Chapter Text
Don’t hold my hands accountable
In the morning, Iris spoons waffle batter into the machine, Joe brings in the paper, and Barry makes the coffee. He customizes without thinking: black with a spoon of coconut oil whisked to a foamy head at super-speed for Iris, black, a drop of cream, and two spoons of sugar for Joe. His own is mostly milk.
The plate of waffles at his seat is two or three times the height of Joe’s and it’s a feast of chopped nuts, whipped cream, butter, and syrup. Barry’s mouth waters. Most breakfasts just aren’t calorie dense enough to make them worth eating instead of one of Cisco’s calorie bars, but Iris makes his waffles with enough carbs, fat, and sugar to keep Barry for an hour or two — if he takes it easy.
They sit at the satin-smooth oak table Joe’s grandfather made a million years ago, some Bill Withers playing in the background, and they’ve partitioned the Sunday Picture-News. Iris has A-1 and real estate, their dad has sports and metro, and Barry has science and book reviews.
There’s an AP deep dive on some updates in gene therapy that Barry has been super curious about, but he can’t concentrate and when the top of the page flops over a bit, he shakes the newsprint to straighten it, and sees Iris’s dark eyes watching him.
He’s suddenly lost in a flashback to the night before. Two a.m., Iris warm and heavy in his arms, eyes shut tight, breathing deeply. They are propped up against her headboard, and it is taking all of Barry’s willpower not to slide them down into a laying position. God knows he wants nothing more than to hold her for real and cover her body with his, but he knows — even if she doesn’t — that she’s not ready for that yet.
Still, his finger tips had slid over soft cotton, his lips had brushed her sweat-damp skin, and his cock had twitched more than was strictly acceptable.
Iris West, I want you, Barry thinks. More than ever. And I deserve you less than I ever have. But I love you and I think you love me, too. And I can’t let you go.
Her gaze is steady on him. Barry’s hands shake a little, and he feels his heart speeding up. It’s not quite what he feels when the Speed Force is pouring into his veins like adrenaline, it’s more like little licking flickers of lightning along his nerves. It’s a thing he only feels when he’s looking at her.
Joe breaks the spell, rattling his paper at his daughter. “Great job on this story about the Marchetti family, baby.” Smile so warm and proud and Iris’s attention shifts to her father completely. “Even I didn’t know about the stuff with their relatives in Sicily...crazy, crazy.”
“Oh my God, Daddy.” She’s suddenly the bright, whipsmart, funny Iris Barry has always known, setting her section of the paper down, and leaning toward her father with quick grin. “I had to hit about 1100 databases just to find the name of the grandmother...”
Barry listens quietly as Iris describes the work that went into her latest scoop — he doesn’t think Joe would appreciate him bringing up the fact that he’d had to speed Iris out of a closet in the Marchetti family HQ after she’d sent him a 911 text followed by a map pin of her location. They mostly keep the dangerous parts of her job between them.
He owes her that.
Instead, he houses the cooling waffles, and lukewarm coffee and speed reads the gene therapy story, very much not noticing that she seems more like Iris than she has in a long time.
--
They’re young and they’re dumb
The problem is that Barry can’t let go of the fact that he’s responsible for Ronnie’s death. And Eddie—it’s hard to think about Eddie, because thinking about Eddie leads to thinking about Eobard, and Dr. Wells, and how the last year of his life wasn’t even in the same time zone as the truth.
Iris doesn’t look at him like he’s done something wrong—no one does, in fact. But he feels it, deeply. And he doesn’t get why they don’t.
It gets easier, marginally, with Central City’s metas emerging and causing small- to medium-scale havoc. They settle into a routine. The bite of Missouri winter sometimes makes his lungs hurt when he runs, but he welcomes it, and the crackle of dry air.
And Iris--he couldn’t be prouder. Her stories make the front page of the Picture-News on a regular basis, she’s constantly fielding tips, and she’s busy, so busy they rarely see each other outside of Sunday dinner at Joe’s.
The space is good, and it gives them time to heal. She’s stopped wearing dark colors all of the time and there’s a light in her eyes he hasn’t seen in months. He wonders what she sees when she looks at him, until one day she turns the full force of her smile on him, tilts her head, and says, “you look great, Barry. Happy.”
He knows she’s referring to the the permasmile on his face, thanks to a pretty detective he’s had a couple of coffees with — Patty — and he tosses back, “You too, Iris.” It should be awkward. He still loves her, he’s kissed her—even if she doesn't remember—and yet he’s somehow dating a sweet, determined woman he’d never have expected to meet.
But for now, Patty is enough, because Iris is smiling again, and that too is enough.
Then he hears about Francine’s return, and illness, and then, and then a son—Iris’s brother, Joe’s son—and Barry’s family is so rocked by the news that he finds himself holding steady for both Iris and Joe, neither of whom are communicating with each other much less themselves. He holds Iris as she prepares for her mother’s death. He sits with Joe in the dark of his lab when Wally’s existence comes to light, and prays that some order comes to the universe soon.
One morning, early, he and Patty are trading sleepy kisses, when she turns to him and asks, “Iris is like your sister, right?”
And it nearly jerks him upright, because no, Iris is not his sister. “Um,” he rubs the back of his neck. “Not really. She’s my best friend -- we were close before I went to live with her and Joe.”
“Ahh,” and Patty’s smile is a little blurry around the edges. “None of your girlfriends got jealous?”
“You’re assuming I’ve had a lot of girlfriends,” he smiles something approximating charm and wolfishness at her.
“She’s really pretty.”
“She’s beautiful,” he says automatically, because one thing about Barry Allen is that he’s never been able to dissemble when it comes to the attributes of Iris West.
"Why didn't you two ever..." Patty's somehow gotten further away from him without him noticing, and he's flashing back to his college girlfriend who just really wanted to understand why his friend who was a girl needed to stay with him in his cramped dorm at CCU instead of at her father's house 3 miles away. The answer is the same. "We're best friends," he says again, simply, because if there's two things about Barry Allen, he's gotten very good at lying about how he feels about Iris West.
Patty relaxes, and he turns to look at her. She really is lovely — perfect for him, he thinks — and yet he feels rather than knows that he'll break her heart.