Spoilers through the season three finale. No spoilers for season four, only speculation and imagination based on the promos. This scenario will clearly not happen in the show, but I have really enjoyed exploring Iris as a character so I thought this would be fun (?) to explore as well.

Enjoy!

She falls into her new life with abandon, because it's the only thing she can do. Iris' life has never been ordered or planned, because she has never allowed it to be. She supposes she slipped so easily into the superhero lifestyle so seamlessly because she easily adapts. Forms which stand in competition to modification and improvement will suffer most. At least, that's what Darwin thought.

Back in the beginning, they used to train Barry here in this abandoned airfield, where they now set up the cannon. Don't think of it as a cannon, Cisco is quick to remind Iris. He has a glint in his eye that she hasn't seen in a long time. Hope. Pure, unbridled hope. Think of it as a magnet. We're drawing something toward us, not shooting something out.

She knows she should feel the excitement that everyone else is openly displaying. The team is the most enlivened they've been in six months. The whole thing smells of contagious anticipation, fresh beginnings.

She imagines them as they were at the first beginning, standing on this same tarmac watching Barry take his first run, when the powers were nothing but exciting—of course, she wasn't there back then, and Cisco didn't quite have his edge of bitterness, and Wells was not Harry, and Caitlin was not the Caitlin who sometimes said her own name like it wasn't hers.

How much of Theseus' ship—

She wins her first award for a piece about the rise and fall of the Royal Flush Gang, which resurfaces about a month after the fall of Savitar and is defeated two weeks after that by Kid Flash. She doesn't write much about Kid Flash, beyond what's necessary for the article. Now that the Flash is gone, she's handed more stories about business consolidations and criminal organizations and housing markets. People don't call her Flash girl anymore. Now that Wally's starting to wear red, she finds herself drawing away instinctively, selfishly. Flash girl stays buried. She wins two more awards and someone mentions a promotion.

"I think I've got a lock on something," Caitlin calls, he eyes burning in that way they haven't for so long. "Now, Cisco!"

Cisco's hair spins wildly behind him. His face lights up. He presses a button and the gun-magnet-cannon comes to life with a whoom.

The breach that opens is less like the controlled energy of Cisco's and more the unstable force into which Barry disappeared in the first place. It's visceral and angry and full of heat and lightning. It's sharp and piercing and it lashes out with teeth and all Iris can think is pain, pain and vengeance.

She doesn't dare to hope, because she's given up so much of that. But her hope is not needed. From the mess of fury and chaos, Barry emerges.

His eyes are open for the briefest of seconds as he stands there. Iris holds her breath, too far away to tell if he's looking at her. Then the breach closes, his strings are severed, and he collapses to the concrete.

She doesn't see her dad much. She tries to tell herself it's not a selfish thing. Guilt gets crushed underneath through sheer force of will.

"He told me to be strong," she asserts when he questions her. "So I'm being strong."

Strength is never something she's questioned. Her dad has never allowed her to. She has never allowed herself to. Strength is buried so deeply under her skin, she's afraid she would bleed to death if it was ever torn away.

"I think you're still in denial," her dad rebuts. "You seem…detached. Barry—"

"I'm trying to move on," Iris interrupts him. She wants to scream at him, suddenly, because he's crying and she's not and she can't think about that, she can't think about—

"Oh my God," Cisco says. "It's him, oh my God."

Caitlin and Iris forgo words as they sprint across the tarmac toward Barry. As the distance closes, Iris searches for a sign of movement, a sign of breath, anything. When she falls to her knees beside him, her heart stops. She doesn't see life.

But Caitlin is so calm, Iris is sure she must have missed something. Sure enough, when Caitlin rolls Barry onto his back, his face twitches slightly. He is alive.

With that detail confirmed, Iris begins noticing the others. Barry is still in the funeral suit he departed in. Stubble spackles his chin and cheeks. His face looks as though it has been sucked clean of color.

Yet, he's alive. And that's what's most important.

"What's wrong with him?" Cisco asks, having finally caught up with the group. "I mean, is he…"

"Pulse is slightly elevated, but he's breathing fine, and I can't find any noticeable injury. It could be exhaustion. I'd like to get him back to STAR to run some tests and get some fluids into him, but I think we should expect him to wake up soon." Caitlin offers Iris what is, in theory, a reassuring smile.

This is normal. This is all, suddenly, so normal.

Iris is content to take a moment, cradle Barry's face with one hand, feel the warmth of his skin under hers.

She allows herself to break open for the first time in months, and relief and hope come spilling out of the cracks. It's overwhelming, because of how unfamiliar it has become—if she doesn't allow herself to feel it, it doesn't have the power to crush her—but the instant it enters her bloodstream she knows she is alive once more.

