Chapter Text
"It's your brother, isn't it? Or your sister?" A strange, eerie calm has settled over Caitlin as she stares at the back of the man who hurt Cisco.
Zephyr startles. He hadn't expected anyone else to be here; there's no barrier around the building, the clinic, they're in. No one else had been here, until Caitlin had pulled up a few minutes ago—of all the coincidences, they're at the clinic she and Cisco had been fixing up with Barry. The place is still closed, wires still exposed, patches of brick missing from the exterior, windows boarded up. In the dark, it'd been foreboding and Caitlin had sat there in her car questioning the sanity of her own mind and what she was about to do. She'd flicked through articles on her phone in her hesitation, reading about the metahuman she’d been about to confront, learning the true extent of damage Zephyr had inflicted on the city in only a few days.
And then she'd made her decision, and she'd entered the building through the same door Zephyr had clearly already broken the lock to, and found Zephyr crouched over a pile of medical equipment, tossing aside things he doesn't need without care.
The metahuman, the villain, spins around at her words, standing. Idly, Caitlin realizes it's the first time she's ever seen anything other than a mostly-placid expression on his face. There've been tinges of amusement and irritation, and a determination not to be interrupted that manifested as impatience once or twice. But now Zephyr's eyes are wide, his plans truly disturbed for the first time. Or, no. Maybe he looked like this when Barry took him in, too.
Caitlin takes a good look at him for this, their third meeting. He's still in the outfit he wore to storm the BSA event this afternoon, though it looks a little less neatly presented. His gray-blue polo is no longer tucked into his waist, and Caitlin wouldn't be surprised if he no longer had his belt, but it's hard to tell. His hair is frazzled too, sticking up in all directions.
When he speaks, it's harsh, "Who the hell—" He cuts himself off, brow furrowing. "I know you." It's not quite a question, but there's uncertainty there.
There really isn't any point in hiding. "Dr. Caitlin Snow. I was interviewing at Stagg Industries when you robbed them. And I was at the Biochemical Society event when you held us hostage." She's not sure if he really heard or absorbed the words she used to announce her presence, so she adds, "I know what you're looking for."
Zephyr scoffs and rolls his eyes. "If you're here for revenge—"
He's raising his hand as he speaks, so Caitlin interrupts before he can finish. "I don't think you heard me," she says, firm and demanding. Eerie calm in her mind or not, her body's starting to rebel. As distant as the sensations are, she can tell her hands are growing cold and clammy, her heart is beating furiously in her chest. All the signals to her brain are telling her to be scared, she's just too stubborn to listen to them yet. "I specialize in understanding metahuman genetics." It's mostly true. "I know what you're here for."
The words—or maybe just Caitlin's confidence—bring Zephyr to a pause. He studies her for a moment, hand still partially raised in the air. "I don't need anyone's help."
It doesn't sound like a boast, like he's masking insecurities and determined to see things through regardless of his own doubts. Zephyr doesn't need any help to accomplish what he wants to do, end of story. Walls can't stop a metahuman like him. All those articles Caitlin had been looking at, stories of the destruction he's caused? Broken sewer lines, severed electrical connections, cracked foundations. Millions of dollars of damage, and it all adds up to one thing: Zephyr's barriers can tear things in half. He's broken into three labs by now, if she counts this clinic. He's broken out of jail.
And sure, Barry had caught him, but only after his barriers had come down, and she has no idea why that happened in the first place. Does he have a time limit? Or had he gotten what he wanted? Jail must not have been anything more than an inconvenience to him, maybe a place to rest while he absorbed what he'd learned and plotted his next move.
What can Caitlin do but agree with him? "You don't," she says, and it's not so much gentle as it is compassionate. Sympathetic. He absolutely can get through this on his own. "But it'd go faster, it'd be easier, with some help." Her heart pangs, thoughts sliding unintentionally to Cisco, to Barry. She shakes the thoughts away and focuses on the man in front of her.
The words do nothing. Zephyr quirks an eyebrow. "Right, and I'm just supposed to trust that you're willing to help me?" He waves his hand and turns away in the same motion, crouching back down to sort through the pile of supplies again.
There's a barrier around Caitlin now. Her heart pounds in her chest; her mouth feels dry. With shaky hands, she reaches out to touch it, probes the size of the cage she's been trapped in. It's not as big as the one that had held her in Stagg Industries, but there's elbow room, space for her to move around in.
One hand pressed to the smooth surface in front of her, she raises her voice to be heard better. "Someone's sick, aren't they! Your brother, or your sister?"
