When Barry moves out, like with everything else, he does so in steps: methodical, scientific, wary. He takes the first one midway through dinner one night, in that critical window of quiet after everyone has finished seeking sympathy for the day's annoyances, and revisiting the day's amusements. He just nibbles on the end of a boiled baby carrot, wipes needlessly at his mouth with a paper napkin, and looks right at Joe as he drops the bomb he's been holding in the back of his throat all evening.

And the thing is — the thing is, Iris should have known. Should have been alerted days before, by the fractional delay before the curl of his fingers on her lower back as they hugged in the driveway, the rounded edge of his luggage cold against her knee from the malfunctioning air-conditioning on the bus he took all the way from campus because he insisted Joe not go to any trouble. Failing that, she should have mulled more over his curious reticence, the way he just listened to them and watched them, speaking only when prompted by Joe to approve of his choice of home-cooked food instead of the pepperoni-olives-and-jalapeño-topped pizza that you must have subsisted on at college, don't you lie to me, Barry Allen.

Then she should have pushed him for an explanation when she laid the table and he swapped their plates around so he got the one he chipped a week after he came to live with them. (It took Joe hours to get Barry to stop apologizing and offering to sell his chemistry set to compensate them, and Iris months to get Barry to stop fixating on whether the plate was set at his place each night. Quit messing with my work and come save the spaghetti, she lectured, rapping him sharply across the knuckles. She wasn't making it up, either — while Joe showered off the worries of the day and Barry finished preparing dinner and Iris laid the table, neither of them was allowed to handle hot water without the other present and watching.)

But Iris doesn't make any of those realizations, and so Joe is nodding at Barry with calm acceptance in his eyes even as she feels her stomach plummet, feels the start of an emptiness spread through her chest. She will forever associate the taste of cauliflower with that moment.

When Barry bumps his foot against hers under the table in a way that is suddenly achingly familiar, she disciplines herself to nudge back.

("I don't want to grow up," she declares months down the road, lounging against the huge maroon bean-bag chair she bought Barry so she would have an excuse to come by his apartment with some frequency. "Can't we just stay kids and eat brownies for dinner and not have to pick subjects for dumb sociology requirements?"

"You still do that second one," Barry points out, increasingly absorbed in reading the third of a gazillion pamphlets she brought and dumped unceremoniously onto his living room floor. This one promotes journalism classes and has a pun in its title. Instant plus points.

Iris clutches her hands over her chest melodramatically. "There is hope yet.")

All she says to him about moving out is everything and nothing she needs to say. Leaning in the doorway, realizing what feels like too late that he never really unpacked: "You aren't going to give us your copy of the keys, are you?"

Barry takes a moment to close the book he's reading. He's still using as a bookmark that bit of ribbon off the present she gave him for his eighteenth birthday. "I hadn't thought about that," he replies, eyebrows arching and gaze flitting up to hers. "I guess I should—"

"Don't," she tells him.

(And he doesn't, not even secretly to Joe, because weeks later she finds a set of keys and a handwritten note on the coffee table where she always puts her bag when she gets home. The oven at my place literally has a 'brownies' setting, it says.)

Title taken from Ben Hammersley's "Stairwell Wall". Not sure why that song seems to be providing titles for all my WestAllen fic.

m.e.