A/N: Wow! Thanks for the amazing reviews everyone! To thank you I'm sending you already this second chapter. Chapter 3 is going well and hopefully you'll have it next weekend.

The flash addict: Sorry about that, chapter 2 was already pretty much done yesterday :( But don't worry Iris is coming to the fic in the next chapter.

SnowyDoves: Who doesn't miss him? Our poor baby Jay.

Lila: Me? heartless? Yeaahh...possibly. No regret! But remember there's 'comfort' in a hurt/comfort category. Keep a candel burning for our Barry and I'll think about sparring his life!

One day. A whole day. That was the time that passed since Barry went away. More precisely, 31 hours, 12 minutes and 37 seconds. What was the minimum time for the pain to get better, how many weeks, months, years? If every day was like the last one, nobody at Star Labs could imagine what the others days would be like.

Jay didn't know how to feel about everything happening. The first couple of days at Star Labs had been rough, but he was slowly starting to feel like part of the team. Not to mention getting fond of the kid. But he wasn't anywhere close to Barry than the rest of his friends, his team. Maybe he should go back home to have a better chance to catch Zoom now that Flash of Earth 1.0 was gone. Right now, he was making sure to let Barry's friends some space to work everything in their heads. They needed each other.

Joe went to the police station as usual in the morning. Hard to tell if he went to go burry himself in work or just to try find the body to get some closure. Maybe, just maybe, they would be able to find who did this. But chances are, if the person who killed Barry was sent by Zoom, they were probably gone from their world by now. Joe still had to tell anyone at the police station. Right now, the official story was that Barry was out of town to visit a friend. Or that's what Joe told the captain. He didn't have the heart to tell the truth, not yet, even to his new partner Patty. He just felt that girl was attracted to his son and he couldn't bear to tell her what happened to him. He was barely able to keep the appearances up in the station.

Not to mention, somehow, a part of him was trying so desperately to hang on to hope. Barry was always fine, no matter the situation. And as long as they didn't found a body, he could still be alive, right?

He did come back to Star Labs earlier for a quick stop, a really quick one. He was there for couple of minutes before the detective got a phone call from Patty. No matter what it was couldn't have been good because his whole body tensed and he closed his eyes tight before leaving in a hurry. Without saying a word.

That happened one hour ago, more or less. Now it was only Cisco and Caitlin sitting in the cortex, behind their computers. Sitting in silence. Their looks moving between black computers screens or just looking at nothing, or simply at an invisible spot in the room. Nobody was looking at the mute news on the farthest screen on the left. None of them daring to look at the Flash suit still hanging, empty, at the back of the room. It was finally Cisco's voice that broke the long silence.

'What are we doing here?'

'What do you mean?' Answered Caitlin.

The young engineer didn't want to talk about the elephant in the room, but the issue needed to be addressed.

'Here, at S.T.A.R. Labs. What are we still doing here?''

He was right. They lost Ronnie little over 6 months ago and while the pain was strong and still is from time to time, the earth kept turning and they got the Flash team back together to fight crime. They find a way to keep the Firestorm legacy going, they found someone else to put on the costume and the name. But what about The Flash?

What about them? They can't fight the good fight anymore. Unless Jay get his powers back? But he would need to return to his home, he had his own world to protect. For a second, Cisco thought about his powers, his vibrations powers. Maybe, just maybe, he could found a way to use them to help people. But…

'Oh my god….'

Cisco quickly turned his head to try understand why he heard thess words. It hit him like a runaway train. Right there, on tv, on the news: 'Boy found in the lac'. That was it. End of story. No fairytale ending. Not that there was much of a doubt left after the video they saw. But still, why not dare to hope for miracle? Caitlin shoulder started to shake and he put his arm around her.

That explained Joe leaving in a hurry. He certainly wasn't coming back anytime soon, if ever. Why would he? After the longest of silence, both scientists decided in a silent agreement to get up and leave. Not knowing if they themselves would ever be coming back. Cisco was the last one to leave. He stopped at the door and slowly turned around, looking one last time at the lab before turning the lights off and leaving. He was gonna need to come back for the suit, but he didn't care too much about it right now.

Somewhere else, in a dark, humid and cold room, there was a shape tied up in a chair. A shirtless, bloody, shape. The shirtless, bloody, shape of Barry Allen. The speedster had his head resting on his chest and he wasn't moving. Unless the regular rising of his chest counted as moving.

A tall, muscular, woman entered the room, syringe in her hand and smile on her face. Without hesitation, she grabbed her captive's hair and pulled his head back. The sudden and rough movement caused Barry to groan and his eyes to move under his eyelids. He was fighting hard to open his eyes, but there were so heavy. The fact that one of them was heavily swollen wasn't helping there.

'Wakie wakie sunshine. The party's just getting started...'

She gave her captive couple of seconds to react, but seeing he was losing his fight to full consciousness, she simply shrug her shoulders.

'Time for test #4.'

Without waiting one more second, she sticked the needle into Barry's open neck.