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Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. – Andrew Marvell
It was exactly 4:13am when Barry called her. Caitlin knew this because she saw the numbers glaring at her accusingly through bleary eyes as she rolled over in bed to answer her phone, coming to in moments with a sick twist in her stomach; these days, calls in the middle of the night meant nothing good. At best, it meant there was a science problem they needed her to solve at S.T.A.R Labs; at worst – well, it meant someone she cared about was badly hurt, and it was down to her to save them. Sometimes, Caitlin hated the weight of that, especially on Thursday mornings at 4am when Barry Allen calls her and he’s crying, and he’s wheezing down the phone, and she can barely make out his words through his gasped breaths –
“Barry, slow down,” she said. On the other end of the line, she heard a shaking, sucked breath, so she asked as calmly as she was able. “What’s happened? Are you okay?”
“Cisc- oh god, Cait, it’s Cisco-”
And Barry was crying in a way she hadn’t even heard after his father passed, a raw, desperate scratch in his voice. The world fell away around her. Caitlin’s stomach dropped into the abyss that opened up to swallow her whole and encase the world in darkness, and it feels like a cord has been snapped that was tethering her to reality and now she’s falling, falling, falling because Cisco has to be safe he has to be okay he has to be -
“Cisco asked me to bring him back, Cait. He asked me to bring back Dante,” Barry gasps, and it’s like a bucket of ice water has been dumped over Caitlin’s head. Suddenly, everything stops. “I woke up and Cisco was at my house and he was screaming and begging me to go back and save Dante and I told him that I couldn’t, and – and he’s a wreck and now he’s gone and I don’t know how to find him.”
Barry was speed-talking, his words spilling out in a half-audible tangle of guilt and worry and grief.
“Stop,” she said calmly, loudly, the words leaving her on impulse rather than thought. Caitlin had already sat up and swung her legs out of bed, fumbling around her room with the phone pressed into the crook of her neck. Finding jeans and a sweater and her coat, feet shoved into shoes in a blur that seemed a lifetime but was less than two minutes, Caitlin grabbed her car keys from on top of a chest of drawers; in front of a picture of her, Ronnie, and Cisco, ignoring the way her heart ached at the sight of his bright, excited eyes. “This isn’t your fault, Barry. Calm down, find Iris, meet me in S.T.A.R Labs if I don’t text you within the hour. I’m going to look for Cisco, he needs someone to be there-”
“I’ll come with you-”
“No,” Caitlin shook her head, already out the door. “You sound like a mess. He doesn’t need that right now, he needs someone to be there for him – I’m not blaming you, I know how it sounds, it’s just – I need to focus on Cisco, and you need to take deep breaths and calm down. Okay?”
“Okay,” Barry replied, voice dull. He sounded awful and a part of her worried, but mostly Caitlin’s thoughts were with Cisco, so she didn’t feel guilty for telling Barry to stay away. He meant well, she knew: Barry loved Cisco like family. “Cait – what if we lose him? Cisco – I can’t do this without him.”
“We’re not losing anybody,” she told him sternly. Caitlin straightened, spine steel as the cold night air pinched her cheeks, and make a promise to herself as much as Barry. “I’m going to find him. We’re going to be okay. Cisco is going to be angry, and sad, and we’re just going to be there for him because that’s all we can do.” She doesn’t need to see Barry to picture his face, broken and slumped, so she added quickly, “I’ll call you when I find him.”
“Thank you, Caitlin,” Barry said sincerely. The crack in his voice is almost unnoticeable. “Be safe.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
And then Caitlin hung up, stepping into her car as it hummed and flashed to life, pulling out of the street and heading towards S.T.A.R Labs at speeds entirely unsafe. But then again, she worked with a masked superhero and had been held prisoner by a deranged speedster, so ‘safe’ was a relative term at that point. She put her foot on the accelerator until it touched the floor of the car below, seeing red lights and street lamps blur past, eyes on the partially lit building hulking in the distance, the place that had been her work and home for the past five years.
S.T.A.R Labs used to be a place of happiness and pride to her. Now all she felt as she approached was a steadily rising sickness forcing its way up her throat. It had been eleven days since Dante had died in a car crash, and they had all been anticipating an explosion like this.
