HELLO, WORLD

FOR THE FIRST SIX MONTHS, Elias Grey was in a complete vegetative state. He resided in his hospital room at Central City General, pristine white sheets covering everything but his arms, which were wrapped in bandages, an IV drip, and nerve patches. He'd been rushed into the ER with no movement, minimal brain activity, and an erratic, failing heart. He was tended to last out of the patients who appeared at a similar time in a similar condition: Barry Allen and Harrison Wells.

His body looked largely uninjured with the exception of his right hand, which was gnarled by a horrendous, red and blotchy chemical burn with remnants of a rubber glove having merged with his muscle and bone.

It took Cisco a week to recover from his own accelerator-related injuries, and three days to find Elias. The first day was spent scouring the west side of the city for Eli's apartment, before hacking the NAD and finding that Eli had no registered address or occupation.

The second day, he searched the hospitals, then the morgues. He'd nearly lost hope when Caitlin Snow called him and told him that they'd found him. A John Doe, name unknown, life unknown.

That's what Eli was to Cisco in that instant. A John Doe. He had no clue where his best friend lived, or where he worked, or how he spent his time when Cisco wasn't around. It was sickening.

But when he saw him, all that anger and confusion melted away almost instantaneously. He visited him every day for four months, sitting in a chair by a sunlit window while Caitlin and Wells dropped by Barry's room, comatose in another hall where his medical bills were actually being paid, where Joe and Iris West sat by his side until Wells convinced them to let STAR Labs host him until he woke up.

Similarly, Cisco worked his boss for permission to let Eli come with. He used several "low-blow" excuses. Eli seemed to have the same condition as Wells, a loss of feeling in his arms instead of his legs. And, if they didn't find a way to pay for his bills, the hospital was going to pull the plug.

Wells had begrudgingly agreed to house him after that, his main counterargument being a cruel one — that if Elias Grey woke up, there was no guarantee that he'd even want to keep on living. Cisco couldn't even comprehend what his mentor was saying at first, but over the course of those first six months, he figured it out.

Why Wells didn't hire Eli. Probably.

Elias didn't live in an apartment. He lived in an abandoned house. The garage, which was the only place in the house not severely waterlogged, was absolutely decimated and marked a hazardous location with innumerable chemicals lingering in the air. The dead corpses of small animals littered the driveway when Cisco drove by. They looked like they'd been torched.

He swore he'd never let Eli go back there.

Eli didn't have a job at a warehouse. He was unemployed, had been for years, running out of money from his father's will and loans that he'd taken out way too long ago. Cisco dealt with the guilt quietly and privately, selling off some of his unnecessary things and paying Eli's loans without so much as a word. He felt sick to his stomach, knowing he could've helped his friend survive instead of buying a new arcade machine for his office.

Wells told him it wasn't his fault. Cisco knew it was.

Eli was a good man, staunchly independent. He wouldn't let anyone help him with anything, not for the sake of his masculinity but for the sake of hating the sense of depending on someone, owing someone. And now, he'd never be able to live unassisted.

He'd built his entire world, his entire career on his own, and it had come crashing down all around him while Cisco stood by, clueless. What kind of best friend was he?

He couldn't blame Eli for keeping secrets from him, Either. Cisco had his own to hold close to heart, guarding them like a dragon's hoard, knowing that if Eli ever learned of them, he would hate him forever.

Cisco Ramon felt like a shell of himself. He could still see Ronnie standing at the entrance to the accelerator ring, telling him to shut the door behind him. He felt like crying every time he had to look down at Harrison Wells instead of up. Caitlin's hollow expression, the death of her warm smile, felt more tangible than a knife to the heart. And Eli… it shattered him.

He didn't know what to do, and nothing Wells told him made it better. Even working with Barry Allen, learning about him through FaceBook, his resumes and Instagram posts only brought short-lived bursts of happiness, like a drug.

And then it happened. July 11th, 2014. A small jolt in Eli's EEG. Brain activity.

From that day forward, there were signs of life. A flutter of the eyes, a twitch of the lips, a tremor in the leg. When Cisco had run to Eli's side and stubbed his toe on a table, the sound of his pained yelp had resulted in a brainwave spike — a sign of concern.

