Author's Note: Wow I really just keep on going with this story, don't I XD

Okay, some things to note: A lot of the actual plot of this season is going to be brushed over:

1. The Nora and Iris drama will be erased completely, and Caitlin will not be replaced with Iris, mostly because I just can't see her doing what Iris did.

2. The metahuman cure will be touched upon but not delved into, and the Caitlin and Cisco drama will barely be looked at

3. Orwin and Grace's whole side of the story will be reduced to some battles that have both Frost and Barry in them (so you can just assume that my storyline is the same as the show's)

4. Various other subplots, like those with Ralph and Sherloque, are going to be diminished or not looked at. I don't think that those are any less important; they're just not relevant for me to write.

5. I will be covering at least parts of 5x01, 5x04, 5x06, 5x07, 5x08, 5x09, 5x11, 5x13, 5x15, 5x19, 5x21, 5x22, and maybe a few others spontaneously or if I get a request, but probably not.

In fewer words, the chapters are probably going to be shorter.

In the chapter titles, where I usually put the episode name, you'll find the word "FULL", "PARTIAL", or "SCENE". "Full" means the episode will be mostly complete, or as complete as a chapter in Snowbarry- Season 4, say. "Partial" means I will be doing anywhere from two scenes to a rushed version of the whole episode. "Scene" means I will just be doing a single scene from the episode.

It's true that I'm going to miss a lot. I'm hoping that, since I originally wasn't even planning on doing this at all, it'll be good enough :)

Okay, let's get started!

Nora's pronouncement that she was Caitlin and Barry's daughter was met with a very, very long silence.

"You're saying you're our daughter," Barry confirmed as Nora beamed around at everyone.

"From the... future," Caitlin added. She blinked a few times, looking down at her glass of champagne. How much had she drunk this evening?

"Named Nora?"

Nora's smile softened a bit. "After your mother," she told Barry, and his eyebrows furrowed a little.

"Anybody need a refill?" Cisco offered. Barry looked at him incredulously and he shrugged and drained his glass. "No? Just me?"

"Cisco Ramon," Nora said with a wide grin as she hopped off the upper landing of the West's house and walked over to Cisco. "Always cutting the tension with a joke."

Cisco turned slowly away from the champagne bottle he was about to refill his glass with, looking weirded out.

"You know our names?" Cecile asked, raising her eyebrow.

"Of course; I know all of you!" Nora chirped. "You're Mama Cecile, Papa Joe, Ralph Dibny, little auntie Jenna she's so cute! Auntie Iris, and Uncle Wally!"

"Uh... and your nickname is XS?" Wally confirmed.

"Clearly not my doing," Cisco muttered. He completely forwent his glass and took a chug of champagne straight from the pale green bottle.

"No," Nora allowed, turning to Caitlin. "It's a nickname that you gave me when I was a kid... mom."

Caitlin felt her stomach flop. Considering everything that had happened with her pregnancy in stasis and her longing for a child, being called 'mom' was... a lot. "Mom," she repeated, swallowing.

"You said I do everything in XS," Nora said with a fond smile. "Guess I've always been like that. Overdoing things, getting in way over my head... like, uh... recently..."

"This mistake that you made?" Barry prompted.

"A big mistake," Nora sighed.

"Which was...?"

"Helping you save the city by destroying the STAR Labs satellite last night," Nora replied with an awkward smile. "I just couldn't stop myself from getting involved. But something happened when I did because now I can't seem to go fast enough to open up the Speed Force."

"Uh- uh- Pardon me," Ralph interjected. "Are we talking about actual time travel here?"

Everyone looked at him, bewildered. "Do you just like... not pay any attention when we have our briefings?" Cisco asked, squinting a little.

"No one said anything about time travel!" Ralph cried.

At the volume of his voice, baby Jenna started to cry. "Ohh, shh, Ralph, you're scaring the baby," Caitlin scolded, watching with the slightest bit of jealousy as Cecile gently bounced her newborn and murmured softly to her to calm her down.

"Noo, no, she's not scared- she just said she's hungry," Cecile said with a fond smile, before freezing and looking up in alarm. "She said she's- Joe! I heard her! I read her mind! I'm might not be losing my powers!"

Joe's eyes went very wide and he leaned his head back on the couch, looking like he was a little less pleased than his life partner. "Awesome."

"I'm sorry," Nora said, coming a little closer to Caitlin. "I know how... bazaar this must seem, meeting your daughter from the future as an adult. But really, this wasn't my plan at all. But I- I'm kinda... stuck here, now? And you're the only people who can help me, so..."

She looked around at them. "Anybody know what to do?"

Flash!

Barry and Caitlin were in the Speed Lab, watching their dau- watching Nora wiz around them on the track. "This is so... so weird," Barry muttered, turning in a slow circle. The ring above them was filled with purple lightning, but as Barry peered closer he saw that the purple was really just a blurred image of red and blue.