On the first day, he had stumbled into S.T.A.R Labs and told them Dante was dead in a thick, flat voice. Cisco hadn’t looked any of them in the eyes, and had quickly left, brushing away tears and standing with his head against the wall in the corridor for ten minutes before he moved again. There was something gone inside of him on that day. Some would call it disbelief, others plain denial; but he told them, shook on his own until he could walk again, and then locked himself in his lab until they had all gone home.
All but her, at least. Caitlin had waited for him, then stood when he entered the Cortex. She didn’t have to say that she understood how he felt - he knew. Caitlin looked at Cisco and Cisco looked at Caitlin until something on his face cracked, and then Cisco was sobbing on the floor and she was sitting beside him, arms around him, until the earthquakes faded to a distant rumble. Caitlin did not give the false lie that everything would be okay.
The second day, he cried a lot, but she stayed by his side and let him. For a while, he looked to be on the verge of talking about Dante, until he ducked his head instead and stared blankly at the floor. The third and fourth day passed in a similar way, with Cisco showing moments of extreme grief compared to hours of stony, helpless silence. It was echoing; deafening, to not have the space filled with his voice.
Cisco brought such a life and energy and light to the vast, empty building, and in those first few days it was like they had all died, it was so quiet there.
On the fifth day, he announced his intention to sit and drink until he didn’t have to feel anymore, and of course Caitlin could not let him do it alone. She matched him shot for shot, drink for drink, but her worry kept her guarded, and when he half-sobbing, half-collapsing stumbled from the bar, she managed to walk him back to his apartment, although it was almost dawn by the time he was safely in bed. She had slept on his couch, and woke to find a coffee next to her head. Cisco had nodded a thanks, which she returned with a smile, and aside from that, he didn’t seem to want to discuss it at all.
That left the sixth day to be hungover and almost scarily normal, hanging out in Cisco’s apartment together. They cooked eggs for breakfast, watched crappy day-time TV, and she even managed to coax him into watching the latest season of iZombie with her. Cisco almost laughed, once, before his face fell in a way that made her want to tear down the world outside that room, so he could stay there with her and never have to face it again, so it could not chip away any more of the brightness around his heart.
Wishes rarely came true outside of fairytales however, and if the great miracle of her life was meeting Cisco Ramon, then her wish was used up, and she could do nothing to hold back the world the following day – Dante’s funeral.
“You don’t have to come with me,” he said, or tried to say, because in truth she had cut him off before the first two words were out of his mouth.
“Yes, I do,” she said, taking his hand. “I am. On the worst day of my life, and all the days after, you were there for me. So I’m coming with you. And if it’s getting to be too much, or you need me – I won’t let go, just squeeze my hand.”
His eyes filled up with tears and warmth then, as the fist in her own squeezed tightly, so she kept on squeezing back, all the way there in the car, rain patting against the windows all around them, flooding the world with white noise. It was almost as if they were the only two people who existed; all that mattered was holding hands, and never letting go. Later, they stood next to the grave, hand-in-hand, Cisco’s knuckles white by the end of the service.
Barry and the others had been there, standing towards the back, looking awed by the pure amount of the Ramon family there – it occurred to Caitlin that she was the only one really to have met Cisco’s family. Iris hugged Cisco when it was over, and Joe placed a heavy hand on his back, while Barry watched, looking desperate to say something, wringing his hands together to stop from reaching out.
Whatever Barry was going to say, he bottled it; Caitlin sent him a weak smile as he left, hands wrapped in Iris’ as tightly as hers were in Cisco’s. Before long, it was just the two of them and the grave. Cisco looked at it, his eyes barely having left it even while their friends were hugging him and speaking their condolences, but when he finally lifted his eyes up to Caitlin, there were tears running down his cheeks and he looked shattered.
“Tell me it gets better.”
“It gets better,” Caitlin replied, forcing down the lump in her throat. “And until it does, you’ve got me.”
