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Cisco opened his eyes, then immediately squeezed them shut as the light produced a sharp pain, accompanied by a wave of nausea. He instinctively reached for his front shirt pocket and extracted a tablet which he chewed and dry-swallowed with difficulty. The nausea receded after a few moments and he smiled in relief: Thanks, Caitlin—I knew that hangover cure you came up with while things were slow at the lab a few years ago would come in handy.
He opened his eyes and the light was less unpleasant—he was able to make out a white ceiling that didn't look anything like the room they had all been in at Star Labs. The surface he was lying on didn't feel like one of the couches there, either. He glanced to his left and noted that he seemed to be lying on a hotel bed with a rather tacky pattern. He turned to his right, and saw Caitlin lying there, stirring gently. To his relief, they were both fully clothed. He called out, “Caitlin, you'd better wake up—I think we need to regroup.”
Caitlin twitched as if hit with an electrical charge, then opened her eyes briefly before slamming them shut and muttering, “Never doing Jello shots again.”
Cisco chuckled, “Join the club.” He reached into his pocket again, then leaned over her and instructed, “Open your mouth, then chew and swallow this. Enjoy the benefits of your own awesomeness.”
Caitlin followed the directions, and after a few moments her eyes flickered open and she managed a wan smile. “Much better. Still not doing Jello shots ever again.”
“Preaching to the choir, Dr. Snow.” Cisco decided to get up and look around. They were in a small hotel room, with the window being about twenty feet away. Cisco walked over and looked out the window, and it took him a few moments to recognize some mostly familiar landmarks. He turned to face Caitlin—who had risen and was walking up behind him—and commented, “We're in Las Vegas. . .I think. Things don't look quite right.”
Caitlin snorted, “Think Barry changed the time line on us again?”
Cisco shook his head, and elaborated, “If he had, we wouldn't be noticing it.” He picked up the phone book and looked at some of the pages before commenting, “The sentence structure looks a bit off, and I don't recognize some of these references.”
Caitlin took the phone book from Cisco and studied it for a few moments before saying matter of factly, “Earth Twenty-Eight.”
Cisco frowned, then blinked as he remembered, “Oh, that one! That was a weird one. I'd still like to know how Elvis was replaced in their world by a giant--” He trailed off, noticing that Caitlin looked distressed. “What's wrong? We're in another world, but it's one we know about and even if we wound up here without a signaler we can throw one together and reach the others. Nothing to worry about.”
Caitlin looked uncomfortable, and it was a few moments before she mumbled, “I remember kissing you—why do I remember kissing you? Also, some weird music with a lot of bells in it.”
Cisco felt a pang regarding a long-held secret of his, but there was a ready explanation for Caitlin's question. “Somebody had the bright idea of playing 'Spin The Bottle,' and even though we're supposedly the smart ones we said yes.” Caitlin laughed, and Cisco added, “So that explains the kissing--” He frowned, then added, “--but not the weird music with the bells, which I also remember. No clue on that one.”
Caitlin shrugged. “Probably nothing. We're in a hotel room with a bathroom, so I'm going to shower and drink some water to make sure this hangover stays away. You can go after me.”
Cisco smiled, remembering recent events. “I always will.”
Caitlin flushed slightly, and gave him a fond if annoyed look before going into the bathroom and closing the door. Cisco sighed, then decided to search the room for signs of how they had ended up there. His memory of the time after Barry had managed to knock himself out trying to leave the room at super-speed was a blur, but clearly he and Caitlin had opened a portal somehow to end up in Earth Twenty-Eight Las Vegas and had somehow managed to function well enough to get a hotel room. Things could have gone a lot worse—Cisco saw a pile of photos and paperwork on a tabletop and spent a few minutes going through them before turning pale—or maybe not. He sank into a nearby chair and buried his face in his hands until the bathroom door opened and Caitlin called out, “What's wrong, Cisco?”
Cisco opened his mouth, then realized that he couldn't bring himself to actually say it. He pointed at the pile of photos and documents, then buried his head in his hands again. He heard her sifting through the documents, and after a moment she audibly caught her breath, but said nothing else. He looked up and saw Caitlin looking at a photo and a document with an unreadable expression on her face. After a moment, she looked at him and commented quietly, “So—we hopped over to another dimension, then got married in a one of those tacky little places in Vegas where Elvis presides?” Cisco began to interrupt, and Caitlin interjected, “No wait—Elvis never existed in this world, so we were married by some guy in a lobster suit?”
