Work Text:
Iris’s earliest memory is of her father, singing to her and holding her close as he danced around the kitchen. She’s not sure if it’s an actual memory or something that has been relayed to her so many times she can see it, clearly, in her head, but she claims it. He sang something old; no one can remember quite what it was, but Iris swears (when she was scared, growing up, or when she can’t fall asleep in college, or when she misses him so much it hurts, sometimes) she can hear the melody sometimes. The words just on the tip of her tongue.
Her mother… well, her mother died. Iris can remember pieces of her (the way her hair looked, all tight curls and twists; her infamous inability to cook; the way her fingers could always find Iris’s most tender spots, whether she needed to be tickled or was hurt or needed a hug), can hear snatches of her voice (the way she said, “Well,” when she was particularly impressed or proud), but it’s all just blurry memories. Jagged edges of a hole in her heart. Fragments of someone who left her, willingly or unwillingly.
Her father was never clear on that.
Her father, after that, is a constant. Her mother died when she was young and her father expanded to fill the space left behind for the most part, but it was hard, for him. It was hard for both of them. She loves her father, and she loves everything that he did for her and continues to do for her, but she can still remember how sometimes he gave up. How he would go into his room and leave her by herself, or would throw himself into his work and not come home when she was awake, how he would sometimes look at her and fall silent as she talked, seeing her and yet seeing someone else imposed over her, talking through her.
“You look so much like your mother,” he told her one day, when she was eight. “When you smile.”
She couldn’t tell if that was a good thing.
The first friend she made in kindergarten, at the tender age of five, is a girl with blonde hair, a weird laugh, and a mom who made really good sandwiches. On those days when Joe would forget to send something with Iris, Jesse would be quick with a smile and half of her PB&J.
They liked to play nurses, and house, and superheroes; Jesse liked to pretend that she could run around the world in a single step and Iris wanted to believe that she could fly (up, up, and away, up to where her mom was). They would run around the house, shrieking and laughing and catching imaginary bad guys until Mrs. Chambers called Iris downstairs to where her father (or grandmother or aunt or neighbor, whoever decided to pick her up that day) waited patiently.
She would wave when she left, and Jesse would smile and wave back, and Iris thought that even without her mother, having a friend like Jesse would make life a lot better.
After her mother died, her grandmother came to stay with them for a while. Her grandmother is a kind woman, and she always had a soft spot in her heart for little Iris, and Iris knew it, too. On the days when it was too hard for her father, her grandmother would try and be strict, try and be forceful, but Iris knew exactly what to do to get what she wanted.
Unlike most kids, though, what she wanted wasn’t cookies or candy (well, mostly). She wanted tales of her father when he was little, stories of how her parents met that were too painful for her daddy to tell. She hoarded her grandmother’s memories, keeping her stories locked up tight to remember on nights when the house was cold and dark and she was alone in her room with no one there to chase away the monsters.
Her grandmother was a good cook, better than her father, and she knew exactly what to do with Iris’s hair when it came to a picture day or those random Sundays that someone decided they should go to church. But she couldn’t stay forever, and she didn’t stay more than a month or so, before she went back to her own house with her own husband, leaving them behind.
Jesse moved away before they started the second grade.
She and her father got better at existing on their own. He knew what kind of frozen foods she liked, and who her favorite babysitters were, and what kind of movies that she would accept as an apology when he missed her school events. She knew his favorite kinds of food, and what games she should record on the VCR, and what grades she needed to get to keep him from being angry (or much, much worse: disappointed). She was only seven, but she knew how to exist with only her father. She knew how to be her own parent, too.
They relied a lot on neighbors to get her places she needed to go when he was working. There was an elderly (to Iris’s young eyes) couple that lived next door who volunteered many times to watch her, or take her to practice, or help her with her math homework. Joe liked them, and Iris loved them, and she overheard the Garrick’s tell her daddy one time that they thought of Iris as the granddaughter they never had.
Iris was a popular girl in school.
Not in the sense that she would sit on top of the monkey bars and order other students around, like some people she knew. No, she was friendly, and nice, and had yet to meet a person that didn’t like her or didn’t want to be her friend. She knew everyone in her third grade class, and played with different groups of kids all of the time, and made the lunch ladies and cooks and custodians smile when she saw them.
She was popular, and she was always smiling, and even when she wanted to cry or scream or fall down and hold herself and sob, she kept smiling. And kept listening. And kept being a friend to everyone who needed one. No matter who they were.
“See you tomorrow,” she said first.
“Bye,” he said back, gripping his mother’s hand like he was afraid she was going to leave them alone. “Wait! Do you… do you want to come over to my house for some snacks?”
Nora Allen was a godsend to the West family, even if she didn’t know it. Sometimes, when Iris thinks of her own mother, she remembers red hair and a warm smile and a woman who drove a minivan, who loved her son and made a mean mac and cheese.
Nora was the one who talked to Iris about her first crush (because she would never tell her father, and Ms. Joan was too old to understand boys), and the one who started Iris’s love of brownies, and who gave her a necklace and took her picture when she went to her first school dance (a sock hop in the fourth grade, that was held at 4 pm and ended at 5).
She never minded that there were weeks Iris practically lived at their house; she just made up the extra room and told Barry to put out another plate at dinner, and asked if Iris wanted the nightlight on when she slept, or if she minded the darkness.
Henry was good, too, but he was a doctor; like her dad, he was gone a lot, working late nights and early mornings. Mostly, Iris liked to watch him and Nora together, standing in the corner of the kitchen, his arm around her waist as she talked to him about something that happened that day. They never argued that she saw, and he was always kissing her and holding her and making her laugh. Iris figured that when she grew up, she would want to be in a relationship like theirs, one where they loved openly and joked around, one where they were stable. She doesn’t remember much of her parent’s marriage, just that they were happy (for the most part).
