(Author's Note: THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE READING! This fanfic is mostly canon-compliant, but there are some key ways it is canon-divergent, and you need to know which ways before you continue, otherwise this'll just get confusing, Jell-O Squares.

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Caitlin never got hurt when Kadabra broke free in 3x18, thus she never became Killer Frost.

2. Savitar did decide to let Team Flash help him. He wasn't faking it.

3. Everything else is the same. Savitar still killed H.R., still kidnapped Cisco to try and make him turn the bazooka in his favor, the only differences are that Cait is still Cait and Savitar accepted the team's help.

4. Julian will be mentioned in this story, but will not show up. Sorry, Julian fans! Love you!

Okay, enjoy! -Doverstar)

It was the morning after H.R.'s funeral. The sun was obnoxiously bright outside, its light glinting off of S.T.A.R. Labs' glass double doors. Most people would feel that after the death of a friend, the universe would be a little courteous and at least go overcast, but the team still using the site of the renowned particle accelerator welcomed the nice day. The late drumstick carrier probably would've thought a good old thunderstorm would be perfect for his heroic demise—and not surprisingly, the makeshift family he left behind disagreed, as they often had when he was with them. A clear sky and a cool breeze felt more like H.R. to them than a gloomy drizzle. Optimistic, eager to please.

Caitlin Snow had been up working all night. She couldn't sleep, so of course she went and made herself useful. The events of the last day and a half kept her from even dozing; her hands were still unsteady as she tidied up her station before the others arrived. It wasn't her first death on the team, that wasn't it. The loss of this latest Wells was a dull throb deep inside, pushed to the pits of her mind in an effort to remain composed. It wasn't almost losing Iris, either. She and everyone else had been gearing up to say goodbye for months, just in case something went wrong. They hadn't expected to be saying it to H.R., though.

No, she'd stayed awake on pure adrenaline. Grief and trauma weren't enough to energize her anymore; they were old friends. The adrenaline came from knowing she wasn't alone in the building all night. She had to keep her guard up.

For the past four days, the man responsible for every inch of Team Flash's struggles recently had been bunking in their very own headquarters. Their safe haven, their home away from various homes, was no longer safe. At least, that was the way Caitlin saw it.

Savitar was asleep downstairs.

Poor Tracy had wanted to chuck the wicked speedster back into the Speed Force the moment Barry Allen had brought him to them, and no one could blame her. Joe had seconded this, but would settle for slinging him in the pipeline. Barry had nixed both ideas, insisting Savitar be given the guest room in the basement of the Labs.

Caitlin, along with the others, had been completely floored to think that Barry would be so risky with the villain who had, hours before, been hellbent on killing his fiancee. How could they just toss him a pillow and call it a night? And Barry of all people, defending him?

But if anyone knew what was going on in Savitar's head, it was only logical it should be Barry. After all, it was his head. Sort of. Caitlin's science-loving mind had flocked to the semantics, but she could only analyze the time remnant's existence for so long before it was off to the pantry for an aspirin. Time loops were not nearly as easy as biology, and she was exhausted trying to understand it.

Impossible to be or not, Savitar was indeed being, and he was being only one floor below her, doing Lord knew what at that moment. She bit her lip, checking the security feed again. Sleeping. He was sleeping. Think it out, Dr. Snow, Harrison Wells would've told her. Dr. Wells, the first one she'd met, mentor extraordinaire, before she knew him as the Reverse Flash. What could he gain in confronting you? He's not exactly holding all the cards in this game anymore, is he? She could just see his patronizing smirk, hear the gentle chiding. Too bad he'd been a murderer. Sometimes she missed his calm observations, the hum of his wheelchair. He'd be right, too; Savitar was only there because he had lost any power he'd had over them. His plan had failed and he would be erased from existence—except, of course, that Team Flash had promised to save him. Now his life was in their hands. The irony.