She sees Zephyr's shoulder blades draw together, tension filling his frame, but he doesn't turn again, just waves his hand a second time. The box holding Caitlin shrinks, just a little, bumps her elbow, presses her in just a little tighter. Or maybe it doesn't shrink at all, maybe he can't change the sizes, maybe he just removes the old one and makes a new one. It matters, because the barriers muffle sound; if there are two of them between him and her, it'll be that much harder to talk to Zephyr.
Heart pounding in her chest, Caitlin tries anyway. "I'm a doctor!" she shouts. "Not, not just a researcher! I work with metahumans." Mostly true. She works with Barry, and she worked with Ronnie and Martin, and she's tried to help others who haven't been as antagonistic as some, or just on scraps of DNA Barry's managed to procure for her. "I can help you!"
Zephyr waves his hand again. Caitlin's prison shrinks. It's actually an interesting scientific problem, how that happens. If he is shrinking her old prison, then it's squeezing her. But if he's destroying the old and making a new, then it's forcing her out of the space it's going to occupy before it's actually there, which is . . .
Mostly irrelevant, Caitlin can admit. Because this new prison is shorter, and her head is suddenly being forced downward, and suddenly she's pressed into a crouch, her skull ringing. She winces and bites her lip and, after a moment, banishes the stray thoughts about what Zephyr's actually doing. Now isn't the time. Carefully, feeling out the confines of her prison again, Caitlin takes a seat, kneeling, sitting back on her heels. She doesn't think she has a concussion. The air around her is getting warmer.
She opens her mouth, then pauses. Her heart continues to pound in her chest, but anger is rapidly replacing the fear. Zephyr won't listen, won't communicate, won't just talk to her! Absolutely nothing she's saying is getting through to him. Nothing she's said has mattered.
"I don't need your help," he'd told her, and he doesn't seem to care that she can speed things up anyway.
Frustration builds. Caitlin came here to end this, to stop Zephyr from ever attacking anyone else, from ever hurting anyone else. If she has to give him what he wants to do that, so be it. His goal isn’t hurting people, and everything about what he’s done suggests he’s deliberately avoiding harm. He doesn’t seem to care too much about causing it—his boxes are airtight, and that Cisco’s (and now hers) were made nearly too small seem deliberate—but . . . Caitlin thinks about the bang that indicated sheer destruction beneath the surface of every building Zephyr’s enclosed. How can a man be so careful not to cause harm with his barriers and so uncaring about someone who only wants to help him!
The next words Caitlin bites out are cruel, unthinking, fueled by her anger and her frustration (and her grief). "This person you're doing this for—how sure are you they actually want you're help?! Did you even ask them first?!" She's almost sneering. Zephyr’s motivations might be to help someone, but he doesn’t seem to care about other people beyond that.
She's not really sure what happens in the next few moments after that. When she comes to, Zephyr has left the room, her head hurts, and her box is even smaller. Her neck is bent, the back of her head pressed against the top of the box; both her elbows smart, now firmly wedged against the sides of her body. And her feet . . . Oh, God, her feet!
Caitlin sucks in a deep breath and then another one, carefully holding herself in place, carefully not moving. Her blurry vision—from hitting her head, from the pain, she’s not sure which, but does it matter?—clears. Her proprioception, her sense of self, comes back. And God it hurts.
Zephyr didn’t cut her in half or anything like that, at least. She’s still got all the pieces of herself. But this last box he put her in is too small, too small by far, and her feet were pushed and shoved and twisted and bent far beyond what human feet should be able to do. The barrier is up against her back now, or it would be, if she wasn’t leaning forward, if she hadn’t been pushed forward and bent down.
She slides down now onto her hip the best she can, gets her legs out from underneath her. Moving her feet—or maybe it’s her ankles, it’s difficult to say—brings tears to her eyes and enough pain to white out her vision for a moment. When she’s steady again—for a certain definition of steady—she’s breathing hard, shaking a little. And the air around her is getting warmer still.
Bracing her left hand against the barrier beside her, curled up against the other side of it on her right, Caitlin does her best not to panic. Panic won’t help anything. Panic will do the opposite of helping, in this situation. She needs to take shallow breaths. She needs to slow her heart rate. She needs to not look at her feet until she knows the sight of whatever she’s about to see won’t send her spiraling.
(But it hurts, heart in her throat, chest in a vice, hot pokers of fire consuming her from the ankles down. There are tears dripping slowly from the corners of Caitlin’s eyes, but those are the least of her worries right now.)
