pre-relationship Barry/Eddie, 3005 words, pg-rated

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If You Want A Storm Come Dance With Me

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He sags back in his chair, fingers locking together at the back of his head, his spine cracking after hours of sitting immobile behind his desk.

Slow days at work usually meant catching up on paper work, type up witness statements and incident reports, review old cases should he have to head into court – all things most cops are allergic to. He didn't mind; there was something oddly reassuring about his phone not ringing, no one in dire need of his assistance, a normal nine-to-five for a change. With any luck he'll be able to pick up Eva from school, make her dinner, tuck her in on time without having to call on a neighbor to watch her. He'd rather not ask Mrs Cole for help again.

He never became a cop for the action; long ago it was a way to go against his father's wishes, get away from politicians and diplomats and actually give back to Keystone rather than leech off it. It only gradually became a calling. As a rookie cop he saw his fair share of drug dealers, petty theft and prostitution, some armed robberies, car chases and abused wives, but none of that compared with what he saw as a detective. Suddenly the job wasn't just a job, it was something he was always meant to do; helping people, saving them, bringing justice to those who couldn't get it for themselves, so much so that he couldn't give it up when Eva came along.

Julie didn't want him to quit his job, even though she cut back on her hours – they had his mom and Julie's parents to help and they'd make due. And for a good while there they did.

After losing Julie the precinct gave him a lot of free time to figure things out, though his captain always assured him there'd be a place for him when he got back. He had to cut back on his hours, rely on his mom more than ever, but in the midst of all of that loss and heartache and chaos there was a little girl that was half Julie and half him.

It's not easy, he doubts any single parent ever truly has it easy, but he and Eva make it work.

He lets his eyes wander over his desk, impersonal compared to every other desk in the bullpen – in Keystone his desk had a picture of Julie and of Eva, a new drawing Eva made every week or so, but everyone knew him there, they'd seen him make detective, if they didn't know his father they knew his mother, they'd seen him and Julie fall in love and start a family. Every detail of his life felt like a matter of public record, which suited him fine. Until the fateful day that it didn't.

In Central City his life didn't need to be an open book, he could control what people knew about him so when he started here a few weeks ago he hadn't felt the need to divulge every detail that led him here. He's not ashamed of Eva, the entire precinct had either heard or seen her prance around last week, but just for a while keeping his private life separate seemed like the right thing to do. No matter what, Eva has been his priority for the better part of six years; he's done little for himself that wasn't in some way for her too, and he wouldn't go back and change anything.

Now that Eva has somehow coaxed Barry into their lives, he can't help but wonder if he's been missing out. For lack of any better analogy, Barry felt like a ray of sunshine, maybe not as bright as Eva's whimsical fairy light, but he provided kindness and warmth where he'd allowed cold to freeze him in place. However little time they've spent together, he's been having a great time getting to know Barry; maybe that's all it will ever be, but he's up for finding that out.

"Have you seen the kid's blog?" a uniformed officer passes behind him, halting near the row of cabinets that lines the walls. "Wide world of weird. Priceless."

"Lab rat or not," another officer replies. "He helps close cases. Kid's a genius."

The short fly-by conversation soon dies out, though it lingers in his mind; he's worked here long enough to know people call Barry 'the kid', either because he's the youngest person working at the precinct or because of his fresh face, but Captain Singh doesn't like that sort of talk – like the officers said, Barry's kind of a genius, so young or not, he deserves some credit.

He's never heard anything about a blog though, not that it's such a crazy notion. Barry seems exactly like the kind of person who would keep a blog.

For lack of anything better to do he pulls his keyboard closer, finding the blog through a few concise searches. And when he heard the words 'wide world of weird' he's sure he expected something, but now whatever he finds; Barry's a scientist, a man of rules and logic and explanations, and while there are some pretty freaky things out there his entire blog seems to be dedicated to things that can't possibly be real – transmutation, telekinesis, telepathy... what was next, time travel? Each entry on the blog outlines a case Barry seems to have actually investigated, not all of them in Central City. Where did he find the time or willpower to put so much work into this?

He hasn't heard Barry talk about this stuff, at work, or the few moments they've had in private, yet it's clearly a well-known fact around the precinct. How long has Barry been chasing the impossible?

"Are you reading my blog?" Barry's voice startles him from his reading, and he looks up to find him standing tall beside him, eyes narrowing on his monitor. Now that he thinks about it, his computer screen is much too visible to anyone walking into the bullpen. The last thing he wants is for Barry to think he talks about him behind his back too. He values Barry, as a colleague, as a friend, as a man in his life who could potentially be more.

