Chapter Text
The dead man's charred skin healed over in increments where Barry’s fingers lightly touched what was left of the ashy sternum, then spread elsewhere across the body until it was a patchwork of dead and mending skin. Charcoal crumbled off it in chunks, seemingly replaced by smooth unblemished pink. Gradually, the body turned from blackened decay to a sickly corpse white, slowly growing into a normal healthy pallor. As Barry watched, the ribs that had been broken not five minutes before began to rise and fall, the new skin stretching across a toned stomach as the now un-dead guy took his first instinctive breath.
Yeah, this was something Barry was never going to get used to.
"Alright," Barry said, and rocked back on his heels, breaking the connection between the slowly warming skin and his handcuffed hands. "Will you let me go now?"
The man pointing the gun at him grunted and gestured between Barry and the still unconscious man. Something between awe and anger fighting for dominance on his face.
"He ain't awake yet," He said.
"He will be," Barry replied, desperately hoping he didn't sound scared. "Higher brain function takes longer to come back."
"Hm," The man narrowed his eyes at Barry. "How long?" The gun came to rest on him again and he flinched, today was not his day.
“I don’t know, I –“ The man pushed the gun into his face.
“I don’t know, okay?” yelled Barry, craning his head back away from the gun. “I don’t even know how these powers work ! Not everyone comes back, but when they do it’s different every time, no-one dies the same.” He looked into the man’s eyes. “I don’t know how long your friend was dead for, I don’t know when he’s going to wake up, but he will wake up. Everyone else who started healing has.”
The man pulled the gun away and reached up to scratch at the mess of burn scars on his arm. “He’ll wake up?” He asked.
Barry nodded. “Yes. Yes, he should.”
“A’ight,” The man shrugged and started forward towards Barry. Before he could react, the man unlocked one of the cuffs and hauled him backwards, pushing at him until he was pressed against a wall with a metal pole running up the side of it. Without a second thought, the man snapped the free cuff dangling from Barry’s left wrist to the pole.
Barry sputtered. “Look – just, please, let me go! Don’t do this!”
The man ignored him. He walked back over to the middle of the room and looked down at the undead man. There were still a couple of patches here and there where the skin was off-coloured, but on the whole the man had healed remarkably well for someone who had been burned to a crisp.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Barry continued. “There’s nothing to tell, I don’t even know your name –“
“’s Mick,” The man grunted as he reached down and dragged his friend by the arms across the floor towards Barry.
“Don’t tell me that!” he yelled. “Why would you tell me that? Oh God, you’re going to kill me.”
“M’not,” Mick rolled his eyes and crouched down next to Barry. “If I was going to kill you, you’d be dead already. No, Boss is gonna want to speak to you.”
“Boss?” Barry wrinkled his nose, they were the only people here and the un-dead guy probably wasn’t waking up anytime soon.
Mick reached forward and grabbed at Barry’s arm, barely feeling the resistance as Barry flinched away. He yanked him forward far enough to quickly snap another set of cuffs onto his right wrist.
“What –“ Barry started and silenced himself when Mick connected the other lock around the un-dead man’s wrist.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Barry groaned. “I’m not going anywhere, he’s not going anywhere, is this really necessary?” At this point, Barry was tired and hungry. He hadn’t expected to get snatched off the street after a long night shift at the station. Who knows how long he’d spent with a bag over his head being driven here. He just wanted to go home .
“Well, I’m goin’ somewhere,” Mick snapped at him and stood. “Ain’t a lot of people who’d target him like this, they gotta be dealt with, ‘an I’m good at dealing with things.” He sneered the word, and Barry was certain dealing involved something highly illegal. “If he doesn’t wake up then I need to know where you are. If he does wake up, then he needs to be where I can find him. Two birds, one palm.”
Barry had never heard it said that way before. He rattled the cuff attached to the pole. Even if he wasn’t attached to an unconscious undead guy, he was never very good at getting out of handcuffs, that was always Iris’s talent.
Mick headed for the door, gun in hand and handcuff keys in the pocket of his coat. Barry’s stomach growled.
“Can you at least bring back some food!?”
Mick left the warehouse without a backwards glance and Barry banged his head against the wall. He looked at the man he was handcuffed to. He was breathing and the last of the unhealed skin was starting to turn pink, but other than the beginning of movement behind his closed eyes, there was no sign of consciousness.
He was screwed.
//
It was a muffled buzzing that woke him. An insistent vibrating that made Barry groan and roll his head to the side. Iris, maybe. Or Joe. Could be the department, but unlikely. He’d just gotten off a long shift after all, there were codes to be upheld, or that’s what he’d tell them if they wanted him to come in again.
