@queercapwriting, I throw this in your general direction, may you keep it for a rainy day when you need inspiration for an unusual pairing.
Caitlin Snow ran away from Central City after the funeral, because let’s face it, the cops were still looking for her (brainwashed by your superpowers is a poor legal defense). She found herself in Star City in short order, and in the glorious tradition of comic books and superhero teamups, ran across Sara Lance almost immediately.
Sara was fresh off Rip disbanding the Legends and taking away the Waverider when she was dumped in Star City. She spent a few days drinking with Mick before he disappeared for warmer climates, and was finally getting around to thinking about how she might find a job where two separate death certificates wasn’t an immediate disqualifier. Honestly, it’d probably be easier to go back to fighting street thugs and mooching off Oliver, but it felt like such a step back from fixing time that she couldn’t do it yet.
Caitlin and Sara know each other in a general sense, that they exist and that they’re involved in the superhero scene, but not much more than that. They never really interacted outside the alien invasion a few months earlier. Still, they’re both at low point in that moment, and having someone to commiserate with is a lot better than doing it alone, and it’s not like there’s a whole lot of people who have the context to understand their situations, so they get talking.
Sara needs a new purpose without the Waverider and the Legends, and Caitlin needs someone to help her learn how to control her powers, and after a night spent at the bar, they both manage to make the connection that they might be able to help each other. Sara badgers Oliver into giving her the keys to the Queen family cabin so that they could do their work away from the general public. While she may have called it a cabin, but to anyone besides the Queen family, it would be considered a lodge. Definitely overkill for just two people, but if it was empty otherwise anyways, Caitlin wasn’t about to argue.
Caitlin was a little skeptical over just how much help Sara could realistically be, it’s not like she had out of control ice powers, but once she started talking, Caitlin realized Sara might know a little more than she had guessed. Sara knew about being overwhelmed, about feeling urges, about giving into those urges, about coming out the other side changed.
The first thing Sara taught her was how to breathe. Caitlin felt silly, sitting in the middle of the floor, cross legged, being told she was breathing wrong, but she kept at it. In through the nose, out through the mouth, same count every time, and before long, it was two hours later and for the first time in a long time Caitlin didn’t hear a voice telling her to freeze everything solid, raging whenever Caitlin refused to listen.
Sara taught her meditation and tai chi, to help her understand her body better. When Caitlin brought up the fact that she was a bio-engineer who knew the human body extremely well, Sara clarified that she didn’t need to know the human body, Caitlin needed to know her own body. How would she ever control herself if she didn’t know herself? Caitlin didn’t have an answer, so she kept at it, even when she felt awkward and slow compared to how graceful Sara looked as she guided her through the forms.
That was their mornings, anyways, and Sara changed out her sports bra and yoga pants for jeans and long sleeves, because the afternoons were when Caitlin practiced her powers, once more at Sara’s insistence. Caitlin didn’t need to learn to control her powers, Sara posited, she needed to learn how to use them, and control would come naturally from there. Given how poorly trying to suppress her powers had turned out, Caitlin admitted Sara might have a point. All she did in the beginning was throw out blasts of ice and cold, but it wasn’t long before she started to improve. Sara encouraged her to experiment, quickly figuring out how to create more complex shapes and how to control her icy touch.
That last one was the godsend. She could finally use the hot tub to relax her sore muscles without freezing the water on contact.
Sara had celebrated her success by giving Caitlin a massage. It wasn’t supposed to be sexy, it honestly wasn’t, but it had been so long since anyone had touched Caitlin, and Sara’s rough hands felt so good working out the knots and tension in her back, then her neck, then down to her legs, and at that point, Caitlin was so thoroughly wrecked that she didn’t think about the fact that she hadn’t kissed a girl since her freshman year of college, she just flipped over and kissed Sara until she saw stars.
Lessons didn’t change after that, but their downtime afterwards definitely did. Needless to say, they both slept like the dead every night, their energy completely drained, even with Sara’s trained endurance and Caitlin’s frosty healing factor.
When Mick calls Sara six months after disappearing with a story about Caesar being tied up in his cabana, she knows their time alone in the lodge has come to an end, and the research she’s done into the Time Bureau is finally about to pay off. Caitlin decides to tag along, happy to help and still not willing to go back to Central, even when they steal the Waverider and nearly doom the world to a Roman Empire that never fell.
Then the Legends are back, and not just for a one off job that landed in their laps, but fixing time for real, regardless of what the Time Bureau may want them to do. Sara offered to drop Caitlin off back in 2017, but what does she have waiting for her back there? Getting the opportunity to work with Dr. Stein again is just as much incentive to stay as sharing Sara’s bunk, and it’s not like there’s anything keeping them from visiting the present if they need to.
Martin and Jax welcome her with open arms, Ray and Nate are friendly enough. Amaya’s a little standoffish when she shows up, but she’s going through her own things, so Caitlin doesn’t hold it against her. Mick doesn’t hide the fact that he resents her stealing Snart’s spot as the ice-user on the team, even if it doesn’t make logical sense, and it’s not like he treats her any worse than anyone else he meets. Caitlin’s pretty sure he’ll come around eventually.
And that’s how Killer Frost joins the Legends.
