author's notes: set in the same 'verse as my other fic i.e. the We Ricochet 'verse from now on, but can be read as a standalone. written for anisstaranise with the prompt 'collarbone kiss' and i could earn bonus points if there were scars involved haha. title taken from Ricochet by Shiny Toy Guns.
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Shell Shock, Fall Back
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A cry rattles her from a train of thought too sinister to retrace in the gloom of her makeshift bedroom. Her eyelids come away heavy and the rest of her feels sluggish too, like she's dredging through water or mud just trying to move.
Outside the sun's hardly up but she stands anyway, having caught little by way of sleep in weeks, and shrugs on the gray cotton-knit bathrobe she'd liberated from a nearby warehouse. She'd stolen a few other odds and ends she liked to spruce up her wardrobe, and to brighten the drab confines of what she called home at the moment.
It won't be home forever, he promised, but it had to do for now.
Another scream cuts through the empty metal and concrete spaces around her, the first indication that it hadn't been her imagination, or the ghost of another self haunting her waking hours.
Savitar?
Confused, she exists her room, heading down the stairs onto the main floor of her current hideaway. Cold nips at her heels and toes but she relishes in it, grown accustomed to her new constant companion.
Her eyes scan the room, a habit she picked up over the weeks spent hiding from those that supposedly held her dear, but equally a tick her sleep deprivation has burdened her with; she's on edge, her nerves frayed around the edges, and it hasn't combined well with her- roommate's temperament. He's told her to expel the shadow at her shoulder, because fear will lead her along familiar paths back to where she started, lost and alone stumbling through the snow. She learned quickly her fear was of no use to him, but only in as far as it was of no use to her, and she'd briefly wondered if that was a shadow of caring on his part.
It isn't so much fear that's keeping her awake, as it is paranoia about that pitiful voice at the back of her mind – it grows smaller each day, but that doesn't take away the fact that it's there, that she's there, and as long as it is there's nowhere she might hide, not even in her dreams. If she lets her guard down, she might yet relapse.
Crossing the main floor, the suit in the dead center of the room draws her attention. She has watched men fall to their knees in worship at the sight of Savitar's armor, and it's no less impressive without him wearing it. It lacks a certain subtlety, but she thinks that's the point, because what's the point in making oneself a god if not accompanied with the right amount of flair? It's meant to instill fear, and awe, while serving to keep Savitar shielded from the deadly static charge his speed generates now. She found that very... human.
He's a paradox; an absurdity in the real world but ungoverned by any of its rules, unborn but becoming with every second that passes.
A strangled cry travels up from the depths below her feet, and her curiosity at last gets the better of her.
She descends further still into the old workers' quarters; it's where Savitar made his bed once he escaped his Speed Force imprisonment. He'd made himself comfortable here – as comfortable as one could get in a derelict factory, some old foundry on the outskirts of the city left abandoned after the particle accelerator explosion bankrupted the company that ran it. It makes their hideaway almost poetic in a way, or metaphorical, representative of all the damage S.T.A.R. labs has caused in their lives.
He'd given her the room upstairs, where the foreman's office used to be, the office now her bedroom and the bathroom hers to use as she pleased, while he stuck to the seedy underbelly of the plant.
"No," an all too familiar voice groans, and she turns into the room in time to watch him kick back the sheets.
The walls drip with condensation, the off-yellow tiles peeling off as if the mortar melted over time, the air moist with dust particles. For the fastest man alive, or God of Speed as he'd have it, he isn't particularly attached to any modern day conveniences. Surely there were run-down houses or hotels somewhere in Central City that might hold a few more comforts and still provide them with ample cover.
No matter. He said it wouldn't be for long.
She leans up against the doorframe, studying him now that she's able to without interruption.
There's little light down here but for a small overgrown window, and the weak rays of the morning sun play over his good side like it's any other morning in any other young man's home. He seems almost at peace like this, finally come to a dead stop, if not for the tossing and turning accompanying his sleep, and the unease crawling beneath his epidermis.
"Iris," his voice trembles, and he sighs, facing the other way, revealing the true duplicity that characterizes them both. Behind the armor and that pretty face of his, he's nothing but a man, like she is nothing but a woman beneath her transformation. Do those two ghosts define them still? Do the other ghosts from their past still have a hold on them?