He needed a break.
The phone kept vibrating. Barry grumbled and lifted his left arm to fumble about for it on his bedside table, or he would have, if his arm hadn’t resisted with a clank that ripped him from his peaceful reverie.
Right. The kidnapping, the burned man, Mick.
He opened his eyes. The warehouse looked the same as before, all grey washed out concrete with hanging fluorescent lights. In the middle of the room where Barry had first brought the man back to life was a table that had been dragged from someplace else. It stood out starkly from the despondent emptiness of the rest of the warehouse. Briefly, Barry wondered where it had come from but figured as a member of the CCPD he was probably better off not knowing. From his position on the floor he couldn’t see much of what was on the table, but he could see his shoulder bag. It had been emptied earlier, when Mick had first dragged him in and dumped his stuff unceremoniously. The bag was hanging open and at risk of falling over the edge and onto the ground. The vibrating stopped.
His phone . If only he could reach it. There was no sign of Mick, no indication of how long he’d been asleep against the wall except for the stiffness of his muscles and the numbness of his butt. Maybe he should try and dislocate something. It’s the only way he was getting out of the cuffs without a key at this rate. As much as he trembled at the thought of hurting himself, it was starting to look like the only option.
He looked down at his other wrist, the one connected to the undead man, and froze.
The man was awake.
Barry watched as he blinked up at the warehouse ceiling, his breaths coming evenly until his gaze shifted sideways and his blue, blue eyes bored into Barry’s with sudden intensity. The two of them stared at each other, the man totally still and Barry barely breathing until the undead man sat up and shifted his body to face him in one fluid movement.
"Who the fuck are you?" He snarled, flicking his eyes from Barry, to his cuffed wrist, to the warehouse at large before resting on Barry again, unease barely showing across his face.
Barry was a little preoccupied registering what he looked like to really give the question any proper consideration. He hadn't looked at the man earlier - there wasn't much left to see when he was dead, and then Barry was freaking out about being handcuffed to an unconscious probable-criminal, waiting for another criminal to come back before he fell asleep… Barry felt justified taking a moment to process.
His eyes flicked down to the man's bare chest. There were scars pock marked and littered in various places across his skin, none of which could have added to the cause of his death. Barry didn't need his CSI knowledge for that, or for it to finally register that the man was naked. His clothes hadn't healed. That made sense, the few people Barry had brought back thus far had all had their clothes intact – the way they died hadn’t altered their clothing in any way, like the fire did for this guy. He’d never thought of that...his powers must only bring back living tissue or old scar tissue; the fibrous tissue somehow rejecting the new collagen alignment despite the reparative nature of his powers. Interesting, he mused. The irony of his powers not creating new scars wasn’t lost on him. The – very – new Lichtenberg figure that stretched its way across his back was a direct result of the same accident that gave him his powers, as always Barry had to be the exception to the rule.
Hang on a second. He'd been handcuffed to a nude man for god knows how long and he hadn't even noticed. Or – well, a mostly nude man. Looking now, Barry could see the charred scraps of fabric still attached to the man's waist through sheer force of crumbly will. What kind of CSI was he? Barry felt his cheeks heat, the guy was hot too - for all that mattered in the current circumstances.
"My eyes are up here," The man said flatly.
Barry reddened even more. Yeah they were. He'd never met anybody with eyes that matched the dark blue of the sky before a storm . The deep blue only added to the intensity of the man's gaze, narrowed as it was under thin slanted brows. The dark stubble of his shaved head and his proud widow’s peak only accentuated the angles of his face, allowing the man an extra level of intimidation.
"Um," Barry said. "Sorry? It's just - you're, uh, naked. Naked and awake, you’re, um, please don't kill me?"
The man raised the arm that was handcuffed to Barry's and nodded to where Barry's other arm was still handcuffed to the wall.
"That would be counter-productive, wouldn't it?" He drawled snottily.
Oh no, the guy was hot and an asshole. Barry was either going to die from embarrassment or from pissing the guy off. He was too scared and tired and hungry for this. He needed greater control of his brain-to-mouth filter or he’d say something he’d regret.
"Look," Barry said. "Do you know how to get out of handcuffs with only your bare hands?"
"I don't even know why I'm in handcuffs in the first place, I didn't do anything," The man paused, then smirked. "This time."
Oh great, he was a criminal. And he must’ve judged Barry as harmless, or else he wouldn’t have said it.
Barry started. "You don't remember – what am I saying of course you don't, not that part anyway." He muffled a groan, he did not want to have this conversation.
"Look kid –“
"Barry."
