This chapter occurs on the same night as and after the events of last chapter. Reviews are hugs :) Enjoy!
As Caitlin drove home, she nodded to herself. She could pretend that the almost-kiss had never happened, and she could be the apparently only friend Barry had who he could be completely open and honest with. Was that exactly what she wanted? No, but making sacrifices was what friends were meant to do for each other, and considering that Barry did so all the time for complete strangers, her doing so for a man she'd come to consider one of her closest friends wasn't that much of a stretch.
She sucked her lip a little and winced at the residual pain her bite had left. She instinctively wanted to bite it again, but the tip of her tongue would, for now, have to make do as a substitute.
Her mind trailed back to what Barry, Cisco and Joe had said about Dr Wells earlier that night. Briefly shutting her eyes in an attempt to prevent those thoughts turning into anger, she let out a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a grunt. They were all really smart people, but even smart people were wrong sometimes. Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie… all very smart, successful people in their own right who had made mistakes and failed at one time or another. Now was obviously just one of those times for her friends.
However, as Caitlin halted suddenly at the red light she almost didn't notice, another thought occurred to her. She and many other people, Dr Wells included, considered herself "smart". She knew all too well that she, also, was capable of making mistakes. Could this possibly be one of her less-than-enlightened moments? Going by the collective opinions of a group of very smart people, one of which had superpowers, the odds were three to one. The notion sent a sickening chill down the doctor's spine. The feeling proceeded to slide down her limbs, reaching the very tips of her extremities, and even to climb up into her skull, where it coiled itself up and became a throbbing headache. Blinking rapidly, the defeated scientist pulled over as soon as the traffic lights glowed green.
Caitlin closed her now-reddening eyes and leaned forward onto the steering wheel, covering her face like a toddler playing hide-and-seek. She was now beginning to feel just as helpless and naïve as one, and was, in fact, attempting to hide from something; the pain. That was, after all, what she'd been doing for over a year now, what with her destroyed career and relationship with Ronnie. Admittedly, her levels of success in doing so had varied; some days she'd come close to choking on her own tears, not being able to stop crying until she'd reached dehydration levels which she, as a doctor, knew to be dangerous; other days, she'd been able to keep herself just busy enough to not feel anything. For months, to her, a day in which she'd felt nothing was an achievement in itself, as was a faked smile, or a phone call to her parents in which she'd been able to lie believably enough to convince them that yes, she was doing okay.
All that had been keeping the heartbroken doctor from falling into the chasm of insanity during those terrible months, she realised, were her boys; Cisco, Barry and Dr Wells. Cisco, for his friendship and shared grief over losing Ronnie; Barry, for the dim ember of hope he represented that something could be salvaged from the wreckage this disaster had left in its wake; and Wells, for the bond of trust and loyalty the two shared that not even a particle accelerator-induced explosion or lightning bolt could destroy. It was then that she knew; her friends were wrong. She was right this time. She had to be. Wells was and always had been an intelligent, caring, compassionate man whose only wish was to make a difference to the world, and none of these qualities, she recalled, had been so evident as they were in the nine months following the explosion. All his apologies, all his consoling hugs, and all his compensation offers to her and other victims' family members, she decided, were more than enough to convince her that he was a good man who wasn't possibly capable of homicide.
Looking after a man in a coma wouldn't have been an easy task in "normal" circumstances, much less the "impossible" scenario that Barry's body had found itself in, but caring for him had been, funnily enough, exactly what Dr Snow had needed. With her beloved fiancé now dead (or so she'd thought at the time), she'd needed a distraction, she'd needed something to look after, and she'd needed to feel needed. A comatose victim of a lightning strike had provided her with all of those things.
The first day, she realised, that she'd felt anything better than nothing since the explosion had been the day that Barry woke up. He had been the first success story her career had brought her in what felt like centuries. To have seen life as opposed to mere survival at last course through her patient's body after months of inaction, months of seizures and (what appeared to be) cardiac arrests, months of her almost hoping that he'd just freaking die already and give the Wests some closure; to have called that moment wonderful would have been an understatement.
Knowing what she now knew about Barry's health, his abilities and how he was using these to help others, she let out a shaky sigh whilst a wave of nausea crashed and immersed her as she remembered all those days that she'd almost hoped would be Barry's final. Almost, but not quite hoped, for two reasons; firstly, because hope was at that time a foreign feeling to her, and secondly, because she had had almost-hope that Barry would, in fact, be okay. It was a paradox, she realised, that at that time she couldn't completely hope for one thing because she couldn't completely hope for the exact opposite thing.
