"All of this time, we've been trying to save Iris - you telling me that ... we should of been trying to save you, too?"
"You did save me, Joe. You took an eleven-year-old boy with a broken heart, and you gave him a home and so much love. No son ever felt more loved from a father."
"No father ever felt more proud of his son."
Joe taps on the door.
"Hey," his pop says, holding open the door and smiling at him. "Son, I haven't seen you in - well, hell, come on in."
Together, they sit out on the back porch. Benjamin West rocks in his chair and smiles. "Man, I love the smell of rain," he says. "Never gets old, does it?" Looking over at his son, he frowns. "What brings you out here?"
Joe tries to find words, but there aren't any. His hands are numb. His heart feels dead. "Something happened," he says.
Benny stops rocking. "Is Iris okay?" he asks at once. His concern is Joe's own. But Joe shakes his head.
"She's fine," he assures. Then, course-correcting, he amends, "As fine as she can be." Throat closing, he reaches up to press a hand to his eyes. Tears press back. "I've been holding this close to my chest for my kids, but ... not saying anything is killing me."
Benny leans forward and puts a hand on his knee, giving it a shake. "You know us," he says bracingly, "we're Wests, we don't let stuff stand in our way. Talk to me. Whatever happened, we'll get through it."
"Barry's gone," Joe says, meeting his pop's eyes. "I don't - I don't know if he's ever coming back."
Benny is silent for a long moment, leaning back. "What do you mean?" he asks quietly. Thunder growls in the distance, but neither man moves.
Joe shakes his head. There's no good place to begin. "It's ... complicated, but he's ... you know that guy in red that runs around Central City every night? They call him 'The Flash.'"
Benny lifts both eyebrows. "That's him?" Joe nods. "The superhero?" When Joe nods again, Benny rocks back in his chair and whistles. "I heard he can run on water."
"He can do a lot more than that," Joe admits. "Been giving me gray hairs for years now."
"You gave me gray hairs in my thirties," Benny says without heat. "That's what kids are for. Somebody hurt him?"
More than once. "Not this time," Joe says. "But he ... went away. To a place I can't follow. He didn't say when he'd - if he'd come back."
"He'll come back," Benny says firmly. "Kid adores you."
Joe shakes his head. "It's not his choice," he says, rocking in his chair. Thunder crackles, closer, now, but it's soothing, primordial. "He felt like he had to go."
"Why?" There's only curiosity in Benny's voice. Joe appreciates it; his dad's never been one to push, only to listen. He loves listening, loves stories. He collects them like some people collect stamps, quietly, earnestly.
"When you can do what he does, it messes with your head," Joe begins. Benny rocks slowly beside him, out-of-sync but still on the same page, gaze fixed on him. "You start to feel like the whole world's your problem. At least, that's how I see it. Back when I was twenty-eight, my life was my badge - I didn't have any superpowers, but I wanted to save the world."
"You were such a bright-eyed wonder," Benny muses. "Every month I'd get a letter. Real formal, too - I could tell the academy had had an effect on you. But I could read between the lines and see how grateful you were to be doing what you were doing. How Captain Sanchez changed you."
"Dani was a hell of a woman," Joe agrees, brought back to that place, nearly thirty years ago, when he was young and his badge still shone bright in the light, when he could walk into a precinct and know everybody's names, where busboys and interns and low-level cops were all merged into one role (and he knows they were because he was all of them). He kept his shirt pressed and his shoulders back, ready to perform miracles. When he showed up for his first week, his first month, his first year, it still felt like being handed the keys to the kingdom every time he stepped into the CCPD, a true-blue member of the team.
His throat tightens because Captain Dani Sanchez, aged forty-nine, took a leave of absence from the force after her second son died. Car accident. Nobody saw it coming - Thiago was rambunctious, loved cookouts and playing with big dogs - but it hit the whole CCPD family. When the call came in that there was an accident involving Thiago, Joe had seen the light bleed out of her eyes as everybody, absolutely everybody, fell silent. A family friend finally delivered the verdict at 9:51 PM.
It wasn't even a question to Joe at the time: she would leave the force. He'd hoped she'd recover, come back some day, because she was a force unto herself, teaching him powerful things about the way the world worked, things you couldn't learn from a textbook. She wanted people to reach their potential, cared genuinely about her team, made it all feel like a family. But he'd known even then that her return was unlikely. There were some things you never got over, and the death of your child was one of them.
Thunder growls in the distance, low and unthreatening. It starts to rain, but neither man moves, shielded by the overhang. Rocking in a chair, watching the blue summer rains come down, Joe finds himself mesmerized for a time. But the heaviness in his chest doesn't abate. "Thiago was nineteen," he recalls.
"Too young," Benny says quietly.
Joe swallows hard. "Barry's twenty-eight."
With unassailable conviction, Benny says firmly, "He'll come back." When Joe doesn't respond, he carries on, hands on either arm of the chair. "You remember that first Christmas we spent together? Kid was glued to your side. You were starting to make me feel awfully old," he adds. The faintest of smiles twitches Joe's lips. "What, with Iris tugging at one sleeve and Barry holding onto the edge of your pants, I thought, 'My God, Joe's grown.'"
"I can't say I haven't enjoyed it," Joe admits, "being a father. Because I have. But..." Tears blur his vision and he has to blink and draw in a deep breath before he can continue. "You hear about terrible things happening to parents. You see it. You empathize with it. And then you live it. And suddenly it's your kids on the line, not just a stranger dealing with something awful, something unthinkable, a hypothetical out there out of reach. It's you. It's not tugging on your heartstrings from a million miles away. It's your baby."