In hindsight, Cisco would come to understand that the suggestion was meant to give him something to do, a way to get over the hurdles of his grief. But when Wells theorized (with no basis other than the belief that it would help Cisco) that Eli might have suffered memory loss, Cisco was the first to volunteer to give Elias Grey a rundown on his own life.

Holding out on hope that his friend would wake up, he would sit at his side and talk for hours, playing solitaire and making houses of cards. He spoke on any matter of things — Eli's deadbeat parents, who, according to Eli, were shitbags who wanted nothing to do with their son. They had taken the money he'd received winning science fairs to fund their respective drinking and drug problems.

He told Elias about how he said that if he ever got married, he'd take his spouse's surname and ensure that the Grey family line never continued. How he swore he'd never have kids.

He told Elias about his sister, Abigail — whom Cisco had never personally met, but was told she had an uncanny ability to know exactly what you were thinking at any given moment. He told Eli she was currently facing a life sentence at Iron Heights with some hesitation — would Eli really want to know that?

Cisco then realized he didn't know why Abby was in prison. But after that, he told him about how Eli's father and brother had died in a bank robbery, how his best friend, Sophia Randolf, had killed herself.

Elias Grey's brainwaves went haywire that day. Cisco had to wipe a tear from both Eli's cheek and his own.

With the hard part over with, Cisco told Eli about their science projects in high school, how Eli had been called to the principal's office far too many times for his stellar grades in science and his consistent D's and F's in English. He talked about Eli's nasty habit of sneaking live cockroaches into the lockers of students who looked at him and Cisco the wrong way, how he would always order a cup of whipped cream and caramel from Jitters during their college cram nights. Just whipped cream and caramel, which Cisco diagnosed as the secret symptom of acute psychopathy.

He told Eli about the casts he'd designed, named the Phantom Limb Enhancers, or PLEs for short. Prosthetic casts with wires and chips that synthesized a long-broken connection between brain and legs, brain and arms. He'd brought a black plastic briefcase out onto the table, patting it fondly. Cisco promised that if Eli ever woke up, this would be the first thing they tried on. The second thing would be a giant yellow banana suit that Cisco had found in his closet four months ago.

And then, when Cisco had nothing left to talk about, he talked about Barry and the accelerator. He was approaching the nine-month mark since the explosion. The first thing he'd told Eli about Barry was a confession, one barely louder than a whisper — that he had designed a cold gun in order to take Barry down in case he ended up being some psycho. He talked about how he'd locked Ronnie inside the accelerator, how Caitlin still hadn't removed her engagement ring and how Wells hardly ever left STAR Labs anymore, branded a pariah by the entirety of Central City.

Barry woke up to the sound of Lady Gaga's Poker Face, so Cisco decided to do the same thing with Eli, albeit less successfully. After playing Starman by David Bowie for upwards of an hour, Wells came in and told Cisco to follow the scientific method he'd learned in middle school and find a different approach to waking his friend up.

The music stopped, the talking resumed. Barry Allen woke up fit enough to run a marathon. And he could run a marathon. In less than a second. Barry Allen broke his wrist and it healed in three hours. Barry Allen unraveled a tornado by himself. Barry Allen caught a metahuman. Barry Allen arrested Clyde Mardon. Clyde Mardon!

Barry Allen. Barry Allen.

Cisco only stopped babbling when he realized Eli had been staring directly t him for the past hour. A massive accomplishment for the man to even move his eyes, and he was using them to tell Cisco to shut up. Elias Grey couldn't care less about someone he'd never met.

He was like that, sometimes, Cisco remembered. Like Harrison Wells, in the sense that they never seemed to spare time for anything they didn't care about. Cisco figured it was a mechanism born from a life of strife and struggle. But it wasn't just that. It was envy that Eli harbored in those eyes, one that was unquestionably justified.

To hear that Barry Allen was having the time of his life with powers beyond man's comprehension while Eli was stuck in a bed with no arms, no ability to move, no house and no money…

Cisco stopped talking about Barry. That very same night, when Clyde Mardon had been shot by Joe West, Wells stopped by with grave news.

'Expect the worst,' he had said. 'Elias Grey may never fully wake up, and it's clear to me that he doesn't want to be stuck between being alive and being dead. Pulling the plug may be the best — and only — option.'

