Chapter 1: The Prince of Nothing Charming

Wells

"Dad?" Jessie waves her hands in front of me like she's worried that she's suddenly gone invisible. A quip about how fast she'd have to run to achieve that goal dies on my tongue before it fully forms. I'm getting distressingly low on quips lately.

"Sorry, honey," I say to my daughter, who crosses her arms over her red costume and taps her foot impatiently. An impatience that I can't even begin to judge her for. It runs in the family.

I take my glasses off, rub my eyes, find that this act does nothing to assuage my emotional exhaustion, cloak my mood with the pretense of physical exhaustion, put them back on, and continue with the conversation.

"I know you're tired Dad," Jessie observes, pacing, "We all are. But this latest meta isn't giving us any time to rest. I'm wondering if we can use that formula you came up with to take our new weapon idea and turn it into a reality."

"Yeah, I think it's time," I say, snapping out of my few-minutes-long reverie and getting my game face on. There's no time to think about my own problems when all of Star City is at risk from a flash fire-causing meta with pyromaniacal tendencies bad enough to give Heat Wave pause.

Jessie and I get down to what we do best: sciencing our way to a perfect solution, saving the Central City of Earth 2 from the continued fall-out of the meta's emergence and Zoom's reign of terror. She jots down numbers and figures while I piece the weapon together, ideally constructed to provide the oppositional jolt of energy needed to stop…whatever this new guy's name was.

It's moments like this, realizing we never even gave the fiery villain tearing the city apart a damn nickname, that I actually miss Cisco Ramon from Earth 1. I chortle to myself at the thought.

But there's missing someone you begrudgingly, yet with your whole heart regard as a true friend, and then there's missing that other someone who has a very different type of hold on your heart and soul. The kind of hold that, no matter hard you try to shake off the near-constant thoughts of her, you just can't because it's not humanly possible.

I remember the first moment I realized I was in love with Caitlin Snow, back on Earth 1. We were working late into the night at the lab, and sharing a growing sense of excitement over the success our collaboration was yielding. More than once, more than made any sense to me at the time, our shoulders were brushing, our fingers accidentally crossing paths as we pointed or typed or wrote a hurried note. Then we solved the problem and protected Star City. Again. It never got old.

Caitlin cried out, "Yes!" with ineffable glee and pride, leaping from her chair to give me an unexpected hug. At first, for just a beat, my arms stayed stiffly by my side, my normal and typical reaction to physical affection. I liked to keep myself cut off from that sort of thing, considered myself totally aloof from most human frailty.

Yeah, I know I'm a total idiot. A genius, yes, but also an idiot.

Then the feel of Caitlin, the warmth and softness of her, her scent, her breath, her rapid heartbeat against me, the sensation of her body so unbelievably close to my own, took me over, and before I knew what happened, my arms were wrapped around her in return. From the loud triumph of our success, we lapsed into a strange quiet. The embrace lasted a little longer than it should have. We pulled back with perhaps a shared understanding that neither one of us wanted to, and it was sudden and heady and insatiably intense.

She looked deep into my eyes like it was the first time she was really seeing me, and I thought about stroking her cheek with my thumb, letting it drift down to her lips, tracing their beautiful lines, slipping between them to open them just a tiny bit. I thought about sliding my hand to the back of her neck, lowering my mouth to hers and kissing her like my life depended on it and the world was about to end.

But I didn't. Why didn't I?

I've thought about little else since I forced myself to come back home, pushed by the belief that I needed to be responsible for my own world and the fallout of events that were certainly in large part my fault, a chaos only I could help tame. But that wasn't all.

I had to get away from her. She'd just had her heart torn to pieces by "Jay Garrick," aka Hunter Zolomon's, betrayal, she was traumatized by her kidnapping, and surely she didn't return my feelings, or why had she been with Jay in the first place? She must have loved him, right?

Right?

God, this was haunting me. Her gorgeous, kind, brilliant eyes were searing into my memories nonstop. I couldn't bear to stay on Earth 1 by her side, too afraid to voice my feelings and too tortured by unrequited longing to ever feel comfortable with the situation.

So here I am.

And then a funny thing happens. Jessie stares daggers at the board where she's been scribbling her equations. "Ugh! Dad, I can't solve this. There's only one person who can get their mind around connecting the equation with the device. Someone with the background in both neuroscience and technology to fully conceptualize the effect we need to create on the meta."

"We need Caitlin," I realize, my heart seeming to stop and start again in the space of a breath.

"We've gotta open up a breach," Jessie determines, totally wrapped up in her own determination to crack the case, clueless as to my inner struggle and the mixture of terror and joy that's flooding me at the thought of seeing Caitlin again.

"We're going to Earth 1," I announce.