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One day, Barry arrives home from work to see a complete stranger frying chicken on his stove.
Through the half-open door, he catches a glimpse of messy, curly brown hair pulled into a loose bun—definitely a woman, then—and a flash of white from the lab coat she’s wearing. Even if her back is facing him, he’s certain that he doesn’t know anyone whose back resembles this particular back. And besides, he thinks grimly, most of the people he knew died years ago in the second Impera outbreak.
For a moment, he considers that maybe what he’s seeing is a hallucination. After all, it’s been a terribly long day. He’d just returned to what was left of his lab at the CCPD to dissect a few fresh dead bodies afflicted with the virus, hoping to find something that would lead to a cure, but despite his best efforts, he still hasn’t discovered anything he could work with. He wonders when the constant frustration, the rising hysteria of the public, and the people dying around him will finally take a toll on his sanity.
But then again, he wonders whether hallucinations could reproduce the mouth-watering aroma of fried chicken so accurately. It’s been so long since he’d taken a whiff of one—it must have been a year or so ago, when governments all over the world recalled all meat products for fear that the virus came from animals—so naturally, Barry rather missed eating meat. He’s also rather sick of beetroots, which he hadn’t even heard of before the government declared it safe, and which he’d been eating for all his meals for the past week. He reckons he’s eaten more vegetables in the past year or so than he ever will in a normal, pre-Impera lifetime.
In any case, he has to make a decision about this very realistic hallucination, who is now humming what sounds like “Summer Lovin’”, but it’s so off-key that he can’t say for sure.
He cautiously pushes the door to his kitchen open and clears his throat.
The girl startles and twists around to face him, blinking up at him with big, brown eyes.
“Um, hi,” she says, slipping two pieces of chicken onto a plate. She nervously dries her hands on her—his—apron. “My place just blew up, so I hope you don’t mind if I crash here for a bit… Would you like some chicken? It’s a bit of a long story, so I took the liberty of preparing real food as courtesy.”
Huh. Not a hallucination, then. Besides, he should have considered that his hallucinations probably won’t sing off-key since he himself has near perfect pitch.
He crosses his arms and eyes the chicken suspiciously, but then his stomach’s grumbling, and now that she’s facing him he realizes that she’s rather pretty, and so he finds himself having a hard time keeping up a facade of stern suspiciousness. “Your place blew up.”
She bites her lip. “Well, technically, S.T.A.R. Labs blew up. I used to work there as a geneticist until they had to close down from lack of funds. When they did, I started living in my lab to continue researching.” A faint frown crosses her face. “But then a bunch of crazy conspiracists decided to get rid of it for good, I guess.”
A geneticist, huh? Barry suppresses his surprise. Back during the first days of the outbreak, geneticists were the stars of the scientific community—they’d gotten all the funding, for starters—but when most of them had given up on cracking the genetic code of Impera, the public had turned on them. Everyone started suspecting that the well-funded labs were where the virus was engineered in the first place, and nearly every geneticist who worked in a prominent research facility was fired. He didn’t think that there were any left still working on a cure, especially since most of the world’s funds now went to constructing habitable space stations on the moon as a haven for the uninfected.
“Oh,” he says instead. He begins to notice that her lab coat is slightly singed in places, and that her clothes are worn and shabby. It doesn’t make her any less pretty, though, and he’s even more charmed by her tenacity. Clearly he has no sense of self-preservation—he just came from examining infected dead bodies today and now he’s slightly attracted to the stranger who just broke into his home. “You’re not injured, are you?”
“No, I managed to make it out on time,” she says. She shuts off his stove and hangs the apron on the hook where he usually hung it, and he’s both impressed and intimidated by how well she already knows his kitchen. “I’m not infected, either, if that’s what you’re worried about. See?” She holds up her hands. “No spots.”
“Alright,” he allows. “So… What’s a former geneticist doing breaking into someone’s home?”
“I didn’t break in,” she hedges. “Your balcony door was open.”
He raises a brow. “So you regularly let yourself in stranger’s houses and cook them contraband meat for dinner?”
