Hugging his knees to his chest, Barry sits on the floor in the center of the forensics' lab and closes his eyes.

He shouldn't be here. No one knows he is here. He was careful not to wake Iris when he slipped out from under the sheets and disappeared into the midnight blue. He didn't call Cisco to talk about the noise in his head; he didn't touch base with Wally to see if running might clear it. He doesn't want to talk anymore.

Breathe in, breathe out. It's the mechanical nature of the thing that reminds him that he is a base animal underneath the show, the suit and tie pomp-and-circumstance, the carefully orchestrated gestures, the social norms he must relearn to fit circular emotions into square societies. He can't tell them that he runs out of words like he runs out of silverware, he runs out of words like he runs out of breath, he runs out of words like he runs out of the brick and mortar of his own soul.

He can't express that when he is stranded he is not silent. His mind does not cease. His sense of self does not end when he stops talking, when he stops moving. His search for the next breath does not halt even when everything else about him shuts down; he persists, no matter how little he wants to engage in the noise, the white noise of ten thousand realities craving attention.

Cisco helps him cope, because Cisco knows what it's like to see ten thousand realities. When it happened to Cisco – happened, past tense – Caitlin called it a stroke. It was a one-time event for Cisco, like a lightning strike. It left no visible scars.

But the scars are there. Barry can see them: he can see Dante in Cisco's eyes. He can see the stiff set of Dante's shoulders in Cisco's. Cisco reaches for him, and it's Dante's hand, Dante's pleading eyes, and the sight presses Barry back-against-a-wall, shaking hard because he cannot divorce the two realities any more than he can separate his name from his soul. He cannot look away when Dante fades from Cisco's eyes like the ghost he is.

He sees Dante's thirty-one years ticking like a bomb strapped to Cisco's chest, taunting him, only a matter of time, only a matter of time. He wants to protect Cisco, but he doesn't know how to protect Cisco when he is staggering away in anguished fear, don't-touch-me, don't-touch-me, I'm-sorry, I'm-sorry, because the dead are part of his life, now.

The Speed Force reveals everything, and everything is bigger than him. It crushes him into a corner. He flinches when they find him because he knows they want to help, but none of them can help him. None of them can change what he sees, what he knows. They see him as broken pieces, missing, missing, like glass in sharp pieces on the floor, because he is too different, he is not the Barry they know.

He tries to be. He tries to remember the words that make his family smile, like red, like blue, like irises, to repeat the gestures that make the tension in the room settle. He tries to be a part of their team without stumbling, to follow orders he can't decipher, to be present no matter how inattentive he feels. He tries not to draw on the walls because he knows it's perceived as wrong, even if he cannot figure out why.

(He knows why: he does not draw on the walls anymore because none of them draw on the walls.)

Whenever he can, he mimics their square rules: he wears a coat outside when it's cold because everyone wears a coat when it's cold. (Even if he prefers the way the cold feels on his skin, the way it wakes up the lightning and makes him feel like part of this reality, part of the scene.) He doesn't make noise when the lights are out because no one makes noise when the lights are out. (It is one of the easiest rules to follow, even if it scares him to leave the lights out, all the stars are visible when the lights are out, and there is nothing to hold on to.) He doesn't fuss when they poke him in the arm with a – a – a thorn.

His hands dig into his hair. "Thorn," he mutters aloud, even though the lights are out, and he is not supposed to make noise. "Thorn, thorn, thorn …" With a frustrated noise, he tries to shove it out of his mind, it-doesn't-matter-it-doesn't-matter, you-know-what-it-is, but it won't leave him alone, and he lunges to his feet, fishing frantically for a marker, you-know-what-it-is. He uncaps a marker with shaking hands, and he draws on the walls like he is not supposed to, thorn-horn-torn-norm, norm, norm.

Normal.

The marker sinks from his fingers, hits the floor, and he looks at the tirade on the wall and feels the word swell in his throat, tighten in his chest. Normal.

Normal, like the way he feels when Iris doesn't speak to him and he doesn't speak to her but it's a good silence, a soft silence, their stars existing in the space without interfering with their shadows, their souls, two quiet souls enjoying each other's company in a loud world, we-don't-need-to-talk-for-me-to-love-you, and he brings her broken roses, they break when he brings them to her because he is not gentle enough when he runs, he is not gentle enough, he is not normal, and they are broken like he is, they are broken, they are broken offerings that aren't enough, he's faking it, he's never going to be normal—

A sob breaks in his chest and he presses a hand to his mouth to muffle the sound because the lights are out and he wants to be normal, he wants to be normal and not this animal that they're afraid of because sometimes he goes silent for too long, a minute in his world stretching for hours in theirs and vice-versa, and they don't understand why he flinches from them and hugs them in the same day because they don't understand how much he needs them, how much he needs them and how much he fears the reality holding them apart.

