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“This isn’t the strangest date I’ve ever been on,” she says.
It’s true, although she probably shouldn’t have said it. A few months ago she grabbed pizza with her back-from-the-dead fiancé, who now shared a soul with a genius physicist, shot fire from his hands, and could fly. That was the kind of date that would take some beating, especially because it had been interrupted by the U.S. military shooting other patrons with tranquilizer darts. It was actually the kind of date that might make a girl declare herself an official hermit, pledged solely to Netflix and Chinese takeout.
But a lot has changed since then, so that now there’s a different man sitting across the table, rubbing the bridge of his nose, eyes anxiously flicking up from the menu to study her face. Different is exactly the right word to describe him, because she’s been to dinner with him before. Sort of. One evening, years ago, she’d met Harrison Wells at the city’s most exclusive restaurant and let him seduce her into working for him on a project that researchers across the country would have killed just to see. And now she’s having dinner with Harrison Wells for both the second and first time.
He smiles a little, teeth tugging at his bottom lip. “That speaks volumes, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t mean…” She’d said it just to say something, really, to try to break the tension. Any sort of social occasion makes her nervous. First dates make her panicky. And this isn’t the kind of date she wants to drown in wine. “I’m glad you wanted to come.”
His smile is wider now, reaching his eyes. “When a woman as far out of my league as you asks me to dinner, I’d have to be a complete idiot to say no, wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t think you know what league you’re playing in.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I really don’t.”
***
None of them had known what, exactly, Cisco’s tech would do. Thrown together with too little time, they’d hoped it would take down the Reverse Flash, and worried that it might kill him. It didn’t take a neurosurgeon to know that attempting to scramble someone’s brainwaves could have disastrous effects, and her heart had almost broken watching him scream, eyes rolling back, blood streaming down onto the yellow suit. And when he’d woken up, tied to the bed with Barry standing watch, he’d been an entirely different person.
They’d doubted, of course. They’d done some major-league doubting. But from the moment he squinted up into the light and whispered “Tess?” she’d known. The brain scans had confirmed it, along with everything Joe could possibly quiz him on. This was Harrison Wells. Just not the Harrison Wells they’d all known.
“Fifteen years,” Harrison had said, fingers pressed to his forehead. “I knew time had passed. But fifteen years…”
He has memories that aren’t his own. But he speaks with a different cadence and an excitement barely anyone had been able to muster in him before. At night he goes home with Joe and Barry, first so they could keep an eye on him, and then because he says his huge, cold, glass house scares the living daylights out of him. “Tess and I lived in a basement the first year,” he’d explained. “We never had enough money for anything. But we had each other.”
Every morning, though, Barry reports back: “He doesn’t sleep. He sits up with my laptop or watching the news till he passes out on the couch.”
He has headaches. Bad ones at first, probably due to the gun Cisco had used on him, and then something that lingers. “It’s the glasses,” he says while she runs another scan. “I’ve worn them since I was five, six. We’re all practically blind in my family. And now…”
Now he has perfect vision. Perfect everything, as far as the scans can tell. Even if he can no longer tap into the speed force, it’s left its effects on his body.
She brushes her fingers against his temples, studying his eyes, which are the one thing she can’t get out of her head. It’s been easy to think of him as a different person. He walks. He brushes his hair forward. He dresses in Barry’s castoffs: jeans and flannel and company t-shirts that stretch tightly around his biceps. Without the glasses, his entire face seems to have changed. But his eyes are still the eyes of the man the world used to know as Harrison Wells, staring out from the cover of his biography on countless bookshelves.
“You need to stop squinting,” she tells him. “Or you’ll-“
“Give myself wrinkles?” He shrugs, but doesn’t turn his head away from her hands. “I’m already fifteen years older than I should be.”
She frowns at that. “I’ve seen the photos. You look great.”
“I can see myself in the mirror.” His hands take hers gently. “But thank you. You’re very, very sweet.”
“He liiiiikes you,” Cisco says, singsong, before she can shush him on the other side of the lab.
“That’s not… He’s not… His wife just died.”
Cisco sneaks a look over to where Harrison and Barry are discussing the treadmill. “Nuh-uh. He said he could perceive time passing. If it hasn’t been fifteen years for him, it’s been at least… five? Ten? Totally acceptable to ask him out.”