"Yeah," Caitlin breathed, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice. She looked over at Barry wonderingly. "I can't believe that's our daughter up there."

Barry didn't look quite as excited as her. "We have been lied to before," he reminded her, giving her a very deliberate look.

"Barry," Caitlin said, looking right back at him. "She has a white streak in her hair, exactly like mine when I start transitioning to Frost, and she's a speedster. I mean- it's gotta be her. We're meeting our daughter for the first time, Barry." She looked at him pleadingly. "Maybe smile a little?"

He gave her a begrudging smile. "Ok, but even if it is true, Nora could say the wrong thing or- or step on the wrong butterfly and screw up the whole time. She could be writing herself out of existence!"

"Mm," Caitlin replied, unconvinced. She grabbed Barry's wrist and put his hand on her stomach. "Or this could be here, right here. Which means that we figure out how to fix what happened to our baby."

"We need to be responsible," Barry said, his thumb brushing Caitlin's shirt. "I think we need to find a way to send her home. And fast."

"Come on, Barry, don't you think we taught our daughter how not to mess with the timeline?"

Nora came wizzing in at that moment, coming to a neat stop in front of them. "Wow," she whistled, looking around. "Speed Lab sure is archaic, huh?"

"Lalala!" Barry cried, clapping his hands over his ears while Caitlin made a cutting gesture at her throat. "Can't hear you! You know what? Just- no future talk, okay?"

"Right," Nora said quickly, nodding. "Don't wanna... wreck the timeline."

"Alright, Nora," Caitlin said, getting down to business as she took a blood sampler out of her pocket. "This is going to link us up with your biometrics..." She stabbed the needle into Nora's hand and her apparent daughter cringed in pain.

"And this little scrunchie doohicky is gonna... uh... measure your connection to the Speed Force," Cisco added as he came into the room, pushing a cuff onto Nora's wrist.

Caitlin led the way to the upper landing on the Speed Lab, throwing a grin over her shoulder at her husband. How could she not be excited about this? This was their proof. If the DNA matched... Nora was their daughter.

The DNA did, in fact, match. "Quick analysis shows patterns that are similar to both of ours," she reported, smiling happily. "She's our daughter."

"What about her being stuck here?" Barry pressed, not replying to that.

"Everything's normal," Cisco said. "She definitely has Speed Force in her system, she's just not going fast enough to open up a time portal."

Barry's phone buzzed. "Crap, I was supposed to meet Singh an hour ago. Wally, can you take the sample to the Legends and see if they can give us any insight? Maybe we can take Nora home on the Waverider?" Wally flashed dutifully off and Barry waved at Iris and Caitlin. "I'll, uh... I'll hurry back. Just... keep an eye on her?"

He flashed off, leaving Caitlin to cope with the fact that, yeah, Nora from the future was her daughter.

Flash!

After an eye-opening encounter with Nora at Barry's CSI Lab (where he discovered that his daughter was also a forensic scientist and liked the exact same ice cream he did), and a considerably more frustrating experience in the field (where Nora rushed headlong into danger and Barry got knocked an entire city block through the sky), everyone regrouped at STAR Labs.

"Oh no, you're mad at me," Nora moaned as she watched Caitlin give Barry a quick once-over to make sure there wasn't anything she had to look at.

"No, Nora, we're not mad," Caitlin sighed, fiddling with the arm of Barry's original suit, which was torn. "We're just..."

"Please don't say disappointed!" Nora blurted. "That's so much worse. I just didn't think it was a big deal; it's just Gridlock."

"How did you know who he is?" Iris asked curiously.

"Flash Museum," Nora replied promptly. "It has all the villains and battles in chronological order. I've studied everything. But Gridlock should have been a one-and-done; you guys beat him in one try! At least... you were supposed to. But now, thanks to me, he's on the run, and the timeline's all messed up again and-" She buried her face in her hands, turning away.

"Hey, hey look, Nora..." Barry walked around the desk towards her. "I've made mistakes way worse than this one, okay? We'll get this guy; don't worry about that. But the longer you stay, the more things might change. We need to get you home."

"But I can't go fast enough to get home," Nora said miserably.

The idea of speed was tickling something in Caitlin's brain, and a thought occurred to her. All they had to do was attach Thawn's Tachyon enhancer to Nora's chest, and she might have enough of a boost to get home. She and Cisco set off to work on that while Barry went to try and track down Gridlock. Nora tagged along with the former pair, and was soon sitting in their lab, watching them work.

"So... Nora?" Caitlin spoke up as she fiddled with the Tachyon enhancer. "I know I can't really ask you about stuff from the future, but... you can tell me about yourself, right?"

