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Chapter Text

Anxiety tumbles through Ronald Raymond, a storm of ups and downs, glee and giddiness swirling with anticipation and trepidation. Fear slides through the storm in blazes of heat; ecstasy hangs to the fear's coattails in the cool rushes that follow. He doesn't think he's ever been so nervous—so excited—in his life, and he's a legally-dead metahuman on the run from the United States military, permanently empathically bonded to another man who'd been a stranger a year ago.

It's sunny, and the grass is green even if the trees are bare. The looming structure of the building that killed him, the building that gave him new life—the building that gave him his first life, because he met Caitlin Snow there—hovers behind him, solid and unmovable. He doesn't have a suit, or jacket; no tie or flower on his lapel. There is no music in the background; his parents still think he's dead. He barely knows Joe West, hovering next to Barry, or his daughter Iris and Iris' boyfriend Eddie Thawne, standing with Cisco. Heck, he barely knows Barry Allen, the superhero who brought him back to himself.

None of that matters—none of it. Only this, only the future, only her. "Is this actually binding?" The words slip out of his mouth with ease, not discomfort, no matter the itch of anticipation worming its way up his spine. He wants this to be real—God, he wants this so desperately to be real—but he trusts his partner, knows that this is genuine.

Martin Stein stands opposite him, better dressed, perhaps, but still not quite what Ronnie had pictured when he'd imagined meeting Caitlin under the altar. But then, he never thought he'd be as close with his officiant as he is now. There's no altar above them, but there is something between him and Martin, the storm in Ronnie's soul merged with another. Ronnie knows enough to know by now that the joy in Martin is an echo of his own, a feedback loop of sunshine and delight and bubbles threatening to spill from his stomach, but it's also Martin's in its own right. The other half of the superhero Ronnie sometimes is is happy for him.

"My father made me become a rabbi before he would send me to MIT. This will be "legit", as the kids say."

Ronnie's happiness spills onto his face into a smile he can't contain any longer. Jokes. Martin Stein is joking with him, lighthearted and easy. The joy echoes between them, strengthening, and Ronnie can feel the difference between their two sides of the same coin, between him and Martin, between giddy anticipation and pleased satisfaction. "No kids say that," he says, and he's still grinning.

Martin looks up from the book in his hands. "Let's not fight on our wedding day," he says, and Ronnie's joy threatens to burst out even further into laughter.

But no, the anticipation is there too, the threat hanging over the day. None of them have forgotten why they're standing in STAR Lab's shadow, what Barry is going to do once the ceremony is over and done with. Ronnie huffs lightly instead of bursting with happiness, and shakes his head, still grinning. He doesn't argue about the "our". They know what each other means, the different partnerships a soul can make. Martin's married too, and it's only the suddenness of today's gathering that Clarissa isn't standing here with the crowd. (Well, that, perhaps, and the threat of Thawne. But Thawne doesn't—can't—matter right now.)

Something catches Ronnie's attention. If he were more of an optimist, more of a romantic, he'd say it was the other half of his soul calling to him. Maybe it's just a hint of movement, a shifting of the small crowd, the scent of a perfume. Does it matter what? It's Caitlin, and it's their wedding day. Ronnie turns, and she's beautiful, and he has no more eyes for the man standing next to him.

She has a proper dress, even if it's maybe not the one she would have picked if she'd had more time. She has a bouquet of flowers, bright yellow in her hands, even if they're not her favorite. Pearls ring her neck, and a smile adorns her face, and her eyes are only for him, too. There's nothing in the world for either of them but each other.

Martin talks, about love, about science, about partnerships, about magic. Ronnie barely hears him. He doesn't take his eyes off Caitlin until Martin calls for the rings, and then Caitlin is handing her bouquet off to Iris, and Cisco is kneeling between the two of them, palm offered upward like a medieval knight offering a boon, and pleasure and displeasure war within Ronnie as he slides a piece of metal on his fiancée's finger.

"I owe you a real ring." It's self-depreciating, no matter the joy behind it. The wedding he'd always pictured never looked like this, done in haste, in a moment of fear, himself a wanted fugitive. Caitlin deserves so much better than this, so much better than what he can give her at the moment.

"I don't need one," Caitlin says, and Ronnie's heart could just about burst. She deserves so much better than this ramshackle wedding—but finally, finally, they get to claim each other, to be together after so long apart, and he couldn't be happier. Caitlin continues, saying what he's thinking, "I have everything and everyone that I could ever need right here. And if all the events of the past year have led us to this moment . . . It was worth it. I love you, Ronnie."

Words are not enough. Ronnie has nothing left inside him to burst out, because it's all already there, his love staring at him through Caitlin's eyes.

Martin—as he has so often this past year—speaks first, speaks for him. "I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride."

There's pride there, in and amongst the joy. Ronnie has no words for Caitlin, but she's not his only partner here. "Stop telling me what to do," he tells Martin, and then he cups Caitlin's face in his hands and falls into her love.

They get a little time, between the wedding and Barry's journey to save his mother, between joy and fear, between the future and the past. Ronnie spends it with Caitlin, she spends it with him, they spend it together, and then it's over. There's hero's work to be done, and the weight doesn't rest on Ronnie's shoulders.

Ronnie still doesn't know Barry all that well. He lets Caitlin say her goodbyes and stays in the control room with Martin.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" Martin asks him, watching the readouts on the screen.

Ronnie can't look at them yet, all those lines and charts and graphs that remind him of the night he died, the last time said goodbye to Caitlin. Fascinating is one word for it. Barry's off to change the past—to save his mother—and no one has any idea what that means for the rest of them, no matter how much Martin theorizes. Will Firestorm even exist, in whatever future Barry means to create?

Will he even have Caitlin?

Martin interrupts the anxious spin his thoughts have fallen into. "Mr. Allen is quite the capable young man." Pride, again—trust and affection, slight though they may be.

His partner's emotions bolster Ronnie's own confidence. He has Caitlin now, and if the past year has taught him anything, now is the only time that truly matters. Martin's words don't quite address his fears, but the man's emotions do. It's good enough for now. Ronnie takes his place at Caitlin's side when the rest of the group—minus Barry—troop back into the control room.

He's standing right next to her, Cisco beside them both, and the three of them are right back where everything started when it falls to pieces around them again.

"It cannot be stopped!" Martin insists, as they stare in terror at the wormhole—the black hole—growing above Central City, and Ronnie knows he means it.

"I have to try," Barry says, firm, and Ronnie knows he means it too—all of them do. No one needs an empathic bond to see the determination written on Barry's face.

Last time Ronnie was here (not physically, but here nevertheless, with Caitlin telling him it isn't safe, it's too dangerous, he can't leave her side), he cupped Caitlin's head in his hands and kissed her lips and told her he had to go.

This time, he cups Caitlin's head in his hands, and kisses her lips, and echoes Barry's words.

They have to try.

Chapter Text

After Cisco's best friend Barry Allen runs, speeds, his way out of a black hole, Cisco watches the man pull his other best friend Caitlin Snow into his arms, whispering desperate, grieving apologies. His third best friend, Ronnie Raymond, is nowhere to be found.

Cisco Ramon is a man who has rarely believed in limits. He got the degree, the job, the knowledge his family never thought he could. He built a tri-polymer reinforced suit that doesn't fall to pieces when Barry runs faster than the speed of sound, that held up to the forces a black hole exerts. He's designed containment for metahumans who can turn to a toxic gas on a whim or freaking teleport. He's seen human beings control the weather.

He has no issue, having three best friends. Best friend isn't a title to be limited, to be hoarded and squirreled away and kept close to the chest. Cisco loves Caitlin Snow, and he loves Barry Allen, and he loves Ronnie Raymond.

Loved.

Cisco stares at a dazed Martin Stein collapsed on the ground, and his two (living) best friends distraught in each others' arms, and realizes it's past tense now.

Again.

Forever?

Ronnie's died before. There's a grave with his name on it in a local cemetery; Cisco still remembers the disconcertingly sunny day that had hovered over them as he'd held Caitlin close and tried to support her. He remembers the distraught face of Ronnie's mother, flown in from Florida—the first and only time Cisco has ever met the woman. And he remembers the horrifying thud of the empty casket as they'd lowered it into the ground.

There isn't a body now either, and Cisco can't help but wonder, can't help but hope, but . . . No. No, this isn't like last time. He stares into the face of Martin Stein over Caitlin's shoulder, that blank and horrified expression, and knows Ronnie isn't coming back from this. He feels hollowed out, like his emotions have gone some distant place they can't come back from. He doesn't want them to come back. He's already watched Eddie Thawne die. The city lies in pieces around them. Barry holds Caitlin close, and Cisco's heart breaks.

The rest of the afternoon—after Eddie and Wells-who-is-(was)-Thawne and a black hole and Ronnie, gone forever for the second time—passes in bits and pieces that Cisco barely recalls later: Iris, sobbing into her father's arms; Joe West, corralling them away from the coming first responders; Martin, shaky on his feet and barely there in his mind, accepting Cisco's arm for support as they stumble away; a bloodstain in the accelerator chamber but nothing else, all the debris sucked out with the black hole (that's two absent bodies they have to mourn now—and a horrifyingly unknown number of people the city is likely already starting to grieve, their bodies lost forever in the black hole's depths).

Did Joe escort Iris home, or did he leave to help his coworkers manage the disaster? Did Barry collect their personal items in a rush of speed—what was left of them, Caitlin's dress already packed away in a small bag, a mug of coffee left out, Martin's Torah—or did Cisco and Caitlin stumble through the shattered remains of STAR Labs and gather them up themselves? Whose car was left in the lot, abandoned alone, rear passenger window shattered by debris, as the rest of them pulled out: Eddie's, never to be driven again? Martin's, since Cisco had shepherded the man into his passenger seat, ready to drive him home to his wife? Or had Iris left her car behind, similarly shepherded by Barry so she could mourn in private?

Cisco doesn't know the answer to any of these questions. Sitting behind the wheel of his own car, staring at the Stein's front door, he doesn't care to know. He blinks, and realizes his passenger seat is empty, Martin gone, the Stein house quiet. He doesn't remember seeing Martin make his way inside, but he knows it happened. He doesn't remember how long it's been. His car is off. He's not sure why he stopped the engine. With a twist of his wrist and a turn of the key, he starts it back up again. On rote instinct, he drives back to STAR Labs.

The abandoned car sits alone in the lot. Barry's gone. Joe and Iris are gone. Caitlin's gone, and horror strikes Cisco's gut at the thought she might be alone. He takes his foot off the brake and sets off again.

Emotion has returned to Cisco by the time he finds himself in front of Caitlin's—and Ronnie's—doorstep, pounding away with his fist, but the horror, the grief, the worry he feels are all still so distant. He pounds and pounds, "Caitlin!" bursting forth from his lungs, but there isn't any answer. Cisco doesn't even know if she's home.

No. Scratch that. He knows his best friend. Caitlin isn't home, and he knows exactly where she's gone.

Chest heaving, Cisco drops his fist and stares at the silent door for a moment. His jaw clenches. He shakes his head. Tears threaten to fall, and he swipes at his right eye angrily with the back of his hand.

It isn't fair. None of this is fair. Only hours ago, he was offering up rings to his two best friends, a pseudo-best man for a perfectly imperfect wedding. And now . . .

He tries the doorknob. Locked, as expected. The little kernel of hope in him that maybe Caitlin just hadn't wanted to answer the door dies. He shakes his head again and turns away.

When a person goes missing during a disaster—be it a tornado, flood, hurricane, building collapse, or your place of work exploding in a city-wide disaster that ended up giving people across town superpowers—it takes paperwork to declare them legally dead. Without a body, sometimes there's never any way to be certain. But Ronnie had gone into the curve of the accelerator, and then the stupid thing had exploded, flooded with energy he'd successfully managed to divert up instead of out. There'd been no body, but there'd never been any doubt in Cisco's mind that his friend had died.

Not after that tumultuous first week, at least. Not after the clean up, and the shuttering of most of STAR Lab's facilities, and the mass exodus of all the other employees but him and Caitlin. Not after several frantic what-ifs, and a night of searching up and down every access corridor and maintenance hatch in the building. Cisco knew what kind of energy had flooded the accelerator that night. They all had. They'd all known Ronnie wasn't coming back—they'd known it, and it didn't matter that they'd later found out they were wrong, because the certainty had sunk in, gotten its claws into them and held fast.

So Cisco had accepted Ronnie's death, and he'd held Caitlin as she cried, and he'd helped her plan a funeral, and file the paperwork to declare him dead, and he'd talked to Mrs. Raymond on the phone because she was listed as the next of kin, and he'd left voicemails for Mr. Raymond that never got any responses.

And he'd picked out the gravestone that still sits in Riverview Cemetery, light gray granite and gleaming. He'd picked a companion upright stone, foolishly, optimistically maybe, because they hadn't been married yet then, Ronnie's name—son, friend, fiancé—on the left, space left on the right for Caitlin to fill in the far distant future. It'd been stupid, maybe. Cisco had never been sure if he'd wanted Caitlin to move on, to find someone else. She—they—were young, and Ronnie had been the love of her life, but she'd had a lot of life left.

For so short a time—too short of time—Ronnie had been her everything.

Cisco hasn't been to his friend's gravestone in months—because Ronnie wasn't there, had never been there, had been off in Pittsburgh with Martin Stein being a superhero—but he still knows the way on instinct. He blinks, and he's at the corner of Forest Drive and route 53, his blinker on as he sits at a red light. It's cloudy, a haze of gray above him that isn't enough to fully blanket the sky; the sun shines through a gap, beautiful beams shooting down to somewhere in front of him, illuminating his view. He blinks again, and he's doing a steady 37 miles per hour down Spruce, perfectly in tune with the flow of traffic. The sun's to his left now, above him only shade and shadow.

He blinks, and he's in turning into Riverview, slowing appropriately, inching along at less than ten miles an hour as he navigates the asphalt road through the hills. He knows where Ronnie's grave is, but even if he didn't it's easy to spot. Caitlin's car is half off the asphalt where she normally likes to park, under the shade of a tree that arcs gracefully over a gravestone at the end of Ronnie's aisle. In the springtime, it flowers with gorgeous pink flowers, big as Cisco's palms; now the petals are on the ground, crushed by foot traffic and lawn mowers and decayed by the sun.

He slows further, shifts his own wheels off the road so there's enough space for someone to pass by, and parks behind his best friend. He can't see her from the road—Ronnie's grave is over the hill, and a little ways down. For a moment, Cisco can only sit there, staring at the back of Caitlin's car. His left hand is still on the steering wheel. He blinks. His chest hitches. He doesn't want to be here, visiting an old grave that'll never be filled, a headstone with the incorrect date, an error they never got around to fixing. There's no point fixing it now.

But Ronnie is—was—only his best friend. He was Caitlin's husband, for however short a time.

Cisco doesn't want to be here.

But Caitlin is.

Slumping, his forehead meets the steering wheel. His chest hitches again as he rests his weight on it, his eyes screw shut, stinging. He doesn't cry. He doesn't cry, and it's an effort to keep the tears from linking through, but now isn't the time for them. Cisco takes a deep breath, then another, until the rock in his heart doesn't feel quite so heavy, and then he opens his eyes and lifts his head off the wheel. He steps out of the car. He doesn't lock it behind him, just shuts the door and hears the thump echo through the empty landscape.