Cisco didn't even have time to be horrified at what his boss was suggesting.

Elias Grey was a master at defying expectations. He woke up the next morning.

⋯⋯ ┇ ♝ ┇ ⋯⋯

Eli might've been a master at defying expectations, but he wasn't a medical professional. Even so, he found it strange that he would suddenly awaken from a nine-month vegetative state with full control over his body and cognizance of the mind.

Well, almost.

His muscles were atrophied. Not as severely as they should have been, but that wasn't the biggest of Eli's worries.

He'd been staring at the ceiling of this room in STAR Labs for upward of three months now with the exception of a few moments of clarity, so the second he realized he had the ability to look away, he did.

The window to his right was floor-to-ceiling, casting the room in bleak, cloud-filtered sunlight breaking through the forested hills of the Central City outskirts. The world outside was half-obscured by a late morning fog, dissipating quickly in the autumn sun.

The first real thing that Eli had accomplished in nine months was getting to his feet. His legs wobbled, the ground ice-cold beneath his soles, leaving him a quivering mess in pale-blue hospital garb. He looked down at his right hand, which was warped and waxy, clearly having been through a couple failed skin grafts. It was an instant reminder of what put him here, not that he hadn't been thinking about it for the past few months.

Cisco's refresher of his life had been nice, but Eli hadn't lost his memory. In fact, the recap had been more than sufficient for Eli to rewind through every failure and experience that he'd faced, and how little Cisco really knew about any of it.

But he pushed that thought away, recalibrated, recalculated, like a homing missile knocked off course and desperate to complete its mission. What had gone wrong that night? The accelerator explosion might've caused a sufficient disruption in the subatomic fields to result in the bridge's failure. The lightning storm, maybe, injecting raw energy into the air, could've accounted for the unexpectedly large quantum output.

But what had gone right? This question had plagued him for months, unsure of what he'd done so differently as to have such a radical success. Had it been that millimeter-movement of the core, that slight adjustment of the framing?

Summoning quantum energy in a controlled — okay, somewhat controlled — environment was a feat unheard of by even men like Harrison Wells.

Speaking of him… Eli felt strange, knowing he'd met the man but had been unable to say anything. Wells had visited him only once during the three months that Eli could process and perceive the world around him, and he hadn't said a word.

He had just looked at Eli, his face blurred in Eli's periphery beyond recognition or even prediction. Eli couldn't put an expression to a voice, because the voice wasn't there. The only identifying factor was that he was on Eli's level — eye to eye, if Eli had been able to look — due to that wheelchair.

Maybe Wells felt bad for him, being in such a similar state. Maybe he was angry — after all, housing two comatose patients surely wasn't a cheap endeavor. IV drips, changing clothes and, well… even Cisco didn't try to bathe him. He was quite literally dead weight, and a dead man is far heavier than a living one.

Eli would know.

He realized he'd been standing, unmoving, even though the privilege of life had been granted to him once again. He took a few steps forward, feeling the sensation of the ground beneath his feet. The world seemed too bright, garish even though his room was a clinically designed, monochromatic laboratory, refurbished into an absurdly blank living quarters. Every time his eyes shifted to another wall, his head hurt.

And he was hungry, but Eli knew he couldn't eat unassisted. Not now, not ever again, it seemed.

The loss of his arms had become painfully obvious to him on the first day that he'd regained awareness. He could feel the sheets surrounding him on every fiber of his skin, every hair, almost as if all the sensations he'd missed for six months were coming back to him in an instant. Even the saliva in his mouth had a distinct sour taste — probably from an inability to care for himself for half a year.

All of that, and yet nothing from his arms. That combined with the very sharp, distinct memory of watching his own flesh burn off with no feeling whatsoever left only one reasonable answer in mind.

He, like his long-time hero, had been paralyzed.

At least Harrison Wells could still do his work. Eli's arms hung limply like sacks of sand and stone, an ever-constant and ever-present reminder of how his life had changed forever.

Anger roiled up within him. He'd already lost so much, and now he'd been robbed of the one thing he had left — his dignity and his independence.

The thought of anyone, even Cisco, feeding him and caring for him like he was some infant made bile rise in his throat. Hopefully the PLEs would work, but...

