#I can’t believe they had 2 minutes on screen and somehow talked about skinny dipping

[mmtions]

westallen pushing daisies AU 1/?

Since the particle accelerator explosion, Iris has been able to bring things back to life, temporarily and even permanently. You can imagine that this makes her life a little complicated, especially when she has to bring her own best friend back to life (because, hey, he’s a superhero, surprise!) at the cost of never being able to touch him again. 

- - -

Iris thrums her fingers on the table, sat on the tall chair in Jitters. Waiting for Barry to get here, her pulse thrums with nervousness. She’s finally going to tell him the truth, after months of indecisiveness.  

The bell above the door jingles and she startles with it, smiling instinctively as Barry walks straight towards her. As he sits opposite her, she pushes one of the mugs towards him, even making it slop over the rim and spill a little onto the saucer in her enthusiasm. “I got you your coffee for you, but it might be a bit cold because I got here early, and you obviously got her a bit late.” Her fingers twiddle between them, “Extra shot americano, right?”

He’s giving her an odd look, and, yeah, she realises she’s being really weird. God, she’s acting more like Barry than Barry himself. She forces her hands to still by clasping them tightly together, and she tries to make her face less crazed.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Sorry,” she says, her voice thankfully more toned down now. “This is, uh my fourth cup today.”

His eyebrows raises and he teases, “You know it’s only eleven am, right? Even for you, that’s impressive.” Then his expression clouds. “Wait, is that what you wanted to talk about? Are you stressed? At work, or-?”

He reaches out to fit his hand over hers, and she turns it so their palms slot together, familiar and comforting. His immediate concern fills her with confidence, and wipes away the fear she had about telling him, about how he’d react - he’s her Barry. He won’t be mad. He might be a little freaked out, but they can move past it, she’s confident.

She takes a deep breath. “Barry, I- I have to tell you something.”

His mouth twitches, but the micro-expression is gone too quickly for her to identify. If she had to, she might say it looked a little like hope, but that would make no sense.

She’s been planning the speech in her mind all day - for the past week, really, ever since she decided that she had to tell someone - but words seem to fail her. Regardless, she opens her mouth, begins, “I-”

But just as she speaks, Barry’s phone rings, shrill and loud in the coffee shop. He looks torn, and apologetic, but she shakes her head, smiling.

“Get it, honestly, this can wait.”

Barry’s mouth flattens into a thin line. “I wish it didn’t have to.” He quickly opens the call, says shortly, “Yeah. Uh-uh. Okay, Cisco.” He mouths another apology to her as he listens to something else Cisco says, and she waves a hand in dismissal, despite the disappointment she feels. Even before he ends the call, she could predict what he says next. “I’m so sorry, Iris, I have to go.”

“It’s okay, honestly,” she smiles. “Is it STAR labs again?”

“Some emergency with their- uh- their generator. They want my opinion on it.” His eyes avoid hers, but he’s out of his seat before she can analyse it, giving her a tight hug. She squeezes him back tight, hiding her face in his collarbone - even on the tall stools at Jitters, he towers over her. “I’ll speak to you later, okay?”

Her mouth opens before she can control it, before she can think better, with her eyes closed and the safety of his arms around her. “Barry, I-”

But he’s gone before she can finish, striding quickly out the door and back on the phone to Cisco.

“-Can bring people back to life,” she finishes, quietly, to herself.

----

Barry is three months into his coma the first time Iris starts thinking that maybe she might have been affected by the particle accelerator as well.

She's just leaving the hospital and blinking back tears. She has her date with Eddie later this evening, and honestly, she's really not sure she's up for it. It's getting harder and harder to believe that Barry's listening, no matter what the articles online say, and she got halfway through telling his unconscious body about the date before she wanted to start hitting things.

She walks home the long way, away from the main streets and bright lights. But as she's dipping through an alleyway, a sharp thud reverberates against the narrow brick walls and into her ears. She looks behind her to see a bird with a crooked wing landed awkwardly on the asphalt.