The clouds above look more white than gray now. The sun's still out in the distance. The grass is green around him—freshly cut, looks like, from the clippings scattered near the edge of the road. He steps onto springy soil and feels the slight tinge of a burn in his calves as he angles himself up to the top of the hill.

Caitlin is kneeling in front of Ronnie's empty grave. Whether she hears him approach or not—Cisco isn't trying to be quiet, but there's no energy to him, nothing to make noise either—she doesn't give any indication. He pads up to only a few feet away, then hesitates. Guilt swamps him barely a second later. What right does he have to hesitate to offer comfort as Caitlin folds in on herself in front of her husband's grave?

He sucks in a breath, and his heart restarts, and he hurries to his knees at Caitlin's side. (It's so different from only a few hours ago, dropping to one knee between his best friends and offering them up their rings.)

"Caitlin," he says, cautious and probing and empathetic and grieving.

Tears have already carved steady streams down her cheeks, her mouth over her hand, her body bent forward, leaning toward Ronnie's name, but a sob escapes her at her own name. It blurts from her chest, ragged and torn, a cry to the world of the injustice she's suffered. "Cisco!" she sobs, and there's no more hesitation, not anymore.

Cisco surges forward, and bundles Caitlin up in his arms, and lets her cry until she has no more tears inside her.

"C'mon," Cisco says, gently, brittleness in his throat, and he stands with one hand in Caitlin's and pulls her to her feet too.

She comes meekly, quiet, drooping and exhausted, and Cisco doesn't think about the logistics of it all, about getting her home, until he's crested the hill again, looking at their two cars bumper to bumper in the dimming twilight. He's not sure Caitlin should be driving right now.

But he's hesitated again, slipped up, and Caitlin's already wiping at her eyes with her free hand (her other still wrapped up, warm in his fingers, smooth against his palm). Before Cisco can say anything, before his mind—normally quick-as-a-whip, but it's failed him now, foggy and heavy and carved out by the river of grief he's still struggling to swim through—can come up with a dozen viable plans, Caitlin slips her hand out of his.

"Thank you," she says, heavy and exhausted and still somehow grateful, through all of it. (The guilt pings again in Cisco's chest.) "But I'd really just like to go home now."

It doesn't really matter that that was Cisco's plan. Or rather, that he hadn't had a plan beyond staying by his friend's side, a shoulder to lean on, to cry on, because they've done this dance already, learned the routine. (He should know the steps, but here he is, tripping up and letting Caitlin lead.) He hears the word Caitlin doesn't say: alone.

I'd like to go home alone now. I'd like to be alone now. I don't want you to see me like this. I don't want to be like this.

They've done this dance before, and it stings so much that Cisco knows exactly what Caitlin is like when she'd grieving the love of her life, and the loss of her life's work, and a city-wide disaster all at once. He reaches out and snags her hand back in his, just for a moment, just long enough to give her fingers a reassuring squeeze. "I'll meet you at yours with sushi and donuts," he says, because pizza is his go-to easy meal, but pizza was Ronnie's favorite food too, because donuts are sweet and an indulgence Caitlin doesn't often give herself, but she needs to eat too, proper nutrients, a real dinner.

She didn't eat enough, the first time around.

There's a shudder through Caitlin's form, small and subtle. A flinch? A reaction to him squeezing her hand? Is she holding herself back from bringing her arms up to her chest and hugging herself tight?

Is she remembering last time too?

"Okay," she says, and it's quiet, quiet, quiet, none of Caitlin's bold brashness, the stubborn, immovable defiance that comes out sometimes when she has the space to be confident, when she's in her element.

The ringing of his phone jerks Cisco awake; he nearly bolts upright from where he's laying down, eyes heavy with sleep and grief, limbs tightly pressed together, body sluggish to respond. For a moment, he doesn't know where he is, and then it all comes flooding back. He's on Caitlin's sofa, wearing an old pair of sweatpants and his t-shirt from yesterday.

It's a cramped, uncomfortable position to wake up in, twisted on his side, knees bent so he can fit between the armrests. Caitlin's sofa was chosen for looks over function, and cost besides that. It's a lovely light blue, but it's no mattress. (She isn't the type to sit around all day and lounge on the couch. Neither was Ronnie.) By the time he's untangled himself from the thin blanket that's somehow gotten wrapped around his legs, his phone has gone silent.

With a muffled, grumpy curse slipping out from between his lips, Cisco gets his feet planted on the floor and reaches over to the coffee table to snatch his phone up in his hand. It was face down so he flips it over, the movement illuminating the screen, flashing the time at him. He barely takes note of that, eyes drifting down instead to the list of notifications he's missed since the last time he checked his phone.

One missed call from Barry is at the top of the list. Cisco blinks at it for a moment, and then, somehow, he's hit with more memories. It isn't just Ronnie, gone. Isn't just Caitlin, grieving again. Isn't just that he fell asleep on his best friend's sofa because he didn't want her to be alone, because both of them were barely functional last night, because he didn't want to be alone.

It's a black hole above Central City. It's Eddie Thawne aiming his gun at his own chest. It's Harrison Wells who was never Harrison Wells, who mentored Cisco—and Ronnie and Caitlin and Barry and so many others—only to use them.

For a moment, Cisco honestly considers putting the phone back, face down on the coffee table. He missed a call. It happens. How disingenuous would it be, pretending like he never heard it in the first place? It's barely a stretch; he was sleeping when it rang, after all. Instead, he pulls himself to his feet—bare against the cool faux-hardwood floor of Caitlin's apartment—and pads toward his best friend's bedroom.

Caitlin sleeps with the door open; Cisco's told her before that that's technically a fire hazard, but she's always just laughed at him and called him paranoid. That was before Ronnie. Before the first time he spent months driving back and forth and back and forth between his apartment and Caitlin's, trying to pull her out of her shell. He steps up into the doorframe now and watches her sleep fitfully, a furrow in her brow. He'd never really succeeded the first time, had he? It hadn't been until Barry had woken up that a spark had finally seemed to return to his best friend.

Cisco's fingers tighten around the phone in his hand. He pulls himself away from Caitlin and calls Barry back.

The sun is up, when Caitlin finally opens her eyes. It's blazing through her window, in fact, a harsh yellow glow draped over her too-big bed. She blinks at it.

Her eyes are stinging. She rubs at them, then rolls over and ignores the light, stumbling to her feet and to the bathroom. She only pauses on the way back, blinking at the blanket folded over the back of the couch. She doesn't keep a blanket in her living room, not normally. Not since . . .

Well, anyway. She runs cold, and she doesn't mind that. Ronnie was the one who—

Well.

Anyway.

Cisco must have left before she woke up. She doesn't blame him. It's late, for her, the workaholic not usually prone to sleeping in. He's got other things to do, surely. She thinks about making herself a cup of tea, about pulling out some eggs or whipping up some pancake batter. It's not like she has work today. She has plenty of time to make whatever she wants for breakfast.

Ronnie always did prefer waffles.

She pads back into her bedroom instead, and throws the curtains closed, and sits back down on the bed, barely able to keep herself from collapsing onto it. It shouldn't be hitting her this hard, Ronnie's death. Her right hand moves to her left, fingers fiddling with the ring that sits there. She must not have taken it off last night; it still feels heavy and uncomfortable. New.

With a surge of anger, Caitlin rips the ring off her finger and tosses it blindly at the wall. She doesn't watch where it lands, and the anger is gone as quickly as it had come.

It shouldn't be hitting her this hard: this is her bedroom, her apartment. She hasn't made waffles in months. There's been no need to leave a blanket out on the couch for movie nights. Ronnie hasn't lived here in over a year. And yet, and yet, and yet . . .

Caitlin curls up on the bed again, not even bothering to get under the mussed and wrinkled covers, and lets the sobs come. Ronnie's pillow doesn't smell like him anymore; it hasn't in a long time. She hugs it close anyway, and hates the universe for taking so much from her.

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.

Chapter Text

Cisco is not, technically speaking, an electrician. He's a mechanical engineer by education, and he's dabbled in robotics and electronics and computers and materials science here and there, but he doesn't have the legal certification—or knowledge—to rewire an entire building. STAR Labs needs re-wiring anyway. He won't—can't—do the bulk of it, but electricians are in short demand at the moment. It seems like half the buildings in the city need maintenance one way or another, and anyway, they have to tidy things up—the prison cells, the super treadmill, the spare Flash costumes—before they invite anyone else into the accelerator.

So he can turn off fuse boxes. He can clip and cap fraying and exposed wires. He can sit on his knees, needle-nose pliers in one hand, and stare, and stare, and stare at the work in front of him that's too big for any one man to handle. Barry had been working on this. Barry's not here right now. Cisco had told him to go home, scarf down three pizzas, remember to eat his calorie-dense protein bars, and get some sleep. (He's not sure Barry's slept since a black hole ripped itself into existence in Central City's sky. Maybe before that, even, with all the stress of time travel and the potential to save his mom.)

Caitlin isn't here either. She'd left with tears in her eyes and a tightness in her throat after Barry's collapse due to not eating enough.

There aren't tears in Cisco's eyes. There aren't. He's alone in the cavernous echoing halls of STAR Labs, and there are tools in his hand, and electrical work in front of him, so he's not about to cry. He can't cry—he has to double and triple check that all the fuses in this section are turned off, has to be extra careful with his work, because electrical injuries are some of the most common injuries—

Morbidly, Cisco wonders what it would be like if he touched a live wire: the feeling of electricity flooding through his veins, coursing through him, filling him up. Barry had been struck by lightning. Maybe Cisco'd get superpowers too, and then everything would be fine.

He shakes his head. Superpowers don't fix everything. He knows that better than most. Barry and Ronnie and Martin and all the criminals Team Flash have encountered have taught him that. Superpowers, in fact, scare the Hell out of him.

("The night the particle accelerator exploded," Wells had said, dragging the explanation out. "You were affected too.")

Again, Cisco shakes his head. He lets the pliers fall to the floor and clambers to his feet, internally cursing the effort it takes. Maybe he hasn't been getting enough sleep either. He doesn't know; all he does know is that he shouldn't be here, working on this, in his current emotional state. What he should do is check on Caitlin, be there for her. What he should do is talk to Martin, see if Ronnie had ever told his parents he was still alive. If he did, someone should call them.

Cisco's a coward though. He's not cut out for the hero business, not like Barry is. He closes up shop instead, and he tidies up the control room, and he shoots Barry a text, and he gets in his car, and he stares at the gaping hole in the building.

Not yet, Barry replies a moment later, so Cisco puts the car into drive, and goes to his favorite pizza place—mostly outside the zone of construction, but he'll give them a big tip to fix that one boarded up window—and orders three pizzas for Barry and one for himself. It's too much, but it'll give him something to eat over the next few days that means he doesn't have to cook.

("I can't do this anymore, Cisco," Caitlin says in his memories as he stands in front of Barry's apartment and rings the doorbell.)

For a moment, Barry doesn't answer. For a moment, Cisco doesn't think he's going to. Then the door cracks open and Cisco is shouldering his way inside, navigating to the kitchen with the ease of experience and setting the pizzas down on top of Barry's counter.

"Cisco . . . " Barry says, shoulders slumping as he watches from the doorway, barely having moved after letting Cisco in.

One hand reaching upward to the cabinet where Barry keeps his plates, Cisco pauses. He looks over his shoulder. Barry looks exhausted. "What?"

Barry doesn't get nervous. No, that's wrong: Barry rambles all the time, blushes when he's put on the spot, sticks to the edges of a dangerous situation if he's not sure how to apply his speed properly. But Barry doesn't hesitate with his words, they pour out of him, quickly and easily and often enthusiastically, because Barry loves science and he loves what he does. This time, when Barry speaks, it's quiet, and slow, and careful. "I don't . . . Cisco, I can't do this. I just, I can't, okay."

("I can't do this anymore, Cisco.")

Cisco holds himself terrifyingly still. Something in his chest cracks, a pain with no origin, no physical cause. "Do what?" he asks. He looks over at the pizzas. "I got your favorite," he says, and it feels nearly like rambling himself, the words nearly tripping over themselves in his mouth to escape, "but if you want to wait, or get a nap in first, that's fine. It re-heats well you know, and it's actually still pretty hot, so I can just stick it in the oven—"

"I'm not hungry."

"You have to eat." The words are stubborn. Defiant. It doesn't matter what else Barry is feeling: with his advanced metabolism, he has to eat.

"I ate three bars at the lab and another when I got home," Barry says, and it's still too slow, too simple, too quiet.

Too defeated. Cisco's heart hurts. His throat is tight. His friends are swimming in their grief, and they're trying to leave him beyond, and Cisco, Cisco can't let them. He can't. (Caitlin drove away from him, and he didn't call out, or try to stop her, and he hasn't gone to see her sense, or sent her a message, or called her.)

"Well, yeah, but—"

"Cisco," Barry interrupts, and that's nearly sharp, nearly cuts Cisco to the bone. "Can we not? Please? I can't right now."

Cisco swallows down the lump in his throat. He finally lowers his arm from where it's holding the handle of Barry's cabinet. "Alright," he says, and he's quiet too now, quiet and cautious and broken. He blinks rapidly for a moment, and then he just leaves, just walks out of the kitchen and shoulders past Barry and makes his way to the front door.

"Wait."

Hope takes wings in Cisco's heart. He pauses, hand on the door knob, and turns to look at Barry over his shoulder.

"Your pizza," Barry says, hefting one of the boxes in his hands like an offering, like a gesture of friendship, like an attempt to apologize for shutting Cisco out.

Cisco's heart hardens. "Keep it," he says, flat, and only just manages to stop himself from slamming the door behind him when he leaves.

Dinner that night is leftovers, heated in the microwave. Morning finds him calling a contractor to get STAR Labs fixed up, then going into the accelerator to tidy up all their personal effects so there's nothing for the man to find. Barry doesn't show up. Caitlin doesn't either. For lunch he drives all the way out to Martin Stein's house, and parks his car across the street, and stares and stares and stares at the front door but doesn't go in. He ends up stopping at a coffee shop nearby for a sandwich, then goes home.

There's nothing to do at home. There's nowhere else to go. Cisco goes back to STAR Labs, and makes a purchase order for the contractor to pull the money from the STAR Labs account, and realizes he doesn't have a boss anymore. Does he even have a job? He doesn't know. He doesn't know if it matters. Wells took everything with him when he left: Eddie, and Ronnie, and Cisco's sense of security, and Caitlin's peace of mind, and Barry's stability, and all their jobs all at once, probably.

But Cisco can't go home, and sit alone on his couch, and lose himself in TV shows and video games and other worlds that aren't this one. He doesn't know if he'd emerge again, if he did that. He sits in front of the computers instead and catalogues all the police reports Barry is missing and searches for even the barest hint of another metahuman out there, wreaking havoc.

