Cisco spent the next couple of hours shoulders-deep in Caitlin's folders. Eventually, Barry talked him into going home, but he took the folders with him. He spread them out on the living room floor, his phone next to him, and kept reading.
Sometime later, he woke up with his face mashed into the carpet and his contacts like pebbles in his eyes.
He flailed around for his phone and checked the sensors on Caitlin's cell. Everything was holding steady, and had been since he'd left Star Labs. It was dark out, and he'd come home in the middle of the afternoon. He checked the time and found that he'd slept on the floor for something like ten hours.
Okay, so maybe there had been something to that whole well-rested thing, he thought, rolling his shoulder and wincing. He debated, then pulled everything together and tried to get another couple of hours of sleep in his own bed. But dreams intruded, dreams of fire and ice that left him rolling, gasping, cowering among his blankets and pillows.
Fucking dreams.
He turned on the light, found his glasses, and tackled Caitlin's notes again.
She still had terrible handwriting, and a sense of organization that would have made the Library of Congress proud. He set the first folder down and went to get his tablet. As he read, he dictated notes into the speech-to-text app. Occasionally, he grabbed a stylus, swiped over to his drawing program, and scribbled a quick sketch. He thought about doodling the sketches right in her notes, but rejected that right away.
When he'd read through all of them, he checked the time again and decided it wasn't too ridiculously early to go in.
He kept glancing over at the folders on his passenger seat as he drove, and at one particularly long stoplight, he picked one up and started flipping through it again. The blare of horns made him hit the gas, answering the waved middle fingers with one of his own.
When he walked into Star Labs, the first thing he did was check Caitlin's cell again, with the video feed this time. She was still asleep, curled up in a knot with the blanket pulled all the way up over her head. All that showed of her were a few locks of hair trailing over her pillow and the fingertips of one hand, curled around the hem of the blanket.
He briefly debated waking her up, but it didn't seem likely that becoming a metahuman had made her any more of a morning person. He turned off the video feed. He needed the monitor for other things.
Besides, watching her sleep? That was some sparkly-vampire level of perv, right there.
He started uploading his notes to the Star Labs server, then scanning in hers, reading them again as he did so. He paused to scrawl a few more thoughts on the pad of graph paper by his computer.
Some hours later, a blip in his sensors made him turn on the audio feed again. Soft rustles told him she was stirring, at least. He switched the audio feed to two-way. "Caitlin?"
A pause. "Yes."
"You awake?"
"Obviously."
Yep. Definitely still not a morning person. "Okay," he said. "I read through your notes and I've got about fifty million tests I wanna perform, so . . . If you're ready, I'll come let you out and we can get started."
"Give me ten minutes."
They fell into a routine - Cisco arriving in the morning, working on his own until Caitlin let him know she was awake. They would work for most of the day, and before Cisco went home at night, he would take her back to her cell and lock her in again.
Central City was very quiet at the moment, without the Rogues or Killer Frost on the loose. Cisco monitored the feeds, and sent Barry off to perform his Flashy miracles, but they'd been doing that so long that it hardly blipped his days. When Barry stopped in, it was most often to say hi or bring a meal in a plastic bag.
The perimeter alarm went off, and Cisco absently slapped a hand over his notes until the wind died down and Barry sprawled in the next chair over.
"Hey," Cisco said, combing his hair off his face. "What are you doing here so late?"
"That's my question for you," Barry said. "You said you were going home just as soon as you locked up."
"Yeah, well, I wanted to finish something real quick."
"That was three hours ago."
"Taking longer than I thought."
"What is it?"
"Mmm, it's printing up right now." He waved at the 3-D printer that was his pride and joy. "Meantime, I'm just looking at these graphs. See that one? That's from a sensor she's wearing in her armpit to keep track of her core temperature."
Barry held up a hand. "Armpit? Really?"
"It won't stay put under her tongue and let's just say the other option is not an option."
"What's the other - ?" His friend turned as red as his suit when he remembered about rectal thermometers. "Armpit! Right! Gotcha. Go ahead."
On the screen, a blue line squiggled up and down. Cisco ran his finger along it. "That's her core temperature."
