Find Your Light in The Darkness

The Pain You Can't See is The One That Hurts The Most

Dedicated to NoraXSWest-AllenFam, @CamrynKissel, @joshuasmith943, @bloodypunkkk, damianflashpoint, @amorheartz, ThatSpiderKnight, @Nicholas_Thawne, and luciferandchloe2021 for all of their amazingly kind support of my Arrowverese stories! Your words truly mean the world to me :)

"I never really appreciated how nice a shower could feel until now," Barry thought, quietly to himself as he casually combed the last few loose strands of his slightly damp brunette hair back into their rightful places on top of his head, his pantless legs dangling vaguely off of Joe's bedroom's old oak dressing chair.

To the average person, by all accounts the last half an hour worth of activity would've probably been called nothing short of a time suck for it took him nearly half that time just moving himself into and out of the shower's tile containment and somehow felt more exhausting than almost anything else he'd done throughout all the last three days combined.

Yet, just getting to feel the warm water splash against his bare-skinned shoulders had somehow sent a wordless sense of serenity to his fragile form's muscles. Even if said feeling hadn't lasted for more than just a few minutes before he'd had to call for Joe to actually help him get out, that is.

I know Iris and I really wanted to keep most of today to ourselves, but that doesn't mean I won't take Joe's help every once and awhile, too. You know, considering there's certain things you only want your Dad to help you with.

Barry breathed a tired breath as he threw his plain white t-shirted upper chest down against his adoptive father's mattress, letting his motionless legs flop tiredly down below them. If one's body could really feel tiredness in an appendage they were only vaguely aware they still had.

I don't honestly know how I'm supposed to feel about any of this, though.

But as he awaited Joe's re-entrance into the room, his eyes fell unexpectedly down on his lying legs, their attention strangely grasped by the lanky appendages that were technically his own.

It seemed like it had been so long since the last time he'd gotten to actually look down at his own legs without some clothed protection covering their skinny structures. Sure, they looked pretty terrible with all the infinite amount of small bruises which still lined every few inches of his skin which covered their bony frames, but that didn't stop the slightest bit of a relieved smile from silently slipping onto the man's face, nonetheless.

It's crazy because I used to hate these things as a kid. You know, because of the whole fact that they were too lanky to help in any sort of sport, not that my actual hand-eye coordination probably would've let me do that in the first place, but they couldn't even do much of anything to help me run away from those bullies, either. There's just something about seeing them now, about just knowing that I still have them after everything that happened that night, even if I can't really feel them, that is, in the most insane way possible, kinda comforting.

"You need a little help there, Barr?" Joe asked, his heavy-treaded footsteps hitting against the bedroom's tan-carpeted flooring jolting Barry out of his lingering thoughts.

"Hm? Oh yeah, sure. Thanks," he responded as he slowly brought himself back up into an upright position as Joe kneeled down on the ground in front of the bed, carefully pulling one of the fabric holes of his adoptive son's worn navy jeans over each of his stationary legs.

"You don't have to thank me for helping, Barr. It's pretty much been in my job description to do things like this for awhile now," Joe chuckled, soulfully as he gently finished sliding Barry's newly black-socked foot through the second slot before slowly pushing himself back onto his own two feet.