Her fingers are trembling against the smooth barrier, her arm braced and shaking. Nearly all of the rest of her weight is slumped the other direction. Carefully, slowly, trying to stay calm, Caitlin relaxes her rigid elbow, slumps fully against the wall to her right, and lets out one, final, deep breath.
Then she tries to breathe shallowly. It’s . . . Well, it’s slow going. Deep breathing is easy. Trying for shallowing breathing in the midst of panic and pain goes against her instincts. She settles, at first, for returning her breaths to normal. Her heart slowly stops pounding in her chest. She can feel herself calming. Swallowing, still resolutely not looking down, she looks up and around.
She’d noticed Zephyr had been gone after the pain had faded slightly, but she hadn’t looked. She does now, turning her head side to side in a way that sends her neck aching and shoots a bolt of pain down her spine. She has to carefully hold herself still after that moment, carefully keep her heart rate from spiking again, but she finishes her search.
Zephyr’s nowhere in sight. Neither is anyone else. She’s stuck here, trapped in one of his barriers, and she has no idea how long that will be the case. (The air is getting warmer!) Does Zephyr control the length of time the boxes last? Is it random? Is there a time limit? Does Caitlin have enough time for any of these questions to matter?
It takes her an embarrassing stretch of a few minutes, trying to keep her breathing even, trying to bear the pain, before she realizes she still has her phone on her. Stupid. Stupid! It’s a rookie mistake, not remembering she can just call for help.
With shaky fingers, Caitlin extracts her phone from her pocket and stares at her lockscreen. It’s a picture of her and Ronnie. She stares too long—tilts it just a little—and the phone recognizes her face, unlocking. The picture inside is one Cisco forced them to take, four of them smiling for the timed photo. Five of them, technically: no one’s in costume, but Barry’s hair is tousled and Ronnie’s eyes are pure white, so Martin’s with them too. Caitlin is dead center in the photo, pressed between Cisco and Ronnie, an arm around either of them, genuine laughter spilling from her lips. They’re all laughing, Cisco bent over and only just managing to look up in time for the shot, Barry’s head thrown back, grin wide.
Even knowing how dire the situation is, Caitlin doesn’t immediately navigate to her phone app. Like with her feet and the box she’s stuck in, she stares at the photo and drinks in all the details she can—all the details she can, that is, without looking at Ronnie. She scans over the crinkle at the corners of Barry’s eyes, Cisco’s hand on his gut as he tries to stop himself from doubling over. She studies her own smile, tries to remember those feelings of happiness and joy. She looks at the surroundings, recalls the fight that had taken place just before, Flash and Firestorm together for once.
It’s a happy moment. It’s a happy memory. It hurts.
Finally, Caitlin looks at Ronnie’s picture, captured in digital, immortalized for as long as the electronics of her phone—of the cloud, of some server somewhere far off in the world—can hold it. His white eyes are barely visible at this distance; with a picture this size, no one who didn’t know to look for them would be able to see Firestorm in this image. He’s happy, but to say she’s never seen him happier would be a lie. She remembers his proposal, all their dreaming for a honeymoon that will never happen. Their wedding.
Tears are fully flooding from Caitlin’s eyes now, a steady, silent stream, but she doesn’t back away from them. She doesn’t wait for herself to cry herself out, put them in a box, and move on. She just cries, and she stares, and there’s a faint smile on her face as she studies the faces of the three people she loves—loves, present tense, because she’ll always love Ronnie—and then she pulls up her phone app and calls Cisco.
“Cisco—“ she starts, when he picks up after one ring.
“We’re already on our way.”
Caitlin stops, startled. She absently wipes away some of the moisture on her face with her free hand, though she’s still crying a little. “What?”
“What were you thinking, going off like that?”
“How did you know I—“
“Because I know you, Caitlin! And because Find My Friend exists! Barry and I couldn’t think of any other reason why—“
And then Cisco’s voice cuts off and he’s standing in front of her, phone pressed to his ear. Well, no. Barry’s standing in front of her; Cisco is held in Barry’s arms, but only for a second, hopping down to stand on his own two feet. (One foot, technically, as he shifts his weight off his injured ankle.)
“Barry,” he says, short and curt, as he sees her—sees that she is trapped in a box, sees that she did manage to find Zephyr, sees that she confronted the angry metahuman alone, without letting anyone else know what she was doing. Cisco’s gaze hardens even as worry strikes through his expression.
He’s angry. That’s okay. Caitlin can understand that. He’s allowed to be angry—just so long as she hasn’t pushed him away forever, just so long as he stays.