Barry squinted at the numbers. "Okay, what scale is that on? Because those numbers don't look right for Fahrenheit or Kelvin."
"We compromised. It's Celsius." Cisco made a face. He'd argued hard for Kelvin, all nice without negative numbers. "Humans have a body temperature around thirty-seven degrees. Hypothermia sets in around thirty-five."
Barry leaned forward. "That's way below thirty-five."
"After a night in her cell, she can sometimes get up to thirty. During the day, it goes down through the twenties and the teens, with dives as low as five."
"What would happen if it got to zero, d'you think?"
Cisco grimaced. "No idea."
"But that'll improve once she's off the meds, right? They inhibited her heat-sucking abilities. They were keeping her cold."
"And keeping other people safe," Cisco said. "But you're right that her heat-sucking is going to rev up. So I slapped this together." He unfolded a thin white tank top, with wires running through it. "It's a thermal shirt. That box and belt? Battery pack."
Barry's brows shot up. "You just - slapped that together."
Actually, no. He'd had the design for seven months, hidden away in a file.
Cisco shrugged. "It's a stopgap. It'll never keep up with her, not really. But it'll supply some, maybe enough that she can be around us without having to take the meds. And as for that - well, that's what I wanted to finish up. Something to keep an eye on that. Check this. I filmed it earlier." He cued up a video.
Caitlin stood in the locked lab, her eyes glittering blue as mist swirled around her hand, coalescing into a deadly ice dagger with a razor edge. She'd been pretty annoyed at him. He'd double-checked the insulation and the locks, and he'd still gotten a chill up his spine.
(Although. Damn. Ice dagger.)
He ran it again in thermal vision. "You see that? You see?"
Barry squinted. "Are her hands actually colder than the rest of her when she makes that dagger?"
"She's focusing the heat drain through her hands. So - " He cued up his tablet, showing Barry the design on it. "Voila. These cuffs will tell us how hard she's pulling heat, involuntarily or on purpose. See those lights?"
"Do we want more or fewer lights?"
"Fewer." He tugged at his lip. "I figure five to eight will be okay to be in the room with her. Under five, you can get within a few feet."
"How high does it go?"
"Ten. Which, unless there's an equal and opposite heat source, is meat locker time."
Barry sighed. "I can't imagine living like that."
Cisco got up and went to the 3-D printer. The cuff casings had finished. He set them on his worktable and thought briefly about putting the innards together, but it would take at least an hour and Barry would get all mother henny and he just didn't feel like putting up with that right now. He'd get here early in the morning and assemble them before Caitlin woke up. "If we get this implant right, she won't have to anymore."
Caitlin sat cross-legged on her bed, reading through Cisco's thoughts on the testing, chewing on her lip. Someone knocked, hard, on the glass, and she jumped. The tablet almost slid off her lap, and she lunged for it. Star Labs certainly had more, all company property left over from when it had been a buzzing hive of research and development. But she had notes on there that she hadn't uploaded to the servers yet.
Tablet safe, she looked up.
Iris stood outside the door, looking furious. "Are you locked in there?" she demanded. "Just - incarcerated all day?"
Caitlin set the tablet aside and got up. "It's fine, Iris," she called through the glass, regretting her decision not to move the cell back into the pipeline. But she hadn't known how long the cold flare would last, so she'd told Cisco to leave it where it was at the mouth.
"No, it's not fine, what crime have you committed?"
"Would you like an alphabetical list?"
"Was there a trial?" Iris looked ready to storm the Bastille all on her own.
Caitlin crossed her arms. "Iris, this is for safety's sake. I'm weaning myself off some of the drugs I've been taking, and I'm having a cold flare. Trust me, everyone's better off if I'm in here for awhile."
"But you can get out if you want, right?"
"It's better if I can't."
Iris looked livid.
"Iris. This is fine. It's my choice."
"That doesn't make it right."
"I don't much care about right anymore." Caitlin turned her back and returned to her bed. Cisco had sent her a message, something about the power source, and she read it, tapping her fingers on her leg. Little flares of mist trailed from her fingernails. She didn't need to check her new sensor cuffs to know that there were eight lights burning, with a ninth blinking. She did, anyway. It was nice to have something concrete to look at, a data point to quantify.
