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Iris woke up disoriented, something prickling on her left arm and a sensation of have been ran over by a truck all over the muscles of her body. When she tried taking a deep breath, willing the discomfort away the result was a sharp, acute, pain on her left side, by her ribs. She made an effort to focus on remembering how exactly what was happening could be, but much like the rest of her senses her memory was foggy, and all she was actually able to accomplish was a groan of pain.
That was when she noticed Barry, by her right side, holding her hand in his sleep, and jumping awake, an anxious energy running through him as a reaction to her noise;
“Are you in pain? You’re in pain. I’ll get the nurse, or the doctor. I’ll better get the doctor.”
He made a feeble attempt of getting up and failed, for he hadn’t let go of her hand yet and as her arm raised a little he fumbled back down on his chair, taking a deep breath and asking;
“How are you feeling?”
Her answer didn’t came out, her voice dying on her throat and she needed a little cough to be able to make it work, in a low strangled tone, questioning him;
“What happened?”
He finally released her hand, rubbing both of his on his face before he could explain;
“That meta who can turn into asphalt, he overturned your car — he engulfed it in asphalt and — oh, god — I thought — you got two broken ribs and a punctured stomach, thank god it didn’t got any organs or anything, but…”
“That explains the pain then. What’s with the IV?”
“Mostly painkillers, but you are on antibiotics as well. You lost a lot of blood, you needed a transfusion and a suture. I’ll go get the nurse, let her know you’re awake.”
Iris tried nodding but it hurt too much so she just let him go, as she was left wondering how long she had been there. Barry looked dismantled, his stubble left undone and his hair down, product-less, and if the circles under his eyes were anything to go by it looked like he desperately needed sleep — real sleep, not hospital chair sleep.
He came back with the nurse, as promised, and she introduced herself, but Iris was unable to hold on to the information. Answering her questions took all the energy she had left.
“How are you feeling, Iris?”
“Like I’ve been ran over.”
The nurse smiled kindly;
“Anything else?”
“My throat feels weird. Like there’s sand stuck on it.”
“I’ll get you some ice chips”, she said, turning around, monitoring things; “your husband told me you were complaining about pain?”
She turned over to look at Barry. Husband then. If she had had any strength left in he she would have smiled, a little knowing, a little wicked, with a promise of teasing him mercilessly when they were left alone, as it was she just enjoyed the way he blushed, rubbing the nape of his neck, finding something extremely interesting on the floor to look at, incapable of holding her gaze.
“A little. Mainly when I move, or, you know, breath.”
“That’s the broken ribs.”
“Can you take off the IV? It’s prickling me.”
The nurse let out a little laugh in response, it was worth a shot, Iris though.
“If you’re complaining about the IV then you’re fine. I’ll give the dosage of the painkillers a little faster and you should fall back asleep”, she told Iris, doing something on her IV bag, and much to her disappointment the needle stayed.
“Just try to rest, ok?”, she instructed Iris, after accompanying her to the bathroom and back to bed.
When she left Iris and Barry alone again he dropped back down the chair by Iris’ bedside and it was all the time it took for Iris to feel her lids growing heavy. She didn’t want to fall back asleep though, she needed to know what had happened, how, when, why. She turned a little, searching for Barry’s eyes and asked;
“Husband?”
He blushed again, shushing her and telling her;
“They only allow immediate family to stay over nights. It was Joe’s idea actually. He didn’t want let me stay, I mean, he wanted to spend the night himself, but I insisted, I couldn’t sleep any other way, and he needed to go back home…”
He didn’t finish but Iris knew. Wally and her mother. Her not-dead-mother. Weirdly Wally, someone she never even knew existed, was taking less getting use to than her mother. Not that she would have time to: she was getting worse, Wally couldn’t possibly take care of her himself and every time Iris would think about it she would get a panic feeling on the tip of her stomach, but she was trying not to dwell.
Barry smiled at her, that way he did sometimes, making his whole face turn soft and his eyes fill with kindness and … something else … something love-like, and she failed to smile back at him, the muscles of her cheek sore for seemingly growing disused to it, as he continued;
“You scared the shit out me.”
