How do you miss someone you never knew?
Iris can't answer the question. Standing in front of her mother's grave, she waits for it to feel more real. Her mother is there, right there, cradled in Mother dirt, never to speak or laugh or live again. Her life is over; Iris' carries on. Knowing that she must be her mother's keeper is a burden she doesn't know she can handle. All she knows it that she has to.
She sways with the dusky wind, waiting for the cold spell of early morning to snap. She refuses to accept the finality of the grave in front of her, knowing that her mother will beckon "Baby?" in that sweet, familiar tone, half-remembered from half a lifetime ago. She knows her mother will stand behind her, and Iris will turn with relief and heartbreak welling in her chest to face her once again.
Taking a seat in the grass, Iris exhales hard. It feels wrong to cry, to mourn someone who has been in her life for less than a decade when she was twice that age now. She hadn't known her mother beyond those affectionate, stirring moments of imagination, conjured up by Dad's stories. Iris recalls nights (real or not real?) where Mom would make Dad smile and laugh; she can almost feel it when her mother hugs her so close that she knows that the rest of the world will have no room to come in between them. Her heart bears the impression of those promises in gentle moments: I love you, baby girl. I love you so much.
She sobs, a deep, irrepressible ache arching through her. She was here once before, walking through the front door and finding Dad on the couch, knowing immediately that something was wrong, but it could have meant anything until: Honey, Mom isn't coming back. It was too powerful to process in one fell swoop, but she still remembers fisting Dad's shirt and wailing into it, like she could somehow release the anguish if she just screamed loud enough. It hadn't changed anything then and it doesn't change anything now. The only difference is the cool crush of her own hand against her mouth as she tries to stay silent and still, to draw no attention to the impossibility of her grief.
She lost her mother once. How could she lose her again?
When Wally's shadow drapes over her, she does not move. She does not say, "Why are you here?"
She knows why.
Wally kneels and sits back on his heels, one hand clasping his opposite wrist in front of him, quiet, reverent. She feels the force of his emotion like a gust of wind as it washes over her, sudden and intensely real. The stillness it brings – the meditative calmness, the absolute restraint – seems to ease the suffocating weight from her chest, letting her breathe. Slower, deeper. More alive, somehow.
He leans forward, caressing the edge of the grave with a hand, and there is a flash of silvery tears in his eyes before he closes them. She doesn't miss the spark of red that passes between living hand and sleeping stone; she recognizes the faint burn of Speed Force under his skin. The grave purples in the morning light before Wally opens glowing amber eyes and exhales, removing his hand after a long moment.
Seeing him humbled, moved to speechlessness, prompts her to rest her head on his shoulder. She feels the muscles in his arm relax even though his gaze remains fixed on the headstone, his breathing slightly unsteady. As if it is familiar to them, he wraps an arm around her back in response, the ache of the Speed Force in him like a swan song.
Wally is different than Barry, yet he is someone she knows. The lightning under his skin is instantly recognizable. Everything about him is I know you with strange certainty, like they have been part of each other's lives for all of these years. Maybe they have – peripherally, never in sight but always in mind, missing one half of the equation. For Wally it was Dad; for her, it was Mom. Being back together is bittersweet; no more searching, no more missing.
Wally is right: they had grown up without each other and he hadn't asked for a sister and she hadn't wanted a brother. Their lives were their own; asking them to intermingle was affronting at best and antagonizing at worst. But now – with Mom before them and Dad at home – it is like being family for the first time, recognizing the degree of loss for the first time.
He says, very softly, "Her favorite color was yellow."
Iris doesn't speak, squeezing his arm lightly.
"She loved to sit out on the porch and watch the sun rise," he muses. "I'd wake up and the house would just be so quiet. You could hear the wood breathing. It scared me at first; I'd look around the kitchen and living room, and ask, Where's Mama? But then I opened the front door and she was right there, smiling out at the sky. I couldn't bring myself to interrupt her, so I'd sit on the stair next to her and wait for the sky to go blue."
He exhales slowly, a cloud of silver sparks tinting it, painless and unthreatening. "We couldn't afford much," he admits, "so we loved to talk these drives every now and then. Sometimes I'd push my face up against the window and watch all these houses fly by, all these people with their own lives, and it was like we were the only two people alive. But I remember how good it felt to roll down that window and feel the breeze when it was sunny, no matter how cold, your breath steaming when there was snow. She'd play her favorite music, old stuff, good stuff, and sing along."
Pausing, he has to clear his throat before he can continue, looking right at the grave with a fond, aching smile. "She had a good voice. I wish you'd heard her sing. She used to say that, uh, her and Dad – it was like their love language. It was the only thing she ever really talked about, so I always –" He laughs, reaching back to rub his own neck self-consciously, "I thought Dad was a singer or something. She loved him," he says softly, falling silent, unable to fill in the space.
