Chapter Text
but now I know how absence can be present,
like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird
~ Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller's Wife
CENTRAL CITY // 03.34AM // ONE WEEK AFTER THE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR EXPLOSION
A person’s odds of being struck by lightning were one in fifteen thousand.
At least, that was what Google told Iris as she stood by the hospital vending machine, messing around on her phone. The odds were higher than she thought they’d be.
The TV in the waiting room was tuned to a late-night news station, the volume turned down low. It was barely even audible over the sound of the vending machine spitting watery coffee into a paper cup. A reporter stood in front of the damaged S.T.A.R Labs building, recapping the story once again, with a few added details. The screen cut to a series of photographs of smiling ghosts—the faces of the dead.
Will Everett. Grant Emerson. Al Rothstein. Daria Kim. Jake Davenport. Ralph Dibny. Baya Dacosta. Ronnie Raymond.
Iris knew all of their names by heart by now, but her stomach still tied itself in knots as she waited to see if any more names had been added to the list. It was ridiculous. Barry wasn’t dead. But she had to be sure the rest of the world knew it, too.
The final photograph faded from the screen, and with a few sombre words, the newsreaders cut to another story. Iris let out the breath she’d been holding. Shaking off the cold dread that had settled over her like snow, she grabbed her coffee and headed back down the corridor.
She moved through the hallways on autopilot, with no need for the blue signs mounted on the walls to guide her way back to Barry’s room. Even this late, the hospital hummed with activity: the TV in the waiting room; the vending machine; the shush of the doctors’ scrubs as they passed her by; the distant beep of a pager. A phone rang at the nurse’s station and the woman at the desk answered it, with a sympathetic nod at Iris as she passed by. Iris knew most of the nurses by now, by face if not by name—after a week of being here almost 24/7, it was hard not to.
She hadn’t left the hospital since the lightning struck, but this was the first night she was spending here alone. After almost a week by Barry’s bedside, nodding off intermittently in a plastic chair, Joe had finally admitted defeat and gone home to get some sleep. Detective Pretty-Boy had offered to sit with Barry so Iris could go home, too—like he wasn’t as exhausted as she and Joe were, working overtime without a partner and covering all Joe’s shifts so he could be at the hospital—but Iris had turned him down. To be accurate, she’d laughed in his face, imagining the look on Barry’s face if he woke up to find Eddie Thawne sitting earnestly by his bedside.
It was kind of impossible to stop laughing once she’d started. She’d tried to apologise, but Eddie gallantly waved her off. “You’re under a lot of stress. It’s understandable. Besides,” he added warmly, “they do say laughter is the best medicine. Keep going like that and he’ll be up and running in no time. A smile like that is definitely worth waking up for.”
Iris found her lips twitching again at the memory. Good thing she was already at the hospital, because that smile of his was infectious.
Eddie was kind of sweet, really. She was starting to feel bad for making fun of him behind his back. She’d have to take him out for a coffee or something to make it up to him.
She came to a stop outside Barry’s room, and that was where she hesitated, watching him through the window from the cold grey emptiness of the corridor. Lying in bed, Barry was unnervingly pale, washed out by the sickly blue of his hospital gown, his face partially obscured by the tube down his throat.
Summoning the will to enter when everything in her screamed at her to flee from the wrongness of it all... that was always the hardest part. Steeling herself, Iris put a hand on the door—and then the lights flickered and went out, plunging her into darkness.
Dread twisted in her stomach. Central City had been hit hard by the particle accelerator explosion, and a week later, they were still feeling the effects. The shockwave that rocked the city had damaged the power lines, and ever since, the hospital's systems had been on the fritz. Logically, Iris knew it was just a power cut, but her heart still beat rabbit fast in the dark, remembering the first time the lights had gone out… and Barry’s heart had stopped beating at the same time.
The memories came in flashes. The dead silence when all the machines stopped at once, like the eye of the storm. The doctors working in darkness, their movements illuminated only by the lightning storm still raging outside, fighting to stop the sick convulsions that wracked Barry’s body, two of them pinning him to the bed while a third performed CPR, forcing his heart through beat after beat while Iris sobbed against Joe’s chest.
If the chances of being struck by lightning were one in fifteen thousand, the chances of being struck by lightning on the same night a mad scientist levelled half the city with an exploding particle accelerator had to be more like one in a million. It would almost be funny, if the thought didn’t make Iris want to scream.
The universe had it out for Barry Allen. Like he hadn’t suffered enough already.
