Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Less than forty-eight hours after Ronnie dies for the second time, Caitlin gets out of bed, showers, dresses, dries her hair, and goes to work. (She doesn't look at the blanket draped over the back of her couch, doesn't look at the takeout containers Cisco had brought over last night piled in the too-full trash, doesn't pull one of Ronnie's shirts to her face to breath in what's left of his scent. She doesn't.)

STAR Labs is in shambles. The roads are clear and unbroken, the traffic is light, but it's easy to look at the city around her and remember the black hole swirling above, threatening to pull them all into its depths. The glinting of broken windows constantly begs for her attention from every direction, skyscrapers hollow and bared to the wind. Cars line the streets too, in various states of disarray; safety glass litters the streets, vehicles lean on popped and shredded tires, their weights distributed all wrong, atilt and askew. She sees two cars flipped on their sides, frames crumpled, during her short drive. A third one is in the process of getting towed; stopped at a traffic light that doesn't have any power, waiting like it's a four-way stop, Caitlin watches a two-man crew struggle with the warped metal. But STAR Labs got the worst of it.

There's a gaping hole in the side of the accelerator; pipes and wires and the insides of the building exposed to the elements. The parking lot is mostly clear though—or it was never filled, the debris of the city never had the chance to settle and land, in this space below the epicenter—so Caitlin doesn't flinch or falter, just pulls her car into its usual spot, next to Cisco's, and puts it into park.

She takes a deep breath. Rare, that she's here after her best friend. Rare, but not unheard of. Her fingers tighten on the wheel, looking for something solid to hold onto, some firm, unmovable thing to ground her. (The entire foundation of the building had shaken when the black hole had burst forth. Even the ground beneath her isn't reliable.)

It's just a fluke, she tells herself. Just a statistical inevitably that Cisco managed to arrive before her. She ignores the fact that she knows he came in yesterday too, called to help by Barry. She ignores the fact that he'd left her a note on her table that she hadn't seen until hours later, too . . . Too something. There isn't a word for what state of mind she'd been in. Waking up to find Cisco gone with no apparent explanation, not finding his note until late afternoon, when she'd finally dragged herself to the kitchen to eat something, hadn't helped matters. But he doesn't know that—she hadn't told him when he'd stopped by with dinner again only a few hours later—and she isn't going to tell him now that seeing his car here before her is so unsettling.

It's illogical, after all, and Caitlin is nothing if not logical. She pries her fingers off the steering wheel, peels her grip off the leather, and takes another deep breath. Her foot is still pressing on the brake, even though the car is in park. She pulls that off too, shuts off the engine. It's sunny outside, but it must be windy because her eyes are heavy and tight and she has to blink hard to keep them clear as she makes the short walk over to the front door.

The walk to the control room is familiar and haunting and passes in the blink of an eye. She's underground now, more or less. The halls here are empty and untouched—she thinks. She doesn't really remember the walk, just opens the front door to the building and steps into the room where she's spent most of her time the past year and a half. (Since the last disaster.)

No one is there, and Caitlin lingers in the doorway, her thoughts so askew she's not even really sure she's present at all. Or maybe she's too present. Maybe she's feeling nothing, or maybe she's feeling everything. She takes a few steps into the room, runs her hand along the edge of the desk. The monitors are all on. Cisco (and/or Barry) were here not long ago. (Ronnie was here, not too long ago, leaning over her shoulder, holding her close, amazed and wonderful. They'd been talking about time travel, and their wedding, the past, and their future.)

Footsteps, behind her. "Caitlin," Cisco says, and there's a little bit of worry there, a little bit of surprise. A little bit of relief. "You didn't have to come in. Barry and I got this handled."

It hurts to hear. They don't need her. That's not what Cisco means, but it's what he's saying. "Got what handled?" The question comes out light and airy, drifting on the non-existent breeze, pushed along, perhaps, by Caitlin's non-existent feelings.

Cisco looks fine. He looks fine, as if he hasn't shattered into a million pieces, like he isn't cold as ice. He's wearing one of his usual T-shirts, and his hair is tucked back behind his ears, and he's steady on his own two feet. His face makes a wry expression, half grimace, half 'what-can-you-do'. "Oh, uh, you know. Dealing with the cops—Joe's got that mostly handled though. Cleaning up the gaping hole in the building. Turns out Barry can learn construction pretty fast too." He grins at his last comment, a hint of the eagerness they once shared at all the wild and wonderful things Barry's speed makes him capable of. The grin falters quickly though, gone in an instant.

