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“Son?” Barry looks up, and Joe can tell he’s been crying, though for now his eyes are red-rimmed and dry. So are the tear-tracks on his face, probably as instant as they formed, from the gusts of wind when he ran from STAR labs. His frostbitten, burned skin has only just recently managed to heal up under the supervision of a still somewhat shaken Caitlin; this latest brush with Snart and his new friend was close for all of them, and it’s changed everything.
The Flash is no longer some mysterious urban legend; he’s real, the city has seen him and his willingness to fight and protect. Joe’s been hoping to avoid it as long as possible, waiting on tenterhooks for this day.
He wasn’t alone in some of his anxiety, however, because once Caitlin had declared Barry in good enough health to get up and change out of his damaged Flash suit—which Cisco was still upset about, judging from the man’s slouched position in his chair and mournful eyes—the kid had done just that, then pulled out his phone while taking quick strides across the room to make a call. His back was to them, but Joe could still see the disappointed slump in his shoulders making it pretty clear no one had picked up. Barry tried again, though a different number he thought as there was an immediate uplift in his posture.
“Felicity, hey, I guess this isn’t a great time, but things just got a little crazy in Central so if Oliver’s busy tell him not to worry about it, but I just tried to reach him so—what?”
It was that last word, spoken in a tone so markedly different from his casual demeanor before, that caused Joe to look back sharply again. Caitlin and Cisco were also watching curiously, but none of them could make out what the woman on the other end was saying. Barry’s responses weren’t making it sound good.
“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” he darted a look back at Caitlin briefly, “she sent you guys back the sample a bit before Christmas, right?...His sister?...He what?”
The phone slipped through his fingers and only a quick blur of movement saved it from shattering on the cortex floor. Barry was almost frantic in asking, “But you guys haven’t seen or- or heard anything from him, right? So maybe he’s—oh.” His free hand reached out and grabbed the back of a chair, bracing himself even as it looked like those fast legs of his might collapse out from under him. “Oh God…no, no I’m—everything’s fine here, it wasn’t even…oh God…I, um…uh-huh.”
Joe wasn’t even sure at this point if Barry had been rendered incapable of forming coherent words, he was so choked up. The hand gripping the chair came up briefly to swipe across his eyes, and Joe had to resist the urge to march over there, turn the kid around, take the phone from him, and demand of Felicity Smoak what in the hell she had to say that could bring his son to tears in seconds.
Barry hung up, both arms came down to hang limply at his sides before he faced them all again. Two words, so faint that they were forced more to read them off his lips than hear them aloud. “Oliver’s dead.” Then Barry was gone, in a storm of swirling paper. Caitlin and Cisco, though clearly in shock over the news, were immediately concerned over where Barry might have gone, but Joe just headed for his squad car. He knew.
Which is what finds him standing in the doorway of Barry’s lab, more a home for this kid than his deathtrap of an apartment. They had meant to swing by here with Cisco later make certain that Snart and Rory’s weapons had been secured, but he slides the lab door closed in order to shut out the sounds of their colleague’s celebration and excitement from the evening’s events. It’s all too cruel a juxtaposition.
Barry’s watching him silently now, and that doesn’t surprise him nor does his distraught appearance. It’s what Barry was looking at before Joe announced his arrival that has him a little confused and a whole lot of worried: the board with its numerous newspaper clippings he’s collected over the years relating to his mother’s murder.
“You want to talk about it?” He offers, leaving it vague enough, though his eyes flick from the phone lying on Barry’s desk to the board. His kid follows the movement, and a rueful smile takes residence on his lips before he shakes his head, pushes himself up from his wheeled chair and unpins one of the clippings. He passes it to Joe.
It’s newer than most of the others, hasn’t really started to yellow, and its headline talks of an unexplainable break-in at Queen Consolidated.
