Chapter Text
Barry Allen becomes Iris’s favourite customer mostly by accident.
It’s not that he does anything especially noteworthy, not at first. In fact it takes three months before he even really talks to her – the first time he comes in he stutters, blinks at her, asks for ‘just coffee, please, ma’am.’ And hands her back the menu with his long thin hands.
But he’s always polite, quiet, respectful. She can tell by the state of his clothes (the carefully patched pants, the thread-bare jacket, the unfashionable hat), that he doesn’t have money, but he always, always tips properly. He calls her ma’am rather than girl (or anything worse). He doesn’t stare at her behind or her chest. He makes eye contact when he orders. He’s always a little late, always in a hurry, but he’s never impatient or rude. He’s always turned out sharp – hair combed, nails clean.
He always greets her in the mornings when he runs in for coffee, and when he comes back, every other evening or so, for dinner, he nods hello like they know each other, like they’re friends. Then he sits quietly in his booth with a book, reading and shovelling eggs and ham into his face like he’s scared someone’s gonna take the plate away from him. Still, he’s so skinny, maybe that’s something that really happens to him.
Barry’s so skinny that she starts packaging up the diner’s leftovers for him, at the end of each day. She takes home a lot of the stuff herself – a girl has got to eat – but she saves him the odd cookie, a stale bagel, a couple of slices of pie.
He scarfs it all down with impressive speed. “I’m gonna marry you one day,” he tells her, with a grin, and she laughs.
“You don’t even know my name.”
“It’s Iris West,” he replies, surprising her. “I heard your boss call you Iris, and there’s a shift board up in the kitchen with all the servers names on – I see it sometimes, when the door swings open. I’m Barry Allen, by the way. I mean, since I know your name, and all…”
“Well it’s nice to meet you, Mr Allen.”
“You too, Miss West.”
And when she smiles at him he blushes all the way to the tips of his ears.
Barry mostly reads big thick science-y looking books – but when he reads fiction they’re those cheap hardboiled detective stories, or science fiction paperbacks with robots and aliens on the covers. Sometimes he gets so engrossed in them, he doesn’t notice his coffee mug’s empty, and sips mechanically from thin air whilst he’s reading.
She sidles over, one evening, after he’s been swigging from an empty cup for half an hour, to offer him a refill.
“Whatcha reading?”
“HG Wells,” he shows her, “The Time Machine. You know it?”
She shakes her head. That evening after he leaves, she finds the book finished on the table with her tip inside, and a note scrawled inside the cover: please enjoy the book. She can tell he wrote and erased at least three different versions of this note from the state of the paper inside.
She takes The Time Machine home with her and reads it in bed, although she decides she doesn’t much care for it, especially the Traveller’s treatment of Weena.
“He just kept her, like some kind of pet, and left her to burn when he had no use for her anymore,” Iris complains to Barry the next day, offering him the book back.
He seems to take it like he, and not the book, has upset her. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, glancing away. “I’ll find you another.”
That’s how they begin this thing where he brings her his science fiction books, and she complains about them. It gets to be such a ritual that after the sixth one she rejects (“Why would aliens look like that?”) he laughs.
“Why don’t you write a book yourself?” He asks, sitting at the counter, swinging his absurdly long legs and digging through the blueberry pie she’s just put in front of him. “If you don’t like these ones?”
“I’m working on it,” she replies, and his expression brightens, his gaze curious.
“You’re a writer?”
And she shrugs, self-consciously. “I guess. Working on it.”
“Oh,” he says, “gee. Well, that’s just swell.” He’s rubbing the back of his neck with a hand, his mouth upturned. “What do you write about?”
“Life. The city.” She waves a hand. “Work. The people who come in here – they all have good stories, or they make good characters.”
“You ever put me in one of your stories?” He asks, glancing at her from under his eyelashes – he has these really long eyelashes, makes him look all young and soft and sweet, like a baby deer.
“Not yet. I’m saving you up till I gave a good idea.”
“What kind of idea?”
