Iris was startled awake by the sounds of familiar lyrics sung in a strange voice. Once her eyes flew open, nothing they took in made sense to her. A mix of images, chaotic and alien, flooded in. There was a young Latino guy in black t-shirt jumping behind a female doctor, and so many machines and white walls surrounded her that she momentarily wondered if she was in a high-tech psych ward.

These two people whose names she couldn't quite catch took turns poking and prodding her, spouting a stream of technical jargon about lightning and cellular regeneration that she wasn't processing. After a minutes, their flurry was interrupted by the entrance of a man in a wheelchair. She blinked a couple of times before suddenly remembering his face being plastered a few of Barry's Physics Today magazine covers.

"Harrison Wells?" She asked, bewildered. She knew he was a renowned scientist, but she hadn't remembered anything about him being paralyzed. "Is this… STAR Labs? How long have I been here?"

"Nine months." His voice was deep and gravelly, polite but lacking warmth. "Welcome back, Miss West. We have a lot to discuss."

Iris shook her head. She didn't want to discuss anything with this man, not when it had been nine months since she'd been home. Where was her dad? Was he okay? Where was Barry?

"Barry came to see you quite often," Doctor Wells responded. Apparently she had asked the question out loud. "I'm sure he's at work right now. He can wait a few more minutes while I explain your delicate situation."

She was about three seconds from cussing him out, but thankfully the guy with the Twizzlers in his pocket – apparently his name was Cisco, she'd try to remember that – saved the day.

"Why don't we let her go see her boyfriend, and then she can come back after?"

He's not my boyfriend was on the tip of her tongue, but she decided it would take too long to explain, so instead she nodded gratefully and took off.

She knew she'd find him hard at work in his CSI lab at the Central City Police Department, but what she didn't expect was how starkly different everything would look when she got there. In place of the usual shelves lined with chemicals, there were now missing persons plastered all over the brick wall, all dating back to the particle accelerator explosion. Which was incidentally the last thing she could remember before today. Next to a few of the photos, there were lists of… Traits? Abilities? Science words, for sure. There was a Danton Black, and beside his picture Barry had written "Nuclear Physiology?" in red sharpie.

After tearing her gaze away from the wall of weird, Iris turned to see her best friend hunched diligently over his computer, typing like his life depended on it with one hand and holding a test tube in the other. Her heart constricted with a surge of emotion she couldn't quite describe at the sight of him. His brow was furrowed in concentration and he was biting his lip so hard she feared it might bleed, but he was still a sight for sore eyes. It felt to her like she'd just seen him yesterday, but knowing it had actually been nine months made her heart ache like nothing she'd ever known before.

"Barr…" She whispered, torn between not wanting to startle him and desperately wanting him to look at her.

Barry's head whipped up immediately and his mouth dropped open. "Iris, what…?" He squeezed his eyes shut, muttering that he must be dreaming.

Iris couldn't take the distance between them and closed the gap within seconds, practically jumping on him as she enveloped him in a tight hug. She felt his arms around her back, wrapping her up in a tight embrace. Her feet lifted off the ground and for a moment she really did feel like she was flying. It was so good to be home again.

Then, just as quickly, he released her and took a step back. "Iris, what are you doing here? When did you wake up? Do you need anything – have you called your dad?"

Coming from anyone else, the series of rapid-fire questions would have disconcerted her, but Barry's worried voice was more comforting than anything else. "Barr, I'm fine. I just woke up, and I wanted to see you first."

He shot her his signature smile, the one so warm she swore it could melt the sun, and then he took her hand gently in his own. "You don't know how happy I am to see you. I really thought… All those times at the hospital, and then at STAR Labs, you heart kept stopping and I –"

Tears were forming in his eyes, threatening to drop onto his long eyelashes, and Iris was overcome with the urge to wipe them away. Rather than let go of him to do so, though, she pulled him closer and placed his hand on her heart.

"See? It's still beating."

Barry's eyes widened in shock, and Iris became all too aware of just how fast her heart was beating. Clearly Barry noticed too, because the test tube dropped out of his hand like a dead weight. Time seemed to stand still as she watched the glass tube suspended in mid-air, but when she finally caught it in her free hand, it had only fallen an inch.

"Woah!" He gasped, staring at her hands. "Those were some quick reflexes."

She laughed it off, making a mental note to ask Dr. Wells if that had something to do with the cellular regeneration. "C'mon, Barry. Take me to my dad. He's waited long enough." She tugged on his hand and led him out of the room the way she'd been doing since they were children.

