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When he wakes up from his coma, he can’t remember what happened, or how he got here in the first place. He can’t remember names and he can’t remember faces, he can’t remember where he’s from or what he does or even what his name is. He can’t remember a single thing about his life, or the people, the places, the memories that defined it. He can’t really remember anything.
Except…well, it’s strange, but the only thing he can remember are feelings. (Which, for someone who wears his heart on his sleeve, who feels as much as he does for people, ends up making things a lot more complicated than it should.)
The first words out of his mouth when he wakes up are not “Where am I?” but rather “Who am I?” and he blinks in confusion and fear at the two people—a man with long hair and a graphic tee and strict-looking woman in a lab coat—in the room before him, feeling nothing. He wouldn’t know whether or not he should recognize them, because he wouldn’t recognize anyone right now, but…somehow, they just feel unfamiliar. Not bad, but definitely unfamiliar.
They’re both staring at him with wide eyes, and they exchange a look of surprise before they’re suddenly rushing towards him, and then there are hands prodding him and a light’s being shone in his eyes and the guy—who is decidedly way too excited about all this—grins at him as he puts his hands on his shoulders, keeping him in place as the no-nonsense looking woman puts two fingers on the side of his neck to feel his pulse. She scribbles something down on a notepad she’s just extracted from her pocket and nods to the over-excited guy, who nods back and finally releases his hold.
“Relax, man. I’m Cisco Ramon,” he says, gesturing to himself, and then waves a hand at the woman next to him, who’s checking the monitors by the bed, “and this is Caitlin—I mean, Dr. Snow. You’re at STAR Labs. You were in a coma. Nine months. They brought you here, and—”
Something registers in the back of his mind, like the words “coma” and “nine months” and “you” together in the same sentence is something he should be concerned about, and he feels a momentary flicker of unease in his chest as he struggles to wrap his head around it. The thought, however, is momentarily outweighed by the concern that’s been pressing on him from the moment he’d opened his eyes, and he cuts Cisco off before he can explain any further.
“Okay, but who am I?” he repeats, and there’s that look again, that silent communication thing between the two strangers—Cisco and Caitlin, he corrects himself—that doesn’t seem to bode well for his situation.
“You—you don’t know who you are…?”
He wracks his brain, trying to remember something, anything, but again he comes up empty. His eyebrows pull together in confusion and he shakes his head at Cisco, who shoots a nervous look towards Caitlin, who looks back at him with sad eyes before running a hand through her hair and heaving a sigh.
“Cisco, I think now might be a good time to contact the Wests. I’m going to run some more tests, see what’s going on—if this is temporary or…well, we should get them in here, anyway. See if that jogs his memory and figure out just how much he remembers or…or not. Oh—and get Dr. Wells. He’ll want to know that Barry’s awake.”
Barry?
He doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until Cisco and Caitlin are both looking at him with matching expressions of pity and mild panic.
Cisco nods to Caitlin and disappears for a few moments, during which time Caitlin continues running her tests, poking and prodding and calmly explaining that he is Barry—it’s his name, apparently: Bartholomew Henry Allen. He’s twenty-five and he’s a forensic scientist and he works for the Central City Police Department, etc. etc. etc. As if he knows what any of that really means. When he tries to lighten the mood, to jokingly ask her if his parents hate him or something because ‘Bartholomew? Really?’ Caitlin gives him a smile that’s entirely forced and then averts her eyes and he wonders just what he’s missing, what she’s so obviously hiding from him. His thoughts become jumbled as he tries to really remember his parents, to remember why the mention of them has brought about this reaction, and feels a sinking sensation in his stomach and a burning in his eyes when he does—although he can’t for the life of him remember why. After that he stops asking questions, just lets Caitlin work in silence, and waits.
When Cisco comes back, he’s trailed by a man in a wheelchair, who’s looking at Barry over the rims of his glasses with an expression that’s almost…predatory. It makes him feel like he’s a bug under a microscope, like he’s a particularly interesting science project, like this man knows something about him that he doesn’t know about himself (which, all things considered, wouldn’t exactly be an unreasonable feat right about now). All in all, it makes him feel uncomfortable, and he blinks and looks away, diverting his attention back to Cisco, who’s relaying information to Caitlin that Barry’s not sure if he’s supposed to hear or not, but he listens in anyway.
“I tried calling Joe, but I couldn’t get a hold of him. I was able to get in touch with Iris, though, and she’s on her way now. Says she’s going to stop by the precinct first and drag her dad away from work, give him the good news. I didn’t—I couldn’t tell her, you know…” Cisco trails off, gaze darting briefly over to Barry, “I couldn’t tell her that there’s some…complications with Barry. Not yet—she sounded so excited. And like you said, we don’t know if maybe they’ll jog his memory or something.”