“Love story, maybe,” she has no idea why she says that. Maybe she wants a reaction out of him. He does sort of squirm, his face going from milky-pale to rosey-pink, rubbing the back of his neck again. “You look like the sort.”
“Do I? Well. Gee.” He mutters, and she could just eat him up with a spoon right there, couldn’t she? Well. Damn.
“Why don’t you lend me one of your proper science books?” She asks, “maybe I’ll find an idea in there.”
“Okay,” he brightens, and proceeds on a long explanation of his current read – something about how planets form – and gets all excited and flustered trying to explain the finer points to her.
That night she tries to write him a love story. She pulls out the peace of junk type writer she got for a steal from the pawn shop two blocks over, and hammers out three pages in quick succession. She pictures a pretty blond girlfriend with freckles and a Nebraska accent. She’s sick, maybe – maybe even dying – maybe that’s why Barry always looks a little sad, just round the edges. Maybe he’s so poor and skinny because he’s using all his money to pay for treatments.
But she doesn’t like the idea of a dying girlfriend, not for him, so she tears that one up and starts again.
She tries a red-headed girl, fiery and pale – a girl who teases him and makes him laugh. She pictures a brunette, slim and clever like him. She imagines a femme fatal from one of his detective novels – blood-red lips and fine, ink-black hair and big blue eyes….
But none of them seem right. No number of pretty white girls will sit with Barry in her head and somehow the whole exercise leaves her feeling tired and sad.
She picks up his science book and can’t get through the first chapter before her head aches. Barry seems to understand every word of this but it might as well be written in a foreign language to her – he might as well be from another country. Another world.
(He practically is, isn’t he?).
“I don’t know where you studied to get your head round all of this,” she waves the book at him the next morning, “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I’m a brainiac.”
“You must be some kind of scientist, huh?”
He shrugs, shakes his head. “Nah. Just a clerk. Over at the police station.”
“You’re a cop?”
“I work for the cops. No one would ever let me anywhere near a badge and a gun, believe me.”
She’s kinda relieved if she’s honest. She doesn’t like the idea of him with a badge or a gun.
“How come you read all this stuff, then?” She nudges the book, “you fixing to be a rocket scientist when you grow up?”
“Like you’re fixing to be a writer?” He asks.
“I’m already a writer, thank you very much.”
He smiles. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t like me very much, if I told you.”
“Hm?”
“About why I – about the books, and stuff. What I’m trying to find out.”
She leans her elbows on the counter in exactly the way her boss is always telling her not to, props her chin on her fists to eye him sceptically. “Try me.”
But he shakes his head. “I’d rather not.”
“Girl!” There’s a big guy with small, mean eyes at the other end of the counter, banging his coffee cup on the table, “quit lollygagging and get yourself over here!”
Iris doesn’t bother to contain her eyeroll at Barry, whose small, sympathetic smile insulates her for the rest of the day.
That night, when Barry’s back for dinner, he sits at the counter with her instead of in his usual booth. There’s a bruise turning the edge of one of his eyes purple, which wasn’t there this morning. Iris resists the urge to reach across and touch it.
“What did you do to yourself, mister?”
He smiles, ruefully. “Got on the wrong side of one of my bosses.”
“You want some ice?”
It’s late and they’re alone aside from the drunk who always comes in to sleep for an hour before they close. She brings Barry ice wrapped in a cloth with his plate of ham and eggs, and though he pulls out a book, he watches her from under those long eyelashes of his the whole hour it takes him to eat.
“They thought I was stealing evidence,” he tells her, whilst he’s pushing the last of his meal around his plate, “but actually, I was putting it back. I mean. I’d borrowed a case file. But I was putting it back.”
Iris nods, slowly.
“Stupid really,” Barry mutters, mostly talking to himself now, she thinks, “could’ve got fired. I’m really good at my job, else I would’ve been. But I’m the only one who understands the filing system in there and they all know it, so…”
“You don’t seem all that stupid to me,” Iris points out, and Barry only laughs, sort of humourlessly. “Why’d you do it?”
Barry purses his lips, steeples his fingers, then casts his gaze down, away from her. “You ever see something you can’t explain, Iris?”
