Barry sits on the porch and dreams with his eyes open.
At some point, some categorical yet indefinable moment later, the front door opens. Iris joins him, not near but next to, hip-to-hip, her body heat palpable. They don't speak for a time, uninspired to intrude on the nocturnal silence. Instead, together, they absorb the scene:
Like houses of cards, blue bungalows line the streets. Within those small homes filled with small people, the occasional lamp peers inquisitively outward, a lighthouse defined by its warm ochre glow. Autumn winds unveil the rich brown earth of the summer catacombs, exposing the roots of yawning oaks and supple ash. Street lamps flicker with periodic inattention, effusing the night with their shallow orange hazes. Even the asphalt, sheeted and silvered from a passing storm with an ample attitude to return, attains a consequent festiveness, shining under the lamplight. Against the backdrop of a dying September, leaves scrapbook their cherry, green, and golden gains, drifting apart in gusts sharper by the hour, posting memento moris across the way.
Feet on one step and elbows on his knees, Barry cups his chin in both hands and listens to the earth change its tune, moved by its profound desire to change. A breeze snaps twigs and he hunches inward, seeking to preserve his own body heat. This late in the year, the temperatures have fallen sharply from their summer highs. He almost misses the summer, but he does not remember the fullness of summer, did not partake in this summer, opted instead to spend the season in a place without summer, or rain, or snow.
He finds himself missing the implicit, volcanic warmth of the Speed Force, even though it is a place where heat cannot truly exist. For at its finest, at its most hair-splitting, temperature is nothing but the vibration of atoms, atoms which do not comprise Speed Force, atoms of which the Speed Force takes no part. Nondescript in the extreme, the Speed Force does not have seasons, or tides, or eons; it only has itself and, for a time, for-ever, him. It can be whatever it desires, unlike the Earth, the chaotic Earth, the undisciplined Earth, the young and guileless Earth.
Hands flexing slightly, he longs for home, and does not know which space calls him: that Place that is not a Place, or the reality before him, the life of heartbeats he has not felt and breaths he has not taken, words he has not spoken, a wedding he has not had. His attention turns gently to Iris, her deep, steady inhales earthen to him, foreign and familiar at once. He matches her, inhaling, holding, exhaling, until the finest of tremors in his shoulders and back ceases. Without asking, she rests her cheek on his shoulder, and he finds himself inexpressibly warmed by it, by the simplest extension of kindness in a changing and unknowable world.
Everything can be known in the Speed Force, for the Speed Force is all there is: ubiquitous, unchanging, unbroken across time and space, with none of the mortal perils of uncertainty. Back home, everything is uncertain: his next words, his next steps, the palette of sunrise and sunset. Nothing seems given – every hour shows him a new world, an unseen world, a world remade, unremarked. They have questions, thousands of questions, that they won't ask, and he extends the same courtesy, for he cannot define the devastated sinking feeling when he realizes just how many choices he must make here: every breath, every step, every glance.
The glancing touch at his side is more soothing than distressing, solidarity, understanding without provocation. Inside the house, Joe sleeps soundly; inside many houses, many people sleep soundly, or less soundly, or not at all, but no one else sits here on this porch beside Iris West. Barry relaxes minutely, for of all the untold fathoms of possibilities, this is his reality: the forgiving grace of a friend who waited forever for him.
For her, it wasn't, but he lived the forever without, the forever where he forgot what other people looked and sounded like. He forgot how the Earth felt beneath his heels. He forgot every worldly sensation imprinted upon him, every kindness and assault, every fear and frustration, every anguish and ecstasy. He knew only a time when the starry Speed Force sky was the full breadth of his reality, nothing before and nothing after. Truthfully, he may have died and not noticed – for there was no distinction between his unreality, his lack of living, beyond living, and the sensation of being alive. It was simply unmoving – and in the unmoving, the stillness, he found peace.
Some part of him still thinks he should have stayed in that safe-warm-dark place, but when they found him, he did not run. He saw their flare in the dark and walked towards it. He knew exactly what they wanted, and he gave it to them. He crossed the threshold and all it entailed, not for a better life, but for a life – a life of falling leaves, and bluegrass breezes, and the sound of Iris West falling asleep against his shoulder.
It's a subtle shift, but a prominent one, her soft sedation seeping into him until he nearly closes his eyes. Nearly, nearly – for there he never slept, never needed to, never truly wanted to, for where else would one go? He had no life apart from Speed Force, no sense of self beyond Speed Force, and in some way he is still Speed Force, intertwined totally, mind and heart. To dream is to live, and he is not fully of the land of the living, this changing place of shifting tides: he is of that Other realm, and something about it tugs upon him, hard enough that he sits on the porch with his eyes open even as it begins to dapple rain.
The rain awakes Iris, and it is she who finally stands, and finally tugs on his sleeve. He rises, and together they step inside the shadowed living room, his feet pressing with more weight against the floorboards than he expects, his every sense heightened to the grain of wood the sound of leaves the ruffled indigo curtains the couch the table the abandoned trinkets coffee cups and papers and chess pieces a bookend a fireplace a kitchen table and sink—
She tethers his sleeve, not touching his skin, and he follows her quietly upstairs. It is remarkably easy to make noise in this world, but his steps are somehow silent as he pads after her, matching her pace, and they retreat to a nook with more floors and walls and windows painted in silver rain a bed and white sheets and a lamp turned off clothes here and clothes there and a discarded note-to-self.
She settles and he settles and reposing on their sides they face each other, an ocean of white linen between them. She settles a hand and he looks down at it, wondering, what happens if he takes it, what happens if he doesn't, in this world of entropy something must happen and from that something, a further something irreversible will fall, dominoes, dominoes, walls and floors and little blue boxes with ochre lights—
Inching closer, tectonic, methodic, her hand pauses at the base of his fingertips, still not touching, and he waits for the world to decide for him, but it will not, not even the unceasing rain will move him, for he is a mountain unto himself, a force of nature, something small and forgettable and yet profound in its own way, like the leaves, and the streets, and the drowsing October.
Slowly and carefully, he reaches for her hand and feels the unlocked chaos in his heart soul and mind finally click into place, a quiet, calming sort of uncertainty, a mellow storm, something to bear witness to than hide from. With nothing but warmth, even that he cannot fail to read, she strokes her thumb across the back of his knuckles and he knows somehow, even as everything confuses him, and everything changes, that she is grateful, and he is grateful, too.
And a part of him longs for the rain and the streets he can no longer see, for the world he aches to experience in totality, for the existence which calls him to other-times and other-places. Yet with Iris' hand in his, he does not move, does not even try to, for it is, undeniably, unalterably, the very best place, and the singular time, that he wants to be.
He does not even know if or when he falls asleep, but he stays with her, and she with him, and it is the rebirth of an enduring love, a quiet conquering of fear, an affirmation of his own existence.
Existence in its grandeur still eludes him, but he still knows and still loves Iris West.