Her headache sharpened, jolting her like an electric shock and snatching her from her thoughts. That was shortly followed by a pained squeal that, had Caitlin not been alone in her car, she would have thought someone else had made. Looking around in desperation, one small stray tear managed to snake its way haphazardly to meet the left corner of her mouth before Caitlin's cheeks became riverbeds. It wasn't until she began coughing and shaking as though she were having an asthma attack during an earthquake that she even noticed that she was crying. She was too lost in the horrible flashbacks of the night of the explosion, and what she now knew to be the longest and hardest nine months of her life. The hours spent lying in bed, racking her brain for a reason to get up at all; the spontaneous bouts of crying that had left her on the floor in the foetal position, with a sticky face, dry mouth, throbbing head, aching chest and salty lips; the sea of black suits and dresses at Ronnie's funeral that had almost drowned her; the harassing questions, prodding microphones and searing camera flashes of the press that mercilessly confronted her everywhere she went for the first few weeks; the long, silent stares shared with Cisco in place of their usual friendly banter that wouldn't have felt right without Ronnie's contribution, and through which the two were nearly always simply asking each other, What now?
In an attempt to break this circuit of emotions conducting these memories, memories that she'd many times woken up hoping were nightmares, she found and pinned down the memory of seeing Barry's gorgeous green eyes spring back to life for the first time. They were, in fact, gorgeous eyes, Caitlin reassured herself. But the memory served to make the distressed doctor's predicament worse, as one of her heartstrings was yanked by her recollection of the look of terror that was the first one she witnessed Barry wearing. Although this expression had been temporary, and one that she'd seen on several of her patients' faces before him, it served to make her closely consider, for the first time, just why he looked like that. He'd missed out on almost a year of his life. As a doctor, she was very familiar with the simple fact that life was short; how could she possibly comprehend what it was like to have nine months of such a short life just ripped away?
Dr Snow felt her tear ducts going into overdrive once more as a little pang of jealousy struck her heart. She would've given anything to have not been forced to live through those nine months, to have herself been the one in the coma. She had also lost almost a year of her life; the difference was that she'd had to sit idly by and actually watch all those dreadful days and sleepless nights drain away at a snail's pace. But Barry had gotten a lucky break, an easy out, as well as superpowers!
She smacked the horn in frustration, before sinking back into her seat as if it were quicksand and staring blankly out the window. Logic and reason beginning to re-enter her mind, it occurred to her that Barry, of all people, had really needed an easy out. He'd lost someone close to him too, and unlike Ronnie, Nora Allen was definitely not coming back. Although Ronnie and Caitlin's engagement was essentially over and things would never be the same between them again, at least she had the comfort of knowing that he was alive. And that her father wasn't serving a life sentence for a crime that he didn't commit. And that the guy she'd been in love with had loved her back and not hooked up with someone else during those nine months. A cringe like that of a sad clown spread across Dr Snow's face as, quietly, tears began to fill her eyes once more, but tears that this time carried in them a different emotion; guilt.
Before she knew it, her phone was sandwiched between her trembling hand and her sticky cheek, and she was impatiently waiting for her call to be answered. On what was probably the final ring before the call would have been sent to voicemail, a tired, croaky voice said her name.
Her small sobs causing her to stutter a little, she answered, "Hey. Barry, l-listen to me."
Her palm flew up to catch her still aching head after she registered that her voice had broken on the last syllable.
"Where are you?" he responded, his heroic concern evident in his voice.
As her sobbing became harder and more obvious, she whispered, "I'm not home yet, I'm on the side of the road. But-"
Her sentence was left unfinished, as the next sound she made was a surprised squeak when she heard a knock on her window.
Startled, she visibly jumped in her seat. Her shoulders slumped, however, and the rest of her body began to relax when she found herself face to face with Barry through the glass.
The doctor mentally kicked herself for being surprised at Barry's flashing over to find her the second that he sensed something was wrong with her.
After hanging up the phone and opening her window, she remarked, "That was fast, even for you," in a futile attempt to draw his attention away from how soaked her face was in tears and smeared makeup.
An open window, however, wasn't enough for the speedster. As he opened her door, he mumbled, "I know the way to your apartment, you know. That, along with when something is seriously wrong with the other person, is something that good friends tend to know about each other. And see, I have this strange tendency to move extremely fast when someone I care a lot about has something seriously wrong with them. Please get out and talk to me now."
She awkwardly stepped out, a bit unsteady on her feet as she did so, and leaned on the side of her car, grimacing as the cold air hit her wet face. He closed the door with, then laid on her shoulder one hand, as he used the other to wipe her face, before wrapping her snugly in his arms as she shook her head and whimpered while more tears escaped.
"This isn't just about the Dr Wells thing, is it?" he spoke softly, her shoulder now tucked under his chin.
She sniffed before pulling away enough to look up into his eyes, but not so much so that his arms weren't still around her.
She spoke swiftly as she said, "No, it isn't, and while I still disagree with you on that matter, what I wanted to say before was that I'm sorry. While you were in that coma, those were the absolute worst nine months of my life, and all I did during them was feel sorry for myself, when really you have had it so much worse than I have, and for that I'm sorry. I am so sorry Barry."
She wasn't sure if she was just seeing things through her watery eyes, but it looked to her like Barry was himself tearing up as he pulled her in. He then held her like he was holding on for dear life, for what felt like centuries.