This chapter is a bit shorter, with a touch more questionable medicine, but-we're nearing the end! Thanks for sticking with it!
Enjoy!
A jolt of fear zinged through her, startling her eyes open—the cold, the sensation of waking up with no recollection of where she was, a sense that she was supposed to be afraid. Heart pounding, she lifted her head stiffly and realized she was not in the warehouse, but the STAR medical bay. She'd fallen asleep in a chair she'd pulled up between the beds, arms folded and head rested on the edge of Cisco's mattress. Her own hurts ached more than ever, but just as she started pulling herself back to stretch, she realized that Cisco was looking at her beneath half-lidded eyes.
"Sleeping beauty," he said, his words a bit slurred.
Caitlin got to her feet perhaps a bit too quickly—after all, she probably had a mild concussion herself. The dizziness overwhelmed her, and she sank back. While the doctor part of her wanted to run tests immediately, the emotional part of her was so relieved her legs trembled too much to support her.
"Especially with the black eye," Cisco continued belatedly. He blinked slowly. Tried to refocus.
"How do you feel?" Caitlin said, assessing these signs while simultaneously glancing up to read his vitals.
"Are you gonna ask me the name of the President and my birthday and all that?" Cisco said.
"Maybe in a little while," Caitlin said gently. The shadows beneath his eyes were so dark they looked as if they'd been created with eyeshadow. Sure, everything about him was cleaner—she'd bandaged up his bare chest and cleaned up most of the dried blood and dirt from his face—but the gauntness was perhaps more pronounced than ever.
After a slight pause, Cisco shifted, winced. "It hurts."
"Four of the fingers on your left hand are broken, and you have a pulmonary contusion," Caitlin explained. "On a scale of one to ten, how would you say—"
"Please," Cisco said. "Cait, I don't want a doctor right now. I want my friend."
A pause, then Caitlin softened. "Sorry. I can't give you much in the way of painkillers yet because of your concussion. What can I do to make you more comfortable?"
He blinked sluggishly again, eyes opening again in a half-squint. Somehow, he managed an awkward, one-shouldered shrug. Instead of answering, he looked past her. "Is Barry okay?"
Caitlin glanced back as well. Barry's heart monitor beeped steadily, if slower than usual. She'd stitched up the hole in his shoulder and put both legs in casts, and he too was drawn and pale.
"I'm working on it," Caitlin said. "Even with the power-dampening serum in his system, he went into hypoglycemic shock. I'm keeping an eye on him, but he should be fine. You both should."
Cisco's eyes lingered on Barry a moment longer before trailing lethargically to her. "And you?"
"I'm fine," Caitlin repeated for what felt like the millionth time.
"Right." Even in his low monotone, Cisco's sarcasm did not go unnoticed. His eyelids fluttered. "But you saved us, right?" He drew in a deep, ragged breath, and his eyes closed entirely. "Superhero Caitlin Snow."
"Let's not get carried away now," Caitlin stood again, this time with more success. She rested a hand lightly above his bruised wrist, her heart suddenly pained. "Get some rest, okay? I'll check up on you in a bit."
He was already gone.
Through she was certain that no amount of noise she could make would wake the man, Caitlin still moved as quietly as she could through the room. A glance at the clock revealed that it was almost eleven in the morning; she'd been asleep quite some time. A cursory check of Barry's wounds confirmed her suspicions that his speed healing was severely compromised, as the cuts to his face and arm hadn't sealed up at all. She looked over his vitals and adjusted one of the IVs in his arm. The numbers were better, but still not great—no matter how tempting it was, she didn't allow herself to think the word coma. She couldn't label that just yet.
Once she was mostly satisfied with what she saw, she tiptoed stiffly from the room. She'd fallen asleep immediately after finishing up her main treatment, which meant that the rest of the team still didn't know Barry and Cisco's status. And, with the snappy way she'd forced them to leave, they were probably too afraid to come in and check.
However, when she went out into the main room to inform them, she found that all three were fast asleep. Wells had elected to take a rest on one of the spare beds in an adjoining room of the cortex, but Iris and Joe sprawled haphazardly in chairs, Iris' head on Joe's knees and Joe's chin dropped to his chest. Caitlin recalled seeing a similar position many times in the nine months of Barry's coma, particularly in the early months when there was hope that just their presence was a healing factor. As with then, Caitlin let them rest; there was nothing to be accomplished now by disturbing them. Lord knew they all needed to recover from the stress and sleeplessness of the past few days.