Barry feels a flicker of–it’s not recognition, exactly. But it’s something, like a strange flutter in his stomach, a sudden spike in his heartbeat. He wonders what could have caused it, and it’s that feeling churning in his gut that prompts him to speak up.
“Who’s Iris?” he asks, his mind whirring and chest constricting, desperate to remember, and Cisco makes a face at him.
“Well, I guess that answers that question,” Caitlin mutters under her breath at the same time Cisco responds, sounding unsure, “She’s, ah…she’s your…something.” Barry continues to look confused, but Cisco really doesn’t have a better answer for him. He’s honestly not sure what Iris is to Barry, because he’s never really asked her. If they’re just friends or something more, because from watching the way she’d looked at him, touched him, talked to him, cried over him while visiting him in his coma, well…he’s sort of inclined to say the latter. Still, better safe than sorry—he doesn’t want to make any assumptions. “She came to visit you a lot while you were—ah, out.”
“Oh,” he blinks, that seemingly perpetual look of confusion still fastened on his face. “Iris.”
He says it just to say it, to hear it loud again, to try it out for size. The name rolls of his tongue easily, like he’s said it a million times before, only when he tries to think past that feeling in his gut he comes up empty. No face, no history, no memories to attach to the name, except…except love. And there it is—another feeling he’s held onto, and all he knows is that this girl’s name is Iris, and that she came to visit him while he was in his coma, and he loves her more than anything. The other name—Joe—stirs something in his chest too, only it’s a much different kind of love, and God, he just wishes he could remember them.
But then the man in the wheelchair is coming closer to him, extending a hand, smiling at him in a way that makes Barry feel slightly queasy. Something about him just doesn’t feel right, rubs him the wrong way. He quietly reminds himself that he doesn’t know this man—or at least he doesn’t think he does?—and he shouldn’t be so quick to judge. He pushes the feeling aside for the time being and takes the man’s outstretched hand, giving him a tight smile of his own.
“Nice to finally meet you, Mr. Allen,” the man says, and at the sound of his voice Barry feels a chill run up his spine, one that leaves him already considering re-thinking this whole ‘don’t-be-so-quick-to-judge’ thing. “My name is Harrison Wells. I brought you here to STAR Labs, and we stabilized you during your coma. Let’s talk.”
“Barry?”
The girl who Cisco assures him is Iris—although he doesn’t really have to, Barry can already tell by the way his heart is suddenly racing in his chest, pounding so loud he’s sure the rest of the room must be able to hear it—approaches the bed cautiously, followed closely by an older man who must be this ‘Joe’. There are tears in her eyes, and suddenly the only thing on his mind is the overwhelming desire to comfort her, to hug her and take her in his arms and assure her that everything is okay and will be okay and that he’s okay.
“Barry, do you…do you know who I am?”
And then it hits him—because there’s only one possible explanation for the crushing, overwhelming love he feels for her, for the nature of what he’s feeling. They must have been together before his accident, of course, it all makes sense. He opens his mouth and he can’t stop himself from smiling because of course and it’s so obvious and he’s finally figured it out, and says, “You must be…my girlfriend?”
Her eyes go wide as she splutters, freezing in place at the foot of his bed. “I—what? No, no of course not.”
He feels a momentary pang of confusion and disappointment, until other thought hits him, and suddenly his smile returns ten-fold. “Oh! Oh, I get it. You’re my wife.”
She blinks at him, bewildered, at a complete loss for words, and throws a desperate glance at the man—her father—behind her. Her father, he thinks to himself, who must be his father-in-law, which is why he feels that familial love for him, and—
“No, Barry,” she finally manages to get out, twisting her fingers together and coughing awkwardly, “No—no, we’re just best friends. The bestest of best friends. Really…really good friends,” she finishes lamely, and despite the overall seriousness of the situation, Joe can’t hold in his snicker behind her. He’s known, of course, about Barry’s feelings for Iris for a long time now, but he never imagined the truth would come out like this.
“Oh,” Barry says, crestfallen. “But it’s just—I look at you and I don’t know you but I feel—well, it doesn’t feel like something you feel for just a friend. I can’t remember anything, but I remember that I love you. I guess I thought—I assumed—I don’t know, I’m sorry.”
“It’s—hey, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Let’s just—let’s just get you home, yeah? Dad and I kept your apartment in good shape for you since you’ve been away, too.”
Okay. Okay, so his home is somewhere with this girl (and her father? his father, too?) but…they’re not together? And he’s also apparently got an apartment, but something about the way she says it makes it seem like it’s…not home. And he feels it too. The confusion must be apparent on his face, because Iris’s eyes are sad and sorry and still a little bit bewildered but it’s almost like she’s silently communicating something to him with that look, something that seems to say ‘I’ll explain later.’ And he doesn’t have any reason to trust anyone right now, but he trusts her. So he pushes those particular questions aside and instead asks another, this one equally as pressing.