Iris idolized Nora (a little). She wanted to straighten her hair like Nora, wanted to be a writer just like Nora. She begged her dad to buy her an Easy Bake Oven so she could try and bake like Nora, too. She got pretty good at it. Neither her father nor her best friend complained, even if the portions were small and tasted mostly of burnt chocolate.
When she was killed, Iris felt the hole in her chest again, could feel the aching loss of yet another mother from her life.
She and Barry officially met on the first day of the third grade, when he accidentally sat down next to her because he was too nervous to try and find his assigned seat. He stared at her for a second, and then asked when she had changed her last name (because he was Barry Allen, so if she was next to him, her last name must now start with an A or B). She smiled and started laughing when he realized his mistake (she couldn’t help it), and from then on, they were friends.
When they got older, he always claimed he remembered her from the bus they both rode home on most of the time. But she couldn’t ever remember him before that first day, when he sat down beside her in class and then she sat down beside him at lunch and followed him out at recess and stuck by him in each of their special classes. That first day, she remembered, they had music as their special class; Barry was good at playing instruments and singing. The next day, they had PE. He was terrible at PE.
They became fast friends, and one day, Barry asked Iris if she wanted to come over for a snack. Her father had been there, and he spoke to Nora in hushed tones as she and Barry waited anxiously, and from then on, Iris was allowed to go to the Allen house after school and on the weekends and really, any time they would let her.
She and Barry joked a lot about silly things, and they liked to play in the woods together (they were runaways, escaping from a government that wanted them; magical beings with special powers; they were old shop keepers that sold moss and dirt and roots) or play legos in the house. Barry had a cool board that they would use to build a house floor plan (complete with flowers and lego tables and lego people) so they could play. They also liked to play his super Nintendo a lot; they loved Donkey Kong Country 2 (he was Diddy and she was Dixie).
He was also really good at math and weirdly interested in science and he loved it when she brought over her dad’s collection of Star Trek VHS’s. She had always thought the show was weird, but when she and Barry watched it together, it was fun. And sometimes, when he came over to her house, her dad would stop and watch it with them, giving them bits of trivia about episodes and actors and everything else.
Barry’s mom died. And his dad went to prison. Iris thought about what she saw in the kitchen all of those days when Henry was home, those hugs and kisses and whispered words, the love and adoration, and she believed Barry when he said his dad didn’t do it.
His room, after that, was right next to hers, only a wall separating them. She would sit in her room on nights when Barry was particularly sad, listening for the sound of tears. If (when) she heard them, she would quietly open her door and tiptoe out, never realizing that her father knew what she was doing and knew that Barry needed her and never stopped her. They sat together while he cried and sniffled and told her that it wasn’t fair, that life wasn’t fair, because his mom was gone.
She, as she always did, listened to him without saying a word. She never told him that she felt the same way, that she had an ocean of tears inside of her that she never cried because her daddy needed her to be strong; most of the time, she believed he knew, but sometimes (when it was dark out and she was angry), she figured that he just didn’t care.
They got older, and life got easier for the both of them. Barry was less angry at Joe the older he got, and he blamed the world less and less for the death of his mother.
At school, they stuck together whenever they could, walking the hallways together, sitting next to each other in shared classes. When Barry had a problem, Iris was there to help; when he was being bullied, she was there to stand next to him and defend him and scare off the kids who tried. People, as always, liked Iris, respected her, and because of her, they left Barry alone.
The first night that Iris bombed a test, Barry sat with her and let her cry on his shoulder and told her that it was okay, that it happened to everyone.
When his dad was denied an appeal for the first time, she let Barry rip up all of her magazines and yell about her father and cry on her shoulder, too.
Their lives were intertwined, irrevocably mixed together; where she went, he followed, and they were soon a package deal. Barry and Iris, Iris and Barry. He was her best friend, and he understood her better than anyone she had ever known, and she wondered if family wasn’t always something you were born into.
Jay Garrick was in an accident when she is in the eighth grade. No one was ever quite sure what happened, but he died and the body could never be recovered, and soon afterward Joan went to live with her sister in Keystone.
Iris helped her pack up the house, and wondered if everyone in her life (except Barry and her dad) was going to leave her in some way or another.
When she and Barry hit their senior year of high school, she gets worried that they will choose different colleges and move in different directions and hardly ever speak; that he will move out of the house at age 18 and live on his own and never come to visit because he still resents her dad for his role in his father’s imprisonment.
“Hey,” he said as she stared at the requirements for the college of sciences at the school he wants to attend. At the time, Iris thought about going to their college of humanities and social sciences for a degree in psychology, sine her dad refused to let her join the force. “We’re still going to be best friends. We don’t have to go to the same school or live in the same dorm to be close.”
“I just don’t want to lose you,” she said, a little too softly, tears welling up in her eyes.
He looked at her, and pulled her into a hug. “You’re never going to lose me,” he told her. “I promise.” She wrapped her arms around him, and believed.
Barry Allen was struck by lightning. Iris sat outside of the room they kept him in and cried, and held her knees tight to her chest.
She wondered if she was cursed.
Over the years, with a third person in their life, she and her father somehow lost their ability to exist, just the two of them. For nine months, they struggled to find some kind of rhythm.
He went back to long nights at the office, and they went back to long periods of time where they barely spoke to each other. She would pass him when he was leaving Barry’s room, and hand him a coffee and give him a hug, and not see him again for 24 hours.
Even after Barry woke up, even after he comes to her and hugs her and tells her that he’s still alive, that his heart is still beating, she can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that everything is different, now. That even though he’s with her, standing next to her, he broke his promise.