Her stomach churned - one of the other side effects of the weaning was nausea - and she got up to make some tea that would calm it. Cisco had come through with a battery-operated kettle and about two or three beat up mugs from the cabinets. She chose the one that had belonged to the HR director and rooted through her duffle for the box of ginger tea that settled her stomach.
She became aware that Iris was still outside the cell, sitting on the little platform, looking at her hands. She went back to the glass. "Honestly, Iris, it's okay," she said. "You don't have to sit with me."
Iris looked up, blinking, shaking her head as if she'd been a million miles away. "I'm not."
"Why did you come down here? Just to get up in arms? Are you going to put this on your blog?"
"No." Iris's voice trembled. "I just wanted to - to sit here for a little bit."
Caitlin stared at her. The kettle clicked.
"Why?" Caitlin said quietly.
"My. My boyfriend died. In there."
Not in the cell. Probably. There was no way Iris would still be working with the Flash and Cisco if her boyfriend had been an imprisoned metahuman. So . . . the pipeline, she meant.
"When?"
"Three months ago."
"What happened?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Okay."
"I'm sorry. That was - "
"You don't have to talk about it," Caitlin said.
They were quiet.
"Cisco said - that your fiance died. The night of the particle accelerator explosion."
"Yes."
"You don't want to talk about it?"
Caitlin poured boiling water over her teabag and added honey. "Honestly, it feels like something that happened to somebody else."
"Lucky," Iris whispered.
Caitlin stared into her tea. You think so?
By the day after Iris had visited her, the worst of that particular withdrawal was over. The cold in her stomach was as sharp as a broken tooth, but manageable.
When she asked, Cisco let her out, not without some reservations. "You're sure? You're sure the flare is done?"
She waved her wrists at him. "You've got these to tell you when I'm suddenly going to transform into a heat vampire."
His gaze lingered on them for a second, then flicked away. "I'm getting a lot of good data off them." They were wifi-linked to both their tablets.
"I know. I've been analyzing it." And it had been unexpectedly useful. She set the tablet down next to the work station. "Can you upload my notes to the server?"
"Sure." He plugged the tablet in, then shifted his body in between her and the keyboard. She rolled her eyes and looked away as he typed in the password to allow the tablet to link up. He'd locked it down, even when there was a cable connection.
"Hmmm," he said, studying her thoughts. "Well. That's a test we'll want to run today."
"Set it up, then," she said in a bored voice.
When he turned away, she skimmed her hand over the keyboard. The faintest flickers of heat told her the password.
"Caitlin?"
She jumped. "Yes?"
"Did you just suck in some heat? One of your sensors jumped."
She curled her hand into a fist and pushed it into her pocket. "I don't know. I might have flared. Set up the test already, Cisco."
For some reason, Iris kept coming back. She would drop in regularly, sometimes with an excuse like a new box of tea or bringing them lunch, sometimes not. She would say hi to Cisco, make impressed noises about whatever they were working or interested faces at whatever test they were performing, but her real purpose there seemed to be Caitlin.
She always, always talked at Caitlin until Caitlin broke down and started talking back to her.
They talked a little more about her dead boyfriend, but not very much. Caitlin gleaned that his name had been Eddie, he'd been a cop and Iris's father's partner, and he'd died saving everybody, in some vague, unspecified way. Iris started sobbing at that point and Caitlin didn't push for further details.
Sometimes they talked about Iris's job, or Caitlin's abilities - "off the record," Iris said - or whatever story Iris was working on for CCPN.
Caitlin couldn't remember the last female friend she'd had, even before her life iced over. As a woman in the sciences, she'd never had very much of a selection at work, and she'd had a hard time doing things for the express purpose of "meeting people." And when she did, she wasn't very good at it. She'd certainly never encountered anyone who was as willing to put quite so much energy into pursuing her friendship as Iris West was.
But. Well.
She liked it.
And she felt as if Iris needed it, too. The other woman could spend hours in the cortex, absently working on a story or surfing the internet. Caitlin got the feeling she just didn't want to go home to an empty apartment, echoing with Eddie's absence.
