Iris West Anchor

Iris West was the first person Barry Allen ever told.

Not because he planned to. Not because he had thought it through and decided she was trustworthy — he knew she was trustworthy, had known for years, but in the days after the lightning he was not thinking clearly enough to plan anything as complicated as a confession. It happened the way the most important things happen: accidentally and completely.

She had come to see him at the hospital. She had brought a book she was reading, and a bag of oranges because she read somewhere that Vitamin C was good for lightning strike recovery, and she sat in the chair by his bed and started telling him about the story she was working on — an investigative piece about development contracts in the Third Ward, the details of which were genuinely very interesting, and Iris made everything genuinely very interesting by the manner in which she discussed it.

And Barry, who was still not thinking clearly, reached for an orange.

He moved at about two hundred miles per hour.

The orange hit the wall. The bag hit the ceiling. Iris stopped talking mid-sentence.

In the silence that followed, Barry looked at his hand. He looked at the orange on the floor. He looked at Iris.

"I can explain," he said.

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, very calmly, "I think you should."

He told her everything. He talked for two hours straight, because the information had been building up behind a door that had no other outlet and Iris was the only person the door had ever wanted to open for. She listened without interrupting, which was not always how Iris operated, so the fact that she listened without interrupting communicated the depth of her attention. She asked questions only when he paused. Good questions — the journalistic kind that went precisely to the thing that needed clarifying.

At the end, she sat back in her chair and looked at him.

"You're the Flash," she said.

"I think so," Barry said.

"The one who's been running around the city."

"Yes."

She thought about this. "Your coffee," she said. "You make your coffee and it's cold on your desk because you go look out the window and then forget it's there, and I always thought that was just because you were distracted, but actually it's because —"

"I run somewhere in between," Barry confirmed. "And then I come back and I've forgotten where I was."

"There's a cold coffee in the break room right now," Iris said, standing up. "I bet it's yours."

It was.

That was the beginning of the most important partnership of Barry Allen's life, and it was almost entirely unremarkable in its daily expression. They ate meals together at the diner on Fifth with the slightly sticky menus. They walked through Central City in the evenings, which took longer for Iris than for Barry because Iris walked at a normal human pace and Barry slowed himself carefully, and this required the kind of continuous small effort that becomes second nature and then becomes love. They talked about her stories and his cases and the things they were both thinking about that were too half-formed to explain to anyone but each other.

She gave him what the Speed Force could not: stillness. Not physical stillness — Barry was almost constitutionally incapable of physical stillness. The inner kind. The quality of knowing, at the center of all the speed and noise and crisis, that somewhere there was a room and in that room was a person who knew exactly who he was, and was glad about it.

When things were very bad — when a crisis ran long, when something went wrong in a way that took time to process, when Barry came home at four AM having run until he was tired in the particular way that comes not from physical effort but from caring too much — Iris was there. She did not make it better in any mechanical sense. She made it not alone.

"Tell me about it," she would say.

And he would. And the telling helped in the way that telling always helps, which is why people do it even when they know it won't change what happened.

In Central City, there is a man who runs at the speed of light and can outrun time itself. He holds the record for fastest rescue in documented Justice League history. He has outthought Gorilla Grodd and outmaneuvered Captain Cold and outrun the Reverse-Flash through the corridors of time.

He has never, on any occasion, outrun Iris West.

He has tried, in the friendly and theoretical way. She always finds him. Not by speed — she has no more speed than the next person. By the particular knowledge of someone who knows another person completely, and can extrapolate from that knowledge the thirty-seven places that person might be when the world gets too loud.

She finds him. She sits beside him. She brings coffee, properly hot this time.

And the Flash, who runs across the entire world, is home.