Heroines_Fest: When She Wore the Mask
Title: When She Wore the Mask
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,100~
Characters: Iris West, Jai West
Prompt: For heroines_fest Jai never becomes a hero, and that's cool because Irey needs a civilian scientist to help her with crime scenes. Who better than her brother?
Summary: Being a hero doesn't make her perfect, but today, Iris doesn't feel like much of a hero, either.
WARNINGS: Domestic abuse
-
As Iris watched the paramedics ease the gurney into the ambulance, she wished her father hadn’t instilled such an unfailing code of ethics in his children before he passed on the suit. The angry husband sat spitting and snarling against a police car, hands hooked behind his back as the officers checked facts back and forth. It would be so easy to blur by, smash his face with her fists a few times to show him how it felt. Maybe the eye-for-an-eye approach was too cliché. She was protected by the speed force, but if she grabbed him by the hair and took off, he’d make a pretty red painting across the pavement. Or it would scalp him, but that was acceptable, too.
“I know that look,” Jai sighed, stepping up next to her and flicking his lighter. Normally, Iris would scrub the cigarette before he could light it, but after this mess, he deserved whatever helped him sleep at night. “He’s not worth it.”
“None of them are,” She admitted. “But it doesn’t change the fact it would feel damn good.”
“Yeah,” Jai agreed wistfully, taking a long draw. “But then we start forgetting what makes us any different from them.”
“I don’t beat people.” Iris uncrossed her stiff arms and set them on her hips, keeping her voice low. “I don’t take a lamp to my wife for being too broke to buy something other than cheap mac’n’cheese for dinner.”
“Not yet,” Jai cocked his eyes and stared hard at one of the dawdling officers who was taking a bit too much ‘professional interest’ in the Flash and CSI West. It was the gossip of the local precincts, whether Jai was dating the illustrious super hero. Iris knew blowing off steam on scene wasn’t helping matters, but if she didn’t let her brother play keeper, she was going to lose her temper.
“Whatever,” She scuffed a boot on the dirty sidewalk.
The radio in Jai’s municipality issued SUV crackled behind them, tossing out the numbers for an armed robbery down on main street, metas involved. “Go on,” Jai tossed his head, dropping the cigarette on the ground. He twisted it out with a sigh and buried his hands in his jacket pockets with the same weathered resignation the old timers carried on their shoulders. “There’s nothing you can do here. Let me do my job, you go do yours.”
“Yeah,” Iris growled. “This time, I get to hit something.”
He gave a crooked smile and pushed a hand through his over-grown hair, “That’s the spirit.”
-
“Hey,” Jai called from the door, his own version of ‘Honey, I’m home!’. He walked into the living room with two greasy bags from the mob run dirty spoon on the corner. Iris was gonna bust the place soon. Honest.
Iris pulled her feet in to give him room to sit on the cheap sofa, but she wasn’t about to give up the good cushion. He could gripe about sitting on saggy springs if he felt like it, but she was working. Jai didn’t say a word and headed into the kitchen to grab a pair of plates and a set of silverware, because they might be strapped singles force to live together in the name of stubborn independence against their father’s offer of moving home, but they liked to pretend they weren’t complete philistines. At least, not until someone had to do the dishes.
“Writing about this afternoon,” Jai asked, pouring a pile of napkins, ketchup, and the weird almost-ranch, out on the table before he fished out a pair of large fries and moved on to the next bag.
“Please,” Iris snorted and rolled her eyes. “Do I look like Clark Kent?” She waved at her fuzzy purple bunny slippers, pink striped pajamas that clashed terribly with her skin, but were the most comfortable bargain bin purchase she’d ever made, and an over-sized white tank top from Damian’s closet that she still held hostage years after a wild night of Titan’s ‘Truth or Dare’. She may have lost her eyebrows snatching it out of the paranoid funhouse of horrors that man called a bedroom, but it only made her victory that much sweeter.
“Well,” Jai hummed considering, stroking his chin with mock seriousness, “You’re tacky enough, but you’re really just a pale imitation without the horn rims.”
“I’m a gossip columnist,” Iris snorted. “I’m a pale imitation of humanity. Right now, I’ve run out of decent gossip about all the other super heroes and financial ruin has forced me to a new low.”
Jai unwrapped his beef sandwich and shoveled it gracelessly into his mouth with an interested eyebrow.
