The sound of Kara's phone ringing jolted her out of the trance-like state she'd slipped into while working on her latest article, something that often happened to her when she was intensely focused on something.
"Barry's awake," Iris said without preamble on the other end of the line when Kara answered her phone. "He came to see me at Jitters."
"What?" Kara asked. She wasn't sure, in the moment, if she was shocked that Barry was awake or offended that upon his return to consciousness, he'd thought to go and see Iris before his own sister. Had he even told their parents that he was awake yet?
"Yeah," Iris said, distracting Kara from her confused and jumbled thoughts and feelings. "You know, he seemed really… normal. Healthy. Not at all like someone who's been effectively out of commission for the last nine months."
"Where is he now?" Kara asked, deciding that she needed to give her brother a talking to.
"We're at the CCPD," Iris replied. "I thought that he'd want to see everyone now that he's awake." Kara realized that by "everyone" Iris probably meant "my dad", but she didn't comment on it.
"Okay," she said instead. "Don't go anywhere. I'll be there in a few."
"Alright," Iris replied, and that was the end of their conversation.
A few minutes later, when she arrived at the CCPD, Kara immediately spotted her brother staring at a criminal someone had been in the process of booking being wrestled into submission with a freaked out expression on his face. At the sight of him, her jumbled emotion resolved themselves into hurt and anger, and that overrode her curiosity about what had happened with that criminal right before she'd arrived and her worry about why Barry looked so freaked out. Marching forward, Kara grabbed Barry by the upper arm, ignoring his yelp of surprise and protest, and hauled him out of the room and up the stairs to his lab. When she reached it, she snatched Barry's key card from him to open the door, yanking it open and then closed again in two quick motions before letting go of his arm and rounding on him as he stumbled forward.
"What the hell Barry?" Kara demanded. "Why did I have to hear from Iris that you were out of the coma?"
"Well, I've never been manhandled by my sister before," Barry muttered to himself of answering Kara's questions. She glared at him in silent reproach.
"Look, I meant to tell you, alright?" he snapped defensively. "But there was a lot going on, all at once, and I got overwhelmed, and it slipped my mind. Okay?"
"But it didn't slip your mind to go see Iris," Kara said sullenly, letting him know that it was definitely not okay.
"Doctor Wells mentioned that she came to see me a lot-" Barry started to explain.
"So did I," Kara interjected crossly. "So did Joe. So did Felicity. So did our parents. And yet you thought of Iris before you thought of any of the rest of us.
"So, what, I'm not allowed to consider her important to me?" Barry asked, his tone shifting from defensive to angry.
"Of course you are," Kara replied, getting frustrated now, "but not more important than your family. Do you have any idea how much it hurt to have to hear that my brother had woken up from a coma- a coma that we couldn't be sure he'd recover from, by the way- secondhand? From someone who isn't a family member?" Barry didn't answer.
"Have you even told our parents that you're awake?" Kara asked. "That you're okay? Do they have any idea?" She waited for Barry's answer, growing more and more irritated with him the longer the silence stretched out. There were only a few times in her life that Kara could recall being angry enough with someone that she entertained the idea of blasting them with her heat vision, but this was one of those times.
"It's a yes or no question, Barry," she said when the silence became unbearable.
"No," Barry finally admitted, his voice soft, his expression sheepish. "I didn't think of it." Kara threw her hands up in exasperation.
"Of course you didn't," she snarled. "All you thought of was Iris."
"Hey, that's not fair-" Barry started to protest.
"But is it incorrect?" Kara cut in.
"No," Barry mumbled, fixing his gaze on the floor beneath his feet. There was another long silence. It drew out the tension between the Allen siblings along with it, pulling it taut until it seemed as though, like a thread stretched too tight, both the silence and the tension would snap at any instant.
"I'm sorry," Barry said, finally breaking it. "I… I know that I should have told you or our parents that I was awake first, before going to see Iris, but everything was all confused and jumbled, and nothing was making any sense, and for some reason the only thing that stuck in my brain was that Iris had been to see my while I was in the coma, and that now that I was out of it I should return the favor by going to see her. I really am sorry." He glanced nervously at Kara, sideways, as if afraid to look directly at her. Kara, for her part, studied Barry's face and his body language and came to understand that he'd meant what he said, that he really was sorry. Now she felt like a jerk for being so angry with him.
"I forgive you," she said. "And for what it's worth, I'm sorry too. It wasn't fair of me to expect you to think rationally when you'd literally just woken up from a coma." She laughed weakly, but there was no humor in it.
"You should call our parents," she added after a moment. "Let them know what's going on." Barry nodded, and Kara left his lab so as to allow him to make the call in private. She felt troubled as she left the CCPD behind- for all that she had made her peace with it and forgiven Barry for it, there was still some small part of her that felt hurt that he'd thought to tell Iris that he was okay before he'd thought to tell his own sister.