Iris takes it up for him, leaning against him. "Dad said she was a good singer," she admits. "And that she cared more about us than anything else in the world."
"Yeah," Wally says, squeezing her shoulder once. "She – she never mentioned a daughter—"
"Dad never mentioned a son," Iris rejoins.
Wally nods, sitting back on his heels a little as Iris does the same, open palms against her own thighs, watching the red light bathe the headstone in pre-dawn light. "But she missed Dad. It wasn't obvious – I missed it for years – but after track practice I'd be out there sweating on the field, struggling to keep both feet underneath me, and when I finally straggled home she'd say, 'You're a good man, Wally West,' and she'd look at me like I was him. Growing up to be like him, I guess." He reaches up to press his palms against his eyes, shoulders shaking briefly before they still. "I – everything I did – was to make her proud," he says in a slow, strangled tone. "I hope I did."
"Wally," she breathes, as a proverbial knife punches through his gut and drives a pained sound from him, "she was so, so proud of you."
He looks skyward, focusing on breathing slow and shallow, and regains his voice. "She – she wasn't perfect, she wasn't – we never had much, and there were nights when she wasn't herself, when – the drugs, they, uh – it was hard, sometimes. It was hard.
"But I loved her," he says fiercely, vehemently, like he needs the universe to know. "God, I loved her. She took me to a ball game once – she didn't care for baseball and I didn't, either, but it was a perfect night. Lots of happy people all crowded in these stands, not so much you couldn't kick up your feet on the plastic back in front of you, just enough that you felt like you were a part of something. We didn't even know which team to root for at the beginning, but by the end when people started to drift off and only the most dedicated fans were left behind, we were laughing along and cheering for our batters like they were our brothers. They lost, but it was a great game, and it was nice to be a part of something big and beautiful for a while.
"That's what life was like. We didn't know all the rules, didn't know how we were going to stay above the streets sometimes, and that's when I started racing, because I was fast on the field and faster behind the wheel of a car. I crashed a lot in those early days, broke my wrist, a couple ribs, dislocated shoulders and fractured that socket around my eye countless times, but I'd get back up each time because four losses were still equal to one win. And after the wrecks, I'd pry myself out of the front seat, and it was clear that the race was over. The racers were gone, and I didn't have friends. You weren't supposed to crash, and if you did, that was on you.
"But I'd come home and Mama would be there and she wouldn't ask why I'd been stupid enough to get roughed up when we both knew the ER was too damn expensive. She'd just call up Dr. Angelina Peters, the widow across the street whose practice was small but important to us, and she'd say, 'Could you come over?' She'd do it for free – we'd force cookies on her, anything to feel like it wasn't taking more than we had any right to, and she'd put me back together, bandaging and resetting and asking how those ribs were healing up. First time I won a race, got a pot of $2,500, I went to Dr. Peters' home on her day off and said, 'Ma'am, I am so sorry to bother you, but I just got this crick in my neck that's killing me.'
"She could see right through me, so she knew I was lying," he muses, rocking forward, like he wants to lean in to Mom, conspiratorial, childish, guess-what-I-did levels of glee, "but she had no idea that underneath my big old varsity jacket I had a wad of cash. So I asked her what the best remedy would be – ice, of course, some ibuprofen, stuff I already knew. I said, 'Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Peters,' and gave her five Benjamins.
"I told her that my team had won the state track-and-field championship – which was true – and that we were each given a small scholarship – which was not – and after everything she'd done for me, it was the least I could do."
He clasps his hands together, one hand holding the opposite wrist, and shakes his head slowly, musingly. "I was fourteen when I realized you could make a living racing cars. You had to be good, and you had to be fast, which meant the stakes were always higher for the best racers," he explains, and Iris watches him, glowing with that Speed Force red-light, like a stoplight before a race began, ready-set-go. It's only just visible, a trick of light, even, but she can't take her eyes away from him. With one hand she tugs gently on the closest strands of grass, needing to channel her emotions somewhere as she listens, engines revving softly in her mind.
"I never had a problem with it," he explains. "High stakes, that is. I wasn't smart enough to be top of the class and get full ride scholarships anywhere. College was the only way up, so I knew I'd be on my own if I wanted to get through it. That puts a certain pressure on you to succeed that just racing for some spending money doesn't. Nobody races for spending money; we've all got families to feed. I'm just lucky I only had myself and Mama.
"But once you get good enough, you realize you can do more than make a few ends meet – you can make something of yourself. You can start to save up some of those big wins, ignore that ache in your back from a spectacular crash six weeks ago because it's not going to stop you from hitting the pavement tonight.
"I started to think, 'Maybe I can go to college.'
"Then Mama got sick."