Barry nods at Cisco’s order, sweeps his own worried gaze over her, then disappears. He rushes back into the room a blur of color, and then the box around Caitlin is shattering as he crashes into it, fist raised. (Logical: Cisco probably told Barry about the amount of force he needed for the drill to work and—It isn’t the time for these thoughts.)
Cisco—ignoring his own sprained ankle—collapses by Caitlin’s side and pulls her into his arms. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s more angry than pleading but Caitlin can hear the love behind it. “I didn’t mean it like that, I promise, but you can’t, I can’t—“
Caitlin holds Cisco tight and meets Barry’s eyes over the back of Cisco’s head. “I know, Cisco, I know,” she says, and she means it.
They could call an ambulance, but it’s faster for Barry to leave, spin into his costume, come back, and carry her to the hospital. It means they don’t have to answer any questions about what she’s doing at the empty, under-construction clinic either. But it also means she’s wheeled into the exam room alone: Barry can’t carry two injured people at once, especially when they don’t know the extent of her own injuries, and he can’t come in with her as the Flash.
So Caitlin’s alone as the doctors rush her through X-rays and set the broken bones in her feet. She’s alone as her adrenaline crashes and the exhaustion sweeps in. She’s alone when they finally settle her in a bed for the night, keeping her for observation after she’d revealed she’d been trapped somewhere airtight for a short while and hit her head at least twice, however lightly.
She’s alone when she drifts off, alone and anxious and stressed, and waiting for the chance to apologize.
Caitlin isn’t alone when she wakes up. It doesn’t feel like it’s been very long at all, she’s groggy and confused and aching with the hurts the painkillers can’t fully remove, and someone is slipping their hand into hers. There was something she’d meant to do, something she’d meant to say, but her brain’s too clouded by interrupted, fitful sleep to remember.
“How did you get in here?” she finds herself asking instead, bleary and blinking at the form sitting at her beside. It’s a question she doesn’t really need the answer to, but somewhere in her tired mind she saw the dark outside the window, realized visiting hours must have ended (maybe?), and questioned that anyone was here at all. Or maybe that wasn’t it? She’s not sure, the thoughts are already slipping away.
Cisco—because of course it’s ever-loyal Cisco holding her hand—doesn’t seem to realize her question is mostly nonsensical. "They asked if I was family." He says it like he's admitting something shameful: eyes to the side, head down. "I said I was . . . " He trails off. Caitlin sees his jaw clench.
The last dregs of sleep slip off her. They both know there's another word that's supposed to go there, that he is trailing off, not just agreeing he's Caitlin's family. Because he is. Caitlin isn't sure there's anyone else in the world she's closer to. Even Ronnie—and her eyes are already watering, but even Ronnie wasn't around for the past year, wasn't there to get to know her as she changed with the city, no matter how much they loved each other, no matter how much they communicated long distance.
"It was the only way I could see you," Cisco ends up saying. "Best friend wasn't enough."
It's the way he says it that clues Caitlin in to the fact that he means more than the face value of the words. The soft, apologetic tone. The way he still won't meet her gaze. The anger in his eyes when he’d realized his worst thoughts were right, that he had needed to track her phone because she’d gone to confront Zephyr without him or Barry knowing.
She remembers being mistaken for his girlfriend when he was the one in the hospital bed only hours ago, remembers how badly it had shaken her up inside. Her own gaze goes to her left hand, where Ronnie’s ring for her sits. Cisco doesn’t have his own matching band on his ring finger, but she isn’t surprised he managed to talk the hospital into believing they’re family—adopted siblings or half-siblings or husband and wife or any sort of crazy connection that only Cisco could convince anyone was actually real.
He's certainly talked her into more than a few things over the years, and remembering that brings a small smile to her lips. Her eyes are definitely stinging now. Trapped in the hospital bed as she is, aching, she can't exactly surge forward and wrap Cisco up, but she can reach out a hand. She can wrap her fingers around him, and twist his arm until his palm is up, and she can nudge and fumble and gently encourage him to follow suit until their fingers are twisted together, until their palms slot together like puzzle pieces and he isn’t just holding her limp hand as she sleeps.
She thinks of Cisco, holding her after Ronnie's death. (Which one? Does it matter?) She thinks of herself, pushing Cisco away. The hurt look on his face as she slammed the door shut on him. She twists her fingers in deeper, holds on as tight as she can.
"Yes it is," she says, and it's as empathetic and insistent and forceful as she can make it, with the tears that are now fully streaming down her face. "Best friend is more than enough." She means it. There are few things she's ever meant more.
Ronnie is dead, and that's awful. It will never stop being awful. But Cisco is here.