Second line, second fic... here's to me maintaining a decent writing pace and thanks to you guys for your support so far.


Timeline/Setting: Pre-series (particle accelerator explosion) continuing up to 1x12.

Warnings/Comments: Canon-compliant mentions of past!Snowstorm, unrequited Westallen and one-sided Snowbarry. Also one minor reference to ~that scene~ in 1x19.


Summer lovin', happened so fast

Time stops on the day of the particle accelerator explosion. The moment Ronnie dies.

At least, that's what it feels like to one Caitlin Snow.

The first two days after that is mostly a blank space in her memory. There is the vague impression of a hospital, the faces of her colleagues on the edges and little else. Cisco fades in and out of her awareness, his features twisted with distress and his mouth forming apologies (for what?, she dimly wonders) that fail to reach her ears.

The halt on all flights into Central City, imposed as a result of the chaos created by the explosion, is lifted on the third day, which is when her parents manage to come down from Coast City to see her. She evades their concern, both her mother's vocal worries and her father's quiet anxiousness, with the kind of detachment that comes with shock and the iron-clad, almost icy control over herself that has been a defining characteristic of her personality for as long as she can remember.

Caitlin functions well enough that she can even see them off the next day at the airport, meeting their parting troubled looks with firm assurances that she is fine and reminders that they are busy people and their businesses do not run themselves.

Then she locks herself in her apartment for the remainder of the week.

It feels a little like a blessing that she and Ronnie had never finished that argument about living together; as it is, the clothes and random belongings he's left in her home over the course of their relationship are enough to cause her fresh pangs of grief and loss every time she sees them. The mere idea of having to live in a space bought by and meant for the both of them would have been unbearable.

A call from Dr Wells is what cuts through the haze, nothing more than a quiet and curt request that she come and see him at the hospital before the phone is taken away by a seemingly overbearing nurse. Her mind whirls at what this could possibly be about even as she mechanically gets dressed and takes her first few steps out of her apartment in what seems like forever. Maybe he's officially shutting down S.T.A.R. Labs. Maybe he's dy- no, don't think about that. Maybe it's nothing.

All those thoughts are put to an end when she finds him battered and confined to a wheelchair, a pale shadow of the man who had hired her and led them all on a quest to push the boundaries of science and technology to the next level and beyond.

She remembers that she wasn't the only one who suffered a terrible loss that day and her already bruised heart aches even more.

"I know I have no right to ask this of you," Dr Wells starts with his head bowed, and Caitlin thinks she has never seen him so... broken, "but I want- no, I need to fix this. I need to restore things to the way they were as best as I can."

He looks up at her then, and she can see the almost manic determination that shines in his eyes - the same kind of unshakeable resolve that she used to see before all this. "Will you help me?" is all he asks.

Of course she says yes. She believed in him then and she believes in him now. Even, as it turns out, if none of her colleagues excluding Cisco do.

(It seems like a simple decision that is in no way as life-changing as it should be, but she is so wrong and will only realise it so much later. After all, this is how she meets Barry Allen.)

-xXx-

To Dr Wells, Barry Allen seems to be a symbol of redemption. This random victim of the particle accelerator explosion represents a way for him to right the wrongs he has committed. He is the means through which some good can be salvaged from the catastrophe.

To Joe and Iris West, Barry Allen is clearly a beloved family member. Even though they are not related, it is painfully obvious that he is a treasured and sorely missed part of their lives if the frequency of their visits are any indication at all. It's a strong reminder of why she'd pointedly decided on a career in bio-engineering instead of medicine; she's self-aware enough to admit that as someone who already has trouble dealing with her own emotions, she's not exactly the best person to help others with theirs.

To Caitlin Snow herself, Barry Allen is just a new element of her daily routine. He is a medical and scientific anomaly in the form of one very comatose body, something to study and fill in the hours of her day. This is nothing more than a puzzle to solve for her.

Cisco sees it as some sort of fun experiment - in a definitely mad scientist kind of way even though his expertise does not match the classic image of one - which makes exactly one of them.

