While Joe had wanted to take Barry and Chloe in, despite the fact that he and his wife Cecille already had a bit of a packed house with their daughter Iris and son Wally, that hadn't been needed, since while Barry and Chloe had stayed with them initially, someone else had quickly come into take custody, by order of their mother's will.

Their father's old friend, Christina McGee, the CEO of Mercury Labs, who was also Barry's godmother, had been named his and Chloe's legal guardian in the event of their mother's death and their father wasn't able to raise them for any reason.

That had been a bit of an adjustment for everyone, since while Tina was great, she didn't exactly have a lot of practice being a parent and the two kids weren't exactly ready to let someone else take their mom's place in their lives.

But overtime, they began to find a rhythm and Tina never insisted that they called her mom, but instead that they just called her Tina or Christina.

As time passed, both of the Allen kids continued to grow up, each of them dealing with the trauma of what had happened in their own way. Barry had chosen to deal with the trauma of what had happened by becoming obsessed with trying to solve what the world considered to be impossible, trying to figure out what had really happened to his mother that night and who knows, maybe even figure out what really happened to his father too. That had led to him deciding to reject a position at Mercury Labs that Tina had offered him and instead became a CSI so he could investigate more cases like this and hopefully find some answers and closure.

Tina honestly approved of the way Barry was choosing to deal with his trauma over how Chloe had, since Chloe had been a real wild child, always sneaking out and going to parties, until Tina had taken her to a therapist who'd introduced her to a much more productive way to deal with her grief. Music. Like her brother, Chloe was a very talented singer and her therapist had recommended that she start using music as a way to cope with what happened to her mother, which Chloe had and she'd found a particular interest in the guitar and she'd gotten rather good and she'd started spending every summer at a very exclusive performing arts camp and while she was there, she'd also come to a very important realization about herself. That she was gay.

Anyways, as he grew up, Barry had also started to develop feelings for his childhood best friend, Iris West, who'd been the only person besides his sister and foster mom who'd believed him about what happened to his mom and she'd even tried to help him get to the bottom of it and while he didn't know it at first, Iris had developed feelings for him too, something that her Joe and stepmother Cecille, since Iris's birth mother had died when she was a baby, so Cecille was the only mother she'd ever really known and it was through her that Iris had a little brother, Wally, but anyways, both of Iris's parents approved of her showing interest in Barry, since they'd known him nearly his entire life and knew that he was the perfect boy for their daughter to go out with, though it had taken Barry awhile to work up the guts to ask her out.

In fact, it was only through Chloe's intervention that he'd worked up the guts to ask Iris to be his date to their junior prom their junior year of high school, to which Iris had said yes immediately.

It was after high school that their relationship began to face a bit of a test, since while Barry stayed local at Central City University to become a CSI, Iris had sought a little more adventure in her life and since her father wouldn't let her become a cop, which to her was a little hypocritical, since he was a cop like his dad before him but wouldn't allow her to do the same thing, so instead, with her mother's permission, Iris had joined the military and had actually joined the Marines, much to her father's displeasure because of how dangerous that was, but he came around after realizing that his overprotectiveness would only push Iris away further if he didn't learn to control his protective instincts, since Iris had already been mad at him and she'd barely spoken to him after she enlisted.

In fact, it wasn't after her unit was ambushed on a patrol that Joe had finally realized that he needed to protect Iris in a different way, by trusting that she could protect herself instead of trying to shelter her and boy could she, since after Iris had enlisted, she'd become an expert sharpshooter, in fact, one of her nicknames had been Hawkeye because of how accurate her aim was, since she'd been her unit's designated sniper and sharpshooter and could shoot a target from over a mile away and she rarely missed.

To this day, Iris still didn't know how she'd survived that attack when no one else in her unit had, but after she'd come home, she'd gotten her fill of that kind of attack and she was still seeing a counselor for PTSD and she spoke at VA meetings trying to help others. At least when she wasn't working on journalism career, since after she'd gotten back stateside, Iris gone to school to study journalism and now she was freelance reporter, something that she did to help process her trauma and she also helped Barry investigate the impossible, since after she'd survived that attack, she was an even more firm believer in the impossible than before and she wanted to help him prove it and maybe she could even uncover the truth about what had happened to her that day. And also prove that her piece of shit CO Cyrus McAdams had set her up.