“I’m writing gossip about myself.”
He squeaked and both eyebrows shot up.
“Oh,” Iris added with a grin, adding in a burst of super speed to finish her article and sent it in with a satisfied click, “and you’re in it.”
“I hate you,” Jai mauled through a full mouth, flinging himself in her direction as Iris shifted her laptop to safety and let him topple her back against the sofa in the name of tickle wars. A row of squeals left, Jai flopped back in his seat and muttered, “I can’t believe you did that. Work is gonna be hell tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Iris shrugged wistfully, “but at least you got that asshole tonight.”
Jai face turned an ominous black and Iris sat up straighter. “You did get him,” she said warningly, “didn’t you?”
Jai’s silence was telling, but she waited until his anger ebbed enough he could talk. “No,” He admitted, finally. “She wouldn’t press charges. Insisted she ‘fell down the stairs’. Happened all the time. Just clumsy.”
“Bullshit!” Iris burst to her feet in a blur, snapping from the bedroom, through the kitchen, and back to the coffeetable in the blink of an eye. “That’s total bullshit! You’ve got witnesses, you can still charge him.”
“No, we can’t,” Jai snapped. “We don’t have witnesses. We have inconvenienced neighbors who say there was yelling - again. Like there always is. We have bruises we can prove weren’t from falling down the stairs, but we don’t have a defendant willing to let us look at them. We’ve got all the photos, all the physical evidence, and a million and one positive gut feelings that this guy is a dirty scumbag, but unless she’s willing to say so, it doesn’t matter.”
Iris flexed her fists, choking rage twisting up her stomach. She ground her teeth, hissed, vibrated good and hard - as hard as she could without falling through the floor - and waited for him to stop spouting all the stupid bullshit she didn’t want to hear.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Jai barked. “You know the law. You can’t tell me you weren’t expecting this. She won’t press charges.”
“So make her!” Iris erupted, throwing her hands in the air. “She’s stupid! She’s - She’s suicidal! She’s gonna die and the only way to keep that son-of-a-bitch from hurting anyone else is for her to press some fucking charges!”
Jai slammed his hands on the table as he stood, voice rising to match hers, “And get charged with intimidating a witness? Police harassment? Do you want me to get the whole city involved? We’d have a law suit on our hands! Can you imagine how much we’d lose if the department got sued? There is no way I can afford to lose my job over that. And,” He cut her off with a sharp finger, “even if I did managed to coerce her into pressing charges, as soon as it came to court, the defense would have my ass and the whole case would be thrown out! I did my job, Iris, and it sucked, but you just have to deal with it!”
“Fuck you,” Iris hissed, rage binding sharply with a bitter betrayal. “You’re more worried about your job than this woman’s life? I thought you wanted to save the world, Jai!”
He slumped back, more exhausted than before, and just shook his head, “You just don’t get it. I push this, and I won’t be saving anyone ever again.”
“Yeah,” Iris snorted derisively, “cause you did such a hot job of it tonight.” She vibrated hard, disappearing into her bedroom with an angry, “I’m going out.”
-
Jai might be big on excuses, but being outside the law had its perks, and Iris was going to end this tonight. Her brother was right about one thing - She did know the law. The ham-fisted bastard the victim called a husband would be let loose before dawn and Iris wasn’t going to waste a minute. A quick preliminary buzz past the apartment showed the home empty, so she moved swiftly on to the hospital.
The nurses at the front desk were a pair of experienced night shifters: a burly battle ax of a man starting to grow a tire around his middle, but clean shaven and respectable, and a woman with a birthstone necklace with three slots, January, February, and September, to go with her painfully sensible shoes. With a charming nonchalance she didn’t feel, Iris leaned on the counter and put on her best ‘Trust me, I’m the good guy’ show.
“Long night,” She asked, crossing her feet at the ankle with a sympathetic grin.
“I’ve had worse,” the battle ax offered with a good natured shrug.
His partner flashed a sardonic grin and added, “Had better, too.”
Laughing, Iris kept the smile strong on her face. “Isn’t that the truth. I’m looking for somebody, actually. A domestic abuse case, from about noon yesterday? I’m afraid in all the hullabaloo I never got her name and I just wanted to check in, make sure she was doing alright.”
