Entwined

He's a nice guy, Iris tells herself. Funny. Awkward, but in the sweet way, not the annoying way. Handsome. Almost perfect, really.

Except, he's not Eddie, with his dorky laugh that always came three seconds after everyone else had gotten the joke. His romantic gestures. His sweetness. And his bravery. Before him, she'd never thought any other man could be as brave as her father. Eddie was. He's gone, but she remembers him so vividly that sometimes it still feels like he lives with her.

And he's not Barry, her best friend, her husband in another world and an unexplored future. The one who can sit across from her and get her to open up in seconds. The one she finds herself holding onto without realizing it, brushing his fingers, reaching for his hugs. Her wool sweater against the world's coldness, the one she wraps around herself to protect her against the chill.

She shouldn't pass up an opportunity like Scott. But for all he is—there's just so much he's not.


It's not like Barry knows how it feels to disintegrate physically, reduced to minuscule remains like Eliza Harmon, but he knows exactly how it feels to disintegrate inside, to feel pulled to pieces by the demands of the world, until your own identity fractures into a million pieces.

But then something amazing happens—if you let it. Out of the fragments of your life, twisted and mixed with the lives of others, comes a new and stronger self, an identity that is bigger and better than you could ever be on your own, because it's connected with other people.

With friends, with fathers, with Iris.

He lives surrounded by beautiful women—Caitlin, Linda, Patty for a time, even the ill-fated Eliza. He values each one, little parts of himself twisted and entwined in a different way with each.

But Iris is different. Iris runs through him, through every memory and thought and hope. Through every imagination of the future and every moment of nostalgia for the past.

Other people lay claim to parts of his heart. He doesn't remember giving any of it to Iris; he simply realized, one day, that she possessed the whole thing.


Joe feels the pain of Harrison Wells as acutely as if it was his own. He knows what it is to love your children so fiercely that you're willing to kill to keep them safe. And when Jesse leaves, he feels the other man's agony at having half of his heart ripped away.

There's an ugliness to loving so much. But there's a beauty too, a painful one. He remembers well the day of Iris's birth when he'd looked into her infant eyes and known that the center of his world had changed forever. Very different, but equally powerful, was the day he'd invited a scared little boy into his life and heart, once again knowing his time would be even shorter and his bank account even smaller—but not caring one bit. Still fresh is the piercingly beautiful wound of finding Wally, of loving a son who's almost grown and knowing that, yet again, his heart has grown to accommodate the pain and the joy that fatherhood brings.

The others don't understand Wells, not the way he does. They sympathize, but his empathy is almost unbearable.