He quiets, rocking slowly, like a half-remembered dream. "She started losing weight, losing touch with reality. She stopped sitting out on the porch; stopped asking how I was doing. It was like she was asleep, never really aware of what was happening. Then one night I woke up and she was crying and I just – knew."
Wally clears his throat again. The tears in his eyes are unmistakable, but his voice stays steady, soft. "I took her to the ER, her front soaked in blood where she'd vomited, and they admitted her right away. They wouldn't give me much – they didn't know much – but their silence – I knew it wasn't good. As it got to be two, three, four in the morning with no sign of improvement, I felt this cold, terrible certainty that she wasn't going to make it.
"She did. Barely. Her organs – liver, kidney, heart, you name it – it was a miracle she survived that night. The bloodwork made it conclusive: she had late stage MacGregor's syndrome. The, ah," he reaches up, holding his hand to his mouth, and Iris puts a hand on his knee, feeling the tension, the pain no amount of painkillers can alleviate. "They gave her six months to a year," he chokes, like it's hurting him, but she doesn't stop him when he keeps going. "They said – they warned us that her quality of life would deteriorate over time, and our best option was to – to keep her comfortable. There's no cure, so we – we didn't have any delusions about it, never thought we'll beat this – but we did know that we still had time.
"I tried – to keep – her comfortable," he gasps.
Iris leans over, then, and it's her arms around his big warm back, his sobs heavy against her shoulder. "I'm sorry," she tells him, tears carving down her own face, "I'm so sorry."
Because she knows that the course of her own life doesn't reflect Wally's – cop's salaries aren't one-percent, but they're enough, and Dad never struggled with an addiction that would one day kill him. There was no question that she would go to college – scholarships were pursued, but they weren't the end-all, be-all. Dad even got Barry through college, helped him get his footing in the world. Holding onto Wally as his earth shakes apart, she's struck by just how much of the family he'd been carrying on his shoulders.
How much he had taken here, to Mom's grave.
As he sobs, she thinks about what this would have been like if Mom had never reached out in those final days – if she had chosen to die quietly, unnoticed, with only a shattered son in her wake. She thinks about Wally planning the funeral, Wally being one of too-few in attendance, Wally sitting here alone, weeping, because she was his only family.
And she is grateful, suddenly, overwhelmingly, that Mom did reach out. That she broke the happy lie Iris had grown up with, that she brought some of the reality that her and Wally had lived with for years, that she wanted to be a family one last time.
They sit in the grass, knees stained with dirt, Mom's grave at their side. The fading white roses at its foot are still too fresh, its sun-dappled surface is still too smooth, but Iris is grateful that she is there.
Mom made mistakes – big enough mistakes that Dad and her didn't stay together, that life got tougher for both of them – but she raised Wally. She brought him here to remember someone Iris couldn't, someone who was gone too soon in her life and back far too late.
She feels Wally exhale hard, his forehead against her shoulder, and she isn't big enough for him, isn't strong enough to support his standing weight, but kneeling at his side she can handle him. She can share some of the pain. She can be there, no matter how much it hurts, because she needs to be.
And she's aware of his own arms holding her up, letting her into his life, a sister he never wanted but accepted, even so.
Yellow light filters through the stack of trees on the far side of the cemetery, fanning across Mom's grave.
Her favorite color was yellow.
Iris feels the Speed Force radiating from Wally, giving him strength, solidarity, and when he finally straightens with a shuddering gasp she releases him.
He reaches forward, putting one hand on the grave, and she expects torment in his voice and finds solemnity instead, heavy, weighed-down, like snow. "I love you," he tells the headstone, leaning forward to wrap both arms around it. "I love you."
There are red sparks between him and the stone when he pulls away, tears in his eyes but strength in his voice as he tells Iris without looking at her, "She loved you, too."
Iris reaches out, squeezes his elbow. You, too.
With a deep breath, Wally clears his throat, planting a fist in the dirt and leveraging himself to his feet. He extends a hand and pulls Iris to hers, the grave still the same, their mother's presence still sedate and sheltered away from them forever, but something changed between them.
Walking back into the city, sunrise at their backs, they take their time walking home.
In years to come, Iris will find Kid's Ghost kneeling at that grave, one arm extended, holding onto the headstone. Wally is nowhere to be found – it's simply the shadowy figure whom she has come to know through Flash but recognizes as not Flash when she sees Kid – but his presence is felt in that humble remembrance. And even though Barry and Wally have been gone for too long and Iris is worried and Jesse has never been more agitated to find them, that sighting puts something in both of them at ease.
Anchor, she thinks, as Kid pays homage to Wally's history.
And, she knows, as they reach the porch of Dad's house, refuge. A place to weather a storm.
Alone for one last moment, they savor the breath of the wood underfoot, the brilliant yellow sunrise, and the gentle lullaby of Mama's memory.
Then Wally takes the door, letting her inside, and follows suit.