Iris considers the question seriously for a moment. “You mean like – aliens or ghosts or something?”
Barry’s mouth quirks. “Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”
Iris shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
His face falls and he glances down at his nails again. She reaches for his wrist but stops herself again – damn, why does she want to touch him so much?
“Doesn’t mean I don’t believe in… I mean, I believe in God, so…”
He nods, glancing up at her. “I don’t want to tell you something that might make you think less of me, Miss West. I like it here. I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“I’m sure you couldn’t make me feel uncomfortable, Barry.”
He glances down, touching the back of his neck.
“You chew that lip any harder you’re gonna split it, Mister.”
He laughs, but he doesn’t say anything more, so she goes back to clean up behind the counter, and when she’s half way through arranging all the coffee mugs in nice, clean rows on their shelves, he says, “my mom was murdered when I was a kid. They put my dad away for it.”
And she has to turn around and look at him because she’s not sure she heard him right.
But she did, didn’t she? And oh god, that explains a lot. Especially the sadness around his edges.
“It wasn’t him though,” Barry is rubbing his eyes with his thumbs, all twitchy and uncomfortable. “I saw it happen. I know it wasn’t him. There was someone else in our house that night. But I was just a kid. No one listened to me.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, returning to the counter and – compulsively – refilling his coffee mug.
He nods, mutely. “That’s what I was doing. I try to find similar cases, you know? Investigate. I try to read a lot, try to learn to – to understand what I saw that night. There’s gotta be something out there that’ll solve it, what happened.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t think less of me for it?” He glances up at last, eye lashes trembling.
“Why would I?”
“Cause no one ever believes me, not really,” his smile is so sad she wants to kiss him, “they think – that poor kid just can’t handle the truth of it.”
“But why would you lie about something like that?”
His smile reaches his eyes this time. “I wish more people would ask that question, Miss West.”
That night she writes Barry a love story – a skinny white boy living in the future, a big city all glass and metal, flying cars and robots and no aliens, no – she makes up a special group of people who have special powers, like they do in comic books. In the story Barry has these powers, too; he solves mysteries with them, he catches criminals, he defends the poor and vulnerable.
She keeps this story, though she doesn’t show it to him. Mostly because she’s afraid he’ll recognise the reporter character she makes up, the one he falls in love with, in the story, and saves and cares for. (Because in this future, young black girls can be like that – they can be reporters at important newspapers, write big stories, investigate big mysteries, be listened to, be respected).
The next day, when Barry appears in the morning rush, with his poor eye swollen up even worse, Iris slips him a free bagel, though she knows she could get fired for giving food away in front of everyone like that. He looks so pleased and grateful, like she’s just handed him a puppy or something, that it’s worth it the whole dame day.
That evening he sits by the counter again, and pretends to read, and looks at her instead, and she feels happy and warm under his gaze as she nips around the diner looking after the other customers, knowing he’s there, can’t take his pretty eyes off her.
And then some snot of a kid calls her an ugly name and her little golden bubble bursts just like that, and she feels like an idiot for forgetting, even for a second, what she is to these people.
It’s not that she doesn’t hear words like that every day – she’s good at deafening herself to it, she has to be; she writes stories in her head whilst she keeps a smile on her face and tolerates everything from girl to – worse. But something about it happening in front of Barry like that, which it hasn’t before, not quite that bad – something about the way Barry’s face reddens and his eyes narrow – makes it worse.
Iris is so exhausted, all of a sudden, that her eyes prickle and her stomach turns and she has to slip out back and bury her face in her little white uniform apron to blot her tears.
This is her fifth twelve hour shift this week and her feet are bruised and her back aches and she can’t take another name, another look, another moment of this place.
“Miss West?”
Good Lord what is he doing back here? Iris turns her back on Barry with a jerk, still hiding her face. “You shouldn’t be out here.”
“I just wanted to…” he clears his throat, awkwardly. “To check you were… okay?”
“I’m fine. Go back inside.”
