(A/N) I wrote this before 3.06, thinking we would get a costume reveal in 3.07, but we didn't. Awwww. (That's also why the power-dampening cuffs are slightly different.) Still, I hope that Caitlin gets some input into her outfit because a) that woman is both a clotheshorse and a control freak, and there's no way she wouldn't have Opinions re: said super suit b) they really do work so well together.
A paper landed on his lab table. He glanced at it, then quickly up at Caitlin, standing over him with her arms crossed. "Uh, hey, Caitlin. What's up?"
"I found this upstairs, by your work station."
He looked down at the paper again. "Uh," he said.
It was a rough sketch of a super-suit, all quick slashing lines and scrawled notes. Smudges of colored pencil ran along the side, in various shades of blue and green and cream and pale grey.
"Care to explain?" Caitlin asked.
"Uh. Well. It's a concept. Some concept art."
"See, when I found it, I thought it was one of your sketches for Jesse's suit."
"Right!" he yelped, reaching for the sketch. "Right, okay, I'll just take that - "
She twitched it out of his reach and nailed it to the table with two fingers. "Except then I saw the date. And I noticed the color swatches. And I managed to decipher some of your chicken scratch, which didn't have a thing to do with speed."
He rubbed his eyes. "Are you just drawing this out to torture me or what?"
"Why are you making me a suit?"
"Concept," he said. "I'm noodling around. You know me. I like noodling. It's my fave."
"There's no reason for me to have a suit."
"You have powers," he pointed out.
"I have a curse," she said, shaking her wrist at him. The silvery cuff of her bracelet caught the light - smaller and more discreet than the Boot had been, but just as effective in suppressing powers. "You're helping me manage that curse. Why on earth would you turn around and design something like this?"
"First of all, on behalf of my work - hey! It's a suit, not a cockroach."
She looked abashed.
"And second of all, because I don't believe it's a curse. I believe you got powers for the same reason Barry and I did. Because you're meant to help people."
Her eyes flickered. "I help people here."
"Yeahhhh," he allowed. "I just think you could also help people out there. You know. With us."
She spread her fingers. "With these?"
She looked at her hands the way she'd been looking at them for weeks. With loathing and a little bit of nausea and a lot of fear.
He wanted to take them in his own, but she got twitchy about skin-to-skin contact these days, even with the bracelet on. "It's a power," he said instead. "Cold's just cold, Caitlin. Like, speed is just speed, and vibes are just vibes. What makes it good or evil is who wields it and what they do with it. I'm not Reverb, Barry's not the Reverse Flash, and you're not Kil - "
"Maybe that's how," she said abruptly. "Maybe that's the best thing I can do with them, is to not use them at all."
"Please," he said. "I can think of, like, five ways you can use cold for good, and I ain't even trying. Nobody ever did any good by doing nothing."
She bit her lip.
He went on in a softer tone, "And anyway, my bracelet works, but it's a stopgap and you know it. What if someone figures out a way to cut it off? What if it somehow breaks? Highly unlikely but still possible. Then you're right back where you started, with powers that you don't have any control over. Yet."
She frowned. "But the more I use them, the stronger and more out of control they'll get."
"Said your mother," Cisco said with magnificent scorn. "Who doesn't know metahumans and doesn't really know you."
She opened her mouth.
He waved his hand like Obi-Wan entering Mos Eisley. "Search your feelings," he said solemnly. "You know it to be true."
She let out her breath with a huff. "Okay. Fine. One day, if I begin to consider the possibility of experimenting with these powers - in a very controlled situation! - that's still a long way from suiting up and going out with you two."
He shrugged, even though he wanted to jump up and down and cheer. This was the closest she'd ever gotten to admitting that she might want to play with her new toy. There had to be a part of her that was dying to science the shit out of her cold powers, but right now the fear was drowning it out. "Like I said, this is a concept. Noodling. Just because I designed a suit doesn't mean you have to ever wear it. Your call, Caitlin, always."
She swallowed and fiddled with her bracelet.
"Give it a think," he said. "In the meantime - what do you think of the design?"
Come on. He was human. He had to know.
"I just gave you my opinion," she said.
"That wasn't about how the suit looked. That was you freaking out. Look. Pretend it's not even for you. It's for somebody named, um, Shmaitlin Crow."
She shot him a withering look.
He'd been on the receiving end of too many of those to wither now. "Just from a purely aesthetic, nothing-to-do-with-you standpoint. What do you think?"
She looked at the sketch for a long moment. "It's - "
He leaned forward.
"I like the lines." She ran her finger over one sleeve.
It sounded like damning with faint praise, but he'd watched enough Project Runway with her to know the line was very important. Especially to her. She liked sleek looks. As abstract and contrast-y as her patterns could get, the cut was always smooth and graceful, moving with her body instead of against it.
So, yeah, job done there. Self-five. "Cool," he said. "No pun intended."
"Is it going to be cloth, or leather, or something else?"