“I think he hated me, when we first met,” Barry finally speaks, and his voice, for now, is steady. “I mean I was—well, you know me at crime scenes.” Joe has to smile a little at that. Yeah, he can picture it; stoic Oliver Queen watching Barry Allen ramble on and on about possible residues or how a scuff mark on the floor could probably break the case. “And then he checked up on me—because of course he did—and figured out I was lying. I told him everything, all this,” he waves a hand back at the board. “I don’t know why. I didn’t think he’d care, but he- he invited me back to this party at his mansion. Fancy dress stuff, dancing, you know?”
“You at a dance?” He can’t help checking with a raised eyebrow, remembering awkward, gawky Barry escorting Becky Cooper to junior prom, miserable because it wasn’t Iris and Iris on her latest crush’s arm miserable because it was Becky.
Barry himself manages a short laugh as he says, “Yeah, I felt bad for Felicity. But I was so late getting back, I didn’t leave that night, because I had to save Oliver’s life. He lost a fight with the guy at the break-in and there was something in his system Dig and Felicity didn’t know how to fix, so they brought me in. That’s how I found out he was the Arrow, cause I had to save him.”
Joe feels whatever humor in him fade. “Barry…”
But his kid doesn’t meet his eyes even as he takes back the little clipping, turns so Joe is looking at his profile, sets about pinning it back up. “So I know what you’re going to say, Joe, that this stuff happens, and I know that. I know he isn’t invincible—” Barry freezes for a moment, the fingers of one hand still gripping the tack that’s firmly embedded in the board, then he hangs his head. “Wasn’t invincible,” is his soft correction. Then he lets the tack go only to slam his fist against the top of the board’s frame, the papers fluttering, the red strings trembling. “But what’s the point of being the Flash when I made more of a difference before it?”
It’s like all the words of wisdom, all the comforts he meant to give upon coming here, have dried up. He feels as distant to him as when Barry was a little eleven year-old boy lost in his anger and his grief.
So he does what he would have done then, reaches out and wraps the kid in his arms, dragging him back from that board with its ghosts and memories. Joe can’t lift the young man and swing him side to side anymore, but he can tuck Barry’s head under his chin when his legs finally do give out. But Joe’s there to hold him up from the hard floor. When Barry sinks into him, gives a shuddering gasp of a breath, and the first drops of water splash onto the floor, that’s when he finds his words again.
“You know that’s not true. Lot of difference’s been made by the Flash all your life, Barry. Cause you are the Flash. But even you can’t save everybody. What’d I tell you, hm?” He reminds, slow and gentle. “There’s just gonna be people you can’t.”
Barry’s voice is wavering, sometimes raising to a near-wail, sometimes dropping off altogether as he chokes out, “Wh-why’d it have to- have to be him, Joe?”
He’s never believed in shushing a kid trying only to express themselves, particularly when it’s coming from the depths of their heart. So he only squeezes tighter, lets Barry be the one to turn enough to unload his tears and muffled sobs into his shoulder. If it’s what he needs, he’s here to give it. “I know, Bear,” he soothes, rubbing circles on his son’s back. “I know.”
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Barry’s been nothing but warm and helpful towards Joe and Eddie and Iris while they all work to move his daughter’s things out of the West home and into the car. He can’t help feeling just a little nostalgic, and if he thought he’d be prepared from when Barry first moved out he’s sadly mistaken. Iris doesn’t tease him for it too badly, and he likes to think she’ll miss him just as much.
But it’s Barry who lingers in the house after the two lovebirds have gone, Barry who flops down on the couch next to Joe instead of leaving for his apartment, Barry who’s dropping just as many hints as Joe that the last thing he wants to be right now is alone.
So he feels no guilt whatsoever in feigning nonchalance and remarking, “I don’t know why you moved into that deathtrap in the first place, since you still got a perfectly good room here.” Because the last thing he wants his kid to be right now is alone, too.
His back might be sore in the morning when he has to lift the kid in a fireman’s carry from the couch up to the perfectly good bed in that room, but it’ll be worth it for the smile that lingers on his face even in sleep. Joe tucks him in, squeezes Barry’s shoulder once more, and leaves the light on in the room on his way out.