someone new?

"What up, Flash, my manI"

"Huh?" Barry distractedly let out as he turned away from the monitors to the person who had just entered the Cortex. "Oh, hey, Chester."

"Anything I can help with?" he helpfully offered, craning his head around the speedster's frame to see what he was looking at.

He shook his head with a sigh. "Not at the moment," the hero admitted, placing his hands on his hips as he studied the screens once more. "I saw a spike in the city's power grid earlier, but so far nothing nefarious has come from it. So maybe it's nothing."

"Cool, cool, cool," Chester trilled as he awkwardly started swaying back and forth on his heels.

Eventually, Barry noticed the behavior and turned to raise his eyebrow at him. "Is there something you need, Chester?"

"What?! No! I'm good. Super good, even," he insisted, nervously chuckling. "You - you good?"

The speedster continued to eye his teammate oddly. "...Yeah..." he slowly answered.

"Good," the other man let out, nodding to himself. "So, are you, like, doing anything this weekend?"

"Not really..." Barry unsurely answered, still skeptical of his teammate's behavior. "Probably just binge a new show and patrol around the city."

"But you did that last weekend," he pointed out. "And you did that the weekend before that. And the weekend before that. And I'm pretty sure you've done the same thing every weekend for the past year."

Barry let out a huff, crossing his arms. "Do you have a point, Chester?"

Chester shrugged, his lips teetering into a nervous grin. "Live a little?"

"Live a little," the speedster repeated with a breathy laugh, shaking his head. "If you haven't noticed, I'm still living."

"You know what I mean," Chester interjected, waving his hands around. "Ever since you broke up with Iris, you've just been doing the same thing day in and day out. You don't seem happy either."

Barry's face broke out into a sincere grin. "Listen, Chester," he started, laying a hand on the other man's shoulder, his gaze gentle, "I appreciate your concern, but I'm fine. Things will happen the way they're supposed to in time."

"All you do is come to STAR Labs from work and go home from STAR Labs. That's not a life."

The speedster retracted his hand to rub the back of his neck. "I - I go to Jitters on occasion too," he meekly defended himself.

"How are you supposed to meet someone new living like this though?"

"Someone new?"

"Yeah, because most of the people you meet at crime scenes are dead and the ones at the CCPD are usually criminals..."

Barry shook his head. "Who says I want to meet someone new? I'm fine," he insisted. "I have all of you guys."

"I may be one of the newer members here, Barry, but I know you are not fine." He sighed, those wide eyes of his distraught, his glasses only magnifying them. "You're lonely."

The speedster's shoulders shrunk. Was he that obvious? "Look, Chester, I appreciate your concern, but I'm not exactly in the position to date."

"Because of Iris?"

"No!" Barry immediately rejected the notion. Maybe at first he didn't want to date because he was broken up about his broken marriage, but that wasn't what was holding him back anymore. "I'm The Flash, it's a little hard for me to build a relationship without prematurely telling them my secret identity or I'd risk being seen as flaky."