Iris wished the ground would swallow her whole, or that Clyde Mardon would pop right back up and suck her into his tornado. Just so that she wouldn't have to see her dad staring back at her with that horrified look on his face for a single second longer. She was in a stupid red leather suit – "reinforced tripolymer," Cisco has called it, and it sure felt like it was forcing her to stop breathing with how tight it was – like she was a tabby Catwoman or something, and she had just been running literal circles around a murderer at super speed. If she were still a teenager, she'd definitely be grounded right about now.

When her father found his words again, the first thing he said was, "You can't tell Barry about any of this."

She was about to agree automatically, mostly because she'd agree with anything to make things seem okay right now, but the order struck her as cruel and unusual. She told Barry everything. In fact, she'd already been envisioning the look he'd have on his face when she modeled the suit for him, which she had been planning on doing right before Mr. Mardon decided to come back from the dead. Thinking about wearing the suit in front of Barry made her feel flushed, which was odd, but she put it aside because the important question here was:

"Why?"

"Baby, you know how he is." Joe West placed both his hands on his daughter's shoulders and gave her his trademark father-knows-best look. "He's been searching for answers to his mother's death since he was ten. Hell, he's already in way too deep with the supernatural stuff going on since the explosion."

Ah. So that's what the photographs in his lab were about.

"If he knew you were a part of it, too? You know he'd stick his nose right in it. He'll get himself killed."

Iris nodded. "I'll keep Barry safe, Dad," she replied evenly. That was a promise she could keep, at least.

She'd spent the last few weeks avoiding Barry as much as possible. Mostly because she couldn't stand to lie to him, but there was also a part of her that had awakened from the coma no longer knowing how to act around him. She found herself laughing more than ever before at everything he said, an awkward high-pitched laugh she wasn't used to. And although she probably wasn't touching him more than normal, she felt it every time she did. She could hear the drumming noise in her ears every time he was near her, and her heart beat so fast she swore he could hear it, too. So rather than deal with whatever that was, she spent most of her time at STAR Labs speed-reading Biochem textbooks letting her new friends conduct speed tests on her.

Tonight, though, she was going to have to suck it up. She'd overheard the new cop from Keystone – new to her, anyway, since she'd been dead to the world when he showed up – making fun of Barry's for his paranormal blog, and she'd figured it was something she had to check out. Sure enough, her best friend had been keeping tabs on every metahuman sighting since the night of the explosion, and was even running a forum filled with conspiracy theorists.

On a hunch, she typed the words "red blur" into the search box and found barely-visible glimpses of her at crime scenes. Or rather, barely-visible glimpses of the traces she left behind after zooming away from crime scenes. So Barry had been keeping tabs on her, after all.

She wanted to pore through the posts and see everything he'd said about her in the last month, seeing as the headline 'Central City's Very Own Heroine' already made her feel tingly inside. How the hell does he know I'm a woman, anyway? But she couldn't waste any more time. She made a username on the forum, praying no one but him would be able to see new registrations, and then sent him a DM.

RedStreak
I'm the one you've been looking for. Don't freak out, I'm coming over.

She hoped he'd have time to read it before she dropped by in approximately thirty seconds. She'd tried to think of somewhere neutral to meet, but she had no guarantee he'd agree to it, and even if he did there would probably be cameras anywhere she chose.

Approximately thirty seconds later, she donned her red suit and jimmied the faulty lock on his bedroom window open. On the other side, she found herself facing a very frightened Barry Allen holding a baseball bat in the dark.

"Did you really think that thing was gonna work on me?" She asked sardonically, vibrating her vocal chords to mask her voice. It was a cool trick she'd been practicing, and it was unfortunate she hadn't learned it before outing herself to her dad in the first place.

"Well, I didn't really think it would be you." His voice sounded out of breath, but no longer the scared kind. "I was definitely expecting a run-of-the-mill stalker to show up."

She felt that high-pitched laughter starting to bubble up in her chest, coupled with an urge to tease him with I'm sure you get plenty of those, but she fought both. "Mr. Allen," she declared, as solemnly as she could muster with the echo chamber her vocal chords were creating. "Why have you been writing about me? You're going to land yourself in trouble."

He smiled goofily. "What, you think some villain might kidnap me for being your biggest fan?"

"It's been known to happen." She smiled in spite of herself, and hoped the dim light from the bathroom wasn't enough for him to see it. "But honestly, tell me what you're hoping to gain from your blog."

He took a deep breath, appearing to be both steadying himself and contemplating her sincerity. "My mom died when I was young," he said, his voice now quiet and withdrawn. "And my dad went to jail for it, but I know he didn't do it. For years, the only person who believed me was my best friend."

