Chapter Text
“Miss West?”
Iris jumped awake to the sound of someone calling for her. For a second, her eyes focused on Barry until traveling enough to find the source of the voice; a nurse. A different one than the one Iris had spoken to when she arrived at the hospital.
“Sorry,” Iris told the woman, she was expecting to get kicked out of Barry’s room all night, but she wasn’t leaving until she necessarily had to, so she asked; “do I have to go?”
“No, no,” the nurse said with a sympathetic smile on her lips; “you can spend the night. I just, need to move your chair a little bit.”
Iris stepped out of the way as the nurse attended to whatever it was that she was doing. Iris liked this nurse better. The one who she had spoken to when she arrived refused to answer any of Iris’s questions, telling Iris that it didn’t matter she was Barry’s emergency contact, they weren’t family so she couldn’t give Iris any information and she would have to wait for the doctor the next morning.
But this nurse seemed nicer, so she tried with this one;
“When is he gonna wake up?”
“Tomorrow morning,” she said chancing a glance at Iris, and she must have seen all of her desperation showing there, for she added; “don’t worry, he’s fine. He’ll be just fine.”
Iris shivered as the memory of picking up her cellphone and being informed it was from Saint Peter’s Hospital coursed through her.
And then of course she couldn’t book a damn flight, had to wait for hours and hours at the airport, agonising, as Barry went through surgery for “internal bleeding” and laid on a hospital bed all by himself.
“But you’ve seen him awake?” Iris asked, willing all that fear away.
“Not really,” the nurse told her, and Iris found that to be a strange answer, but she explained without needing to be probed;
“He was hallucinating when he got in. It’s normal,” she added in a hurry; “don’t worry.”
“What was he saying?”
“Something about his parents,” she told Iris, and of course he did.
Barry’s parents had died in a car accident when he was 11 years old. It took Iris four months to get Barry to talk about it for the first time. They were together there was more than a year already the first time she persuaded him to take her to his parents grave.
And now she felt guilty. She had been the one to talk him into taking his driving test, she was the one who taught him how to drive in the first place and now he was lying in a hospital bed after a car accident and it had taken Iris almost a whole day to arrive.
“And he kept calling for you,” the nurse added. “He’s fine, miss West. I promise.”
“Yeah, ok,” Iris agreed, even though she wasn’t sure how much she believed it.
Seeing him like that made things harder. For starters, Iris wasn’t planning on seeing Barry again. Not now anyway, not until she was over him, so probably not ever.
Seeing him all broken like that made her miss him even more. Miss him awake, the sound of his voice and his nervous tics and the way his knees would jitter.
His lips on hers.
All the while they had spent apart Iris had kissed one other boy, only to find out that kissing someone else felt wrong, felt like cheating, even though it wasn’t, felt like his lips moved wrong, like he tasted wrong, like he breathed wrong. So she hadn’t kissed anyone else afterwards. She was giving herself some time, time to forget how Barry felt. Now she would need extra time.
Barry and her had fought for months and months before graduation. They were talking about getting married, but Iris wanted to move back to Central City, go to journalism school there, work at CCPN one day, hopefully. She didn’t want for her family to be built away from her parents and Wally, and it was delicate, it was easy for it to sound like I have family and you don’t so we’ll go there before we start ours. And then Barry got a job he didn’t like at a lab he didn’t like and he refused to leave Metropolis, so Iris stayed for a while, she stayed until it was time to apply to journalism school, hoping one day in the middle she would be able to convince him.
Convince him that he didn’t have to stay in a job that didn’t make him happy just because the pay was good and was what he “had chosen to do with his life”, that he could talk to his grandma about moving, that she wouldn’t hate him for bringing it up, that he could live in Central City again and not be tormented by the town his parents had lived, and died, that was the problem, in. But she never did manage to convince him, so Iris got into the program she wanted for grad school and she moved back and Barry stayed.
That was why Iris didn’t want a serious boyfriend in college anyway, because graduation was always bound to come. But life had other plans, life had put Barry Allen literally in her way on the first day of college. Before the first day actually; Barry lived two floors down from hers in their freshman year and after almost knocking her to the ground when moving his armchair into his dorm-room, he helped her move all of her shit and she helped him move all of his shit.
They kissed the first time 3 hours later. They fucked the first time 28 hours later. They moved in together 12 months later. And they broke up 57 months later and now there she was, realising fully just how much she missed him for the first time. How much she missed his heart beating under her fingers at night. How much she missed their home, the smell of it, and the dirty sofa which Barry had worked so hard on convincing her that was the one for their living room. She hated the sofa and the fact that it was off white so it showed every mark. But if she were to look at the sofa she was sure she would cry.
She often wondered how he managed to keep living amongst their stuff. To have their stuff to turn into his stuff. She often though she probably wouldn’t manage. To look all around her and see him all the time. She already saw him in little things throughout her day enough as it was, without having to come home and sit on the damn sofa at the end of the day.
And then there was all this weight sitting on her chest because of the boy in front of her. Because of all the space he used to take and left empty all the sudden, all because he was too stubborn, and she was too stubborn and he refused to see her reasons.