She edges a step forward, emboldened by the idea that he has pitiful voices playing through his mind same as hers, and sits down beside him on the bed. He sleeps in the nude, she notes with an arch in her brow, but that's not what she finds shocking – there's something wholly unsubtle about the way he carries his body, so she's not at all surprised, but to find he wears more scars than just those on his face—
No wonder he built himself a suit.
He whines in his sleep, like a helpless boy afraid of the dark, and she reaches out without reason, brushing his hair from his forehead. The way a mother would. The way a lover might. Except they're not lovers; they're not even friends, and she dismisses the idea as soon as it occurs. Caitlin Snow was all about caring for others and falling for men destined to leave her, reflexes she hopes not to inherit. She's not about to repeat old mistakes that may have led her down this path in the first place.
But it makes her question why she came down here at all, if not out of some primal call to soothe an ailing mind.
A sheen of sweat covers his skin, while his jaw clenches, muscles straining in his neck, his ribcage quivering under the strain of what must be a terrible nightmare.
What could scare him this much? What monsters chased him in his dreams?
Unthinking, her hand ventures lower, and softly, as if it were a kiss, she strokes a finger along his collarbone, from his sternum over the conoid tubercle, until the clavicle meets the acromion. His skin's so hot to the touch she fears the contact might stir him from his sleep, but he doesn't respond. She's playing with fire, part of her realizes, but she gives into the pull of mischief the trespass brings with it.
She's often wondered about the specificity of her powers, whether it would be possible for her icy touch to single out a specific bone and freeze it, whether she could freeze someone's spine one vertebrae at a time and then shatter it into pieces, leaving nothing but a helpless sack of flesh.
She doubts a Speedster could at all recover from an assault like that.
A hand grabs around her wrist, Savitar's eyes opening on her face.
Startled, she tries to pull her hand back, catching the gasp at the back of her throat in time to hide the featherlight hint of fear that touches her heart.
He sits up in one fail swoop, forcing her a few inches back, his grip around her wrist tightening to a near intolerable pressure. "What are you doing?"
She straightens, loath to give a single inch more than those he's already taken. "You were screaming."
She doesn't tell him whose name; she imagines he knows that all too well.
And eons pass.
That's what it feels like, as he stares at her, coming to terms with the words she spoke and giving them some place in a mind that likes to pretend it comes unattached to anything that Barry Allen once loved. That pretending doesn't come easy, and it always comes at a price, because the moment it's pretend it's still there reminding them it hasn't been erased.
He dreams about Iris, about Joe and Cisco, perhaps even about good old Doctor Snow, and that haunts him, even in his waking hours.
Then, at long last, he casts down his eyes, and releases her, climbing out of the bed on the other side.
She rubs over her wrist and stands, bristling. She has no need to be anything like Caitlin anymore, but she won't be treated like this; she won't fall to her knees in worship of him, she won't tremble in fear or in awe. He is not some apex predator and she's not anything lesser than him.
She could bring him to his knees if she so chose.
Strengthened by that resolve she marches out of the room in search of him, ready to fight if he forces her to, only to come to an abrupt halt when she finds him in the old communal showers, stark naked under water that must run ice cold down here.
And for the first time she can see the full extent of the scar tissue covering his body. Down his back. Down his right thigh.
Forget the man he once was. Forget Barry Allen. He's nothing like any of the other men she's known so far; he's a better kind of selfish than Barry, humorless and unkind, he's not warm like Ronnie, nowhere near as deceptive as Thawne, and far more ambitious than Hunter Zolomon ever was.
But is he different? Or did none of the others simply not have their trauma show on the outside – if Thawne was smart and calculating and Hunter a man gone insane, than what is he, this would-be savior of hers? Just a sociopath? Just the right kind of selfish?
Her eyes tell her this much: he is a man broken, by rejection, by time, perhaps even the source of his powers itself, and she can't help the tinge of compassion that warms her veins. Killer Frost or not she's not exempt this sensation, because no one asks to suffer like this, to carry the outward appearance of madness so plainly, and her own mirror image flashes like a specter in her mind's eye. Is that what Cisco saw when he looked at her now? Nothing but scar tissue?