He gasps, pain and grief making themselves known above the burgeoning storm. He strangles over his next words, agonizing aloud, "I tell them, I tell them 'Be careful' and they don't understand because they don't know what it's like to watch the life die from a parent's eyes. They think they'll be okay, that their lives are in their own hands. But I have to try ... I have to try to keep them safe or I won't be able to live with myself."
Holding a trembling hand to his mouth, he exhales and closes his eyes. In his memory, Dani is there, standing in the hallway outside Thiago's hospital room, hours-after. Joe wants to say something, but he finds himself utterly speechless. There is no designated language for grief.
The overwhelming powerlessness, the hopelessness, consumes him now, and it is not like a wave but a letting out, a giving-up, an ocean tide receding and never coming back. The shores he once knew are unfamiliar; everything about them is unmistakably different, irreconcilably changed. He does not know what to do about it as he wanders over the empty sands looking for it, calling its name, shouting it out to a void that won't hear, and a void that won't ever be filled.
"I can't live without them," he says, tears spilling over. "I - I can't, I can't - I can live with everything, I could lose everything but them. Not my kids."
The rain lets him sob in peace, Benny's gaze on the storm but a hand on Joe's knee. It is a ragged, gasping pain, like he drowned in those waters and came back looking for the joy they once brought him. That was what you did: you ate your heart out, loved them and loved them and loved them until you couldn't remember the world before them, and then one day you let go of them, and hoped that they returned.
"Joe," Benny says at last, and Joe sits up and recovers himself, because he can't air his grief out all at once. It is simply too deep, too raw, too insistent. All he can do is not die. "No matter how much that kid wants to save the world - how much any of your kids want to, Wally included - he will come back to you. You are his world."
Joe can barely speak. "I should've stopped him," he says, devastated and unwilling, unable to correlate his own guilt with survivor's grief ensnared by the endless cycle: if-only, if-only, if-only. Nothing he could've done would've stopped Barry, and Barry's mind had been made up for years, but it didn't matter. "I should've held on tighter." His hands clench around nothing, still able to feel the kid, lean and warm and solid one moment, vanishing the next. "I should've done something. Because if he never comes back-"
Benny sighs. "You'll kill yourself if you think like that," he says simply. He leans back in his chair, rocking back-and-forth, careful and contemplative. "Nothing and nobody is ever gonna replace Barry for you. No matter what happens. It's either Barry, or it's not Barry, and that's all there is to it." He reaches out and clasps Joe's shoulder. "But Barry is still alive. And as long as that kid is alive, and has even the remotest chance of coming back - he's going to. I know this is torture. I know it - not like you do, not like any other parent ever could, but I let go of my boy once, too, and he came back. Sometimes you've just gotta trust the universe."
Joe thinks about the universe, how singular and sharp it is - sentient, even, according to Barry's vague descriptions of the Speed Force - and tries to imagine trusting it to bring back Barry. It's not easy. Last time he came this close to losing Barry, he almost didn't let the kid out of his sight, terrified to see an empty suit where Barry had been standing. He should've held on. But there were too many should'ves in his life that he could never change.
The rain thickens, thunder corralling them back inside, and they settle on adjacent seats in the living room. It's so familiar to Joe - his pop never moved, preferring the simple, quiet life - that it takes some of the tension out of his shoulders.
He even smiles as he remembers the first time he brought Iris and Barry over. Barry was shy, especially around strangers, but Iris made herself at home anywhere and knew Paw Paw well. She showed Barry everything from the swings out back to the gray Maine Coon named Zanzibar perched irremovably on top of a tall cabinet. Even now, he's up there, regarding them regally, hasn't-aged-a-day magnificent. Joe and his own pop spent a good time doing what they're doing now - drinking, talking, listening to the rain in place of children's laughter - and he finds something reassuring in the timelessness.
His kids are grown-up, too, and moving into their own. There's a certain surreal joy to it all, first living the dream, and then seeing his kids get to live theirs. And yet - his chest still aches to think about that empty space at the CCPD, the empty hours waiting for a flash of red light, the empty consumption of his own life, on-hold-until-further-notice. He can't be removed - and he hasn't been - because Iris and Wally still need him, but he hasn't been fully present, either.
Soaking in the scene of a time long-past with the man who made him who he is today, Joe finds a sense of peace settling over him. He finds, even, that the prospect of riding a train for four hours tomorrow to get home won't be as torturous as it seemed on the way out here, aching over what he would say, how he could possibly encapsulate his feelings, all the while pretending for Iris and Wally that he wasn't falling apart.
Maybe he was falling apart a little, and maybe there was no way his own dad could stop him from hitting the ground hard. But he wasn't dead, and that meant he had to go on - somehow, some way, no matter what impeded him - for them, for himself. He had a life to live. He had a life to continue, in restless, in patient anticipation, in aching, unending trust of something he couldn't even see. In hope. Out of love.
"He loves you," Benny says, looking at him squarely. "He'll come back."
For the first time in four weeks, Joe starts to think it's true.
Seven months later.
One cool fall afternoon Benjamin West's doorbell rings. Not expecting company, he rises slowly to answer it. When he holds it open, he smiles at what he sees. "The prodigal's son returns," he announces with a smile, letting Barry clasp him in an inherited bear hug, a learned bear hug, that shows how deserving he is of the hyphenated West almost preceding his own last name. "Welcome back."