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Vibe had always been a mystery to her.
She had felt the air of a secret the first time she had seen him in action. Like a painted figure on a canvas of alleyway. Like fiction coming straight from a comic book. Like a ghost, hidden deep in her memory from another life she couldn't catch another glimpse of. It was ridiculous and delusional to ponder but she swore she knew him somehow, deeper than her friends at Star Labs and more significantly than any lover she had ever had. And once, when he had carried her through swirling blue to safety, she had seen the magnetic pull of his brown eyes. She met them and swore that his eyes were filled with recognition too.
She took that first moment of silence to pull him closer, offering him an exit from the lonely life of solo vigilantism.
"I work with the Flash," she told him. "You would be a great addition to the team."
He seemed like he almost considered her, flashing his exposed eyes toward her before covering them again. But yet, he held his ground. "I don't do teams," he said, staring at her through lit goggles. "I'm sorry."
"Nobody can do this life alone." At least, she knew she couldn't.
His tone was firm and sincere. "I can."
She made the mistake of turning her head for a moment, about to offer him a cup of coffee. When she turned he was gone, through another flash of blue color before she could ask for his name or give him her own.
Nobody really knew anything about him. Even The Citizen had very few articles on the man who could breach through portals. Very few had managed to capture a photo, being that the second he was seen, he would disappear again through another hole. He was fast. But more than that, he was a secret. Nobody had a clue where he would go. Where those cosmic pathways lead. Where he lived or what he was truly like. Nobody could catch a glimpse before he would disappear into nothing again.
There was really only a handful of information she knew about Vibe, but really, it told her a lot. He seemed incredibly kind. Incredibly protective and warmhearted. She had seen glimpses of his careful way of talking to the children he would save and the dedication to stand outside late night clubs and be there to make sure drunken citizens got home safely. He was the only superhero she had ever witnessed who would sometimes pull their opponent into a hug and tell them that he would be there for them since nobody else ever was. The little details she knew had her wrapped up in the thought of him, and there was nothing that could pull her away.
All of it was a rare occasion though, and it had been quite some time since she caught a glimpse of his silhouette, ghostlike but very much real in his tight leather pants and his long wavy hair.
But she did see him again. He was passing through a breach one day when she was walking out of Jitter's. She had the thought to chase after him, wondering if the breach would allow her to step through and follow, but it closed before she could blink, only to leave her staring at a blank brick wall.
She sighed, glad for the distraction from the frozen cup of coffee that she was grasping, solid now under the touch of the cold hands that made her sick with dread.
There was a dazzling haze about him, she realized, watching him stand in the middle of the pipeline.
The way he would talk. The way his lips would move up to smile. The brush back of his long dark hair. The sweet softness of his patience with her team. The sway of his steps. The confidence of his stride. All of him, dazzling like a diamond in the corner of her dark eyes, lighting a fire to the coolness of her cheeks.
But despite how very dazzling, he was hidden. Cloaked by his wonky goggles. shadowed by his suit. Darkened behind his avoidance of every detail he could offer them. He was in a foggy haze, hidden by the persona of Vibe from the people he should have known he could trust with an identity.
But he helped them quite kindly with Zoom, opening a few breaches for them and then creating a device to help them open more on their own. He was bright and open to help, but he wouldn't let his mask fall.
He was just about to leave them, when he paused at her, giving her a quirky little grin.
"Doctor Caitlin Snow," he said simply, sunny despite the serious tone of his words. "There's something very, very strange about you."
She was startled, not sure how to take it as he walked away from her, disappearing through a breach at the end of the cortex.
She swallowed, lifting up her hand to feel the cold building up. He was right. There was something very strange about her, and she wasn't quite sure how she was going to stop it.
She took a leave of absence to go visit her mother, hoping to get answers.
She hadn't expected the fear that had filled her mother's eyes. And even more, she hadn't expected the recognition. But it was clear as day that her mother knew more than she let on, but she didn't comment. After running a series of tests, her mother sent her on her way, promising to call when she had the necessary results. But Caitlin could tell, by the fear in her eyes, that the results would not be good no matter what her mother may find.
She needed a distraction, so she found herself in a downtown bar, sipping on something far stronger than she was used to. Losing track of time. Losing worries fast and balance faster.
It was strange to wake up the next morning in her apartment, feeling the phantom hand of Vibe holding onto her arm to steady her.
But then, when she thought about it, letting herself believe it wasn't just some fever dream, it seemed more and more possible.
It was so vivid.
The tilted room.
The steady hand.
The muffled way she said, "Vibe?"
The way he laughed. "Like the vigilante?"
The way she laughed senseless in response.
"I'm Cisco."