Caitlin scrubs her apartment clean, and she changes her sheets, and she does her laundry, and she takes out the trash, and she doesn't let herself think anything in the process. More importantly, she doesn't let herself feel. She throws out the old leftovers in her fridge and the cucumber that's starting to shrivel up a bit and the oranges with their spots of mold. She pulls out a box and she packs away the few outfits of Ronnie's that he'd brought with him back to Central City. She logs into all her utility accounts to check that autopay is working, goes through all her emails, makes sure her credit card bills are paid.

And then she leaves the house. There's nothing left to do, and she can't sit here and do nothing, and she needs groceries. That'll give her something to do. Maybe she'll make some soup, something like split pea or some kind of chowder, something that she'll need to chop up a lot of vegetables for, spend a lot of time monitoring as it slow cooks. She can even freeze some for later. Or maybe she'll make a lasagna, or chili. Something she only makes every now and again. (Probably she'll have to do some quick Googling at the grocery store, since she didn't make a list.)

She's running through recipes in her head, driving fifteen miles per hour in the downtown rush hour traffic, when the gas main line explodes.

She doesn't know that's what it is at first, of course. There's just light, and a deafening thunder, and her car rocking on its wheels like the earth is shaking beneath her. She blinks as the light fades, heart pounding a mile a minute, and realizes her hands are gripping tight to the steering wheel. She blinks, trying to get rid of the yellow and orange afterimages in her eyes, and realizes the car three cars ahead of her is on fire.

She blinks, and realizes that something exploded. Her heart pounds. There's a car on fire. Caitlin's scrambling out of her car before she realizes it, throwing it into park, fighting with her seatbelt. She doesn't bother to slam the door behind her, barely processes the shocked cries of bystanders and the blaring, overlapping sounds of multiple car alarms going off.

The sidewalk a little further down from where she'd been is cracked and caving in, collapsing downward. The streets is too, the front of the car on fire dipping dangerously into a divot in the asphalt. (Distantly, she worries about the asphalt melting.)

Flames haven't yet engulfed the car, and she's not worried about the thing spontaneously exploding (that's a thing for the movies), but smoke is pouring from the engine and she knows it'll only get worse when the fire reaches the gas tank. She stumbles forward, but someone beats her to it, wrenching open the driver's side door of the car.

The driver is in near hysterics, twisting and turning where she's trapped by her seatbelt, penned in by the airbag, still deflating. A cut on her sluggishly drips down her face, framing her left eye. "Monica! Monica! Sweetheart!"

The bystander in front barely seems to notice, already reaching into the car to try and wrestle with the woman's seatbelt. Plenty of other people notice though. "Oh my God, there's a kid!" someone shouts. "In the backseat!" someone else says with alarm.

Caitlin gets there first. Caitlin wrenches open the back door and spots the frightened child sobbing in the backseat, and Caitlin is the one to unclip her belt and pull her out of the car.

"Here, here," someone says, and Caitlin hands over the girl without thinking about who she's handing her to, staggering as she's relieved of the weight. She stumbles away from the car, the small crowd around her doing the same. She blinks at them; pedestrians have wandered closer, and others besides her have gotten out of their own cars. It isn't safe, but she doesn't have the energy to tell everyone that.

She doesn't need to. Other bystanders begin to corral people away from the burning car, from the cracks in the pavement, from fender benders and vehicles that swerved into the parked street traffic at the moment of the explosion. Caitlin looks around—the driver shrieks as she's reunited with her daughter—and blinks again. Her thoughts feel sluggish and incoherent and for a moment she doesn't know what it is that's caught her attention.

But there's a leg sticking out of the crack in the pavement. Caitlin's running for it before she even realizes she's doing so, before she can contemplate what it means.

Thankfully, by the time she gets there, dodging through cars and coughing at the smoke from the one still on fire, it's easy to see that the leg is still attached to someone. Less thankfully, that someone doesn't seem to be conscious, and they're slumped in the hole in a way that'll be difficult to get them out.

Caitlin reaches down to swing their arm toward her—to spin the wrist to face her, to get her fingers on their pulse point—and hisses in alarm, drawing back, as her hand brushes up against a hot pipe. Her eyes follow the metal through the crack in the pavement. The gas line explosion seems to have broken open a seam in the pipe, metal peeled back by the force of it. Gas is still pouring out of it—and she can tell, because that gas is on fire. She hadn't been able to see that before, the flames blocked from view by the car on fire, but there's a steady stream of orange and yellow and red.

And the victim before her is laying half-on the scorching pipe. In alarm, Caitlin surges forward and shoves her fingers into the victims' armpits, ready to heave them out and upward. Her forearm brushes against the pipe. She sucks in another breath through her teeth, tightens her jaw, and heaves. Her arm is on fire, her muscles straining, and she isn't strong enough. Almost without thinking about it, Caitlin braces her arm on the hot pipe and finally gets the victim upright and off it in return. She can smell something burning, but the pain's barely hit her yet.

There's a woosh. There's a streak of lightning. There's Barry in front of her, costume bright red and worry in his eyes.

"Your arm!" he says in alarm.

Caitlin doesn't have time for that. "The gas!" she gasps out, breathless, still holding the victim in her arms upright. "You have to shut off the gas!"

Barry blinks. She sees him take in the burning pipe, sees his gaze come back to her, sweep over her, linger on the burn on her arm she hasn't looked at herself. There's another woosh of displaced air, another flash of lightning and ozone in the air, and then Caitlin's arms are empty and Barry is gone.

The next few hours pass in a blur, though not, Caitlin imagines, the kind of blur Barry usually experiences. By the time she gets herself out of the cracked sidewalk, arms trembling and heart still pounding, the paramedics have arrived. Or maybe they've been there a while. Someone shepherds her away from the epicenter of the explosion and toward an ambulance. She sees the victim she tried to help on the back of a stretcher already as she passes. (She doesn't even know if they're still alive—she never did manage to check their pulse.)

The paramedic runs her through all the usual questions to check if she might have a head injury, and Caitlin doesn't bother to correct them. Maybe she hit her head. She honestly doesn't remember the incident in anything other than snatches—the light of the explosion, her car jerking to a halt, the smoke wafting through the other car's hood, the driver's cries for her daughter, the weight of the victim in her arm. The heat of the pipe as it burned her arm. Her arm is cool now. Shaking, but cool now, treated and wrapped up by the paramedic.

She listens with half an ear as he describes how to manage her injury. Part of the rest of her catalogues the situation: it's a mass casualty event—using the technical definition of casualty as anyone even injured, not necessarily killed—and there aren't enough ambulances to transport every injured person to the hospital all at once. The paramedic has to move on and treat other victims, because Caitlin's burn isn't serious to require additional immediate medical attention. That's a good thing. She barely cares.

"Is there someone we can call for you?"

The question takes her by surprise, her gaze snapping back to the paramedic in front of her. Ronnie, she doesn't say. (She's not wearing her ring.)

"I don't know which one of these cars is your, but most people won't be driving away from here anytime soon. If you want to call a friend to take you to the hospital instead . . . "

Caitlin's gaze goes back to the epicenter of the explosion. She can see Barry's lightning flashing around the scene now: a piece of rubble gone there, a car shifted aside to clear the road, a victim gone. He could take her to the hospital too, she knows. She doesn't want to ask him. She wants Cisco, she's startled to realize. She wants Cisco at her side, holding her up by the elbow, flashing her his cheeky grin and making her laugh through her pain.

"No," she says. "No, I'll be okay." She shrugs off the paramedic's attempts to prod her further, encourages him to go help others in need, and makes her way to her car. She'd managed to avoid a collision with the car in front of her when the explosion went off, so it shouldn't be damaged at all. With any luck, Barry will have cleared the road enough for her to be able to just drive off.

So much for buying groceries.

Chapter Text

In the space of a single afternoon, Barry had lost more than he'd known he'd had to lose. He's not done with the losses, it seems like. He stands at the edge of the crowd for Eddie's funeral—late, because he's always late, couldn't even show up on time for this—and finds his gaze searching for familiar faces. Iris is at the front, with Joe, crying silent tears that she can't seem to stop. Joe has an arm around her but as Barry watches he pulls himself free, straightens his uniform, and steps forward. It's Eddie's partner, not Iris's dad, who starts to speak to the crowd.

There are too many people here Barry knows without knowing at all. Coworkers from the department he's never really been friends with.

He never used to be friends with Eddie. He's not even sure he really was, at the end, too much between them with all the talk of the future. Barry wanted Iris happy more than he'd wanted Iris in his arms, but only just. Jealousy is an ugly thing to feel toward a man who killed himself to save you, but Barry knows the truth. Eddie hadn't done it for him.

Iris has a hand to her mouth, holding back sobs as Joe speaks. Someone else takes her hand; Barry thinks it's Eddie's mother, though he's never met the woman. He never met Ronnie's mother either. Didn't know the dozen people reported missing after the black hole dissipated, didn't know the man who'd died when parts of a building fell on him that day, didn't know the woman who'd been crushed by a stampeding crowd as they'd fled.

There's another man in a coma after a gas main explosion yesterday, and Barry doesn't know him either. The city is crumbling around him—his friends are crumbling around him—and it's all Barry's fault.

No. He understands Oliver better now than he ever has. It's better for Barry to work alone. There's lots to be done anyway. Barry doesn't stick around to the end of the funeral.

Barry's suit is gone already when Cisco makes his way to HQ that morning. It's not unheard of—crime never sleeps—but Barry has a day job. One he's often late for. It's rare he's already racing around town when Cisco and Caitlin arrive for the day. It's rare, too, for Cisco to start off his mornings with crime fighting, but it's not like he has any other work to do.

Wells' efforts to keep STAR Labs open had been a sham. Oh, the money had been real—Cisco and Caitlin both had been able to do real science, to earn real salaries, as the last dregs of the once-great accelerator project—but it'd never been anything but an excuse to keep them around, to help Barry improve. Caitlin to monitor Barry's health, Cisco to keep the lights on. Looking at all his work that way is depressing, and certainly doesn't give Cisco any motivation to continue it. Most of it had been to help Barry anyway: the materials he'd developed for the superhero's suit, the treadmill Barry tested his speed on, the metahuman containment chambers.

Put that way, helping Barry fight crime feels almost like a sham too, but Cisco logically knows better, whatever his emotions are trying to tell him. Wells created all the metahuman criminals. Wells wrecked the city twice. The least he can do is use the man's money to help put things right.

And, he doesn't want to think about Wells, but, oh God, he's probably not getting paid anymore, is he? He's going to have to find a real job, preferably one where his boss isn't a supervillain.

An alert flashes through the cortex as Cisco is flipping through crime reports and despairing over his future job prospects. He slides his chair over to the relevant computer, scanning the information quickly. (He's done this without Caitlin before—sometimes it's easier for them to take different shifts, help Barry help as many people as possibly in a day—but her absence is still palpable. STAR Labs feels empty and hollowed out with just him occupying it.)

"Got an alert on the east side," he tells Barry even as he reads. "Shots fired; cops on the scene are calling for backup." They're not technically calling for the Flash, but Barry is just about the best backup that they could ask for. Some of that pride comes through in Cisco's tone, he's sure of it—this should be an easy incident—but there's worry that lingers, that he hadn't meant to express. Sure, he can read Barry's vitals on the screen, but the discomfort of not having seen him that morning yet lingers.

Barry grunts out a quick answer. "On it."

Cisco's finger moves to hover over the button for the microphone. He bites his lip, pulls his hand back, then surges forward again before he can second guess himself. "You ate today, right?" And yesterday. All that pizza Cisco had gotten for him that Barry had all but rejected . . .

"Keep the line clear," Barry just says, hard and focused already.

Maybe he's already at the scene; maybe he was nearby. Maybe he's busy, and distracted, and trying not to get shot. If wishes were fishes . . . Cisco pulls back from the microphone button as if burned. His eyes dart to Barry's vitals again but he doesn't understand them as well as Caitlin could. He shakes his head, looks at all the data he was going through, then pushes his chair away from the desk with a sick, heavy feeling in his gut. There's plenty of work he can do elsewhere; God knows STAR Labs could do with some elbow grease.

Hours later, Cisco's elbows are thoroughly greased and he hasn't heard from Barry once. The sick, twisted feeling in his gut has faded, replaced by worry and guilt. Barry was right next to Ronnie when he died; Barry was right there with Eddie, fighting Wells, when Eddie pulled that trigger. Barry watched his mother die. Again. What right does Cisco have to blame his friend for struggling to deal with that? What right does Cisco have to make this all about him?

Of course Barry and Caitlin are struggling! He shouldn't have expected any differently. He goes back to the cortex, and he sorts through the reports that came in while he was gone. Nothing major, thank goodness, but there's a road block on one of the main streets downtown, collapsed debris from a nearby building. Barry could be handy in clearing it away.

Cisco presses down on the microphone and shares the details with his friend.

"I got it, Cisco," Barry snaps back. He sounds slightly out of breath.

Do you mean you're already there, or are you just having a bad day, still? Cisco doesn't—can't—ask. He swallows, and he leans back in his seat, and he nods to himself past the heaviness in his heart. Barry's having trouble with everything. Fine. Cisco is too; he certainly doesn't have any room to question the way Barry responds.

With a quick glance at Barry's vitals—at his location, and yeah, he's approaching the road block Cisco told him about—Cisco gets back to work.

"There's a fender-bender on 35—" Cisco starts, knowing Barry's speed in cleaning up debris will prevent traffic jams before they can even start.

"I've got it, Cisco," Barry snaps back.

"Cops just—" Cisco starts

"I heard."

So, what, Barry's got his own police radio now? Cisco swallows down his questions, his objections, nods, and moves on.

"Barry," Cisco says, trying to keep his tone light and easy.

"Not right now, Cisco," Barry snaps back. "I'm busy!"

Cisco's finger falls off the button even as he bites his lip. His eyes dart over to the menu pulled up on one of the screens, a dozen different sandwich options displayed for him to choose from. Barry'll eat anything, he knows.

Or at least, he used to.

Jaw tight, Cisco finally turns away from the monitors. If Barry doesn't want his help, fine. No point in getting lunch delivered. He needs to get out of these empty, cavernous halls anyway.

Lunch is quiet. Cisco eats alone, in a booth near the back of an empty chain restaurant that must have a dozen different locations in the city. That, and the fact that it's just past peak lunch hour, and people don't usually sit and eat in places like these, keep the place practically deserted. There's a decently steady stream of traffic in and out, businessmen and women picking up orders, rideshare drivers grabbing their deliveries, but those people don't linger. Cisco is left mostly alone to . . . to, what? To mope?

He doesn't know. He's not sure he could put a name to his emotions as he picks at his sandwich, as he scrolls through the news on his phone for something to distract him. Is there a name for this hollowness that's scooped out his insides and left him empty? For the way he yearns and wants and wishes, without knowing what he's wishing for? A perfect world, he supposes. As if.

The bell rings over the front door. Cisco's eyes go up. Again. Two cops walk in. For a moment, Cisco tenses. He's not sure why. They're not Joe. They're probably not even Joe or Barry's coworkers; this is a different part of the city, a different district. They probably didn't even know Eddie. They're chatting idly as they walk up to the counter, flash smiles at the teenager manning the register, grin and laugh and exchange greetings. The bag one of them accepts a few moments later is big, packed full of sandwiches. An order for the office, maybe. One of the cops starts to pick it up. The other one elbows his partner out of the way with a laugh and scoops the bag up into his own arms.