“Ask him out?” The last word comes out as a disbelieving squeak.
“But hey, don’t take dating advice from me.” He turns away, absorbed once more in his tablet until Caitlin grabs his arm.
“You really think I should ask him out?”
Cisco glances at her, then at her hand on his arm. “I dunno about really, but I think you want to. Ronnie’s not around. Harrison’s not a supervillain anymore. And sure, he’s older, but not that much older, in his head anyway.”
She’s the one who looks now. Looks at him laughing, nodding along to whatever Barry’s saying, sketching something on one of the scraps of paper that keeps getting blown around the lab. Looks at the set of his shoulders, slim hips, long fingers reaching to adjust glasses that are no longer there.
“Or we could all go out,” Cisco adds. “You have to hear me sing the Pina Colada Song.”
Caitlin spends more time that night than she’d ever admit Googling “How to ask out boys”. She’s been here before, around the time Ronnie Raymond joined STAR Labs, but that had been more of a hopeless crush. He had been unattainable, the way Dr. Wells had also been handsome and brilliant and completely out of her league. But Ronnie had asked her to marry him. And now Harrison, albeit a different Harrison, seems a little more on her level. He’s like a cute lab partner in med school. A boy who might even be slightly overawed by her, although really Harrison is overawed by everything at the moment.
The next day she gets in late – dental checkup – to find Cisco alone in the lab. It’s not an unusual thing really: Barry’s usually at his day job, and when Dr. Wells was here he was often… Well, now she doesn’t want to think what he was actually doing when she’d assumed he was trawling through paperwork.
“Where’s Harrison?” she asks, too deliberately casual.
Cisco looks up and around, as if checking to see that Harrison isn’t actually there, in plain sight. “Think he went down to the pipeline.”
“Alone?”
“He said he needed a walk.”
It can only raise fear in her chest, though, that idea that he isn’t gone, that he still has nefarious plans for the particle accelerator. But it’s silly, she reminds herself. They’ve done the tests. And it’s natural for Harrison to be curious about this immense project he’d only ever imagined before waking up to find it both built and destroyed.
She waits two minutes before excusing herself. Cisco, his safety goggles on, probably doesn’t even notice.
The pipeline doesn’t strike her with panic anymore, but it’s not her favorite place to be, with criminal metahumans just out of sight, and the immense potential, given the right adaptations, for the whole thing to cause mayhem again.
“Harrison?” she calls. If he really had set out for a walk, and who knew how long ago, he could be on the other side of the complex by now. She fingers the phone in her pocket. Harrison has one – a spare that Cisco had lying around in his workshop – but he hasn’t seemed entirely comfortable with it yet. It could be switched off in his pocket. Or lying jammed down between couch cushions in the West house.
But, along the walkway, she can see something that might be more than just the irregular safety equipment and access panels. She sets off toward it. “Harrison?”
It’s him, red-checked flannel over jeans rolled up an inch or two at the bottom. But he’s sitting on the floor, back to the steel wall, knees gathered to his chest and head between them.
“Are you…?” She hurries the rest of the way to him, crouching down when she sees how he’s shaking. And there’s that fear again: that he’s vibrating, affected by the speed force, maybe being taken away from them and replaced by the other soul that had once inhabited his body. But when he raises his head, he has the wide-eyed, frightened expression of a dozen other people she’s seen this way, and she knows that his gasping breaths and the sweat on his forehead have a more normal cause than anything to do with 25th century technology.
She touches his shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m here. It’ll pass.”
He swallows. “I just… I can’t… He’s going to come back. He’s going to do it all over again.”
“He’s not doing anything. You’re having a panic attack. Just try to breathe normally.” She could call Cisco, but what would he do? Maybe freak out about exactly the same possibility, just as they’ve begun to trust this new – or old – Harrison Wells. “Nothing bad’s going to happen.”
“I… I feel like I’m having a heart attack.”
“We’ll run some scans up in the Cortex,” she says. “But I’m sure you’re fine. Better than fine. You’re in better shape than I am.”
He smiles. Coughs. Sucks in another breath. “I doubt that very much.”