Caitlin glanced at the monitor again, inhaling very slowly and running her tongue along the insides of her cheeks, a mental exercise in calming the nerves. Savitar still wasn't going anywhere. Though the image was fuzzy, she could see he was on his side, no blankets, he hadn't even changed clothes. For someone whose breathing spoke of sleep, his posture was practically crystalized. She wondered how anyone could sleep when they were that tense. Was he lying there wide awake, faking it? Staring into nothingness? She could think of few things creepier in the early morning hours with no sleep herself.

The sound of footsteps in the corridors behind her made her whip around. It couldn't be Barry, Wally, or Savitar; they wouldn't bore themselves with that average of a pace; they'd just explode on in, lightning everywhere. For a moment she checked for the smell of coffee. H.R. would be bringing her a treat from Jitters around this time, inhumanly chipper.

Then she remembered, and wondered if Tracy was waking up to the same memories at that moment.

Instead of Wells, Cisco entered the Cortex, carrying a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and balancing his phone on top of the box, eyes glued to its screen. He was reading Iris' article on the latest Flash adventure, with a tribute to H.R. toward the end. Dr. Snow had read it twice over just after midnight, when Iris had copied it to her blog.

"What are you doing here so early?" Caitlin demanded, clearing a space on the desk for the donuts.

"I could ask you the same thing." Cisco's voice was dull, his eyes weren't as bright as usual. It could've been the time, but Caitlin knew him well enough to know he wasn't sleepy—he was sad. As much as H.R. had pushed his buttons, Cisco would always feel empty without at least one Harrison Wells at his shoulder.

"Did you get me a cruller?" She wanted to cheer him Cisco wasn't happy, no one was happy.

Cisco flipped the lid up with two fingers, using the other hand to boot up the other computer. At least three crullers had been included in the dozen, and though Caitlin didn't feel much like eating, she gingerly picked one for his sake. Calories soothed the soul.

"I couldn't sleep," Caitlin explained, folding her donut in a napkin and dabbing at her lips. She took another look at her partner's expression, noticing the bags beneath his eyes. "I'm guessing you were having a little trouble with that yourself?" she added gently.

Cisco shook his head slightly. "Hard to sleep when you know Mr. Hyde's waiting for you at work," he muttered. He glanced at her. "Where is he?"

Caitlin turned the monitor so he could see it. "...Sleeping."

Cisco leaned in to study the image, then actually curled his lip, scoffing. "Yeah, right. I bet you my cruller he's been plotting all night."

"Cisco, what could he be plotting?" Caitlin tried not to sound too exasperated. They'd all been through so much in just three days. It wouldn't be fair to lose patience, but she was tired, and Cisco was just being petty. "It's not like he can do much of anything. Any minute he could be wiped from existence, remember?" She straightened in her chair. "Did you say your cruller?"

He picked one up. "One for you, one for me."

"There are three of them."

"Yeah, and this one's mine."

"I don't eat the other kinds, Cisco."

"Oops." He stuffed half the treat into his mouth, cheeks bulging. He nodded to the screen showing Savitar's room, eyebrows puckering, grumbling around the donut, "Goob riffance."

"We promised we'd help him," Caitlin reminded him, but the tightening of her fingers against the bottom of her chair told him she agreed. Good riddance.

Savitar may have been willing to accept help, but that didn't mean he was sorry. Their friend was dead, and that murder had been unintentional. What if it had been Iris after all? Barry never would have recovered. The Flash was made of gold—and though technically gold couldn't rust, if anything could cause him to, Caitlin knew it was losing Iris. Without her, it had been proven: he'd let himself become invaluable. And they couldn't have that. Not to mention what sweet Wally and her father Joe would've done. And then there was the icing on the cake. He'd trapped Wally in the Speed Force once, possessed Julian, deceived generations into worshipping him, and murdered hundreds. Tracy was right, he didn't deserve a future. But they had sworn to give him one.

"Did you come up with anything to solve his temporal problem?" Caitlin tossed her donut in the trash bin, wiping her hands. She really wasn't hungry.

Cisco swallowed the last of his breakfast. "Oh yeah, I lost a lot of sleep over that one." His eye-roll would've made Captain Cold jealous.