They thank the employee. They walk out side by side; the partner whose hands are empty jogs forward a few steps to open the door for the partner carrying the bag. The bell dings again, the door shutting behind them. Something in Cisco's chest, something small and aching, cracks. It isn't a break, isn't devastation crashing down on him—isn't hearing the crack of a gunshot, or watching Ronnie fly off into a black hole—but it adds to the hollowness inside him.

He takes one more bite he doesn't taste, wraps up what's left of his sandwich, and tosses it in the trash as he stands. He goes back up to the counter. "Hey. Any chance I can get one more sandwich to go?"

Caitlin's building is familiar to him. The parking lot with the couple of guest spots he pulls into, the lobby with the mailroom just off to the side, the elevator with the worn, faded buttons, it's all familiar to Cisco. (Caitlin's only on the second floor. He usually takes the stairs, but he's too jittery today.)

Caitlin's door is familiar too, and yet Cisco stands there, bag in one hand, and hesitates to knock. He shouldn't. He shouldn't be caught up like this, shouldn't be frozen, shouldn't have a lump in his throat and an ache in his chest. He know how Caitlin grieves, he knows how much this is hurting her, he knows, when she said "I can't do this anymore," that she wasn't talking about her friendship with him.

It feels like she was. Feels like she was rejecting all of it at once. STAR Labs, the work they do with Barry, their past with Wells. Him.

She hasn't called him, since then. Hasn't answered any of his texts. But how many has he sent, really? Caitlin needs space, sometimes, and that's okay, and it doesn't matter that Cisco needs company, wants so desperately not to be alone (oh. So that's what the yearning in his chest is) because Caitlin is the one who lost her husband, so Caitlin gets to grieve however she likes. (And Cisco lost one of his best friends, and he feels like he's losing Barry too, and he needs to know he's not also losing Caitlin, but none of that matters. Ronnie wasn't his to lose, not in the way he was for Caitlin.)

He knocks. It's tentative—more than usual for him, at least—but he knocks. There's no response. Not at first. He knocks again.

Still nothing.

"Caitlin?" He waits. The bag starts to feel heavy in his hand, though it shouldn't. It's just one sandwich. His left arm drops anyway, hanging limply at his side, bag brushing his knee. He keeps his right hand raised, and knocks a third time. "I brought lunch?!" It's more of a question than a statement, and it's more like a dozen question rolled into one than it is just one question.

Are you home? Have you eaten yet? Do you want to see me? Are you alright?

Cisco swallows before the worry can consume him. "I'll just . . . I'll just leave it right here," he says, and his voice trails off at the end, weakens as the energy leaves him. If Caitlin is inside, she probably couldn't hear him. He doesn't try to speak up: she probably doesn't want to hear him. He pulls out his phone anyway though, throat tight, and sends his words as a text.

He waits. Still nothing. Biting his lip, Cisco sets the bag down, and walks away. He'll try again tomorrow. Caitlin deserves that.

Cisco's been to the police station before. It seems more chaotic than normal, but he's not really sure if that's still the lingering aftermath of the disaster of the black hole or if he'd just visited during quiet moments before. He finds his gaze catching on everyone, on every movement, his head snapping to the side at every shout. Everyone here knew Eddie—well, everyone but the civilian's filing their reports, the concerned citizens sharing their problems—and Cisco's shoulders are tight, his jaw tense, as if he still carries Eddie's blood on his hands. (As if he ever had; Barry had been the one to scrub that stain clean, as far as Cisco knows.)

No one says anything to him, and he waits his turn to speak to the receptionist at the front desk. She recognizes him as Barry's friend. Not Eddie's, not Joe's. Cisco doesn't ask if Barry's in, he doesn't ask if she knew Eddie, if she's mourning him, if she was as his funeral. (He'd come here months and months ago too, pressed tightly to Caitlin's side as they'd reported Ronnie's death together. He doesn't know if he'd seen Eddie then, if he'd seen Joe. Barry hadn't yet been transferred to STAR Labs' care.)

When the receptionist moves to call Barry, he speaks quickly, tells her he's actually there to talk to Joe—Detective West.

Her eyes widen a little. She slowly lowers the phone back into its cradle; her other hand still poised over the number pad. "What about?" she asks, and he remembers that Joe's partner just died, and the whole station knows it.

Is Joe on leave, maybe? God, how insensitive is Cisco, for coming here to talk to the man. Anxiety flutters up inside him, batting away some of the hollowness that's consumed him. "Metahumans!" he blurts out, the words spilling forth without thought. He swallows down his eagerness to provide some sort of explanation, to not seem like such an insensitive jerk. "Metahumans," he repeats. "He asked me to do some research . . . "

It's not quite the truth, it's not quite a lie.

Cisco waits.

The receptionist picks back up the phone. "I'll see if he's in," she says, and the smile she gives him is weak and tremulous.

Cisco resists the urge to bounce, to fidget, to tap his fingers along the desk he's leaning against. He's been thinking too much about threats. Thinking too much about the absence of the cells in the accelerator. Thinking too much about Barry working alone, about Caitlin pulling away. He does have information for Joe, ideas and thoughts about metahuman containment the police can implement, now that Wells won't be funding them anymore. Maybe now isn't the time to ask—but it's too late. The receptionist is handing Cisco a visitor's badge and waving him on through.

Joe looks . . . rough. No other word comes to mind but that. He probably shouldn't even be at work. Then again, maybe Cisco shouldn't be either. Ronnie wasn't his partner, but he was . . . Well. No. Cisco's looking at this all wrong again. Ronnie wasn't his his partner in the field, wasn't the man he relied on to keep him safe. Ronnie wasn't his parent, murdered before his eyes. Ronnie wasn't his husband, the person he'd promised to be with forever. Ronnie was just . . . his friend.

So maybe Joe shouldn't be at work. Maybe Caitlin shouldn't, and maybe Barry shouldn't. But Joe is, and Barry is, and Caitlin's not talking to him, so maybe the least Cisco can do is try and make all their lives a little easier while they grieve.

Joe offers him a tired smile, and a thought so absurd and out of place crosses Cisco's mind: Is this the first time I've seen him sitting down? It's ridiculous, and yet, there it is. Joe's sitting at a desk, one hand on his mouse, and he looks nothing like the man Cisco knows. The Joe he knows is a man of action, a man built for the field.

"Cisco," this tired, gray man before him says, light and easy and exhausted. "What are you doing here? Looking for Barry?" There's a question in this man's eyes.

Cisco doesn't answer it. He doesn't tell Joe that he doesn't think Barry is handling things well. He doesn't mention the extra hours in the Flash suit, the way Barry's being shrugging off his help and trying to do things alone. He doesn't put any more burdens on Joe West's shoulders.

Instead, he grabs a nearby seat, and twirls it around, and sits in it backward. He rests his arms on the back of it and grins at his friend and hopes it doesn't look hollow and empty on his face. "Actually," he says, "I was thinking about our metahuman containment problem . . . "

Chapter Text

Caitlin hasn't had any patients beyond the one in a very long time (and beyond the occasional bump or bruise Cisco would accrue; beyond her trying to check in on how her boss had adjusted to his wheelchair only to be gently rebuffed with kind lies, because he hadn't actually needed the wheelchair after all). Changing her own bandages though, rubbing burn cream over her wound . . . It feels like she could do it in her sleep. It feels like she is asleep, as she sets out all the supplies on her bathroom countertop, as she gently exposes her wound to the air, as the sting of it tries to bite at her unfeeling heart.

It hurts, of course. Stings and aches and twinges as she presses her fingers into it with the cream, as she wraps it back up gentle but snug. But it's supposed to hurt, isn't it? That's what bodies do: they hurt. And anyway, it's a small thing. Caitlin takes a deep breath, and cleans up the mess she's made, and leaves the bathroom without having showered. She'll shower tomorrow, maybe. Or maybe she'll just go to a salon, and zone out, and let them wash and cut her hair for her. It's been long enough since her last haircut, hasn't it been? And it doesn't really matter if it hasn't, does it?

She finds herself in the kitchen, finds herself looking around, finds herself wondering if she should eat. Her burn stings lightly. Has she already eaten? She doesn't think so. It would be the logical thing, to eat before going out, so Caitlin opens her fridge, and finds it mostly empty, and opens her cupboards, and finds them mostly bare. She almost grabs a protein bar before she notices the wrapper and realizes it's one of Barry's she keeps on hand, just in case he's ever in a tight spot.

With a start, she remembers she'd never made that grocery trip she'd been meaning to, and it's only logical to get that done while she's out today, so she pops a piece of bread in the toaster and sits down at her tiny kitchen table, with it's tiny wire-frame chairs, and starts a grocery list as it toasts. (She rests her arm on the table, padded bandages beneath her sleeve pressing down, and it stings, but that's the hand she needs to write, so she doesn't lift it up, and doesn't do anything about the hurt.)

Cereal, she writes down, because that's a breakfast food, and breakfast is the most important meal of the day. With hesitation, she adds, milk below that. She can't remember if there's any in her fridge, and it doesn't seem worth the effort to check. Her pen hovers above the paper. There are other things she should buy. Nutrition. Fruits and vegetables. Protein. Foods for lunch and dinner and just snacking.

The toaster pops up; she jumps, and the pen clatters to the table as it slips from her fingers and a hiss escapes her teeth as she bangs her burn on the table's surface beside her dropped pen. For a moment, she finds herself torn in two, frozen by what should be a tiny, insignificant choice. Finish the list, or fetch her toast? She fetches the toast, and then looks at the clock, and then realizes if she doesn't leave now she's going to be late. Calmly, she takes a bite of her toast—of dry bread, slightly overcooked, without butter or jelly or flavor—then drops it in the trash as she chews and grabs her purse from it's usual spot near the door. It isn't until she's downstairs in the lobby of the building that she remembers her half-hearted attempt at a grocery list.

Oh well. It's not like she wrote anything down anyway. Biting her lip, Caitlin shakes her head, shakes off her hesitation, and heads for her car. She unlocks it two steps away, slides herself into the driver's seat. She checks her mirrors, and buckles her seatbelt, puts the key in the ignition and gives it a twist. She puts her hands at ten and two and ignores the ache in her forearm and checks her mirrors again. No one else is leaving her apartment's parking lot at the moment; she presses on the brake, and puts the car into reverse, and pulls out of the lot.

It's sunny, as she drives. She gently swerves around a pothole; she waits patiently at a red light; she takes an extra two minutes to get where she's going when she finds a section of the street she'd wanted to take is closed for repairs and she needs to make a small detour. That's alright. She knows these streets pretty well. (Giving Barry, giving the Flash, giving Firestorm directions, not shouted but spoken loudly, hurriedly, aware of the lives at stake as she leaned into the microphone—) She puts on her blinker and turns into the parking lot of the Alva Industries lab complex in Central City.

There's a man at a booth at the front of the parking lot. She tells him she's there for an interview, and he hands her a visitor's badge and tells her where to park. She follows his direction and slots her car easily into one of the empty spots marked by Visitor painted in yellow on the asphalt.

She's never really liked Alva Industries, as a company, but she can't really remember any of the reasons for that now, as she slips from her car and smooths down any wrinkles in her skirt and tugs her sleeve down to make sure her bandages are covered and double checks that the folder with her resume is in her bag. Not that they don't already have it, but it's a last minute interview, a quick call back after she'd called them, and it's good to be prepared. Her sensible flats, in a teal that matches her blue and green and blue-green outfit, click gently on the concrete as she makes her way to the front door. She pushes through one door, and then another, and then she's in a lobby area and speaking to the receptionist.

"Caitlin Snow," she tells the man. "I'm here for an interview." As she waits for the man to look her up in the system, she realizes she'd forgotten to introduce herself as Doctor Snow. That used to be so important to her. Before STAR Labs, before Wells—before explosions and disaster and death, and a face that smiled gently to her as he lied and lied and lied—that was the only way she could get respect, by forcing that knowledge into other people's heads. By making sure they knew her credentials, knew how much effort she'd put into her field, knew she was serious, and educated, and had passed all the most rigorous tests.

She thinks about correcting herself. Thinks about adding, "Dr. Snow, actually," as if that'll help the receptionist find her in the system any quicker.

She doesn't say anything. She nods politely, and offers a small smile when the man in front of her says her interviewer will be down shortly to show her around. When the man says she can sit while she waits, if she wants, she says "Thank you," quiet and polite, and does as he suggests. She looks around at white walls and the patterned carpeted flooring and the impersonal art. She waits.

A man enters the lobby. He introduces himself, and holds out a hand, and Caitlin takes it in her own, and shakes, and says her own name in turn. He already knows it, but she remembers to add the Doctor in front this time, so maybe that's worth something. He shows her around. He takes her to an empty conference room and she sits on one side of the table alone. He asks her questions, and she answers them.

"Walk me through your resume," he says, and what he means is "What were you doing at STAR Labs after the accelerator explosion? Why were you still working there? Why are you leaving now?"

"Why do you want to work here?" he asks, and what he means is "Have you done any research at all into what we do here?"

"Are you planning on having any children?" he asks, and Caitlin pauses, and Caitlin swallows, and Caitlin stares at him.

It could be friendly enough. Could be a test of her commitment to the company. Could be that he'd said something about his own kids while showing her around, and she's already forgotten it. Could be that he wants to tell her about benefits, and maternity leave, if she's interested. (Ronnie'd wanted kids. She'd never been sure, but she'd been willing to let him convince her. He'd never gotten the chance—never would, now.)

Her arms are resting on the table, hands folded politely. She presses down, her forearms against the rounded edges, and it burns. "You can't ask me that," she says, sharp.

The interviewer startles, a tiny little flinch, a widening of his eyes. He looks down at the sheets of paper in front of him then back up at her. "I beg your pardon?" he says, and it sounds affronted and tetchy.

"You can't ask me that," Caitlin repeats. "That's illegal," she says, because it is, but also because she doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to think about Ronnie, because this was supposed to something different and separate from the life she had before.

The interviewer bristles, and stammers, and sneers out a sly comment about her sensibilities, but Caitlin isn't listening. She remembers why she'd never liked Alva Industries now, and she doesn't want to listen. (She doesn't want to remember.)

She stands. The conference room is near the front lobby. She remembers the way out. "Thank you," she says, bland and impersonal and interrupting, and she moves for the door. The interviewer moves too slow to stop her, but he comes after her, chiding, scolding, dogging at her heels. She doesn't listen to the words, but the tone whines in her ears, grating and present. She doesn't want to be present. Her hand finds her bandage through her sleeve; her fingers grip her forearm and squeeze. Not tight, not hard—Caitlin doesn't want to set back her healing, doesn't want to make the wound scar—but just enough to hurt.

The pain pings through her chest and drowns out the noises around her. She takes a deep breath and lets go as she reaches the lobby. She hands over the visitor's badge clipped to her blouse, and ignores any words that are being said to her, and leaves. She gets into her car, and drives up to the gate at the exit, and hands back over the visitor's parking pass as well. She pulls out onto the street, and she drives, and drives, and drives, and she isn't really driving anywhere, and her arm aches.