"Slow workday," he says, and closes the website, hoping he manages to sound curious rather than judgmental. Just because he doesn't understand doesn't mean he's not willing to. "You're really into this stuff."

"Yeah." Barry frowns, eyes flickering across the room. "Have you seen Joe or Chyre?"

"Coffee run."

Barry bites nervously at his lip and nods, but can't seem to bring himself to meet his eye. He straightens in his chair, about to ask if everything's all right, but Barry turns on his heel and leaves. Was it something he said? Should he not have been reading the blog? It's a perfectly innocent hobby, it's not something Barry should be afraid or embarrassed to share with him.

He gets up a bit uncertain, backtracking to his desk three times before he decides to follow behind, out of the bullpen, up the stairs, down the hall that leads to Barry's lab. Should he even say anything? Maybe Barry was busy, maybe he'd misread the situation, maybe something else was bothering Barry, and he doesn't want to mess anything up before whatever they have has really started. His gut tells him it's more though, that Barry carries a weight he shoulders all on his own – it's not noticeable all the time, it's in the quiet moments when he drops his guard and a young boy shines through in his eyes. That boy's been hurt, that boy lost his parents a long time ago.

It's that last thought which finally propels him through the door, has him confront Barry rather than ignore the fact that he might have done something wrong.

Barry's behind his desk, peering down the lenses of his microscope, making notes blindly.

"Are you okay?" he asks, the question slipping past any defenses he might have in place after years of being alone. If he's serious about Barry, if he wants to get to know him or allow him to play a part –any part– in Eva's life, this has to come from both sides. Barry, this thing, whatever it is, would be for him, so wonderfully selfish, but he still has to think about Eva too.

Barry swivels his chair around, a breath of fresh air as his eyebrows rise in a soft, "Hmm?"

He takes an awkward step closer, open and exposed in the large room that somehow seems bigger than it did before. "Was I not meant to read your blog?"

Barry averts his eyes, carefully considering his answer, his shoulders soon relaxing. "People they– they don't always understand."

Does Barry know that people talk about him behind his back? The thought alone makes his skin buzz, an all too familiar anger crawling underneath his skin, the need to protect, to serve, even though he's pretty sure Barry's more than capable of taking care of himself.

"Hobbies?"

A pained expression flashes over Barry's face, one he has no desire to ever see or be the cause of again. "It's not a hobby though." Barry shakes his head. "This is real for me. I believe that the impossible is possible."

"Even as a scientist?" another question tumbles haphazardly from his lips, but not because he's confused; with Barry he wants to soak up as much as he possibly can, before Eva or an emergency whisks him away again. Half the reason he hasn't dated is because he has so little time to himself to begin with, so why waste that precious time on awkward dates or things that don't work out. It's different with Barry, he'd spend every moment he has left with him, and it's such an out-of-nowhere feeling that he has no idea where to place it or give it the space it might need. He wants to take and learn and listen, heedless and careless, the light that Barry carries with him starting an excitement in him he hasn't felt in years.

"Most scientists accept that there are things their field can't explain." Barry sighs. "I don't know."

"I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable."

"I'm not ashamed of chasing the impossible. I just–" Barry makes a half-hearted gesture at him, eyes scanning him up and down, and it isn't until Barry stutters, "I don't–" that he realizes what's really going on.

Barry doesn't want to give him any reason to be ashamed of him. But what could Barry possibly say that he'd find too embarrassing to have associated with him? There are so many people who would run screaming the moment they found out he had a kid, but Barry seems to be the opposite. Barry likes Eva, she's what brought them closer together in the first place. There are few things Barry could say that would make him turn tail and run.

He walks over and pulls up another chair, its legs scraping across the floor. He sits down opposite Barry, their knees not quite touching, but close enough to be mistaken for more than two colleagues simply talking about work.

"Tell me," he insists, because he's not about to let Barry dictate what he can and can't feel, especially not about something still out of his reach. If it's something he can't handle they can still see where to go from here, but he highly doubts there's anything Barry can say that'll scare him away.

Barry nods as if he's still trying to convince himself, but leans his elbows down on his knees. "I saw something impossible the night my mom died," Barry says solemnly. "There was red and yellow lightning, and inside the lightning there was a man."

His eyebrows knit together. Part of him instinctually chalks it up to a young boy's overactive imagination, a boy traumatized by the death of his mother and spinning the night into an unbelievable narrative.

"He's the man who killed my mom," Barry says. "No one believed me, not even Joe. But I know what I saw. My dad didn't kill my mom."