She tiptoed past them to the computer bank and clicked on the screen. She held her breath as the image materialized.
You saved us. Superhero Caitlin Snow. You saved us.
In her cell, Canton tucked herself against the wall, sobbing.
Caitlin clicked off the screen and turned away.
The chair in the medical bay was sounding awfully appealing, so she made her way back across the room. Iris stirred in her seat, but her eyes didn't open. The cortex remained shrouded in darkness and in quiet and in dreams. It weighed down as a physical presence, almost stifling the heavy sense of dread lingering beneath Caitlin's ribs.
The world of sleep preceded every step until she closed the door behind her in the medical bay. To her surprise, Cisco's eyes were open again, wider than before. The heart monitor beside him beeped frantically. Still, despite the physical signs with which his body betrayed him, he kept his voice remarkably level.
"Is everyone okay?" he asked.
Caitlin stayed near the doorway, paralyzed by something unspeakable. "Everyone is fine," she replied. "There will be time to explain later. Try to get some sleep."
His mouth pressed into a hard line. He looked away, fixed his gaze on the ceiling. The heart monitor began to slow down, bit by bit, but Caitlin had heard how fast it had been going.
"Nightmare?" she asked.
Mutely, Cisco nodded.
Feeling almost too stiff and weighed down to move, Caitlin forced herself forward, back into his company, and collapsed in the chair. In the darkened med bay, she thought it wrong that the two beeping heart monitors acted as such a balm—so much had gone wrong, so much had gone off course, and the quiet and sterility soaked up the wake of calamity. A great, unattainable distance lay between the superheroes of chocolate bars and pop songs and the three battered, half-dead creatures in the med bay now.
Caitlin reached forward and took Cisco's hand, not even pretending not to notice the way his eyes went glassy with tears. "Well, the least we can do is to have them together," she said wearily, and she leaned her head forward on the bed again, letting the whirr and beep of machines usher in unsteady sleep.
The first time Joe and Iris entered the medical bay, the first time they roused Caitlin from where she'd fallen asleep against the bed, the change was immediate.
"They're fine," Caitlin blabbered, groggy and insubstantial-feeling, every bone weak. "They're fine, fine, I promise they're going to be fine…"
"Shh," Joe said, helping Iris lift her to her feet. "Come on. Easy."
They'd dragged out another spare bed into the already-cramped room, so guiding Caitlin to the sink was somewhat of a challenge. Iris kept a firm hand on her elbow, but Caitlin's hip still struck the edge of a metal table. Her muscles wouldn't move right; her brain was sluggish with exhaustion and pain.
"They're gonna be okay," she kept muttering over and over, desperate for Iris and Joe to know that at least. "I'm so sorry I didn't—I didn't wake you—"
"C'mere." Iris guided her hands to the sink and turned on the water. At some point, Caitlin must have removed her gloves, though she didn't remember doing so. Dark blood caked her fingers, gathered beneath her fingernails, smeared up her bruised wrists and arms.
The warm water and soap washed away all of that and more, almost instantly. Automatically, mechanically, Caitlin picked at the crust beneath her nails. The water swirled pink down the drain. Some of it must have been hers, residual blood from old injuries, but it was impossible to distinguish her blood from Cisco's from Barry's, human from metahuman—it swirled together and sloughed off her skin as one.
At once, Caitlin began to cry. Not the controlled, restrained tears she'd allowed herself in the warehouse or in the hospital, but a world-shattering, bone-quaking sob that originated deep in her gut. For a few seconds it was mostly silent, but after a few more, the shaking in her shoulders was too pronounced to ignore.
"It's okay," Iris said as the sobbing began in earnest, but the words were much like Caitlin's own just minutes before. Methodical. Necessary. Caitlin's hands had frozen beneath the tap, so Iris turned off the water and guided her away.
Blinded by tears, Caitlin didn't even comprehend where they were going until her knees hit the spare bed. By some miracle, Joe and Iris got her up on the hard hospital mattress. She registered the fabric and the soft, comforting sounds Joe and Iris continued making. The rest of the world was lost. The rest of the world was drowned out by the emotion that spilled out of her like acid, rendering her immobile, curled in on herself, wracked by sobs so painful they set her bones aflame.
One more to go! Thanks for reading, and, as always, I love hearing your feedback.
Till next time,
Penn