"–Barry," He amended. "Just tell me what happened . This sure as hell isn't some kind of fun night out, otherwise I wouldn't be the only one naked with memory loss."
He scooted closer and grabbed a fistful of Barry's sweater, pushing him back into the wall so he could loom over him. What was it with criminals pushing Barry into walls? he didn’t like getting pushed into walls and it happened far too often for someone who was meant to see less of the action as a CSI than a cop.
"You better start talking, kid, or things are going to get a whole lot less civil. I said I wouldn't kill you, I didn't say anything about hurting you."
"Uh," Barry said, still trying to recover from the mental image of a fun night out. His fun nights never ended that way. "What's the last thing you remember?"
The man – no wait, that was getting tiring. "Actually," Barry said quickly. "What's your name? Mick didn't tell me."
That caused the man to pull back. "Mick?”
"I said your name not his," Barry joked, and found himself pushed harder into the wall.
"Ow! Fine, fine. Yeah, Mick. Big burly bald guy with scars on his arms?"
The man inclined his head. "He was here?"
"Yeah, he's the reason I'm stuck here," He rattled the handcuff around the pole. "And why you're cuffed to me, didn't even have the decency to say when he'd be back."
"Sounds like Mick," he eased his grip a little. "Why?"
Barry shrugged. "I answered your question, you answer mine."
The man tightened his grip and grit his teeth but Barry just glared at him resolutely, two could play this game. "Fine. Leonard."
"Leonard?" Barry made a face, that was almost as bad as Bartholomew. "Okay, Leonard," Really, Barry didn't know what to say. How did you tell someone that they were currently what counted as the undead? "Seriously, what's the last thing you remember?"
//
"I was dead ," he repeated, and looked down at his hands. His tough and cool facade from earlier had shattered, replaced with something almost vulnerable. He was slumped against the wall next to Barry, no longer the violent bully from before. Barry wasn't sure he liked this side of the stranger.
"Yeah," Barry said, "death doesn't tend to stick when I'm around."
He shifted uncomfortably as they lapsed into silence. He didn't do this. The few people he'd brought back were accidents, victims of crime, dead until Barry showed up to case the scene and brushed against them looking for evidence. He'd never sat down and talked to one, never purposefully brought someone back. Sure, when he realised the connection to every healed victim was him , he thought of the things he could do, the people he could save...
Joe knew. Joe told him there was a balance between life and death, and he was right. Barry knew the science; death was necessary to the planet's survival, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Didn't mean he hadn't experimented, tried to learn the boundaries of his powers...
He'd crept into the morgue once. The lab where the autopsies were done was empty of everyone but the body of an exhumed victim, her bones spread across the table in a crude image. There was no attempt to recreate the bones into an anatomically correct skeleton, instead they were sorted into neat alike piles, legs bones to the left, arms to the right, spine and ribs above them with the neck and head at the far end of the table to where Barry had stood hesitantly in the doorway.
He’d known it was crazy, but he had to know; how old could the corpse be for his powers to work? Could he save his parents through these impossible powers? You couldn’t be convicted for murder if there wasn’t a victim, after all. There was only one way to find out and no matter what Joe said, he had to know.
With trembling fingers he’d reached out and touched the femur bone of the victim. She was seventeen when she was murdered. Attacked from behind, blunt force trauma brought her down, the head injury and following rape kept her there, but it was the inhaled alley water that killed her in the end. The case had gone cold mere months after her death, but now, seven years later a weapon had been found in the same area she was killed. All they had to do was match the weapon and the fingerprints to the damage her skull had received.
Her name was Maya. She would have been twenty-seven had she lived.
He’d touched her skull as lightly as he could, accepting the potential risk of leaving his prints behind. He’d wished she hadn't been killed so young. Had wished his touch would cause her body to reassemble itself while at the same time he hoped nothing would happen at all.
And nothing had.
He’d pressed his fingers to the bones for as long as he could, the risk of being caught increased with every minute he’d stayed, until, finally, he was forced to leave the lab in shaky remorse. He’d wanted his mother back, but the guilty relief that crawled up his throat as he fled the precinct made him hesitant to say how much. She’d been dead longer than ten years; if it didn’t work on Maya, it wouldn’t work on her.
That was three weeks ago. And still, he barely understood his powers. He didn't know how they worked other than the fresher the corpse the higher the chance of resurrection. He didn't know where they'd come from, but after nine months in a coma he could hazard a guess - waking up at S.T.A.R Labs was one thing, but waking up with powers in the place where the particle accelerator exploded, that was another.