His chest aches with a phantom pain he thought he'd dealt with a long time ago – it's not the same, Julie's killer was caught an hour after the deadly shoot-out, but he knows what it's like to have no one understand, to be torn between the utter devastation of losing someone while you have someone else relying on you. And yet, in all of this, in all the horrors Barry has seen, all the years he's been screaming for someone to believe him, all this time he's been searching for the impossible, Barry has found it in himself to be kind.

"You're a cop." Barry shrugs. "I didn't–"

"It's not my place to question what you saw," he says in earnest, even though it sounds too unbelievable to be true; but he's spun stories about the night Julie died all the same, he's wondered how exactly it went down, how that bastard got the upper hand. If he'd been in Joe's shoes he would've arrested Barry's father all the same, but he's not in Joe's shoes, he's a guy hearing someone he likes quite a bit talk about his trauma in the healthiest way possible, someone who believes in science and the impossible all the same. How can he ignore that? Unbelievable as Barry's story is, he seems one hundred percent sure of what happened. "I'm sorry I put you on the spot."

Barry smiles softly.

"And I'm sorry for what you saw that night."

"I'm not," Barry says, calm as ever, as if it's a story he tells every time someone asks him about it. He has to hand it to Joe West; as a single father of not one but two young teenagers, he did a remarkable job raising both Barry and Iris. "If I hadn't gone downstairs that night I might've thought my dad guilty too."

"You're close?"

"As close as we can be."

The thought of Barry visiting his dad in prison breaks his heart, separated by a Plexiglas window, no real contact. He'd go out of his mind without a steady supply of Eva's hugs. It pains him even more to think that Barry thought he needed to hide this from him to save him the embarrassment. What kind of man would he be if he let something like that come between them? Barry's a remarkable man despite his trauma, but the way he carries it, as a burden he's all too willing to carry, that makes him beautiful.

Slowly, as if the decision hasn't been made until he's already halfway followed through on it, he reaches for Barry's hand, curling his fingers around Barry's, warm and soft to the touch, and looks him in the eye. "Look, Barry," he says softly, his mouth dry, but he hasn't been this sure about anything since the day he became a dad. "I know we're still trying to figure out what this is. But I want you to know you can be honest with me. About anything."

Barry nods softly, stroking his thumb over his fingers. "Okay."

"Why don't I," –he swallows hard, determined not to lose his cool. He may not know how to do this dating thing properly anymore, but that doesn't mean he can't talk like a person– "make you some dinner tonight. You can come over when Eva's asleep? We'll have to be quiet but–"

"I'd love to."

"Good," he breathes, relieved Barry stops him before that sentence got away from him. "It's a date."

Barry chuckles softly. "Yeah."

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Footsteps sound outside as Eddie pulls back his hand, his soft touch lingering deep beneath his skin, his left knee bumping his right as Joe walks into the lab with the coffee he'd promised earlier. He's never been more disappointed to see Joe in his life, not since he'd caught him making out with Becky Cooper when he was sixteen years old.

"Detective West," –Eddie stands up too fast to be inconspicuous, the awkward fidgeting somehow endearing, however surprising it is to see– "Good to see you."

"Thawne." Joe eyes him up and down. "Captain need you downstairs."

"Sure thing," Eddie breathes, locking eyes with him for a few seconds, communicating his earlier point with a brief glance all over again; talk to me, confide in me, there's no need to be afraid. There's something in the mere idea of having someone like that in his life that makes him want to chase after Eddie the moment he leaves the room. The only other person he can do that with is Iris.

"You sure you know what you're doing?"

"Hmm?" he hums, pulled back to a reality where he and Eddie don't actually have that kind of relationship yet, though the anticipation of building towards that makes his heart beat faster.

Joe takes a step closer, handing him his coffee. "You know he has a kid."

"A daughter, yeah," –he nods, and smiles at the memory of Eva– "I've met her. She's amazing."

Joe frowns at him, a sentiment soon mirrored in between his own eyebrows – he's as taken with Eva as he is with Eddie, he realizes, and that's exciting and scary at the same time. If they do this, if they start dating, he's making a commitment to not one but two people. But if anything of what Eddie just told him is true, if his support is real, if he's simply willing to listen, he's not sure he even needs his understanding. Iris' support has kept him going in so many ways, he can only imagine what Eddie's support could mean.

Joe whistles. "I hope you know what you're doing."

And he smiles, because, yes, he does know what he's doing; he's going to have dinner at Eddie's place tonight. Their first real date.

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tbc

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