“You look like it. Shit, I mean.”
His smile grew at it, filled with relief. She figured he guessed if she felt good enough to mock him feeling good enough wasn’t that far away.
“Oh, that’s nothing. You should have seen me earlier. I actually went home to take a shower a couple hours ago. Wally and Joe stayed with you while I was gone.”
She closed her eyes her eyes wishing she could tell him she was grateful he was there, that he was the one spending the night, that she was thankful she had him, what it felt like always, that both of his hands holding her right one, rubbing his thumbs on her knuckles, did made her feel better somehow.
“I felt it”, she fought the sleep on her eyes to look back at him. As her eyes opened he continued; “I felt you getting hurt. My powers — I — they kept weakening and I knew something was wrong — with you, I mean.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. When Joe called me — I couldn’t even run all the way through to the accident, and then, when I got there, they were taking you out of the car and I held your hand and I felt it.”
It was taking an indescribable effort for her to keep listening to him, to understand what exactly he was saying, so she asked;
“The electricity?”
“Yeah. Like a jolt, and then I could run again.”
She tried to ask him what did it meant. Why would he loose his powers, but before she could help it she was asleep again.
Barry was waked by his phone buzzing on his shirt pocket and he needed to sleep. The last two days had been a nightmare. Ever since his phone rang with Joe telling him that Iris had been in an accident he had been in a half aware state, the other half of him on a constant panic attack, sure that if something would happen to her he would die. Which sounded like an exaggeration, but once he figured that there was a connection between his powers acting all weird and Iris getting hurt, somehow, it felt like a real, actual, possibility, and not at all an exaggeration.
Iris was still asleep, looking a little more peaceful than she did at 2 in the morning the day before, when she had woken up the first time since the accident. The second time it wasn’t him at the hospital, he had left, trying to find the meta-human who had hurt her and Caitlin had told him 40 times in 45 minutes over the comms that she thought it was a bad idea, what if he just dropped powerless like it had happened the evening before. He had given up then, trying to fill his mind with other stuff, trying to sleep and eat and work and act like Iris wasn’t laying on a hospital bed and suddenly he was filled with another kind of admiration and gratitude when he thought about her doing just that for the months he had spend on a coma. So he went back to the hospital, telling Wally he could go home, he would stay over night again with her, but he had already missed the couple of hours she had apparently spend awake, and her dinner too, and Barry tried very hard not to resent the fact that neither Joe nor Wally had called him to let him know. At least by her side, holding her hand and making sure she was actually there he was able to sleep throughout most of the night. Still, 6:30 in the morning was not a time to call someone.
He stepped out of the room to answer to Cisco’s call. Central City would have to deal without the Flash for an extra day or two, he was definitively not leaving this hospital for longer than it took for him to go home and shower until Iris was released from now on.
“Hey, I’m at the hospital, what’s up?”
“Barry, I think I figured something.”
“That could make us catch Tart Pit?”
“No, about your powers.”
“I’m not talking about that anymore. I told you. Next time call me if you have something on that asshole.”
“If you hang up on me I’ll just share my theory with Caitlin.”
He took a deep breath. He should never have told Cisco and Caitlin that. Granted, they were over the communicators, they had all but seen it, — it being him dropping to a sudden stop, like all the energy of his body had been knocked out of him — but the two of them had been all up his ass asking questions, texting him, trying to engage him into participating on the debate to formulate a theory to explain it, and diverting their attention from finding where that asshole that almost killed Iris was, and prying into something that he didn’t felt like sharing with anyone. He wished Cisco could see his eyes rolling when he asked;
“What?”
“You said you first noticed your powers when you saw Iris again, for the first time after the coma, right?”
“Yeah. But that was the first thing I did after I left STAR Labs that day.”
“And that super sonic punch — Iris was endangered, and that other time when you had to fight Grodd it was cause Iris talked you through it that you managed it.”
And the first time he went back in time was right after she told him she couldn’t stop thinking about him. And kissed him. And he fucking ruined it. But he was not sharing that with anyone, ever. Never. Maybe Iris, one day. No one else.