The backup generator kicked in with a low hum, and the lights sputtered back to life. Most of them, anyway. Barry's hospital room remained dark, lit only by the sickly glow of the ECG. They probably couldn’t spare enough power to keep the place fully lit; it all had to be diverted to essential tasks, continuing the vital work of keeping people alive.
Shaking off the morbid thought, Iris turned the doorhandle and stepped into the room. She closed the door carefully behind her, as if there was any danger of waking the unconscious figure in the bed. The heart monitor beeped out a steady rhythm, while the ventilator whirred softly with every inhale. During her first few nights at Barry’s bedside, the sound had grated on her, a constant irritation like a scratchy label in a shirt, but in the days that followed, Iris had come to find it comforting. A much-needed reminder that he was still breathing.
Something shifted in the dark.
Iris flinched. Coffee spilled over the rim of her cup, stinging her fingers, and she hissed in pain as she backed towards the doors, her heart pounding against her ribs. The shadows moved again, and as her eyes adjusted, she realized there was a man sitting by Barry’s bed.
Not much of him was visible in the low light, but she made out a few distinctive features: a buzzcut with a sharp widow’s peak; the stark lines of a tattoo peeking out from behind one ear. His eyes gleamed like a fox’s, their colour indistinguishable in the shadows.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He had an unusual voice—smooth, but with a strange, almost nasal quality.
Iris glanced warily at Barry, lying in bed just as she’d left him: unconscious, not so much as a flicker of awareness behind his eyelids. If it weren’t for all the tubes, the IV line, and the plastic monitor pinching the tip of his index finger, he could have been sleeping. He certainly showed no awareness of the man at his bedside.
When she turned away from Barry, she found that the stranger was still watching her. There was something unsettling about the unblinking intensity of his gaze.
“Are you a doctor?”
It was a stupid, sleep-deprived question. What kind of doctor wore a navy-blue parka and combat boots?
“Just a friend passing through,” he said.
Iris’s forehead creased. Barry didn’t have any friends, except for her.
“It’s pretty late to be stopping by,” she said. It was way past visiting hours; it had taken a lot to convince the nurses to let her and Joe stay by Barry’s bedside overnight, and even that had only been permitted because they were the closest thing to next of kin he had.
He shrugged. “I have an unusual schedule.”
No kidding.
The man wasn’t family. The nurses would probably remove him if she asked… but truthfully, she was glad of the distraction. Iris set her coffee down, taking her seat at the other side of the bed.
“How do you two know each other?” she asked. At first, she’d thought he might be a work colleague of Barry’s—the buzzcut was giving cop vibes, maybe even military—but she couldn’t imagine anyone from CCPD stopping by, except for Eddie. There was a reason Barry had a lab all to himself; most of his coworkers gave him a wide berth. Besides, with her dad and her best friend working there, Iris was a regular visitor to the precinct, and she was pretty sure she'd never seen this man wandering the hallways.
A wry smile touched his lips. “It’s… complicated.”
Oh, Iris realised. He was one of them.
Ever since his mom died, Barry had been obsessed with the impossible. Desperately seeking an explanation for the things he’d seen the night of Nora Allen’s murder, and the mysterious man in in the lightning who’d haunted his nightmare ever since, Barry had developed a fixation on anything inexplicable. Unexplained disappearances. Folklore. Cryptids. UFOs. He researched them with an obsessive fervour and recounted his findings every night at dinner while Joe eyed him warily across the dinner-table.
Barry’s therapist was unconcerned. It was a trauma response, she told Joe. Faced with the unanswerable question of how his father could have committed such a heinous crime, he was seeking answers to impossible questions. It would pass.
Except it hadn’t passed. In fact, as time went on, and Barry went from an angry kid to an even angrier teenager, he and Joe butted heads over the subject over and over again, with Barry infuriated by Joe’s closemindedness, and Joe running out of patience with Barry’s refusal to accept the world as it was. Eventually, after a particularly vicious fight, Joe put his foot down and refused to hear another word on the subject. He could handle school science experiments at the kitchen table and posters of the solar system on the walls, but he drew the line at Bigfoot.
Rebellious to a fault, Barry had turned to the internet instead, discovering a whole community of people who were equally obsessed with the impossible. Every night he hunched over the family computer for as long as Joe would let him, exchanging theories with strangers back and forth on weird little blogs and forums under the guise of doing his homework. Iris knew he talked to people online, but she hadn’t realised he’d met any of them in person.
Iris gave the man in the parka another once-over. If he was a cryptid conspiracy theorist, he at least had the self-awareness to be embarrassed about it, if not enough to revaluate his questionable fashion sense.
