The stall had developed a problem Jude hadn't anticipated, which was that it had become too popular with a very specific and extremely determined clientele.
The original plan: set up in a different neighborhood each day, sell until the stock ran out, use the movement to map the city while maintaining a low profile. A mobile food operation, pleasantly untraceable, covering ground that would be useful later when the Flash started generating incidents across the urban area.
The actual situation: his phone number was now in a group chat with forty-three Japanese students, Nagisa had apparently been designated as the group's official procurement officer, and the cart was currently surrounded on three sides by people holding insulated containers.
"Jude." The voice on the phone had the patient, relentless quality of someone who had already called twice this morning. "The nikuman from last week. Do you have more?"
"You bought three hundred of them."
"We're out."
Jude looked at his phone. "Three hundred nikuman. Gone. In a week."
"It's forty-three people."
"That's still seven nikuman each."
"Jude. Some of them are athletes."
He exhaled through his nose. "The braising liquid from the pork pot — you still have it?"
"Yes."
"Add water and salt, bring it to a boil morning and evening to keep it from turning. Soak any new pork in cold water first to draw out the blood, then add it to the pot over medium-low heat. It'll absorb the existing flavour. The spice balance is already in the liquid — don't add more, just top up the aromatics after the third batch." He paused, looking at the crowd pressing against the cart's sides. "Also, how did this many people find me? I've changed streets four times this week."
The silence on the other end was eloquent.
"There's a locator in the group chat, isn't there."
"It's just a shared pin—"
Jude hung up.
He looked at the assembled crowd — thermoses, insulated bags, one person with what appeared to be a small cooler on wheels — and made the professional assessment that he had underestimated the depth of collective homesickness in Central City's Japanese student population.
"Right," he said. "Single file. We're doing this in order."
The atmosphere at the Central City Police Department had been a different kind of difficult lately.
Joe West had been arriving at his desk every morning with the look of a man running on bad sleep and worse coffee, which was accurate. Eddie Thawne had been arriving at the same time with the look of a man who genuinely wanted to help and couldn't find the angle, which was also accurate. The two of them moved around each other with the careful courtesy of people who hadn't yet worked out how to be partners.
It wasn't about Eddie. Joe knew that. Eddie was capable, professional, and had good instincts — the Iris incident alone had demonstrated that, and Joe gave credit where it was owed. Under different circumstances, training a new partner would have been straightforward.
These were not different circumstances.
He'd been at the hospital that morning, same as every morning, sitting in the chair beside Barry's bed. Barry Allen, who Joe had brought home at eleven years old and raised as his own, who had grown up to become the most infuriatingly late, genuinely brilliant forensic investigator in the department — Barry Allen was lying in a hospital bed with burns covering most of his body, not responding, not waking, his vital signs stable in the specific way that means not dying rather than recovering.
The attending physician had explained it once, clearly and without cruelty, which was the kind of honesty that stays with you.
"Mr. Allen is, in the technical sense, fortunate. Anyone sustaining a direct lightning strike with open chemical wounds would, statistically, have died on the scene or in the ambulance. He didn't. His vitals have stabilized. The burns are severe but not expanding. The problem is the neurological picture — the strike may have affected the brain's signalling, or it may be the medications, or something we haven't identified. He is, currently, in a vegetative state. He won't deteriorate further. He also won't wake up on any timeline we can predict. It could be hours. It could be a year. It could be permanent."
"The question of whether to continue life support is yours to make, Mr. West. We'll support whatever you decide."
Joe had not told Iris the last part of that conversation.
Eddie appeared at the edge of his desk, read his face with the quiet perceptiveness of someone younger than his rank, and said, "What happened?"
Joe looked at him.
"My adopted son is in a coma. My former partner is retired with a gunshot wound." He kept his voice level. "Nothing's wrong, Eddie. I just need some space to think. You understand."
"Of course." Eddie retreated without pressing it, which was the right call and Joe knew it. He watched the young detective go and felt the flat weight of being sorry for something he had no energy to fix right now.
There was also Wells. That conversation was sitting in him like a stone he hadn't decided what to do with yet.
It had been three weeks.
Iris had started coming to the hospital every evening, bringing coffee and the steady, gentle pressure of someone who was frightened but refusing to show it in front of her father. Joe recognized the tactic because he'd taught it to her.
"You fell asleep in the chair again," she said softly, setting a cup on the table beside him.
"I wasn't asleep."
"Dad."
He straightened up, took the coffee. Across the room, Barry lay exactly as he had for twenty-one days — eyes closed, chest rising and falling with the machine's assistance, the burns on his face and hands in various stages of the slow process the doctors called healing and Joe called something he didn't have a word for yet.
"You need to go home and sleep in an actual bed."
"I'll sleep when he wakes up."
Iris looked at him for a moment with the particular expression of a daughter who knows she's not going to win this argument and is choosing her battles. She pulled her chair close, wrapped her hands around her own coffee cup, and settled in.
The monitor alarm went off without warning.
Not the slow, steady rhythm it had been maintaining for three weeks — this was urgent, sharp, the sound of something happening that shouldn't be. Barry's body convulsed, a single violent full-body jerk that snapped his spine rigid against the mattress, and then another, and another, his limbs fighting the restraints, his head thrown back.
"Barry—"
Iris was out of her chair before Joe was, hands on Barry's shoulders, trying to hold him still against the shaking. Joe was already at the door, already shouting into the corridor with the full force of a voice that had spent thirty years making itself heard over everything.
"Doctor — I need a doctor, now — my son—"
The corridor filled with running feet.
Inside the room, the monitors kept screaming.