“Yeah, what’s the actual point, Cisco? She could be waking up right now, I wanna be there. I have to talk with the doctor.”
“What if you lost your powers cause Iris is the one that, you know, powers you, and she was —, you know.”
That made no sense. The particle acceleration explosion plus getting hit by lightening was what had powered him. Cisco took his silence as invitation though, and continued;
“I think maybe speedsters need something, like a lighting rod, to keep you from getting lost on the speedforce. Think about it, why did Eobard needed you, to go back to his own time? He still ran faster than you for a while there. Cause maybe he didn’t have that, but you do, you have something that keeps you anchored so you can travel time and know how to come back, and not get lost.”
“Iris?”
“Hey, you’re the one who loves her and shit.”
“Iris?” He repeated. Crazier things had happened in his life, maybe that did made some sense. If there was one thing that was constant on his life was Iris. He did love her and shit. He peaked back inside her room and somehow he had missed the doctor going in, she was already talking to Iris.
“I have to go Cisco.”
Iris was sitting on the hospital bed while the doctor examined her, stethoscope on her back, and with her hospital gown opened he could see that the bruises over her left arm and temple continued all over the left side of her back as well, she also had a nasty cut under her collar bones and she hold her hair, a complete mess, with the right hand, out of her back — he noticed the IV gone from the left arm then, and took it as a good sign — even so, somehow, Iris still managed to look beautiful. He would resent her a little if he didn’t enjoy looking at her so much. Her eyes focused on his and he smiled at her, god, he did love her. Too fucking much.
“Hi.”
It was the doctor who answered him, though;
“Mr. Allen, I was just telling Iris she is getting discharged.”
“Already?”
Iris threw him a nasty look and he couldn’t help to laugh at it, real relief washing over him for the first time in what felt like too long.
“Already”, the doctor smiled at the two of them, explaining how the suture was supposed to be cleaned and instructing Iris to do breathing exercises because of the broken ribs so she wouldn’t get pneumonia and how she should strain herself from brusk movements, saying the ribs usually take six weeks to heal but she wanted to see Iris again in two and until then she should stay as quiet as possible.
When she left, leaving Iris and him to gather her things and sign all the papers and Iris disappeared into the bathroom to change into real clothes and he was momentarily left alone to contemplate everything, and that was when things actually started to dawn on him. Maybe it was the relief of knowing she would make a full recovery, that she was fine, maybe it was just standing still long enough to let everything caught up to him, allowing himself to feel all the fear he had kept at bay, maybe it was what Cisco had told him and how much sense that was starting to scarily make.
He sat down at the hospital bed and suddenly couldn’t make himself move. He wasn’t even conscious about what he was doing until he heard Iris asking Barry, what happened? Are you ok? and that was all it took for the tears win their way out from his eyes, they were few, but he wasn’t able to explain them to Iris when she asked what they were for, maybe they were just relief, maybe they were realisation, he couldn’t understand them himself, so he shook his head and dried the stupid tears away and his whole body froze for a second, as Iris sat down on his lap, like she had done it before, like it was something she was used to do, cradling his face on her hands and questioning again;
“Barry, did something happen?”
He shook his head one more time;
“It’s nothing, it’s just, …you —”
“I’m fine, I’m going to be just fine.”
He buried his nose on the crook of her neck, breathing in, and she smelled like hospital and Iris, and when she pulled away to place a kiss on his forehead, then another on the tip of his nose, slipping his lips between hers was just too easy, and she parted them, just enough for him to feel her tongue on his and he couldn’t explain how kissing her for the first time — first time that counted anyway, even though she tasted the same despite the chapped lips — could make him calm instead of about ready to explode, he figured it was the realisation that her, and the soft noises she made as she kissed, were all he would ever truly need, moving his hand up her spine, until;
“Ow! My ribs.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
She smiled for the first time since the accident and it felt like a lifetime since he last had seen it, and the way it shined on her eyes.
“Come on”, she told him, getting on her feet, and extending her right hand to him; “let’s go home, I desperately need a shower, and I’m sick of hospitals.”
He smiled back at her, obliging to the soft pressure of her hand, she was fine. It would all be fine.