Hello again! Happy one week until the return of The Flash.

This story came about from an ask on Tumblr requesting an AU of a moment in "Fallout"-a prompt which got thoroughly out of hand. What resulted is an experiment, something longer than the drabble I'd originally intended.

Warning: This fic contains light medical whump and mentions of character death. If that makes you squeamish as it often does me, proceed with caution! This is also my first time writing a "kidnapping" fic, so please bear with me.

Disclaimer: The Flash and its characters/dialogue do not belong to me.

Enjoy!

Barry thought of stars, the way the shards exploded and twinkled in the air. His adrenaline still pumped through him—punching six grown men to the ground, even with super-speed, was not as fun as it might sound—and it made his senses super-sharp.

He was blessed, or cursed, with the ability to process things faster, clearer. Hyper-sensitivity, Caitlin had called it, the ability to catalog things in his mind at a speed that matched his new physical prowess. War and Peace was no daunting task when you could flip fifty pages in one second and still retain comprehension.

And sure, he'd had plenty of experience crashing into walls in his first few days with his powers (and he'd had many bloody noses to prove it), but now that he was used to it, he found it easy to dodge the buildings and cars that suddenly came up at 700 miles an hour.

None of that mattered now, because in the time it had taken for him to contemplate his options, those sparkling stars, suspended in slow-motion, pointed toward him.

Hyper-sensitivity be damned. This was going to hurt.

Sure enough, when he turned to shield himself, the shards of metal came zooming down faster than he could even grasp, and his body jolted at a hundred simultaneous points of impact.

It wasn't even like fire; truth be told, he couldn't find a word strong enough to describe the sensation of a hundred pieces of metal piercing his body at once. Instantly, he went rigid, his mind blanking and his legs giving out. The cold, wet pavement met his back, seeping through his uniform. It wasn't enough. Every bit of him was screaming.

Suddenly Ronnie was above him, trying to offer some kind of reassurance. But what could he do? The man hadn't even been scratched by the falling shards—it seemed like they'd been designed specifically for Barry.

"…attracted to kinetic energy," General Eiling was saying, confirming Barry's suspicions. His voice was filtered through a high-pitched, frantic ringing. "Firestorm was tonight's main objective, but getting you…well, that's just gravy."

No.

Barry struggled to sit upright, but even that slight movement sent shocks through his body. Ronnie put a hand on his arm as he groaned.

Surely Caitlin and Cisco and Wells would be there any minute. Surely they'd tracked his signal, heard him screaming, seen his vitals spike, something…

Around him, soldiers were picking themselves up from the ground, shaking themselves off, and everything was taking so long, too long—his senses were slowed so much that the world pulsed frame by frame like a heartbeat, clicks of a stop-motion film.

Where were they?

Almost on cue, the screech of tires sounded at the end of the alley. There was no time to register the look of dumb shock on Eiling's face. Everything was still too blurry with pain, and everything was happening too fast even for a speedster.

The Star Labs van skidded to a halt halfway down the alley, and Ronnie seized the opportunity. Taking advantage of the confusion, he leapt forward and decked Eiling in the face, sending the General stumbling backward.

The van door crashed open. Caitlin's face, terror-stricken, appeared.

"Get in!" she shouted.

Barry wanted to say something—he couldn't move, they should go on without him—but Ronnie grasped him under the arms and heaved. He howled instead.

The next thing he knew, he was on the floor of the van, his back slick with sweat against the carpeted floor. Ronnie was shouting at Cisco to drive, drive, as if the other man was waiting for such a signal. The van was already moving. Barry could tell, because each bump in the road sent a shockwave through him.

Caitlin was crouched down over him, muttering something that Barry couldn't understand. He tried to focus on something, anything, else, but all he could process was the ragged gray carpet of the van.

Suddenly, a sharp tug at his arm launched him back. He yelped, and Caitlin pulled her hands away like they'd been burned.

"Sorry, sorry," she said, panicked. "I wanted to see—they're embedded pretty deep—"

"Faster, Cisco," Ronnie said.

The acceleration tugged at Barry's blood. The speed, he noted blearily, was both a comfort and a disquiet. He took a deep breath, and the action forced him to scrunch up his eyes. Then Caitlin's hand was on his forehead, pulling back the mask, running through his hair soothingly.

"We're on our way to Star Labs," she said. "It'll be okay…you'll be fine."

And while her acting could use some work, her words did ease a small part of Barry's tension. For the first time, the gravity of what they were doing hit him, and he thought back to the situation they had just evaded. He was defeated, in pain, but at least he was there, on the floor of that van, with Cisco in the driver's seat and Caitlin kneeling beside him. On their way to Star Labs.

"It'll be okay," Caitlin said again.

He winced at another bump in the road, then attempted a feeble smile. "Could be worse," he said.

Perhaps his and Caitlin's acting skills were not so dissimilar.

Car tires screeched at the end of the alleyway. Eiling, Ronnie, and the soldiers all turned to face it. Barry didn't bother looking; he knew the sound of the speeding Star Labs van when he heard it.

By that time, the soldiers had fully recovered; they stood at attention at the sound of the vehicle, and Eiling's face turned nasty.

"Cut them off!" Eiling yelled. "Do it now!"

The soldiers, like little toy puppets, glided away from Barry's field of vision. Boots clunked too loudly on the pavement, each one a sharp pop, one after the other.

"No!" shouted Ronnie, immediately springing to his feet.

Then it hit Barry: those weren't boots. It was gunfire.

Ronnie looked down desperately at Barry, his face sharp with indecision. Barry groaned, squeezing his eyes shut against the gunfire. "Go," he said. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was Caitlin, Cisco, and Wells in the van, the white exterior and the windshield riddled with bullets. "Don't worry about me. Go."

Ronnie was off, dare he say it, in a flash—but not before decking Eiling in the face.

As the General struggled to his feet, Barry tried again to raise himself up to a sitting position. Now that he was effectively a human pincushion, super-speed wasn't doing him any favors. Every tiny movement was felt throughout his entire body, his nerves a chain reaction that sparked like downed power lines. The logical part of his brain knew, also, that his healing factor was working against him, that if he didn't get the shards out of his body soon he would be in for a very unpleasant removal process further down the line.

Shouts from down the alley distracted him, kept his awareness flared; what was happening? Had Ronnie managed to apprehend the soldiers before they killed his friends?

One second. One second earlier, maybe Caitlin and Cisco could have saved them. One second earlier, before the soldiers could have a chance to recover. One second earlier, maybe things would have been different. Now the Star Labs van was at the end of the alley, his friends were being shot at, and he was lying in a puddle on the ground with a very upset General looming over him.

"Well, Flash, isn't this a spectacular turn-around," Eiling said, wiping a sleeve across his bloodied mouth. Were there two of him? Barry blinked. "Maybe things are looking up. For me, at least." He motioned sharply, and two of the remaining soldiers crouched low and heaved Barry up by the armpits.

His stiff body screamed, and so did he. Powerless to resist, he watched the ground move as he was dragged forward. His grip on consciousness slowly weakened, and even as he was thrown forward, he wasn't sure he was lucid enough to care about where they were taking him.

Since learning about time travel, Barry had been thinking a lot about parallel universes. Just as he blacked out, he was decided: this was, definitively, the worse one.

Thanks for reading! If you have a moment, please drop me a review to let me know your thoughts-I always love chatting Flash. The next chapter should be up soon!

- Penn