Iris felt the blood rushing to her ears again, and she had to physically restrain herself from reaching out to him.

"The night the particle accelerator exploded, my friend was struck by lightning. She was in a coma for nine months, and I was so scared she would… Well, at the same time, I started noticing all these strange events around the city. People were walking around with powers, and I knew it had to be connected to that night, you know? I guess I hoped that if I could figure out what was going on, I could figure out how to wake her up."

She swallowed, trying to choose her words carefully. "You said your friend was in a coma. Did she wake up? Why are you still looking, then?"

"She did." His eyes lit up with the relief of his words, but his mouth was still etched in a frown. "But she hasn't been the same. I didn't want to burden her with all this while she's recovering, anyway. Then you showed up, and…" He steeled himself before releasing his next words in a burst of energy. "I thought you could help me solve my mom's murder."

With impeccably terrible timing, Cisco chose just then to alert her to a fire downtown through her headset. She silently cursed the Central City fire department for being so slow. "Listen, Barry, I've got to run. But we'll talk again soon, okay?"

"So you're not going to force me to stop writing about you?"

"No." She smiled warmly at him and, this time, she didn't care if he could see. "You should burden your friend, though. Trust me, if she really is your friend? She wants you to."

And with that, she dashed back out into the night.

Barry followed her alter ego's advice and gave her a call the very next night, so she agreed to meet him at his apartment. She was grateful he hadn't asked to him over to her place, because she didn't need her dad listening in or giving her the evil eye.

This time, she knocked on the front door like a regular person and waited. She felt that it took him an eternity to open the door, but the sight of him once he did was rewarding. He was wearing a crisp new shirt, and his hair was barely tousled enough that she wanted to run her fingers through it. But that wasn't the reason she had come.

"You said you wanted to talk, Barr?" She prompted once he had led her to the couch in the living room and sat next to her like a mute.

"Yeah." He cleared his throat, looking as nervous as she felt. "I have to tell you something."

She watched him take a deep breath as she waited for him to continue, noting that he seemed to be bracing himself for something awful. Unable to stand the worried look on his face, she pulled him in for a hug. He accepted it willingly, and she found that she didn't mind the way he nearly crushed her in his arms.

"I love you, Iris," he whispered into her hair. He'd said it a million time before, but this was more important somehow.

"I love you, too, Barry." She responded without thinking, but she meant it with all her heart. He released her from his embrace so quickly, though, that she feared she had said the wrong thing.

"No, I mean, I'm in love with you."

She could've stopped him right there, but he clearly had a lot more to say, so she kept quiet.

"When we were kids I loved you before I even know what the word love meant. And then my mom died and I had to go live with the girl I had a crush on. Look, there were so many times I wanted to tell you. Junior Prom, when I went away to college, when I came back from college, nights that we stayed up talking, all the birthdays, all the Christmases, but I never did. I kept it in."

She wondered how he knew himself as well as he did. There had been so many times she wanted to say so much more to him, but she certainly hadn't figured out so quickly what that more was.

"After I lost my mom and my dad, I was afraid that if you didn't feel the same way, I would lose you, too. That's the irony. I was so scared of losing you, that I almost did. If you had died, I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. I know I've had our whole lives to tell you this and you've just lost nine months of yours, and my timing couldn't be any worse, but I just –"

Iris decided she had heard enough. She grabbed his collar and pulled him in, silencing him with the crush of her lips against his own. His surprise wore off quickly, but his first gasp of unexpected pleasure made her smile against his lips. His hands stopped flailing long enough to cup both her cheeks, and she tugged on his shirt to bring him even closer. He gently caught her bottom lip between his own and sucked on it as his thumbs caressed her jawline. Once he released her bottom lip, she opened her mouth to deepen the kiss so that their tongues could find each other.

She had absolutely no desire to pull away, but she knew there was something she was supposed to say. She let go of his shirt and scooted back with a sigh, happily taking in his dreamy glazed-over expression before speaking.

"I had something to tell you, too, but now I guess it's two things."

He nodded for her to continue, his left hand still resting on her cheek, tracing soft circles with his thumb while he waited ever so patiently.

"First: I love you, too. And when I say love, I also mean in love with you."

This produced a sound from Barry that was somewhere between a choke and a cry, and she found she liked it very much.

"Second: I'm the Streak. A name which, by the way, you need to change immediately. It's not cute and you can do better."

They'd have to work on alternatives later, though – personally she was gunning for 'the Flash' – because Barry had literally slid off the couch and fainted.