Things are about to get weird. Thanks for sticking around and joining the pain train.

Enjoy!

Iris frowned as the voicemail beeped.

"Hey, Cait, it's me," she said. She ducked out of the way of a nurse, pressing herself against one of the hallway walls. "I just wanted to check in on you, make sure you're doing alright. You took some hard hits yesterday." She tried to sound casual, conversational, but if the past few days had taught her anything, it was that worrying was never an unreasonable thing. "Anyway, I'm visiting my dad. Call me back when you get this."

She paused, hung up. She was probably overreacting. The morning was young. Caitlin was likely still asleep.

Trying to push the worry out of her head, she pocketed her phone and stepped into her dad's room. He looked up as she entered, beaming.

"Hey, baby," he said, propping himself up on his pillows. "Good news—they should be releasing me later today. It'll be strict bed rest for a while, but at least I can be home with you."

She took a seat and tried to smile, but his brow crinkled.

"Uh oh. What is it now?"

"It's nothing." Her dad raised his eyebrows. "It's Caitlin. I just tried calling her, and she didn't pick up. I know I'm probably being stupid and overprotective…I just want to make sure she's okay."

"I don't think you're being stupid," her dad said. "With everything that's happened this week, I'd be surprised if you didn't worry. But I agree that you have to recognize her need for space. She lost two people the night of that wave. I think she still needs to process that."

"Yeah." Iris picked at a spot around her fingernail. "I can't imagine what she's going through."

"I don't know about that," her dad said softly. "Barry...you've decided to stop looking for him, I take it?"

Iris lifted her head. "Who—"

"Eddie," her dad said apologetically. "He told me that you've been walking up and down that beach for days looking for something you're not going to find. Frankly, I was surprised to see you here, not there."

"Of course I'm here," Iris said. "Of course I came to see you." She reached across to grab his hand, squeezed it gently. Then she dropped her head, nodded. "And I think it's time to stop looking. I think it's time to accept that Barry is..."

She fell silent, and so did her dad. She felt him trembling, and she didn't dare look up at his face.

It was always hard to see a parent as a real person, not as the one-dimensional figure so often constructed by a child's eyes, but occasionally Iris could break through that façade. In that moment, Iris was overwhelmed by her dad's pain, struck by the loss through his eyes. He'd been there, watching through binoculars, as the lives of his children were threatened. He'd watched, helpless, as his son was overtaken by a force that was stronger than any of them.

She thought of her walks up and down that beach, the hours of searching, the hours of sand-streaked hope that her dad would never get. Because she'd done the walking for the both of them, and there was nothing left for him to do.

She squeezed tighter.

And then she remembered.

"Wait," she said. "I did find something at the beach. Yesterday. Before Caitlin and I went after Mardon. I got so distracted with everything else going on, I totally forgot to tell her."

Her dad extracted his hand from hers. "What was it?"

"I don't know," Iris admitted. "Some kind of shimmery patch in the air. And water droplets, I think, just hanging there."

"So something supernatural, I take it?" her dad said.

Iris chewed on her fingernail. "Something not normal. At first I thought I was seeing things, but I think..." She looked up at her dad for confirmation. "I mean, I don't even know if it's still there."

Her dad nodded at her. "There's only one way to find out. Go."

"Are you sure?" Iris said. "I just got here. It can wait."

"If there's anything I've learned about these weird things in this city," he responded, "it's that they usually can't wait. I'm fine. Go."

Iris hesitated only a moment more before springing to her feet and planting a kiss on his forehead. "I'll be back soon. Keep me updated."

"Likewise," he said. She was halfway out the door when he called, "Be careful."

The warning would be stored for later use, when danger adopted a physical face. For now, Iris' heart pumped with the thrill of it.

"Pass me that, please."

Wells motioned without taking his eyes off of the microscope. Caitlin, grinding her teeth, picked up the vial he was asking for and passed it to him.

She had to hand it to the guy—as Wells in a wheelchair, he'd done a great job of pretending to enjoy actual conversation. While she wasn't looking for conversation now, the absolute smug silence of this Wells grated on her.

She hated it. She hated every part of it. Standing at one of the tables in the med bay, playing assistant to a man who knew he had total control over her. They both knew it, and it hung stagnant in the air between them. All she could do was hand over new components, write down new equations and compounds that might help them. Wells deferred to her very little, but whenever he did, his eyes pierced the weak defenses of her flesh into her mind. Truth, honest opinions, were all that she could give—she got the feeling that he would know immediately if she provided any false information.