The gaping hole in the building, the black hole in the sky, Eddie's body pulled in by gravity, Ronnie flying up never to return. STAR Labs is broken. (It feels like there's a hole somewhere in Caitlin too.) She doesn't want to think about that. "The cops?" she asks instead. Again, her question is light and untroubled. Distant, even, echoing from a room far away. The words don't sound like hers. She's not sure she remembers her mouth moving.

Cisco's grimace deepens, his gaze glancing to the side. He fidgets a little. He's uncomfortable. (Caitlin observes that, and doesn't move, and doesn't do anything, and doesn't know if she cares.) "There's no, you know, body. But, also, it was a black hole, and a lot of people . . . So it's not that hard to . . . to declare him legally dead, you know." He gives her a look, wide-eyed and flinching a little, and hurries to elaborate. "Eddie," he says, and his tone is apologetic. "Joe was there, so, he's handling that. Barry says Iris is—" He shakes his head.

Right. Because Ronnie was already legally dead before he died a second time. There's nothing to handle there. The city will never see Firestorm again, and they'll probably never think to wonder why.

There won't be a second funeral.

"Barry's here, then?" Caitlin asks, before Cisco can say anything more about dead bodies and grief and grief and grief. She doesn't want to think about Iris. It's selfish, but Ronnie was her husband. Her husband of all of a couple hours, maybe, but her husband nevertheless. She's here—why can't Iris be? What right does Iris have to complain, to grieve, when Caitlin lost Ronnie twice, when Caitlin—

She bites her lip as Cisco starts to talk about Barry's efforts to tidy up STAR Labs and holds back the anger, the warmth, in her heart. (It isn't enough to thaw her edges, just sits there, burning.)

Cisco talks, and he talks, and he talks, and it should be comfortable, and familiar. It isn't. Barry's somewhere nearby, speeding through the building, cleaning up the small things, apparently. He can't close up the gaping holes in the side of the accelerator, but he can close off pipes and tie off wires, clean up debris and smooth down rough edges. Caitlin hears all that, and doesn't hear it, and she listens closely, and doesn't listen at all.

The beeping of the computer though. That's familiar. Cisco's words die, and they blink at each other, and then Caitlin's turning to the computer and Cisco's hurrying to her side, and she clicks on the comm link to Barry's suit on rote instinct. There's no need to think, only to do, and Caitlin's done this dozens of times already. Her body knows the routine.

"There's a robbery," she tells Barry without any greetings, and it's not off, it's not rude, because there's people in danger and there's no time for idle chitchat. That's how this works. That's how it's supposed to work. She can be numb, here, and it won't change things, won't ruin them. "Twenty-fifth and Center."

"What kind of robbery?" Barry asks after a second. Caitlin knows him well enough to detect the slightest hint of strain in his voice. He's already moving. He'll be there shortly.

"Armed," Cisco said, straight to the point, eyes and ears on everything they have from the police. "Cops are already on their way. You'll get there first." The smug satisfaction in that statement isn't, perhaps, as strong as it usually is, but it's there nevertheless.

"Two assailants reported," Caitlin says, tone matter of fact. "Gas station store. No reported meta, but be careful." She doesn't even have to care, right now, to tell Barry to be careful. That's rote too, habit and instinct all at once. But she feels lighter after she says it, feels the hint of a thaw in her fingertips and toes, as if telling Barry she cares is enough to make her care.

Barry doesn't say, "I will." He doesn't speed through a cheerful, "Always am," almost too fast for them to understand over their connection. He just makes a sound, half-grunt, half-hum, a noise of acknowledgement. That's not . . . It's not too strange. He might already be at the scene. He might need to concentrate.

He might be feeling the overwhelming weight of grief from two days ago: an unchanged past, a mentor barely defeated, two friends dead.

Caitlin shakes her head to clear it, and laments to herself, not for the first time, how annoying it is not to be able to see what's going on. She's never wanted to be there, with Barry, but it's tense, sitting in front of the computers with Cisco, relying on police reports and Barry's updates and, if they're lucky, the city's network of traffic cameras Felicity got them access to.

