A/N: I was meant to start writing and posting these back in January, however life happened, and progress didn't happen, so now here I am, a little over two months late but finally kicking things off! This coming July, as I've done for the past two summers, I'll be leading a 100-day countdown story set across the Arrowverse (featuring Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow). I decided to do things a little differently this year. For one thing, the entire 100 days will be a single story spread over 100 days, one chapter to every day. And for another, the more planning I did, I saw the possibility and the need to lay in some ground work in the form of preludes.

Twenty-four prelude one-shot stories, six each to the four series (again, it was meant so that each month from January to June would have one of each show, but now… yeah ;)), posted every 5 (or 6) days.

The story this will all be leading to, Once More Unto the Breach, is an alternate universe story (not another Earth, ha :D), which will soon become evident enough. It's very possible you do not watch all four of the shows, but I highly encourage you to seek out the other preludes, as they will help to fill in this world I'm very excited to share with you guys!

Alright, enough chit chat, let's go! If you have any questions, send them my way and I'll be happy to answer them!

THE COLD & THE HEAT
Prelude to ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH
(3 of 24)

Location:
BREACH EARTH, HAVEN QUARTER
(ARGUS designation)

It was years ago now that their story began, and before it did begin, there was only him. Nathaniel Heywood, aged nine, not that many people out there would know… or care, as far as he could tell. There was something wrong with his blood, see, and he'd known it for about as long as he could remember. He could probably have laid out everything from the name onward, for how many times he'd had to hear his mother discuss it, but all he really cared about was what it meant for him, and that was that he was too fragile to be allowed to do anything. That wasn't his decision, it was his mother's. How many times had he asked her if he could have this thing, or be allowed to do that thing, and always she would get this look in her eyes and start to shake her head. He hadn't asked anything too crazy, had he? The more things he was denied, the more he would take the time to really stop and think about what he would say to her when he made his pitch, but it was no use. All he'd have to do was go to her, with what he guessed was his telltale look, something like stern determination, and she would have her refusal locked and loaded, ready to be dispersed and send him packing back to his room with disappointment.

He knew his problem was serious, of course he did. There had been a number of incidents over the years of his short life, enough to let him get even a small feeling of how bad it could get, but then all the same… Was he really that worse off, or was it that each time something happened with him, his mother would react in such a way that it felt like the world was crumbling around them, and so it inflated the danger he was supposedly under.

So his entire life revolved around his room. His entire home felt as though it had been baby proofed – Nate proofed – to minimize his risk of injury, but at least he had his room, where he might not have had everything he wanted, but at least he had some things, enough to keep him occupied, because what else was his mother going to do, if she insisted on keeping him here like this? He was home schooled, he had no friends, and more often than not, when he managed to leave the house, he only ever got to do so because he had a doctor's appointment… or a visit to the emergency room.

He expected to go mad before he reached puberty.

Then, one day, a rock crashed through his bedroom window.

He wasn't hurt, might have been if he hadn't been in the bathroom at the time, though he almost wished he'd been. Instead he had to suffer through his mother's panicking, and going through his room inch by inch, to ensure not one bit of glass was left behind that could lead to his cutting himself. He wasn't allowed inside throughout the process, which took over a week. She had gone through everything, everything, some things it really wouldn't have been necessary to inspect. And in doing so, she'd found all the items he had so painstakingly acquired in the last couple of years, through so much ingenuity considering his situation that she should have been proud, no?

She hadn't been proud, not at all. She'd thrown out most of it, along with some other objects she believed could still have glass in them and would be beyond salvaging. When he was finally returned to his room, it felt like it wasn't his anymore. It took another week for him to really get it into some shape he recognized as being his own space, although it wouldn't give him back all the things he'd lost. And now that his mother knew, there would really be no chance of his getting away with his tricks again. His small world had just gotten miniaturized.

"Hello."

The one small change he'd been granted in all this, which was sort of a notch in the 'win' column was that his freshly replaced window was allowed to remain open, weather permitting. The reasoning went something like 'if it's open, it won't get broken,' which he couldn't say made complete sense, but he wasn't going to poke holes in his mother's logic if it meant the world was just a bit less boxed in. None of it had prepared him for this. He thought maybe he'd imagined he had heard the word 'hello' being spoken near him, until he turned his head and saw he wasn't alone.