"Cisco," she mumbled, stumbling into his arms.
It was clear to her. The speed of travel, leaving her sprawled out on grey pillows and a fuzzy white comforter. The glass of water that he left sitting on her side table. The way he laughed angelically, saying "Sweet dreams, Doctor Snow."
She felt awful when she woke up.
But she was certain she had spoken to Vibe. She was certain she had seen him again.
Her only regret was that once she took a shower and managed to somewhat relieve her hangover, she couldn't remember what he had said his name was.
She knew she was a monster long before she watched Julian Albert's outstretched hand shatter into shards before her.
She had felt the drive, the marvelous rush, the alluring lust for power. She had felt it deeply like a cold stone sitting in the gap where her heart used to be, warming her up despite the avalanche flowing through her. And it hurt in a way that made her sick, but when she let herself be swayed by the bitter winds, she found freedom in it. She felt ease in accepting her monstrous identity.
But this, this was far from a feeling. This was a friend, on trembling knees, begging her for mercy. Begging for the life of his other hand, cowering below like a frightened child. At this, she felt herself smile, reached out to touch his remaining wrist. Intent on causing harm.
And she had the audacity to call herself a doctor.
"Caitlin, don't do this. I can cure you!"
"I don't want your cure."
Caitlin is dead, she thought to herself, feeling cool pressure drip from her fingertips. And I want that.
A glassy blue hand shook underneath her grip, as Julian shrieked, sounding like a forgotten ghost in the night. In her darkened vision, bringing the dragon out to slay, she felt a wicked smirk peel at her lips. She loved it and she didn't want to stop.
But then, a simple sound came forth in her eardrums, causing her clenched hand to pull away, allowing Julian to fall back into the snow.
"Stop!"
She turned, and it was him, Vibe, standing in the shadows. He peered at her for a moment, extending a hand forward, lit up by his gauntlet.
She turned her face away from him, shielding herself with her long silver hair. It took everything in her to bury the shame rising in her pale cheeks, imprinted by Caitlin screaming from inside. But Frost directed her fingers, producing a quick blade of ice, and puncturing Julian through his side.
"No!" Shrieked Vibe, placing a hand over his mouth as he gasped.
Just as soon, she felt her body fly backward, like a dart on a board against the warehouse wall. Despite Vibe's hidden eyes, she could feel them bore into her, as she lingered there, feeling energy pin her up as he approached her. He snarled, clenching his teeth as he threw her back again, just missing the wall. She rolled sideways, dragging her body with weakened wrists, heaving as she slid toward a back exit. But he had plummeted against another wall the moment she almost landed on her feet again.
Two streams met at once and they stood across from each other, like tug-a-war, testing to see who would break first.
And it hurt.
She never knew Vibe could hurt.
She never wanted him to see her like this.
So in a split moment of redirected fire, as she slid away from him, she created a smooth pathway, carrying her upward and out the busted window.
And he followed her, slipping in and out of his breaches just as fast as her smooth trail and the only reason she escaped was that Frost let her free, causing her to stumble into an alleyway all alone.
As Caitlin let her head rest against a steel wall, she shivered, horrified that she just made herself an enemy of Vibe.
"Leia, please," Cisco said softly to his feline, sighing in exasperation as she sat down proudly on his keyboard.
The kitten looked at him with wide eyes as if warning him that his actions were not wise. But Cisco pushed his kitten to the side, slanting the keyboard so that it was facing him. Against her protests, he hovered over the image on the screen, unable to keep himself from staring.
Killer Frost stared back at him, with an eerie familiarity in her smile, gnawing in the back of his mind and making him restless. he knew her from somewhere, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t seem to figure out exactly where.
He had been there when Killer Frost had nearly murdered that man in cold blood. If it wasn't for the careful hands and vast intelligence of Doctor Caitlin Snow he would have died that day.
If Killer Frost would have angled the icicle in even the slightest variation, he would have died before Caitlin could get to him.
He wasn’t sure why the case had him so obsessed, but he would revisit it from time to time. Much more often than he did any other case. Despite the weight of his responsibility, he tried to keep his civilian life separate from the vigilante one. If he dwelled too much of things he had seen as Vibe, he may never function properly as a human being. He couldn’t allow things to become too personal.
But boy oh boy was he bad at it. He was horrible at remaining stoic and passive. He simply felt too much to not make things personal. And that was a bad thing, but it was the price of operating solo. He had no way to release it all besides by blasting criminals into back-alley walls. And while he relished in that feeling, sometimes he found himself so wrapped up in his feelings that he would convince himself that he could save them, in all their corruption, and cure them.
He had never felt this as strongly as he did for Killer Frost.
