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There’s a brief moment of happiness when she wakes up. It’s all warm and comfortable and it smells like him so for a short second her brain somehow believes that she’ll reach out and Barry will be there by her side.
But then she remembers what happened, she remembers him dissolving in front of her and she remembers that the reason why it smells like him it’s because she fell asleep on his bed after a couple hours of crying the amount of her weight in tears.
Her head hurts from it and she can barely open her eyes but then there’s another greater pain rushing into her all over again and her whole body aches. Her lungs and her throat and her ears and her heart. There are places hurting that she didn’t even know existed in her.
There’s no fighting it now. Unlike the horrific nine months there’s no hope now, nothing to cling on to, nothing to pray to, there’s not even a body so Iris would never look at his face again, she would never touch his soft pretty hair or marvellous on the pretty long eyelashes that no camera had ever been able to capture to its full glory.
She would never see him laughing again or watch the way his eyes shined in their own unique way whenever he did.
She would never get to kiss him.
Never. That’s a cruel word.
She should have kissed him. She shouldn’t have asked, she should have just taken and then whatever happened they would get to deal and it would be better than having to deal with the knowledge that she would never know how Barry tasted like.
She never thought possible to ache so much, like everything in her body is broken and she just wants to go back to sleep, to be trapped in that little second when her brain wasn’t remembering what had happened, she wants to close her eyes and not see him screaming in pain.
She wants to hold his hand and trace the freckles of his body and she wants to kiss him.
She would never get to touch him again. He didn’t exist any longer.
It’s an endless loop when in one moment she can’t take it so it all seems like a cruel dream, like it isn’t true somehow, like she’s watching from afar it happening to someone else and then the knowledge of it hits her full force again and the seconds of subsiding pain make the impact of it worse, and she has to learn what it means to exist without him.
She gets to live without him.
She gets to live without Barry.
She hopes a little bit of this never-ending pain go away somehow, so she can breath and not feel like drowning.
She hopes he knew. That she loves him. That she has always loved him. That she will always love him.