The warehouse door bursts open, interrupting each of their introspective silences. Leonard and Barry instantly tensed, acutely aware of their limited options handcuffed as they were. But it was Mick who strolled through the door, covered in soot. His grim expression was belied by the light in his eyes, which only grew brighter as his face split into a grin at the sight of Leonard sitting up and awake.
"Snart!" He yelled and strode across the room barely coming to a stop before kneeling and gripping Leonard's shoulder. "How you feeling, boss?"
Barry might have flinched at the speed with which the burly man approached, were he not too busy making a horrified face. He looked at Leonard. "Your name is Leonard Snart ? And I thought I had a bad name."
Leonard scowled at him and Barry forced his mouth shut with an audible click, but Mick barked a laugh.
"Bartholomew Henry Allen ain't no walk in the park either, kid. But we can't all be called Mick Rory." And then he frowned. "Jesus, Snart. You didn't even tell the kid your name? Harsh."
Leonard's scowl deepened. "I've been awake for all of ten minutes, Mick , my last name is the least important revelation of tonight."
Mick winced. "I guess he told you about that, huh."
Leonard's expression was downright frosty. Even Barry felt guilty and he hadn't done anything except bring the man back to life. Without his consent sure, but it's not like either of them had a choice in the matter. Barry looked at his bag, open on the table. His phone hadn’t vibrated again, it had to be getting late now, or early, depending how you looked at it.
Taking a chance, Barry decided to interrupt. "Touching as this reunion is...I'd really like to be going now. So, if you could just," he gave each arm a shake. "I'll be on my way and you can have an angry heart to heart without any prying ears! Just what you want, I bet..." He faltered. "...No?"
Mick and Leonard looked at him.
Barry groaned. "What do you even need me for? I did my job! After a long shift at the station and being kidnapped! I haven't even eaten in hours, just let me go I won't tell anyone. Please ."
Mick looked at Leonard, who shrugged. "I could use some clothes myself." Mick blinked and flicked his eyes down like he hadn't realised Leonard was barely holding onto his last shred of dignity. He nodded slowly.
“Safehouse then,” he said, shooting Barry a quelling glance that spoke volumes. Barry wasn’t going home tonight.
Barry had done a very good job at putting that thought out of his head in the ten minutes he'd explained to Leonard what happened. He was just glad that his exhaustion was winning out over his own second-hand embarrassment and his brain-to-mouth filter.
"What time is it anyway?" He asked, before he could blurt out something else. It had to be some time in the early morning by now, given Barry had been off just before the graveyard shift when Mick kidnapped him. The warehouse had small windows up high, but most of them were covered in a thick layer of dirt and with the lights on inside Barry couldn’t see if it was still dark out. He hoped it was.
Mick didn’t look at him as he uncuffed him from the wall and helped haul the two of them to their feet. He took off his coat and draped it over Leonard as the charred remains of his clothing finally gave way, leaving him stark naked and filthy. The handcuffs connecting Leonard to Barry remained in place, and Mick doesn’t look either of them in the eyes as he busies himself with packing away Barry’s things that were spread across the table. Barry watched the man pocket his phone without even looking at it, a sinking feeling in his gut.
“Mick ,” said Leonard.
Mick stopped and then turned. “I got distracted.” He said sheepishly, still not looking Leonard in the face. His fingers twitched for his coat pockets like he’s forgotten Leonard’s wearing it.
Leonard glanced sidelong at the tense line of Barry’s shoulders. “How long?”
“…Four hours.”
Barry balked. It was 4 AM!? That meant it was probably Joe calling, wondering where he was.
“You have to – “
“Shut it.” Leonard barked at him. Then said to Mick, “His phone was on. We need to move, now.”
Without a word Mick put Barry’s phone back on the table and slung his messenger bag over his shoulder. He gave the room one last check then hustled Barry towards the door when he resisted Leonard’s pulling, Barry spluttering all the way.
“Kid, you’ve been kidnapped for hours already,” said Leonard, as he led the way through the door and over to a nondescript black car. “What’s a little longer? Consider it workplace experience .”
Barry huffed. “Okay, first of all, I’m twenty-five . Second, there really isn’t any reason not to leave me here. If the police are on their way looking for me then all you have to do is leave without me. You don’t want a manhunt – which there will be one if I’m not found – and it’s not like I’m going to be any use to you now, you’re both alive.”
Leonard gave a noncommittal hum and looked him up and down before getting into the car. In the dark, his gaze flashed with reflections from the street-lights. Barry repressed a shiver. He didn’t have a choice.
“Danger, Will Robinson,” he murmured and followed the pull of the handcuffs into the backseat.