Chapter Text
"Iris. You've gotta eat."
Iris turns away from her dad, facing the wall as she wipes tiredly at her tear stained eyes, all cried out, nothing left to give.
"It's just some toast. With that special peanut butter that Henry and Lily made you." A plate is placed on her side table. The bed sinks where her dad sits beside her. His hand cards through her greasy, weeks unwashed hair. "Could you at least drink some water for me?"
Iris pushes herself up slowly and takes the water bottle, sipping at it slowly, trying not to gag as it hits her throat.
"I keep seeing him," Iris whispers, voice hoarse from disuse and from waking herself screaming. "When I close my eyes, I just see her stabbing him through the chest. Seeing the way he looked at me when I was too late. Seeing him in my arms when he… when he…" A sob escapes her throat. "He's gone, Daddy. He's gone."
"Oh, I'm so sorry." He pulls her into his arms, cradling her like she's a little girl whose woken up from a bad dream instead of the grown woman who can't escape the nightmare that's become of her life.
"I didn't want this. Any of it. When the lightning struck me, all I wanted was things to go back to normal. And instead, there's vengeant speedsters and other dimensions and evil versions of me who… who…" She throws the empty water bottle. "It's not fair! It's not fucking fair!"
"I know."
"You don't," Iris cries. "You don't know. You don't know what it's like to see your best friend turn into something unrecognizable. You don't know what it's like to be betrayed over and over again only to be betrayed again by the one person you thought you could trust only to lose him. And he did it for me. Everything he did, he did it for me, and that's not what I wanted! I didn't want any of this." Iris takes a long few minutes trying to catch her breath until the bone tiredness takes over again. "I'll eat the toast. And… and I'll drink more water."
"Let me get that for you." Joe rubs her shoulder softly before heading downstairs.
It's in that moment that the familiar swirl of a breach starts to open in the center of the room and Iris can only curse whatever dieties out there hate her so much and she speed eats the toast just to have a semblance of strength, too exhausted to really care about what will happen to her when she faces this new foe, but stills when an oh so familiar body is flung to her floor, bleeding all over her carpet.
She falls to her knees, trembling hands shaking as she turns over the limp body.
"Barry?" Iris whispers.
He opens his eyes and they're filled with so much hate that she almost thinks it could be her Barry, despite how much it hurts to think, but he's different from the Barry she knew. His skin is marred with burn scars, but not the chemical burns that her Barry had. His hair is flat and unstyled, sticking to his forehead. And his gaze is impersonal yet burning with so much vehemence.
"Iris. You're alive." There's disbelief in his voice and almost resentment.
"You're alive," Iris says.
"Am I not supposed to be?" Barry asks, eyes darting around the room, taking in every detail with a newfound perspective.
"You're not my Barry, are you?"
"No," he says. "I'm not." Finally he tears his eyes away from his observation of the room and takes in the sight of Iris. It's hungry, not in any explicit way, but like a starving predator taking in its prey. And then his eyes go soft, reminiscing and longing.
"You don't seem very surprised by the fact that you've just traveled universes," Iris says. "So I'm guessing our worlds aren't too different."
"Maybe," Barry says. "How did your me die? Going out in a glorious heroic sacrifice?"
Iris chuckles sadly. "I wish he did. No, he… he was killed by a future version of myself."
Barry's face falls into a blank confusion. "…What?"
"A time remnant a future me had made—"
"What do you mean that you made?"
"I… a version of me called Dianmu killed Barry got so lost in grief that she—"
"You. You. You're… you're The Flash here?"
Her eyes go wide. "Am I not in your world?"
Barry holds up his hand and it blurs with speed.
"No," Iris says. "So… so Thawne's plan actually worked in your world."
"And it didn't here. Instead the lightning got you?"
"Yeah," Iris breathes. "What… what am I like, in your world?"
His lips twist. "Determined. Stubborn. Persistent."
She smiles with melancholy. “That sounds like someone I know.”
.-~*~-.
It went like this.
Barry’s train was running late from Starling and Iris waited for him in his lab.
Water dripping from the ceiling. An open skylight. A strike of lightning.
Nine months later, Iris woke up in STAR Labs, her life irrevocably changed as she discovered her newfound powers.
Iris always wanted to be out here, helping people. Her father would never let her be a cop, and even so, she never saw herself in that role, not like him, not when she saw what that weight had done to him. Instead, she hoped to do it through journalism by uprooting corruption and spreading the truth.