He turns off the water and grabs a towel, ruffles it through his hair before drawing a line down his body, catching her eye as he dries between his legs.
Crossing her arms over her chest, she does hope she's not meant to be impressed, or appalled. She's seen Barry naked, and while he had a great body, wiry and toned in all the right places, he's not the first naked man she's ever seen.
Unlike Barry, however, as he closes the distance between them, he makes no attempt at all to cover up, throwing his towel over his shoulder.
"Do I surprise you, Frost?"
He grins, a few drops of water falling from the strands of hair curled over his forehead.
Since he's so eager to shock, her eyes trace a lewd line down his body, but she keeps her expression in check, even as she pauses over the scars on his chest - they're less angry than those on his face, not quite so red and blotchy, but they are extensive.
Should the wounds not have healed? What could cause such permanent damage?
Or is it at all possible, in that twisted mind of his, that he likes them this way?
"You intrigue me," she answers, before he can accuse her of getting too sentimental. It's no more than that; she's still a scientist underneath this all, cold and logical, the one thing she hasn't felt the need to sacrifice in her quest to becoming Killer Frost.
His head tilts, and right there, underneath all that scar tissue, she recognizes some specter of Barry, long forgotten, long since erased, and yet even the God of Speed doesn't sleep soundly. "How?"
"You don't move like him."
His eyes sweep down her body now, but he returns to her face with an obvious answer. "And you don't move like her."
It's an answer to a question she didn't ask, but one at the origin of her insomnia. How can she be Killer Frost when she scarcely knows what that entails? Killer Frost was someone other on another Earth, a reflection of herself she saw die at the hands of a madman – but it'd been a madman Killer Frost had served for many years.
Is she falling for the same trappings? Did she serve Savitar now?
Savitar advances another step, shaking her from her disarrayed thoughts.
Her breathing deepens, and she's bolted to the ground, privy to this- what is this between them? Why her? Why here? Why allow her close at all? Did she provide intimacy he missed? Trust he found in few others?
He is a paradigm, a puzzle the scientist in her desires to solve, a man who shed his shame, gained confidence, wore his body like a different suit than the one he was born in. She means to achieve the same thing.
He cocks an eyebrow. "Why did you come down here?"
"I told you." She straightens her shoulders. "You were screaming."
"Were you worried about me, then"—he smiles—"doctor?"
She can smell his skin he's so close and all she wants to do is strip him out of it, then maybe that face of his, that good side caught in the morning sun, wouldn't have such an effect on her. Was he exempt the simple desire to be cared about?
Her lips press together in a tight line. "You woke me up."
Laughter rises in his throat all at once, and he trips several steps back shaking his head, bringing a hand down over his heart as if it's all too much amusement for him to take. "I think we both know that's a lie."
Her eyes flare an angry white.
Two can play that game.
"What do you dream about?" she fires back, and gains a step on him, watching him still and his shoulders slump, stare set another thousand yards further. She doesn't need him to answer the question to realize at least part of the answer, but now that it's out there the plot thickens; if he was able to remake himself and found peace with the idea of killing someone he once called the love of his life, how come he still dreams of her? How does she separate herself from Caitlin Snow here and now, when he's had centuries and failed?
"I don't know." He shrugs. "What's been keeping you awake?"
Her blood runs cold.
It's maddening how he chooses which of her buttons to push so wisely, even though he can't know her past the way he knows Barry's. Can he? Does he hold memories of her somehow? Has some part of him lived a future with her by his side, and he's not allowed to tell her lest it blows a hole in the space-time continuum? Though, if anything could do that surely it would've been Barry's little pet universe.
She doesn't know. She can't tell, not like she's able to read Barry, and Savitar isn't big on sharing. They're eerily alike in that regard.
She could press the issue, push into his scar tissue until she finds the spot that's most sensitive, but their short conversation has given her enough to think about. Enough to lie awake over. Enough to drive her mad.
So she does what she's been doing at the end of many of their talks.
She retreats, falls back, before either of them causes the other any bodily harm.
Between the two of them the room starts reeking of denial.
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fin
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