Maybe it's because she's feeling particularly vulnerable and melancholic in that moment, but she actually turns to walk carefully back to the bird. It's definitely dead - it has to be, though somehow there's not much gore. She crouches in front of it. She feels weird, like there's some extra energy humming through her. Her arm seems to move of its own accord, and, though she'll feel super gross about it later, she gently touches the bird's crooked wing with the pad of her finger.

One second, the bird is lifeless - in the next, it hops to its feet with a chirp. The wing is still broken, but it flaps the other one, and its eyes dart around with life.

Iris lets out a sob of a breath, somewhere between happiness and shock. She can't save her best friend, but somehow, fate has helped her to save this bird. She reaches out again - maybe she can take the bird to a vet to fix the wing, and tries to hold the bird in a cupped hand.

But as soon as her fingers touch it again, the sparrow crumples. It falls lifeless into her palm, eyes seeing nothing. Iris flinches, and the bird's corpse falls back to the pavement.

Her head darts up to see if there's anyone else around - but still, she's alone in the alleyway. She shakes her head, and stagger backwards to her feet. She fights the urge to run from the scene, panic making her breath come quickly and her heart beat fast. She doesn't look back as she strides all the way home. 

She decides in the next few days, that it was a hallucination, or even a dream, brought on by stress. She cancels the date with Eddie, but makes sure to reschedule for next week - of course, he's perfectly understanding, and offers to bring her his grandmother's soothing tea.

But just because she dismisses the scene from her reality, it doesn't mean she stops thinking about it.

Fast forward to  month later and she’s gardening her father’s backyard - he’s been too busy between work and visiting Barry and all the new, especially weird crimes going on to tend to it, and she hates the sight of it being overrun. (Usually Barry would mow the lawn while she’d trim the shrubbery, but she pushes the thought of sunny laughter and shining, skinny arms away.) She also read some article about how raising life banishes thoughts of the dead, and, by this point, she’s a little desperate.

She feels the tickle of an insect on her neck and in panic, she slaps it away. It’s a beetle, which, ew. But she watches its legs curl in on itself and shudder into immobility, and she feels a little twinge of guilt. After all, she’s the one displacing rocks and soil and its home.

A crazy thought enters her head. Despite the obvious logic echoing in her ears, reminding her that what she thinks she saw that night in the alley was impossible, she still reaches out, and gently touches the insect.

Almost instantaneously, it sparks back to frantic life, legs and arms kicking wildly to upright itself. She lets out a breathy laugh of surprise as it scuttles away through the grass. She watches it in wonder, watches it weave across the flowerbeds bordering the pavement. As it makes its way further into the peonies, she sees it cross paths with a spider, which she flinches from, having never gotten over a childhood fear of the arachnids. Almost unintentionally, her eyes now track the spider as it follows a different path on the soil. But abruptly, it freezes at apparently nothing. In the next split-second, it furls into a crooked ball, rocking onto its back.

Iris blinks, a slow, sinking feeling creeping into her stomach. She uses a small twig to poke at the spider, but nothing. It’s dead.

She spends the afternoon experimenting with almost a fever of fear and trepidation. She obviously has some connection to death, but she has to know the limitations before she accidentally harms something - or someone - more important than a bird or insect.

She manages to narrow her findings down to three conclusive rules, through trials involving worms and other small insects.

1.       If something is dead, as long as it’s all in one piece, she can bring it back to life no matter how long it had been dead for.

2.       When she touches the revived something again, no matter when, it dies, and cannot be brought back to life.

3.       But if the revived something stays alive for longer than a minute (she estimates) something else must die to take its place.

She also manages to conclude that her touch has no effect on the living who have never died - which isn’t that surprising, considering she’s been just as tactile as she always has. The assurance is a relief nonetheless.

She has nightmares that Eddie has to wake her from, where her powers change and everything she touches dies. Where everyone she loves dies, and when she touches them, they don’t wake up. Where she touches her dad to bring him back to life, and then Barry dies to take his place.