Nora's face relaxed into a smile. "Yeah!" she said happily. "I double majored in forensics and chemistry in college and now I'm a forensic scientist like dad." Her smile widened a little. "I liked chemistry because of you, though. We used to make these period table of elements where we'd get to invent our own elements."

Caitlin's eyes went very round. "I used to do that with my dad," she breathed.

"I know," Nora said shyly. "And when Uncle Cisco would come over we'd show him the elements, and he'd draw up these maps of crazy, magical lands so we could pinpoint where you'd find all of them. And- and we had this tradition of making a different dessert every weekend and we'd always get flour everywhere and I'd eat way too much chocolate and be up all night."

Caitlin felt like she wanted to cry, but it was a nice feeling, for once. "I can't wait," she murmured, and she really, really couldn't.

Unfortunately, their Tachyon plan didn't work. Barry and Nora were wizzing around the Pipeline when Wally showed up. "Did they already leave? We have to stop them."

A moment later, there was an electric sounding explosion from inside the Pipeline. When Caitlin, Wally and Cisco made it down they found father-daughter speedsters sprawled on the ground, unconscious.

"Sorry I was too late," Wally sighed when everyone reconvened in Caitlin's lab and Barry and Nora woke up. "It took me awhile to find where the Legends were. Or- when they were. But we got Gideon to scan Nora's blood sample and we found negative Tachyons."

"Negative Tachyons?" Cisco replied incredulously. "So, what? Instead of speeding you up, they slow you down?"

Wally shrugged. "Yeah," he said. "Basically."

"Oh dang, I was just joking. That's a real thing?"

"Ava and her team at the Time Bureau have encountered them before but no one knows where they come from or where they're generated, like Dark Matter or the Space Time Continuum," Wally elaborated. "They're saturated in Nora's body and are keeping her from entering the Speed Force."

The Waverider was a dead end too, unfortunately. Negative Tachyons coming in contact with the Time Drive would vaporize the ship, and that was something everyone wanted to avoid.

So they were back to square one. Nora was stuck in the past, unless they could somehow figure out a way to negate the reaction of the negative tachyons. On top of that, there was now the newly-increased problem of Gridlock. Every time he moved, he absorbed the kinetic energy from that movement and grew stronger. The longer they waited, the stronger he would get, and there was no way to know if he could ever "peak", so to speak.

When Caitlin, Cisco and Ralph got home from the Gridlock crime scene, Caitlin found her husband pouring over the negative tachyon information. "Figure it out yet?" she asked, stepping up beside him.

Barry shook his head. "These negative tachyons feel more like science fiction than actual science," he admitted.

Caitlin smiled a little. "I was asking about your daughter," she elaborated gently. "You two seem to have such a good relationship. Why are you so set on sending her back?"

"I..." Barry pulled away from the table and shrugged cluelessly. "What do you mean? First of all, she can't stop talking about the future. You know the danger that her being here poses to the Timeline."

"Yes, that's true," Caitlin accepted. "But I also know you, Barry."

He huffed out a breath and moved to sit down on the steps to the Speed Lab Landing. Caitlin followed suit.

"Look, you're the man who went back in time to borrow Snart for a mission," she reminded him. "The same man who traveled to 2020 to figure out who Savitar was, and to 2015 to train with Wells."

"I know."

"You changed fate to save the world," Caitlin went on. "So... now that our daughter is here in front of us, asking for our help... do you really expect me to believe that you're afraid of affecting the Timeline?"

She smiled gently over at him as Barry crunched up against the side of the short stairwell and hugged his knees. "Nora shouldn't be here," he pressed. "Look, I always wanted a family. And when we got married, I thought one day we'd decide to have a baby. Then you got pregnant and suddenly those dreams were coming true. She'd come, we go home... I'd get to see her first smile, her first tooth. Her first laugh. When I read to her the first time. The first time she walked- the first time she ran. But her coming here... meeting her now... don't you feel like we skipped all of those firsts? All the good stuff?"

"Barry, we'll still get to have all of those firsts," Caitlin tried to explain. "Just maybe not in that order."

"Well, my whole life's been out of order. These powers; time travel... it's the reason my mom was killed. Why I grew up with my dad in prison. They missed so many firsts- they missed our wedding."

Caitlin sighed and brushed her hair back behind her ear, letting her eyes fall from his face.

"I don't know," Barry went on softly. "I just thought that when it was our turn to have a kid... the Universe would let us have this one little thing to be... normal. Just one. And now we've lost our chance."

"You're not losing anything by having her here now," Caitlin told him, reaching out and taking his hand. "We're only gaining something. We've gone the past few months with so much fear and uncertainty regarding our child. But now we know. We know it all works out." She put his hand on her stomach. "We know, Barry. Do you know how lucky that makes us?"

"Maybe you're right," Barry relented. His lips twitched upward a little. "But of course you are. It's you."

