in a strangled voice. "Why?"

"You deserved it."

"I didn't." This was punctuated by a shake to her shoulders. "I was trying to help you."

"Look at how desperate you are," Eliza wheezed. "You're not the hero everyone thinks you are."

A monster was cracking through the surface, and for a moment all Barry could see was the images from his dream, a spiral that he could never escape from. "You did this to me."

Hurt, fury, and desperation welled up inside him and burst out of his skin. He gripped Eliza by the shirt and dragged her away. Her weight meant nothing to him, because he was weightless again, and stronger than her, stronger than the V9. He had to be stronger than the V9. He refused to believe that it was the other way around.

Still, she gripped his hand, pried at his fingers, and it was something of a nuisance. On one of the downtown streets he finally let her go, flinging her outward and watching as she tumbled down the asphalt. A taxi screeched around her, and civilians on the sidewalks gasped accordingly. But they didn't matter. They didn't exist.

Only Eliza, now bleeding down one side of her face, the sleeve of her jacket smoldering.

"You know how to cure this, surely," he called out to her, approaching slowly, like a giant cat. "Tell me, Eliza, truly, that you wanted this for yourself?"

Eliza spat out blood. "Look at you. Dragging around your victims like trophies. You're no better than the dark speedster."

"I. Am. Better." He rushed forward and caught hold of her, flinging her the other direction and watching in slow motion as she hit the windshield of a car. Lightning again crackled down his arms. A trapped part of him screamed in the back of his brain and went unheeded. He approached Eliza fast this time, coming up short just as she was picking herself off of the pavement.

Now there was fear in her eyes, and the beast at the forefront of Barry's mind roared in approval.

"Please," she said. "Stop. I surrender."

She held out a hand. Somewhere behind Barry, someone snapped a camera. The sound was impossibly crisp, filtered through the web of perception the V9 had created for him. He jerked toward the sound and wrested away the camera. An expensive one. One that news crews might have. It shattered on the ground into a hundred pieces. The civilian who'd been holding it careened backward onto the sidewalk at the force. Another cried for help, but the cry fell on deaf ears.

Barry rushed Eliza and wrenched her away again. A boom echoed in the wake of his departure, and broken glass rained down in the streets of the city.

Guys you don't know how much I agonized over where to place the cliffhanger-there were so many opportune moments. Think things can't get worse? Because THEY CAN. But you'll have to wait until Wedesday.

Thanks for reading!

Till next time,

Penn