A/N: So I started watching The Flash and this popped into my head and wouldn't leave. Set during Season 1, there will most likely eventually be a sequel that's Harry/OC on Season 2.
Like all far-reaching catastrophes in her life, it all began on a split-second impulse.
The four pm traffic jam on the northern Missouri River bridge was always bad, but this was ridiculous. Stella took off her helmet, shook out her hair and glanced at the clock on her phone again. The line hadn't moved an inch for five minutes now. Technically, since she was on a motorcycle, she could have gone around, but the cars before her were packed so tightly she likely would have scraped off some paint if nothing worse. She sighed in frustration, put the helmet back on and opened Facebook just to get something to do.
Then there was a godawful noise and the road before her shook so hard she fell over. Looking over her shoulder, her eyes widened as she saw the pillars of fire around the support beams on both sides. All around her people were screaming and scrambling out of their vehicles to run to safety. One of the beams broke from the root and, with an ear-tearing creak, started falling towards the road.
It was an instinctive reaction rather than conscious decision. Stella pushed off the motorcycle, got up from the ground and ran to the opposite direction, towards the beam. It was a couple feet shy of hitting the highest cars when she raised up her arms and focused on pushing against it. The metal groaned, but stopped falling.
"How – are you doing that?!" wondered the couple nearby crouched down, staring at the hundred of pounds of steel now hovering above their heads.
"Doesn't matter, just run!" Stella yelled. The couple took off and she drew a deep breath before she threw the steel beam over the edge into the river. Before she could congratulate herself or even feel relieved that she wasn't crushed to death, another scream caught her attention. A couple of rows back a car had turned to its side from the impact, someone still inside it. Stella rushed towards it, gave it a nudge and tried to float it down gently so as not to hurt whoever was inside. There was a woman on the driver's seat and a little girl strapped to the back. The doors looked damaged, so Stella just ripped them off entirely and dove to the backseat to get the kid out. Besides being scared, the child looked fine, as did the mother whom Stella handed her to.
"Thank you", the woman whispered, clutching the girl to her chest.
"Anytime", Stella grinned, even though the woman couldn't see it under the face shield.
Then, a sound of more explosions, though she couldn't see where, and the entire bridge shook. Stella climbed onto the car she had just turned over and tried to spot the source when she noticed the cracks in the asphalt.
"Oh no, hell no", she breathed.
The entire bridge beneath gave out.
Barry, or The Flash as the other people saw him, arrived at the scene just in time to see the explosions under the bridge, one after another. It was crammed with cars and people were still running out. He sped up to the highest point where the road was cracked all through, he could see the sparkling blue water underneath, but… it wasn't falling, nothing was falling. He wondered about it for about two seconds, which was a small eternity in speedster time, until he spotted a woman standing on top of a car, hands reached out. She had a motorcycle helmet on, but her posture screamed extreme concentration.
"You guys are not gonna believe this", he spoke.
"Believe what, what is happening?" Caitlin asked on the other end of the comm line.
Barry decided to explain later, once the situation was dealt with. He ran up the woman.
"Hi!" he shouted over the general chaos. "Can you hold this?"
Apparently he had distracted her, because the ground dropped down a couple of inches before she got the hold of it again. Not much of her was visible with the helmet, leather jacket, jeans and boots, but her neck was glimmering with sweat.
"I – I'm not sure!" she yelled back. "I'll try, just get everyone out!"
Barry gave her a thumbs up before he ran. He searched between the vehicles, found every person still on the part of the bridge that was about to collapse and carried them off, one by one. By the time he put the last one down on solid ground, the bridge was trembling. He turned back around, about to get the woman, when it finally gave out.
Barry sped up, jumping from concrete block to the next, until he reached the car and the woman, the latter collapsed on the roof. He scooped her up and ran even faster up the falling blocks. It was like a level of Mario, except if he missed a step, they might both die. Fortunately he was the fastest man alive and could get both of them out in time. He didn't stop by the group where he'd gathered the other people, though, but ran straight into a secluded side alley.
"Barry, what's going on, talk to us!" Caitlin yelled in his ear.
"Everything's fine, I got everyone out before the bridge collapsed", Barry spoke as he knelt down and carefully laid the woman down. She was still limp and didn't stir even when he slipped the helmet off, spilling dark brown and firetruck red hair on her shoulders. She couldn't be much older than he was. "Someone was holding it up, I think she's meta-human – and now she's unconscious, her pulse is really weak, what do I do?"