He looked around, rage simmering just underneath his skin. He wanted to throw something, punch something, but he knew that he couldn't. He just couldn't win. One minor success led to a decades-long failure.

He shut his eyes tight, eyes burning with unshed tears. He swallowed hard and clenched his jaw, trying to refrain from screaming and breaking down. A sound like a swarm of bees faded into his mind, drowning everything out in a loud, discordant buzz. Spots of orange and blue-green poked at the back of his eyelids like he'd just turned away from the sun.

The door opened and the buzzing stopped. Eli gasped for air like he'd just been pulled out from underwater, head jerking towards the sound.

Four people. Cisco Ramon, Caitlin Snow, Harrison Wells, and a lean, brown-haired man that Eli assumed was Barry Allen.

He couldn't handle looking at Barry Allen for longer than a split second. He knew what he could do, how that compared to what Eli was deprived of. He wondered how Wells could stand it, and nearly laughed.

How could Wells *stand* it? How could Eli *handle* this? Humor peeked through the crashing waves of rage, and his eyes drifted to Cisco, happy to recognize someone.

He spoke, feeling like little more than a program that had been under construction for years upon years, degraded to nothing more than a single line of code.

Hello, world.

"Hello," he said. He didn't recognize the sound of his own voice, so accustomed to Cisco's that he expected to hear his best friend when he opened his mouth. "Hello," he said again, feeling the sensation of his tongue on the roof of his mouth, tasting the words. It tasted better than his spit.

"Eli," Cisco breathed, before rushing forwards, arms outstretched.

Eli stepped back hesitantly, unsure of how to receive it with his own hands hanging limp at his sides. Cisco stopped cold, an unfathomable possibility coming to mind. "You… you recognize me, right?"

"Of course." Eli didn't hesitate. "I just…"

It dawned on his friend as he looked at Eli's arms. "Right," he whispered, before coming in with less gusto for a gentle hug.

Eli felt Cisco squeeze him, only by the pressure on his back and the strange sensation of pressure on his ribcage.

When they finally broke from the embrace, Cisco turned to Barry and gestured with a toothy, sheepish smile. "This is Barry Allen."

Eli looked directly at a mole on Barry's forehead and smiled graciously. He could not meet his eyes.

"Cisco's told me all about you, Eli," Barry smiled graciously, holding out a hand before dropping it sheepishly. "Can I call you Eli?"

He wished Barry wouldn't call him anything. "Sure."

"You shouldn't be up." Caitlin found a gap in the conversation and stepped in with the air of an actual medical professional, speaking a truth that Eli just didn't want to hear. "You're not — we haven't run any tests."

It was clear she hadn't been expecting Eli to wake up at all.

"I'm fine," he lied. He was one wrong word away from exploding like a hand grenade. "Just… call me a cab and let me go home."

"Slow down, Mr. Grey," Wells said, holding up a hand. "Dr. Snow is right. And beyond that, you're not equipped to go back to your normal life now."

Eli's eye twitched. Wells had touched a nerve, pulled the pin.

His shoulders squared and he spoke coldly. "You think I don't know that, doctor? I've been thinking about it for months now." His grey eyes were alight with fury. "But my quantum bridge is at my house. It — it worked that night." He turned to Cisco, desperate for a supporter amongst Caitlin's full face of concern and Barry's expression that Eli didn't bother to read. "Give me a chance to find it, fix it up, and —"

"The prototype wasn't there," Wells said curtly, watching Eli's expression with discerning eyes. "The authorities said it was destroyed in the explosion. I'm truly sorry, Mr. Grey."

Wells had been expecting something different than what he saw: the final pillar in Eli's life crumbling into dust. He swallowed his words as Cisco gave him an apologetic look, eyes skittering over Eli's like they were hot coals, too bright to look at for too long.

Eli slumped, and Caitlin seemed to gravitate towards him like she wanted to run to him, comfort him, offer him condolences in a soft, understanding voice. She didn't need to imagine how he felt. carved out from the inside, no less hollow than the particle accelerator's gaping, unusable maw.

"So… what?" Eli spoke just louder than the buzzing in his head. So there's nothing left from years of compounded efforts and endless failures. One fleeting glimpse of success, a lighthouse in the distance, before you're submerged in an ocean of strife once again.