It seems impossible. How on earth can she possibly have such control, even if it is restricted, over life and death?

But doesn’t the impossible keep on happening in Central City?

----

Now.

She goes to work after finishing her coffee and having them put Barry's in a takeaway cup - no sense in wasting it, after all. On the walk, she hears the faraway sound of sirens, but this is Central City, after all. Sure enough, when she gets to work, everyone is pretending to work whilst sneaking glances at the large television on the wall. The screen shows the ‘Breaking News’ that has everyone held in rapture: The Flash Fights Murmur in Main Square.

Linda elbows Iris as she sits, and whispers, “You know anything about this?”

Iris rolls her eyes. “I write about the Flash, I don’t have a telepathic connection with him.”

Murmur was a low-life villain even before his incarceration in Iron Heights - though he somehow has managed to escape, he doesn’t have any powers Iris could see defeating the famous Flash. She turns back to her laptop ; though, as Linda hinted, the Flash is her area of expertise, this is hardly a story she can give a new angle on. Anyway, she has other deadlines that seem far more important.

She’s opening up her email inbox when she feels her stomach turn abruptly, as if she’s on a rollercoaster that’s just dropped. The office has gone silent, and she slowly pivots in her chair, panic introducing a tremor to her fingers.

The Flash is down. The reporter on the scene sounds just as confused as Murmur advances. “-yes, Gavin, it is not looking good for the Flash. Murmur just shot something at him - the Flash is convulsing, badly - no, we don’t - oh!”

The Flash slowly, looking like it pains him, rolls over onto his front and raises into a crouch. Iris is leaning forward in tension, feeling sick as she bites down on her bottom lip. “Come on,” she breathes.

And then he’s gone in a streak of red lightning. The police on the scene advance on Murmur, but he holds whatever weapon he has high, and two other officers go down. Another car appears, an unmarked black SUV, and he climbs in and speeds away. Clearly, the weapon has the police scared.

Iris should already be starting to investigate what that weapon could be. But the horrible feeling won’t go away.

“Iris?” Linda asks. “He’ll be okay, it’s the Flash.”

“I- I’m just gonna-” she’s about to make an excuse about going to the bathroom so she can pull herself together, but her phone rings.

Iris can’t tell you how she knows, but she knows. It’s the same feeling she had before the doctors came out to tell them her grandmother had passed. It’s the same feeling she had right before her friend’s parents rang to tell her dad that Bella had been in a car accident.

It’s the same feeling she had right before her dad called to tell her about the lab accident.

“Iris, you don’t look well…”

Linda’s voice fades away as Iris reaches into her coat pocket and presses accept to her dad’s photo. She raises it to her ear, and clasps her hand over a sob as Joe says, voice croaky and thick, “Iris, you need to come to STAR labs, now. Baby, you need to hurry.”

----

Linda has to call Iris a cab because Iris’s hands won’t stop trembling. She chucks a fifty at the driver and runs into the damned building that still haunts her dreams, racing through the corridors faster than she ever thought possible. 

She comes into the main hub, and her dad’s rising to meet her but she pushes him aside to get to where she needs to be. She stifles back another hysterical sob as Cisco and Caitlin part for her to see: Barry, in the Flash suit, unnaturally still on the hospital bed. But that doesn’t seem important now, not when he’s lying on the bed so still and pale and sickly.

“The poison…” Caitlin tries, a whisper into the silence. “It was too fast. Barry’s metabolism only sped it up…”

“No,” Iris shakes her head, stumbling forward, sure that it’ll be okay, that this is just some huge prank and he’s going to pull through any second. At least in the coma, he had been seizing, had been showing some movement. “I saw him fifteen minutes ago, it’s not-”

But then she sees the way his eyes stare blank up at the ceiling, sees the discoloured foam down the side of his chin, and she claps her hands over her scream.

