The sunset on Caitlin's birthday came in over the river around 5:47 PM and laid a long copper line across the front of the apartment building across the street from mine.
I was on my apartment roof.
I had not been on my apartment roof since Christmas Eve. The roof was not a place I went often — the door to it from the stairwell stuck, and you had to phase through it if you wanted to get up in winter without bringing bolt cutters, and I no longer had phasing. I'd brought bolt cutters.
The cake was in the fridge downstairs. The candles were on the kitchen counter. Cisco was bringing matches and Iris was bringing wine and Joe was bringing the pasta salad he'd brought to the last three team gatherings because he believed he was good at pasta salad, which he was, and Eddie was bringing a cheese board he'd been talking about all week.
Caitlin didn't know any of this was happening.
She thought she was coming over for dinner with me.
She'd been at the lab all day running her own diagnostic on her own Frost — she'd been doing one every Thursday since the trap, marking the slow upward curve of her Sync rate the way I'd marked my powers' sync rates a year ago — and at five o'clock she'd texted long day. couch? and I'd texted back yeah, come over and then I'd sent a separate message to the group chat saying we're on, six PM, my place, surprise.
I checked my watch on the roof.
5:51.
She was going to be at my door in fifteen minutes.
I'd come up here for the same reason I always came up here, which was that my apartment was small and my own thoughts were larger when I was indoors and smaller when I was on the roof. The wind off the river was steady but not cold — early February in Central City was a forgiving month most years, and this year it had been mild for a week running — and the sky over the city had the specific quality I'd come to know as Central City evening, which was a pinker version of the Central City morning I'd had coffee at my counter watching every day for thirteen months.
Below me, on the street, the woman in the building across had taken her dog out for the evening walk. I'd never met her. I'd seen her from this roof on a half-dozen occasions over the year. Small dog. She walked it in a long puffy coat that she'd worn last winter too.
I watched her cross the street.
I let my mind do nothing for a minute.
Then I pulled up the System.
[Rank: C. Level: 78. Powers Stored: 8/10. Cellular Integrity: 69%.]
[Recovery to current ceiling: 91%. Estimated completion: 14 days.]
[No active alerts. No pending recommendations. No threat designations.]
I'd been waiting for the System to get impatient.
It hadn't.
I'd told Cisco it was being patient. The honest read was that patient wasn't quite the word. The System wasn't sitting in the back of my head waiting. The System was quiet in a way I hadn't experienced from it in twelve months. As if it had logged the silo trap and the reverse-extraction and the seventy-percent integrity floor as a plateau and was now operating at a cruising altitude that did not require its constant attention.
It was — and I'd noted this in my notebook three nights ago and underlined it — the System acting the way it would act if it had decided that the survival objective was, for the first time since Day One, no longer in active question.
I dismissed the readouts.
Below me, the apartment door buzzer rang.
I checked my watch.
5:58.
Of course she was early.
---
Caitlin was at the front door with a bottle of wine and a paper bag from the bakery on Beaufort.
"I brought —"
She stopped.
She'd looked past me into the apartment. The kitchen lights were down. The cake was sitting on the counter under a single low spotlight from the under-cabinet fixture I'd switched on for it. Iris had made a banner from a roll of butcher paper with HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAIT in marker, and Iris had hung it across the kitchen archway because Iris was a person who did banners. Cisco was at the kitchen counter with a lighter in one hand. Joe was setting out plates. Eddie had the cheese board going on the coffee table.
She did not move for a full second.
Then her face did something I'd been hoping for and had not been certain about, which was a small specific kind of crumple that was not crying — Caitlin was past crying for a thing like this, her tear inventory was budgeted now — but was the cousin of crying that happened when a person who had not had a proper birthday in three years was in the doorway of an apartment that had a banner with her name on it.
She set the wine down on the entry table.
Set the bakery bag next to it.
"You — what is this."
"Surprise."
"Harry."
"The cake's lemon. I asked Iris."
"Harry."
"Get in here, Cait, the cake is going to get warm."
She came in.
The next two hours were the noise of the team in my apartment, which was a noise I had not had in the apartment before. Joe at the kitchen table eating his own pasta salad with a face of suspicion as if checking whether it was as good as he remembered. Iris taking pictures with her phone. Cisco lighting candles for the second time because he'd let the first set burn down too far. Eddie convincing me to try a cheese I'd never heard of. Wally — who was at his second team event now and was visibly less skeptical than the first — trying to recreate one of Cisco's Star Trek references badly.
Barry showed up at 7:14 with a small wrapped box. He'd been at the precinct. He apologized for being late.
Caitlin opened the small box.