Well, he was alone, in his room; the boy stood outside the house, in front of his open window. The most he could see of him was a head of dark brown hair framed around a face he could only estimate was roughly the same age as him, the parts below his neck were out of sight. He didn't know the boy, though the way he stared back at him, the stranger seemed to know him.

"Hi," he replied, too lonely to do anything but wait and see where this went.

"My name's Ray Palmer, what's yours?" the boy asked, stretching his hand in through the window. Nathaniel was quick to scurry to his bedroom door, peering down the hall, listening. His mother was on the phone, and he could tell it was his aunt on the line, which meant in all likelihood his mother would be wrapped into that conversation for a while and he'd be in the clear. Even so, he looked back to the window – Ray still stared back at him in wait – and signalled that quietness was in order before finally answering.

"I'm Nath… Nate. I'm Nate… Heywood. Nice to meet you," he nodded as he shook the boy's hand.

"I wanted to say sorry for breaking your window." He blinked. That was him? Before he could ask it aloud, the other boy had launched into explanations. "I didn't mean to do it, I was only testing something out and I lost control, and the rock…" he jabbed his finger in the air within the window frame as though it represented the shattering glass. "You weren't in here for a while, so I couldn't explain. You're the boy who can't go outside, aren't you?"

"I can go outside," Nate replied, a bit more defensively than he would have liked, and he went on a bit calmer. "There's something wrong with my blood, it's complicated. But if I get hurt, it could be really, really bad. My mother worries a lot," was as much of an explanation as he was willing to dish out at this point. He didn't want to scare his visitor away, although looking at him, Ray didn't seem inclined to run now that he knew. Instead, he looked like things finally made sense, and he was glad. "What were you testing out?" he asked. Ray looked confused for a second before remembering what he had said before.

"This," he pulled something from the bag he had on his back. It looked like some kind of launcher, made from bits of other things. "I've been perfecting it since I broke your window, I think it's better now. See?" He handed the object over, and Nate took it with something like reverence mixed with glee. It almost looked too dangerous – by his mother's standards at least – for him to hold, but here he was doing it and the world had not come to an end. "Here," Ray crouched before returning with a small rock from the ground, which he placed in Nate's waiting hand. "How's your aim?"

"Not a clue," he shrugged. It wasn't like his mother had given him the chance to find out. So Ray gave him a quick run down of how to aim, and with the launcher loaded, Nate took aim – at a small pile of grass clippings left forgotten a little way ahead of his window – and let the rock fly. It didn't exactly hit the target, but he didn't mind. Just trying it had felt more exciting than anything in the last several weeks of his life.

"Not bad!" Ray declared. "I can let you hold on to it for a while," he added, nodding to the launcher.

"That's okay," Nate handed it back. "If my mom finds it, she'll just throw it out."

"Right," Ray understood. "Well… I can bring it again another time, and…" They both stopped, hearing what definitely sounded like someone coming toward Nate's room. Ray started to move away at once, but then stopped briefly, turning back. "Do you like comic books?"

From then on, most every other day at least, Ray would come and visit his new friend's window. It required a lot of caution, Nate catching Ray's signal to show he was nearby, and Ray awaiting Nate's call to promise the way was clear. Sometimes he would stay all of a minute before having to make a run for it, but one minute was better than none for Nate. Ray had helped him come up with new hiding places for the things he brought over. As it turned out, the other boy knew something of loneliness and sneaky mothers, all of it making the pair of them closer friends day by day, by week, by month… It took almost four years before Ray became a fixture inside the house and not just outside of it. Mrs. Heywood assumed they had only just met, and the boys never corrected her.

As beneficial as each of them was on the other, with the passage of time it had created something else, too. For Nate, the secret world they shared made him not quite as resistant to his mother's rules. What did he need of the outside world when he had his best friend? No one else was going to understand what he was going through like Ray did, and it made him less eager to interact with strangers or let them come near him. And for Ray, it took seeing how interested the shut-in boy was in his inventions for him to see no one else took them half as seriously as Nate did. So he kept working at them, learned more, tried new things, the better to share them.

