Chapter Text
He thought he knew what misery felt like.
Barry had lost Lup. He had watched his family drive themselves to despair looking for her, and then he had watched the memory wrenched from them so they couldn't even remember who they were missing. He'd almost forgotten her himself. He'd spent months on his own, recovering, decaying, and trying to hold himself together while he toiled to find out what, exactly, Lucretia had done and track down her hideout.
All that, he could take. He had to take. Because if he was right, and he was the only one left who knew everything, and he thought about anything for too long... no. Barry couldn't afford to lost control. It was about the only thing he had left. So he dealt with it.
But this -
He raises his hand once more, reaching out tentatively as if the tenth attempt might make a difference. His spectral fingers hit an invisible point and just like every time before, a pain fizzles and burns through him. Arcane energy. Unsurprised, he pulls back, flexes his incorporeal hand. At least the results are conclusive for once: a lich can't get through to where Lucretia is.
"Ow," he says. Somehow that encompasses everything. The barrier hurts, and it's not just the magic shock.
Lucretia, quiet, thoughtful Lucretia, has made a barrier against him. For the first time in more than a hundred years, Barry is well and truly alone.
There's a dull ache inside him, similar to what hunger used to feel like. It gnaws away at his being and there's a second - just a second - where it threatens to devour him completely. More than shaking - he's vibrating, oscillating wildly. Red bolts of lightning peel off him and dissipate into nothingness, crackling and terrible. His soul feels loose and fragile and honestly fucking useless; it's just making things worse to remember how much there is at stake, how much he cares, how much he misses Lup -
A lifeline to a drowning man.
He flails out and grabs it, clings to it, gathering the memories close to his center. Lup laughing at him. Lup intensely focused on a book, biting her lip. Lup offering him a spoon from the pan to taste and shooting him a wink. Lup, on that one glorious day.
Thinking of her hurts about as much as the realisation that Lucretia has made her decision; she doesn't want to see him. But it's a solid, dependable, welcome kind of hurt. That's not going anywhere anytime soon, he thinks grimly. And as far as he's concerned, that's a good thing. That's just swell.
A lich's focus can be any strong emotion, Barry thinks as he drifts away from the barrier between him and the last part of his family who knows who he is. For him, for decades now, that emotion has been love of Lup, plain and simple. Now it's not that he loves her any less, or that she isn't the thing literally holding him together most of the time.
It's just that nowadays, sorrow, not skin, is how he keeps it all in.