All at once he wants to be hugged, wants to be hugged because hugs mean love, hugs mean love like the heart beating in his chest, still beating, still beating. It's the first thing he ever truly taught them, taught her, taught her, and he doesn't need her name when he holds her in his arms and she hugs him back, doesn't need words but he wants them anyway because it is the only way she can hear him, he is silent when he is without his words, and he is stranded in his silence.

He cries and aches for the lightning, but not the lightning already under his skin, the lightning which made him see and know too much, which paralyzed him in its profundity, which divorced him from his own impression of reality, granting him a new life but a life he never asked for.

He aches for the lightning that came from above, for the lightning which took him and made him not normal, but good normal, a new normal they wanted, a new normal they loved effortlessly because he still spoke in straight lines and laughed at the right moments.

It tastes colorless to him now, like a field of dead grass, a field of emptiness, a field without the things he loved, transported back to a past that is utterly devoid of the self he knows they crave.

I'm still Barry, he pleads to the emptiness, but it never responds, and the louder he says it the less real it feels, like he's fading with every affirmation, I am real, I am real, I am real, I'm not real, I'm not real, I'm not real…

He doesn't hear her arrive, but he feels the other presence in the room. He feels her standing in the doorway, waiting for him to acknowledge her. He wanders over to the windows, putting distance between them, trying to find himself in the shadows, in the darkness, in the way a pair of red eyes stares at him from the building across from the way, taunting him, come-and-get-me, and he wants to snarl, wants to chase it down because it's the one thing he is, I'm fast now, and he's fast enough to stop those burning red eyes, fast enough to stop all of this.

But then his hands rest on the windowsill, and he feels how he is shaking, how he is weak, how he is fast but not human, anymore, not if he can't express it, how can I be human if I can't understand them?

Slowly, he hears her – maybe the third or fourth repetition of his name, but only the first step towards him: "Barry?"

Who's Barry? he wants to ask, and laughs when he realizes he said it out loud because he sounds crazy but he's not crazy. He clutches the wood and begs it to validate him, but it doesn't say a word, and still it validates him in the fact that it is there, firm beneath his hands even if he is not the person they deserve.

He's a heavy soul, full of things they will never know, things he strives to protect them from, and pain does not touch him like it used to, pain glances off of the lightning, but it can still hurt them. He can still hurt them.

He turns to her and feels tension bleed out of his shoulders at the sight of her. The plea bubbles almost childlike out of him, a quiet rasp in the quiet darkness: "Red."

Like irises.

She crosses the floor and he stays still, trying to be normal, trying to just breathe, and when she pauses a few feet away, he waits for her to flinch, for her to fortify herself, for them to both put on their coats and pretend to be perfectly normal together, perfect together. You found me, he doesn't say, because she knows, and he can't say it out loud because he's drowning in everything he wants to say to her, it is one plea in ten thousand, and all of them coalesce into a single message: help.

With a hand cooled by stress and anguish, he reaches out and takes hers gently. He brings it to his chest, holding it to his heart, looking down at the floor, unable to look at her, at the sheer warmth she radiates, the fondness that can't be faked or hidden, that he could feel from a lifetime away. He lets her hand go and she keeps it there, and he knows she knows, knows one word will never capture it all and yet –

And yet it is still everything, still all that ever needs to be said, is the way she stays, she stays even when he is not the Barry she knows, when he doesn't know who Barry is anymore because it can't be him, it can't be him. "I'm not Barry," he whispers aloud, and it's like a prayer and a curse, something too terrible to speak in her company, but as soon as he says it he cannot take it back.

She reaches up and frames his face in her hands. He lets his gaze meet hers and sees only Iris-Iris-Iris-Iris, his heart aching with how much he wants to love her in a way she knows like love.

"You will always be Barry," she whispers.

He sobs, and he doesn't try to quiet it, doesn't try to hide it from her as he buries his head in her shoulder and weeps, for all that they could have been, all that they never will be, and all that they are, her hand in his hair at the base of his neck like the softest anchor the universe has ever conceived, come here, stay here, and it's easy to listen to, easy to be with, and he loves that she makes the hardest things feel easy.

Acknowledgment is like catharsis: it drains him, bleeds him. It leaves him holding onto her, arms around her back, please-don't-leave in every heartbeat, every breathe-in-breathe-out.

She doesn't leave, and she doesn't ask for more, and he embraces the quiet love that rests between them, bringing them in sync in a way that never needed words, that never needed more.

It just needed them.

I just need you.

He holds onto her and she doesn't let him go, and a different truth sinks into his bones, a different weariness emerging from the strain of darkness: I want to be your Barry.

"You are," she promises, pressing a kiss against his cheek, and his tears slow as Speed-purrs build quietly between them, the crux of their two worlds: not mine and ours.

Hugging her, he murmurs, "Ours," and she squeezes him gently, so he repeats, "Ours" and means it with every fiber of his being.

Ours.

It's not perfect – it never will be – but it is theirs.

When they leave, he leaves the noise behind him, and enjoys the snowy quiet beyond the precinct's walls as they walk home hand-in-hand, alone together in their mismatched universes.