Inside was a thing I didn't immediately recognize — a small enamel pin in the shape of a snowflake, hexagonal, six points, sloppily symmetrical.
It was a model of the snowflake she'd made on her living room floor on Day One of frost-control training.
She held it in her hand.
She looked at Barry.
"How did you —"
"Harry told me."
She looked at me.
"Two months ago," I said. "Long before tonight. Before I knew there was going to be a tonight."
She closed her hand around the pin.
She did not say anything for a long beat.
Then she said thank you very quietly to both of us, and she pinned it on the collar of her sweater, and the conversation moved on, because Iris started telling a story about a courthouse interview that had gone sideways, and the apartment did the work of being an apartment full of people, and I sat at the corner of my own kitchen and watched.
---
At 9:47 the apartment emptied.
Joe with his Tupperware. Cisco with the leftover cake. Wally in tow. Iris with Eddie, both of them yawning. Barry was the last out. He stopped in the doorway. Looked back at the apartment. Looked at me. Said that was good, brother, and went.
I closed the door.
The apartment was suddenly quiet.
Caitlin was at the kitchen sink rinsing wine glasses.
"You don't have to do those."
"I know I don't."
"I'll do them in the morning."
"I'm doing them now. Sit down."
I sat down at the kitchen counter on the stool she pointed at.
She finished the glasses. Dried her hands on the towel hanging from the oven door. Came around the counter. Sat on the stool next to mine.
She did not look at me.
She turned the snowflake pin on her sweater between her fingers for a moment.
"Harry."
"Yeah."
"I want to talk about a thing."
"Okay."
"I don't know what we are."
I looked at her.
"I know that," I said.
"I don't know if we're we."
"I know that too."
"I have been at your apartment three nights in two weeks. We have had lunch eleven times this month. You have held my hand on the porch at Joe's. You stayed at my apartment for a night that was not a transactional night."
"Yeah."
"And I want to ask what we're doing."
I turned on the stool to face her.
She was looking at the counter.
"Cait."
"Don't make me look at you. Not for this part."
"Okay."
I left it.
She took a breath.
"I'm not in the same place I was when we were together. The first time. I know that. I am not — I am not the person who was at our table at Jitters in March of last year. I am a person who is becoming something I do not yet have a name for, and I am a person who has friends who watched me become it, and I am a person who has a snowflake pin from a friend who knew which snowflake to give me. I am also a person who is afraid of becoming the woman in the cell on Earth-2."
"You're not her."
"I might still be. It is a possibility I live with every morning."
"Cait —"
"Let me finish."
I shut up.
"What I want to ask is — what I want to know — is whether you are interested in the version of me that I am now. Not the version of me you fell in love with last spring. The version that has cold hands sometimes. The version that named a man's father in front of him to break him. The version that does not have a clean line under who she's going to be in two years. That version. Are you interested in that one."
I thought about it.
I gave myself a moment with the question, because it was the kind of question that did not get a good answer if you answered it fast.
"Yes."
She finally looked at me.
"That's it?"
"That's it. Yes. I am interested in that version of you. Not because she's familiar. Because she's the one who is here. The version of you who said his father's name in the silo is the version of you I would walk through more silos with. The version of you who asked me to stay at your apartment is the one I stayed for. I do not need a clean line under who you're going to be. I do not have a clean line under who I'm going to be. We can have crooked lines together if you want."
She held my look.
"Crooked lines."
"Crooked lines."
"Together."
"If you want."
She breathed out.
She put her hand on the counter between us.
I put mine on top of it.
Her fingers were not cold.
She was holding the cold down on purpose. I'd watched her do it for two months. She could do it now without thinking. The hand under mine was just a hand. Warm in the places hands were warm. A little stiff in the joints from washing wine glasses.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay."
She squeezed my hand once. Let it go. Stood.
"I'm going home tonight."
"Okay."
"Not because of anything. Because I have a panel at seven tomorrow and I sleep better in my own bed before a panel."
"I know."
"Tomorrow night, here. I'll bring something."
"Bring whatever you want."
"And Harry."
"Yeah."
"Thank you for the birthday."
"Anytime."
She got her coat.
At the door she turned back.
"And — at some point soon — we are going to talk about the thing you have not told me yet."
"I know."
"You said eventually."
"I did."
"I'm going to keep choosing complicated. But I want eventually to be a real word."
"It will be."
"This year."
I looked at her.
"This year."
She nodded.
She went.
The door closed.
I stood at the door for a moment with my hand on the handle.
Then I went back to the kitchen. The cake was three-quarters gone on the counter under the spotlight. The banner Iris had made was still hanging in the archway, slightly crooked at one end where the tape had given. The wine glasses were upside-down on the towel by the sink, drying.