Caitlin slips an arm around him as his breathing eases a little and he leans into her. The pipeline hums and hisses. Time passes.
“If it ever happened,” Harrison says finally, his voice clearer, almost normal, “promise me you won’t let him do what he did before. I’d rather be dead.”
“No one’s…” She’s not going to talk about anyone she cares about dying. Not again. Not in the pipeline. “We won’t let anything happen to you. It was just a panic attack. They’re terrifying, I know, but pretty normal compared with everything you’ve been through.”
“Most things are.”
The intercom clicks on somewhere above them. “Helloooo? Does anyone else work here? There’s just been an abduction across town. Barry’s en route but someone has to monitor the roads and police comms, and I only have one set of eyes last time I checked.”
Harrison’s already getting to his feet, a palm pressed against the wall for support as he gives her a hand up. “You go,” he says. “I’ll be there once the room stops spinning.”
Later, after Barry has shown up with a box of donuts a grateful rescuee had thrust upon him, and she’s run all the scans on Harrison yet again, Cisco has even more opinions: “So he’s needy and half naked,” he says, indicating with his half-eaten bearclaw as Harrison pulls his t-shirt back on. “Is there a better time to ask him out?”
“Tell me that’s not when you ask out girls.”
“I’m not saying they ever say yes…”
So she waits two days. Another two days. The weekend. It would be easy to put it off forever, to keep nervously pushing the thought aside, because what if she’s taking advantage of him? What if he says no? What if he says yes and it goes horribly and they have to be awkward around each other for the rest of their lives?
At least, it would be easy if he were less friendly, sweet, and attentive. He helps her carry equipment, asks about her background in genetics research, reads out the funniest parts from the pop culture magazines she buys for him at the supermarket. Sometimes, when she catches him glancing at her shyly from across the room, she half thinks he might ask her out. It would all be so uncomfortable if she wasn’t so incredibly, embarrassingly attracted to him.
“So dinner…” she says to him as they’re playing chess one afternoon. He’s not as practiced as Dr. Wells was, which makes it a more equal match-up. “…is a meal we have here in the 21st century.”
He looks up, already smiling. “Is it?”
“It is. It definitely is.” Her heart is pounding, Barry and Cisco bickering over details of their suit just feet away. “So maybe, you know, as part of your reintegration into modern life… we could grab some sushi? One day? If you wanted? If you even like sushi?”
“I like sushi.”
“Great. Great. So… tomorrow? I’ll pick you up?”
“Caitlin.” His expression is suddenly so serious, so earnest, that she thinks he might have already changed his mind and decided not to go anywhere with a woman who can’t phrase anything as something other than a nervous question. “This is a date, right?”
“A date,” she says, and narrows her eyes just a little, hoping to hit on the right answer. “Yes?”
Harrison smiles again but looks away, back to his doodle of what looks like some kind of reactor. “And you’re single?”
Okay. Fair question. “Ronnie and I… Yes. I’m single. Free and single. Absolutely.” Which raises another question, unfortunately. “And you…”
He nods, meeting her eyes for just a moment. “Yes. I am.”
The next night, he’s waiting for her outside the house. They’re going to have to get him a car, or at least investigate the garage on his property. Although first they should probably find a way to stop him sleeping on the Wests’ couch every night. He’s a fifty-year-old man who possibly has millions in the bank. And yet this feels something like a misjudged prom date.
He looks nice, though: charcoal gray suit, a blue tie that highlights his eyes, his hair tamed as much as it ever can be.
“That doesn’t look like Barry’s,” she says as he straps himself in and leans over to kiss her cheek.
“Detective Thawne was very helpful. As was the black credit card with my name on it. Which I think we have to put to good use tonight.”
If anyone recognizes him in the restaurant, there are no questions, no confrontations, not even any staring that she can see. Eventually Harrison will have to present himself to the world as someone who can walk, let alone all the other differences, but now isn’t the time for press conferences or interviews. Probably the waiter only sees them as exactly like any other couple (the idea that people might assume Harrison is her father just seems absurd). Any other couple at all on their first date, with nervous tension in the air.
“How’s your head?” she asks.
There’s a safe question. “Not bad. At least not since I popped two Excedrin before I left. I’d think I should just do what he did and wear fakes, but-”
“No,” she says.