"So you pick yourself up," Barry said. Eli still would not look at him. "Cisco made those PLEs. You can get your arms back. Apply for a job. You can —"

"Rest," Caitlin urged. "Lay down, Eli. You've been through a lot. No one's going to blame you for laying down and taking some time to process."

Just like that, the fire was taken out from underneath him, and Eli focused all of his efforts on keeping himself from collapsing. Just rest, he repeated to himself numbly. It would be easy just to rest. To not wake up.

He physically recoiled at the thought, straightening like he'd just been struck by lightning. He turned to Caitlin. "I'd rather not rest, Dr. Snow. I'm actually really hungry."

He wasn't hungry, not anymore. He had a feeling that his appetite would not return for a long time. But he needed something, anything, to distract him from what his mind was suggesting that he do.

Despite that, Caitlin's eyes lit up, and she turned to Barry. "Could you grab him something from Jitters?"

"Of course." Barry shot Eli a sympathetic look. It made Eli angry.

Eli knew all about Barry Allen, though he really wished he didn't. Successful life, good job, happy family and reliable, kindhearted friends. His largest problem so far was that he wasn't sure what to do with his new abilities. Barry Allen was winning the game of life, and Eli had just been sideswiped off the board.

'Maybe this is just what you deserve,' he thought to himself.

Barry sped off in a bolt of lightning, and Wells turned to Cisco in what might have been apprehension: nigh-imperceptible crease in the brow, upturned lip, piercing eyes. He knew Harrison Wells' face almost better than he knew his own.

The man had been his role model since the ripe age of nine. His micro-expressions were stored in Eli's memory, right next to his father.

Learn to read people, avoid catastrophe. A skill you learned early on if you lived Eli's life, spent time with his family.

"Sorry," Cisco said, baring his teeth in a grimace. "I wasn't thinking, Dr. Wells. Eli won't tell anyone."

"I can't imagine I'd find any interest in talking about Barry Allen," Eli replied. "And since I've really got nowhere else to go, and no one else to tell it to… I wouldn't worry."

Wells nodded and turned to Cisco. "Set him up with the casts."

That was the last thing he said before wheeling out of the room. Eli couldn't afford to think about how distant Wells had been. He wasn't sure what he expected.

Eli walked over to the table where Cisco was popping open the briefcase, revealing what Eli could only consider to be a feat of engineering: sleek metal and rubber around the joints, pale blue lights pulsating around the elbows and wrist. Padded gloves covering the fingers, palms open. The roaring in Eli's ears seemed to dull as he ran his eyes over them.

"How much did they cost?" Eli mumbled.

"Not enough," Cisco replied. "It doesn't make up for what's been done to you, Eli. I'm so sorry."

"Cisco, it's not your fault," Eli said, kicking a chair out and sitting down in it. "You can't blame any one person for what happened." His eyes went to Caitlin, who was fiddling with the EKG and avoiding his gaze. "Do you know what went wrong?"

Cisco nodded. "The coolant. Dr. Wells reviewed everything a week after, figured it out. Apparently, the storm did affect the accelerator's launch more than we could account for."

Barry sped into the room with a brown paper bag and a cup of coffee from Jitters, the wind from his arrival buffeting Eli's hair and ruffling the sheets on the gurney.

Cisco pulled the casts out of their box and sat next to Eli as he set them up, snapping plastic and steel over Eli's arms. "Let me know if I pinch anything."

'I won't be able to feel it if you do.' Eli dipped his head in agreement.

Barry looked at the casts, his gold-green eyes wide. "Why aren't you selling those things, Cisco? They're incredible."

"No one buys anything from STAR Labs these days," Caitlin said, walking over and fixing her white lab coat. "Even if they did… these casts were built specifically for people like Eli and Wells. Genetically coded for those who suffered virtual amputation via dark matter."

"So why isn't Wells wearing his?" Barry tilted his head, and Eli found himself wondering the same thing.

"Didn't want to," Cisco muttered, snapping the last clasp over Eli's wrist. The casts whirred to life, and Eli felt pricks of pain just beneath his collarbone and behind his shoulder blades as the machines connected with his nerves, spinal cord, and brain. "I think he's punishing himself for what happened."