“I miss him so much,” Cisco said, and it was barely a whisper, a strangled whimper escaping his throat. “I miss him so much it feels like I can’t speak, I can’t breathe-”
“Like all the air got sucked out of the world,” she finished, “I know. When Ronnie . . . when Ronnie died, I felt the same way you do now. I couldn’t think of a future without him in it, so I stopped believing I had one, for a while.”
He blinked up at her. “What changed?”
“I did,” she answered, sounding out the words in her mouth. It still hurt, it did – but it was like a phantom pain, a distance ache, an old wound she still felt from time to time. “I thought I wouldn’t get through the day, but then I did, and it was the next day. I did that over and over. And,” she bit her lip, “I had you, and Barry, and we were a part of something greater than ourselves. You made me better. Cisco – I’m so sorry. And it hurts. And it’s going to hurt, for a long time – but when the day comes you can think of Dante and smile – I’ll be here, waiting to see that day with you.”
Cisco looked at her, his mouth having fallen open. For a long time, they just looked at one another, until he closed his mouth and swallowed hard, eyes turning back towards the grave.
That had been four days ago.
She had been waiting, really, for him to ask Barry to save his brother. It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do. Cisco loved Dante fiercely, and had someone in his life who he trusted immensely who could travel in time; so no, she was not surprised at all that he had finally asked. It was a desperate attempt, one Cisco must have known had little chance of succeeding, but he was desperate; he was grieving and feeling guilty for never making things right with Dante and traumatised.
Just asking, just knowing he had tried – she hoped it might help ease the burn in his chest, just a little.
She also had a feeling that he would run to S.T.A.R Labs the moment it failed and either try and hail the Waverider to ask the exact same thing, or work himself into the ground trying to find a way to save Dante himself.
When she ran into the Cortex to find it not only dark but empty, she stopped in surprise. Slowly, Caitlin turned in a circle, searching for a sign of life – she had been so sure that Cisco would come here. She knew him well enough to predict his plans, and was feeling the ice spread through her veins when she noticed a tiny, flashing light on the computer, telling her a hatch had been opened, and the yellow flicker looked a lot like hope in the semi-darkness.
The hatch to the roof had been opened. It had been years ago, during the initial construction of S.T.A.R Labs, that she had last been up there; Ronnie was overseeing the building work, and she had stopped by to visit, hard hat and high-visibility vest and all; he had beamed when he saw her. It had been a rickety scaffolding then, not the smooth metal ladder she climbed towards it now – as far as she knew, Cisco had never been up there. Why was he up there now? She wondered, biting her lip in worry, Was he trying to contact someone from higher ground?
Caitlin crested the hatch, coming to stand on the roof, the darkness of the night around her being erased by dawn’s approach, turning the world a murky grey. The roof was concrete, plain, boring, with a thin layer of dust around her heels reminding her that this was an abandoned place. Just when she was thinking that it made no sense –
– she saw him.
Cisco was sitting on top of a concrete block at the edge of the building. His knees were tucked up to his chest with his hands looped over them, and he didn’t look up when he heard her coming, although he must have, as she sat down beside him a moment later, legs dangling over the edge. Caitlin glanced over, worry twisting her guts, but Cisco’s eyes were not on her.
“Have you ever watched the sun rise?” he asked, voice somewhere far away as his eyes set on the lightening grey of the horizon, across the city spread out at their feet. She had eyes only for him. “The actual moment, I mean. Because I’ve been thinking too much about what I’ve been missing or what I’ve never done before, and that’s one of those things it feels like everyone should have done but most people actually haven’t, you know? People have seen the sun start to rise. They’ve noticed it getting lighter through the window and in between glances they’ve missed the moment it finally appears, but they’ve never sat and waited and watched. I’ve never done it. I just felt like I should, at least once. So I’m watching the sun rise . . . There . . .” Cisco’s finger stretched out towards the skyline, to a spot in the dawn where the clouds about to crack and spill out through the seams, flooding the world with golden sunlight. “There. That’s where it’ll be.”
She was stealing this secret glance, watching softly, and found the tips of her ears turning pink when he turned suddenly to her, sure she had been caught staring, jumping and running a hand through her hair to distract from this. His gaze was just as piercing levelled at her as it was at the sky.
