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The crash sounded distant, but it still jolted Iris out of her daze. She sat up, blinking. The journal article on DNA that she’d been reading aloud, which had put her to sleep in the first place, slid off her lap.
Cisco popped his head in. “Hey. Was that you?” His eyes flicked to Barry’s monitors. They were unchanged. Of course. Her best friend was still in his coma, the monitors still fluttering and flickering in unreal patterns.
"No. It came from off that direction." She waved a hand to indicate.
Cisco frowned. “Huh. Caitlin uses that lab.”
"I’ll go check on her," Iris said impulsively.
"No, I should -"
"I could use a walk anyway. Can you keep an eye on Barry, please?"
"Sure," he said. "Yeah. But he - okay."
Iris wended her way through the hallways, depending on the four or five times she’d gotten lost on the way to the bathroom to guide her. She found the lab a few doors down.
Caitlin stood rigid in the middle of the room. Her phone lay on the floor several feet away.
Iris didn’t know her very well. Okay, at all, considering how much time Iris spent at Star Labs. Mostly, the other woman was the cold, efficient doctor checking Barry’s vitals and telling Iris that the moments when Barry’s eyelids fluttered or his fingers twitched were normal for coma patients and didn’t mean he was coming out of it. Iris hated her a little for that.
But Caitlin’s fists were clenching and unclenching, and she was panting, and her eyes looked - well, Iris didn’t know any way to describe it except that it was awfully similar to what she herself saw in the mirror these days.
"Uh," Iris said uncertainly. "Are you okay?"
In the history of dumb questions, that had to be some kind of prizewinner, because Caitlin Snow was clearly about as not okay as it was possible to be.
"Yes," the other woman snarled.
"What happened? I heard a crash. Did you drop your phone?"
"No. I threw it at the fucking wall."
She announced it like she was noting the weather, curse and all.
"Oh. Why?"
"My hair salon called. A reminder about my appointment."
"Those bastards."
Caitlin’s eyes flicked to her. “My hair appointment. To get my hair done for my wedding. It’s my wedding day tomorrow. I am supposed to be getting married.”
Iris sucked in her breath. “What happened?”
Caitlin pointed at a paper sitting on the lab table. The yellowing, months-old headline announced, Disaster Out of Triumph over an aerial shot of the particle accelerator explosion. “That. That happened. He just had to play hero, and that happened, and I’m not getting married tomorrow, or ever.”
"Wow," Iris said. She’d never imagined this particular backstory. "Oh my god. I - I -"
"Don’t say you’re sorry. I’ve heard it enough."
Iris thought, I should be insulted by that, but she wasn’t. She’d heard it too. All those well-meaning people, patting her hand, gripping her father’s shoulder, frowning and shaking their heads. So young. Such a tragedy. It made her want to punch everybody in the face, but she never did, because that wouldn’t be nice.
Nice was accepting their sympathies, smiling bravely, telling them it was so kind of them to say those stupid, meaningless words, pretending not to notice the skepticism in their eyes when she insisted that he’d come out of his coma any day now.
Iris might know how to throw a punch and stand up for herself, but she was a nice girl, with almost everybody besides her dad and Barry. Even them sometimes.
Caitlin blew out her breath and shook her hair back. She walked over and picked her phone up, staring at the shattered screen. “Well, it was time for an upgrade anyway. Sorry. I didn’t mean for you to see that. I lost control.”
The words jumped out of Iris’s mouth. “I left my phone in the other room. Have you got anything for me to throw?”
Caitlin wheeled around slowly, staring at her. “Why?”
"Because Barry’s birthday is next week. He’s twenty-five. I was going to throw him the mother of all surprise parties. And now the best I can do is sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a coma patient."
"At least he’s alive," Caitlin said bitterly.
"Yeah? For how much longer?"
They glared at each other for a moment. Then Caitlin nodded at a mug on the table. “That. Throw that. Coffee’s cold anyway.”
Without hesitating, Iris grabbed it and hurled it at the wall. It exploded, spraying pottery and lukewarm coffee everywhere.
She made a noise somewhere between a yelp, a laugh, and a sob.
"Feel better?" Caitlin asked.
"Not really, no. You?"
She shook her head, lips pressed together. “Not yet. But there are a lot of things to throw in this room.”
A few thoughts crossed Iris’s mind, like Don’t these belong to Star Labs? and We’re going to make a lot of noise and who’s going to clean it up?
But then she remembered how nobody except her posted on Barry’s Facebook wall anymore, and the rare messages from others said things like, “I’ll never forget you, man.”
She said, “Let’s do it.”
"Wait," Caitlin said. She went to a cabinet and pulled out two sets of ugly plastic safety goggles with elastic straps. "Safety first."
Iris accepted her pair and adjusted the strap. Caitlin had an armload of glassware from a cabinet. She set it all out on the table like she was arranging shot glasses. Iris wondered randomly if the other woman had ever played beer pong and almost laughed.
This was so weird.
"Ready?" Caitlin asked, picking up a beaker so big she had to lift it with both hands.
Iris picked a skinny-necked flask. “Yeah.”
The beaker hit the wall, and the pieces were still flying when the flask shattered just under the new dent.
Some of what Caitlin had pulled was tempered glass, and either bounced off the wall or cracked into large pieces. But some of it shattered beautifully, and the crash soothed Iris like a lullaby.
After the destruction of one large-ish flask sent pieces flying back hard enough to make both of them duck, Caitlin screamed, “Goddammit, Ronnie!”
Iris seized a fistful of test tubes and sent them flying, shrieking, "Barry you dumb shit!"
She pictured every person who had stopped calling or texting because they didn’t know what to say.
Her dad, who was starting to talk about what Barry would have wanted.
Harrison Wells. He might have brought Barry here and put him under medical care, but it was his damned particle-accelerator-atom-smasher-wonder-of-science that had exploded and killed Caitlin’s fiance, put Barry into a coma, and generally made so many good things into a smoking hole in the ground.
Most of all, she hated Barry, for going back to his stupid lab and not leaving during a thunderstorm and just standing there to get hit by lightning.
Dumb shit.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!"
Iris’s arm paused at the top of her wind-up. Caitlin’s hand hesitated over a beaker.
Cisco stood in the doorway, arms shielding his face. “What are you doing?” he yelped from behind his hands.
"Throwing shit at the wall," Caitlin said. Her voice sounded raw. Iris wondered if she’d been screaming the whole time and Iris just hadn’t heard.
Cisco lowered his arms enough to peer at them. “Yeah, I see that but - why?”
"Feels good," Iris said. Her shoulder was starting to ache, so she set the beaker back down.
He blinked at her, then looked at Caitlin. “Um. Is this about tomorrow?”
"Yes," Caitlin said.
"Okay then. Got it." He looked at the floor, which was a glittering lake of shards. "Wow. Wells isn’t gonna be happy."
"I don’t care," she said, and whipped the beaker at the wall hard enough that glass sprayed in every direction. Cisco yelped and jumped back out of the room.
Iris noticed, however, that Caitlin had aimed it at the corner farthest from Cisco.
"Okay," he said from a safe distance. "Are you done?"
Caitlin looked at Iris.
Iris looked at Caitlin.
"Not yet," Iris said.
Caitlin hefted a rack of test tubes. “If you don’t want to hear it, shut the door.”
FINIS