Then Barry Allen wakes up, tilting her world on its axis, and time which had halted nine months ago for her starts up once again and speeds off into the future at a momentum beyond human comprehension as if to compensate for its stagnation.

-xXx-

Barry Allen, Caitlin discovers in the span of only a few days, is kind and selfless, oblivious yet observant, boyish but mature at the same time and a good number of other contradictions rolled into one individual. He cares too much for his own good, can't lie to save his own life and has a stubborn streak that almost rivals her own.

In short, Barry Allen seems to have been designed by the universe as its ultimate tool to drive her up the wall.

He's impulsive and reckless and it worries her to no end but being someone who's just terrible when it comes to dealing with her feelings, all she ends up expressing is anger. She doesn't hesitate to scold him when he rushes headlong into danger and gets hurt in the process or when he tries to keep secrets about things that could prove potentially harmful to his well-being.

It's entirely unfair, she thinks, that this relative stranger notices things about her and elicits such strong emotions from her when it usually takes people a good long while to accomplish both those things.

(It's also utterly cruel how often parallels between him and Ronnie keep popping up. There's a pattern to be found here, the scientist in her points out as the incidents pile up one by one, if she could bring herself to acknowledge them.)

He notices that she doesn't smile much. Then she finds herself doing just that on an increasingly frequent basis because of him.

He recognises her fear of going to the place Ronnie had died so he offers to go with her. He listens as she pours her heart out to him - this guy who she hardly knows - and hugs her because she needs it.

He teases her about her inability to have fun and she finds herself wanting to just a little bit if only to prove him wrong.

Before Caitlin realises it, she cares about Barry a lot more than she ever expected to. She wants to be there for him the way he's there for Central City beyond simply being the person who patches him up every time he breaks something. So she does just that.

She tries to dissuade him from his ill-advised meetings with Iris as his costumed alter-ego. (Not that he listens, naturally, and she's kind enough to refrain from saying "I told you so" when things predictably go south later on.)

She sets aside her fears of losing yet another person dear to her heart as she puts her faith in him and tells him so when he is stripped of his powers and death is quite literally just around the corner. (She's never been happier about him messing up her hair with his whoosh-ing than when he gets his powers back and saves their lives yet again.)

She readily forgives him when he apologises profusely for his harsh words about her treating him like Ronnie and even has to remind him that he'd said those things while under a metahuman-induced rage state when he won't stop beating himself up over it. (To be fair, she thinks he might not have been half-wrong about it and resolves to try harder to separate both men in her mind and heart from then on.)

She tells him to stay away when she is used as leverage against him and stares a madman down as she tells him to do whatever he wants to her but to leave him alone. (When they're both back at S.T.A.R. Labs safe and alive, they trade apologies as she tends to the wounds he sustained during the battle with Snart and Rory, he for putting her in danger and she for being used against him. The fact that they both end up almost talking over the other brings smiles to both their faces and eases the tension, leading to promises to be more careful next time.)

...She's not entirely sure what possessed her to put so much effort into dressing up for their (not-a-date) improvised stakeout of the dive bar their latest teleporting metahuman and her boyfriend used to frequent. Or why she drank quite so much. Or why she thought singing on stage when she knows she's tone deaf was such a good idea. Maybe it's a blessing she doesn't remember most of what happened that night because she's very sure she said and possibly did some very embarrassing and not-entirely-platonic things. (He teases her every now and then about it, doing things like changing her ringtone to Summer Nights much to her mortification.)

At the end of the day, she thinks it's a sign of how strong their friendship is when they end up helping each other move on from their doomed relationships to find someone new to be crazy about.

(It only occurs to Caitlin that she might have been a bit in denial about her true feelings on the matter when she finds herself kissing Barry back - only it hadn't actually been Barry, and in hindsight maybe that was a blessing - and she realises she may have fallen so deep and so fast that she hadn't even noticed it happening. "Oh, my god" indeed.)


That became much, much longer than expected. Still, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out although I'm a bit nervous about the timeline and events immediately after the particle accelerator explosion. Hopefully I didn't make any errors there... Either way, feel free to leave a review with your feedback (or correct me about said timeline).