I put the cake in the fridge.
Pulled the banner down. Folded it. Set it on the counter for tomorrow.
Killed the spotlight.
Stood in the dark of my own kitchen for a minute.
The City outside the window was Central City at 10:14 PM on a Thursday in February, which was a quiet city, lights on in apartment windows across the way, a single car going past on the street below, the sound of the building's heat coming on under the floor.
I went to the cabinet over the fridge.
Took down the bourbon Caitlin had brought to my apartment in October, the day after the singularity-anniversary memorial, when she'd put it on the table in front of us in her own apartment and I'd watched her not drink it.
I poured a glass.
A small one.
Sat at my kitchen counter with the glass in front of me.
Did not drink it.
Looked at the calendar on the fridge.
The first week of February still said vacation.
The fourth said Cait's birthday, with the circle.
The twelfth said Joe's PT thing.
The page after that — March — was no longer blank.
I'd written Caitlin on the morning of the seventh, because she'd said something offhand at Joe's last weekend about hating her early-March physical and wanting someone to be at the appointment with her.
I'd written Cisco birthday on the eleventh. He'd told me three weeks ago, casually, in passing, the way Cisco told you things that mattered to him.
I'd written Earth-2 trip — confirm with Cisco on the eighteenth, because the monthly cadence was supposed to start back up after my recovery period and we hadn't yet decided whether we would.
I'd written Eddie & Iris dinner on the twenty-second, because Iris had emailed me the date without preamble two days ago.
The page was not blank.
Pages in this body had been blank for thirteen months. The pages had been countdowns, mostly. Days to extractions. Days to tracker updates. Days until the next canon event I'd recognized. Days until Eddie's death I'd been planning to prevent. Days until the singularity I'd tried to think my way through. Days until the thirty-day clock ran out.
This page was something else.
This page was appointments.
Birthdays. Dinners. A doctor's visit with a person who would not sit in an exam room without me. A trip to a parallel universe that was no longer about hunting and was now about the long-term project of understanding what we were doing in a multiverse that was bigger than one Earth's worth of plans.
I turned the bourbon glass in my hand for a long minute.
I didn't drink it.
I poured it back into the bottle. Capped the bottle. Put it back in the cabinet.
[Rank: C. Level: 78. Cellular Integrity: 69%.]
[No alerts. No recommendations.]
[Stable.]
I dismissed the System.
Stood at the kitchen window with my hands flat on the counter and looked at the city for a while.
I did not feel like a person who'd lost things.
I'd lost them. I'd lost twenty-eight percent of cellular reserve I would never get back. I'd lost the original Phasing ability that had been my first stolen power and had been with me through every fight I'd been in since March of last year. I'd lost the option to take risks with my own body the way I'd been taking them all year. I'd lost, in the silo, the version of the trap I'd been planning that put me as the keystone.
I had also gained things.
I had a banner folded on my counter with my name on it nowhere.
I had a snowflake pin on a woman's collar leaving my building in a coat I'd never seen her wear before.
I had a glass of bourbon I'd poured back into the bottle.
I had a calendar with March on it.
I had, somewhere down in the Pipeline of a building I'd lied my way into thirteen months ago, two men in cells who would not be killing anyone in this city — and a man on Earth-2 named in a file and waiting for what came next.
I had a reverse-extraction scar on the inside of my left forearm that Caitlin had drawn in red pen when she was running the procedure, so she'd know where to put the probe back if she had to. The line was four inches long. I'd not washed it off. It had faded to a pink shadow over the last week. By the end of the month it would be gone.
It would be gone, and then I would draw it back on with a pen of my own, because I was — I'd realized this around the third night of sleeping on Caitlin's couch — I was the kind of person who kept marks on himself to remember what had happened.
I went to the bathroom mirror.
Looked at the man in it.
The man was tireder than the man who had stood here a year ago. The hair was longer. The jaw was leaner. The eyes had a small set at the corner I had never seen in any photo of any version of me from before this body.
I looked the man in the eye for a long minute.
I said, out loud, to my own reflection:
"You're still here."
I went to bed.
I set the alarm for 7:30.
Tomorrow Caitlin had a panel and I had a workstation at STAR Labs and the city was going to do the work of being a city.
The page after tomorrow was March.
The page after March was April.
There was no countdown on any of them.
For the first time in a year of mornings, I closed my eyes without doing the small final mental check of what's the deadline, because the deadline was no longer a thing I had.
I slept the way I had slept on Christmas Eve.
The way a person slept when the house they were in was full of the people they had spent a year trying to keep alive, and all of them were sleeping in their own houses elsewhere in the city, and nobody was coming to take any of them in the night.
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