“I can’t release her name,” the woman said, leaning over her computer as she fished through the files, “but if you make it quick, you can go ahead and peek your head into room 227 and check her out for yourself. Just remember,” she added with a twinkle in her eye. “That peek doesn’t include her medical chart. That’s confidential.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Iris beamed in relief, standing tall and flying a salute. “I’ll be gone before you know it.”
“You’d better be!” The nurses called after her with good cheer.
Ok, simple hero stuff. Go in, be heroic, tell her it’ll all be ok if she just does her part, and Iris would take care of it from there. Sure thing! Hop, skip, and a jump away from hunky dory.
Room 227 was quiet, only the steady beep of the heart monitor making it through the solid door. Iris debated for a moment whether it would be better to knock and risk waking her, or just pop her head in to check. If the victim were sleeping, Iris would feel like a real tool waking her up for a penitentiary pep-talk. Deciding to go with door number two, Iris turned the knob quietly and peered in, surprised by what she saw. Iris hadn’t really noticed the victim’s age before, but it seemed odd she was older than Iris imagined. There was something about this whole mess that just made Iris think of the young and naïve, not pushing 40.
She was also staring straight at Iris with clear apprehension.
“Hi,” Iris greeted sheepishly, noting a second bed with pulled curtains. There wasn’t a second heart monitor, but she kept her voice low, just in case, hoping she sounded appropriately apologetic. Iris really should have knocked. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” the woman said warily, hiding behind her hair. Iris still caught a glimpse of the mean swelling covering most of her face. Painfully, the woman tried to hide her shaking hands by crossing her arms, but a tightness around her mouth betrayed the tenderness in her right arm. She laid it under her covers instead. The wrist cast was still visible.
“You sure?” Iris pressed the door shut with a click, making sure to step lightly. She tried to be as sympathetic as possible as she pointed out, “He rung your bell pretty good.”
This was why Iris never handled delicate situations. She knew better than to bring up the attacker in the ‘safe zone’ of the hospital room without direct preparation and permission from the victim. It was sloppy, insensitive, and damn it, she was losing what little connection she had with her already.
As expected, the woman tensed all over, head snapping around to pin Iris with a sharp gaze. Her lips were pressed furiously tight despite the swelling and her voice chilled, “I’m fine.”
“Right,” Iris agreed with desperate pleasantness, itching for some handy dandy pockets. She rubbed her hands along her hips instead and gave a good bounce before she stepped closer. It was time to rebuild the feeling of safety in the room. Iris searched for a nice small talk topic and zeroed in on the cheap celebrity tabloid on the end table. It had that trio of rich sisters who put out a clothing line or something. Tapping the cover, Iris smiled, “I heard one of them was getting married.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the woman rolled up the magazine and dropped it in the trash can next to a pair of bubblegum pink sneakers. “It isn’t mine.”
Strike two.
“Well, then,” Iris rolled her lips thoughtfully. “Can I get you something to drink? Some water? Maybe some coffee?”
Iris really wished she knew the victim’s name, because there was something personal about being flipped off from three feet away.
“Stop it, I know what you’re here for. The cops won’t believe me, so they sent in the super hero to get all chummy and make me change my mind. Well guess what,” she spat, grabbing her neon green jacket off the chair and pulling it snuggly around her. “there’s nothing to change. I told them, it was an accident. I tripped and he just happened to hit me when he turned around.” She turned to look at the crawling sunrise as it peeked the horizon. “There’s nothing to get all worked up about.”
Iris just didn’t get it. For all the psychology seminars the league put them through to understand this sort of thing, Iris just couldn’t figure out why a woman would protect the man who knocked her front teeth out. “Why,” She shook her head. “Why do this? You know he can’t hurt you once he’s put away, right?”
And, boy, that wasn’t supposed to be funny, but the woman sure thought so. She laughed, long and hard, in an ugly, depressing way. “He can’t hurt me?” she choked out another guffaw, “You are such a kid. I never thought about it before, but you are, aren’t you?” With a shake of her head, she turned away, “Just a dumb kid.”
“Hey,” Iris snapped, “I’m trying to help you, here.”
“Did I ask for your help?” The woman turned on her again. “I didn’t ask for anything. I didn’t ask for you to run in and give me a hospital bill I can’t pay. I didn’t ask you to put an arrest on my husband’s record. Do you know how long he’s been looking for work? He’ll never get a job now! Some help you’ve been. I’m gonna be starving and homeless thanks to you, and for all your worry, I bet you never thought about what sort of temper he’d be in after that.” She snorted, “So worried about being the big hero you can’t do anything right. Why don’t you go stop some real crimes, or is ruining people’s lives the only thing you’re good at?”