“That’s it for tonight, I’ll see you in the morning,” the nurse said, and Iris attempted a smile as she thanked her, but it was probably more a wince than anything.
She dragged her chair back closer to Barry’s bed again and grabbed his hand. She missed how they fit together. Her hands on his. She missed how his fingers fit between hers. She missed how he fit on her, all of him and all of her.
She missed his green eyes and his glasses, she missed his smell too, the hospital was messing it up, she couldn’t feel it, not even so close to him, he smelled sickly of sweat and maybe that was blood, and hospital disinfectant, so Iris ran her fingers through his soft hair — and that felt familiar enough under her fingertips — hoping he would hurry and wake up soon.
And she was dreading having to go back to their apartment — his apartment — when he did wake up; he had broken ribs and a fractured arm, he would need some help, at least for a while, and she hadn’t a good enough reason for not to offer it, so it wasn’t like she would be able to avoid it, the place, their place, completely.
(She wondered if he had changed the keys. If hers would still work. The one she still kept on her key chain.)
Dreading having to face Mrs. Allen and having to tell her that her grandson was at the hospital, after a car crash, like her son and daughter-in-law once.
Dreading having to go back to her own life after that, having to once again grow accustomed to the fact that she no longer shared it with Barry.
Barry watched as Iris unlocked their apartment door. Or rather his apartment door since she no longer lived there. Having Iris back in Metropolis felt almost worth it, worth the pain when he breathed in because of the broken ribs, and the surgery, and then the 48 hours in a hospital bed. Worth anything, however temporary her actually being there was going to turn out to be.
She dropped her bag on the side table by the door and took her black boots off, like she used to, like she could still walk around in the dark and remember her steps and not bump into furniture.
Furniture she had chosen with him. Granted they were mostly from Ikea and some really cheap stuff on craigslist but it took seven months so they could settle on what couch they should get. They had chosen everything together. And Barry could feel her perfume in the house, and the smell of her lemon cake in the air and it was all painfully familiar. She was painfully familiar.
She had gotten him blue hydrangeas and they sat on the dining table inside her favourite vase, the same one Barry avoided using since she left.
Blue hydrangeas were her favourites. Barry got her irises for months and months until she confessed she thought that was a little too cheesy and that she didn’t really like irises. Then he started buying her white peonies and blue hydrangeas instead. Then she left and he stopped buying flowers all together. There seemed to be no point in it. They would die anyway.
“I cleaned up a bit, this place was a mess,” she said, like she hadn’t just walked into their home, like it was still their home, like she had forgotten she didn’t live there anymore; “and I bought some fruits and stuff yesterday at the farmer’s market,” then she turned to face him and said; “I saw Sara, I can’t believe how big she is.”
Barry nodded because he knew exactly how big Sara was. He still saw Sara, and John and Lyla every Sunday he managed to get his ass down to the farmer’s market, he still bought his fruits from them every week.
He also nodded because he knew Iris and she was talking to avoid the overwhelming which was in turn overwhelming him, so he closed the front door behind him, and with the hand that hadn’t been broken he pulled her to him, because he hadn’t touched her until now, because if he didn’t hug her, he would drown.
She felt exactly like he remembered and she smelled exactly like he remembered, her soap and her shampoo and her perfume and her clothing detergent — the one he had also stopped buying — she smelled like Iris, his girlfriend, his best friend, but then she was pulling away, telling him he stunk of hospital and that he needed a shower and that she would make him soup and then pick his grandma up so she could come for a visit.
With every second, Barry regretted exponentially more having told her no.
She was right, he didn’t like his job, and she was right, he was afraid to admit it, admit he had failed in picking what to do with his life. It wasn’t about the money though, his parents had left him enough money for a few years of figuring it out, it was his pride. She was also right that he was afraid to move back to Central City and be haunted by the city where his parents had died, and she was right that he used his grandma as an excuse, that he never asked her because he knew she would say yes, yes Bartholomew, I’ll leave my nurses and move to Central City, I’ll go with you and your pretty girl. She still called Iris “your pretty girl” even months after the break up, after Barry had tried and spectacularly failed to move on, and if he had asked her she would have said yes, and then all that would be left as excuses would be on him.
That was the trouble with Iris; she knew him all too well and she was always right.
After his shower and the soup, after his grandma’s visit and after Barry had done the dishes and Iris had driven his grandma back home and taken a shower herself and changed into his clothes because she had forgotten to pack pyjamas, after she sat on the couch by his side like they used to do in the end of the day, every day, for four years straight, and told him he had scared the crap out of her, after she changed the channels until deciding on some movie Barry had watched her watching at least a dozen times, Iris leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder and told him;
“Now you smell right.”
And there was nothing Barry could think to say as an answer to that. If that was months ago and they were together, he would have kissed her, he would have nuzzled into her and he would have felt her skin under her shirt and felt the weight of her boobs on his hands.
Now all he seemed capable of thinking, on a loop in his brain, was I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, but it didn’t feel right to tell her that.
And as he thought about how no one would ever feel that right against him, he thought that maybe it was time, there was nothing more scary than the fact that he was losing her, had lost her, after all. And the ring had been in his sock drawer fitted for her finger for three years now, so he should just tell her yes and hope for the best, hope she would tell him yes too.