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It’s like the whole world has burned to cinders around her, ashes lay in thick layers beneath her feet and slowed her down, soot stains on her cheeks and forehead, up and down her arms and legs – Barry kept her safe from the explosion, her and a few others, and after digging through the rubble for half an hour, helping Barry with the survivors where she could before the paramedics showed up, she steadily worked herself into the dirt.
Barry speeds her away once the last ambulances leave the scene, but stops them in the middle of nowhere, where they can watch the aftermath of the explosion from afar. At this distance it seems so small, so insignificant, the panic dulls and the heat of the flames flits from her skin, even though the memories lay anchored in her hippocampus. She hadn’t stood this close to danger since the night of the particle accelerator explosion and even still she never felt the fire of that one after Cisco pulled her away from the pipeline. She’d followed Barry without knowing, there was no way to suspect anything like this could happen – the CCPD had always been safe, low-risk, and now look at it.
Blown to smithereens.
“I wasn’t fast enough,” Barry breathes, leaning down with his hands on his knees trying to catch a breath, weighed down by the entire world.
“Don’t do that.”
One of her heels breaks as she takes a step closer, but she grabs onto Barry, who keeps her steady with one hand at her waist.
“People got hurt, Caitlin,” Barry says, a sadness in his voice that’s there for all the injustices in the world, all the people that he couldn’t save, like he carries all that on his own and doesn’t have people looking out for him. She gets it, Joe and Eddie and Captain Singh could’ve been hurt, other people Barry worked with every day, but they didn’t; they’re bruised and broken, but none of them died. And the few he did manage to get away from the blast will watch their colleagues heal, at a much slower speed than Barry does.
“You can’t save everyone, Barry,” she says. “You learn that as a doctor, too. You’re one man and you can’t take on the entire world.”
Barry licks his lips, the growing frustration over how right she is tenses in his shoulders and he shakes his head. “But I have to. I need to.”
“You have to know your limits!” She raises her voice so that for once he might actually hear it, let it sink into a place where he doesn’t have to be the big damn hero, where he doesn’t risk his life every single day and she doesn’t have to deal with the potential of never seeing him again. “How many times do we have to tell you that before you hear it?”
She’s patched up too many scrapes and cuts and bruises, seen too many scans of broken ribs and debrided open wounds for it not to matter how little Barry cares about his own wellbeing. Personal physician was never part of her job description, she’s a geneticist, a bioengineer, not someone who can take the continued barrage of seeing someone she loves–
No, she checks herself, not loves. Cares about.
She staggers a step back and kicks off her broken shoe, the other quickly following – the hard gravel hurts the soles of her feet, and she’s starting to get cold, but what’s a little more hardship after today. Turning her back tears sting the corners of her eyes, the last time Barry landed on her table outlined in charcoal red. There’d been so much blood, a bullet lodged inside his suit right below his ribcage, and she knew why he wasn’t healing, she knew, she knew, she knew.
His heart had stopped beating.
“You got shot, Barry, and I barely got you back.” Her voice fails to reach over the sound of her heartbeat. “You’re not invincible.”
Barry’s silence settles slowly and precariously around her heart, as if not speaking might keep it safe this time, except she’s learned to decipher all the things he doesn’t say. When he’s out there, Barry thinks himself invincible, thinks that risking his life is a small price to pay if it means saving someone else’s. Ronnie thought the same thing too, once.
“I won’t watch you do it.” She faces Barry again with her hands balled into fists, whatever resolve she felt mere moments ago quickly faltering; she’s not sure she’s strong enough for what this might mean. “You want to kill yourself, fine, but I won’t be there to see someone I care about die again.”
Barry’s lips part, his eyes take in her face, but he clearly sees how serious she is. “You’d walk away?”
“I’m human, Barry,” she says. “And I’ve lost too much.”
Two weeks ago she’d screamed. There’d been panic at first, watching Joe rush in an unconscious Barry and putting him down in the hospital bed they kept handy; Harrison was gone and Cisco only knew how to fix tech so it was up to her, it was all up to her, The Flash lay dying in front of her eyes and her brain short-circuited around a single thought. Not again.