“Don’t you get it?” Iris exclaimed, exasperation driving her half-mad. “I can get you out. The league has the resources to set you up with a women’s center safely away from your husband, even if he’s let out early on parole. We can get you employment and financial coverage for all your medical bills. All you have to do is help yourself. We can get you out.”
“I married him,” she said with a solid certainty. “I know that doesn’t mean much to you, but I took my vows and I meant them. Through good times and bad, till death do us part.”
“Death,” Iris quipped snidely, unable to stymie her frustrations, “Good to know you’re goal oriented.”
“Can we skip the part where you tell me all the ways they’ll find my corpse rotting in my living room after he’s had one too many out with the boys and go straight to the business cards and insincere promise that you ‘believe in me’?”
Their hard eyes met in a battle of wills until Iris admitted defeat. She wasn’t a mind reader and she certainly wasn’t a mind controller, which left her with some spectacularly terrible options when she really looked at things. Somehow, witness intimidation wasn’t exactly what she was going for when she walked in the door. With a sigh, she shook her head and gave in. “Fine. But,” she flashed a crooked smile and pulled out the plastic baggy of Jai’s business cards she kept tucked in her collar. “If you change your mind - if he hits you again? Anything,” She set the card on the empty side table and gave it an extra tap. “Call him. He’ll make sure I’m there.”
“I don’t need your boyfriend’s fucking card,” the woman spat, slapping it into the trash.
“Like hell you don’t,” Iris muttered, but she left in a burst and let sleeping dogs lie.
All this repressed witness intimidation was making her feel like some suspect harassment. After all, if at first you don’t succeed… change targets and press him till he squeals like a stuck pig.
-
Her target wasn’t hard to find. The wait was a bitch, but Iris just crossed her arms and waited in the alley across from the police station, obsessively tapping her foot in the same place. It was wearing down the pavement by the time six am rolled around, but Beefy McHamhands lumbered out the doors like clockwork and it was a simple matter of sweet anticipation to watch him meander down the block until he was out of range for the police security cameras.
Then, Iris swooped in like an avenging angel. Or a really pissed off bird, like a falcon or something else ready to tear squealing little rats a new one. She stopped 20 blocks over and dropped him on the pavement, striking her best ‘We need to talk’ pose. It took something extra to loom when she wasn’t six foot four and solid muscle, but Iris managed. Her maniacal smile probably had a lasting effect on her victims, and she couldn’t take Damian’s Joker references too personally because, hey, effective.
“Hey there, Buddy,” She grinned viciously, “I’m thinking we need to talk.”
“What the fuck is this?” He squealed, eyes darting around the alley, “Did the cops put you up to this?”
She cocked her head and gave him a long hard look. He wasn’t a bad looking guy. Give him a shower and a fresh pair of pants and he was probably a bit of a looker, even. Iris tried to find that glint in his eyes, the one that said he was just a bad egg, through and through, but all she saw was a scared guy in a bad alley before anyone was up to care. It was a disappointment. She really wanted to know she was punching a disgrace of a human being. Guess she’d just have to take a good gamble and work with what she had.
And that was a wife so black and blue she was drowning in it.
“Now why would they do that?” Iris answered finally, crossing her arms. “There something you’ve done they might have an issue with?”
“Look,” He said with the exasperation of a well-rehearsed excuse. “The bitch fell down. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”
“Funny, she said it was coordination mishap. She zigged, you zagged, hands ended up in unfortunate places by sheer accident,” Iris replied. “Funny how you two remember it so differently.”
“You can’t do this to me, “ He steamed, finally pulling himself off the ground with righteous indignation. “I have rights. The cops cut me loose. You ain’t got a right to do this without it like, impeding my constitutional whatever.”
“Constitutional Whatever,” Iris nodded. “You’re a regular Shakespeare. But,” Iris blurred behind him and hefted him up by his collar. He flailed a bit, pushing up on his toes to stay comfortable. “I’m not a cop. So, really, that whole constitution thing doesn’t really apply.”
Any state or federal law on kidnapping did, but what she didn’t tell him couldn’t hurt her.