“No,” he agrees.
The food is good and the conversation easy once they settle into talking about research, her family, and the team’s adventures over the past few months. “You’re telling me we could be at a karaoke bar?” Harrison interrupts, sashimi halfway to his mouth. “I love karaoke. At least Tess always told me I did. I could never remember much the next morning…”
“I’m not sure Central City is ready for Harrison Wells drunkenly singing Grease.”
“Grease? No no no. But I do a mean Build Me Up Buttercup.”
It’s not like waking from a coma, he tells her as they both jab their spoons at a bowl of green tea ice cream they’ve agreed to share. It’s like recovering from a drug addiction and seeing the world clearly for the first time in years, as well as the havoc you wrought when you weren’t yourself. The other Harrison Wells built up a reputation as a technological superstar, but he also caused chaos, killing seventeen people on the public record, and pretended to need a wheelchair. This Harrison can’t simply duck back into the life he had before, back when he was a researcher nobody knew, with a bright, hopeful future. He’ll have the weight of the Reverse Flash on him forever.
“You’re going to do great things yourself,” she tells him, laying a hand over his. “With Barry. With new technology.”
When he shakes his head, it’s with resignation. “I’m not him, Caitlin. He was brilliant. He knew the future. I don’t even know the past. I’m sure I can be Cisco’s assistant, but that’s about all.”
“It’s only been a couple of weeks. You’ll adjust. And you built this accelerator in his timeline too. You did it all without being from the future or having superspeed or any of it.”
“I had Tess,” he says.
“And you have us. You have all of us.”
He turns his hand so he can grasp hers. “I have you.”
It’s a first date. She’s supposed to drop him off back at the Wests’ and have an awkward moment before he kisses her on the cheek and says goodnight. Even with Ronnie, when she’d been mentally tearing his clothes off for weeks, she’d yawned and said it was getting late. In her car, though, she switches on the engine and hesitates, the direction unclear until she turns to ask him, and there he is gazing at her in the half-light of the parking lot, lips just parted.
She snaps off her seatbelt and leans across to kiss him, the handbrake jabbing her thigh, his mouth sweet on hers. Never has she more seriously considered how good sex on her back seat might be, even if he’s far too tall and this is far too public and in any case she is not having her first time with Harrison Wells on top of a stack of medical journals and jumper cables.
“We could, um…” Harrison cards his fingers through his hair. “Apparently my house has biometric access. We could go there.”
His house also has a roaring fire, an incredibly well-stocked bar, and probably zillion-thread-count sheets. But she’s not having her first time with him in the Reverse Flash’s bed either.
“My house has a pretty rusty lock and an alarm system that sometimes randomly beeps at 2am,” she says.
He sighs with relief. “Sounds wonderful.”
The last man – the last person – in her apartment was Barry, who’d brought her here at superspeed in the middle of the night. Sometimes getting to her bedroom and undressed in under a second would be more than useful. But tonight it’s nice to have all those minutes to look forward to.
She unknots his tie at the door, his arms wrapped around her, this kiss easier, deeper, longer. Without it, though, he’s the stark monochrome of a man they both want to forget. Harrison shrugs out of his jacket as she reaches past him to turn the lock. “Coffee?” she asks.
His eyes are fixed on her lips. He shakes his head slightly before remembering what language is. “No. Thank you.”
Her phone dings with a new message, and she slips it from her bag, because actual emergencies do happen. Cisco: Good date? Answer SOS if date sucks and/or he’s secretly a supervillain. She texts back NOT FUNNY, hoping Harrison hadn’t seen any of that, but he’s already browsing her living room shelves, a finger trailing along the spines of books.
“Sure about that coffee?” A spell seems to have been broken.
“I’m sure.” The finger pauses. He tilts his head and pulls out a slim volume. “Hello.”
Its cover is an unidentifiable tan. “What’s that?”
He’s flipping through it. “Me.” He looks up and smiles. “The real me. One of our articles. Morgan and Wells. 1998.”
“I think I’ve got everything you ever published here.” She’ll have to start drawing a line between the pre-2000 Harrison and everything that came after, though.
“It’s nice,” he says, fingertips against the print. “Makes me a little more confident I actually exist. We’ll have to put something together. Snow and Wells. 2015.”
