We're getting a little darker, guys. Typical warnings for chapters apply-blood and injury, especially.

Enjoy!

The first thing to come back to Caitlin was sound. Not a sound she might expect, like voices or footsteps or music, but a high-pitched whine. It was comforting, in its own way, in its own static, unwavering nature. Soothing, predictable. Until it wasn't.

The whine turned into a painful drone as the other senses returned. Vision blurred into being, as did smell and taste. All of them were like ash. Ash in her eyes, ash in her nose, ash on her tongue. And ash, too, on her skin, which should have burned from the heat of the explosion but didn't. She realized why when she looked down at her hand: a thin, almost imperceptible layer of ice covered her body. It had perhaps once been thicker, but Jason's combustion had reduced it to what it was now. Just enough to keep her unscathed.

Well, not unscathed. Caitlin shook off the unsettling revelation that the serum had worked on her and focused on other things, namely getting to her feet. The blast had been powerful enough to knock her chair to the floor and blow loose her restraints, and she found herself sprawled on the concrete floor with bones made of jelly. She coughed up a lungful of smoke and pressed herself upward. Her arms could barely support her, so she crawled to the wall and used it to heave herself upright.

Once the dust had cleared her eyes enough to see further than her own hand, she surveyed the room. Soldiers and scientists alike lay on the floor, some groaning weakly and others still and silent. Caitlin locked onto the scientist who had been attending Jason, the one with the face so like Caitlin's. She was crumpled against the wall, her clothes and her hair smoldering, her glasses just a twisted mess of plastic on the floor.

It took all of Caitlin's will to look away. The place where Jason had once sat was nothing more than a pile of ashes, the kind of thing one might see at the end of a vaporizing gun in some old science fiction film. The other figure of note was Eiling, stirring feebly by the blown-open door, the rubble of one of the walls. His sleeve had caught fire in the blast, but it was just as well. Let him burn, she thought.

With a buzzing in her ears and smoke in her eyes, she stumbled out of the room and into the hallway. The facility wasn't big, and she'd seen which way, vaguely, Barry had been taken. He was the only thing that mattered now. Once she had him, she would be free.

Him, and Rose Canton. Though, now that the world had gone to hell around her, the likelihood of finding her once-captor seemed thinner than ever. Canton had been their mission, yes, but now—now the mission didn't feel important. The guilt of it clawed at Caitlin's already ragged insides, but she could not allow it to slow her down. Not now. Not when there was still a slim chance of recovering her friend. She was the last hope he had. With Cisco weakened, Iris shot in the arm—there was no telling if anyone would be able to help them anymore.

The hallways were so clouded with dust, and the confusion so palpable in the air, that Caitlin managed to proceed with relative invisibility. None of the soldiers she passed gave her much of a look, determined as they were to reach the site of the explosion, or the exit, depending on their disposition in the face of chaos. Caitlin couldn't blame them for running; the blast had shaken the entire foundation of the building, and the smoke was darker and thicker than any Caitlin had previously encountered.

Only when she reached a stairwell at the end of the hall did things start to level out. The smoke was thinner, alarms muffled, people all but nonexistent. She staggered into the new hallway, which looked more like a cellblock than anything, and paused to lean against the wall. Wiping the back of her hand across her forehead, she discovered that she was bleeding above her eyebrow, the red blood tainted and darkened by soot.

In that one, brief period of silence, she heard the screaming.

It was an unfortunate reality that she could identify, from experience, screaming that belonged to Barry. Without another thought of respite, she dipped forward and lurched toward the sound. Even though ice ran through her blood, she still felt fire, fire that made her lungs burn and her eyes spill over.

Rose Canton could have been behind any of the doors she passed, Caitlin would later muse, but she couldn't stop for anything. The screams guided her relentlessly forward. She managed to keep her feet long enough to find the right door, which she pushed open without a thought to what or who might lie in wait behind it.

Luckily there were only two people in the room: Barry, and a single scientist. This scientist was tall and blonde, with shadowed eyes when he spun toward her. His face flickered in the light from the contraption he was fiddling with. Barry, now shirtless and still covered in blood, convulsed on a table behind him. Electric shocks, Caitlin realized. She had seen evidence of the same treatment on Cisco.

"Turn it off," she said. After all of the smoke inhalation, her voice had turned husky. "Turn it off now."

He didn't. Barry wailed. The scientist and Caitlin stared at each other, stock-still, for a moment, wondering what the other would do.

Just back away, Caitlin wanted to say to him. You're not like the others. You can run away from all of this. Do what's right. You don't have to be like them.

However, she didn't say any of it. Before she could make a sound, the man rushed her. The attack was so unexpected, she didn't have a chance to move out of the way. The scientist grabbed her by the front of her shirt and tossed her to the ground, and the impact knocked what breath was left out of her body. His dark eyes flashed menacing, and determined.

I'm a scientist, too, Caitlin thought, wheezing. You don't have to do this.

But the man was already reaching for something, a walkie-talkie, and the electric currents continued their race through Barry's body. The screaming, the panic, turned Caitlin's stomach inside-out, and she flung herself forward. If the scientist called for help, it would be all over. The place would be flooded with soldiers, strong men and women with guns and batons and needles and knives. This scientist was larger than her by far, but he was only one man. And Caitlin didn't have time to think about the odds.