She falls forward onto the cot, limbs failing her. She clutches at him, but there’s no skin to feel, no comfort but the cool leather of the suit. The damned suit that got him into this mess.

 “Iris-” her father tries, and she hears the pain in his voice.

But all she can think is, “You knew.”

There’s silence.

“Maybe we should-” Cisco tries, obviously about to give them space. Iris doesn’t want space, she wants her best friend back.

“Everyone leave.” She should be crying, probably, but a numb shock encompasses her. “Just leave me with him, please.”

She hears all their footsteps recede. She can’t even cry, can’t do anything but squeeze his torso, aching deep in her soul for this all to be a crazy dream. She just- how the fuck is she supposed to process this? When fifteen minutes ago he’d been just normal Barry, safe and dorky. God, she’d been about to tell him-

She slowly raises her forehead from where it rests on his torso.

She’d been about to tell him that she had the power to bring things back from the dead.

Shaking, she leans over him more, and slowly, with a shaking hand, reaches to cup his cheek. Her palm rests along his cold cheek.

There’s a split-second where she thinks it won’t work - she’s never tried it on people before - but then she feels it, feels the life pass from her skin through his. She feels the heat, watches the colour come back to his face. She pulls away and watches as he takes his first breath back in.

He splutters and gasps in breath like - well, like he was recently dying. His eyes dart about in panic, and finally rest on her. “Iris-” he breathes, like she’s the air and he’s been drowning.

He reaches for her and she flinches away, because she remembers the cost of this particular gift like she’d been poisoned herself.

She can never, ever touch him again.

His expression twists in confusion, and then he looks down and sees he’s still in the Flash suit. He opens his mouth to explain, presumably, but then a voice comes from behind Iris.

“Well, now, isn’t this interesting?”

It’s Dr. Wells, but as she spins around, she realises: he’s standing.

Barry seems to have the same thought, and he croaks, still groggy from the whole being-brought-back-to-life thing, “Dr. Wells?”

“You can bring people back to life,, Ms. West. You must have been affected by the particle accelerator as well.” He saunters forward, hands clasped behind his back. “That will be very, very useful to me. In fact, I think this rather changes everything.” 

She’s always found him a little unnerving, but now, the real danger of his character is unveiled. He steps forward, and she senses Barry trying to get up, and his hand is vibrating, and-

And something in the back of Wells’ throat gurgles.

Iris realises a minute has passed since she revived Barry.

Wells clutches at his heart, and she watches him sink to the floor.  He’s looking up at her with fury, and disbelief, and she will have to live with this forever. Tears run down her cheeks as he collapses, and stills.

There’s a beat of silence, and Barry’s standing, and she feels him come close, and she actually runs away from him, even skirting around Wells’ body in her urgency. “I-” she stammers. “I’ll get Caitlin.”

She runs to the door and shouts for Caitlin, for her dad, letting the panic of the past few moments echo into her voice. They come running, and she can’t even explain, has to just gesture to the scene behind her. Barry: alive. Wells: dead. Surprise!

Caitlin immediately crouches down and begins CPR, but Iris doesn’t need to be a doctor to know it won’t work. This is how the rules work. One life for another.

She thinks that might make her a murderer, but she can’t bring herself to mind every time she catches sight of Barry, looking lost and confused and stressed, but alive nonetheless. He keeps looking at her, she knows. She also knows that he’ll have questions.

He reaches for her,murmurs, “Iris-”

But she flinches away, and his hand drops.

He can’t touch her, he can’t. Not even a graze of his hand against hers - it’s not worth it, no matter the confusion and hurt in his eyes. After all, she could never see those eyes feel anything again.

It’s worth it, she thinks, even as Barry tries to answer Cisco and Caitlin and Joe’s questions, all the while shooting glances at Iris. It’s worth it -it has to be.

----

The first question, and possibly the most urgent after Caitlin determines it was natural causes that killed Wells, a random heart attack, is why he wasn’t in his wheelchair.