She pulls into her local grocery store, and is both surprised and not that she'd had enough presence of mind to remember the directions. Right. So. The job interview was a failure, but the outing doesn't have to be. Besides, she'd never really wanted to work at Alva Industries anyway. She gets out of the car, and remembers to lock it, and grabs a basket from the front of the store as the motion sensors part the doors for her.

Produce is first, as it almost always is in most grocery stores. She adds a few pieces of fruit to her basket, easy things she can just bite into without any effort. She grabs a pre-made bag of salad; she throws in a small bag of dried fruit too. She wanders, without any thought for a direction or a task or a goal. She can't remember how much she has at home, so she adds a loaf of bread to the basket. Puts in a carton of a dozen eggs. Tucks a can of vegetables next to the fruits, then moves the bread on top of the eggs to sneak in a few frozen meals she can just stick in the microwave whenever she wants.

The basket gets heavier and heavier as she goes; she tucks the handles over her wounded forearm, and they're not pressing into the burn, which is on the underside of her arm, but it sends an ache through the whole limb anyway, a tingle through her injury that stings. There's not much to be done about it now; it's too late to get a cart.

A crash distracts her from her thought, the clatter of something solid on the cheap tiled floor. Caitlin looks up, and there's only one other woman in the aisle she's wandering through. The woman is heavily pregnant; cans of something roll around on her feet. She has one hand on her belly, another on her cart where a toddler sits in the front basket, and she looks close to tears. Without thinking, without hesitating, Caitlin hurries forward. She sets her basket down and kneels and starts collecting the fallen cans.

"Oh!" the woman says, surprised and pleased and distraught all at once. "Oh, you don't have to do that! I'm so sorry! Here, let me—"

"No, no, it's alright," Caitlin's mouth says on autopilot, before the other woman can bend over. She doesn't look up; she doesn't look at the little boy with the blue eyes staring down at her. "I've got it." She does; it's only three cans. She stands with them in her arms and offers them out to the other woman.

"I'm so sorry," the woman says again. She takes one from Caitlin and puts it in the basket of her cart. "I only needed the one, but—" She gestures to indicate the mess.

"That's alright," Caitlin says again, and she puts the other two cans back on the shelf as the woman twists back to face her. She's very heavily pregnant, judging from the fact that she sounds slightly out of breath even from that small movement. "How far along are you?" Caitlin finds herself asking, and it's half small talk, half the doctor in her peeking out. "Sorry, sorry," she says quickly before the woman can answer. "You don't have to answer that. Just—Doctor. Force of habit."

"My due date's in two weeks." The woman still has a hand on her belly as she smiles proudly at Caitlin. Her other hand moves almost unconsciously back to the handle of her cart; whether she's aware of it or not, she's reaching for her son, brushing up against him with her fingertips.

Suddenly, Caitlin doesn't want any more details. She doesn't want to know why someone with a due date of two weeks is out grocery shopping—if she got a sudden craving, or if she's just fiercely independent, or if it's because her husband left her and died and went away and isn't ever coming back. Caitlin can't know that. She ducks down and picks up her basket quickly.

"Congratulations," Caitlin says, and it's rushed. "I've got to—" she nods toward the end of the aisle, indicates her rush to leave, and doesn't bother to wait to hear the woman's reply. She goes up to the checkout, and doesn't know if she has twelve items or less in the basket, and can't be bothered to try and count it. She slips behind an elderly woman at one of the open registers, and waits.

She pays for her groceries. She leaves, and she drives home, and she unpacks the basket and realizes she hasn't really eaten anything yet that day. (Yesterday, Cisco had dropped off a sandwich, and she must have devoured it because it's gone, even though she doesn't remember eating it.) She's not sure she wants to eat anything today, but that's what the microwave meals had been for, because Caitlin is logical, and sensible, and logical and sensible people eat. She peels the plastic film off one at random, and can't be bothered to search for the directions. Three minutes is good to start, and if it's not enough she'll just put it in for longer.

She puts it in the microwave and types in the time. She stands back. She waits. She waits and waits and waits, and it's only three minutes, but only twenty seconds have even passed. Shaking her head, refusing to let her thoughts dwell on her sudden impatience, Caitlin hurries to her bedroom and gets out her laptop. She brings it back to the kitchen and sets it on the table and opens it up and the microwave beeps and beeps and beeps.

Caitlin wrenches the door open just to get the beeping to stop, reaches her hand in, then curses when her fingers hit something too hot to handle. It hurts, but only for a second, because that's how pain works, that's her body doing what it's supposed to do, signaling danger.

(She's smiling and smiling and smiling and she's happier than she's ever been as he slides a ring on her finger, and there's anticipation too, because she knows what plans the day holds, but there's no dread, because how could there be, in a moment like this. And then Ronnie's cupping her face in his hands, and giving her that sad smile, and the danger signals are flashing in Caitlin's gut, but there's nothing she can do about it. He's gone.)

Gritting her teeth, she pulls the meal out of the microwave. She sets it down on the oven and moves to fetch a fork. She brings them both to the table, sits down, stares for a moment, then stands and gets herself a glass of water because it's too much effort to get anything else. She sits back down. Her laptop's gone black. She turns it on, and opens up all the tabs she already has open to all the job posting sites.

Alva Industries was a bust. Fine. There's something else out there though, something other than this, something other than STAR Labs. Caitlin just has to find it.

Chapter Text

"Group interview" is not a term that Caitlin is intimately familiar with. Anything she's ever applied for that needed a follow-up interview for she's dealt with one-on-one, or sometimes one-on-three or -four or -five, if there were multiple people involved in the interview process on the other end. She's never seen a situation the other way around. But Stagg Industries apparently structures their interviews that way, calls in all the candidates for a position, gives them a tour and goes through the details of the position together, and then takes them one at a time into a room for the actual interview part.

So, maybe it's not technically a group interview, but it's still something strange. Still leaves her sitting in a room with three other people as the first of their group gets interviewed. She wonders, idly, if they get to leave one-by-one, or if they all have to wait for everyone else to be done too. She wonders if she cares.

Nobody's talking to each other, as they wait. A young man—younger than Caitlin—has his phone out. He's slouching slightly in his uncomfortable chair and looks bored, or maybe irritated. An older woman—stern faced and with gray in her hair—is flicking through the documents they were given. Caitlin can't tell if she's reading idly for something to do or memorizing as if in preparation for a test. The third other candidate waiting is probably around Caitlin's own age, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. Anxious and stressed, or bored and irritated?

Caitlin doesn't know. She doesn't care. She sits in her own chair, and she waits for her turn. They're going alphabetically by last name, they'd said, and she doesn't remember the names of her fellow interviewees, but that probably means she's going last.

The young woman with the restless energy picks up one of the magazines sitting on the side table next to her chair, flips through it idly, quickly, then seems to take a breath and starts over from the beginning, slower this time. The young man with the phone shifts and adjusts his slouch, repositioning himself to be more comfortable without ever looking up. The older woman reaches the end of her packet of papers, nods to herself, and then starts over from the beginning.

The interviewer comes back into the room. He shakes the hand of the alphabetically fortunate first interviewee trailing behind him, says the bland, everyday platitudes they must learn in HR departments the world over about calling later, and looks around the room as said interviewee leaves. (That answers that question.) "Dr. Eszes?" It's phrased like a question, but the man's gaze is narrowed down, polite and expectant, on the woman with the restless energy.

The magazine is still splayed open on her lap. It's dipped forward slightly, held loosely between distracted fingers. From the looks of it, Caitlin doubts the woman's read anything since their interviewer stepped back into the room. In any case, she nods at the sound of her name, a quick, jerky little thing, and stands quickly. The magazine snaps shut, carelessly deposited on the side table again. Caitlin zones out as the woman steps forward, hand out and meaningless greetings on her lips.

A loud bang! makes everyone in the room flinch. Caitlin jerks in her seat, wincing as the movement jars the still-healing burn on the underside of her forearm. She swivels her head around, everyone else's gazes moving in the same direction, and watches as a man strolls into the lobby.

There's nothing unassuming about him—there's no indication of what made the noise. There's no indication that the noise is even linked with him and his incongruous entrance in the middle of the work day. He looks bland and inoffensive, dressed in jeans, a faded red polo shirt tucked into his waistband under a brown leather belt. There are solid, everyday boots on his feet, and his hairline is receding slightly above his thick eyebrows and brown eyes.

He strolls in like he owns the place, and all eyes are on him, and he doesn't seem to notice or care. He reaches the receptionist's desk. The top surface doesn't even come up to his waist, but he leans against it anyway, both palms down, pressing into the edge of the desk, elbows straight as he grins a placid grin.

"This is a robbery," he says, easy as can be. "I'm gonna need you to step away from the desk, darling." There's the faintest hint of a southern drawl to his words, especially the last word.

For a moment, no one moves. The man's words don't seem to make any sense to anyone, least of all to Caitlin, emerging as if from a distant fog. A robbery? This is a company that does biochemical research. This is the receptionist's lobby for visitors and DoorDash drivers dropping off lunches. There's no money here. There's nothing here beyond a few fake plants and some truly uncomfortable chairs.

The interviewer moves first, takes a step forward toward the intruder with a frown on his face. "I will call security—" he starts to say.

The intruder braces himself on his right hand, still leaning on the desk, lifts his left hand, and waves it idly toward the interviewer as the other man speaks.

"—if you don't leave . . ." A puzzled look crosses the interviewer's face as the end of his sentence turns muffled—Caitlin can barely make out the last few words—and he trails off before he can complete his thought. His threat. He opens his mouth, gaping and wide-eyed a little, then closes his mouth again with a deeper frown than before. He doesn't look hurt, but there's a strange glint in the air around him, a weird refraction of the light that shouldn't be taking place, because there's nothing for the light in the room to refract off of.

Still frowning, the interviewer reaches out, palm up and out like he's moving for the world's slowest high five. He shouldn't hit anything. There's nothing to hit. But his palm presses up against something flat, his movement is halted by a solid surface, and he gapes. The rest of the room does too. The rest of the room, excepting the intruder. He's looking at the receptionist again.

"Darling?" The southern drawl is even stronger on the second instance of the patronizing endearment, the tone now expectant and impatient.

Caitlin feels like she should say something. This is her purview more than anyone else's, isn't it? Hasn't she, as part of Team Flash, dealt with more metahumans than anyone else in the city? Her brain is certainly already running a mile a minute, skipping right past panic in favor of analyzing the situation. (What, exactly, is the solid surface now mostly invisible in the air? If the interviewer's voice was muffled, does that mean he's surrounded, encased by whatever it is? How thick is the mystery substance?)

As she thinks and processes and calculates and feels more alive than she has since the day Ronnie died—adrenaline spiking through her system—the rest of the room reacts. The receptionist scurries out of his chair, off to the side, eyes wide and frightened. The intruder gives the man a bland smile that doesn't meet his eyes, and waves his hand toward the frightened office worker. Dr. Eszes, closest to the two now-imprisoned men, moves to flee, panic in her eyes too. The intruder, moving to position himself behind the desk already, waves his hand a third time.

Dr. Eszes slams into something solid and immovable, and that's when the room starts to panic. The interviewer, who'd been feeling out the extent of his confinement, goes from gentle probing with his fingers to pounding with his fists. The receptionist faints, slumping against a wall no one can see as he slides to the ground, then, dazed, blinks himself awake again. Dr. Eszes reels backward with a wince and a cry that's muffled by her new cage. The intruder settles himself behind the desk.

Caitlin looks over at her fellow interviewees-in-waiting. The older woman, so careful and precise as she'd flipped through her paperwork, looks like a deer caught in oncoming headlights, aware of the danger before her and utterly unable to do anything about it. The younger man, so unfocused and uncaring, holds his phone limply in one hand now, barely paying attention to it as his other hand grips the armrest of his chair. His fingers are white with the strain.

Caitlin should be frightened too. Maybe she is. The intruder doesn't even seem to care about them though, doing something with the computer on the receptionist's desk. Caitlin's been in real danger before. She's worried, and she's being careful, but her brain is processing a dozen inputs at once and she isn't worried about dying.

She stands, and clears her throat. "Excuse me?"

A few of the others in the room shoot her panicked looks. She ignores them. The intruder ignores them too. He ignores her even, for the most part, just waves his hand, and then the world outside Caitlin gets a little muffled. She can see just fine, and some sound is getting through, but not much. She reaches a hand out, and the nearly-invisible surface in front of her is smooth and featureless, but not frictionless. It's solid, whatever it is, trying to have the same transparency as air and failing only because it's not a gas.

The young man bolts from his seat. Another wave of the intruder's hand, and he's trapped too. Caitlin tests out the space to the sides of her, behind her. She stretches out her hands above her, then bends to the floor and realizes the carpet doesn't feel like carpet.

The intruder stands. There's something in his hand she can't see, and he pockets it as he moves out from behind the desk. He doesn't look at anyone as he leaves; actually, he pulls out his phone and starts to navigate through it even as he opens the door distractedly with one hand. He doesn't say anything, doesn't wave his hand again, and then he's gone. It's been maybe two minutes, if that even.

The others stare at the man's back as he leaves, differing degrees and versions of panic spilling forth from all of them. The receptionist says something from where he's slumped against the wall of his prison, sitting on the floor, but Caitlin can't hear it through the double walls between them.

She frowns, thoughtful, and bites her lip, and thinks about vibrations of sound molecules through the air, and robberies, and danger. Her phone's still in her bag. That should have been the first thing she thought of, but despite the intruder declaring his intent, calling for help had never crossed her mind. She'd been too bewildered for that. Even now, she doesn't dial 9-1-1.

Instead, she calls Barry. The phone rings, and rings, and rings. Others in the room are looking at her now. Someone else has pulled out their phone too; the interviewer is trying to talk to the older woman still sitting in her chair, or at least that's what it looks like based on his gestures. Distantly, Caitlin realizes the other interviewee never moved, and was therefore never targeted. She, out of everyone in the room, isn't trapped in a box.

Not that it helps them any, now. The threat, however much of one it was, is gone. The police will get here when they get here. Barry's phone rings and rings and rings.

Voicemail. Caitlin hangs up and tries again and looks around the room. The interviewer and the young man are both on their phones now. Dr. Eszes is doing a more methodical pat down of her prison than Caitlin had only moments ago. The older woman is shaking a little, fumbling with her own phone. Only the receptionist looks like he's really still panicking.

Voicemail, again. Caitlin can't tell if the air around her is starting to feel a little warmer or if that's just her imagination. She takes a deep breath and sits back down in the chair that's been trapped with her. (That makes her box a little bit bigger than everyone else's but the young interviewee with the phone. If she's five and a half feet tall, approximately, and the box is a little taller than that, and maybe double her width . . . In a distant, distracted sort of way, she starts to do the math in her head.)

Barry must be busy. Maybe he's out as the Flash and he doesn't have his phone on him, or maybe he's at work, or maybe he's just in the bathroom, who knows. It's probably too late to track the intruder anyway, non-descript as he is. (She and Barry and Cisco have had debates about that before, about how long it would take Barry to search the entire city for one person. None of them ever managed to agree on specifics, but even so they all agreed the answer was too long, even for Barry. Plus, there would be a lot of breaking and entering involved.) She navigates away from Barry's contact info and calls Cisco instead.

