Cisco paid for the vintage comic book and paused to take a selfie with it before putting it away. He sent the picture to Caitlin, with Farmer's market score!

He put his phone away without waiting for an answer, because she didn't always answer right away. Sometimes she was too busy, and sometimes she was in places without cell reception at all. Once he'd gone four days without hearing back from her, and was getting worried enough to start scouring the web for mentions of some freak cold-related accident, when she'd texted, Sorry sorry sorry NO RECEPTION ugh what the actual hell. She'd been in northern Arizona, and apparently cell reception was spotty at best.

He'd had to put his head down on his workstation for a good five minutes, hyperventilating with relief, before he felt able to say, Thx gud 2 know and how was it?

Bad she'd said.

He'd read the word a few times over, wishing he could hug her. He'd said that before he could talk himself out of it, and she'd said, Me too.

She used her phone to upload the stats from her implant to a cloud server very regularly, so he could check on how it was going. So far, their design was holding up. They'd texted a few times a week since she left. Most often pictures of where she was, or little bits of chatter from him about the newest metas in the city or some new piece of tech he was working on. Anybody reading it would have been bored to death.

Once, he had texted her, Drnk & hrny, u? and she'd called him back, and they'd had a phone sex marathon, interspersed with a lot of ridiculous pillow talk.

He hadn't actually been that drunk, but thought it was a good excuse for trying.

At the beginning, he'd had to stop himself from texting, I miss u I miss u I miss u every day, because he didn't want her to feel like he was pressuring her to come back. Then she'd sent him a picture of Ronnie's grave, and said, I wish you were here and he'd felt like he could say, I do 2

It was nice, where they'd buried him. All green, with trees, and the ocean glittering hazily in the distance. The stone was simple and it had some quote on it, something poetic-sounding that was completely out of character for Ronnie.

But Caitlin had said, It was a deep, dark secret, but he loved poetry.

He did?

We'd been dating for six months before I figured it out. I think he thought it was too unmanly, or too imaginative, for an engineer. I always thought that once he got older it would stop mattering what people thought and he could geek out over Mary Oliver as openly as he did over Stephen Hawking.

Cisco bought a book of poetry and tried to read it, and super-duper didn't get it. Maybe Ronnie could have explained it, he thought, and missed his friend so badly for about three days that it was kind of a relief that Caitlin was missing him too and they could talk about it together.

She also texted with Iris and Barry, which he knew because they always made a point to tell him that they'd heard from her and that she was fine. Even Luci had gotten a couple of texts, which she'd showed him when he went over to her and her boyfriend's place to play Risk one evening. "She's healing really well," Luci had said, studying the picture that Caitlin had sent of the piercing site.

"Yeah, I think she is," he'd said.

"She is in California, right? Helping with the wildfires?"

Cisco smiled. "Yes."

"That's rough," Brian had said when Luci got up to get a refill. He was a giant, with arms about the size of Cisco's thighs, and scarred and pierced and tatted up on top of it. He looked like he ate live kittens for breakfast. He adored Luci and his mom and his six-year-old daughter and his job as a youth counselor, and he was a nerd down to his core. Cisco and Barry had dragged him to the nearest Geeks Who Drink night and he'd been their ringer. It had been awesome.

"You worry about her? At those fires?"

"All the time," Cisco said quietly.

"Yeah," Brian said, looking over at Luci.

As dangerous as the fires sounded, it helped her to help others. He could hear in her voice when they talked, and read in her texts. She sounded better. More content. More at peace.

He also read the news reports of the astonishing luck that firefighters were having, keeping it away from houses and towns. No mention of a miraculous fire-eating woman, although any news story written by someone in Central City threw out the possibility of Killer Frost going out there to help, with a kind of proprietary pride.

He was almost okay with the name now. It was her name; she'd chosen to keep it. He tried not to feel guilty about the way he'd given it to her.

Ray and Felicity had come through, along with Iris writing editorials about metahuman service to the city. The last of the charges had been dropped as of last week, crushed under the sledgehammers of money and power and computer chicanery and public opinion.

"Hey," Ray had said on their last Skype session. "So I was talking to my head of R&D for Palmer Pharm, and I think you guys should put your heads together."

"Yeah, why?" Cisco had asked, furrowing his brow over a problem in Ray's Atom suit.

