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Barry swallows hard, pants heavily through trembling lips. It's been over an hour, but he plans to go for an hour more. He's pushing his body to its limits, aiming for fatigue.
He needs the pain.
With pain comes silence.
His sweat-soaked shirt clings to his skin. The soles of his shoes slap the icy pavement. The winter wind rakes his skin, leaving red streaks in its wake.
For a man who spends close to twelve hours a day in a cozy studio with a tattoo gun in his hand, this is actually his element. Out of doors, gray sky overhead, wind in his hair.
When his mind refuses to settle down and give him a break, Barry runs.
First thing in the morning, in the middle of the night, on his lunch break - whenever he has free time, he slips on his sneakers and runs.
He runs to clear his head. Conversations, thoughts, memories - they get clogged in there. As the day goes by, he needs to flush them out. Today's cocktail of mental congestion has been particularly potent. The thoughts in his head, the voices, are all about goodbye: the look on his father's face after he got convicted, the conversation he had with Iris when she announced she was getting married to another man, sending his boyfriend off in an invisible ship to timelines unknown, combined with the screams of his mother right before she died.
And as if that psychological torture weren't enough, he suffers from a rare form of tinnitus. Not a single doctor he has seen has been able to cure him of it. Some cryptic physician with a literary name (Dickens? Wells?) referred him to a neurologist, Dr. Snow, but Barry never made an appointment.
What is the point?
Barry knows his tinnitus isn't curable. It's a side-effect of being struck by lightning. That’s obvious. He always assumed it would go away on its own eventually. It's not a bad affliction if he's being honest. Not maddening. More like a soft voice humming in his head. It's more of a sizzle than a high-pitched ring.
Tattooing silences it.
Running silences it.
But most of all, Len silences the static in Barry's head. Three days of running couldn't accomplish what Len does with a smile or a kiss.
Len knows about the tinnitus. Barry told him about it, thought he’d be pleased as punch about the positive effect he has on him, seeing as Len sometimes argues the negative.
But Len is worried.
When a man with access to the best that supernatural tech has to offer gets nervous, Barry knows there is cause. But Barry plays dumb and reassures Len that everything will be all right.
It's the only lie he's ever told him.
Barry knows there is something not right about him. Something not normal.
Not human.
He has been running from it for a while. There's something inside him, deep inside, growing stronger and stronger every day. Something he can't always control. He didn't need a strong, handsome man with a futuristic job to tell him. Barry doesn't know what it is, and at this point, he's not sure he wants to know. Knowing would mean dealing, and Barry doesn't want to deal. He doesn't want things in his life to change.
In the coming days, he may not get a choice.
But right now, he'll keep on running.