“He was standing,” Barry says, sounding lost. Joe wraps a comforting arm around him - though Iris suspects the action is just as much to ground Joe himself. “And he said- Iris would be useful to him.”

Cisco frowns. “Why Iris?”

To his credit, Barry doesn’t even glance at Iris as he lies, “I don’t know.”

Cisco runs his hands through his hair, eyes watery. “I don’t understand.” He leaves, feet quick as he stalks away from the main hub.

Caitlin looks equally shaken as she says, quietly, “I’m going to take him down to the morgue.” Before she leaves, she touches Barry on the arm, just lightly, and says, “I’m glad you’re okay, Barry.”

It leaves the West trio alone. Iris is looking at her feet, and Joe clearly sense something’s going on between the two younger adults - though he obviously thinks it’s about the other elephant in the room, the gold lightning bolt on Barry’s chest, as he says, a touch awkwardly, “I’m going to go to the station, try and dig up some answers there. You sure you’re okay?” He directs this last question at Barry, who nods.

Certainly, if you were to only look at Barry now, you would never guess his heart had stopped beating just a few minutes ago. He looks healthy, and bright. Or maybe Iris is just exaggerating when the memory of his corpse is still so fresh in her mind.

Joe leaves, and then they’re alone. Iris stands with her back to one of the walls while Barry stands by the desk. She doesn’t know how to start this conversation, doesn’t know how to even begin. Luckily for her, Barry speaks first.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

That makes her chin dart up. He looks apologetic, and devastated, and - and he thinks she’s mad about the Flash secret. Sure, when she thinks back to all the conversations and arguments they had about the Streak, she’ll probably be a little pissed off later. But hasn’t she kept an enormous secret as well these past few months?

“I wanted to, so many times.” His eyes are pleading, as is his voice. She realises that even after coming back from the dead, even after watching his mentor die, his main concern is still her. He’s the best friend she could ever hope for.

“It’s okay, Bear,” she says, before he can keep apologising. She makes sure her tone is sincere as she says, “I’m not mad, I promise.”

“You’re not?” His expression is doubtful.

She spreads her arms wide and lets out a humourless laugh as she says, “I haven’t exactly been forthcoming with you either.”

He shakes his head, runs a hand through his hair, looking a little slapped over the head. “I’ve wanted to tell you so much this whole time. I- God, there’s so much to tell you. And you can tell me about all about- whatever your power is. Is it from the accelerator? You’re a meta too?” The more he talks, the more animated he becomes, obviously relieved and excited, and she can feel herself smiling with it despite the stress of the past few minutes.

But then he reaches for her instinctively, and she flinches away, almost tripping over herself to put a few more steps between them.

Barry’s face shutters down. “You are mad,” he accuses.

“No, I-” She falters. She gestures for him to sit back on the bed. “You want to talk about our powers, Bear? Because mine comes with some caveats. Mine- mine isn’t a power, Barry, it’s a curse.”

His brows crease. “What do you mean?”

She licks her lips, the statement that will change everything between her and her best friend forever failing to come out. She wrings her hands. “If I ever touch you again, you’ll die. That’s the cost of bringing you back.”

He finally takes her unspoken advice and sits back down on the cot, though it seems less of a conscious decision and more that his legs have failed him. “What?” he croaks.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and finally, the tears spill over. “But I don’t regret it - you were dead.” 

And that’s it, really, because as terrible as this, as much as she might have to move to Timbuktu to avoid touching him, it’s better than the memory of his corpse that’ll haunt her for years to come. Although from the look on his face, he certainly doesn’t seem to agree. 

----

hey remember i mentioned last week that I had this hanging around in my drive? Really not sure about whether to continue with this so would appreciate feedback and especially constructive criticism! also I’ve never actually watched the original tv show, going off tumblr gifsets and the premise. not sure if it’s too angsty or drags with the explanation? 

((p.s - would obviously have a happy ending eventually, come on, I’m not a monster.))

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