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There is something about the way that Barry clutches to her that sets off warning bells in Iris’ head. Her mind grinds to a halt and every ounce of holiday cheer, every other thought, is replaced by, Barry is distressed, Barry is in trouble, Barry is hurting and it takes everything she has not to start peppering him with questions, not to burrow her head into his neck and pull him tighter to her.
“I love you, Iris,” he says over her shoulder and she freezes, unsure of what to do. He has told her many times that he loves her, that he cares about her, that she is his best friend and yet none of those times come close to the way his voice sounds right now. Those times, she thinks, he sounded a little unsure of himself, a little guarded.
But now he is just raw and open and it scares her, puts her heart in her throat, because she’s heard that tone before and it wasn’t from Barry. She’s heard that tone wrenched out of someone who was broken and destroyed and she doesn’t want to think of Barry that way, but that’s all she can hear when he says her name. The loss and devastation and fear. But all it takes is a deep breath, a second to push her heart back down and open her throat back up so she can talk. So she can make it so he isn’t hurting anymore.
“Aw, I love you too,” she says with a smile plastered onto her face, exactly what she thinks he wants now, exactly what she thinks will make it better.
He pushes her away from him and looks at her as heartbreak writes itself in his eyes. “When we were kids,” he says, and his voice shakes and she starts to shake too, “I loved you before I even knew what the word ‘love’ meant. And then my mom died and I had to go live with the girl I had a crush on.”
She wonders if her bottom lip is quivering. She thinks it should be, because she wants to cry and talk at the same time but nothing comes out, not a sound or word or even a breath. Iris backs away from him, toward the couch, and he follows her, follows her every movement like he has since they were kids. They sit down and she looks at him, really looks at him, and sees Barry staring back at her with a plea that he can’t quite bring himself to put into words.
Iris wants to reach out and touch him, but she wonders if it would be appropriate. If it would be okay. In the past, she would have done it without hesitation because that was how she gave Barry comfort, how she let him know she was there for him, and she knows what it is like to spill your heart out to someone who couldn’t do a thing, but she can’t bring herself to do anything other than stare at him.
“Look, there were so many times that I wanted to tell you: junior prom, when I went away to college, when I came back from college, the nights that we stayed up talking, all the birthdays, all the Christmases.” He motions to the tree with his eyes but she doesn’t follow them, doesn’t let her eyes stray from his face. “But I never did, I just—I kept it in. After I lost my mom, and my dad, I was afraid that if you didn’t feel the same way… I would lose you too.”
They stare at each other, and she feels like yelling at him, like saying something about loss and devastation and heartbreak, but she can’t, because he does know what that feels like. He lost his mother and was taken away from his father and she knows how it hurt him, how it tore him up from the inside out and kept him from living his life. But, she thinks, he doesn’t know what it’s like to lose her. He can say he knows, she thinks, but he doesn’t. Not like she does.
"That’s the irony. I was so scared of losing you that I did,” Barry says quietly. A tear rolls down her cheek and Iris shakes her head, her heart thudding in her chest and her fingers rubbing small circles into her own leg. To remind herself that she still has a body, that all of this is really happening, that he is truly sitting next to her and admitting to loving her and caring about her and not wanting to lose her.
Barry starts talking faster, his voice shaking less, and he can’t seem to decide if he wants to look into her eyes or look away from them, look down at her hands or his hands or anything but her. “I know I’ve had our whole lives to tell you this, and you’re with Eddie now and I know that, and I know that my timing couldn’t be any worse, but I just—I couldn’t lie to you anymore.”
Iris shakes her head without thinking and tries to say something, and her lips move (she can feel them move, can feel the way they form shapes around empty air) but she makes no sound.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and for the first time she tears her eyes away from him and looks toward the tree that she took so much time to decorate, to the fire that’s burning in the fireplace. She glances back at him and can see the way he breathes, the way his Adams apple moves up and down as he swallows air and his emotion together into his lungs. She can’t say anything, can’t produce a noise, and he sighs and she stares back at the fire, seemingly transfixed.
His sigh morphs into a single word—Okay—and he pushes off of the couch and looks at her once more before he walks away.
She lets him. She lets him, and for a long time she can’t do anything but stare at the crackling fire and think about the way his voice sounded and his confession and his face, already showing his shattered heart to the world without knowing it.
She wishes she could have said something, that she could have yelled at him and told him that he doesn’t get to say this to her, not after he left her, not after she had to lose him. Not after she had to be pulled away from his dying body over and over again in the hospital, screaming out his name and finding that she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t get air into her lungs because Barry could die and she didn’t know what she would do without him. He didn’t understand what it was like to lose her; this, she knows. He thinks that losing her is pushing her away and keeping her at arm’s length, but she knows that losing him is so much worse than not being able to hug him; it’s watching him die and being told that he might never wake up.
She remembers going to see him in STAR Labs, walking up to his sleeping body and collapsing in front of him and saying, in the same broken and raw and open voice he used, that she loved him and she needed him and he couldn’t leave her, couldn’t die and go somewhere she couldn’t follow. She remembers that her father picked her up and held her as she sobbed into his shirt and said, “I love him Daddy, I do. He can’t leave me. I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” over and over again until her lungs hurt and her throat hurt and she was just as raw and just as broken as the words coming out of her mouth.
And then Joe held her and whispered soothing words into her hair until she had calmed down enough to see straight. He held her until she pulled away and went back to Barry’s side and held his hand, and she felt better until her father told her that Barry might not ever wake up.
Her world stopped spinning.
Iris remembers the heartbreak the most. The way, as her father admitted that Barry might never wake up and she shouldn’t hold on to him and she can’t do that to herself, her heart tore itself apart and wouldn’t stop. Joe said this and she knew he was right and she cried again as she held onto Barry’s hand and realized that, had she only been sooner, he would have known how she felt about him.
Iris thinks about all of this, and then thinks about Barry confessing his love for her and the way that he told her he lost her and she thinks, he only lost me because I lost him first.
“I’ve taken all this time to fall out of love with you,” she whispers to an empty room, another tear rolling down her face.
It isn’t until the fire is dying amongst the charred logs that Iris lets herself really cry, that she channels this revelation into anything more productive than a stare. She is glad, for once, that her father was called into work on Christmas Eve, that he isn’t here to witness her, once more, cry her heart out over Barry Allen.