“No! No, of course not,” she says. “This is the first time. It’s a really long story, Barry, but I swear I have a perfectly good reason for being here—”
“—wait, how do you know my name?”
She has the decency to flush. “I… Well, I looked around a bit.”
He stares at her. If she isn’t even prettier when she’s blushing, he would’ve thrown her out of his apartment already.
“I’m glad you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt,” she says with a sly smile, and Barry realises belatedly that he’d actually said that out loud.
He’s an idiot.
He groans and a blush creeps up his own neck. Jesus, he must be really exhausted. “Look, miss—”
“It’s Dr. Caitlin Snow,” she says holding out her hand. “I already know you. You’re Barry Allen. You work for the CCPD.”
“Yes, well, thank you for doing my introduction for me, Dr. Snow,” he says, but without the snark he’d intended, not when she’s smiling at him like that. “Look, no matter how pretty you are, you still can’t break into people’s homes.”
She’s still smiling. “Of course not.”
“And you most definitely can’t snoop around.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“It’s just very wrong to invade someone’s privacy.”
“I completely understand.”
They stare at each other for a few moments.
Barry finally sighs in defeat and pulls a chair out. “Alright, Dr. Snow. Why, exactly, are you here?”
She grins in triumph and settles on the seat across him. “Well,” she says, folding her hands together and taking a deep breath. “I think… I think I may have discovered a cure for Impera.”
. . .
Over the next hour or so, Caitlin explains the extent of her research—how she’d studied plants for a year since they’re generally immune to the virus, how she’d found a way for the immune system to fight Impera, and how she’d found a way to stop Impera from replicating its genetic material if it did manage to get through the body’s immune system. After she’d created the serum, she’d experimented on rats and chickens, and found that if she’d injected the cure immediately after the symptoms started showing, it could still save the infected animal. But her vaccines are extremely volatile and had to be stored in a freezer or they’d deteriorate, so when the explosion at S.T.A.R. Labs happened, she’d immediately grabbed her stash and made her way to the first place that still had electricity—which happened to be Barry’s apartment building.
Barry listens to her with increasing awe, and he finds it hard to believe that this one woman in front of him managed a feat that nearly all geneticists had given up on—and with limited resources, too.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she says, some time after she’d finished her story. Barry still hasn’t said a word, and her brow creases in concern. “I promise I’m not trying to infect you. I’ve been eating the chicken I’ve experimented on for the past month and nothing’s happened to me so far…”
He finally lets out a chuckle and shakes his head. “No, it’s not that,” he says. “Despite you breaking into my home—”
“—like I said, no such thing happened—”
“—I actually trust you,” he smiles at her. “It’s not about the chicken. It’s just… Well. You’re pretty amazing.”
She flushes. “So… I take it I’m forgiven for my intruding on your privacy?”
He feigns a confused look. “What intrusion of privacy?”
She laughs at that, and he grins in return. He decides that, second only to saving the world, his goal in life should be to make her laugh. “I’m really sorry, though,” she says. “I was so focused on getting the vaccines and the samples into a freezer that I’d completely forgotten my manners.”
“Yeah, I mean, by all appearances, you broke into my house and then tried to murder me with fried chicken, but it’s all good.”
“Cooking fried chicken for someone is hardly the most efficient way of killing them.”
“Do enlighten me on what is.”
She rolls her eyes at him, but she’s smiling as she gets up to fetch him the plate of chicken.
“Here, help yourself. It’s getting cold.”
“This could very well be my last supper.”
She shrugs. “True. It could be my last-ditch attempt to get this apartment all for myself.”
He narrows her eyes at her in mock-suspicion, and she starts laughing again. “I was kidding. Go on, I’ve been hearing your stomach grumble since you came in.”
