She doesn't understand what's happening, only that she's never seen an assembly of police lights as blinding as those currently flashing outside on her street, or this many cops surrounding her house this late at night. The alarm she feels is brisk, and she hurriedly rushes downstairs in search of her father. He never left for a work emergency unless he woke her to tell her he would be gone, and the fact that he hadn't done that tonight sends Iris into a panic.
"Daddy!" she calls out, skipping the bottom two steps of the staircase in her haste to find him. "Daddy!"
She halts when she discovers that the lamp in the living room is switched on, and a sense of relief overcomes her. The feeling swiftly becomes confusion when she discerns that the person seated on the couch bathed in a warm glow isn't her father.
"Barry?" She blinks at him, trying to fathom what her best friend could be doing here at this hour, not to mention in the midst of a seeming police crisis where her dad was nowhere to be found.
Once he meets her eyes though, all questions cease, and Iris doesn't want to probe anymore, only wants to hug him until he has no tears left to cry.
"My dad didn't do it," Barry sniffs, his voice small from his position on her lap, smaller still after having sobbed through his story of what he just witnessed. "I swear my dad didn't do it, Iris."
"I know he didn't," Iris affirms, her hands stroking his hair. And she did know it, because Barry never lied, and Henry was the best man she had ever known, after her own dad. That he asked her to call him Henry instead of Dr. Allen was just one testament to his kindness.
"What's going to happen to Henry?" Iris asks her father once Barry's asleep in the guest bed they made up for him.
Her father fixes her with a long sympathetic look before inhaling. "Baby…you know bad actions have their consequences."
"You can't put Henry in jail!" Iris cries, her eyes welling at the mere thought of her friend's father in prison, surrounded by real criminals. "He's Barry's dad!"
"Sweetheart-"
"He didn't do it!" Iris shrieks, surprising herself and her father with her frantic emotion. "Barry said he didn't do it!"
The next thing she perceives is her nose being pressed to her father's coat and his strong arms around her.
"Okay, Babygirl," he murmurs into her forehead, planting a kiss there. "It's okay, just-cry. You cry all night if you have to, and I'll be right here."
"He's going to go to jail," she weeps against his chest, "for something he didn't do."
Her father doesn't reply, only rubs her shoulders and kisses her hair.
She squeezes him tightly, buries herself into him as much as she can, hot tears falling briskly.
"Why do bad things happen to good people?" she whispers.
The flashbacks she's experiencing now are palpable enough to be the real thing, and it takes Iris a moment to realize what she's watching is real. Flickers of red and white, sirens blaring loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood, yellow tape marking the entrance to their apartment building. She quickly learns that the last few years of living a life on edge haven't diminished the trepidation that always comes with the feeling that something isn't right.
She's grateful for her dad by her side, insisting he would drive her to the loft after Barry didn't come back. She exits the car, taking the scene in, her brows furrowing.
Iris freezes when she spots the last thing she ever thought she'd see: Singh ushering a handcuffed Barry to a cruiser.
"Barry!"
She races in his direction, confusion replaced with a different kind of hysteria altogether.
He turns to her, his arms twitching slightly as though they want to reach for her before he remembers they're trapped behind his back. She catches just a glimpse of his expression before another cop she doesn't recognize pushes him forward again. As brief as it was, it's long enough for her to know the remorse etched into his face will haunt her for days to come.
"What the hell is going on here?" Joe's tone is fierce, and Iris can't remember a time she's felt her father exude anger like this. "David?"
Singh shrugs, and it's a little too heedless for Iris's liking, even if her present cognition is distorted, is focused only on Barry, is framing anyone willing to treat him like a convict as heinous. In this instant, she can't believe this is the same man her father deems a friend, how he could attend her wedding one day and arrest her husband another.
"You should ask Allen that at the precinct," is all Singh says, and Iris has nothing for him but hatred.
She has to put that aside though, because there's no way she's waiting to speak to Barry until then, as though he were a real felon, and not the best man she's ever known. She runs as far as her heels will take her toward him, before they can force him into the police vehicle.
"Barry…" and the tears are gathering, and they've been gathering for a long time now, since her supposed death, since his disappearance into the Speed Force, since the attack on their wedding, and Iris can't help if they spill now, after finally having him only to lose him once again.
He's crying too, but she can tell he's hiding his anguish in his assurance of her.
"I didn't do it," he utters with soft firmness. "I didn't do it, Iris."
She doesn't get a chance to swear that without even knowing the crime, she believes him, that she's always believed him and always will, because he's then shoved into the backseat, obstructed by the door shutting, and driven off into the distance. The sirens echo through her ears long after the car disappears from her vision.
For not the first time, Iris feels abandoned, and even her father stepping beside her to cradle her close can't lessen her loneliness. He holds her while she weeps, and she contemplates the same question that seventeen years haven't helped her answer: Why do bad things happen to good people?