Complicated, he’d said. “I know the feeling,” Iris muttered. Her own relationship with Barry wasn’t exactly straightforward. A little bit best friend, a little bit brother—though the word didn’t sit right, not really. What words could truly describe everything Barry was to her? He was family. He was home.
But there was no one home right now. Barry was never still; even when he slept, he was always restless, tossing and turning to escape the nightmares that had plagued him since childhood. Right now, slack features obscured by the machines keeping him alive, he was just… gone.
Her eyes stung. Iris swallowed, fighting not to break down in front of this stranger, but the sudden rush of grief threatened to crush her.
Something soft brushed her knuckles. Startled, Iris looked up. The man had picked up the box of Kleenex from the nightstand and was holding it out to her. He didn’t meet her eye. Iris wasn’t sure if it was due to discomfort or tact, but she was grateful not to have an audience as she grabbed a couple of tissues and blew her nose.
“You should go home,” he said. “Get some rest.”
Iris wiped her eyes. “I have to be here when he wakes up.”
There was a moment’s hesitation. “I hate to be callous, but you might be waiting for a while.”
Iris bristled. “You said you weren’t a doctor.”
“I’m not. Call it a hunch.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask for your opinion.” Cheeks burning, she got up to fluff Barry’s pillows, her fist sinking into the down as she punched them back into shape. Who did this guy think he was, showing up and making predictions like he could see the future? Iris thought crossly. Even the doctors had no idea when Barry would wake up. You never knew, with coma patients. He could be out for a few more days, or weeks. Maybe months. Or he could wake up tomorrow like nothing ever happened.
None of them had said the word ‘if’. Not to her face.
“Iris.”
Her tears had made him uneasy, but her hostility had the opposite effect. There was something gentler about him now, his eyes soft with compassion.
“He’ll wake up when he’s ready.”
Goosebumps rose on her skin. It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it—not a platitude, but a promise.
“In that case, we’ll be waiting for a while. He’s not exactly a morning person.”
The man let out a short bark of laughter. Iris found herself smiling back, and for a moment she felt a little better. It felt good to laugh, the way she had with Eddie, like maybe the world hadn't ended. Like life could, somehow, go on.
Then, her brain caught up with what he’d said.
He’d called her Iris.
“I never told you my name,” she said. “Have we met before?”
Those shrewd eyes lingered on hers for long enough to make her skin prickle. Iris swallowed. Just as she was starting to get really uncomfortable, his eyes flicked back towards the hospital bed. His whole gaze changed when he looked at Barry. It softened, somehow.
“Nah,” he said. “But he talks about you a lot. Kinda feels like we know each other.”
An alarm echoed down the hallway, a smooth recorded voice announcing a code blue, and there was a flurry of activity as footsteps pounded past, rushing to answer the call. Distracted, Iris watched the doctors’ silhouettes dart past the window, their sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.
“I wish I could say the same,” she said. “I’m not sure he’s ever mentioned you. What did you say your name was again?” She turned back towards him and did a double take.
The chair on the other side of the bed was empty.
Iris blinked. Bewildered, she twisted to look behind her, then peered over the bed in case he might have bent over to pick something up, but there was no sign of him. The man in the parka was gone.
How the hell had he got past her? She could have sworn she hadn’t taken her eyes off the door, and yet he’d slipped out without so much of a creak of his combat boots. The guy must have moved like a ghost. The thought made Iris shiver. Automatically, she moved to tuck Barry’s bedsheets higher around his throat in case he was cold. Her other hand reached for the coffee cup on the nightstand. That would probably be cold too, by now, she thought, glancing down—and then she did another double take.
The stranger had taken her coffee with him.
Unbelievable, Iris thought as she flopped back into her seat, staring up at a watermark that mushroomed across the ceiling. Too bad she didn’t catch the guy’s name. A little Facebook stalking might have passed the time. She made a mental note to question Barry about this coffee-stealing friend when he woke up.
It was weird, she thought, that Barry had never mentioned someone he was so close to—because she had a feeling they were close. There was something about the way the stranger had looked at Barry, the affectionate way he’d spoken about him, that spoke of more than just a casual friendship. A strange intimacy that had almost made her feel like the intruder.
Iris shook herself. Sleep deprivation did weird things to people. Maybe tomorrow, she’d take Eddie Thawne up on his offer and let him sit with Barry for a few hours while she went home and took a nap. Her mind was playing tricks on her.
Like for a second, when she’d first walked into the room, she could have sworn the man in the blue parka was holding Barry’s hand.