Hi friends, I'm back! Bearing a brand new longfic in the terrible wasteland of hiatus.
I've had a few requests for another kidnapping fic, and this is the result of that. Technically this is based on a section of my fic "Candlewax and Lightning," but I have taken a lot of liberties with it and it's not necessary to read that first. This has been on my mind for a while-it's been exceptionally painful to write at times but also a great joy, and I am so excited to share it with you!
Takes place somewhere vaguely in the middle of season 2, post-Earth-2 shenanigans, while Harry is off with his backpack looking for Jesse.
Enjoy!
As with most things when it came to Team Flash, everything was going fairly okay—until it wasn't. Yet another hiss of static burst through the monitors, again followed the obligatory "owww."
"Barry?" Caitlin said. "Barry, are you okay?"
"What's happening out there?" Cisco chimed in beside her. "Is the thing working?"
"The thing hasn't had a chance to work yet," Barry's breathless voice came gargling through. "I can't get close to him. He keeps knocking me off course."
"All you have to do is get a hand on him," Cisco said. "Just a little tap. Like touch football."
"Do you want to come out here and try?"
"Point taken." He looked to Caitlin for support.
"Maybe speed isn't the answer," she offered. "His vertigo waves are going to be exponentially worse the faster you go. It'll just exaggerate your skewed trajectory."
"So you're saying I should attack at normal speed?" Barry said.
Although Barry couldn't see the gesture, Caitlin shrugged. "It's worth a shot. You'll still be disoriented, but it might be easier to fight through it if you're going slower."
Might. Caitlin bit down on the uncertainty of the word. With each new threat they faced, this was the worst part. The experimentation. The might. The gap between theory and implementation with no room for controlled tests. If her hunches were ever wrong, if she made a bad call, the failed lab experiment would be Barry's life.
She and Cisco blindly waited on the sidelines—although often it didn't feel so much like sidelines as open graves waiting to be filled—while sounds of Barry's fight burst through the comms at random intervals. Grunts, pants, crunches.
Then another burst of static. Caitlin clutched at the edge of the desk.
"Barry…?"
She didn't know how many time she'd called his name into the microphones at the desk, fearing non-reply. How many times she'd gripped this desk, terrified.
"I'm okay," came the reply.
And Caitlin couldn't count the number of times she'd let out a sigh of relief like she did then, expelling all of her anxiety in one go. How many times her heart swooped back up to her chest where it belonged, just at the sound of Barry's very-alive voice.
"Your tech worked, Cisco," Barry breathed. "I'm bringing this guy in now. Be there in a sec."
Cisco cut the feed, and he and Caitlin both sat back wearily in their chairs.
"Job well done," Cisco said, offering out a hand with mock seriousness.
"You too," Caitlin said, accepting the gesture and giving his hand a firm shake. "As always."
She leaned back in her chair, longing for something to put her feet up on. Even though they'd done this hundreds of times, it was still exhausting—not to mention how Barry must've felt. This was just part of the ritual, though, and she wondered if she shouldn't take it for granted. With a notable exception or two, it was always the same story. Barry finding the meta and getting beaten. Caitlin patching him up, often exercising her traditional disapproving look. Cisco developing some new tech to counter the meta's abilities. Caitlin and Cisco coaching Barry through a second fight, and a hard-won victory. The cast behind the table had changed, of course. Instead of wheelchair-bound Eobard Thawne, they often had his double, and recently they even had the much-appreciated support of Joe and Iris.
Speaking of which—Caitlin looked down just as her phone buzzed. On screen popped up a picture of Iris: a silly one from the last time they'd gone out, when Iris had out-drunk one of the bikers at the bar who had challenged her. In the photo, Iris was posing with arms out in a muscle-man pose. They'd had to practically carry her out of the bar afterward, but the memory was worth it.
Smiling at the photo, feeling light in her own adrenaline crash and relief, she picked up the phone and answered.
"Iris."
"Hey," came the familiar voice. "Everything okay? Picture News is going crazy. The Flash fought a metahuman right outside our building. Thought you might have some juicy leads."
"The juiciest," Caitlin teased. "Just a little trouble with our meta of the week. It's solved, though. Much damage downtown?"
"A bit, but nothing we can't handle. Ironically, it was Barry doing the destruction. He couldn't seem to run straight."
"Meta with vertigo beams," Caitlin explained. "I think it was a little disorienting."
"Ah." Iris lowered her voice slightly. "Need me to come over? I can try to get out of work."
"No, I don't think that's necessary," said Caitlin, eyeing Cisco, who was starting to hook up his phone to the speakers with a mischievous look on his face. "Maybe after you're done with work tonight? We could all go out."
"Sounds great," Iris said. "I'll come with my dad later tonight when he stops by to pick up this meta."
"No rush," Caitlin said. "I don't know how long it'll take for this vertigo to wear off. Thanks for calling. See you when I see you."
She hung up and tossed the phone on the desk.
"Iris is coming over?" Cisco said absently, still scrolling through his own phone.
"Not until late tonight," Caitlin responded. "I thought we'd go out."
"With Harry?" Cisco grimaced. "He's also coming back tonight, remember?"
Right. Harry had been in and out so much lately in his search for Jesse, Caitlin had lost track of when he was actually at STAR.
Caitlin winked. "Maybe we should get him a babysitter for the night."
Cisco barked out a laugh and kicked his feet up on the desk, as Caitlin was always too polite to do. "I wonder how much babysitters charge these days to look after three-year-olds."