He picks up on the third ring. "Caitlin? What's wrong?"

Caitlin's words, her ready explanation of the situation, get caught in her throat. She swallows them down, eyes stinging, and has to swallow down her emotions too. "Who says something is wrong?" The question is shaky—it won't fool Cisco one bit. But suddenly she's more worried than before, and not for herself.

She hasn't seen Cisco in days. He dropped off that sandwich, left her a few voicemails she hasn't listened to yet, but they haven't really spoken. She thought she'd been okay with that. Out of sight, out of mind, and she'd pulled away from STAR Labs because she couldn't watch her friends walk—run, fly—into danger anymore, but that doesn't mean they haven't been doing so. Caitlin is trapped in a box of unknown material that she suspects is airtight, and all she wants to know is whether or not Cisco is okay.

"Caitlin?" Cisco repeats, more alarmed this time, and Caitlin can picture him sitting up straighter, eyes going wide.

"I'm alright. I'm, I'm not hurt. But there was a metahuman at my last job interview."

She realizes after the fact that she'd never told Cisco she was going to any job interviews, but he doesn't mention that. "Where?"

"Stagg Industries. I tried to reach Barry, but . . ."

There is barely a second's hesitation before Cisco speaks, and Caitlin doesn't know what it means. (Is he surprised about the company she's interviewing for? On the way out his door already and trying to type the address into his phone? Has something happened to Barry?) "He's probably busy. But you said you were fine?"

"Technically, I think I'm trapped—" she knows she is "—but the metahuman's already left."

"Talk to me," Cisco says, and physics and materials science are so much more his thing than hers, so Caitlin walks him through everything she knows about the situation, every detail she can glean about the boxes she and everyone else seem to be trapped in.

Sirens in the distance grow louder as she talks, until there are flashing red and blue lights outside in the parking lot. The interviewer is still on his phone, talking calmly. The restless woman—Dr. Eszes—is trying to pace best she can in the limited space available for her. The receptionist is still slumped to the floor, eyes locked in the front door.

The young man is kicking at his confines in frustration—and then his foot hits nothing at all, and he's free. He blinks. Everyone stares at him. Hesitantly, cautious, he reaches a hand forward. It doesn't hit anything. It takes only a second for elation to replace wariness, and then he's darting away from the chair he was trapped with, exclaiming his euphoria with empathic swears.

That's when the police burst into the room in rows of two, one group of partners, then another, then a third, all with guns out. Caitlin, sitting down, doesn't really have anywhere to go, but her hands fly up anyway, dropping her phone and her conversation with Cisco. The two people who aren't trapped freeze in place, and, at the polices' prompting, go to their knees on the floor. So do the others, despite their prisons. (Overzealous cops, Caitlin thinks uncharitably. But then, maybe they're just scared, or maybe they didn't get all the details from the 9-1-1 operator. The whole city's on edge right now.)

Distantly, Caitlin hears Cisco ask what's happening. Trapped in her box, she watches as the police clear the room, watches as they holster their guns and shepherd out the two free victims, watches as the confusion morphs over their faces as they take in the situation. With the new threat gone, Caitlin picks her phone back up. "It's alright. It was just the police coming in."

"I'm pulling in now," Cisco says in answer, voice hard, and then he hangs up.

Caitlin puts her phone away, calm again. A couple of techs come into the room and head straight for the computer; one of them has her camera at the ready. Caitlin searches their faces, but none of them are Barry. The cops split up in the meantime, one of them to each of the four invisible boxes, each of the trapped people.

"How are you holding up?" the one in front of her now asks, voice raised to be heard properly, and Caitlin blinks.

Terribly, she doesn't say. She's doing terribly, and it hits her all at once, the way it does sometimes, that her husband is dead and she's not coping with it at all. But she knows that's not what the woman is asking.

"I think the prisons are airtight," she says instead of answering the question. It's maybe more effort than it should be to dig deep into her lungs and speak loudly in return, but Caitlin doesn't think that has anything to do with the possibly-airtight nature of the box. She's just tired. "But they might dissipate on their own."

Calm and collected, the cop just nods along and doesn't try to probe deeper into how she's doing. The fact that she's sitting down and not visibly injured probably helps with that. "Why do you think that?"

Caitlin walks her through her observations: the fact that the last to be trapped was the first to be freed, the possibility that with each box the metahuman's power was weakening, or the possibility that maybe it's not that at all, and he just knew he wouldn't be staying much longer and so therefore didn't put any effort into his last trap. Partway through an explanation of that last thought, the air seems to shimmer for a second and there's a cool breeze on Caitlin's face.

Relief hits her harder than she'd thought it would. She hadn't realized how tense she'd been. (Hadn't realized how stuffy her prison had been getting.) Shaky, she closes her mouth mid-sentence and closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath of clean air. When she opens her eyes again, the cop is watching her, patient. Their eyes meet, and the cop waves her hand, and two paramedics hurry over.

"If they clear you, stick around so we can get your official statement." She's already moving as she finishes talking, and she's gone before Caitlin can tell her the rest of the prisons will probably collapse—or dissipate or dissolve or whatever they're doing—in the opposite order that they were formed.

The paramedics crowd around her chair. "I'm fine," Caitlin says, but they insist on checking her breathing and her blood pressure and giving her a quick breath of oxygen. (She's not the only one worried that the prisons were—are—airtight then.) She tries to look around over their heads as she submits to their tests, but if Cisco really is here, the police aren't letting him in.

She wants him holding her hand. She remembers her burn getting bandaged when the gas main exploded, remembers the paramedic there asking if there was anyone he could call, and she wants Cisco by her side. She doesn't know how she thought she could do this without him. If Ronnie was her sun, her moon, the stars shining above her and the infinite sky that held them—beautiful but distant, forced out of her life by circumstances outside either of their contol—then Cisco is the solid ground beneath her feet. Her world's gone dark, but she's still standing.

The paramedics give her the all clear quickly when Dr. Eszes' prison dissipates as well. The woman hit her head—she was running when the prison trapped her—so Caitlin doesn't blame them. She stands quickly herself, ready to hurry outside and find Cisco, to give her official statement and go home, when she spots the receptionist still on the ground. The man is having a very visible panic attack.

That, alone, wouldn't be enough to give Caitlin pause. The room is swarming with authority figures now, and there's a paramedic crouched at his side on the other side of the barrier, trying to walk him through it. But she hears someone else mutter—a cop to another cop, maybe, barely loud enough for Caitlin to hear it—"How much oxygen do you think he's got?"

It's not the lack of oxygen that would kill him, Caitlin doesn't say. It's the build-up of carbon dioxide. She hurries forward toward the cage, and drops down on the other side of the paramedic. She listens for a moment, just in case she's got it wrong, but no, the man is panicking about his perceived lack of air. The paramedic is trying to get him to focus on something else, trying to get him to slow his breathing.

"Do you know how big the box you're in actually is?" Caitlin cuts in, calm and collected.

The receptionist jerks. Whether it's the unexpected question, the sound of a new voice, or the actual words she said, Caitlin doesn't know, but she's caught his attention. He shakes his head, a frantic motion, still breathing heavily and not quite meeting her gaze. He's still in the midst of a panic attack, of course—Caitlin's no miracle worker—but he heard her. That gives her something to work with. She catches the eye of the paramedic; they gesture for her to keep talking.

"Well," Caitlin says, and then, keeping her voice calm and even, she talks about math. She converts meters to feet and talks about volume and the percent of oxygen in the air and rates of respiration and slowly, bit by bit, the man's breath evens out. Eventually, the receptionist gives a startled flinch as the surface he's leaning against vanishes. His breathing almost picks up for a moment—hitches and stutters as the startlement of the relief almost kicks him back into panicking—but then he catches her eye and lets out a sob.

The paramedic is quick to move in, placing a reassuring hand on the man's shoulder and flashing a quick thumbs up in Caitlin's direction. Caitlin doesn't mind being ignored; her job here is done. It's time for someone else to take a turn. With a tightness in her chest and a stinging in her eyes, she pulls herself to her feet. No one stops her when she finds herself drifting out into the parking lot, where the police have set up a small operations center.

And then there's Cisco. There's Cisco, standing there, trying to get past the police cordon, pacing anxiously, waiting for her.

There's Cisco.

The relief that hits her could swallow Caitlin whole. She lets Cisco's arms swallow her instead, and sinks into his embrace and finally lets her tears fall.

Chapter Text

"I'm sorry," Caitlin says. She presses her face to Cisco's chest—him standing straight, her slumping down, because they're basically the same height—and feels her tears drying on his shirt, and it's not remorse or regret that fills her but relief. Cisco's here and in her arms, and solid and unhurt, and that's all that really matters, isn't it? She pulls back a little. "I'm sorry," she repeats, and wipes at her eyes. "I didn't mean to—"

She had though, hadn't she? Saying anything else would be a lie.

Cisco still has his hands on her shoulders. "You don't have to apologize for getting attacked," he says with a shaky laugh, an uncertain smile.

He's always so good at adding levity to situations. But that wasn't what she'd meant, and she knows it, and she knows he knows it too. She could play into the levity. She could joke back, change the topic, take the opening Cisco's given her and talk about the attack—though it barely really qualifies as an attack in her mind; a ruckus maybe, a slight kerfuffle. But she wants—needs—Cisco to know that she means it.

"I wasn't going to call you back." It isn't what she'd meant to say, but it's the truth. She's never been the hero Barry is, never been as invested as Cisco had become in helping the Flash. She'd always been the worrier, the doctor, the negative Nancy, urging caution and patience. Oh she'd helped people, and she'd loved helping people, and she'd thrown her all into it, but if there had been a voice on the team warning them to stay back, to think things through, it had been hers.

She hadn't been going to call Cisco back. She hadn't been willing to go back to that. She couldn't see Cisco, see Barry, hurt. She can't. But that's not how danger works.

Cisco blinks at her. It takes him a moment to process her words, to understand the shift in conversation back to the original topic.

Caitlin seizes on that moment. "I'm sorry," she repeats. "I wasn't—I couldn't—" She shakes her head. Her cheeks are still drying from her tears, but her eyes don't sting. The adrenaline from the temporary hostage situation—so to speak, the intruder hadn't exactly stuck around to threaten them—has faded. Her heart rate is back to normal.

Her chest still aches.

"Look, it's, it's all good, okay?" Cisco says. There's a hint of unease in his tone as he starts talking, an uncertainty, an inability to handle the genuinely emotional conversation Caitlin's trying to have, but it fades the more he talks, settles into a gentle surety that Caitlin envies. "It's . . . I know it's hard. I know you, okay? You're just dealing with things the way you do. I . . . I know that, okay?"

If there's such a thing as a gentle punch, that's what hits Caitlin's heart right then: all the things Cisco is saying and all the things he isn't. He doesn't blame her—which means he expected her to push him away and ignore his attempts to do nothing but help. He knows how she mourns Ronnie—because she's done it once already. She'd thrown herself into work then too, it's just that back then she'd still been able to stomach walking through the halls of STAR Labs, and that had kept Cisco by her side.

Suddenly, Caitlin doesn't want to talk about it anymore. She doesn't want Cisco's gentle forgiveness. She doesn't want to dwell on her mistakes. (She doesn't want to think about mourning Ronnie.) "I tried to call Barry first," she says, half apology. "Is he okay? He didn't pick up."

Cisco looks around the parking lot they're still standing in. It's a busy situation, the police trying to get everything in hand, the paramedics finishing up their evaluations of all the victims. The man who'd had a panic attack is sitting on the back of an ambulance, breathing slowly and watched closely. The man who was supposed to interview Caitlin—she wonders idly if they'll reschedule—is talking to several police officers. There's another man in a suit huddled with that group, maybe his boss. Others are giving statements, or heading to vehicles. She wonders if Cisco's looking for anyone they know, but Barry's not here and neither is Detective West. (They won't ever see Detective Thawne again.)

"I don't know," Cisco says idly, still scanning the crowd. He turns his gaze on her, refocuses. "He's been kinda doing what you were doing. Pulling away."

Something in Caitlin hardens. It's not harshness or anger, it's resolve. She gets it. She gets the appeal of pulling away, of going it alone, of making sure it's only you in the thick of things, that you don't have to watch those you love get hurt. (God, Barry had the chance to save his mother, and then lost it, and here Caitlin is crying over Ronnie, who'd loved her but made his own choices, who hadn't been murdered but had walked boldly into danger, saving countless lives.)

"When was the last time you talked with him?"

Cisco frowns. "Define 'talking with him'," he says, and there's a little bit of his usual levity, but not enough to hide his grief, his despair—how hard this has all hit Cisco too, and what has Caitlin done to support him?

Nothing. That's what. Not one thing. She metaphorically squares her shoulders, then pulls back from Cisco's reach and physically squares them too. "Well then," she says. "There's a new metahuman threat in town. Might as well go tell him about it."

It's not that simple, of course. Things rarely are. First, Caitlin has to give her official statement to the police. She manages to do that at the scene, passing along her contact information as well, without needing to go down to any station. The paramedics check her over one more time and give her the all clear. She feels solid enough to get in her own car and drive away, and she follows Cisco out of the parking lot and back to her own apartment. He waits for her in her living room as she showers and changes out of her interview clothes into something more comfortable, more practical.

By then, it's well past lunch. Caitlin knows she doesn't have much in her kitchen, so they call Barry again—no answer, still—and head out to a place only a few blocks down they can walk to together. There, they find a corner booth out of the way and Caitlin walks Cisco through all the details—in more depth this time, without panic eating into her words—of the barriers the metahuman used. They talk about the science of the airtight cages, the work of Stagg Industries, and what, exactly, the metahuman might have wanted. (They don't talk about dangers or threats or Barry or Ronnie or the grief that hangs over them. Caitlin knows they'll have to; she's just not ready yet.)

Then they go to STAR Labs. Caitlin . . . still isn't sure. About that. Still doesn't want to. She lets Cisco drive them both so she doesn't have to pull into the parking lot. She sits in the car for a long moment, staring at the building with dread, before she can convince herself to open the door. She lets Cisco lead the way; she keeps quiet, and focuses on her breathing, and manages to not have any panic attacks of her own. They make their way into the control room.

Barry's suit is gone.

"Well, that answers one question," Cisco says dryly. What he doesn't say is that it brings to mind a dozen more, but he's already moving for the computers. It's the work of a few seconds and fewer keystrokes to bring all the information they need to find the Flash to the forefront. "Shit."

"What?" The word comes out shakier than Caitlin would have liked. She pushes away from where she'd been scanning Barry's vitals—all good, he's all good, not hurt or dying or lying broken somewhere, unable to make contact, he's fine, so whatever Cisco's worried about can't be all that bad—and turns to find what triggered that tone in Cisco's voice.

Cisco points. "He turned the mic off on his end."

It's relief that hits Caitlin, not despair. Barry doesn't want to talk to them, Barry's cutting them off, Barry's isolating himself from everyone who could help him—but Barry's fine. He's fine. She sucks in a shaky breath, then another one, then nods. "Okay. Fine." Her words sound distant, like someone else is speaking them. "If he's not going to come to us, I guess we'll just have to go to him then."