But now, she had the opportunity to help people in a hands on way. Truly make a difference.
The team that had formed from her caretakers at STAR Labs grew unlikely friendships, a bond like a second family.
Hartley Rathaway was Harrison Well’s secondhand man, his protege, who had worked for him for years.
Lily Stein was a brilliant mind, daughter of Dr. Martin Stein, who had gone missing, presumed dead, during the particle accelerator explosion. She had first come to Wells in anger, in grief, seeking some retribution for her loss, and instead finding a mentor to guide her and give her new purpose.
Henry Hewitt was a man dedicated to science and because of his past with anger issues, had difficulty keeping a job, but Wells saw potential in him and knew that there was more than what was on the surface, that pasts can be forgiven and a new future can be forged.
Together, the five created Team Flash.
Iris struggled to find balance between her normal life and her secret masked heroism but she managed, somehow.
She finds love in Eddie Thawne, the man who she had once seen as a vapid pretty boy who had grown on Barry surprisingly, the two becoming close friends when Iris was in her coma.
The secrets start to strain her relationships.
Barry finally had proof of someone in lightning, though the woman in the purple lightning was not the man in yellow in his red lightning. Iris tried to get him to stop his search. To stop his obsession with The Flash and the dangers that he could encounter. It hurt him, to see her not support him when there’s finally solid evidence that he could prove his father’s innocence.
Her father grew more and more concerned with her elusiveness and the growing injuries she kept gaining that couldn’t be healed fast enough from her super metabolism.
When her dad catches her with Eddie, his first conclusion is that Eddie is the one who is hurting Iris. The screaming match is astronomical and Iris ends up revealing her powers keeping the two of them from ripping each other to shreds.
Her father is understandably upset about her escapades as The Flash, overprotective and terrified for her safety, but at least he knows that it isn’t his work partner who has been hurting his little girl.
“Does he make you happy?” he asked her later.
“I love him,” Iris admitted quietly.
And that was all her dad needed to hear.
Team Flash continues to grow, gaining another member through Bette San Souci, the woman they save from her own explosive powers and the corrupt government officials after her.
When Hartley discovers evidence that Lily’s dad may have survived the accelerator, that he may be out there, they start their search. Which is how they discover not only Dr. Martin Stein but a Ronnie Raymond, old employee of STAR Labs who had also been presumed dead.
They reach out to his fiance, Caitlin Snow, who had quit from STAR Labs after his death, to help them separate the two.
With insurmountable relief and disbelief, Caitlin is reunited with the love of her life and Lily is reunited with her father.
So wrapped up in their success, Iris doesn’t know that her father conducts an investigation of his own with Eddie about Wells, or the man who claimed to be Harrison Wells.
Her father in his overprotectiveness vetted every single one of the members of her team and dug up horrifying details of Wells' past that pointed to a mystery he was afraid to solve.
Time travel gone wrong. A stranded speedster. His life’s work dedicated to returning home and seeking revenge.
A late train and a lightning bolt. A young woman given superspeed. Wrong person, right outcome.
Eddie defeated Thawne by killing himself. Iris felt a part of herself killed with him.
When Jay showed up, a speedster stranded from another universe, who had just lost his fiance to his nemesis, Zoom, she finds solace in him. They understood each other in a way no one else could. The pressure of heroism weighing heavily on their shoulders, the consequences of it leading to the hurt and pain and death of the people they loved.
They find solace in each other in other ways too. It’s too soon for her to fully open her heart to someone else, but he understands her, he sees her, and he’s… he’s there.
As they work to get his speed back, Iris tries to rebuild in her civilian life, finding a job as a reporter like she had always dreamed, making friends with Linda who she sets up with Barry, the two a perfect match that makes Iris’s heart pang for some reason.
Iris reconnected with her mother and the brother she didn’t she had. It uprooted everything she knew but it was worth it to form these connections.
She tries to find normality, going out with Lily and Bette, the two bringing their respective partners, Jax and Lisa, and she starts to invite Jay along with them too.
She was starting to rediscover what happiness felt like. She was starting to heal.
Which is why his betrayal blindsides her. He had come there, manipulating her to care about him, to fall for him, just to steal her speed.
He broke her spine. He killed her mother. He took everything she cared for and threatened it just by his existence alone.
To everyone’s surprise, it isn’t Iris who defeats Zoom. It isn’t Firestorm or Bette or any of their other meta allies.
