Chapter Text
She was thinking about dinner and she was in a hurry when she stepped through the breach. She was half paying attention to her movements. She had used the extrapolator many times and it was set to breach her to her house. It could not be recalibrated. Barry and Cisco had decided that it was too powerful an invention with consequences that they couldn’t control if someone, like Eobard Thawne for example, got a hold of it and decided they wanted to breach somewhere… which could be literally anywhere. And although he hadn’t worked on it yet, Barry was suspicious that the interdimensional aspect of the extrapolator was viable, he just didn’t know where outside of his earth he could land. Cisco agreed that they should keep that part inactive until they knew more about this multiverse possibility that Barry had explained to him one evening.
So the scientists had only produced a limited amount of extrapolators with a limited number of destinations and in their own timeline. Both men’s fingerprints were embedded in it. Both men needed permission from the other to produce more. Henry Allen had one. He could only breach from his cabin to their house and back. And Iris. She had an extrapolator to breach from her office at her home to her office in downtown Central City and back to her home, and that was it. Now she felt small asking Barry to calibrate it for her just to evade evening traffic so she could get home to cook dinner, and since her housekeeper had been cooking weekday dinners for a few years and she had an agreement with her favorite catering service, she really did not need it. Her pride just got the best of her. She just wanted it. It was Barry’s invention. Well, he shared part ownership and Cisco gave him part credit for the device when Barry showed him how to fingerprint it. If someone stole it, it looked like a spindle adapter for playing old school forty-five vinyls. It was shiny and metallic and besides Barry and Cisco, it was useless to everyone but Iris.
So she felt comfortable in breaching. She almost always breached without thinking, always a story of hers, an article or interview or the kids’ school work on her mind. She breached from her office at Citizen Media and when she stepped into the room she immediately realized she was not in her home office. “Dad’s house?” she asked herself. How did she get there? Did the extrapolator misread her coordinates, because Barry had already set them, and she did not know how to reset or change the coordinates. She was going to call Barry and tell him what happened, but then….
Iris felt lost or confused or…something. She had breached to her old bedroom. She spotted her old picture between the vanity mirror and its frame on her dresser. It was Barry and she when they were twelve on the first day of seventh grade. That picture was a marker for how Barry had grown that summer. He was so much taller than she. ‘I’m gonna catch up,’ she had told him, but she was in awe of how much taller he was. She went to her old vanity and started to reclaim the picture because she thought it was in her album at their house. She looked around and said, “I thought Cecile had redone this room. Did Dad make her put back my old furniture? Why?” Suddenly the bathroom door opened and she… an Iris, a younger Iris, no, Young Iris in a plain white cotton gown stepped into the bedroom.
They both pointed at each other. “I’m you. You’re me, but you’re… older… younger….”
Then Iris said, “The extrapolator malfunctioned.”
Young Iris said, “The what?”
Iris knew she was treading in danger. Don’t mess up your timeline, girl. You are so in love with your life. Don’t change it. Because she knew where she was.