(A/N) Written before 3.02
According to Killer Frost, she'd woken up the morning after the particle accelerator explosion on Earth 2 already ice cold, her hair already white, her eyes already blue. An overnight transformation, like so many of the metas that had been affected by it.
For Caitlin, it started much more slowly.
Maybe it had already started when she stood in Zoom's lair, talking to her double from another universe.
Maybe it had begun back when she would wake up in the night right after the explosion, shivering, and burst into tears because Ronnie was no longer next to her to wrap his arms around her and warm her up.
But whenever it began, it proceeded so slowly that it took her a very long time to notice.
She found herself wearing sweaters later and later in the spring. Long sleeves that she could pull down over her fingers. Little fingerless gloves. Stylish silk scarves around her neck (silk was actually quite warm). Leggings and thick tights instead of nylons. Then on top of nylons.
She would mess with the A/C until Cisco, red-faced and sweating, would yell, "Eighty-four, Caitlin? Eighty-four!?" and dial it ten degrees cooler.
She would stand closer than necessary to Barry until he gave her funny looks and edged away, until Cisco reminded her quietly that Barry had a girlfriend - not just a girlfriend, an Iris, and if she'd developed, um, feelings for the speedster, well, um, that was - Cisco was sorry, okay? Need a hug?
She found it hard to explain that she wasn't cuddled up next to Barry out of attraction, but because he threw off so much extra heat. He always ran a degree or two warmer than everyone else, and it was a degree or two she was happy to steal for herself.
She took the hug, snuggling into Cisco's warmth, and took to hanging out in the boiler room when she could. Nobody could accuse her of being attracted to the boiler. Besides, the wifi worked surprisingly well down here.
"Did you get contacts?" Iris asked her one day. (Apparently the whole hanging-around-Barry-like-a-middle-school-crush incident had never gotten back to her. A blessing. Caitlin had few enough friends, male or female, and she couldn't afford to lose one of the few women in her life.)
"No, why do you ask?" Caitlin said, huddling over her giant mug of steaming coffee.
"Your eyes," Iris said, stirring her iced mocha latte. "They look - lighter. Or something."
Caitlin smiled brightly. "You always see me under those awful fluorescent lights at Star Labs."
"That must be it," Iris said, not pointing out how much time they all spent in the cortex, with natural light pouring through the windows and the skylight.
Caitlin ordered brown contacts off the internet and started wearing them.
On the morning of her thirty-first birthday, she found her first grey hair. Then her second, third, fourth, all the way up to a number where she lost count.
Well.
She didn't know if her mother had gone grey early. It wasn't the kind of thing you asked Dr. Carla Tannhauser. She did know that any grey hair discovered had probably been yanked out by the roots or immediately colored over.
This might be genetics.
She blinked her now entirely blue eyes.
Might be.
She turned on the water to wash her face. She didn't have to twist it to the hot side because it was already there, had stayed there for months.
She watched the steaming water flow over her hand and tumble to the bottom of the sink as shards of ice.
Or it might be a whole different kind of genetics than simple inheritance.
She stood looking at herself in the mirror, at the fine threads of white that glinted in her hair, at the incandescent blue of her eyes and wondered if her heart was freezing over as well. If she would become her doppelganger, laughing as she kissed a man to solid ice, willing to murder her own innocent double after she'd helped her escape.
And whether she cared if she did.
FINIS