[action] locked to Cisco

[snowandfrost]

As busy as this version of STAR Labs is, Caitlin manages to find a secluded hallway to pace back and forth in by herself.

Oliver isn't getting better. He's getting worse. And no matter what test or treatment she tried or they put together, it seemed to not make any kind of a dent into this illness.

Worse, there were more patients. She saw Barry-2 get taken in. Mick.

When she saw Mick, her heart stopped for Cisco. She couldn't imagine what he was going through until she saw Oliver take a turn for the worst after each treatment. Even with people around her and even Pilot trying to persuade her to rest, to take a break from working on treatments, she hasn't taken a break. They were all working together. She knew that. She knew that she needed to take a break but she couldn't just sit by and watch Oliver get worse and worse.

But she made sure he wasn't alone. Not in all those moments when he was awake. She stayed as close to him as possible. Caitlin only left because she needed to pace, needed to have time by herself to not be scared about losing her friends. Not be scared about losing Oliver.

When she hears footsteps, she looks up, hoping that it wasn't one of the other workers at STAR Labs trying to get her attention with worse news. There's some relief when she sees her best friend.

"Cisco."

Holding out for a hero?

[kid_flash_found]

Bart hadn't left STAR Labs since he brought Barry-2 there. They were acting on borrowed time trying to find a solution before the people affected by the temporal radiation leak died of it, and he was only slowing down when he absolutely had to. Anything else could wait. Well, not sleep, he wasn't a Bat, he knew he needed to take some time for that, but aside from that, slowing down to communicate what he'd gotten done and eating massive amounts to offset what he'd burned up with all the speeding, he was blurring through everything.

Trying to put the bits and pieces he recalled of the science of the Speed Force he'd learned from Johnny Quick and Val and others who'd made a study of it to use wasn't precisely hard, but it wasn't an area of study he'd been dedicated to. The closest he had to that was when he'd tried to become a CSI in LA when he was old, and that...well, thinking about that was leaving him as conflicted as thinking about Val. Most of what he learned were things he overheard while he was fighting Thad and his Rogues to try to buy time to release the trapped Speed Force in a harmless manner to those around it.

So books vanished and reappeared as he read the reference material, he spent subjective hours reading through everything he could find as quickly as he could absorb the information, adding to the equations on the bulletin boards and suggesting revisions. Using the Speed Force to produce the required energy wasn't the issue, it was keeping the effects limited in the same way the temporal radiation had only damaged people already changed by being in their little pocket of broken time.

The only time he took was to spend a little bit of each day sitting next to Barry's hospital bed, trying to be there for this particular not-grandpa. He couldn't let anyone down if he could help it, because even if he could run back in time and try to change things, it would never be enough.

[[OOC: Event post for Bart, find him in the lab or med bay, or pretty much anywhere else in STAR Labs burning himself out. He will try to drop dead for at least a few hours every thirty or so...]]