“I heard,” He squawked, losing his footing, “what the cops say about you. Screwing around with that mouthy scientist, right? The one with the frown. Yeah, I can see it.”
Huh, sounded like Jai alright. Of course, they really had to do something about those office rumors, eventually. After she found new column fodder. Of course, it wasn’t her job, so it was more hilarious than anything else, but she had to focus. Ruining Jai’s life could wait. “Funny, I’ve always liked men with a sense of humor, myself.”
“Fuck that,” He snarled, “You both shake a man down the same way.”
That was… a little embarrassing, actually.
“Well, if it works,” She shrugged with feigned innocence.
“Problem is,” he laughed, “I already told my lawyer about your little friend. Yeah. He said if I had any more problems, he’d have your boyfriend’s ass served up on a silver platter. So, come on, Flashy. Dirty those pretty little hands. Show me what a punk like you can dish out. When I’m through suing this city for all it’s worth, there won’t be a cop in the city willing to protect you. Their pensions’ll look like a fucking desert and it’ll be all your fault.”
Iris gave him a good hard shake as his smug shpeel really started to sink in. Dirty fucker had a good lawyer. That was always such a bitch. For good measure, she snarled back, “But it’d make me feel better.”
His yelp satisfied a petty primal part of her and she debated giving him a good kick in the balls before she finished up. Instead, she leaned down and squeezed his cheeks good and hard. “Listen to me, Chuckles. I ain’t your daddy’s hero, you go that?” She bluffed, “You touch a hair on that woman’s head again, and I’ll be back.”
He snorted, watching her warily, “And do what? Shake me some more. You’re the good guys,” he mocked. “No matter what you do to me, you’ll have to answer to some body. Me? All I gotta do is make sure my wife,” and his tone spoke of such complete ownership, Iris wanted to rip his tongue out, “and I have an, what do all the TV shrinks call it? Oh, right. And ‘open line of communication’ about where things stand.”
“I should beat the tar outta you.”
“Jay, right?” He laughed. “Your boyfriend’s name. Wesley. Weasel. Oh, right. West.”
And it was about the fifth time her thoughts circled around to dropping this yellow-bellied bastard under the Gotham docks that Iris realized she had to get out of there or she was going to damn herself over this pathetic excuse for humanity.
-
There were days where Iris wondered what it was like to run and get tired. Where the world passed in meters instead of miles. When a bad day meant bursting out the front door and running halfway across town instead of across the country. Would it be easier to sooth her mind if her body gasped for air and her legs got tired long before her mind ran out? Would the exertion burn away the shame she was feeling, the desperate failure that this time, the bad guys won?
Iris really wanted to know, because speeding over the Pacific Ocean wasn’t doing her any good right now. She was just as furious with herself as she was when she began.
When Jai chimed in on the JL frequency, she didn’t feel any better.
“What were you thinking?” He shrieked without preamble. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Busy,” Iris snapped. “Saving the world and stuff.”
“Right,” her brother scoffed, “You’ve done a real bang up job tonight. I hope you’re real proud of yourself, Irey. You’ve officially let Frank Delling off as a free man. It doesn’t matter what we manage to dig up or get out of the wife and kid. The defense can just cite police harassment and have the whole case tossed, and then they’ll sue our ass.”
“There’s a kid?” Iris moaned. A kid in that household? She never saw anyone, but then again… The gossip rag on the end table, the set of sneakers by the bed, and the neon jacket in the corner. She should’ve realized those weren’t the victim's. Nothing about them said ‘Middle-aged abused spouse’.
“Yeah, genius. There’s a kid. That kid was why I stepped back and let social services do their thing, but now they’re going to have to back off, too, because any sort of poking around after your little stunt is a perfect excuse to fry the whole lot of us.”
Well shit.
“Whatever,” She growled into her comm and turned it off, “Flash out.” Fuck running. Iris just wanted the world to stop.
With a burst of speed, Iris headed for the end of the ocean and some place where she could think.
-
So, Tibet.
Not really all it’s cracked up to be, Iris decided.
Lian and Damian went on and on about the meditation up here, but all Iris felt was a deep rooted seed of really fucking cold. Obviously, inner peace only came with the deluxe heir and heiress package for multimillionaires and their devil spawn. Still, she wanted to be somewhere remote, away from her mistakes and responsibilities, away from the victim and the suspect and their kid, and most of all, away from her brother’s furious disappointment.
