I'll always be there when you wake

I just want someone to say to me, oh

I'll always be there when you wake, yeah

You know I'd like to keep my cheeks dry today

So stay with me and I'll have it made.

— "No Rain," Blind Melon

Barry Allen woke to a woman shining a bright light in his face, speaking so fast he could barely process it.

"Where am I?" He couldn't really remember what happened. One moment he was looking at his board of newspaper clippings, and the next he was here in this hospital bed.

The woman ignored him. "Pulse 120. Pupils equally reactive to light. Look at me. Look at me."

"Whoa whoa whoa relax," another voice said. Male. "Everything's okay, man. You're at S.T.A.R Labs."

"S.T.A.R. Labs? Who are you?" They helped Barry sit up.

"I'm Cisco Ramon. She's Caitlin — Dr. Snow," the man corrected, with a good-natured roll of his eyes.

"I need you to urinate in this," Caitlin AKA Dr. Snow said. She seemed to be the hyper-focused one; Cisco seemed to be the one that would actually answer his questions.

Barry started putting the pieces together, and the more he thought, the more questions he had. Why wasn't he in a hospital? What happened to him? Why did S.T.A.R. Labs have him? Where were Joe and Iris? Why was he shirtless?

Cisco and Caitlin (do I call her Dr. Snow? Barry wondered to himself) were still arguing. Cisco had snatched the pee cup.

"What is going on?" Barry demanded. He was beginning to lose his patience. He pushed his way past them, out of the bed. I feel great, he thought absent-mindedly.

"You got struck by lightning, dude," Cisco said.

Barry looked at himself in the mirror. "Lightning gave me abs?"

"Your muscles should be atrophied, but instead they're in a chronic and unexplained state of cellular regeneration," Caitlin (Barry decided he was going to call her Caitlin) said, grabbing him by the shoulders and moving him back to the bed. "You're lucky. They're nice abs."

Cisco and Barry both just looked at her. So she's not a robot, Barry thought.

"Oookay," Caitlin said. "Moving on."

Things happened very fast. Dr. Wells came in, told Barry he'd been in a coma for nine months, his heart was beating too fast for the doctors to tell it was even beating, apparently, Iris had come to see him a lot —

She cares, Barry thought.

"She talks a lot," Caitlin interjected.

"She's hot," Cisco proclaimed.

—and Barry knew that as unbelievably cool it was to meet Dr. Wells and to be wearing a frickin' S.T.A.R. Labs sweatshirt, he needed to get back to Joe and Iris.

"Thanks!" he said as he rushed out.

Dr. Wells looked resigned. Cisco shrugged.

"Really?" was all Caitlin had to say. You would think that I would get more than a 'thank you' after being by your bedside for nine months, Barry, she thought. But she didn't really blame him. After all, he, unlike her, had a family and loved ones to go back to.

She already missed him a little, though. There was something startlingly clear and open in those green eyes of his, and she wished she could get to know him better.

"C'mon, Dr. Snow," Cisco said gently, as if he were reading her thoughts. "Let's get everything cleaned up."

Caitlin sighed and followed him out the door. Just another day at S.T.A.R. Labs.

The second time Barry met Caitlin, she was treating him like a test subject again. Without so much as a hello, she tapped on his suit, syncing it to the slim black tablet she held. Her light hair blew in her face, but she ignored it, focused on the task at hand.

She did notice him staring at her.

"What?" she asked, a little irritably. It hadn't been a good day.

"I just noticed you don't smile that much," he said without any hint of pity or malice. It sounded like he actually cared.

Caitlin shook it off. Nobody had checked in since the particle accelerator exploded, and she wasn't about to open her heart to Dr. Well's new science project.

"My once-promising career in bioengineering is over, my boss is in a wheelchair, the explosion that put you in a coma also killed my fiance." She finally looked up at him, pained brown eyes meeting concerned green ones. "So this blank expression feels like the way to go."

Barry swallowed and watched her go. And then he ran.

"He just passed 200 miles per hour."

Caitlin stood up. "It's not possible," she breathed.

Little did she know that Barry Allen would soon do many, many things that should not have been possible.

It wasn't until the fifth time that Barry was sitting on the bed in S.T.A.R. Labs with Caitlin yelling at him that he realized —

This was the way Caitlin showed she cared.

It meant she was concerned about him.

"I haven't seen her this pissed since Ronnie," Cisco said as he ambled off.

"Ronnie was… Caitlin's fiance?" Barry asked Dr. Wells.

"Yes. Ronnie is… missed."

Barry understood all too well what it meant to miss someone.

"When some people break, they can't be put back together," Dr. Wells said, looking at the report of Mardon's death on the news.

"And some people become stronger than ever," Barry said softly.

Barry realized this as he ran, hearing Caitlin's smile over the intercom as she said, "Get your ass over there."

Some people's pain made them stronger because they were needed to help those who couldn't help themselves.