She wrinkled her nose a little and swatted him on the arm before sobering up again. "You're gonna be there for that first smile. To drive her to her first day of school, to help her ace her first science test. We both are. And I mean... we have a daughter who defied the laws of physics to come hang out with her parents. Not too many people can say that."

"Yeah," Barry chuckled. "As eager as she is, you'd think that she's the one who didn't grow up with-"

He broke off suddenly and the color seemed to drain from his cheeks. "What's wrong?" Caitlin asked anxiously, the change in the room palpable.

Barry tried to cover it up with a smile. "Uh... nothing. I'll... be right back, okay?"

He got to his feet and jogged out of the room, leaving Caitlin to wonder what revelation, exactly, he had just come to.

Flash!

"Nora."

The young woman in front of him slowly set down the picture frame in her hands and turned to face her father. She tried for a smile but something in her face had changed.

"What happens to me?" Barry asked softly, taking a few slow steps further into Cisco's Lab. "In the future. You said you spend your whole life with your mom, but... you didn't say the same for me."

"My poker face is that bad?" Nora avoided with a light laugh.

Barry didn't smile back. "I need to know."

It was then that the whole story came out. Nora brought Barry to the Time Vault and pulled up the article that had been hanging over Team Flash's heads for as long as they could remember. Everything about it was the same; the title of "Flash Missing, Vanishes in Crisis', the byline reading Iris West, the date.

But then Nora showed him another article.

25 Years Later- Flash Still Missing.

So that was it. He disappeared, and he disappeared for good. According to Nora, she was a few years old when he left but she didn't have a single memory of him. It was the reason she had come to the past. It was the reason she wanted to spend every moment with him possible before she had to go back to her present. It was also the reason she had lied about being stuck... she had known all along about the Negative Tachyons, and how to get home. But she just hadn't wanted to, and Barry...

Barry understood.

But hearing Nora talk about how she and future-Caitlin were alone; about how he had just... left, and hadn't been able to teach Nora anything about being a speedster, hadn't been able to grow old with his wife... that's what broke him.

"I'm sorry," Nora whispered as Barry put his hand over his face, feeling tears welling up. "I just wanted to see you so badly. Spend a day with you, go for a run for the first time... together."

"I missed all your firsts," Barry whispered. "I was so worried about screwing up your childhood and our family, but... I'm not even there."

There was a bleep from the intercom system. "Barry?" Caitlin's soothing, familiar voice paged in. "We need you in the Cortex. It's about Gridlock."

Barry swallowed and wiped the last of his tears away before looking to Nora. "I-"

"It's fine," Nora interrupted, taking a deep breath. "You need to go fix my mess and then... then I can go home."

Barry nodded. But, even after waiting to hear that for so long, he wasn't sure if that was what he really wanted.

Flash!

After a nail-biting final fight against Gridlock that took place in a plane above Central City, the speedster-crime-fighting duo of Barry and Nora came back to STAR Labs in a high of excitement. It didn't hurt that Barry had gotten a new suit in process, all the way from the Flash Museum in the future.

To top it all off, or so Caitlin thought, she and Cisco had fixed the Tachyon absorption device to allow Nora to go home.

"Consider yourself no longer stuck in time!" Cisco crowed as he handed her the tech.

"So... I can go home now?" Nora confirmed.

Caitlin nodded, smiling a little. She was sad to see her daughter go, of course, but it was what needed to be done. Barry had been right about that, even if she hadn't exactly agreed with his methods of dealing with things.

But then her husband surprised her by taking the tech from Cisco instead. "Or... maybe we could put a pause on things," he suggested.

"You want Nora to stay?" Iris asked.

"Uhhhh..." Cisco looked between them blankly. "Uh, yeah, I thought getting her home was our priority..?"

"It- it is," Barry said hurriedly. "But now that I'm thinking of it... maybe we should make sure her powers are working correctly before we send her home."

"And what about the timeline?" Caitlin pressed, not quite buying his excuse. Something had passed between Nora and Barry that she couldn't quite figure out, but she had a feeling it had spurred this sudden change of heart.

"It's risky," Barry agreed. "But, I dunno. Wally and I were talking about it and he thought it'd be okay."

"Well, it looks like Nora is going to need a place to stay," Caitlin said with a bright smile. And, considering all the others they'd dealt with... that was not the worst problem in the world to have.

Author's Note: Ok ok just to remind you guys, at the very end of the episode Ralph gives Caitlin her father's faked death certificate and that starts the whole Snowpack plot. Decided not to get into that just because I didn't feel like it honestly. All of that stuff will be dealt with in Episode 6 :)

I hope you guys enjoyed! I'm also hoping that, because (some) chapters are gonna be shorter, they'll be able to come out faster. But you know me lol.