“You knew better,” she could see him say, and that burned because it was true. This was the sort of thing she was trained for, she should have handled it better. She should have noticed the signs that the victim was holding on for something more. She should have picked up on the little things. She wasn’t the World’s Greatest Detective, but she had eyes and a brain. Jai would’ve figured it out and the most heroing he’d done was walking drunken sorority girls home in college.
“Face it, West,” She muttered to herself, drawing aimless pictures in the snow where she sat, “You royally fucked up.”
Suddenly, she didn’t feel very Flash. Slipping back her cowl, she let the bitter wind pull at her sweaty red hair. It would be a tangled mess when she got home, but the idea of focusing on nothing but her hair for half an hour was close to heaven. Normally, she made Jai brush it out while she did something more worthwhile with her time, but it didn’t seem likely that her brother would be willing to do much of anything for her right now.
He’d had this and she screwed it up. Jai had looked at the situation realistically and found the best solution he could, except she’d blasted in like a damned rookie and tossed so much dirt in the air no one came out clean. It didn’t matter if the guy did it - everyone already knew that. Now they couldn’t prove it.
And the kid.
She shook her head and sighed.
Did her dad ever have days like this? Iris dragged her hand through the crunchy top layer of snow and squeezed it hard in her glove until it made a nice compact grip print. She wanted to know if she was making the same mistakes every hero did, or if this was a sign she should go back to the drawing board, figuring out where she belonged. Because playing Mr. Policeman was definitely not it.
Lying down in the snow, she propped her head on her folded arms and let the chill in her bones cradle her in the winds. She wouldn’t freeze, her metabolism ran too hot for that, but maybe she’d fall asleep like Rip Van Winkle and wake up some place new where she hadn’t managed to screw everything up.
It was a nice thought.
-
“-ere are you!”
Iris jerked away, looking around for her brother until she realized someone had reactivated her communicator. She fumbled with the switch, turning on her side of the signal. “I’m here, what’s up?”
“Where have you been?” Jai demanded, “I’ve been looking for you for nearly four hours.”
“I was taking a nap,” She snapped sulkily, standing stiffly. Iris sniffled a bit as she started dusting snow off her bum, “So sue me.”
“Oh shut up,” Jai snapped unsympathetically. “And get your ass down to the station. You have a visitor.”
Awesome. Iris sighed. She always loved playing nice with lawyers. They never failed to make super villains look well-rounded. Iris took a long minute to decide if she wanted to run back the way she came, or if a short detour through Europe was in order. She could grab some of that extra milky Belgian chocolate Jai loved so much as an apology. It wouldn’t help the rumor mill much if she arrived at the precinct with it, but it was his own fault for not taking a lab position in the first place. Nerds gossiped way less that the beef head jccks. She would know. She made a living being a beef head gossiper.
Traffic in Rome was something of a nightmare, but she weaved through the wandering crowds anyway, making something of a beeline up through Germany and Belgium before detouring back again as she tried to decide between the Belgian chocolate and the deliciously dark triple fudge cake in the window of the expensive corner eatery. Finally, she decided she was sucking up and bought both, grudgingly willing to face a hop across the pond.
When she sped into the building and paused outside Jai’s empty office, Iris took it as a good sign no one was waiting for her with a magic net or something to lock her away. Of course, it also meant her brother wasn’t there, so he was somewhere else, but she was willing to go on a wild goose chase for him. That’s what good, guilty sisters did. She quickly organized his desk for him, shuffling his piles in perfect squares and returning all his scattered pens and misplaced paperclips back in their little boxes, arranging her gifts in the exact center of his workspace. She’d learned a long time ago that subtle apologies never worked on Jai. He preferred abject groveling, but a girl had to have her limits. Otherwise, Iris had nothing to fall back on for times when the shameless bribery failed. That day had not yet come, but she knew it would. Taking a deep breath, Iris fortified herself and set out to find her brother.
She found him in the break room with a pretty teeny bopper, chatting about the funny haired vampire dude over a pair of non-fat frozen yogurts.
"No," the girl insisted with a dramatic eye roll, "You don't get it. See, she can't be with the werewolf because he doesn't really love her. He just thinks he loves her, and you have to be sure about these things or the relationship will never last."