Caitlin gave him her sternest expression. "Well, I did. What do you think I was doing here all night?"

"Biting your lip and staring into space?" Cisco offered.

She handed him her notes, all business. "I keep trying to think of a way to anchor him to this plain, to anything, but...no luck. I even browsed some of those science-fiction blogs you have bookmarked," she added sheepishly. "Nothing. No ideas on how to keep a loop like his from cancelling itself out. I mean, the only way he can stay is by doing what he was created to avenge—killing Iris." She threw her hands up quickly. "And we are not condoning that. But without rectifying the hole we created in his timeline, it's going to suck him up." She gripped both knees, meeting Cisco's eyes. Neither of them liked to admit defeat. "I don't know how we're going to save him."

Cisco let out a puff of air that toyed with his shoulder-length hair. "We'll think of something. We got time before all that temporal zone energy comes to nab him."

"How can you be sure? He could—" Caitlin cast out for the right word, gesturing with a hand, "—fade any minute."

The smallest of smiles graced Cisco's face. He was getting that clever look in his eye, and Caitlin was glad to see it beneath the mourning. "I can track it."

"You can track it," Caitlin repeated, disbelief making her voice taut. "How?"

Cisco pulled up a diagram of the time stream he'd constructed on the nearest monitor. It was like looking at a hurricane, Caitlin mused, only more jagged and complicated. "I can feel it." He grinned, insufferably proud. "Yeah. It's part of my powers—not like I'm vibing the rip, the Force ain't that strong with me—but I can sense there's something wrong in the energy on our Earth. A corrupted timeline, a jacked-up loop...it leaves a trail. I don't know how else to explain it," he added apologetically, lifting a shoulder. "It's just there. So I did some calculations. We got at least two days before he should start writing a will."

"But..." Caitlin looked at their ever-helpful glass demonstration board, then back at the diagram. She leaned forward, zooming in. "It's not that straightforward, I mean—we're dealing with a loop, something that doesn't make sense to begin with. Theoretically, anything could change, he could be gone in the next hour."

Cisco folded his arms. "Nah, see, that's the thing, anything could change. Not killing Iris, coming here for help—everything unexpected he does slows it down. It's like it has to accommodate for the differences that keep taking place."

Caitlin stood up, tearing her eyes from the screen. "So all we have to do is keep making changes?"

"That'll only delay it by like a hair," Cisco had started typing, running tests, doing his thing. "It's too strong to be held back for much longer. Ready or not, Cait, he's got two days. That's it. So we've gotta work fast." He paused, crossing his eyes a little. "This is all still just, like, speculation though, I mean I could be totally wrong and he's gone right now. Bye Felicia."

They both looked sharply back at the security feed. Caitlin's eyes grew so wide, it hurt and she had to blink several times to keep the water at bay.

"He's not there." The bed was empty. Cisco gave her an equally alarmed glance. Caitlin swallowed. "Cisco—"

"Looking for somebody?"

Cisco let out a very masculine shriek and Caitlin spun around, jumping at least three feet into the air in high heels.

She was never ever going to get used to it.

Savitar was not Barry Allen. Her Barry, their Barry. The forensic scientist with the child's smile and the hero who liked to play Operation. Savitar was a murderer and a liar.

But he had Barry's face.

He had one green eye, ridiculously familiar, lacking the softness Caitlin was so fond of. His grin was the same grin Barry wore when he caught them all by surprise, showing up in the Cortex in a blur of light and papers. Same hair, same voice—a little throatier, but otherwise—the same height, the same posture. He even favored the right side of the desk the way Barry did. Only a network of scars and a milky left eye told them who they were really seeing. And he was looking at them with so much intelligence, so much calculation. He knew them, he knew their strengths and their weaknesses, he just stared and stared like he was reading a museum plaque. Caitlin hated that he watched them with their hero's eyes and that quirk of his mouth. As if he were deliberately playing the part, a substitute Barry for breakfast, ladies and gentlemen.

