Work Text:
‘Iris, you got to stop doing this.’
Though they’re the specifically neutral words that Barry has been practicing in his head for the past two weeks, they’re not the right ones for the situation. They don’t serve as a reminder of the flirtatious conversations that Iris and Flash once had, when things were easy (well, for Barry at least). They serve to drag the match that is Iris’ temper up and down grits and the spark lights in her eyes as she whirls around. ‘Iris?’, and for a second Barry is confused, and so she continues, raising her voice and, enunciating her words as though he’s a particularly unobservant person in the back of a presentation she’s giving, she forces the meaning. ‘No, ‘Miss West’ ?’ she says, in a clipped, cold tone, her voice barely rising at the end to register the question. And there’s not much Barry can say to that at all.
No, there isn’t any ‘Miss West’ anymore. There’s no elevation to hero status and freedom to be just another shapeless, nameless guy who is flirting with Iris and who doesn’t have anything to lose by showing her just how far he’ll fucking go for her. He tries again, less clumsily, his lips given purpose and his skin given spark by the fire in her eyes. It aches to hear her voice, like he's been starving for her words for the last two weeks, and now that they're being given to him he's frantic with aching.
Pleasure has always been something that has ‘Iris Anne West’ embroidered through it for Barry.
He takes a gulp, ‘Iris..’ he says, thick and worn with the amount of times he’s practiced his apology in the mirror, ‘Iris…’ and the end of the sentence was bound to be something emotional, ‘…I’m so fucking sorry, I lied to you’, ‘… I still think about you all the time but now I just think about how much you deserve so much better…’, ‘…I can’t do anything anymore without you, I need you to at least hate me to my face, I need you to know I exist.'
But Iris is a mountain in the way of a river, and plants her words in a way that turns his angst and spleen into vapour. ‘Yes, Barry ?’ it's dismissive, acrid and in a simple, three second inflection, stops Barry in his tracks.
‘Iris…Iris…’ he repeats uselessly, tongue too big, mind screaming at him to be anyone else at this moment; anyone that isn’t Barry, any normal stranger who had never hurt her. Her name is the anchor that keeps his heart beating as he repeats her name twice again like a mantra to give him courage for the words ahead, ‘I’m so sor…’ and she waves him off again, dismissive, a queen on a throne sending a peasant to jail, he is insignificant to her now, and it’s the worst thing he’s ever felt. ‘I don’t need that right now, Bar…ry’ she says, rushing quickly in to paint over the cracks in he aloofness in order to cover up her unchanged reliance on a pet name to soften the blow whenever she disagrees with him.
‘I need to know why you did it, why you lied to me for so long... so well’
‘I wanted to keep you safe!’
‘You wanted to keep me ‘safe’’ she says, punctuating her sarcasm with finger quotation marks, ‘But you let Grider and The Clock King…’
‘I didn’t always do it right…’ he looks down at her, trembling, eyes locked on hers, ‘I love you, Iris and I… I just, I couldn’t justify exposing you to something that might… I… Cisco and Caitlin and everyone else that was involved, I met them because I was The Flash, and they fell into it and they said it was okay for their lives to constantly be in danger and… I… I couldn’t… I couldn’t be a hero without you Iris, there’s no… anything for me without you Iris.’
‘You love me.’ she speaks, in a hushed tone, looking up at him with a ghost of the tender and open looks that she once gave him when she trusted him, when he promised her things and she had no reason to believe he’d ever lie to her. She steps forward to him, and being away from her for so long… there’s something about Iris, something about him and Iris that does something with his powers. He didn’t notice at first because his world has slowed down when Iris is around ever since she'd bounded up to him in her bright red coat. But his world literally slows down when Iris is around now. So she steps forward and he staggers, because everything is slow and he can’t deal with it. He grapples at the wall for support and scrabbles and stumbles into her and she mistakes his movement and surges up and pulls him down to kiss her.
