Just a heads up: this takes place long before the beginning of the show. It's also genderbent because I'm crazy and genderbend everything at least once in my head, and while there are no pairings, there's a slight mention of the canon unrequited Barry/Iris…so if you're weird about girls crushing on girls, you might want to go away. (Bartholomew "Barry" Allen is Bernadette "Berry" Allen.) I'll add a few more chapters soon, but for now, here's the beginning.

Update: I've already had to remove one anonymous review for being entirely irrelevant and a little bit rude. Please, if you're not going to be constructive, don't bother to review. I'm always willing to hear honest criticism, even the brutally honest kind, but I have no patience for inanities. Danke schön.

I don't own the Flash.


The Science of Human Cruelty

You're not sure whether Joe can save your ass this time. You know you're very, very good at what you do, and your coworkers do too – that's why they don't do more than tease you when you race into the station ten minutes later than you should every morning – but this case is time-sensitive, and you're thirty minutes late. This time it's legitimately not your fault, but considering this is only your third time out to a crime scene and everyone knows your little habit of perpetual tardiness, they probably won't believe you.

"Thank you for joining us, Allen," says the Captain – shit, he's here too? You're so fired after this, you just know it.

"Sorry I'm late," you reply, ducking your head. You don't want to look at Joe, who will probably be giving you his patented I-would-ground-you-if-I-still-could stare, which always makes you feel three foot tall. "What's happened here?"

"Homicide." He pauses, and says quietly, "You might want to prepare yourself. It's a pretty nasty one."

"I thought that as an assistant I wasn't allowed to work murder cases," you say, pulling out a pair of gloves nonetheless. Joe isn't a homicide detective, or at least he wasn't last time you checked, which makes this whole thing much weirder.

"Well, Smith is out with food poisoning, so you're it. Do a good job on this one and maybe I'll think about not firing you."

Well, then. Since you're so late, they'll have taken plenty of photos of the scene, and you can dive right in – oh, god.

The scene is nauseating, but you switch off the part in your brain that automatically sees them as two dead human beings and switch on the part that sees the scene as a puzzle to solve. Two bodies on the floor in the living room, one of which has a line across her neck. Neither of the bodies have gone into the rigor mortis stage, which means this is a fresh crime scene…which means that the blood still hasn't dried. Focus. From the directionality of the slit and the spray pattern on the wall by the body, adjusting for time factors and the very, very remote possibility that the killer stood on his or her toes during the act, the killer isn't much taller than she is – about 1.7 meters tall. She wasn't moving when the weapon was drawn across her throat – from the front, as evidenced by the slight variation in the pattern and the fact that there's a partial footprint in the pooled blood – and if you're correct, which you usually are, the weapon was thin and about twenty centimeters inches long.

Other than the outline of the toe of a boot in the blood puddle, the killer was remarkably careful to keep out of the way. Still, you dutifully scrape under the victim's nails, despite the fact that she clearly didn't lash out, scour the ground for anything that sticks out – blond hair, and it's not hers since she's brunette, and even though the male body has blond hair you should bag it anyway, some gravelly stuff that may or may not be relevant, the little crucifix in her hand that is almost certainly irrelevant but it's not your job to decide – and store your findings in the extra compartments in your kit. You close your eyes for a moment to wash away the sight of your bloody hands, change your gloves, and move on.

You go to examine the male body and part of you recoils, but this is your job. You knew what you were getting into when you applied. This kind of mutilation usually implies some sort of emotional connection, but it's not your job to postulate motives, so you'll keep quiet about it. The face has been removed very carefully. You're not a medical doctor, but if you had to guess, you'd say that it was removed by a scalpel; it was certainly a different weapon than the one that slit the female body's throat, at any rate, tiny and precise. You don't gag when you shine your flashlight into the gooey eye sockets, but you're sure you'll throw up later.

"Did anyone get pictures of the eye sockets?" Your voice is steady. Good. "I need to swab for particulates, but I don't want to disturb anything."

"Go ahead," says a detective you don't know, and you nod, swallowing harshly.

You're not allowed to look away from what you're doing, but you would if you could. The eyeballs have been crushed entirely, almost like the killer removed them and then squeezed them into pulp before pouring the pulp back into the sockets, so you collect as much of it as you can and store it in a tight-seal container. Hopefully, you can separate the eye gunk and vitreous humor and other organic matter from traces of whatever the killer used as a weapon, but that's probably too much to ask. Still, you are nothing if not thorough.

Other than the mutilated eyes and the missing face, the victim is also missing his fingers, but unlike the facial tissue, the fingers haven't been removed from the scene; they're scattered around him like the killer played with them for a while. That's probably not what happened. Focus. You scrape under the nails, sift through the fluid leakage for anything out of the ordinary, and change your gloves so you can examine the rest of the room. Searching the house will be much easier than searching the bodies, and although you're still in what Iris calls "science mode," you just want to turn tail and bolt out of there.