"Bring her here", Dr. Wells said without a beat.
Eobard Thawne, even as Dr. Harrison Wells, had never been the kind of person who squandered an opportunity to gain an edge. So when his plan had reached the critical moment, his focus had of course been on Barry – or rather, The Flash – but he had been keeping an eye out for other meta-humans that might prove useful. Unfortunately, the results so far had been… underwhelming. The ones that weren't petty criminals were quite literally too volatile to control. Nevertheless, when Barry called in about a woman who could hold up a collapsing bridge, Eobard was intrigued.
When Barry brought the woman to S.T.A.R. Labs, she was still unconscious and rather pale. They put her on a bed in one of the smaller lab rooms, and Eobard and Cisco hooked her up to the monitors while Caitlin examined her. She concluded that there were no injuries, merely acute hypoglycemia likely caused by spending up her energy reserves, which would be healed with rest and a few IV bags.
"That makes sense", Barry said. "Holding up that bridge must have drained her."
"When you say 'holding up a bridge', do you mean like -" Cisco raised his hands above his head, "physically, or -?"
Barry shook his head. "No, not like that. I think she's telekinetic. Or that's how it looked like – is that even possible, Dr. Wells?"
Eobard rolled closer and studied their newest meta-human find closely. The woman was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, medium-height and athletic. Olive skin, heart-shaped face, full lips, feathery eyebrows, somewhat ethnically ambiguous but most likely partially East Asian. He noticed that she was beautiful, as a kind of scientific observation, but he was much more interested in what wasn't visible on the surface. The most curious detail was the Drake equation tattooed on the outside of her right arm.
"It's possible. The real question is how she does it, because it's not a matter of simply..." He waved his hand and snapped his fingers. "Dr. Snow, how long until she wakes up?"
Caitlin shrugged. "Hard to say. Could be a couple minutes or a few hours."
Eobard stroked his chin, deep in thought. He was tempted to give the meta-human something to speed up her waking, but he didn't know how it would interact with her physiology, or if she happened to be allergic to something. Which reminded him -
"Did she have any identifying information on her?"
There was a blur, and Barry was standing there holding up a wallet. "Her name is Stella Carrick, she just turned twenty-eight, and she's from Gotham. Or at least, she got her driver's license there", he recited. "Also, she goes to the Unibody gym and is a frequent shopper at Whole Foods. And she's a blood donor, her blood type is A positive."
"It's a start, but we're going to need more blood", Eobard said. He took an empty blood collection syringe from the nearby table and stuck it into her IV-free arm.
Caitlin shot him a disapproving look. "Shouldn't we wait until she's awake to do that?"
Eobard shrugged. "The sooner we discover how her powers function, the better", he replied. "Can you stay with her in case she wakes up?"
"Of course."
"Thank you", Eobard said, smiling, as he tapped the vial of blood between his fingers. "Barry, Cisco – let's go see what we can find out about Stella."
It turned out there wasn't much to be found on the subject of Stella Carrick. She wasn't in the police database, so at least she wasn't an established criminal, but neither was she in any other databases Barry and Cisco could hack into. (Eobard didn't count Instagram as a reliable source of information.) Well, almost any other.
"Guys, I'm almost sure she's a meta-human", Cisco said. "I pulled her blood donation records. She used to go every couple of months, but suddenly stopped ten months ago. Which would be about the time the particle accelerator went off."
"That is highly suspicious", Barry agreed.
"Which brings me to another question", Cisco continued, clicking to another browser tab where he's opened Stella's Facebook page. "How come all the meta-human women we've discovered are really good-looking, but the men look like Vin Diesel's ugly cousins?"
Barry snorted. "You mean, all two of them? That's not really an adequate sample size."
"Possible aesthetic patterns aside", Eobard interrupted them, "Cisco's right. She is a meta-human. Take a look at this."
He moved away from the microscope where he'd been studying the blood sample. Barry took his place, staring down into the ocular.
"What is that bonded with her blood cells?" Barry wondered. "Dark matter?"
He was interrupted by Caitlin's frantic voice on the comms. "Uh, Dr. Wells? We have a problem."
"Is it the meta-human?" Eobard answered. "Is she getting worse?"
"No, she's fine. She's awake, in fact. And she locked me out of the lab."