And Caitlin was stunned into silence for a moment.
Because she could see that it was Cisco, but it was not-him at the same time. Because her Cisco was burning up with every second that he breathed, releasing light and life into the air around him, flaring and sparking like a supernova. The man sitting in front of her had his warm eyes, and his long dark hair waving in the breeze, but his eyes were dead and he was so still – she had never seen Cisco sit that still in the entire time that she had known him.
It broke her heart, to see him that way.
“No, I’ve never seen the sun rise, either,” she replied, eyes flicking to the sky, as his returned there, too. “Can I stay and watch it with you?
“Sure.”
“Are you okay?”
Cisco shook his head thoughtfully, lips pressed against his teeth. “No. I don’t know how to be, anymore.”
“Why do you think this is important?” she asked instead. “To watch the sunrise?”
“Because we’re not going to be here forever, I know that now,” Cisco said, looking small in his sadness, the weight of a heavy world pressing down on him. He shrugged a little, eyes on the horizon, but he was almost himself again, for a fleeting second. “I don’t want to miss anything. The things we see, Caitlin – metas and time travel and gods made of lightning – it’s easy to forget that we have to live our lives, too. I want to watch the sun rise. And I want to travel to every continent on the planet. And I want to kiss you, one day, when it’s better.”
The bluntness of his confession shocked her, more than the words themselves, and she gave a tiny gasp. With a dark laugh, Cisco tilted his head towards her.
“Come on, you have to have known. I’ve loved you for almost as long as I’ve known you, Caitlin.”
“Why did you never say anything?”
“Because when I met you, there was Ronnie. And you loved him, and he made you happy, and I was content to just have you in my life as a friend, as long as that was true. I liked seeing you smile,” Cisco admitted, face falling slack and soft. The hard edges and deep lines of grief were erased, a small smile creasing his lips, which Caitlin returned, wanting him to go on. “I still loved you, but you were happy. Who would I have been to do anything to ruin that? . . . Then there was Jay, and I thought ‘Okay, she’s never going to like you back’, but you were happy again so that was enough. We both know how that ended. And that leads us to know – waiting again, because I was afraid to lose you, so I watched and waited like we are for the sun.”
He looked at her, eyes open and honest, and she blinked away tears, searching for the right words.
“I’m supposed to be patient. As a doctor, I mean – I’m supposed to be able to sit, and wait, and never complain – and I can. It’s my nature. But I always hate that part the most, when one of you is hurt and I have to wait for you to wake up,” Caitlin said, trying to think of ways to be gentle. There was ice in Caitlin’s heart now; it wanted her to be cold, it wanted to freeze her from the inside out and make her hurt – but she kept it at bay; for now, the sunrise would melt her frosty veins. “I don’t want to lose you, either.”
She wanted to tell Cisco everything, had wanted to for a long time, about her powers and how his smile shone like the stars and she wanted to scream KNOW ME but what came out instead was “I love you”, and she supposed that the two meant the same thing.
A slow, sure smile spread itself across Cisco’s face. His face moved an inch closer to hers, but at that moment the sun crested over the city, spilling light into their eyes, and they both turned their heads to do what they came for – to watch the sun rise. The glowing yellow orb inched its way above the horizon, imperfect and flickering, struggling its way upwards, pushing aside the clouds and burning off the last remnants of the night, leaving the early dawn rays warming their skin, reflected in the smiles on each of their faces.
Caitlin took Cisco’s hand. The sun hailed their quiet revelation, and it was enough; they had time, more than enough, and this was the moment from which their future could grow like seeds to the sun, hand in hand on the rooftop, eyes filled with wonder at the light which touched their singing hearts and joined them together as one. After a while, Caitlin stopped watching the marvel of nature, and instead turned her gaze to another one, watching Cisco watch the sunrise.
There are two kinds of people in this world.
Caitlin knew she was the first one; made for patience, content to stand still and watch in wonder, the kind of person to wait for the sun.
Cisco Ramon was the type to chase it.
And as long as he did, she would follow him into its light and what lay beyond it, whatever that may be.