But you can't just run away. Even if you could run fast enough to escape the entire town, you'll never escape the images. You think you understand, now, why you're usually not allowed to work murders.


The Captain might still fire you, but even if he doesn't, you don't know how much longer you can do this job. After everything you saw, you don't feel comfortable out in the open, so you've decided to sit on the floor in the corner of your lab, mostly out of sight but close enough to the monitors to see any changes on the screens.

You've submitted your initial report, but you can't bring yourself to leave your lab. You're still running blood samples and what if your other tests finish sooner than they should? That's stupid. You know they won't. But you can't just sit around at home while a killer is on the loose. You feel like you know the killer now, because you went over the whole scene again and again in the interest of thoroughness and you're not a detective, but you're smart. Genius, your physics professor called you, and maybe it was a ploy to recruit you to the program but she wasn't the only one to use the term. It doesn't matter that your job is to collect data and run tests; you know the killer now.

You could be the killer. You can picture it in your mind, see yourself taking out your knife, and – and it's awful. The floor under you feels uncomfortable and you can't stop your legs from shaking. You want to run away.

"Berry? You okay?"

It's Iris. Of course it is. Out of all the times to walk in on you. You're not crying, but only because the tears are stuck in your sinuses, and you know you're blotchy and shaky and just a mess, and you don't want her to see you like this. "Uh…"

"What am I saying? Of course you're not okay." She sits down next to you and takes your hand. It's amazing, the way your hands always seem to fit together, and you don't feel better, but you kind of do. Just because she's here. Just because she cares. "Want to tell me about it?"

"Yeah," you reply, but you shake your head anyway. "But I promise you, you don't want to hear about it. I…I just want to forget."

And it's weird, because it's not like you haven't seen gorier stuff on television or in movies, but it's different. Seeing it in person, getting into the killer's head, seeing what happened over and over and over, is really messing with your head.

"Okay," she says.

"It's just." You swallow and try again. "I don't understand."

"What don't you understand?"

"I mean, I know there are murderers out there, more than just the one that got my mom. They're everywhere. We have crime shows and entire homicide divisions because people kill each other. But Iris, I don't understand why. It's so senseless. I've been angry before, I've been jealous, I've been terrified, but I've never thought that killing someone would be the right solution. And now I feel like I'm the one who killed them, I'm the one who cut him up, and I can't do anything about it because I'm not the real killer. I'm not a cop, either. I'm not some kind of hero, like the Arrow or like Joe. I'm just a lab tech who saw everything and I don't want to see it anymore."

She squeezes your hand and, thankfully, doesn't comment on the tears that are finally slipping out of your eyes. Iris has always been able to just get you like this. Finally, your breaths even out and she says quietly, "You know what I've always loved most about you?"

"My willingness to carry you through calculus?" It's a terrible joke, but it makes you feel a tiny bit better to see the smile on her face. "My tendency to sleep-eat?"

Iris rolls her eyes and puts her hand on your chest. "This. Right here."

Your brain completely fizzles out for a moment and you ask, stupidly, "My boobs?"

"Oh my god, Berry," she says, yanking her hand away and swatting you on the shoulder. "Your heart. So many people, you know, they start looking at crime scenes and they lose this, but you care. You've always cared about other people, even if you didn't know them, even if it was scary and it hurt to care. You've always wanted to help people. And you're smart enough to actually do it."

"But I can't."

"Yes, you can. You absolutely can. Sure, you're not a cop. But the cops are the visible heroes, Ber; when it comes down to it, they couldn't be as accurate in their jobs if you weren't so good at yours. Last week you recreated an entire robbery just from looking at the damages!"

"It's just a matter of looking. They don't actually need me; anyone could do it."

"But that's where you're wrong. You're damn good at your job, and your work is gonna help them catch the guy who did this."

You breathe shakily and Iris sits beside you, quietly, still holding your hand. Eventually, you can move again, and you allow her to lead you out of your lab. Your face feels a little numb, but you're not going to cry or throw up, so at least there's that. You pass the Captain, who is looking at you thoughtfully, and you tell him, "I'll have those results for you within a few days. I'll update you as I get more information."

"Good job out there today, Sherlock," he replies, giving you a nod. "I see my trust wasn't misplaced."

It's nice to know that you're not going to lose your job, and your best friend will always be there for you, and you were planning to go home after work but you don't protest when Iris decides you're going to your childhood home instead. You'll have dinner with Iris and Joe and maybe today's crime scene will never leave you, but today you learned something new.

You're not a cop, but that doesn't mean you can't help people. And if your work can save just one person from being another victim, then it's worth doing after all.