"Caitlin! Caitlin!"

With a shaky exhale, Caitlin stops walking. She's in the parking lot of STAR Labs. She doesn't remember how she got there. She doesn't remember leaving the control room. The last few minutes are a blank stretch in her memory, after her declaration to go get Barry herself. When she turns, Cisco's hurrying toward her with a worried look on his face.

She left him behind again. The thought doesn't hurt as much as it should; her body feels restless, the urge to flee this terrible place coats her like ants crawling over her skin. "Sorry," she says, still shaky. "Sorry." She doesn't have any other words, doesn't have an explanation.

Cisco flashes her a grin as he nears her, as he slows, and it looks tremulous and uncertain but it's there. He holds up the handheld monitor he's carrying and waves it slightly to catch her attention. "How were you planning to track Barry, exactly? Or did you forget he's the fastest man alive?"

A huff of amusement escapes Caitlin's lungs; even with the most charitable description it could not be called a laugh. But it's something. It's there.

The systems at STAR Labs are complex, and secure—they can't normally be accessed from anywhere but the physical terminals. Felicity made sure of that, shored them up against intruders, gave them copies of her best firewalls. But there are a few mobile devices that can be linked, and the one in Cisco's hand shows a blinking dot that gives away Barry's location. He was right to grab it.

As that thought crosses Caitlin's mind, the brief flicker of amusement goes out, replaced with dread and regret. Her chest feels tight again. More mistakes—but mistakes or not, she can't be here. She starts moving forward again, one foot in front of the other.

"This doesn't make you smarter than me," she says. It's a weak joke. There's barely a hint of amusement in her tone, barely a trace of the way they used to argue back and forth, bantering about their respective fields, their degrees, physics vs biology. It barely gets Cisco to crack a grin.

But barely isn't nothing.

There's a building falling apart in downtown Central City. That isn't particularly special. A black hole tore open the sky above them, ripped the glass from windows, doors from their frames, whole walls crashing into the accretion disk. Barry had used that debris to run his way into that disk, had jumped and lunged and sped, around and around and around, until Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein had unfused in the black hole's center and collapsed it into itself, leaving a shattered city beyond.

So there are lots of buildings falling apart in downtown Central City. Or at least lots of buildings with broken windows, with gaping holes, with insides that look like the buildings were picked up and shaken about or tossed in a blender.

This building though, this particular building, was—is, maybe? The tenses aren't clear here—an apartment building. Five stories. More up than out, only four apartments per floor—two on the ground floor, to make room for a small gym and a smaller lobby and an office for management—for a total of eighteen homes. According to the records Barry had managed to find, seventeen of those had been rented; most of the occupants had been at work or school when the disaster had struck. No one had died. (Not in this building.)

It isn't livable anymore, isn't safe. The windows are all gone. The walls and floors creak and shudder in the wind. The inside looks like a tornado came through—or a black hole did. Barry doesn't know why he keeps going to the tornado metaphor in his mind. Or maybe he does. A black hole, above the city—and his fault, all of it.

He starts with the windows. Clears the last of the glass, covers them up, patches the holes, stops the wind and weather from wreaking any more havoc than it already has. He finds anything he can, shower curtains, loose wood, a thin card table, and he secures it over the holes, covers up the outside until the only breeze through the halls comes from him. (He'd love to patch them entirely, his construction skills have really improved these last few days, but he simply doesn't have the supplies to replace every window he broke.)

With the building enclosed again, Barry gets to the real work. He picks up the remnants of people's homes, threads wires through the electrical system, tidies and cleans and braces walls. He starts at the top and works his way down. He's fast, but there's so much debris; constantly he races to the city dump, a bag in each hand of unsalvageable material.

Two hours into the work, he's on the fourth floor when he hears a sound. He races to the hallway, listens, then to the stairwell, and only then can he make out the shouting.

"Barry!"

It's his name. It's his name, shouted Cisco. A scowl crosses Barry's face. He'd thought he'd made it clear to Cisco—

But, well, maybe not. Maybe he'd never actually said the words. He shakes his head and zips back to the apartment he'd been working on. Wind is howling outside the building now, a storm coming, and it muffles any further sounds as Barry gets to work again. He speeds. He toils and labors and grinds away at the effort before him. Eons pass before he hears sounds again—for everyone else, it's only been a few minutes.

Cisco isn't alone, when Barry spots him in the hallway on the fourth floor. Caitlin's a step behind him, looking wary and uncertain at a collapsed portion of the ceiling and floor: a hole that goes from the fifth floor above them all the way down to the second floor below. Seeing Caitlin gives Barry pause. If it were just Cisco—fun, jovial Cisco, who rarely embraces anything sober and grim—maybe he'd be able to brush off the visit, chase Cisco away. But that Caitlin is back, Caitlin who lost Ronnie the way Iris lost Eddie: to his own choices, to his bravery, to him, sacrificing for Barry's mistakes . . .

Barry can't turn away from Caitlin. He pauses. The slowness to his friends' movements disappears, time resuming its normal tread. "You shouldn't be here." It's placid, his statement. Matter of fact and bare. He means it in the kindest of ways, but he does mean it. He doesn't want them here, and it isn't safe.

Thunder crashes in the air outside. It's dark in here, light seeping only through cracks, through the one construction spotlight Barry's rigged up with just about the longest extension cord he could find. Shadows are cast on his friends' faces. Probably on his too.

"There's a new metahuman," Caitlin says.

"He attacked Stagg Industries while Caitlin was there for a job interview," Cisco says.

If possible, Barry stills even further. Something cracks, an opening in the wall he's building around his heart. "What?"

Caitlin shakes her head and looks around at their surroundings. "You weren't answering our messages."

No. He wasn't. But it sounds like he should have been. Another mistake in a long list of them. "What did he do?" A harshness seeps into Barry's tone, a threat not directed at the two before him. He takes a step forward. Thunder claps; the floor creaks.

Cisco and Caitlin exchange glances. "We need to work on this as a team," Cisco says.

No one's responding to each other's statements. There are half a dozen conversations flying around unspoken, because none of them want to dwell on the hard questions.

Barry doesn't want to work on this as a team.

He takes another step forward. The wind howls. Caitlin's eyes widen. "Barry!"

She lunges for him, ready to tackle him to the ground at whatever she's spotted behind him. Barry, lost in his own thoughts, isn't fast enough to stop her from making that leap. (He's too late: even with superspeed, he's always too late.) He's fast enough to make a difference though. Fast enough to catch her, to spin them to the ground with him on top, her sheltered beneath him, his back braced to take the hit of the falling debris she'd seen coming before he had.

But Cisco had been lunging too, Cisco had been ready too, and Cisco throws something in his hand—Barry looks up in slow motion, and it's a thick mobile device, black and heavy-duty, flying through the air. Cisco's throw hits a thin support beam Barry had put in place to prop up the unsteady ceiling. It collapses, and the bits of the ceiling that had been falling down follow its collapse, leaning away from Barry and Caitlin on the ground, missing them both.

It isn't quiet, the moment that follows. There's stunned silence from all three of them—Caitlin who'd dove to save him and Barry who'd shifted to save her and Cisco who'd saved them both—but it isn't quiet as the building creaks and clamors and the debris cracks and crashes and the thunder claps around them.

Chapter Text

Barry takes them one by one to the small gym downstairs, away from the debris and disaster of the upper floors. Downstairs there are no holes in the walls, in the ceiling or floor; there are no windows broken and shattered and leaving gaping breaches to the storm outside. It's dark, for a moment, but Caitlin blinks again and then there's light, Barry's work light joining them in the cramped space.

The gym's equipment is in disarray. The solid structure—the floors above them—might have shielded the room from the worst of it, but gravity doesn't care about what walls might stand in its way. There are dents in the walls, more in the ceiling, where weights hit the plaster. The single treadmill and exercise bike are tipped and toppled, lying on their sides. It's still tidier than the mess of upstairs, and then Caitlin blinks again and it's tidier still. Barry's piled most of the smaller equipment in one corner, cleared a space around their feet. A padded bench—Caitlin doesn't know what it's called—rests upright behind her and Cisco.

She doesn't sit. Cisco doesn't sit either. Barry finally comes to a halt in front of the two of them, finally stops vibrating, but he doesn't take off his cowl. With it on, in full costume, he looks intimidating and distant, nothing at all like the playful, excited young man she knows.

It's been mere seconds. Caitlin's heart is still slowing from its racing beat. It's not fear that hits her, remnants of her reaction upstairs, it's sheer relief. She hadn't been willing to see Barry hurt, to be the one to set his broken bones again, to hold his hand as he grimaced and dealt with the pain because there aren't any painkillers they've found that can outrace his metabolism.

Well, no, maybe that's giving herself too much credit. Maybe that's hindsight rationalizing away her brain's response to the danger. She hadn't been thinking anything near that coherent in the moment: she'd seen the dangling debris shift and give way, felt nothing but a deep dread, and moved without thinking. Still, it's relief that hits her, that they're all standing here, upright and fine, and it's relief that bursts out of her in a shaky, exhaled chuckle, a wry grin.

Searching nearly blindly, eyes still on Barry, her hand reaches out to her side for something she knows will be there, something that's always been there. Cisco reaches for her too, and their hands meet, and they hold on tight. It's grounding, that touch, even as it buoys up Caitlin's relief. Her still-healing burn—hidden under bandages, beneath her sleeve, not intentionally kept a secret but one nevertheless—throbs in tune with her slowing heartbeat. It hurts—she must have banged it against the floor upstairs when Barry sheltered her—but Caitlin barely notices.

"Are you okay?" She's looking at Barry when she speaks, but he wasn't the only one there, so she drags her eyes to the side to finally look at Cisco, sweeps her gaze over him and looks for wounds. There aren't any, thank goodness. She turns back to Barry.

"I'm fine," he says, short and impatient. Hurting, but not in the way she's asking about. "You shouldn't have been there."

Caitlin ignores the second statement and focuses on the first. Despite Barry's quick dismissal, he's probably not lying. There are no visible tears in his suit, no blood against the fire-engine red. And if he did get nicked by any debris, if Cisco's redirection of the falling wreckage had only partially succeeded, he hadn't been hit hard enough to cause internal injuries. Caitlin definitely would have noticed that. Anything else—any bruises or cuts or sore muscles—have probably already healed. So he is fine.

He doesn't seem fine. He's already shaking his head, a scolding frown on his face. "You shouldn't have been there," he repeats, "but, I didn't—it wasn't supposed to—"

"Dude, not your fault," Cisco cuts in, before Barry's thoughts can turn coherent enough to panic. "Storm like this, the building's practically shaking. Probably would have collapsed even sooner if you hadn't shored it up a little."

Barry just shakes his head, eyes lost in thought, but thunder crashes through the silence between them as if accentuating Cisco's point. "You said there was another metahuman attack?" The question is directed solely at Caitlin.

"I also said you weren't answering our messages," Caitlin returns, defiant.

"Guys, maybe we shouldn't be having this argument in a building that's collapsing around us in the middle of a thunderstorm."

Barry hesitates and Caitlin can see the dilemma behind his eyes: safety, or isolation? "You guys should go home," he says, apparently deciding on both. "I've still got some stuff to do here."

Cisco looks affronted and confused even as Caitlin bristles. "What about the new metahuman?"

"I can read the police report."

"Or I can just tell you, since I was actually there!"

Barry's eyes snap to her, his sharp gaze pinning her down.

"Oh, you forgot about that part of what Cisco said, didn't you?" It's cruel and taunting, not like Caitlin at all, but she's just so frustrated! She pulled away, and danger and Cisco pulled her back, and now she's going to do the same thing for Barry, anything else be damned!

"Hey!" Cisco's hand separates from hers so that he can step between them a little, reaching out to hold her back, the other palm stretched toward Barry. "What did I just say?"

The words are on the tip of Caitlin's tongue, the suggestion to meet back at HQ—at STAR Labs—but she can't bring herself to say anything. She hasn't been able to since Cisco first made the suggestion to leave here.

"Look," Cisco continues, "Caitlin's fine, and you're fine, and we're all fine, but this guy attacked in broad daylight and we don't even know what he wants."

Barry's shoulders go down a little. "Was anyone else hurt?"

Caitlin mirrors his quieter tone, speaking softly as she says, "One man had a panic attack, and there were a couple bumps and bruises, but no real injuries." She fills Barry in on the bare bones of the situation: the solid, invisible, almost-certainly-airtight prisons; the intruder's calm assurance that he was robbing them, without visibly doing so; the quick police response.

When she finishes, thunder rumbles. Barry's brow is furrowed even beneath his cowl, his lips turned down in thought. "Forensics should be able to figure out what he took from the computer," he says almost idly, speaking more to himself than either of them.

Cisco uses the hand stretched out toward Barry to latch onto his forearm. "Now's not the time to go racing off," he says. Barry hadn't been about to move—at least, he hadn't looked like he was, though it can be hard to tell with him sometimes—but Caitlin is glad Cisco latched on anyway.

"We're working on this together," she tacks on, firm. "If he stole any biochemical research, I'm the best person to understand it." Barry's not half bad with biology—though he's better with dead bodies than living ones—and Cisco's no slouch, but they all know she's right.

Barry bites his lip and pulls his cowl back; his hair is messy from being plastered to his head, giving him almost the look of a mad scientist. When he shakes his head, Caitlin knows it's because he's thinking deeply, not because he's disagreeing with her. "I'll go find out if Joe knows anything," he says.

"I'll check Felicity's software, see if we can ID the guy who attacked," Cisco chimes in. The police have their own equipment, but thanks to Felicity they have access to federal databases as well. Definitely illegal, but so is most of what they do.

Caitlin opens her mouth, but finds herself unexpectedly adrift. She got what she wanted, Barry is including them, but she has nothing to offer in the meantime.

Cisco keeps talking anyway, and her silence goes unnoticed. "We can meet back at my place for dinner," he says, and Caitlin expects him to throw her an understanding look, to offer up a gentle smile and acknowledgement that she can't go back to STAR Labs, but he's not looking at her. He's looking at Barry, a little chiding, a little playfully stern.

Barry looks away for a moment, then looks back. "I'll bring the pizzas," he says.

It sounds like an apology. It sounds like too much. It sounds like she missed things when she abandoned her friends, and there's no one to blame but herself. (Ronnie loves—loved—pizza.)

Caitlin blinks, and she's back home, standing in the center of her apartment and cut adrift.

It doesn't happen like that, of course.

She doesn't lose that much time.

But it's kinda like that.

They say their goodbyes, get out a few last bits of shared information, and then they go their separate ways. Caitlin and Cisco drove together, so she doesn't have to drive to get herself home. They hurry across the street through the rain to where they parked, the storm raging above them. The thunder, when it rumbles is fainter. Lightning flashes in the distance. Caitlin remembers the first night Ronnie died, and doesn't say anything on the way home.

When Cisco drops her off, she thinks she remembers a worried look on his face. She thinks she remembers a time given to meet up again. She thinks she remembers him telling her that she can show up early, soon as he's done at STAR Labs, so she doesn't have to sit around alone and wait.