"It's not his fault," Eli repeated like a broken record player. "Mistakes happen in science. I should know it better than anyone. If it's anyone's fault it's probably —"

Cisco squeezed Eli's shoulder, tight-lipped. The warning was obvious. 'Don't say anything about your involvement in the accelerator's creation.'

Eli clenched and unclenched his fingers, raising and lowering his arm like a robot testing its joints — inarguably inhuman, connected in all the wrong ways.

Barry set out the food for Eli, and he looked gratefully at Cisco for putting the casts on instead of trying to feed him. A valuable way for Eli to snag what remained of his pride.

"Blueberry bagel." Barry pointed at it like Eli didn't know what it was.

Eli wanted to punch him. "Thanks."

He leaned forward and grabbed a plastic knife and a plastic container of cream cheese. The latter immediately crumpled in his grip, exploding on his palms, and Cisco's eyes widened like saucers.

Barry was the first to find a napkin and help Eli, but a steel-encased hand grabbed his wrist and held it tight. Eli was staring at the mess on his hand, trembling.

Barry wasn't sure if it was with fury or humiliation.

After a moment, Eli released Barry from his iron vice, picked up a napkin, and wiped himself down. "It's fine, Cisco. The casts are wonderful."

"I need to make adjustments," Cisco laughed uneasily. "What if you shake someone's hand—"

"I'm not going to be shaking anyone's hand, Cisco." Eli's voice was bitter, and he could taste it on his tongue as he pushed to his feet and wiped some cream cheese off of his shirt. "I think we both know that."

Caitlin folded a jacket over his shoulder gently.

"I'm getting some fresh air," Eli said abruptly, shrugging the jacket off and walking away.

He found himself storming out of the room before he could even collect himself, humiliation heating his face and fury causing his fists to curl.

Is this who he was now? At least he didn't need to be spoon-fed, but he couldn't even use a spoon without breaking it.

"Fuck!" He whimpered to himself, walking faster and faster down hallways he didn't know or recognize. Tears sprung from his eyes, and he wiped them away with the napkin that was still clenched in his hand.

'You deserve this,' he reassured himself, the back of his throat burning as he threw open a fire escape door and found himself bent over the railway, staring down nine stories of stairs.

'This is a small price to pay.'

"Shut up," Eli hissed.

The ground was so far away. Nine stories up. He wouldn't even feel it if he hit the ground.

'Come on.' The voice slithered and hissed like a snake, Satan to Eve, to Adam. 'You want to, and you deserve it. And it would be so much easier than this slow death you've been cursed with. You have nothing left.'

"I have Cisco," he whispered hopelessly. "I have... Abby."

'Cisco would be better off without you. You know that. And Abby probably hates you for what you've put her through.'

Eli leaned further over, hands — no, casts — gripping the railing as the stairs began to spiral in front of him, hypnotic and beckoning him closer, dragging him down to the pits of hell.

'When have you ever done anything worth applauding, Eli? You serve no purpose in this world. You just drain everybody around you — Cisco, your brother, your sister, Sophia.'

'It's your fault she's dead.'

He tipped, teetered like a performer on a tightrope except no one was watching and surely, surely it wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things given that he really was no one at all. A grain of sand before an unrelenting ocean, caught in the endless onslaught of the tide, and suddenly, it was so easy to just tilt, tilt, tilt like the axis of the earth, a clock's hand dragging away from the hour mark and —

He was falling. And it felt so blissful, so free, so easy, for just a split second, before regret rolled through his body and he no longer felt keen on shattering his skull on the blue and grey tile.

Across the hallway, Cisco was running. "Eli! Where the hell did you go?"

He looked through each of the doors as he passed by, breathless, his side stinging. "Where the hell are you? Come back! Caitlin wants to run tests!"

He stopped in front of the fire exit and pulled the door open, knowing what he might find and praying that wasn't the case.

The stairwell was empty. He immediately looked over the edge, down to the first floor, praying Eli's body wasn't there.

It wasn't.

Cisco breathed a sigh of relief, clutching his heart as he slid down against the wall before a more concerning question came to mind.

If Eli wasn't here, then where the hell did he go?