There are no traffic cameras near the robbery. (Or, if there are, they're down, just like the traffic lights Caitlin encountered on her drive in.) Caitlin isn't sure she's ever been more aware it's an armed robbery. It shouldn't matter. Barry's handled meta upon meta. A single gun—or two, even, or twenty—should be a piece of cake for him. The statistics crowd her brain instead: bullets, on average, travel twice the speed of sound. Barry can go faster—and has, and does—but she still remembers the first meta they ever faced, the threat and wonder of him speeding over 600 miles per hour around a tornado to unravel it.

Will he go faster than the speed of sound, in a tiny store on a corner lot? Can he, in such confined quarters? She's never asked him for the details like this. She asks about his injuries, and she asks about his capabilities, and she draws his blood to make sure he's healthy as can be, but the part where he fights crime? That's not her forte. She's (normally) happy to let Cisco gush about that with him, to let Wells dig into the details—

No. She's not thinking about Wells, about Thawne, about how everything that happened is his fault. About how he recruited her and Ronnie and everyone else, about how he planned for the accelerator to explode. About how he pushed Barry into a corner, dangled the opportunity to save his mother in front of him—

Are her hands shaking? Barry still hasn't said anything. She doesn't know how long it's been. She presses down on the button on the microphone in front of. "Barry?" Like a scared little girl asking for her mother, her voice trembles and shakes. In the space between her pressing down the button and then letting go of it again, her gaze scans over her screen, across all of Barry's vitals transmitted from his suit. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. (Barry's ordinary, at least.)

"Scoping it out," Barry says. "Looks like—"

And then his voice cuts out. No, and then the power cuts off, the screens going black, the lights switching in an instant to emergency power, barley a dim glow in the room. Caitlin flinches, jerking back from the control panel as her heart violently skips a beat. At her side, Cisco swears, pushing back his own chair and standing. She barely processes it as he hurries away, off to find a fuse box or something. If her hands weren't shaking before, they are now.

She sits there, and she trembles, and she doesn't know how long it is before the power flickers, once, twice, and then it's back. The screens turn back on with a characteristic click and hum, black for a moment as they reboot. Caitlin watches all the screens come back to life, and doesn't know how long that takes either.

She can't do this. Ronnie hadn't been wearing a comm, when he and Martin had flown into the event horizon of a black hole, but she can't do this. The accelerator is broken, and warning lights are flashing and sirens are blaring and she doesn't know if there's too much energy from particles being smashed together, or if Barry's just created a singularity by traveling through time.

Cisco's back. She missed him entering the room, isn't quite sure where he went. But she watches, still two feet from the computers, pushed back by her flinch at the power outage, as he hurries to the microphone and presses down the button to speak.

"You there, Barry?" he asks, hurried and tense. There's a strain in his voice, a thread pulled tight and threatening to snap. "Sorry. Still having power fluctuations."

Still. Maybe that's what Barry's been fixing, maybe that's why he called Cisco for help. It makes more sense than imaging them building the walls back up together.

(The accelerator is broken. Caitlin thinks she might be too.)

Barry responds, but Caitlin doesn't hear the words. Her eyes are scanning her screens again, Barry's vitals once more displayed. They look fine. She thinks they look fine? There's something . . . His heartbeat is elevated, but not for him, only from the average human. Body temperature is fine too. Respiration looks fine. But no, something's off. Something is, only she can't tell what it is, because she can't tell much of anything.

Her hands are still shaking.

She blinks, and lightning strikes the room, and Barry's there, a tired grin on his masked face. "Wasn't much of anything," he says. "They weren't actually armed, just a hand in the pocket. I—"

His voice cuts out again. His voice cuts out, even though he's standing right in front of her, and for a moment Caitlin thinks again that there's something wrong with her, that she's the one breaking and shattering, that she can't process what's happening right in front of her. And then she sees Barry blink, and watches a puzzled look cross his face for a second, and stands there as his knees crumple and he folds to the ground.

"Barry!" She's up in an instant, and her hands are steady as she grabs at her friend, rolls him over to his front. He's not seizing, he's still breathing, she goes to open his eyelid to check his pupil but he's already rousing, already blinking up at the ceiling. "Barry!" she says again, more question than exclamation, and she can barely hear her own outcry over the rushing of her heartbeat in her ears.