She bites his lip as soon as his mouth reaches her and her fingers clutch along his neck, rummaging. A surge of electricity goes through him as she slips her tongue into his mouth, her lips pressing against his hard, completely different to the tenderness that brackets the centre of their kiss. She opens her eyes, lets out a defiant and somehow triumphant breath and leans back in, smoother this time. Her hand is on his jaw and he kisses her back, tender, soft unable to be unyielding where Iris is concerned. He opens up to her, tips his head down to meet her and tries to force an apology into a kiss. He doesn’t know if she receives the apology, but she receives the tenderness and presses her breasts against his chest, pulls at his hair. It becomes tactile quickly and he’s kissing her neck and she’s pushing his shoulders down…down…
They end up on Barry’s bed, tangled in his blue sheets, just changed, barely slept with because of the life he's been living. Barry wonders if Iris has any idea that in his second bedside drawer he has folded green satin sheets with a mix CD with her name scrawled on it in a paper wallet, just in case.
As Barry moves into Iris he looks down as she stutters a sigh,
‘Iris?’
‘Barry.’ she says neutral, with none of the previous acridity, and then as she twists her hips and gyrates under him she says it again, ‘Barry’, and it’s anything but neutral this time.
It’s Iris steering them from the beginning, Barry hasn’t really done this very much before, and even if he had he’d still be at the brink of shaking, at the brink of crying, at the brink of sliding down the bed and crying worship into the alcove in between Iris’ perfect thighs.
There’s a rise and a fall and a panting, Iris is so much louder than he ever hears her when she’s not laughing and she’s all tiny moans and soft groans (‘Barry, like that... yeah..unn…’) as her hips move under him taking him in. He feels himself slide in and out of her, ripping groans from his chest, and eventually he gets the memo, hoists her moist thighs up by his stomach and kneels while he fucks into her. ‘Iris…’ he starts, trying again for that apology as they both reach into bliss, ‘Iris, Iris, Iris...irisiris… oh god..’ and then after minutes of them moving together, and him stroking her hip and looking at the way her bottom lip curves over her teeth when her mouth falls open with sighs, ‘Iris, I’ll spend the rest of our lives making this up to you’, and there’s a tear running down her cheek, that he wipes away with the broad expanse of his thumb when she replies, shakily, ‘Shut up, Barry’.
And so they fuck quietly after that, into the night, moans and grunts forming a special language in which there are no lies, there are only feelings. Once, Barry does say, ‘Iris, am I… are you... is this okay?’ through the tears that have started to make their way down his face and Iris replies with, ‘Don’t worry Barry, I’m getting mine, you get yours’, knowing that that’s not what he meant.
Barry wakes up sore, sated, and completely alone. He rolls over, to inspect the traces of Iris that she’s left, and he finds neatened sheets where once they were rumpled with the twists and turns of their naked bodies.
He stands aimlessly in the middle of the kitchen, clad only in his boxers, distraught and loose from his loneliness. A noise behind him makes him start suddenly. When he turns, his heart leaps to see her face again, skin fresh and glowing, hair wet and sweet smelling like the soap she ironically bought him. He gapes at her for thirty seconds before he can speak again.
‘Iris, sorry I uh… I didn’t realise you were still… do you…? I should have...uh..’ she smiles small and steps towards him, ‘I’m not here for long, I’ve um… I’ve got work’ she says, though her voice is soft, something in her tone is frozen.
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, um… Barry I don’t… I don’t want this to be awkward I’m not like…’ the ghost of a grin sneaks over her face as she glances up at him,”, ‘…sneaking out before the sheets are warm or anything I just… I have a lot of…’ she said, with her voice rising slightly on the next word, ‘…complicated feelings about you, and I need to be by myself, … doing my work for a while.’
And so she leaves and for the first time in his life since the two hours after his mother died, he's completely alone. His limbs felt as though their only purpose was negated and he slumped down. They had loved so freely last night because it had been what Iris had wanted- nothing like his plans. But that was the point, maybe he had ruined it all trying to be a man that could protect Iris.
There's a tiny timid knock on the door and he stands up and wipes his eyes like he did when he was crying and he didn't want Iris to know. She always knew, and when she sweeps in like the wind she kneels down and breathes, 'Bar..' and kisses him again. He chases her lips and leans against the counter limp. 'Iris?' (I'm so afraid) And she lowers her chin and looks at him (a habit from when he was shorter than her) ‘Barry… it’s going to be okay,' she starts, warm and breathy, '...you have to believe that when I’m an Iris West that can deal with this, well, you’ll be the first to know’. ....