Sometimes it would all start with Nate asking something to the tune of 'I wonder if you could…' or 'Wouldn't it be great if we had…' and it would carry into Ray attempting to meet the challenge.

Mrs. Heywood's hold over her son's destiny could only last so long once her boy wasn't a boy anymore. Moving into adulthood, it was a brand new world for Nate, but he didn't worry, not with his best friend by his side. Brave as he made himself to be though, it was a rough turn for Nate to see his mother's concerns had permeated him. He wanted to be in the world, but it also frightened him to some degree, much as he tried to hide it.

It became his goal then to reclaim his control, and it would lead to the pair of them getting into some scrapes. It was only little things, nothing to worry themselves over, or at least that was what they told themselves. No one was getting hurt, and they'd never get caught, so really it might as well have never happened.

That kind of logic would only hold for so long though, and eventually the scrapes weren't so small anymore and they did get caught. For almost three years they didn't see one another, not until they were released, and when they found each other again, the old friends had changed and they hadn't changed at all. They wasted no time getting back to where they'd left things off, although… Nate was that much more against anyone invading his space, while Ray… Three years locked up with little more to do could do wonders on someone's creative impulses. Only weeks after their release, he had shown Nate the plans on two items he planned to build, one for each of them. Once they had those… there would be no stopping them. It took a few months, but then it was all ready.

"Where are we going now?" Nate asked. He was very aware of the two cases sitting in the back of the truck.

"Somewhere a little less conspicuous," was Ray's response.

"Right," Nate grunted. Hadn't they gone way past inconspicuousness by now? He had difficulty matching Ray's patience in this, and if it had been anybody else he would have tried and gotten those cases open already. Instead he waited, drumming his fingers against outside of the door, his arm hanging out the open window.

His patience would be well rewarded, as they finally reached their destination and, standing at the back of the truck, Ray pulled out the first case and set it on the ground before him, flipping the clasps and opening the lid. What Nate found inside piqued his interest at once… lit it ablaze.

He picked it up out of the case, and if there ever had been something more fitting of the name 'firearm,' he had yet to be made aware of it. Ray had incited him to try it out with the same words he'd used, handing out his first invention to him.

"How's your aim?" He knew very well how his aim was by now, and Nate smirked without breaking eye contact with his gift. "Not that you'll be doing any sharp shooting with this. Here, put these on," he handed him a set of goggles.

Nate let out the first shot at this, and the night skies around them brightened with the eruption of a long plume of fire. Even after it had been spent, they could almost still see it in his eyes.

"Well, Palmer, this might be your best work yet," Nate declared.

"Just wait," Ray told him with cool intrigue in his tone. "Wait until you see the other half of the set."

The second case was opened, though Nate couldn't see what was inside until Ray stood again, his eyes protected, too, though there was little time to get much of a look before he aimed his first shot, off to where a small fire small burned. A rush of cold broke past Nate, who turned to find the fire iced and extinguished.

"Always did appreciate a bit of symmetry," Ray explained with a nod. It left Nate with a powerful sort of thrill, the same kind he'd had when he was nine years old and he'd shot that rock from his window.

A new start had been signalled. He believed it; Ray knew it. The guns were not the only reason he'd brought him out to this place.

"I believe we need to make our mark somewhere different," he told Nate, who looked at him, wondering what he meant. "When I was inside, I started hearing rumors about these… doors, to other worlds."

"Other worlds?" Nate asked, his tone showing his disbelief. Ray remained confident.

"As it turns out, they are invisible."

"Of course."

"Unless you know how to open them," Ray continued, determined as ever.

"And did these guys happen to tell you how to open… invisible doors?" The look he got in response was not too far off from the one his boyhood friend would give him when presented with a challenge of invention.

"What do you need to open doors?" Ray asked, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a small object he held up for Nate to see. "All you need is the key."

If there was one thing he'd learned to trust long ago, it was that when Ray Palmer was this sure of himself, it left no place for doubt. Other worlds, invisible doors… If he believed it, then it was real.

"So what are we waiting for?" Nate asked. Let anyone try and get too close to him, oh, he'd give them a flare of his gun and they'd know better. Ray had him covered now, and with all these new toys in hand, they were ready to play. That other world, wherever it was, whatever it was, would soon find out their names.

THE END

Check out the next prelude, coming March 20th!