"You should check this out, Caitlin," she said one day, tilting the monitor towards her. "This is a very good sale. Cisco, do you mind? You're not setting up any new tests, are you?"
"Oh, no, nothing much. Shopping is way more important than science."
Without thinking, Caitlin rolled her eyes at him. "Like you don't check TeeFury every single day."
He pointed a tiny screwdriver at her. "Okay, that's different. Their designs change."
"So very true," Caitlin said, "and ModCloth never puts up new styles."
Iris laughed. "Ooo, look at this one!"
Because Caitlin was turned away, she didn't see Iris reach out to touch her shoulder, but she felt it, right through her sweater and the thermal shirt. The cold woke with a roar, sending claws through her veins, snatching at the delicious warmth - and for a moment, Caitlin let it.
Then a set of alarms shrieked, Iris gasped, and Caitlin jolted back, her wheeled chair rolling a few feet with the force of her recoil.
"Sorry," Iris said. She was holding her hand, pressing it to her chest, her eyes wide.
"Are you okay?" Caitlin demanded. "Show me your hand."
It was fine. A little reddened, but no black or white patches of frostbite. "I'm fine." But Iris's voice shook. "I just wanted you to see this dress. I think you'd look really cute in it."
Caitlin didn't look at the screen. "I can't wear dresses anymore. Too much exposed skin." She got to her feet. "Cisco, I'd like to go back to my cell."
"Yeah," Cisco said, putting down the heat gun. "That - we can do that."
Cisco stuck his hands in his pockets so she wouldn't see them trembling. The near-miss with Iris had shaken him, and he hated that he'd grabbed for the heat gun without so much as thinking about it. He hated, too, that it was about the smartest thing he could have done.
When he opened up her cell, letting the sauna warmth of it roll out around them, she walked straight in and grabbed a blanket from her bed, wrapping it around herself.
"You okay?" he asked her.
She sat down on her bed and stared at the wall. "I think I'm getting too comfortable."
He put his hand on the glass, wishing it was her shoulder, knowing he couldn't.
She said, "How far would you say we are from a workable prototype?"
"A couple of days."
"Can it be faster?"
"Yes," he promised.
She nodded and pulled the blanket tight around herself.
When he went back up to the cortex, Iris was still there, studying the mess on his worktable. He said, "How's your hand?"
She flexed her fingers. "Kinda feels like I was sifting around the ice bucket too long."
He dug into a box under his worktable. "Here." He handed her a reusable hot pack and a towel to wrap around it. He'd bought several when Caitlin had arrived.
"Thanks. Is she okay?"
"Shaken up. Iris, you can't - "
"I know, I forgot."
He toyed with his screwdriver, hating what he was about to say. "Maybe it's not such a good idea, you coming around."
Iris glared. "You're as bad as Barry. Trying to wrap me up in cotton balls for my own good."
"Or maybe it's for Caitlin's good," he fired back. "Iris, you write about metahumans using their powers in big flashy ways, no pun intended. You have no idea what it's like living with them on a daily basis."
"Then maybe it's time I learned."
Cisco's eyes narrowed. "Is that why you come see her? Are you just trying to punch up your blog?"
"No!"
"Then why?"
She fiddled with the hot pack. "Do you know what skin hunger is?"
"Sounds like a horrifying meta power."
"Nothing metahuman about it. Just human. I did a paper on it for a psych class. There are studies that showed that being held and cuddled stimulate chemicals in a baby's brain that help their development. Not only emotional development - overall, body and brain. And babies who didn't get that, or didn't get enough, suffered from this thing called 'failure to thrive.' If it was bad enough, they might die."
"For real?"
"Yeah. We never lose that," Iris said. "Human beings need to be touched. And not like sex, necessarily. Just - touched. A hug, or taking their hand, or - anything really." She looked back at Cisco. "She hasn't been touched in a year and half, Cisco."
"She can't," Cisco said. "Her powers - She could kill you."
"I know," Iris said quietly. "Isn't that just about the saddest thing you've ever heard?"
"Don't feel sorry for her."
"I know you hate her for some reason - "
"I don't hate her. I just - I know her. She'd be furious if she thought you felt sorry for her."
Cisco buried his head in the design, feeling Iris's eyes bore into the side of his head.