Cisco gritted his teeth at the duplicate. "Don't—do—that!" he hissed.

Savitar gave him a perfectly baffled, mocking expression, reaching for the donuts. "What's the matter, Cisco? Trouble sleeping?" He himself sounded raspy, as if he really had just woken up, but there wasn't even a sign of bedhead. Caitlin started to think he really had been awake all along.

The waves of loathing she saw on her best friend's face were enough to boil the moon. Cisco was glaring at Savitar as if he were the devil incarnate. Savitar was blinking placidly back. The way his eyes remained half closed reminded Caitlin of the jeweled irises snakes were born with. Never impressed, always searching.

The tension was suffocating; Caitlin could see H.R.'s coffin reflected in the artificial light glinting off Savitar's jacket zipper. Cisco must have been imagining something similar. His shoulders had gone sharp and still.

But in true Cisco fashion, all he said was, dripping with ice, "No donuts for you." And he lifted the box off of the desk, walking to another room as if to hide the cookies on the top shelf from a naughty child.

Savitar glanced at the screen the two scientists had been commenting on. Cisco must have switched it back to the diagram as he'd stalked off; the footage of the speedster's room was gone.

There was a moment of silence as Caitlin watched Savitar and Savitar watched the monitor. Finally he said, exactly as if he were reading a very boring teleprompter, "How far have you gotten?"

Caitlin didn't trust herself to speak at first. She had barely spoken two words to this, the real Savitar, in the flesh—Barry's flesh—from the moment he'd revealed himself. She had avoided him from the start, not just because there was no light between them, the way there was between herself and the true Flash, but because talking to someone so familiar and distant was too much. Savitar was illogical, and Caitlin's sturdy mind sometimes refused to comply.

But he was asking for facts, in a friend's voice she had heard so often and listened to so intently, so her mouth began moving without asking her permission.

"We don't have a hard and fast solution yet, but we...did some calculations, and Cisco's powers coincide with the energy in the time stream—which is one of the reasons he's able to contact the sort of Limbo that is the Speed Force—and he was able to find out..." She fumbled for a moment, wondering if there was a tactful way to say this, "...how long you have until..."

"Until I disappear." Savitar was motionless.

Caitlin wound the heels of her palms in opposite directions against one another, still watching him. "Right."

Savitar let out one of Barry's snorts that substituted for a laugh. "Right. You know, Doctor Snow, I think your bedside manner needs work." He moved to look at her with his scars and smirk and Caitlin felt a snowstorm stir within her, held back by her necklace. She kept herself from envisioning what it would be like to shoot a few icicles his way. He did not get to turn to her with that cockiness, the look the Flash loved to sport after a successful mission, as she finished patching him up.

Caitlin stared back at him, trying not to get too caught up in his conversant appearance. If she thought about how impossible he was—to be so Barry and so not—where he came from—aspirin again. Instead she focused on maintaining a poker face. She'd had to practice it often enough when Cisco was around at work.

Savitar swung an arm up to gesture to the right-hand corner of his own mouth. "You got a little frosting right here, Cait." He let the arm drop as she fixed it, nodding those many nods people nodded when they just knew everything. "I can see you guys are working real hard on getting this right."

Maybe it was the sarcasm, or the fact that she only let two people call her Cait, and Savitar was neither Barry nor Ronnie. Caitlin drew herself up, cold swirling behind her eyes.

"I don't think you're in any position to go criticizing our methods," she told him quietly.

The smirk didn't slip off.

Cisco was back, talking a mile a minute before he'd fully entered the room, clearly speculating. "What we need is something to block detection, you know? Something to keep the paradox from finding him, like a, like a shield..." He snapped his fingers a few times, looking at the floor as he walked but not seeing it, coming around the desk to get to his computer. He bumped into Savitar, who was still favoring the right side.

Cisco started. Too close to Barry's burnt face, he drew back a little more than he needed to, brown eyes going hard again.