It’s Barry.
Barry, who apparently, had a secret life of his own, working with the Arrow in Starling, training with a bow with a killer aim.
Barry never liked Jay and Iris chalked it up to his overprotectiveness and jealousy.
But he had been watching Jay with a critical eye this whole time, who had uncovered there was something mistruthful about him, and had been plotting how to take him down in case he ever turned on Iris.
An arrow caught by the speedster, who gloated at Barry’s arrogance and stupidity as he crushed his bow between his fist and held his throat with the other.
Another arrow, shot into Zoom’s neck from behind, one he had not accounted for, one he was too arrogant himself to not anticipate.
When Barry found out the truth, the truth that he was supposed to be The Flash, not her, the truth that his mother was killed by a vengeant speedster and she never told him even though she was the only one who believed him about the man in lightning, he was beyond betrayed.
And so consumed by grief again, the loss of her mother fresh, Iris makes a choice and goes back. Goes back and changes the past so that Barry’s mother was saved, that Thawne would not lead to Eddie’s death, that Iris could bring her family back together again.
But this false world she created was not real and she couldn’t live in it forever.
But in the months she lived there, with her happy family, mom and dad and brother all together, she got lost in the domesticity of it all.
She didn’t pursue Eddie again in this false world, knowing all she brought him was complication and hurt.
Instead, she found herself falling for someone else, someone who had always been there for her, who had been her best friend since she was a child, a best friend who in this world got to be raised by his two living parents.
And they were happy. In this little bubble created by her, they were happy and she fell in love and something in her finally got to heal.
But then things fell apart as they would inevitably have to.
She had to make the choice to betray Barry again to repair what she had broken.
And when she returned to the reset timeline, she realized that even in her attempts to revert it back, things still changed.
Ronnie was dead, Martin now genetically bonded with Jax as Firestorm.
Henry now had fire powers, not just the scientist and medic of the team, with an elevated anger he had to keep in check.
And what left her most distraught was her now broken relationship with her father, the two estranged for choices Iris didn’t make herself.
And somehow, because of the change she made, Barry didn’t have a late train that fateful night and was there with Iris the lab, crashing into his shelves of chemicals and gaining the ability to control them. He had a limited amount of chemicals he could produce but he used his scientific knowledge to combine them to create different compounds.
The Chemist, he called himself.
With his chemical compounds, he was able to apply them to his arrows, and make his attacks like that.
Iris, fresh out of another lifetime of falling in love with Barry, didn’t know how to interact with this Barry. Didn’t know how to not be in love with him, even more so now that it was her Barry.
But there were more pertinent concerns. Like the speedster called Dianmu claiming to be a God, existing across all time, Caitlin turning into Killer Frost seeking revenge against Iris for changing the timeline and getting Ronnie killed, and Barry growing more distant with each passing day.
Iris couldn’t defeat Dianmu. Dianmu knew Iris’s every move, every choice, every plan.
Iris discovered too late that the more Barry used his powers, the more they twisted his mind.
He kept using them, to protect Iris from Dianmu, to save her when she couldn’t save herself, but by the time she realized that the man she loved was changing, he was too far gone.
It didn’t stop her from trying to find an antidote, a cure, a something to save him.
But as she was distracted trying to find a way to fix Barry, Dianmu did what Iris thought to be impossible.
Dianmu got Barry to turn against her.
Barry slaughtered for Dianmu. Barry followed every order blindly for Dianmu. Barry looked at Dianmu with such reverence and love that it made Iris sick.
He had turned into something unrecognizable, his eyes a toxic blue as his lips curled into a mocking smirk, veins dark from the chemicals pulsing through him.
How could he choose this monster over her? How could he pledge his allegiance to her?
"I am the monster you made me," he had told her once. She didn't understand. She couldn't.
And then all was revealed.
Dianmu was her. Dianmu was Iris and Iris would be Dianmu and it all made sense.
Because Barry didn’t choose Dianmu over Iris. He still chose her.
Dianmu taunted Iris. Told her that she would not kill The Chemist, only Barry Allen.
And Iris thought that that meant she would change Barry. Take away his humanity, his kindness, everything that made him Barry and made The Chemist who he was.
But then, after Iris poured her heart out to the man she loved, after she begged him to see the light and to return to her and to choose her because she would always choose him, for a moment, it was him again.
And then Dianmu killed him.
She followed through with her promise.
She did not kill The Chemist. She killed Barry Allen.