"I started out with the tripolymer that I've been using on Barry's suit, and I'm tweaking to account for extreme cold instead of air friction. Still messing with that." And if she would agree to start exploring her powers, she could help him test the material. But he didn't bring that up. "Color-wise, I'm leaning toward the navy end of dark blue." She looked amazing in dark blues, in his not-at-all humble opinion.
"Navy is a very flattering color," she said thoughtfully. "And good for stealth too."
"Right," he said.
"It's not just navy all over, though, right? There are some accents? Contrasts?"
"What do you take me for?" He tapped a finger on the lapel of the jacket, folded back. "Definitely something right here. I'm thinking, like, pale fur. Or maybe some shearling."
She wrinkled her nose.
"What?"
"I don't know about fur. Or even shearling."
"I'm not talking Henry the Eighth's ermine cloak here. It's just an accent."
"Nnnnnh."
He thought it was very big of him to say, "Well. We can come back to that."
She squinted at the sketch. "What if you used silver? Not a lot. Just touches. Against the navy - "
"Oooooh," he breathed. "I like it. Icy."
"Also, sort of glam."
"You wanna be glam?"
She put her nose in the air. "Better than dominatrix-y."
"Yeah, that corset was … not you." He grinned at her. "All right. Glam it is."
"Not too much," she said quickly. "Not overboard."
"No," he said, poker-faced.
She fixed him with a beady eye. "It doesn't have one of those silly cut-outs on the back, does it?"
"No," he said. "Noooooo."
"Good, because that was just impractical. It let the wind right in down my spine."
"Yeah, I remember." She'd complained about that for hours. Days. Mortally offended by the pointlessness of it. "No cut-outs."
She squinted at the picture again. "I don't know about the shoulders."
"They look okay to me."
She shook her head. "If you based it on that Killer Frost jacket, I didn't have anything like optimal range of motion," she said. "The material was too stiff and bulky. That was why I had to leave the jacket open. It was the only way I could lift my arms above my shoulders without it cutting into my deltoids."
"I actually based it on my jacket. My range of motion is fine."
"I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm built very differently from you in the chest and shoulders."
Was there a safe response to that? He elected to stay silent.
She ran her finger over the curve of the sketched shoulder. "What if you put some spandex panels there? Across my - the shoulders."
He pretended not to notice that possessive. "Uh, yeah, I could do that if you think it would help."
"Just a thought." She touched the sketch again, very gently. "I like it," she said. "You always do good work."
"Awww. Thanks."
"You know you do," she said.
"Yeah, but it's nice to hear it."
She shuffled her feet a little, turning her face away. "I should go check my experiments," she said abruptly. "The analysis must be almost done."
He touched her elbow, safely covered by her sweater. "Hey. You'll think about practicing?"
She bit her lip.
"You mentioned controlled conditions. We can control the conditions. That's, like, what we do. No sweat."
"I'll think about it."
"Sure. Let me know."
He waited until he was sure she'd gone upstairs before he went to a shelf and took down a big, battered cardboard box of fabric scraps. He rummaged through it until he found something he liked. A gently glinting silver fabric, softer and more flexible than it looked. A lot like Caitlin, really.
He didn't usually take design notes. Mostly he decided he was going to make a suit, or he got asked for one, and he hunkered down with all his ideas and his fabrics and about a week later - ta-daaa! Genius, applause, adulation.
But mostly those had been re-treads of Barry's speedster suit, with small tweaks. Caitlin's suit had to do a completely different job and do it really well. And she'd made good, practical points, as usual. He needed to make more lady suits if he'd missed that thing about bulk and stiffness at the shoulders. He jotted a note to himself to check in with Jesse about how her suit was doing.
Plus, this was Caitlin, and she had capital-O Opinions about what she wore.
He fingered the silver fabric, trying to work out how it would feel against skin, shifting over stress points.
Then he went and opened a disguised closet to pull out the mannequin inside.
It wore his first mock-up, in muslin because he still wasn't happy with the tripolymer and it wasn't like he had a whole of that lying around anyway. But when he'd picked the color, he'd dyed a scrap and pinned it to the front of the suit, along with some spandex in the same shade.
He unpinned the scrap of shearling and the bit of fur he'd fastened to the mock-up's lapel, stuck both in his pocket, and pinned the silver weave in their place.
Okay, that was pretty awesome, honestly, and very Caitlin. She was no suit-builder, but she knew her own style.
He thought for a moment, then unpinned it and held it between his two hands, stretching and twisting. It was a lot more flexible and giving than it looked. He took some tailor's chalk and sketched in the outlines of sleek panels over her shoulders and down her arms, then pinned the silver fabric back onto the lapel.
He tapped his lower lip, thinking. "Piping," he muttered, tilting his head. He'd been thinking about a lighter blue or maybe a glacier green for the piping, but if he already had the weave there - "Silver piping. Mmm."
He looked the mock-up over. "You will see the light of day, my friend," he promised. "I believe that. I really do."
FINIS