Savitar lifted a hand in a small wave, a jovial, plastic smile springing up. "Hi Cisco!"

"Are you still here?" Cisco looked Savitar up and down, shaking his head a little on his way around him.

"Sure looks like it, doesn't it, buddy?"

Cisco pointed a lollipop at him Caitlin hadn't realized he'd retrieved. "Don't call me that."

Savitar's hands drifted to his pockets and he leaned against the desk, back to watching them. Caitlin didn't know how long he planned on standing there, but it wasn't exactly a big motivator. She saw Cisco still for a moment, looking at the keys without touching them.

"How uh, how's the view back there, Digiorno?" Cisco said loudly. "We're trying to get stuff done. Your legs broken?"

"Want me to break yours?" Savitar replied lazily.

Cisco turned around too quickly to maintain nonchalance. "Hey, okay, no! No, you don't get to make threats anymore, you got it? We could just be twiddling our thumbs here and watch you blip on out of time, but we're not. Because our friend asked us to fix you. So how bout you show a little gratitude and leave us alone so we can save your clinically-insane butt? Huh?"

Savitar was laughing before Cisco had finished speaking. It was very quiet, and at first they didn't realize it was happening because he'd let his head droop. His shoulders bobbed. Caitlin had felt like slapping Barry before—usually after he'd done something stupid and she was cleaning a wound—but this was stronger; she could absolutely do it right now and not feel sorry later.

Caitlin put a hand on Cisco's shoulder, rubbing a little the way Ronnie used to do for him when Cisco 'gave up' on a project after an all-nighter.

But Cisco wasn't having it. Gently he pulled himself away from her and gave her a sulky, apologetic, "Nuh-uh, I need some air, I'm not doing this right now. Not for him."

He flicked his lollipop into the trash bin with a thunk that should not have been loud given the lollipop's weight. With a last flower-withering glance at Savitar, Cisco stormed from the Cortex.

Savitar watched him go, and when he wasn't in view anymore, the speedster turned his bored stare to the ceiling.

"I don't know what we did to you to make you this way," Caitlin found herself muttering, "but Cisco's right. Whatever it was, it doesn't give you an excuse to treat us like that. Barry brought you here to help you, even after everything you did." Savitar met her eyes, expressionless. Caitlin felt the bitterness pool on her tongue, spitting out every word. Nobody messed with Cisco. "You are making it really difficult to try any harder."

Savitar was inches from her before she could complete a blink. He was grinning now, one blue eye gleaming. "That's a lot of ice, Cait." He took her necklace's pendant in one hand, between a finger and thumb. "You're not holding out on us, are you?"

Caitlin held his gaze bravely for a few seconds more, but it felt like a spider was crawling up her spine. She yanked away from him, moving to the other side of the desk. She could feel her hands growing colder. She should've moved away as soon as he approached, she shouldn't have let him anywhere near her necklace. Standing up to him was one thing, but if he'd managed to steal her trinket, she would've lost all control of herself. In the back of her mind, that same old logic was telling her the only thing he'd gain in making her Killer Frost at this point was a few wicked laughs, but she wasn't going to risk it anyway.

"It's too bad I don't have something like that," Savitar went on, pointing to the necklace. "A failsafe that goes with my eyes. Well," He raised an eyebrow. "One of them, anyway."

Very funny. Caitlin folded her arms around herself and waited for his next move. She couldn't work while he was in the Cortex. It was too soon after H.R., after Wally's injuries—which he was only just healing from—too soon after the night Iris nearly died.

She expected him to rattle off a few more taunts, but she was going to be disappointed. Savitar turned and slipped out of the room, so slowly she wondered if he were deliberately keeping from flashing out just to make her squirm.

Caitlin returned to the monitors, taking a deep breath, trying to ignore the glow from her pendant. It was hard enough trying to figure out how to defy time and space. They were doing it for someone who deserved everything coming to him. More than one headache was going to be plaguing her before the morning was over.

(Next chapter coming soon! I got this whole thing outlined, baby. Give it a chance. -Doverstar)