Summary – Barry and Caitlin wake up in a strange room with no recollection of how they got there. Set early season two, Snowbarry, and semi AU.
Never Knew
Chapter One
Barry Allen stirred slowly against the pain. Tentatively he opened his eyes, only to close them tightly. Fumbling, he reached a hand to his head. He felt a moist lump beneath his fingertips. He was bleeding, his hair damp, and sticky to the touch.
With a groan, he forced his eyes open. He lay face down on a dusty, hard floor. With a throb sparking alive in his skull, he turned on to his side. Disorientation and fear filled him. He stared around the empty room. The entire space was compromised of metal. It was small, and square, like a box. There were no windows, and no door that he could see.
Studying the strange, barren surroundings, he realized he wasn't alone. Caitlin Snow lay a few feet away. He shuffled to her. She was unconscious. Her long, brown hair fanned over her face. He pressed two fingers to her throat, and felt the gentle, thrum of reassurance.
They'd come here. The two of them. He couldn't recall why. His dazed mind struggled to recover the details. He guessed their captor knocked him unconscious first. He reasoned the slender, young doctor would have been easier to overpower. She may have gotten a look at the attacker.
Standing, Barry had no intention on waiting in the odd prison. His legs were weak, and he felt a wave of nausea rise from the pit of his stomach. It was all he could do not to throw up. He breathed in deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and the sensation passed. He rushed around the tiny space, searching for a door, a handle, a seam. Any sign of weakness that could help them escape. Coming to an abrupt stop, he came up empty.
Strange and impossible. There was no trapdoor or skylight either. They had to have been brought in the room somehow. He wanted to get them away from this place. Shoulders squared, he rushed at the wall. He connected with the hard, unwavering metal, and skidded to the floor with a thump. He couldn't phase through.
Stubborn, he pulled to his feet, and tried again with the same result. Three attempts, at different point later, he conceded it was useless. Wherever they were being held, it was designed to hold a speedster. Admitting defeat, and out of ideas, he moved to the sleeping brunette.
"Cait!" He shook her by the shoulder. "Cait, wake up."
Caitlin stirred from the depths of unconsciousness, her peaceful expression clouding. Instinctively, she reached for her temple.
"Barry?" Her face was a mask of confusion. Waking up with her friend wasn't an everyday occurrence. Reluctantly, and with help, she sat up. "My head. What happened?" She took a glimpse around the box, and looked to the speedster. "Where are we? What's going on?"
"I don't know. Wherever we are, I can't phase through."
"What?" Caitlin's eyes shone with alarm. Her hands moved toward his head. "You're bleeding."
"It's nothing."
"I'll be the judge of that," the doctor scoffed. She examined the wound. "The wound is fairly superficial, luckily. You may have a concussion. You're going to have one hell of a headache for a while."
"I've got that all right."
Caitlin offered a sympathetic smile. She reached a hand to the left side of her throat. "My neck hurts."
"Here…," Barry brushed her hair aside, finding a needle mark, bruised and puckering, on her neck. "You were drugged. Do you remember anything? Did you see anything?"
Biting down on her lower lip, she tried to focus. "We were looking for someone. A metahuman." Her voice sounded strained as she forced herself to recall the events. "A metahuman had come through the breach."
Barry nodded. The pieces were slowing fitting together through his foggy memory. "We split up," he continued for her. "Harry and Cisco took the subway. You and I went to the shipping yard."
Her brow furrowed. Cisco went out on the field, but Caitlin rarely did. There was a reason she had done that morning. "Killer Frost," she uttered the name of her evil alter ego.
"She lured us here?" Barry asked, and Caitlin shook her head.
"I don't think so."
Barry nodded. Something had happened to bring them away from S.T.A.R. Labs. The emergence of Caitlin's doppelganger, and the bounty hunter sent to kill her, had done that. Killer Frost had come through the breach, seeking sanctuary from them. She'd left, not getting the answer she wanted from them. She'd crossed the breach back to Earth Two. He remembered clearly not trusting the ice queen. Not believing that Zoom wanted her dead. Given their predicament, he believed his suspicions may be right.
