RESEARCH ( barry berkman.. ) ✔

o5. unlocked door..

"I don't feel anything." He paused.

"I'm supposed to at least feel a sting, Adelaide. What's going on? Talk to me...," Barry frankly raised his voice at the wall, because looking over his shoulder or moving in any way to see on her expression the gravity of the situation was off the table considering the bullet which was still in his shoulder blade. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but Adelaide was seated behind him for about ten minutes already and nothing changed.

Its been ten minutes since they reached a safe place, locked the door on Barry's room in his shared apartment with his friends from theater who were still out for classes, according to him. Adelaide thought her adrenaline would be able to wear off after that narrow and bloody escape, but images stuck to her mind and now, she was reading a tutorial on how to remove a bullet, while the one about making stitches waited on an open tab down on her phone. 

Barry provided her with all the clean material necessary to do this and frankly, he would have done it himself if he had the angle. He did not. And she did offer her help, so there they were, him on a chair on rolls, breathing heavy, but steady, while Adelaide was sitting on the edge of his bed, behind him, with the first aid kit on her right side and the phone in her lap. She was concentrated on reading the instruction that she did not realize her hand was shaking on her forceps, too scared to even approach the open wound unless she was truthfully sure she was going to do it right.

Not getting any answer got Barry concerned enough to use the mobility of his chair to just push his feet down and spin around. His wide eyes fixed on her shaking hand in air and caught it to a stop by a light grip on her wrist. It was, however, hard enough to wake Adelaide up, lifting her eyes in shock to not seeing his back and that slowly bleeding single wound.

"What are you doing?" Barry let go of her hand.

"I'm looking up how to safely remove a bullet, okay?" Adelaide bowed her head, moving her attention to her phone only to cover up just to cover up her embarrassment. "I am helping you, is the least I can do, but if I do it, I have to do it right. Do you know how many things can go wrong if I don't do this properly-?"

"Just as many as it would if you do it with your hands shaking like that," he pointed out, tone flatly following a tone a bit too normal for someone bleeding. Barry had a calm exterior, while the showcase of anxiety shivered before him. 

As soon as his words pointed it out, Adelaide looked down at her hands and they calmed down, "Sorry about that, I was just... worried."

"Just get the bullet out, it's not that deep in, and I don't want it there," Barry turned around on his mobile chair. With his back at Adelaide, finally feeling her left hand press down on his spine, Barry had the little moment of privacy to acknowledge a moment of truth he did not expect... it was a smile on his lips and it scared him, while bringing so much warmth. 

Adelaide drew herself a bit closer, just enough that even though she did not realize, Barry definitely felt her breath tickling. Luckily for both of them, he wasn't too ticklish and she seemed to have forgotten to even breath when the forceps grabbed the little piece, slowly dragging it out. She surprised herself by not causing any excessive bleeding and not hearing even a little reaction from him.

On the latter matter, she was unfortunately wrong to believe as a man with experience, Barry wouldn't have learned to hold in reactions to pain from little wounds. Either way, he was busier making a conversation. "You know you don't owe me anything for that escape, right?"

Adelaide hummed along, pursing her lips into an amusingly thin line. Any movement of hers paused as Barry instinctively flinched at the first needle puncture. From there, silence became comfort and though the uncomfortable situation was getting slowly fixed, time moved at a fast pace which equaled not the dreadful passing of life, but the frivolous moments of happiness any human will forever register shorter than they actually were.