“Not much of what we do at S.T.A.R. Labs is publishable.”
The journal slides neatly back into place. “I’m sure we can make time for a side project. In between saving the city from certain doom, of course.”
She could get used to seeing this side of him: the one winningly pleased with himself, smile broad, his hair still tousled from the car. She could see herself falling hard for this side of him, so long as that other side can be pushed far from her mind. “We can brainstorm tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. Right.” He looks down at himself, at his shirtfront, then back at her. “Something wrong?”
“You need to wear more colors,” she tells him. “But for now you can take those off.”
Probably she’s never been this confident with a man while sober, but once his shirt lies crumpled on her couch, her anxieties seem to have disappeared. No one with his face should ever make her feel safe, not anymore, but even his eyes seem different now, his hands cupping her cheeks while hers stray over his back, over skin that seems so much safer than clothes.
He’s still kissing her when he toes out of his shoes, unloops his belt, and steps out of his slacks. “Better?” he asks.
Muscled arms, flat belly, and… bright red boxer-briefs. He holds his arms out to his sides. Shrugs. “Go Team Flash?”
Her bedroom is neat and tidy, which she’d done yesterday night, pretending it was more of a chore than preparation for their date. Buying condoms and stashing them by the bed? Less easy to write off as spring cleaning.
He unzips her dress, unclasps her bra. His hands on her are warm, gentle, as she leans back into him, the play of his thumbs over her nipples awakening a new warmth down between her legs, where she badly needs him to be. “Harry…” She twists around. “Does anyone call you Harry?”
“I tried to get them to when I was a kid. Harrison always sounded pretty weird before Star Wars. And… Cait?”
“Mm hm.” She pushes the dress down from her hips, guides his hand lower.
His body only seems harder in her soft, soft bed, with its fluffy comforter and mounds of pillows, and the mattress that’s probably terrible for her back but great to sink into at the end of the day. Harrison’s slighter than Ronnie – most people are – yet still everything she wants, strong and tender, kissing her without smothering, working his way downward until his mouth… Oh. She arches up into him, crying out with delight at it having been so, so long since anyone tasted her there. She can feel him laughing as she tangles her fingers in her hair and spreads her thighs, lying back against her pillows and wondering just how loud she’ll have to be for the neighbors to know she’s brought a boy home at last.
She’s already undone by the time he tears open a condom wrapper, her body pulsing, hot and wet from his tongue, from the curl of his fingers inside her. The loss of contact as he sits back and rolls it on is maddening, the only saving grace knowing how aroused he is too, and the thought that later she might get to return the favor.
“Is this okay?” His thighs are under hers, his cock a lovely pressure inside her.
“I…” It’s great. It really is. But with anyone else she would already have said… She looks up. “Harder?” she asks.
His eyes widen. “Oh,” he says. “Okay. Good.”
Good boys, she reminds herself, like to fuck too.
She doesn’t have to ask him to stay afterward. He retrieves pillows from the floor and gathers her up in his arms, and says, “Is this okay?” again. She’d wonder how to break him of that habit if she didn’t find it so endearing. So she squeezes him tight and kisses his chest and hopes he’ll still be there in the morning.
Her phone wakes her up.
The sunlight shining in is bright – how did she ever sleep through that? – and she has to stretch all the way over Harrison to stop her phone jumping around her nightstand.
Cisco: You’re late. Tied to railroad tracks?
She’s about to text back something scathing, but Harrison turns beneath her, squinting into the sunshine and smoothing a hand over his wild hair. “Hey… g’morning.”
“Hi.” She holds up her phone as an excuse for why she’s lying across him.
“Oh. Weather Wizards? Alternate realities? Killer bees?”
Caitlin scoots back over to her side of the bed, nestling close to him. He smells nice. Feels nice. “Just the guys, probably wondering which one of us kidnapped the other one.”
“Well, we are in your bedroom.”
“But I’m young and innocent.”
He laughs. “You’re one of those, definitely.”
She nudges him in the ribs and lifts the phone. “Smile.”
It’s not the greatest selfie she’s ever taken – half asleep, hair in disarray, broadcasting her night of debauchery to the world – but the wink and thumbs up that Cisco sends in reply might just be worth it.