“Where is home?”
This time it’s Joe who opens his mouth to respond, but Dr. Wells cuts him off before he can answer.
“I’m not sure if that’s such a great idea,” Wells says rather coldly, “Mr. Allen is still obviously facing the after-effects of whatever is going on with him. There’s still so much we need to figure out, and he’s lost his memory, so I believe—”
“We’re taking him home,” Iris snaps at him, undeterred. “We’ll bring him back for check-ups every day or whenever you want, if you must, until you figure out what’s wrong with him, but we’re taking home. He’s still our Barry.”
Barry feels something warm settle in his chest at the way she says ‘our’, almost as if she’d meant to say ‘my’, and he finds himself wondering again how it’s possible that they’re only just friends.
In the end, Dr. Wells is no match for Iris West when she’s determined, and he’s forced to let her and Joe take Barry home with them–and they decide together that it’s best to take him home, to have him stay with them again instead of alone in his apartment when he’s got no memory and they don’t know exactly what’s wrong yet and any slew of things could happen—just barely managing to hide his glare as they make their way out of STAR Labs. They’ll be back, he knows. He has time. He just has to be patient.
Caitlin explains it to Iris after she brings Barry in for his second check-up, that it’s strange, that it’s the most unusual thing she’s ever seen, (but then again, she says, everything about Barry’s case is unusual), and she doesn’t quite know the reason yet, but Barry appears to have woken up from his coma with no memory but the lingering feelings from his life before it.
The real kicker is that they don’t know if it can be reversed, if he’ll ever really get his memories back. So in the meantime, Iris puts up with Barry mistaking her for something she’s not, with constantly having to remind him of his mistake, with him forgetting again the next day. It’s not his fault, she knows—there are only certain details he retains from day-to-day now. His name. His age. Their names, but not how he knows them, really. It’s frustrating, waking up every morning with an increasingly dwindling hope to ask him if he knows who she is and finding herself facing that same confused, blank stare and then the resulting, tentative ‘my girlfriend?’, but that’s by far not the worst part of this seemingly short-term memory loss—more stupid fucking memory loss, of course, to go along with all his long-term lost memories from before the coma. No, the worst part is having to explain to him why he’s living with her and Joe, where his real parents are. He doesn’t always ask, but on the days that he does…she just doesn’t know how much longer she can put up with seeing his face crumple like that, with single-handedly being the one to break his heart with one short explanation.
“If all he can remember are feelings then…why does he think I’m his girlfriend?” Iris asks on their fifth visit, since it’s the first time her dad’s not with them too, as Caitlin is hooking Barry up to some machine while he’s asleep and Cisco is standing by with her to watch. “Or wife, or whatever. We’ve never been anything more than just…friends. I don’t—I don’t understand.”
Caitlin and Cisco exchange one of their trademark ‘you-handle-this-please’ looks, and Caitlin gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head as Cisco shrugs helplessly. Caitlin pauses what she’s doing to pat Iris awkwardly on the shoulder, gives her a pitying look and then hurriedly turns away, back to her task at hand and leaving her to face Cisco, who’s regarding her with nothing short of exasperation.
“Well…?”
“Iris…listen,” he sighs, like he’s explaining something very self-explanatory to a very oblivious person, “if Barry acted anywhere near as obvious about his feelings around you before his coma as you did towards him while he was in it and you never realized it…I don’t really know what to tell you except—well, he clearly was, is, whatever, in love with you. And you…you were here a lot Iris. I saw the way you acted around him, heard what you said to him, and it seemed like more than ‘just friends’ to me, you know?”
She wants to deny it, she’s got a protest at the ready on the tip of her tongue, but in the end all that comes out when she opens her mouth is, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Because she does. She really does.
At some point over the next couple weeks, even though he’s still got his condition, even though he’s still on medical leave from work considering, well, he can’t remember anything, even though he’s not back to normal, even though he’s still going through regular check-ups at STAR Labs, Barry insists on moving back into his apartment. And he can definitely take care of himself, Iris knows that—it’s just his memories that are missing, not his basic understanding of things–but that doesn’t make her any less reluctant to see him leave.
Especially because even though he’s different, at his core he’s still the same, he’s still her goofy, nerdy, Barry. Even though his memories are still jumbled or missing, he’s still got the same heart, and if she’s being honest it’s been sort of…eye-opening, this whole experience. She doesn’t know when she stopped correcting him when he calls her his girlfriend, when he tries to hold her hand or his touches linger a little longer than they would when they were ‘just friends’—if they ever really were just that—but she does, and she finds that she really doesn’t mind. Somewhere down the line, she realizes that she wants it to be true.