“Um, yeah—and their wedding music sucks, which is what we've been remembering hearing.” Cisco forced himself to look her in the eyes, even though he was pretty sure that he was about to become an ice cube. Her expression remained unreadable, and Cisco decided to press his luck: “On a scale of 1 to 10, just how much do you want to kill me right now?”
Caitlin focused a glare on Cisco for all of half a second before she started laughing so hard that she was forced to stagger over to the bed and lean on it to avoid collapsing. Cisco stared, then waited for Caitlin to compose herself. She looked at him and shook her head in amusement before replying, “Cisco—I just came back from being a super-villain, and we've had a horrible year in all even though it ended better than we had any right to expect. Yeah, a drunken Vegas wedding is a cliché and something we should take to our graves as a secret, but come on—we've been through a lot worse.”
Cisco chuckled, then shook his head self-deprecatingly and said, “You're right, it's a big stupid cliché and not worth getting worked up about.” He turned away from her and sighed, “It's just that you've been through so much lately, and the kissing thing obviously put you off a bit, and now we're literally married—meaning I kissed you again-- and I'm pretty sure that's not want you wanted, Caitlin.”
He felt her come up behind him and whisper, “It's a marriage in another world we'll probably never come back to, Cisco, and we apparently didn't, ahem, consummate it, so probably not even legal yet here.” Cisco shrugged with a casualness he didn't feel, and Caitlin added, “So we can just go home and ignore it, or we can do a bit of research before coming back to have it annulled. Whatever works best for us.”
Cisco couldn't hold back a bitter laugh at that, but he recovered quickly with a muttered, “Yeah, whatever works for us.”
After a brief pause, Caitlin whispered again, “Turn around, Cisco.” He hesitated, and there was just a touch of the Killer Frost harshness in her voice as she added, “Now.”
He turned to her, and the look on her face contained none of the harshness from her tone a moment before as she asked, “You don't want to make that go away, do you?” Cisco started to protest, but Caitlin interrupted him and pressed, “Do you?”
Cisco shrugged again, “It's silly, and it's not what you want. We'll handle it however you want to handle it.” Caitlin shook her head, “I get a feeling that we're not really talking about the ceremony with the ridiculous lobster or the awful music any more, Cisco. What is it that you don't think I want?”
Cisco stood up and walked over to the window and looked out onto the alien yet not skyline as he whispered, “Me.” Caitlin remained silent, and Cisco shook his head in exasperation as he continued, “After all the time we've spent together, all of the things that have gone down, including literally almost fighting to the death, and I lose it over this.” He turned back to her and stated flatly, “I've been in love with you for five years, but I knew I wasn't who you wanted, then or now. I'd accepted that, damn it. And now we're married, for God's sake! Just life playing another joke on Cisco Ramon, I suppose.”
Caitlin just stood there and watched him, compassion naked on her face. Cisco shook his head and snapped, “It doesn't matter. I'm going to take a shower and then we'll go home, and we're not going to let a moment with an idiot in a lobster costume and crappy weird music mess up our lives. You deserve better.”
Cisco started walking past her to flee into the bathroom, but he was reminded at that moment how strong she was when she seized his arm and pulled him into a hard kiss. A long moment of incoherent, random thoughts captured him, though he was pretty sure he heard her murmur, “And so do you.”
Cisco felt her step back and looked up to see her looking at him with an expression he had seen her direct at others, but never at him. His thoughts were still chaotic, and his chosen words were a bit jumbled: “Why do I remember kissing you?”
Caitlin smirked at him and replied, “Because we did it well.” She kissed him again, then stepped back and asked, “Is that one sticking in your memory too?”
Cisco nodded, and stared at her with a sense of confusion and awe. After a moment he had gathered himself enough to ask, “But you were going to try to find out what you wanted to do with your life—this couldn't have been part of the plan.”
Caitlin shrugged and replied, “A plan that won't handle a bit of improvising isn't a very good plan, is it? We'll work out the details later.” She kissed him again, and Cisco decided that letting Caitlin handle the details from there on out would be the best plan ever.
*