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Joe sighs wearily to himself, rubbing a hand over his eyes.
Overnight shifts are the worst.
He pushes back from his desk abruptly, not really looking forward to another cup of the piss disguised as piss-poor coffee but needing the caffeine, and watches in amused bemusement when Officer Espinoza sashays into the bullpen, chuckling merrily.
“What’s got you in a tizzy?” he questions, and Espinoza’s eyes snap to his, the merriment in them growing.
“Just a D&D,” she says, waving a hand airily. “Got picked up outside the dive bar off Stockton—when Avery and Mulholland got there, one of her gal-pals was holding her back, and there was a guy on the ground with a broken arm.”
Joe whistles, impressed. “What’s her BAC?”
“Point-one-one,” Espinoza tells him, and Joe feels his eyebrows raise into his nonexistent hairline.
“Damn.”
“You’re telling me,” Espinoza laughs. “She’s sitting in the drunk tank now—we’ll let her out in the morning.”
“It’s already morning,” Joe mumbles, rubbing his eyes again, but he stands from his chair and heads downstairs anyway, curiosity piqued, all thoughts of coffee pushed to the back of his mind.
Joe can’t help but laugh when he approaches the room and sees the young woman, laying against the wall opposite the door, flat on the ground with her legs thrust up into the air above her, feet tapping on the wall sporadically. She catches sight of him in the next second, mouth widening into an upside-down cheshire grin.
“Detective West!” she almost-shouts, and Joe would be impressed with how sober she sounds if he wasn’t busy puzzling over the fact that she knows him by sight.
“Do I know you?” he asks, and the girl bursts into giggles, apparently finding his question hilarious.
“Not yet you don’t,” she trills out in a sing-song voice. “Someone hasn’t wanted us to meet for a very long time.” She pouts over-exaggeratedly at him.
Say what? It’s too late, far past the wrong side of midnight, and there isn’t nearly enough shitty precinct coffee for Joe to be able to handle a crazy drunken nutjob. “You got a name, lady?” he asks in annoyance, crossing his arms and frowning.
The girl tsks at him, then brings one finger to her lips in a shushing motion and grinning. “Ask your daughter,” she stage whispers before collapsing into another round of drunken giggles, feet falling away from the wall in a slow-motion arc and dropping to the ground with a thud.
Joe’s frown deepens even more, and warning bells start to go off in his head. He whirls away from the room and starts back toward his desk at a pace slightly faster than walking, phone already in hand. He presses the button for his number-one speed dial, and his dread grows when the line rings and rings.
Just as he reaches his desk, and just as he’s about to end the call and try again, the call is answered, and Joe hears Iris’s voice as if from far away, like she hasn’t quite gotten the phone to her ear yet. “I know, Barry,” Iris is saying, and the knot in Joe’s chest starts to dissipate as he realizes his baby girl is fine, that she’s with Barry, sounding whole and healthy (and annoyed, Joe notes confusedly), that the drunk girl was fucking with him, trying to get a rise out of him.
(Joe is ashamed to admit that it worked, but he blames it on the fact that it’s a quarter past too late for this shit—not to mention that Iris will always be his biggest weakness.)
“Dad?” Iris’s tinny phone-voice says, and Joe half-laughs into his own phone.
“Hey baby,” he sighs. “Sorry, sorry, forget I called. Just being your overprotective cop dad.”
“It’s okay,” Iris says warmly, and Joe smiles to himself, sitting down in his chair with a huff. “How’s work?”
“Same as ever,” Joe says dryly, not wanting to admit to his daughter the real reason of his call—actual spook or not, Iris would never let him hear the end of it.
Iris laughs—and Joe doesn’t know if it’s the abominably late hour or something else, but it sounds just the slightest bit off.
“You doin’ okay?” he asks in concern, and there’s that laugh again—distracted, and… nervous?
“It’s nothing,” Iris dismisses, using that same tone she had tried on him when she was fifteen and telling him that it wasn’t really a big deal that she had taken his cruiser on a late-night joyride to Big Belly Burger. “Just… Flash stuff, a small problem with the Rogues. Nothing crazy, don’t worry.”
“If you say so,” Joe says dubiously, and he ignores the small sigh of relief Iris gives.
He can’t, however, ignore Barry’s slightly muffled words from the other end of the connection. “Dibs on not telling Snart his little sister got picked up for drunkenly defending your honor.”
Several small, seemingly insignificant clues click together in Joe’s mind all at once, creating a bigger picture that Joe is sure he’ll kick himself for not noticing later.
“Are you telling me the girl currently sitting in my drunk tank is Golden Glider?” he whisper-shouts into his phone, mindful of the scant handful of people still working tirelessly around him.
The other end of the line is silent for a beat, two, three, and then Barry’s voice says, “Shit.”
“Dad—” Iris starts hesitantly, but she stops, clearly unsure of what to say.
“Iris.” Joe breathes in heavily, holds it for a lengthy second, then blows it all out in one long puff of air. “Are you dating Lisa Snart?”
“Um.” Joe can practically hear Iris’s hesitation. “Remember when I told you I might have met someone?”
“That was three months ago.”
“Yeah, well.” Iris sighs heavily over the line. “Okay, look—this isn’t quite how I imagined my dad would meet my girlfriend. Can we continue this later? Like, in the morning, after we get some sleep and I pick up Lisa? We can do breakfast.”
“Breakfast,” Joe repeats flatly. He wonders vaguely if he’s been dropped onto an alternate Earth without his knowledge. It’s a thing, he knows it could happen.
“Lunch?”
Joe rubs a hand over his face again. All he wants is sleep and the chance to forget this night ever happened. “How’s about we sleep on it, then maybe we can talk about lunch.”
“Okay,” Iris says quietly. “Love you, Dad.”
“Love you too, baby.”
The line goes dead, and Joe stares at his phone for an indeterminable amount of time before sighing to himself again and getting up once more in search for coffee.
He’ll deal with all of this when he’s had more time to process.
And a lot more caffeine.