A quick piece before this gets jossed tonight. Spoilers for 2x22 "Invincible." Takes place immediately after the episode.

Enjoy!

When Barry took off, there was absolute silence for at least ten seconds. Not absolute silence, because the TV still murmured from the next room, and some overflowing pot rattled on the stove in the kitchen. But the silence was still more silent than anything Joe had ever heard, because every other sense was sucked away.

Cisco was the first to act.

"GPS. We can track them."

Then the dining room was alive with activity. Everyone was speaking at once. Cisco and Jesse were pulling out phones and speaking in techno-babble, Caitlin was barking instructions at Iris from across the table, and Wally was muttering, terrified, at anyone who would listen—which nobody was. Joe was speechless, staring at the empty spot where Zoom and Henry stood ten seconds earlier. He was speechless even when Iris tugged on his sleeve.

"Dad, it's okay. They'll be okay."

He looked over at her and saw that it was not a statement. It was a question. Iris wanted him to comfort her, like he did when she was a child, to let her know that there were no boogey monsters in the closet or under the bed and that nothing could hurt her while he was around. Except there were boogey monsters. And he could not give her the reassurance that she craved.

In the background of the chaos, Tina McGee stood, out of place. It was the sight of her that brought Joe back to his senses.

"Cisco, anything?"

"Just a minute…" the scientist said, tapping a few buttons on his phone, face creased in worry and concentration. "I hooked up the suit's systems to my phone, just in case we weren't in the lab—here we go, GPS." He paused.

"Cisco?" Joe took a step forward.

Cisco looked up at him, dread plastered across his face. "His old house."

Something painful lurched in Joe's stomach, and he jolted into action. "Alright, Tina, you stay here, watch over Jesse and Wally. The rest of us are going after Barry."

Across the room, Cisco visibly swallowed. "Barry's not moving."

Joe hustled around the table to Cisco's side and looked over his shoulder at the phone screen. The dot labeled Flash was stationary. "He's fine though. He's alive?"

Cisco typed in a few commands on the phone, and a new display was brought up on screen. "His vitals are all out of whack," he said, clearly unable to hide the fear in his voice. "His heart rate is high, even for him. But, yeah, he's alive. He might be hurt—Zoom might have hurt him—"

Joe knew what Cisco was picturing—Barry bleeding out on the floor of his childhood home, Barry dying—but he was imagining something far different. He had seen the look in Henry's eyes as Zoom wrapped an arm around his throat.

"We've got to move," he said decisively. "Right now. Come on."

With all the air of a detached police officer, he practically dragged Cisco, Caitlin, and Iris out of the house. No time to explain things to Wally. No time to argue about strategy with Jesse. If Joe's suspicions were correct, they had exactly zero minutes left.

Being a cop had its blessings and its curses—one being that his suspicions were usually correct.

By the time they made it to the house, the inside of the car was dead quiet. The four of them-Joe, Iris, Cisco, and Caitlin-piled out and swarmed to the front door without a word. The possibility of Zoom still being around clearly didn't faze any of them. Or, if it did, the need to get to Barry overshadowed all of that.

The door was still open. Iris was the first to make it through, and her horrified moan sent a jolt of lightning through Joe. The one second of not knowing, that second between hearing Iris' sob and entering the house, might have stretched for years. Joe was generally driven more by logic than emotions, but he was swept up in a sudden burst of irrationality, the terror clouding his brain.

He brushed past an immobile Iris, in front of Caitlin and Cisco, and heard the two scientists gasp behind him. He paused in the middle of the floor, holding out a hand to keep them back.

In the middle of the living room lay Henry Allen, unquestionably dead, chest soaked in blood. Signs of a scuffle littered the room: scattered petals from an old flower display, an overturned side table, a picture frame shattered on the floor.

Barry sat against the back wall of the living room, legs splayed out in front of him, arms limp at his side. His gaze was unfocused, trained outward, his pale cheek marred by a fresh red scrape. He looked otherwise uninjured, but based on his stillness, Joe thought for one swooping moment that he was dead. Then he saw the rise and fall of the speedster's chest and was momentarily pacified. Momentarily, because the weight in the room didn't allow for any kind of lasting relief.

Emotions, not logic, drew Joe forward like a magnet to his son. Behind him, Caitlin whispered, "Joe, he's in shock."

But Joe continued forward into the scene, breaching the sanctity of it, entering the aspic of the tragedy. He stepped past Henry's body, willing himself not to look at it, willing himself to stay focused entirely on the motionless, grieving, very alive man before him. When he knelt beside his foster son, he could tell that history was repeating itself, and the man in front of him was not a man after all, but a broken little boy with darkness in his eyes.

"Bar," he said softly, reaching out a hand as slowly as he dared. The tear tracks had not quite dried on Barry's face, but his eyes were dry, glassy, empty, staring forward into nothing. "Come here, Bar."

When Barry showed no signs of responding—that was the shock, Joe reasoned—Joe gathered him up in his arms and pulled him close. Barry remained limp, a ragdoll, a shell. Joe didn't bother speaking; if he knew anything about shock, he knew that Barry likely couldn't hear him.

Instead, he closed his eyes. Everything about the scene told him he had stepped into the past, but he knew, now, that this was much, much worse. The boy he cradled in his arms was an orphan in the true sense of the word, and this room was dark and quiet and full of broken things, and Joe was crushed beneath more responsibility than he'd ever had in his life.

He was the last line of defense. When everything was stripped away, he was the last thing close to a parent that this boy had.

And, with a deep sort of plunging in his gut, he realized that he would be next on this blood-red list of tragedies.

He gripped Barry—his son—closer. And he prayed.

Come cry with me. And cower in fear of the finale tonight.

Thanks for reading! Please leave your thoughts below if you enjoyed!

Till next time,

Penn