"He wants to create some kind of universal drug therapy that will suppress meta powers. People could use it if they'd rather be normal, or it could be part of sentencing - Cisco?"

Cisco was gone, sucked under into a nightmare timeline that he'd never seen before, filled with metas who'd had all their humanity stripped away. Only the powers were left, so they'd become tools for evil men to slaughter and subjugate the powerless.

"Cisco?" Ray called out.

He blinked hard, dragging himself out of the vision to see his friend looking at him with concern through the computer screen. "That would not be a good idea," he said hoarsely.

Ray stared at him, mouth slightly open. He knew about the visions, because Cisco had told him, too, but he'd never seen one grab him before. He closed his mouth, swallowed, and said, "Okay. Gotcha. I'll kill it."

Cisco nodded his thanks, wiping sweat away.

The visions didn't usually snatch him like that, in his waking hours. He'd managed to get control of them in his dreams, able to yank himself out if it got bad, and even starting to have some success choosing where to go when he dreamed. But when something happened, or started to happen, that pushed two worlds too close to each other, that other world tended to slam into his cerebral cortex.

He should start working on that next.

He wasn't thinking about that right now, though. He was putting all his efforts into enjoying the day, balanced on the knife edge between fall and winter.

He meandered through the farmer's market, pausing to glance at stalls every so often. There was one stall with fairly bad paintings, including one of the Flash, so broad-shouldered and lantern-jawed that it was pretty clear the artist had never seen him for real. Cisco thought about snapping a picture and sending it to Barry, but he just smiled at the artist. Poor dude couldn't help it, seriously, nobody ever got to see Barry up close and personal except bad guys and cops and Star Labs.

Which included Iris now, on a regular basis, as well as some slow, careful testing on metas who'd contacted her, asking for help after she'd said in her blog, Maybe there's a place where people like this can go.

Caitlin had gotten on Skype a few times, talking through some particularly thorny problem, suggesting some course of treatment. The metas, listening, had all seemed to realize that this was Killer Frost, and looked at the computer screen with as much awe as they'd looked at the Flash. More. The Flash had always been a hero. Killer Frost was someone who'd transformed into one - someone who'd wrestled her powers into submission, turned them into something good.

The air was chilly but the sun leavened some of it. He tucked his hands into his pockets and breathed in. There was a Central City out there, where all this was ash and tatters, where the particle accelerator explosion had been much, much worse.

His stomach grumbled, and he found the food trucks, all parked around the edge of a public square. He bought a banh mi and sat on the edge of the fountain in the middle of the square to eat it.

And then there was the other thing.

It had started with being able to control volume, dialing things up if he couldn't hear, down if there was too much. He realized he'd been doing it without thinking for awhile. Waveforms, they'd decided after testing. He could vibrate the air, and other materials. Barry theorized that sonic booms might be a possibility once Cisco trained up to some real power, which would probably happen fast because the more he did it the stronger they got, like lifting weights. Sonic booms yeaaahhh buddy!

When he'd told her, Caitlin had just about blown up his phone firing off text after text. He'd finally just uploaded all the testing data to the same cloud server that she used, and then she'd really gotten excited. Seriously, his phone may have started smoking, just a little.

Iris had dissolved in giggles when Cisco had said, "Wow, she's really into this."

Barry and Cisco had said, "What?" several times until she told them, "She's just found out her lover can vibrate. She is absolutely into this."

Barry's eyes had widened, and he'd gone very quiet.

For his part, Cisco had walked around Star Labs for about the next three hours with a dumb grin on his face. Her lover.

But it meant he missed her more than ever.

He checked his phone, even though he'd told himself he wouldn't. She'd been quiet since the day before. He kept hoping she'd send him something that said I'm coming home now that the charges were dropped and the wildfire season seemed to be done with. But, nothing.

He tucked his phone back in his pocket and decided to work on some accuracy. Focusing on a penny on the cement floor of the fountain, he flicked his finger, and the water above it splooshed as if something had hit it. He grinned and did it again.

Flick

Sploosh.

Flick.

Sploosh.

Flick

Crack.

His hand went still.

The surface of the water had gone solid, except for the spot where his shot had shattered a hole in the thin sheet of ice that had formed. His heart hurled itself against his ribs. He got to his feet and turned around, scanning the crowd. He stopped, smiled, and opened his arms.

Caitlin walked into them.

FINIS