She caught him by the legs and clawed upward at his white lab coat, her weight enough to topple him sideways. In the tangle of falling limbs that followed, a knee caught Caitlin in the face, sending ringing pain through her cheekbone and temporarily stunning her.

Half-blinded by the tears that sprang to her right eye, she crawled toward the console in an effort to turn off the machine at least, but the scientist grabbed her by the hair and flung her back to the ground. Her lungs would not take in air: they smoldered and groaned with the effort. What little breath she did manage was soon stifled by a forearm pressed against her windpipe.

"Stay down," the scientist said, kneeling over her, his weight crushing against her throat. A droplet of his sweat spattered against Caitlin's cheek. "You're one of the new Subjects, aren't you? You're trying to escape?"

Caitlin choked, fingers scrabbling weakly at the arm that pinned her down. "Stop," she said. "Let us go. Please."

"Stay. Down."

The words were punctuated by a firm shove downward, surely bruising Caitlin's throat, rendering her utterly speechless. A shrieking sound assailed her. She thought it was Barry at first before realizing that it was her own blood, calling for release. Forces were moving underneath her skin, creeping outward, awakened. She was losing consciousness fast, and Barry's cries were fading.

Please don't please don't this can't be happening I won't let you hurt him I won't let you hurt us—

The pressure was released from her throat suddenly, the scientist moving as quickly as though he'd been burned. Caitlin blinked away the gathering darkness, watching him sluggishly. One arm he kept close to his chest, and the other groped upward, reaching again for the walkie-talkie.

No.

In a burst of last-ditch energy, Caitlin rolled to her stomach and dragged herself on hands and knees toward him. This time, it was him who couldn't react. She had just enough time to see what had shocked him—his arm, now coated in solid ice—before she fell forward and planted her hands on his chest.

His eyes widened as they met hers. She channeled as much of her desperation, her anger, her anguish as she could, hoped he would understand just through her eyes. For a moment, she thought that he did: his eyes remained wide and glassy, fixed on her.

Then it hit her all at once, that the eyes themselves were not glassy, not sparkling with warmth or life or even darkness anymore. She pulled away from the body. The scientist was encased in ice, stiff and cold in his last moments of shocked comprehension.

If Caitlin had been in any fit state to do so, she might have vomited. As it was, she watched the world tunnel out of existence for what could have been seconds, hours, years. An aggressive, domineering part of her wanted to black out, to make the image in front of her disappear for a time. But the scene came rushing back all the same, not quite reality anymore, something she was not entirely a part of.

Somehow, driven by a mindless goal, Caitlin found herself pulling herself to her feet and pressing a button on the console. All at once the persistent thrum of electricity halted, and Barry's thrashing devolved into a kind of dull twitching.

"Barry," she said automatically. "Are you alright? We have to go."

She was piloted now by some distant sense of purpose, a wheel that she could not stop from moving. Once it was over, she told herself vaguely. Once it was over, she could allow herself to process, to break down.

Barry groaned, moved his head stiffly to the side. It seemed ages before his eyes cracked open. "Need...some help."

Right. He was still secured to the table by leather restraints, not unlike those used to hold Caitlin. They were simple buckles, clearly not intended for long-time use, easy to unfasten and refasten as needed. Still, all at once the task of undoing them seemed daunting. She froze, breath caught in her throat, suddenly afraid of her own hands.

"Cait," Barry moaned, looking barely conscious. "Help."

She couldn't be afraid, not now, not when courage was so crucial. She took a deep breath and fumbled forward with the restraints, trying to balance caution with urgency. Barry had not seen what she'd done to the scientist—he had no reason to believe that she was not still herself.

When she'd unbuckled all of the many straps, she gingerly put her arm around Barry to help him sit up and scooch off of the table. Fear strangled her as her hands made contact with his bare skin. But he had always run hot, and the warmth felt surprisingly reassuring underneath her fingertips. As his heat radiated into her, some of the shock symptoms melted, as did much of her hesitancy and disorientation.

"I'm sorry it took me so long," she said honestly, as she helped Barry limp toward the doorway. "Things went a little...sideways."

"Mm." Barry leaned heavily on her. She wondered about the paralytic that had been on the barbed net. How long did they have until it immobilized him completely? Had the electricity slowed the process down or sped it up? No matter, she told herself. There was no way they had time to search for Canton, in any case.

"Can you run?" Caitlin asked.

"I…" Barry shivered under her touch. "I don't know, maybe. I don't think I can carry two people, though."

"It's fine," Caitlin said unconvincingly. "The mission is a bust anyway. I don't think we have time to look for Canton. We'll get back to STAR, regroup, figure things out from there."

But Barry halted. "Caitlin," he said in a voice barely above a whisper. When she followed his gaze upward, she saw what had caused his tone to fall so dramatically.

It turned out, they didn't have to search for Canton after all. No, she appeared in the flesh at the end of the hallway, standing so still she too might have been frozen, with Eiling's gun pressed to her temple.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you're ready...only one more chapter to go! I appreciate all of your comments!

Till next time,

Penn