This is the moment, she knows. She burns with fire and anticipation and emotion, and she knows that this is the moment she becomes human once more.

Except the hours pass and amount to nothing. Barry does not wake up as planned.

He lies in STAR Labs with monitors stuck to his chest and an expectant audience at his bedside. Caitlin is prepped with a litany of rehearsed questions. How do you feel? Are you in pain? Can you walk? Cisco waits anxiously by with a different set of curiosities, wondering where Barry had come from, how time and space operated there, how they might use this exciting new information in the future. Joe paces. Harry tinkers with something in the corner and does his best to stay out of the way, occasionally muttering something that sounds like, "Give it time."

Iris can't pace or distract herself or think of any questions. She waits, because in six months, she has not allowed herself to wait.

"Everything looks normal," Caitlin reassures them all, after three hours and many second glances at the monitors. "Medically speaking, he's fine. Maybe we should all get some rest. He'll probably be up by the time we are."

The word probably has been thrown around far too much for Iris' liking, but she complies, finding an empty cot and dragging it close to Barry's bed. She traces a few of the freckles on his chest where they're exposed under the funeral shirt, where Caitlin has carefully placed heart monitors.

She marks the same pattern over and over, thinks of constellations, and sleeps.

The barista at Jitters knows her coffee order and knows her name. It's the one familiar spot Iris has frequented since Barry's disappearance.

She goes early in the morning, after an equally-early jog through the neighborhood.

She orders a black coffee, one cream, and drinks it in the corner in one of the plush chairs while reading her book. She pretends that historical fiction wasn't one of Barry's favorite genres and reads it religiously, even though she'd never cared for it before. The bookshelves in the apartment are full of historical fiction. She tells herself that she'll read them and sell them at a used bookstore for a quarter of the price. It will clear off the bookshelves, make room for books she actually enjoys. She reads a book a week, maybe two, and they always go back on the shelf where they came from.

When she's done with her black coffee, one cream, she puts in a bookmark and tosses her cup. When she gets up from her chair, the barista is already standing by with the vanilla latte she leaves with.

Once, she finds an iris carefully flattened in the pages of one of the books. She remembers giving the flower to Barry when she left for college. She puts the flower back in the book and puts the book back on the shelf and puts her memories back between their own pages.

After the third day of Barry lying prone in the medical cot, Iris starts bringing her books to his bedside. The time for waiting expectantly on the edge of her seat has passed. Now she fills the hours, has to. The only difference is that now she starts calling them Barry's books again.

"I'm just borrowing it," she tells him as she sits down with one tome on the fifth day. "I figure someone has to read them. When you wake up, you can have it back. Maybe you can read it aloud to put me to sleep."

A week passes before everyone gets seriously worried. Caitlin seems to make up new tests on the fly, unable to rest without checking every conceivable cause for Barry's unconsciousness. When he's not out in the field, Cisco sits for hours at a time in the recovery room, eyes glazed.

When Iris goes back to the apartment at night and closes her eyes, she feels nauseous. The sheets and the extra pillowcase she'd washed in preparation for Barry's arrival need to be washed again.

"It's okay to wake up, Barry," Iris reassures the figure on the bed a day later. "We got you out. It's okay now. You can wake up."

They've long since removed the funeral suit, and his bare chest hardly seems human with all of the wires hooked up to it.

"Dad's going to so pissed if you don't wake up," Iris threatens the figure on the bed three days later. "Seriously, remember how mad he would get when you slept past your alarm in high school? This is way worse, Barry. You'd better wake up soon."

Iris finds Caitlin collapsed in a corner of the pipeline, finally sobbing. I've done everything I can do, I don't know what else to do—

"Please," Iris begs the figure on the bed, one week later. "Please, wake up. I need you, Barry, please."

She's used up her sick time at work, plus her personal and vacation days, so she reluctantly goes back. People at work look at her like she's spontaneously grown an extra eye: fearful, concerned, but curious. Family emergency doesn't satiate the curiosity—she can tell in the way they look at her—but it does at least stave off further questions.

She turns down invitations for happy hours in order to bolt back to STAR Labs the instant the clock hits five.

One foot stays planted in STAR Labs. The other reaches across the chasm to find purchase in her new life. She threatens to tip: not one way or the other, but down.

"Maybe this is something about the will of the Speed Force," Cisco offers as a solution one day. "You know, last time he was in a coma for nine months. Maybe he was supposed to be in there for nine months again. Maybe we ripped him out of the womb three months too early."

Iris can't bear the thought of waiting another two and a half months, but she tries to agree with the rest of them. It's that hope that's keeping them all going. The hope that maybe there's a reason for their suffering, that maybe there's an end to it.

Impulsively, she buys a bottle of Barry's favorite red wine and leaves it on the counter; they'll open it on their first night back together.