"Hm." Caitlin nodded at Cisco's phone. "What are you playing with over there?"
"Putting together a little playlist for us. Wait for it…" He dramatically lifted his finger. After a wholly unnecessary pause, he pressed a button on his phone, and immediately the music began blaring through the cortex. As it did, Cisco reached into one of his secret drawers and pulled out two chocolate bars, one of which he kept and one he tossed to Caitlin.
Cisco started munching on his chocolate bar as Caitlin struggled with her wrapper. She jerked her head up to indicate the music. "What's this?"
"Mm." With his mouth full, Cisco couldn't say anything, but he raised a finger—wait.
Caitlin listened, and at that moment, the lyrics changed:
You give me vertigo, vertigo.
"Oh my God," Caitlin said, and, beside her, Cisco dissolved into barely-contained giggles.
Right on cue, an alarm light began flashing on the computer screen for one of the pipeline cells. Cisco pulled up one of the video feeds to see their meta securely locked in the cell.
"Looks like Barry is back," said Cisco. "I wonder what took him so long."
In answer, a concussive bang sounded in the hallway outside the cortex. Cisco turned down the volume of the music a few clicks. A flash of lightning in the hallway, then Barry himself appeared in the doorway, staggering into the doorframe.
"How's it going, dude? Going a little slow," Cisco said.
"Want to tell me how long this vertigo is going to last?" Barry said miserably.
Caitlin frowned. "Is it that bad?"
Barry gave her a withering look. Almost as demonstration, he sped forward, directly toward her. At least, it started out as straight toward her. Where he ended up was somewhere behind her, colliding with a side wall and landing flat on his back.
Cisco, for what it was worth, kept giggling.
"Is this song called 'Vertigo'?" Barry called from the floor. Cisco giggled louder. Barry groaned.
Rolling her eyes, Caitlin swallowed her bite of chocolate and moved toward Barry. "C'mere. Sit down."
Barry stood, visibly wobbly on his feet. He turned toward her and collided with another doorframe. Caitlin stifled a laugh with a hand and used the other to guide Barry over to a seat. Like a drunk man, Barry was swaying, his feet tangling up around each other, his eyes squinting to find focus. Silently Caitlin began cataloguing all of his symptoms and running over potential solutions. The usual dose of concern still lingered under the amusement's surface. Earlier, the effects from the vertigo beam Barry had been hit with had gone away fairly quickly, but that time it had only glanced off of him. This time the energy had been much more prolonged, intense. Even when Caitlin got him into a chair, he looked close to blind, dazed, on the verge of passing out or throwing up or both. The downsides of being a metahuman, she supposed. Especially a crime-fighting one.
"Put these on. I'll be right back," Caitlin said briskly, taking a stack of dark blue STAR clothes from a nearby table and handing them to Barry, who was already in the process of removing the sticky Flash suit.
Modesty was not something they treasured in the lab, not after nine months of caring for a comatose Barry, plus two more years of patching up scrapes, re-setting broken bones, cutting him open and stitching him up. Even so, Caitlin liked to give privacy when she could—maybe it was the shy part of her that had been instructed long ago not to wear too-short skirts. She exited the lab quietly and headed down to one of her larger medical stashes a floor below.
Once there, she moved slower than usual, allowing time for Barry to get adjusted and for her to sift through her own thoughts. With metahumans, treatments were unpredictable, often spur-of-the-moment. Her degree had not prepared her, for example, for yanking two-inch metal spikes out of rapidly-regenerating human flesh. Or keeping a friend on a physical plane while he wavered between realities.
Treatment, again, became experimentation. All of it was, at the end of the day. Experimentation. The big might. The theories that would keep her friends alive or kill them. The theories that had, ironically, created them.
After searching around for a bit in the lab, a dull crash on the floor above caught Caitlin's attention. She allowed herself a private grin, wondering what new surface Barry had managed to smack into, picturing the way Cisco would laugh uproariously regardless. The thought gave her a warm sort of rush in her chest, the biggest payoff to her unofficial job at STAR and the only true salve for the worst of the anxieties that scalded her. Eager to go back up and return to the high spirits of the cortex, Caitlin gathered up every item she thought might be useful and carried the bundle carefully out of the room.
As she climbed the stairs, she caught strains of the next vertigo-themed song on Cisco's playlist. The tune was vaguely familiar, though she couldn't place the name, so she began quietly humming along as she ascended.
"How many songs could you possibly find with 'vertigo' in the lyrics?" Caitlin called out with a playful lilt in her voice. She rounded the corner into the doorway of the cortex.
The first thing she saw was Barry and Cisco, sprawled out at odd angles on the floor near the main computer bank. With the joyful sections of her brain still active, Caitlin's first instinct was that they were, unbelievably, pulling some kind of prank.
The second thing she saw was Cisco's half-eaten chocolate bar lying on the floor, and her phone smashed beside it.
The third thing she saw, at first only in her periphery, was a shadowy figure pointing a gun at her chest. It was also the last thing she saw—the glass bottles and bandages and medication fell from her arms, the barrel of the gun flashed, and the dart that sprouted from her chest sent her tumbling into a cold, violent darkness.
Thank you so much for reading! If you're new here, I generally post new chapters Wednesdays and Sundays, so I'll see you this weekend! If you want to yell at me for any reason, please leave a comment below! I love hearing from you guys, especially if you're interested in what's coming next.
Till next time,
Penn