"But he broke into her bedroom at night," Jai countered, waving his spoon around like a blade of truth, justice, and the sensibly law abiding way. "You can't tell me that's not creepy."
"It's sweet!" She squawked.
"I am yet to have a case on my desk where 'He loomed over me in the dark while I slept' is described by anyone as a good thing."
"That's because it's not true love."
“Uh,” Iris interrupted stupidly, brain shorting out. She pointed at the kid and raised a pointed brow at her brother, “A little young for you, isn’t she?”
The pair froze and looked up. Jai blushed, but glared back unrepentant, while his dessert partner sucked on her spoon and watched them with intent interest.
“I’m kidding,” Iris offered weakly, giving a shameful smile and a half-assed shrug. The weight of her brother's attention was more than a little uncomfortable, particularly since he wasn't acting as openly disgusted as usual. That meant he was really, really pissed. At least, that's what it usually meant. “Jai’s nowhere near grown up enough for you. He still wears footy pajamas.”
“And you go to work in them,” He snapped back grumpily, standing up. Jai smiled at the girl and pushed his portion, drowned in rainbow sprinkles and gummy bears, over to her. “We’ll be just a sec, ok?”
“Yeah,” the girl nodded, shamelessly shoveling his ice cream into her mouth. “Ok.”
Jai marched outside and waited for Iris to follow with a scowl and surly crossed arms.
“So,” Iris dragged down the hall, wondering if this was where she'd be filleted alive. Turning coward, Iris tried to play off the seriousness of the situation with a joke. She jabbed a thumb back towards the door. “She really is too young for you.”
“Shut up.” Jai growled, blowing his bangs out of his face. “That’s Emmy Delling.”
That tone of voice meant Iris was supposed to know exactly what Jai was talking about, so she racked her brain for the name, but in the end, she had to accept defeat. “Who?”
“Delling,” Jai hissed quietly, tipping his head towards the door in a reminder she could hear them if she spoke too loud. “Frank Delling. Cottey Delling? Ring any bells?”
“Wait,” Iris blinked, the pieces falling into a starling picture, “Like, the Dellings? Sue your ass for breathing near him Delling?”
“That’s the one.”
Iris stared at him. Then she stared over her shoulder. She turned back and gaped, “How did you do it?”
All of a sudden, her world wasn't so terrible anymore. Iris had no idea what was going on or how Emmy Delling came to be happily pigging out with her brother after a nightmarish night of hospitals and police cars, but she couldn't bring herself to care. It was one thing to fail a woman who didn't want to be saved. The idea Iris had doomed an innocent kid was eating her alive. But, here, safe and sound, was Emmy Delling.
Jai just shook his head and cracked a smile. With a laugh he said, “You are something else, you know that?”
“Uh,” Iris blinked, utterly confused. He cut off her off with a business card. She took it. The raised black letters with'Protect and Serve' stretch the top was unmistakably familiar. It was one of his. “What about it?”
“She showed up with that four hours ago,” Jai explained with a quirk. “Said the Flash promised she could come see me any time if she needed your help.” Jai shrugged, “Ends up, she’s failing math.”
Iris stared.
Jai quirked an eyebrow, “Well?” he prompted, “Aren’t you gonna go save her from a failing grade?”
She blinked.
“Go on,” Jai turned her around and gave her a push. “This one’s all you.”
“Right,” Iris swallowed nervously. “I can do this.” It wasn't a miracle in one step. Emmy Delling had a world of hurt ahead of her, but Iris had a chance to make a difference for an afternoon. Maybe she really could save this one.
“You can,” Jai agreed. His tone turned snobbish as he stuck his nose in the air with a sniff, “And you had better have bought me the good stuff, because I can’t believe I spent over and hour comparing glittery vampires to shirtless werewolves.”
“Jai,” Iris spun around, ready to tackle him to the ground, before she remember the many interested eyes peering at them from every corner. She bit her lip. This is precisely the sort of thing her mother warned her about. Taking the easy way out always ended up biting her in the ass. “Oh, fuck it,” Iris muttered. Screw the gossip mill all to hell, she decided, wrapping her brother in a tight hug. “I love you.”
“You too,” He murmured, squeezing her back. He pressed a kiss to her cheek. “Now get. Your public waits.”
Iris stepped back with a bright grin and winked, “Jealous, Jai?”
“Always,” he shook his head with a soft smile. “Always.”