Eddie's phone rang mid-sentence.
He looked at it. Looked at Iris. She gave him a small nod — go ahead — and he answered.
"Eddie? No time — get to the station, now. Serial robbery suspect just hit Gold Bank. We've got a vehicle and a direction. Move."
He was already standing. "I'm sorry," he said to Iris, reaching for his jacket. "They need me."
"Go." She smiled, the kind that was mostly exasperated. "You look ridiculous trying to be a hero, but go."
He hugged her once, quickly, and pushed through the café door.
Iris watched him through the glass until he'd crossed the street. Then her eye snagged on something else — a figure on the sidewalk opposite, standing still while everything else moved around him.
Barry Allen, hands in his pockets, staring directly at her.
Oh.
Three minutes later, they were walking side by side along the city block, and Iris was doing the thing she always did when she'd been caught — talking very fast.
"Barry, please don't tell Joe. He doesn't know yet."
"I didn't know either," Barry said. His voice was flat in the way that meant he was working through something. "If I hadn't seen it just now, I wouldn't have suspected anything."
"While you were in the hospital — Eddie took shifts with Joe. He was there a lot. It just... happened."
"He's Joe's partner, Iris."
"I've liked someone for the first time in a long time." She stopped walking. "Can't you be happy for me?"
"You're asking me to help you lie to Joe—"
A black Mustang blew through the intersection doing twice the speed limit, and two seconds later, a chain of police sirens followed.
Barry's head turned on instinct. Through the Mustang's window, the driver's face swept past in a fraction of a second — short blond hair, jaw set, eyes that Barry had last seen in a police file Joe had shown him.
That's impossible. Joe had told him just yesterday — both Mardon brothers, confirmed dead in the plane crash. Both of them.
And yet.
"Iris." He was already stepping off the curb. "Go home. I have to follow them."
"Barry, you work in forensics—"
"I know!"
She watched him disappear around the corner, moving in a way that didn't quite look like running.
"Jude." Satsuki's voice came through the earpiece, clean and clipped. "The police units are closing the distance on Mardon's vehicle."
Jude leaned into the turn, the motorcycle eating up the block. At his current speed, the Mustang was barely visible ahead — a black shape threading through intersections.
"Copy. Once the cruisers are in position, trigger the loss of control. One-stop service."
"Hold — Jude. Barry Allen is in pursuit."
Jude processed this for exactly one second.
"How. How is he here right now? What is this — the timeline correcting itself?"
"I don't know. But he's accelerating. He's going to reach the vehicle."
"...Fine. Change of plan. Let Barry make the arrest. Just trigger the skid on schedule and let him do the rest."
The Mustang's tires bit wrong against the asphalt and began to slide.
Barry wasn't thinking about the Mardon brothers, or Joe, or Iris, or anything that had happened in the last nine months.
He was thinking: I can catch up. I can catch up. I can catch up.
He'd spent the morning at S.T.A.R. Labs — Wells, Cisco, and Caitlin measuring things he didn't have words for yet, producing numbers that didn't fit inside the part of his brain that still thought of himself as ordinary. And then he'd gone to see Iris, and then the Mustang had gone through the intersection, and now he was running.
He was passing police cars.
Not weaving between them — passing them. Like they were standing still. Like the whole street had been dipped in something thick and slow that affected everything except him.
The world transformed around him as he pushed faster. Flowers at the edge of the road hung suspended mid-sway. A pigeon crossing above the intersection had forgotten, apparently, how to finish its wingbeat. Sweat moved down a police officer's face in the adjacent cruiser with the unhurried patience of honey. The sirens behind him had dropped three octaves into something barely recognizable as sound — long, stretched notes, almost musical, bleeding into each other like something played backwards.
He could see the Mustang's tires now. Could watch the individual rotation of each wheel — slow, incomplete revolutions, never quite finishing a full turn before he'd already covered another hundred feet.
Time had become a physical thing. Elastic. Enormous. A second stretched into a minute, a minute into something longer that didn't have a name yet. And through all of it, only he was moving at normal speed — his speed, the speed that felt, he realized with a shock of recognition, like his actual natural pace, like something he'd always been slightly holding back from without knowing it.
The force running through him was not new. It felt, impossibly, like coming home.
The Mustang lost traction. He watched the rear wheels step sideways, watched Mardon's expression begin its long slow journey through surprise and then disbelief and then something that looked like fury — all of it unfolding with the stately pace of a painting being assembled one brushstroke at a time.
The car was going into the tree. Barry was already moving.
Window. Mardon's collar. Grass. He set the man down on the roadside and stepped back. From Mardon's perspective — Barry understood this, almost academically — something had simply happened to him. The car had malfunctioned. Then he was outside it, on the grass, with his hands behind his back, and he had no account whatsoever of the interval between those two events.
Barry took a breath. Let the world spin back up to its usual speed.
The police cars were pulling over. Officers were getting out. Sirens were completing their cycles.
"This is the CCPD." He kept his voice level, professional, like this was something he did every day. "Clyde Mardon. You're under arrest for armed robbery."
He walked to the curb and quietly let out the longest breath of his life.
At the street corner half a block back, Jude idled the motorcycle and waited.
"Report."
"Barry Allen has Mardon in custody," Satsuki said. "CCPD officers are on scene. The recovered funds are still in the vehicle."
Jude turned the motorcycle around and headed home.
"You did well," he said. "Money recovered, suspect in custody, and I didn't have to show my face once. That's a clean operation." He paused. "We won't need the backup plan. Good meal when we get back."
"I can't eat human food," Satsuki said, reflexively.