Which is how she finds herself outside of his apartment early one morning, high off of this revelation, this realization of her feelings—and how ironic is it that all he remembers, the only thing he’s really sure about, are is feelings for her and yet it’s taken her so long to figure out her own?—but she’s here now, and she knows what she wants, and if he’s not going to remember then she’s ready to move forward, anyway. Her heart is pounding like it’s trying to fly out of her ribcage and burst from her chest and her hands are shaking as she knocks on the door. She stands there for at least two minutes before she feels herself deflate, realizes that he must still be asleep, but just as she’s about to turn away the door swings open.
“Hey, Iris! What are you doing here? Not that I’m not happy to see you, of course, but it’s sort of really early, and…um…” Barry trails off, his voice bright and cheery, stepping to the side and gesturing towards the now open doorway. “I mean, since you’re here, want to come in? I just made pancakes.”
“You know who I am?” she asks, mouth dry, struggling to get past the lump in her throat and brushing off his questions entirely. Something about the way he’s addressed her takes her off guard, throws her for a loop, and she momentarily forgets what she came here to say. He nods seriously, and even though his hair is still mussed from sleep and his pajamas are rumpled and he’s clearly just recently woken up, his eyes look more alert than she’s seen them in a while. She starts to wonder if maybe something’s changed, if maybe he’s actually recognizing her for real this time, recognizing her from years and years spent growing up together, having each other’s backs, being the one steady constant in each other’s lives. Then his eyebrows pull together in confusion, and he opens his mouth, starts to say the same thing he’s been saying for weeks, and she figures she must have been getting her hopes up, that it must have been a trick of her imagination.
“Uh, yeah. Of course. You’re my—”
And suddenly she decides she doesn’t need to hear it, not anymore, because she’s already made up her mind and she knows it’s what she wants and she knows it’s what he wants and if they’re really going to have to start over like this then fuck it—why not? This is what she came here for, anyway. And so she grabs his shirt, bunches it in her fist and pulls him close and then reaches up on her tip-toes to cut him off with a kiss.
His lips are a little bit sticky with syrup and it’s decidedly delicious, not only because of the sugar but even more because of who she’s finally kissing, and she can pinpoint the moment that Barry’s shock must wear off because then he’s kissing her back and oh—oh. She wastes no time taking his bottom lip between her teeth, just barely pulling away and taking in the sweetness before leaning right back in for more. She can’t help but let out a little sigh of pleasure when he takes a hand and tangles it in her hair, cradling the back of her head and tilting it up to deepen the kiss. He tastes like home, like something she’s been so sorely missing, like the bacon-and-chocolate chip pancakes her dad had taught them to make when they were younger and they’d get up early on the weekends when he’d first come to live them, and—wait. Bacon and chocolate chip pancakes? That’s a West special recipe. That’s not something easily forgotten. That’s a memory.
She abruptly pulls away, takes a step back, and bumps into the door frame, feeling the heat rushing to her face.
“—best friend?” Barry chokes when he can find his voice again, the words coming out like a squeak. His eyes are wide and dazed as he blinks down at her, looking both astonished and ecstatic, and he sounds so out of breath she wonders if he’s been holding it this whole time. His mouth is hanging open a bit in shock and it would probably be funny under any other circumstances but— “You kissed me. You’re my best friend who just kissed me. That was—oh my God. Oh my God, Iris.”
“You—you remember that?”
He nods his head, his eyes still wide as saucers, looking at her in awe and confusion. “It…it literally just happened, Iris. And…it’s also something I’m never going to forget, seriously, you have no idea how—”
“No, no–not the kiss. I meant…you remember that we’re best friends? You remember me?”
“I—what? Of course I—”
“Your memory is back.” It’s not a question, and she says it in stunned disbelief, like she’s struggling to wrap her head around the fact that after waiting so long, after thinking it was gone for good, it’s finally true. His memory is back. Which means he doesn’t think she’s his girlfriend, or his wife, or his lover. Just his best friend and–and she’s just kissed him. Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh—
“My memory was gone?” he says, bemused, momentarily pulling his gaze away from her lips, which she wipes self-consciously on the back of her hand.
“You…yeah. Yeah, you lost it after you woke up from your coma, and—”
“Coma? I was in a coma?”
“Okay,” she breathes, mind reeling at this turn of events. She loops her arm through his and tugs him through the door, because judging by the look on his face, and considering everything she’s thrown at him in the past few minutes, he doesn’t seem to be capable of moving on his own. “Okay. Let’s go inside. I think I’ll take you up on that pancake offer, now. We have a lot we need to discuss.”