Barry blinks, looking confused again. Cisco's kneeling on the other side of him, and when Barry tries to sit, it's Cisco who props him up, who gets a hand under Barry's elbow and lets him lean his weight on him. Barry's other hand goes to his forehead as he frowns.

"Sorry," he says, and it's loose and distracted, but he's not slurring his words, not exactly. "Sorry, I . . . " He shakes his head.

The incident has all the symptoms of a classic faint. Caitlin's heart pounds at her chest; her eyes sting again with unshed tears.

Cisco asks the question she can't bring herself to speak. "What happened? I thought you said nothing went wrong?"

Barry's still frowning. "Nothing did go wrong," he insists. His tone is clearer, back to normal. Firm and strong, though he's still leaning on Cisco. "I just, I don't know. Maybe I didn't get enough sleep."

"I can't do this." The words burst out of Caitlin's chest without her permission. She hadn't intended to say them out loud. But she's backing away from Barry anyway, she's standing, hands raised as if her friends are going to shoot at her, shaking her head, shaking, shaking, shaking. Is the building shaking again? "I can't," she gasps out, and then she's fleeing the room.

She doesn't remember the walk—the run?—back to her car. She doesn't remember if she fumbled with her key fob, trying to find the right button, or if she never locked her car door in the first place. She doesn't remember if she sobbed, or screamed. She blinks, and the car is still off, still stationary, and her hands are on the wheel, and Cisco is knocking on the window, looking concerned.

She has to start the car, first, before she can roll down the window, but she manages it, shaky and fumbling, she manages it.

Cisco's frowning at her, eyes wild and searching. "Barry's fine," he says quickly, and Caitlin hadn't been thinking about it, but she'd never actually thought that Cisco had come because Barry wasn't fine. Cisco would never leave Barry while he still needed help, and if Caitlin had been the only one who could have helped, her best friend would have been even more worried.

She doesn't know what to say to that though. She can still picture Barry's collapse, the blankness in his expression for that split second as he'd made his way to the ground. Her hands are both gripping her steering wheel tightly again; she doesn't remember when she'd put them back there.

"He's fine," Cisco repeats, and she's not sure who he's trying to convince. "He just, with everything, he just forgot to eat. He's snacking on a couple of bars now."

Right: the super-high/dense-calorie bars she and Cisco had concocted what feels like eons ago now, back when all this had first started, back when metahumans were barely a thing, and Ronnie was legally dead. Ronnie's still legally dead, and she still knows that he isn't ever coming back. She'd been worried about Barry's health back then too, hadn't had any data on what his advanced metabolism had meant for him.

Back before even that, before Barry had started to faint for what had seemed like no reason, she'd thrown herself into caring for his unconscious body. She'd had a goal, a mission, something to work for in the wake of Ronnie's absence. (His death.) But caring for Barry can't be that goal again. She hadn't known Barry then, and sure she'd wanted him to survive, but between Wells' confidence that he would and her own lack of emotional attachment, she'd never really been worried. (Thawne, that was Thawne, never Wells, and he'd killed Barry's mother, and murdered Ronnie twice, and Caitlin will never forgive him for that.)

She doesn't have it in her to be worried now. "I can't come back here."

Cisco blinks at her. "What?"

She shakes her head. Her grip is less tense on the wheel; her car vibrates beneath her, as ready as she is to leave this place. "I can't do this anymore, Cisco," she says, and she sounds close to tears, and her eyes are stinging, but she's pretty sure she's not about to start crying. Not again. "I . . . I can't come back. Not here." She can't sit in that control room and watch someone else die.

"Barry's going to be fine." Cisco is leaning forward, his tone halfway to pleading.

Incredulity mixes with despair, dripping off him, and part of Caitlin wants to comfort him, and part of Caitlin doesn't care. Her gaze goes to the gaping hole in the side of the building. Her gaze goes to the small patch of grass where she and Ronnie stood before Martin Stein and promised to love each other forever. It's not forever, though, is it? Just until death parts them, and death is the only thing that could have. And it did. Because Ronnie is dead.

She can't come back here.

Caitlin shakes her head again. "I'm sorry," she says, and she is—not that she doesn't want to come back, but that she's leaving Cisco here—but not sorry enough to stay. She puts the car into drive. Cisco takes a step back, eyes widening a little.

"Caitlin . . . " he starts to say. If he says anything else, Caitlin doesn't hear it. She's already driving away.