He finally does take a tentative bite, and he makes an embarrassing groan when the meat gives way between his teeth and the flavour oozes onto his tongue. He misses this. He misses meat. He misses joking around with someone like the world isn’t about to end. And he really, really misses human company. Ever since his parents and the Wests passed away, he hasn’t interacted with a lot of people aside from the few men left in the CCPD, and he’s become more suspicious of anyone he doesn’t know. Somehow, with Caitlin, he feels like he’s making a friend the same way he used too before Impera happened.
When he’s polished off three pieces, he wipes his mouth with a table napkin and smiles at her. She’s finishing up with the dishes. “Best meal I’ve had,” he tells her. “I think I can die happily now.”
She wipes her hands on a towel and smiles. “I’m glad.”
“So,” he says, standing up and stretching, “what’s your next move?”
“Well,” she says, “I’d need to find a place to live in—”
He waves her off. “You can crash here.”
“You really don’t have to—”
“Look, you can save the world with that, and I want to help you in any way I can,” he says firmly. “We can split the bills if you want.”
Her face lights up with relief. “Thank you.”
“Hey, I also get free meals with you around,” he returns, grinning. He moves to stand beside her to help her dry the dishes. “So, what’s next?”
“Well, I know the vaccine and the cure works for animals, but I haven’t actually tested it on people,” she says, biting her lip. She looks dejected now. “I need to see how the vaccine interacts with an infected human cell, but I don’t have access to the quarantined places, and now I don’t have a lab, so…”
“Oh, I have a lab,” he offers. “I mean, it’s pretty run-down, but I still have most of the reagents for processing DNA—”
“—you do?”
“—and I just harvested a couple of cells from fresh cadavers awhile ago, so there’s a small chance that the virus is still ali—mmph—”
Barry finds himself unable to speak, not with Caitlin’s lips on his. He stiffens in surprise, and then just when his brain finally screams Kiss her back, you fool! she pulls away abruptly, embarrassed.
“Um, that was—that was completely inappropriate, I’m sorry. I just got excited, and…”
But then Barry finds his body belatedly obeying his brain’s order, and before he knows it he’s wrapping an arm around her waist and kissing her back and she’s placing a hand on his arm and standing on her tiptoes to deepen the kiss, and when they finally pull apart for air they’re both incredulous and breathless.
Barry licks his lips and clears his throat. “Well.”
“Well,” she returns.
“Well, now we’re both equally inappropriate.”
“Yes, that should neutralise the inappropriateness of it. Two negatives make a positive, and all that.”
“We should, uh, be inappropriate more often. If I’d known that telling girls I was keeping dead bodies made them want to do inappropriate things to me—”
She slaps his arm and laughs. “You’re incorrigible.”
“You seem to like it.”
“Only because you seem to like me,” she returns, her tone teasing.
“Well, a little bit,” he confesses, rubbing the back of his neck and smiling sheepishly. “You are a very pretty trespasser.”
She gives him a fond smile and bites her lip. “You know,” she says softly, “I’m glad it was your apartment I broke into.”
He grins. “So now you admit that you broke in.”
“Oh, shut up,” she laughs. “I was trying to save the world.”
“And you will,” he says. He gently pushes the stray tendrils of her from her face and presses a kiss to her temple. She leans into his touch and smiles.
“No, silly,” she murmurs. “We will.”
. . .
The next day, they rise before dawn. Caitlin makes them chicken seasoned with beetroot sauce for breakfast. He teases her for her off-key singing in the shower, but he effectively shuts up when he sees her in his clothes, and they spend quite some time kissing. Barry’s already trailing open-mouthed kisses down her neck before she remembers that they’re supposed to put on their protective gear and head out to do More Important Things, and he almost suggests that they never leave his room, but fortunately for the world, doing More Important Things wins out.
Before they leave the house, Barry checks if all doors and windows are locked, and Caitlin locks the balcony door herself.
Then Barry takes her hand, and she smiles at him, and for the first time in years he actually thinks that they have a fighting chance of saving the world. Even if they’re going through roads littered with corpses, even if conspiracists are burning buildings again down the block, Barry feels invincible.
Hope, he thinks, looking at her, makes him feel invincible.
It’s not much, but it’s a start, and he believes that it makes all the difference.