“You…” she can tell by the sound of his feet scuffing that he must be hovering, awkwardly, behind her, probably touching the back of his neck the way he does. “Forgive me, but you don’t seem fine.”
“No, well, what’re you gonna do about it?” She wipes her face, not turning round. “You gonna fix the world for me, Mr Allen?”
She doesn’t mean to snap, but it seems to have the desired effect – he goes quiet, and she thinks he’s gone back inside until she feels his hand on her arm, gentle and tentative. “I wish I could.”
Iris glances at him, from under her wet eyelashes, and swallows hard. He looks so good and so kind and so tender that she only feels worse. “What do you want from me?” She asks, swallowing again, trying to keep her voice level. “Come in here every day and look at me like you do and I… what am I meant to think? That you’d ever… I mean, the world we live in? Really? You and me?”
“Iris…” Barry is shaking his head, “Iris…”
And then he pulls her to his chest and she never wants to let him go, he feels so warm and solid and real, better than anything she could ever put on a page. She can hear his heart thudding fast beneath her ear as he cradles the back of her head with one hand, squeezes her waist tight with the other. Iris wraps her arms around him, and he presses his mouth to the top of her head, clumsy and strange, and she feels her pulse stutter.
“You wanna kiss me, Mr Allen?” She asks, her voice strange even to her own ears, low and shaky, tipping her face up to look into his – he stares down at her like she’s some kind of miracle, his smile quizzical.
“Yeah,” he replies, “that okay?”
“You better do it quick – my boss is gonna come looking for me any minute.”
So he kisses her, cupping her jaw with his hands. It’s close mouthed and it’d be almost chaste if it didn’t go on so long – she pushes herself up onto her tip-toes (good Lord she’s never registered before quite how tall he is), and puts her hands up to the back of his neck to tug him down to her.
That’s how Iris claims Barry, just for a moment, just for now, he’s all hers in that gentle crush of his mouth. There’s nothing anyone else can do to take him from her.
Then someone is calling her name and she pushes him away from her, catching her breath, trying to pull her head back down out of the clouds and into the reality of a full diner, enough to go back inside and do her job without tripping over her feet or floating off into the sky.
Barry lingers by the counter for the rest of the night, reading. She waits until the diner has emptied out and her boss has gone home, and flips the ‘closed’ sign on the door, then pulls out the left over pie – strawberry and rhubarb today – and heats each of them up a slice, spoons on cream and brown sugar.
“I’m gonna marry you one day,” Barry tells Iris, when she lays a plate and a spoon in front of him. “Just you wait.”
Iris snorts, sits down and slips off her shoes, curling her toes with relief. “Take a girl out to dinner first, maybe.”
He doesn’t answer for a moment, though his mouth turns up at the corners, his eyes crinkling. His bruise has gone down a little. “Okay then.”
Iris quirks an eyebrow, dips her thumb in the cream on her plate, meets his gaze for a moment and then glances down, because he can’t be serious. A cuddle and a sweet kiss is one thing, maybe – even if, in the moment, it had felt like everything – but he cannot be seriously suggesting that they go out. Together. In public.
Does the poor boy have any idea what he’s suggesting?
“What?” Barry asks, chewing, “what’s funny?”
Iris shakes her head.
“Would it be so – I mean – totally… unreasonable if we just… went out to dinner? Two people can’t go out to dinner?”
“Two people like us?” Iris gives him a long, sceptical look. “Barry. Do you not know how we’d be treated? How I’d be treated? You get that there are places in this city where I’d have to go in through a separate door to you, right?”
Barry purses his lips, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well. Okay. What if we don’t go out to dinner? What if we… stay in? For dinner?”
“What do you mean?”
“You could – come round to – my place? For dinner?” Barry lifts his eyebrows and looks so hopeful she’s tempted to lean over and pinch his cheek. “Or – or – I could come to yours I mean – it’s – totally up to – up to you… whatever you want.”
His ears have gone pink.
“Okay,” she says, before she can think too hard about it. “Okay, you come round to mine.”
“Really?” He blinks at her.
“You’re asking, arentcha?”
And Barry grins so wide he looks like his face might split open.