After what happened with that civilian, Killer Frost had vanished. Some people began to believe she had never been there to begin with. Julian was no longer in the city and many people never bothered to see if he was a real person at all. Killer Frost could have easily been a fever dream, but Cisco knew she must be real.
And he was right. A few months back and there was a sighting of her, strong and furious, shielding a group of children from gunfire. Her eyes were chaotic, but her determination didn’t waver. She was all on her own and she was nothing short of heroic.
It began to happen, again and again, the sightings of her. For a while people were wary of her return, but they quickly began to see that something had changed. Cisco wasn’t shocked in the slightest and found himself watching the videos, throwing his feet on to his desk with delight, pride emanating in his eyes.
He had been right about her.
And despite his better judgment, and the furious look in Leia’s eyes, he was determined to find her.
Days passed to weeks and Vibe was gone as if he had never existed, until one January night in the chilly Star Labs parking deck when Caitlin felt eyes watching her toy around with the keys in her coat pocket. She swished around, ready to blast the intruder with a fleet of icicles but stopped instantly when she saw the blue light cloaked in the shadows, just two lit up goggles piercing the night. She lowered her hands, catching the smirk on his lips and the steady pace of his quickening steps approaching her. He wasn't startled by the icy demon inside of her. In fact, he looked intrigued by the blue color that burned away at her dark eyes.
"It's you," she mouthed to herself, feeling Killer Frost slip away from her sparkling chocolate brown. Frost feared him, knowing that Vibe held the kind of power that could obliterate a monster such as herself. It was weird, to feel fear grip her own heart, as Frost became one with her, knowing there was no greater threat to her than the man standing across from them both.
"Killer Frost," he said, with a bit of malice bitter on his tongue. " You're Killer Frost."
"Who did you expect?" another voice came rolling out of her.
He laughed. "Not the pretty and sweet girl I know from Star Labs."
She melted into herself and took a tentative step toward him, linking her fingers behind her back. "Go on then," she said, fixing her eyes on him. "Go on and put me down."
"Do they know?" he asked simply. "Your friends? Star Labs? The Flash?"
"They will never know."
"So you're living a double life?"
"A cursed life."
"Oh," he said softly, tearing his goggles away from his face to reveal kind eyes, much kinder than the glowing blue would allow. She supposed they both wore the frightening mask of glowing blue. "I'm sorry about that, Doctor Snow."
"Caitlin," she said, offering him a hand. He took it slowly, squeezing her palm with his gloved fingers.
"Cisco."
"It's a pleasure to meet you."
"And you." He opened his mouth to say more when an alarm sounded from his watch, diverting his attention away from her. "I'm sorry, I've gotta go." And like that, as if she had never spoken a word to him at all, she stood alone in the chilly parking deck.
Caitlin was a stranger to late-night visits from superheroes on her roof. But despite the initial horror of Vibe tapping on her bedroom window, she found herself waving him in. She had a stupid, dopey grin that made her look like an overly caffeinated fangirl rather than the professional doctor he had talked to in the parking deck. Regardless, he didn't seem to notice as he slid down and made himself comfortable on the chair by her wall.
"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I don't usually knock on bedroom windows. But you weren't answering your front door and I really needed to talk to you."
"My doorbell is broken," she said simply, shrugging her shoulders. "What would you want to talk to me about?"
"Something you said the day I met you."
She crossed her legs as she sat on her bed, touched that he still remembered the day they had met since they had only interacted for a few minutes.
"You said that nobody can do this life alone."
She nodded. "It's true."
"Says Killer Frost, the solo vigilante."
She shut her mouth, realizing he had a point.
"But it's true."
She looked up, perplexed. "You want to join the Flash?"
"No," he said. "But I don't want to be alone anymore. And since you've been doing this solo act all alone and I've been doing my thing alone, I was wondering if you'd consider being alone together."
"You want me as a sidekick?"
"As a partner."
She simply watched him for a while, surprised by the encouraging smile on his lips, in disbelief over the offer altogether.
She could still remember the heat in his eyes when they had fought, burning out the rock in her heart, melting the flesh around her ribcage with shame. It had made her feel so dirty that Frost had pushed her way out and dropped Caitlin alone in that freezing alleyway. She had always assumed he had hated her by the way his eyes bored into her. By the way he had even said the words “killer frost” in that parking deck.
But whatever hatred had been stirred up in those two instances, had seemingly vanished from his eyes now.
His offer in itself had her mind racing. It was so much to think on and she hadn’t ever considered it possible. Vibe joining Team Flash had made sense to her, but her joining Team Vibe had never even crossed her mind.