Eventually when she is asked to a happy hour after work, she accepts. She and her coworkers take turns dipping tortilla chips in a bowl of guacamole as they swap gossip about the new sports writer. Someone mentions the rumor of Iris' promotion, and Iris cracks a joke. Her laughter comes easily in the dark restaurant. At the end of the night, one of her coworkers offers her a ride home.

When she shuts her apartment door behind her, the loud music from the restaurant leaves an uncomfortable ringing in her ears. It's oppressively quiet. It's too late to go to STAR. Her face feels stretched from smiling.

She swallows her guilt in gulps of Barry's wine and falls asleep on the couch with most of the bottle gone. It doesn't' taste like she remembered it.

She tries to call in sick the next morning, but she's used her sick days. We really need you to come in, Iris, her boss tells her.

At her desk, the woman who gave her a ride the night before whistles. Damn, Iris, I didn't realize how much of a lightweight you were.

Yeah, Iris says in return. Guess I am.

Then the woman invites Iris to a movie the next week, and Iris accepts, and Iris excuses herself to throw up in the bathroom, which she is sure is an unrelated incident.

Keep running, Barry had told her, and she'd nodded her head Okay.

There's a little less than a glass left at the bottom of the wine bottle, but Iris doesn't think she wants to drink anything but water ever again. The wine will probably turn to vinegar. She considers letting it, but she also doesn't want to see the bottle anymore. She ends up pouring the wine down the drain, before it can become tainted.

When Barry was in the coma for the first time, Iris had to face who she was without Barry Allen. When he walked into the Speed Force and died, she discovered it.

Now, with Barry's body on the recovery table for three months, she's not sure who she's supposed to be. Hope, once buoying her from one day to the next, now acts as a ball and chain as she sinks deeper and deeper into the sea.

Their window of possibility passes, and the breath of expectation expels through the lab. They enter the fourth month of unresponsiveness.

Maybe we have to wait the full nine months again. Nine months from when he came out of the Speed Force, Caitlin suggests. They all agree automatically and mentally mark new calendars for the next opportunity to become hopeless.

"Did we make a mistake? Bringing him back?" Iris asks her dad one night.

She wants him to say no, or maybe she wants him to say yes. Instead, he takes a long drink and changes the subject, like he always does.

"He might have been trapped in some kind of hell, for all we know," Cisco says, when Iris poses the same question. "Endless abyss of suffering, and all that. If there's even the slightest chance of that, why shouldn't we pull him out of it?"

"What if it wasn't that, though?" Iris says, chancing a furtive glance at the ever-still Barry. "What if he was happy there? What if we just did the selfish thing and messed with fate and made everything worse for everyone?"

If Cisco is teetering as much as she is, he doesn't show it.

Her life bustles forward again, unwavering. Her writing suffers as long as she lets it. When she tightens her hand, she finally gets the promotion that was rumored. The piece that earns it for her is average, in her eyes—though she realizes too late that what it's missing is someone to read it five times over with a smile while she waits anxiously in front of the coffee table.

After the promotion, she brings it to Barry's bedside and reads it aloud.

Her time at STAR grows more limited as she tries once more to cross that divide back into the life she's tried to cultivate. Hope cuts off her circulation, dragging her backward.

"I almost wish you wouldn't have come back," Iris whispers to the figure on the bed five months later. She won't, of course, admit this to anyone else; but this is Barry, and she and Barry have long since decided not to keep secrets from each other.

"I'm sorry," she adds, stroking the back of his hand with her thumb, the rest so still in the dark room. Still, she imagines his sad smile, his hand tightening in hers, his response: Don't be.

Before she knows it, she is crying. She'd forgotten how it felt to cry like this, to feel raw like an exposed nerve: it has been a long time. It's not unwelcome, to fall to pieces.

She keeps holding his hand as she cries, and she and the comatose man watch over each other through the night, each waiting for the other to find peace.

She'll keep an extra place setting in the cupboards, but she won't set the table with it. She'll keep his books on the shelves and read them in her corner at Jitters with the barista who welcomes her back each morning. She'll write pieces about business consolidations and criminal organizations and housing markets, and she'll go to more movies and she'll have more drinks with her coworkers and she'll go to bed thinking about constellations.

She stands on a moment, looking out across the tarmac with electricity and anticipation lifting the hair on her arms. In that moment, she beams so wide her cheeks hurt, and she swears that Barry is looking at her. And she is human. And she hopes.

When nine months pass, she holds the sleeping Barry's hand a little tighter and kisses him on the forehead.

Keep running, he'd told her.

She stands on a moment and she is alive and broken open and bleeding hope into the world.

Okay, she nods.

Wow, thanks for reading!

I would love to know what you thought of this little experiment. Comments are welcome below.

Till next time,

Penn