"What was your first kiss with Mom like?"

Barry meets his son's curious dark eyes, so remarkably like Iris's, that they take him back to that formidable afternoon, a day permanently obliterated from history, but forever embedded in his mind. As staggering as it had been to have the threat of death looming over him, the memory of her enamored eyes looking up at him wondrously was just as powerful, maybe even more so.

Fatherly instincts shake him out of his reflective stupor temporarily. Should he be surprised that his adolescent son was asking him such a question? Not particularly, he decides, especially when the kid's romantic ideals started to emerge ever since he became a teenager.

"It was…solace," Barry contemplates, after a minute. "It was comfort in the midst of chaos, a source of warmth from the freezing air around us, safety between the throes of danger."

"Okay, Dad," Don scoffs, rolling his eyes with a smile. "Be more specific."

Barry can't help the grin that spreads across his face. Where most teens would gag at the mere thought of their parents kissing, here was a young man demanding more intimate details.

The boy was a starry-eyed dreamer. There was no doubt he was Barry's son.

Barry becomes more solemn. "That day," he begins, "I was afraid Papa Joe was going to be killed. I was scared I was going to lose your mom. I was petrified that all of Central City would be no more. I was terrified of what was coming, and intimidated by what I was going to have to do to stop it, if that was even possible.

"Then your mom told me the one thing that could have eased all those fears, at least for a moment. And for that, I had to kiss her. So I did."

"What did she tell you?" Don breathes, fascination glistening in his eyes.

Barry glances away, reminiscing, smiling covertly to himself. The reprieve, the fortitude, the elation seems just as palpable now as it did years ago, feels so authentic even though the events that inspired such potent emotion existed no more.

He gazes at his son.

"Something I wanted to hear for a long time."

"What was your first kiss with Dad like?"

At first Iris wants to know why her no-nonsense, judicious daughter of all people was inquiring about her parents' romance, let alone the kisses they shared. Was she interested in someone? If that were the case, it would be like Dawn to shrug it off when asked.

Iris mentally reprimands herself for going investigative journalist on her own child and decides to play it innocent.

"Why do you ask?"

"Really, Mom?" Dawn defends, irately. "I'm just curious, that's all. And it's not what you think."

Iris shakes her head fondly. She's proud to have a clever daughter, undeniably, but one that outsmarted her mom was a bit more than she had bargained for.

She turns her attention back to the question at hand, and is struck with the painful recollection of a late summer night sitting on the front porch of her childhood home, of hopeful prospects that were dashed, of proclamations of love that were more like goodbyes.

"It should have been a happier occasion, but it wasn't," she admits.

"Why not?" Where it had just been peeved, Dawn's face softens in genuine sympathy.

"Because your dad was so heartbroken after Grandpa Henry died that he wasn't ready to be with me yet."

She figures such a response is sufficient an explanation for pragmatic Dawn to comprehend and accept.

The way her daughter furrows her thick brows and blinks her green eyes tells another story though, and gives her a spectacular resemblance to Barry in his classic confused state. "Then why did he kiss you?"

Too pragmatic for her own good, Iris thinks.

She doesn't attempt to blink back the slight tears that are welling beneath her eyelids, and they spill out of love for Barry. That he believed she deserved nothing less than the best version of him. That he appreciated her willingness to wait for him. That he pledged he would come back for her once he attained his peace.

"Because he still loved me, even if we couldn't be together."