She thinks, in fragments of memory and pieces of the past. She's wet, even from the short runs to Cisco's car. She's already showered today, but Caitlin doesn't want to be here in her living room, watching the storm pass from her windows. She goes into the shower and twists the adjustable shower head to give her the hardest possible water pressure and drowns out the storm.

She's feeling better, when she gets to Cisco's place an hour before Barry is supposed to show up with their dinner. Better but still distant. Cisco directs her to a place on his couch—more comfortable than her own—and Caitlin sits and watches the evening news for a length of time. Eventually, she blinks, realizes where she is, realizes she's watching the TV without watching at all, and looks around for Cisco. He's working on his laptop, seated on the couch next to her, and she studies him for a moment, studies the bags beneath his eyes, the frown twisting his lips.

"Are you okay?" she asks, quiet and sorrowful. It's a stupid question. She knows he isn't.

Cisco looks up. He blinks. "He's calling himself Zephyr."

For a moment, Caitlin thinks he hasn't heard her, but then he ducks his head and his eyes dart away for a moment before his gaze comes back to her, and she knows he's ignoring her.

"The metahuman," Cisco continues, shifty. "I mean, maybe that's his name, who knows—kids these days, right?"

Caitlin ignores the weight in her heart and lets the corner of her lips twist upward. "Pretty sure he was around our age."

"Exactly. Zephyr. Bartholomew. Who knows what our parents were thinking."

A startled laugh escapes Caitlin, but then her brain puts the pieces together and Barry's mom is right there, looming over them all. Oh, does Caitlin ache. She doesn't care what this new metahuman is calling himself. "I don't think Barry's okay," she says, just as quiet as she'd been a moment ago.

A heavy silence settles over the room for a moment. And then Cisco says, like he's really been thinking about it, "Barry . . . He skipped it all, the first time."

It hits Caitlin like a physical blow: he's right. The first time, Ronnie's first death, the accelerator's first disaster, Barry missed all of it. He fell into a coma, and by the time he'd woken up the city had moved on, cleaned things up, let it become a thing of the past. Caitlin hadn't, perhaps, been over Ronnie's death—she suspects a part of her never will be—but she'd already spent months grieving. When Barry met her she'd already known what it was like to wake up alone and live alone and move around like part of her had been cut off.

It's not that Barry's never suffered any tragedies, but the last time he was a kid, and now he's being hit with that same tragedy all over again, on top of half a dozen new ones, two friends dead, the betrayal of a mentor. He's already lost his mother, but, she's not sure it matters. She doesn't think her grief is any less just because she's already lost Ronnie before. It's a new grief, though, and for Barry it might be completely different. She lost Ronnie the same way she did the last time: to his own heroics and the knowledge that he died saving the entire city—and her. Barry got the chance to stop his own mother's death, and didn't succeed. It's not the same thing.

Death never is.

But maybe Caitlin is better at managing it. Maybe she knows her own patterns now. Maybe she's better at taking a step back and recognizing her grief for what it is. She's not sure that matters either. The grief's still there. She still tried to leave Cisco, Barry, behind. She still doesn't want to—can't—talk about Ronnie.

"He still has us though."

"Always," Cisco agrees easily.

Something in Caitlin's gut lurches; her throat tightens. Cisco can't promise that. No one can. She shakes her head and shifts her position, and curls into Cisco's side.

Chapter Text

It should have felt like old times, the three of them chasing down a new metahuman threat together, but everything is different now. It isn't just that Ronnie's dead—they'd worked with that assumption in the beginning, taken down plenty of metahumans without Firestorm after that. It isn't just that Eddie's dead either—Joe and Eddie and Iris had never been huge parts of their team.

It's not even that Wells isn't with them, because Harrison Wells had been a mentor, a teacher, a guide, but he'd always been distant. The three of them—not the four of them—had been the unit, had hung out together. Had laughed and texted when they weren't at work and gone out to the movies together and talked about their favorite TV shows and memorized each other's take out orders. Wells had been . . . Well, he'd been a lot (and Caitlin can see now, how thoroughly he'd inserted himself into Barry's life) but he also hadn't cared about them. Not really. (That's hindsight too.) He'd never been their friend.

But even if it doesn't feel strange, to not have Wells butting in with a clever observation (knowledge of the future?) or strategy (training, to make Barry faster?), it does feel strange not to be working out of STAR Labs. It feels strange to be holed up in Cisco's apartment, to listen as a curse slips from his lips as he struggles to set up the remote connection to all their expensive equipment in the cortex, to watch Barry pace a little in costume.

Beyond that, it's just strange. Grief hangs heavy over them all, and Caitlin can reminisce about her conversation with Cisco the previous day all she wants, about how Barry isn't okay, but . . . But none of them are. But Barry isn't the only one struggling. Maybe she doesn't know if Barry's even cried yet, but she's the one who can't bear to step foot in STAR Labs again. And Cisco . . . Caitlin shoots him another look. She doesn't think Cisco's sleeping.

It's a weird sort of tension in the air, because Caitlin trusts these people with her life while at the same time she's terrified of seeing them hurt. Because Caitlin can fall asleep on Cisco's shoulder with tears falling down her cheeks but can't bring herself to speak Ronnie's name out loud.

"God, I can't wait until the construction is done," Cisco mutters under his breath. He finishes typing whatever he's doing with a flourish and an elaborate pressing of the 'enter' key, and then the TV in front of them comes to life, projecting a duplicate of their screens at STAR Labs. "Got it!"

Caitlin tenses at . . . Well, at everything. At the reminder, for once, that it isn't her fault they're not at STAR Labs right now—which means no one knows she won't be able to go back there, once the repairs are done. At the task before them, the danger she's choosing to send Barry into. At the exhausted way Cisco slumps back in his seat after his proclamation, his usual energy fading quickly.

"Finally." Barry stops pacing and moves closer to the screen, studying it. "Anything?"

Cisco pulls his laptop off his coffee table and onto his lap, studying the screen himself. He shakes his head after a moment. "Just the usual pile-up of reports. Traffic accidents, some vandalism, a few B&E's. Nothing for the Flash to handle."

Barry shakes his own head for an entirely different reason. He looks ready to speed away. He doesn't, though. Caitlin doesn't think it's her earlier insistence that they cooperate that's holding him back. Not entirely.

"At least we know what Zephyr took now," Cisco cuts in. He switches the screens away from all their crime monitoring applications and to the copy of the files from Stagg Industries that Barry was able to get from the CCPD. (No one's asked him if he got those copies legally. Caitlin doesn't think he's been assigned to the case. She also doesn't think it matters.)

"He took everything," Barry counters, irritation shining through.

It's an exaggeration, but it's not much of one. Caitlin leans forward, feeling the call of the puzzle before then beckoning to her. "He targeted Stagg Industries for a reason." Part of her is surprised at how vehement the statement is when it escapes her, how strong the emotions feel about something that has nothing to do with Ronnie's death.

She looks around at Cisco's weary expression, Barry's irritation. She can feel her own fear. More than that, though, she can sense the determination in the room. They're squabbling and on the edge, grieving and shattered, but all three of the want to bring Zephyr down. 

She doesn't doubt that they can.

They spend hours at Cisco's going through the files from Stagg Industries. The company's network must be a mess: there's no organization to the folders they do have. Some are named by location—building or lab—some have individual people's names on them. Some are sorted by department—HR and Security and Quality and so on. There are duplicates of countless files and old folders that haven't been updated in a decade. 

Somewhere in all the mess is something Zephyr wanted, but they just can't find it. A robbery, he'd called it, so it had to have been the theft of this information that was important. But without another data point, they don't have anything to go on. If Zephyr truly got what he wanted, they might not even ever see him again.

So they pull back at some point, put the files away, drop the remote connection to STAR Labs, take a break. Barry's out of his suit by now. Cisco's slumped over on his sofa, eyes closed, mouth cracked open, and snoring faintly. Caitlin feels enormously fond as she looks at him. 

She feels exhausted too, the satisfied kind of exhaustion that comes with a good day of hard, fulfilling work. "How long has he been sleeping?" she asks, quiet, as she stands in the doorway to Cisco's living room. Barry looks up from where he's idly thumbing at his phone; she hopes he's not drowning himself in the news.

"Since you left." The corner of Barry's lips quirks upward for the briefest of moments. "He's been snoring just as long too." Barry isn't being loud, but he's not trying to be quiet the way Caitlin had been.

Cisco jerks awake with a final, loud, snort—though whether at Barry's words or her return (her arm had been throbbing, and the bandages and burn cream are back at her own apartment) is impossible to say. "What?!" He looks around wildly, one hand reaching up to wipe at the corner of his mouth. "I don't snore."

A tiny laugh escapes Caitlin at the blatant lie, the way Cisco's words are bleary and nearly slurred as he finishes waking up. Barry's grinning too, something fond in his eyes. 

But he doesn't joke about it. Neither Barry nor Cisco do, both of them still weighed down and weary. The world intrudes again on Caitlin's thoughts and she feels that weight herself, the demands of the past and the present and the future all cloying for her attention.

"Did you want to do a patrol?" she asks Barry. None of them want to wait for Zephyr to strike again to get their second data point—if, in fact, he even will—but they all agreed on this break. There's so much data to go through—it'd been a portable 2TB drive Caitlin had seen him pocketing yesterday morning—and they need to step back and give their brains time to process everything.

But Caitlin isn't ready to split up the team, and she doesn't want to go back to her own apartment to wallow in her feelings alone. She suspects the other two feel the same way.

Barry opens his mouth to respond. Caitlin speaks first. "I want to help." She doesn't exactly know what she means—running point from Cisco's couch?—but she's not taking the words back.

For a long moment, Barry just looks at her, the two of them locked in a staring contest. The least intense staring contest Caitlin's ever seen; there's no urgency to their stares, no fierceness, just the same somber weight that hangs over everything these days.

When Caitlin finally does look away, when Barry finally pulls his gaze from hers, it's because of Cisco saying, "Me too."

Barry can't argue about not needing, not wanting, their help. They've been working together for hours now to try and find Zephyr, or at least understand his motivations. But Barry starts to shake his head anyway, slow and still thinking things through, and the anger in Caitlin surges. "You can't keep cutting us out," she says, and it's hypocritical—she can't look at Cisco—but she's practically swearing as the words spit out of her.

Barry bristles. "I don't need your help," he spits back, more reflex than a carefully thought out response.

"Who's going to put you back together the next time you break a bone?" Caitlin counters, nearly sick to her stomach at the thought. "Who's going to give you directions to the next crime scene? If it hadn't been for me, if we hadn't tracked you down, you wouldn't even know about Zephyr!"

Cisco sits up, wary. "Guys . . . "

"No," Caitlin interrupts, firm and angry. "He doesn't get to do this to us, he doesn't get to just leave!" The words burst out of her in a fury—and she deflates as soon as they escape her. Horror squeezes in past the anger and threatens to consume her as she realizes what she'd just said. Tears well in her eyes, a sob escapes her unbidden. Furious and heartbroken, she spins on her heel, storms out of Cisco's apartment, and collapses in the hallway just outside his front door.

The sobs take her fully then, a breakdown she hadn't seen coming. Hadn't let herself see coming. She sinks to floor, back to the wall, and presses a palm to her mouth to try and hold back the wails from escaping her.

Ronnie'd chosen to leave her, again and again and again, and he'd always had a good reason for it—a mad general from the army chasing him down, a black hole in the sky above Central City—but she's furious with him anyway, and furious with herself for not realizing it, and furious with Barry, and Cisco, and, and, and the whole damn world!

Her shoulders shake and shudder, tears blurring her vision. It takes her a moment to register a distant sound as Cisco wrenching the door to his apartment open again. (She must have slammed it shut behind her.) He doesn't hesitate to wrap her up in his arms, and Caitlin hates that too, hates the way he's shouldering all her grief, but she doesn't hesitate either when she sinks into his grip. Somehow, he gets her upright, gets her back onto his couch, gets her settled against him with a blanket draped over her lap and a box of tissues within reach. She thinks Barry helps—he's certainly hovering, a disconcerting expression on his face—but she's not really sure.

When she looks up again, when she wipes her eyes dry enough to see again, she realizes she's not done being mad at him. "You can't leave us, Barry," she says, exhausted and defeated and still crying. "You can't." A sob escapes her again, cracking her final word in half, but she thinks she's gotten her point across.

Barry . . . hovers. Cisco holds her tight. Caitlin cries a little longer, but there aren't many tears left in her.

She wipes the last few away. "I'm sorry." There are more words on the tip of her tongue—'I'm not ready for this,' 'I don't think I can do this,'—but she doesn't give voice to them. She isn't ready. She can't do this. But she's not ready to be alone again.

"There's . . . there's a small hospital," Barry says, slow and hesitant, eyes on her. "More of a clinic, really. They closed, after . . . " He bites his lip. "I've been trying to put it back together with the rest of the city, cleaning it up, but it's taking me a while. I don't want to mess with the equipment too much and even with superspeed it takes me a while to learn what everything does."

It takes Caitlin a moment to realize what Barry's offering. It isn't much, but at the same time, it's everything. Words burst out of her almost before she's done processing. "Yes," she says, sitting up. "Yes, of course." Putting together a hospital? Helping people, helping Barry, staying a part of Team Flash, without any danger being involved at all? Caitlin would be a fool to turn that down.

She turns over to look at Cisco. There's hope, in his eyes, behind all the weariness.

"Okay, but I'm driving," he says with a small grin. "I don't need you speeding me around town."

It's a jest—Cisco loves Barry's speed—but it works. Barry huffs a small laugh. "I wasn't offering," he says, and Caitlin can tell it's just to be contrary.

A weak grin makes its way onto her face too. It's an effort, to heave herself off the couch—but Caitlin thinks it's worth it.

"Okay, like, I get that we need to get new jobs now, you know—boss was a supervillain and all that," Cisco says, delicate and comedic all at once. "But Stagg Industries? Seriously Caitlin?"

"'Of all the laboratories in all the cities'," Barry misquotes, grinning too.

"These on top, these in the back, and don't put those anywhere near those," Caitlin says, pointing as she ignores them both. Her eyes are sore and her chest is tight and they're still not talking about any of it. Not Ronnie, not Eddie, not Wells—Cisco's jokes don't count—and not her breakdown.

There's a flash of light, a blur of motion, and then the room they're in is pristine, everything back in its place. Well, a place. Hopefully the people who work here can understand Caitlin's organizational system.

"I was really just taking anything I could get." The words are on the tip of her tongue, but they don't escape her mouth.

Cisco heaves himself to his feet from where he'd been lounging in a chair, and as a group they head over to the next room. Barry whirs through it, picking up the obvious debris, sorting and stacking the non-obvious for them, and Caitlin starts to read through all the labels in front of her. Cisco takes another seat. There's really nothing for him to do here but no one suggests he leave.

Barry finishes his tasks in a blink, Caitlin is still sorting, and Cisco picks up his conversational thread right where he left off. "I haven't even started looking for a job," he says, and the words are half-wistful, half-sardonic.

Maybe this won't be so awful—maybe she really can get through this. For the first time in a while, Caitlin starts to hope.