And she wouldn’t have it, she wouldn’t watch him die, she wouldn’t let it end like this, not after Ronnie walking out of her life again, not after Harrison, not after everything Barry has come to mean to her. Barry wouldn’t be yet another person who left her, voluntarily or otherwise.
“If I lost you–” she whispers, but knows Barry can hear it. “Please, don’t make me find out.”
“I don’t know how else to be.”
Barry closes the distance between them with a few concise steps, gravel cracking beneath his shoes. He’s not in the suit, there hadn’t been any time, and she thinks she prefers it this way, seeing him just how he is, the boy behind the superhero.
“I’ve been given these powers for a reason. I don’t know what else to do.”
He’s so much taller than her now that she’s barefoot.
“I’m not asking you to stop being The Flash.”
She reaches out a hand for his arm, though she couldn’t say why. Barry’s come to mean something to her, much more than that boy she watched over for nine months, much more than the superhero she has to berate from time to time because he won’t listen, and so much more than just a friend. But that’s a scary thought, to have grown attached to someone so fragilely everyone else’s too. Someone wilfully leaving her every time there’s danger.
“I’m asking you to come back alive,” she says. “If not for yourself, than for Joe and Iris. For your dad and–”
And her, yes, for her too, but she’s not sure she wants Barry to hear that. She’s not sure she wants to put him through the guilt of running away from her every time, or the guilt should he not feel the same way.
“For you?” Barry asks softly.
Her brain almost short-circuits around the answer. How can she say this? How does she open up to this again after barely healing? She doesn’t do that as fast as Barry.
Barry steals a step closer. “Caitlin.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “For me.”
His eyes don’t leave hers, but a hand rises to her face, Barry’s thumb wiping away a tear she’s cried too many times already. “Okay,” he whispers, his eyes fall to her lips and there’s no holding back, this has built for too long, she’s denied it for too long.
“Barry,” she hushes, but he pulls her closer around the waist, she steps on top of his toes to spare her feet further pain and next his lips touch hers. It’s hesitant, slowly gauged in between every smile and ‘are you okay’, every little touch and angry glare, but when her lips part and Barry licks into her mouth it turns desperate – he holds her steady to his body, close, so close, and she reaches a hand up in his hair, their mouths moving against each other while half of Barry’s world burns.
But that’s their story.
(In a parallel reality, mistletoe is involved. They’re on their third date, taking a long walk through the snow, the city quiet and peaceful, slowed to a halt by wonderful winter weather. Their veins run warm with hot chocolate, both of which she spiked with a hint of Courvoisier earlier. She has an arm hooked through one of Barry’s and they sway against each other, laughing, gossiping about their roommates, the snow cracking beautifully beneath their feet.
Barry loves the snow because his mother does; they still built snowmen together and their hot chocolates involve small marshmallows floating at the top. She likes how the cold snaps at her cheeks and even though it burns a little, it’s a good kind of burn.
Near midnight they head back to campus, and find one of the lanes decorated with one branch of mistletoe after the other, someone’s idea of a practical joke that will go over well with most of the student body. Barry giggles and scratches behind his ear, while she smiles at the potential of every single one of the branches.
She tugs at Barry’s arm, “Come on”, happy when Barry’s body gives way to her pull immediately.
“We don’t have to do this,” Barry says, the gentleman in him giving her a way out. But she doesn’t want out of this. They’ve known each other for more than a year, slowly becoming friends, but never intending to stay that way. If Barry hadn’t garnered the courage to ask her out, she would’ve asked him out herself.
She scrunches her nose, tugged cosily beneath the mistletoe hanging from a large poplar tree. “Yeah, we do.”
Barry smiles, shakes his head a moment like he always does when she acts impulsively, and he can’t quite believe he got so lucky. But then he breathes in deep and raises a hand to her face, and before she knows it his lips close over hers, like they were always meant to. Her lips part and they sink into a long lazy kiss that eases the burn in her cheeks, but sparks a flame in her heart.)
- FIN -