"The bounty hunter?" Caitlin broached the question. It was possible that the bounty hunter could have taken them prisoner.
"Do you have service on your phone?" he asked.
"Sure." Caitlin pulled her phone from the depths of her jacket pocket. "Cisco installed that app remember? So, we can get cell service wherever we are, even if we're in some supervillain's metal box."
"Yeah I remember." Cisco had perfected, and installed the technology in the early days of Team S.T.A.R. Labs, after they'd encountered Blackout, the electrical metahuman, who'd besieged the labs.
Caitlin's pretty smile dropped to a frown. She uttered an 'oh.'
"You didn't update the app, did you?" Caitlin was notorious for not updating her applications and computer programs as soon as the new updates arrived. It had always been a source of contention with the tech-savvy Cisco.
"It's not that. My phone just died." Barry chuckled. She was also terrible for charging her cell and her laptop.
"What are you like?" Barry chided, pulling his phone from his jeans. "Oh," passed his lips.
"Oh? Oh what? Did you forget to charge yours too?"
"No, I charged my phone this morning. I had a hundred percent." Without fail he always followed through on the ritual. He guessed the cold air had caused the battery to die. It was slowly changing to winter. The mornings, and evenings, were getting darker and colder. "I'll wait a couple of minutes and try again."
Caitlin nodded, running her hands up and down her arms idly. She'd never been fond of enclosed spaces, odd as she spent much of her time in tightly confined laboratories. "Maybe there's a secret door?" she suggested. The four walls seemed super smooth but their captors had to have gotten them there in the first place.
"I already checked, I didn't find anything."
"There has to be a way out," Caitlin's breathing was a little shallow. She was trying to keep calm but as the minutes passed by, she was starting to panic.
"Yeah, help me look."
He was almost certain he hadn't missed anything but it couldn't hurt to take a second sweep of the room. Together they pawed at the walls, looking for some invisible seam. They went silently around the small space, not once, but twice.
"This isn't getting us anyway," Caitlin sank down to her knees and pushed her hair back with both hands. Her forehead was clammy, she felt dizzy and short of breath.
"Cait?" Barry asked worriedly. He didn't know she was claustrophobic. He moved to her. "Cait, it's okay. Just breathe okay." He placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, trying to calm her. "Breathe."
For a few minutes they sat, breathing in deeply. Caitlin's trembling subsided.
"They'll be looking for us," Caitlin broke the silence. "They'll know that something's wrong. Cisco will find us." Her best friend always came through.
"Yeah." They couldn't be far away.
"Barry?" Caitlin uttered fearfully. Her gaze was locked to the far left-hand corner of the room. Barry's eyes trailed along with her line of sight to see what had gotten her so spooked.
Icy air trickled from a high vent on the opposite side of the space. He hadn't noticed the vent in his searches. His brow furrowed as he heard a clacking sound and watched an identical vent appear on the right. Cold spilled from it also. The temperature dropped in an instant. The freezing air circulated.
"Barry, we gotta get out of here."
Both sprang into action. Their hands probed the walls for anything, the slightest weakness. Searching for an escape that wasn't there. The cold pierced through Barry's clothes; jeans, shirt, and jacket. He wished he'd dressed differently but then he hadn't expected to be locked in a metahuman-made freezer.
Beside him, Caitlin huddled deeper into her coat and zipped up the front. She'd rolled down the sleeves in a feeble effort to ward off the cold. "There's no way out. We're just wasting energy." She motioned to the ice-cold air pumping profusely around them. "We need to focus our energy in staying warm."
"How long have we got?" he asked. He suspected he knew the answer and really didn't want it confirmed.
"A couple of hours." The doubt and the fear was reflected in the bio-engineer's eyes. "Cisco will find us."
To be continued….