While she loved her friends at Star Labs, they didn’t have as much sympathy for Killer Frost, which is why she hadn’t told them about it. They were the only people who knew what really happened to Julian and she was too full of shame to ever admit that she had almost been the one to kill him.
Vibe offered her his hand without wavering, a bright certainty in his eyes that made Caitlin feel off balance.
"I'm not stable,” she told him, half protesting. “I'm still learning to work with Frost instead of against her."
“You seem to have a decent amount of control to me.”
She shook her head fiercely. “Every day is a battle. She has to feed off of something and that’s why I have to go out there and beat up criminals. If I don’t redirect her she might just go out and kill everyone.”
He nodded. “I know what you’re saying, but you’re a doctor Caitlin. Julian survived because there was enough Caitlin inside of Frost to direct that blade. You saved his life.”
“And he almost died because there was a little too much Killer Frost inside of Caitlin Snow,” she said sharply, turning away from him.
He looked thoughtful for a moment as he was reconsidering his offer, but his face didn’t show any resolve. “Consider me up for a challenge then.”
His words hurt in her chest like she had put one of her icicles there because it felt so foreign to see such compassion directed at her these days when it came to Killer Frost. Team Flash feared and wanted her defeated, but Vibe wanted to help her. Vibe wanted to work with her despite the challenge. She couldn't believe him as she looked into his eyes, warm and wide from the other end of her bedroom. He was still so mysterious to her even with his open heart and a name was given to his face. Cisco, she repeated in her mind, steeling her smile as it almost warmed into a blush.
“You don’t see that I’m a monster?”
“I see perfectly fine.”
She highly doubted that. "You're not afraid?"
"I wouldn't have this job if I was afraid of you,” he said with a little shrug, producing one of his interdimensional extrapilators from his coat pocket, tossing it around in his palm. “But tell me, Caitlin, do you trust this Frost?"
"With my life,” she said with an automatic answer.
His eyes beamed with resolve. "Then so do I."
"Okay,” she said, her voice a whisper over the noise of her pounding heart. She still wasn’t quite sure she was hearing him correctly.
"Okay," he repeated, lifting up his hand to open a breach. “Let me show you my base of operations.”
It was strange to walk through the breach on her own instead of having Vibe carry her. Unsteadily, she walked into the brightly colored room, spacious, but homey in a way that even Star Labs wasn’t. It was mostly due to the decor that filled up the walls and furniture, causing it to appear much more like a home than a superhero base. There was just so much color. The walls were full in the back with vintage movie posters, shelves of action figures, and an array of legos. He had lots of lamps, various monitors, and colorful carpet. It all so felt so new and fresh, and him, despite the mystery that he still was to her.
A mystery, that she had just agreed to work beside.
There was a whole other side of the room that was clearer. The walls were blank and the furniture was clear. The only sign of Cisco was a colorful red lamp on a desk and a cutout piece of a newspaper announcing the Killer Frost drink at Jitter’s. It was full of lab equipment and more monitors, fresh and empty as if somebody had moved out.
When he caught the gaze of her eyes, he motioned to that side of the room, “It’s all yours.”
She shook her head in awe. He had truly planned this.
“Oh!” he said suddenly, running toward the other end of the room and collecting a small ball of fur. “I hope you aren’t allergic, this is Princess Leia.”
“Princess Leia,” she repeated, laughing inwardly. “I’m not allergic. How adorable.”
“I know,” he said, putting the started kitten on his desk. She circled around with back upright, terrified of the new human looking over at her.
“She’ll get used to you,” Cisco said, putting the cat back on the floor.
"Where are we?"
"Officially nowhere. It's called a pocket dimension. My original base of operations was in my parent's basement. But this is safer. Nobody can track it."
She looked around. "Wow."
He placed a cold metal object into her fingers. “You aren’t a breacher so you’ll need this to get it. I might be able to think up a better solution though.” She pocketed the extrapilator, walking into her portion of the room slowly. It was so spacious and there was so much to do with it. She even considered painting the walls, perhaps a shade of blue, to color it up more. Normally she would leave a lab blank, but Cisco’s colorful idea of a superhero base inspired her.
She turned to face him, growing excited at the life she was embarking on. She never would have considered it a possibility a few hours ago, but now it felt so right. It felt better than anything had in a very long time.
She wouldn’t be alone anymore and neither would he. She could be Caitlin Snow and be Killer Frost, and not have eyes full of hatred and terror look back at her. It was just Vibe, Cisco Ramon, standing on the other end with big, beautiful eyes.
“Cisco,” she said, sinking into her new desk chair, still in a state of shock. “Are you sure?”
He moved his own desk chair to sit across, crossing his arms. “I haven’t been this sure about something in a very long time, Caitlin.”