And still, as she worked, there was a small part of her—extremely small—that doubted her new hate. Wells worked with all of the intensity and precision of a man bred from purpose. Stranded in time. Helpless.

"Dr. Snow. Epinephrine. Now."

And she was back to hating him.

She tried to breathe evenly at his tone, but inside she felt fury at his dismissiveness, his impartiality. Fury, now, for the impartiality that had killed one of her best friends.

She clenched her teeth and moved around the table to duck down to the drawer where she kept the adrenaline shots. Luckily she'd never needed to use them on anyone—Barry hadn't gotten himself in that much trouble yet—but given her line of work, she liked to have a stock of them anyway. Better to have them on hand, in case Barry did need one after a nasty mission.

As she crouched there, pulling open the drawer, the idea hit her.

As inconspicuously as she could, she glanced back at Wells. He was still engrossed in his microscope, his eye pressed to it as he shifted one of the glass slides. Caitlin turned back and reached into the drawer. Though the shots were near the front of the drawer, she made a show of rustling around, searching. Her hand closed around two of the plastic-wrapped shots; one she kept in her hand, and the other she slipped into her coat pocket.

Heart pounding, she closed the drawer and stood. The walk back to the table was measured, deliberate, and she tried to keep her face as passive as she could. When she handed the shot over to Wells, he accepted it without a word.

Her hands shook, but she took a breath to steady herself. The adrenaline shot, while not large, might have been a ton of bricks in her pocket.

She went back to work, hardly daring to move.

As she reached the beach, Iris checked her voicemail; maybe her phone had acted up, or maybe she'd somehow missed Caitlin's call. The voice declaring no new messages seemed to mock her. She hung up.

The morning had melted into a creamy afternoon, the sky a periwinkle blue and brushed with white clouds. The nightmare of Mardon's storm could almost be dismissed as that: a nightmare. She doubted the residents of the city even considered the possibility of a metahuman attack. To them, the tidal wave and the ensuing storm were just a natural disaster. That's why the Flash had failed. Because there wasn't a person to fight.

Iris picked her way down to the beach, mentally mapping out her route from the day before. A few new footsteps marred the sand, so she couldn't rely on her own tracks, just her memory. She set off in the direction she believed she'd seen the anomaly, tapping her phone against her leg. Putting it back in her pocket was no longer an option. If she did, she might not hear it ring when Caitlin called.

After a few minutes of walking—and a lot of confused searching that would've certainly garnered her strange looks from passers-by—she finally found it. The patch of shimmering air was still there, pulsating slightly. Iris glanced around to make sure nobody was around, watching, then pulled up the camera on her phone and snapped a picture. Even on an iPhone, the photo wasn't clear enough to do it justice, but it would have to do for now.

Her pulse was quick with excitement now, so she dialed up Caitlin again. There was no telling how long the anomaly would last, and a picture wasn't nearly as good as seeing the real thing. The dial tone sounded and Iris held the phone up to her ear.

A few feet away from her, a generic jingle sounded from the sand.

Iris moved toward the sound slowly, dread creeping through her, as the dial tone on her end rang and rang, then clicked to voicemail. Iris hung up and crouched by the object half-buried in the sand, a plain black phone.

On the screen read: 4 missed calls: Iris West.

"Shit," Iris muttered. She picked up the phone, navigated to the home screen. A photo of Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin glared up at her. "No, no, no..."

The alarm collected within her, heightened. She stood and looked around her. She saw it now, the dozens of footprints around this spot, too much activity concentrated in one area. A large gash of sand just below the anomaly; a circular imprint; and, there, a streak of slightly-blackened sand, furrows of a high-speed departure.

"No...no..." She couldn't stop repeating the words to herself, and her grip on Caitlin's phone was too tight. She looked down at her own phone, considering, but who would she call? Eddie? What could he do, what could any of them, against the Man in Yellow? For she knew, now, exactly what had happened. Exactly who had taken Caitlin. She knew it in her gut.

She stood, paralyzed by indecision. And, just like that, the anomaly flashed, and the water along the coast began to rise. Just like that, her world filled with gold light, and a figure fell to the ground, emerging from nothingness.

Iris couldn't speak. She couldn't even breathe.

Panting on the ground in front of her, pale and trembling but very much alive, was none other than Cisco Ramon.

I warned you! You understand now why tags on this story were so hard.

Anyway, thanks for reading, as usual; and, as usual, please leave a comment on the way out!

Till next time,

Penn