The man who looked like he'd been sleeping under a bridge for a month did not respond to Caitlin's call. His gaze moved slowly across their three faces — back and forth, like he was trying to place a word he'd forgotten — and came up empty.
Barry could understand not recognizing him. They'd never met. But Cisco and Caitlin? That was a different kind of blankness entirely.
Caitlin took a careful breath and tried again, keeping her voice low and steady. "Ronnie, do you remember me? It's Caitlin."
At the name, something shifted in him. His face creased in pain, and he grabbed his own head with both hands like he was trying to hold something in — or keep something out.
"I'm not Ronnie."
"You are," Cisco said, unable to help himself. "You're Ronald Raymond. During the particle accelerator accident, we all thought you were—"
"I said I'm not Ronnie." Each word came out clipped and precise, the kind of calm that lives right next to the edge. "I've said it twice. Back off."
Caitlin stepped forward anyway. "Ronnie, we can help you — we can help you remember—"
The fire came without further warning.
A wall of heat slammed into them, and all three stumbled back several steps, arms up against the sudden, scorching brightness. When Caitlin lowered her arm and looked, Ronnie's eyes had gone white — completely, flatly white — and his entire body was wrapped in flame. He wasn't burning. He was the fire.
"What the hell—" Cisco breathed.
Ronnie didn't look at them again. Jets of flame erupted from his hands and feet simultaneously, and he launched upward in a roar of superheated air, clearing the top of the parking structure in seconds and vanishing into the night sky — a streak of orange and white trailing smoke behind him like a comet going the wrong direction.
The three of them stood in the sudden silence of the empty lot, watching the trail fade.
The next morning, Star Labs.
"Back again."
Jude walked in without particular ceremony. No food cart this time — instead, he had his cat draped over one arm and a woman beside him who was very pointedly not making eye contact with the room. The same woman from the bar the previous night. The one who'd been drugged. The one who could teleport.
Shawna Baez.
The alcohol had burned off, and with it, whatever social ease the evening had lent her. She stood stiff-shouldered in the doorway of a metahuman research laboratory and looked like she'd rather be anywhere else.
"Shawna — Barry, Cisco, Caitlin, you already met at the bar. And this is Dr. Wells, head of Star Labs." Jude turned. "Everyone, Shawna Baez."
No one seemed particularly startled by her presence. That was new. The last time Jude had brought an outside party into the lab unannounced, there had been a notable lack of enthusiasm about it, and he had, in fairness, acknowledged the point. This time he'd sent word ahead and waited for a green light before walking through the door. Progress.
Shawna offered the room a polite nod that communicated nothing warmer than I am aware you exist.
She hadn't woken up this way.
The morning sun had come through the window at an angle she didn't recognize, falling across a ceiling she'd never seen before, and Shawna had gone very still for a moment, doing inventory.
Unfamiliar room. Male voice nearby. Last clear memory: a bar, a few drinks with some guy, and then a gap where the rest of the evening should have been.
She'd thrown back the covers and checked her clothes and her bag in one motion.
Both intact. She let out a breath she hadn't planned to hold.
It wasn't naive fear exactly — Shawna had been in bars her whole life and could handle herself when conscious. But there's a difference between choosing something and having it chosen for you, and she wasn't interested in the latter under any circumstances.
"Hungry?" The man from last night — Jude — was sitting across the room with a steamed bun in his hand, looking unsettlingly unbothered by her assessment of the situation. "I didn't make a normal breakfast, sorry. But these are fresh. Still warm."
She looked around the room while she processed this. Twenty, maybe thirty square meters. Clean walls, simple furniture, no strange smell. A spectacularly stupid-looking cat was asleep on top of his head, rising and falling with his breathing.
"You took me back to your place?"
"Hotels are expensive. At least the rent on my room is sunk already."
I should just grab my bag and go, she thought.
The bun smelled incredible.
When she came back to herself, she was already sitting at the table.
She ate half of it before looking up. Nothing happened last night, right?
"Nothing happened," Jude said, apparently reading her face without difficulty. "You mentioned a boyfriend. I'm not that kind of person."
What he left unsaid was longer and more specific, but it amounted to: Shawna met none of his criteria, there was no foundation between them, and he was genuinely, almost quaintly, old-fashioned about the entire subject of relationships. The short version was that he didn't consider any of it worth doing halfway, and halfway was all last night could have been.
"A true gentleman," she'd said, because she didn't know what else to say.
"First time I've heard that one." He looked pleased. "Keep going, I'm fine with it."
She decided not to.
"I know this might sound like a lecture," he continued, "but you should be more careful. Going to bars alone when you have a boyfriend — you got lucky last night. If it had been someone else—"
"Snacks." The cat peeled open one eye. "Boss. Where are the snacks. Meow."
The cat, apparently incapable of subtlety, had climbed off his head and was now regarding him with the expression of an entity who considered hunger a moral emergency.
Jude's face went flat.
"Give me a second," he told Shawna.
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