Color My World (just paint it with your love)
For the Killervibe Gift Swap, a gift for @ava-has-a-closet-murderboard. Eventually I hope to get everyone a gift but it’s going real slow, y’all!
You see in color when you meet your soulmate AU. (Also obviously Ronnie died the first time and didn't come back as Firestorm, sorry Ronnie.)
Title from the song Color My World by Petula Clark
Color My World (just paint it with your love)
When Ronnie died, the world went grey in an instant.
Even as Caitlin screamed his name, she knew it was hopeless. Just the same as the world had exploded with color between one blink and the next the moment she'd met him, it reversed the moment his heart stopped beating.
-
For years, Caitlin assumed that Cisco saw the world in the same shades of grey as she did. She knew he was friendly and flirty and went on dates, and well - he was Cisco, after all. So she always expected to see him come rushing into the cortex one day, looking around at everything and seeing the colors after having met the person he was supposed to spend his life with.
So when she walked into his lab one day to find him comparing two apparently identical swatches, it was a surprise - but it wasn't.
"Cisco!" she cried, and he whirled to face her, stuffing both swatches behind his back. "Are you seeing in color?"
"Um, I - what? No. I was - comparing - um." He sagged. "Yes."
"You met your soulmate! Who is it? When can I meet them? What's their name?" She realized he wasn't looking as excited as people usually did in that first flush of color and love. "What's wrong?"
"I haven't met anyone new."
"Well, of course you have, you're seeing in color -"
"I met them years ago."
"Years? You've been seeing color all this time? You never said anything."
He nodded. "Sorry. Yeah."
"But when? And why didn't you - why aren't you - what happened?" Dramatic, overblown scenarios raced through her head, taken from cheesy cable movies with titles like "Soulmate to a Serial Killer.”
"Nothing happened, exactly. It's - " He looked away. "They're my soulmate, but I'm not theirs."
She goggled at him. You heard about those things, of course. Small percentages. Sad stories whispered behind hands. But knowing Cisco was one of them - "How do you know?"
"They'd already met their real soulmate when I met them."
She shook her head, attempting to wrap her head around it. "Are you sure? Have you told them? Have you talked about it at all?"
"Yes, I'm a hundred percent sure."
How could the universe be this cruel? Warm, laughing, loving Cisco, to be matched with someone who wasn't matched to him. To watch from the sidelines as they built a life with someone else.
It was almost as horribly unfair as losing your soulmate. No - no. More unfair. She'd at least had a life with Ronnie, no matter how short it had been. Cisco never had that with his soulmate, and never would.
"Why didn't you ever say anything? I always thought - "
"Because I didn't want you looking at me exactly the way you're looking at me right this very moment. Like I just told you my puppy has cancer."
She tried to rearrange her face. "I'm just -"
"Caitlin, it's fine. It happens." He shook his head a little. "I'm sorry I kept it from you."
"Who else knows?"
"Barry. And probably Iris."
"Has he met them?" A flush of - jealousy? she didn't know what to call it - washed up her throat.
"No, he doesn't even know who they are. Just that they exist." He shrugged and tossed the swatches on to the table. "Couldn't exactly keep it from him when we were designing suits together."
She said very quietly, "Did Ronnie know?"
He shook his head hard. "No, he didn't. No. Not even a suspicion. Look, I don't talk about it because there's nothing I can do about it, and there's nothing you can do about it, either. A soulmate is a soulmate, right? Even when they're not."
She reached to put her arm around his shoulder. "Cisco - "
Gently but firmly, he shrugged her hand away. "I've come to terms with it. It's just the way things are."
She swallowed hurt. "But you've been dating. Haven't you?" He had an app on his phone, and sometimes he would take it out and swipe through photos. She'd thought it was a regular app that just set you up on dates with other people who hadn't met their soulmate yet.
"It's a different kind of app. We all know the score. Nobody's on there to meet their soulmate. Just to find a good time."
"Is it just people who are - " She floundered. There was a term for people like Cisco, but to her mind, it was nasty and rude.
He said it anyway. "Third wheels?"
She made a face. It sounded even worse now that she knew it applied to him.
"Most of us, yeah. But there's a pretty good number of people who - uh - " He looked at her sidelong. "Who lost theirs."
"Oh." She couldn't imagine seeking anyone out after Ronnie. "Really?"
"Yup. I mean, they're not dead just because - well, anyway, if you ever wanna - you know. See the app. You can."
"Thank you,” she said. “But don't try to distract me. How long has it been?"
"A few years," he said. "Look, it's just a thing about me. Like having brown eyes and vibes and a rockin' fashion sense. Can you do me a solid, as a friend?"
"Anything. Of course."
"Let's never talk about this again."
Painted into a corner, she bit her lip. "Okay. If that's what you want."
"It's what I want."
Of course, she hadn't gotten the chance to ask the question that burned the most. Who was it? Who could possibly overlook Cisco?
But she'd promised.
-
She thought about it, though. She thought about it a lot, in her cold bed, in her grey house with all the colors she couldn't see anymore. At her kitchen table, set for one. When she opened up her phone and looked at the last picture Ronnie had sent her, a selfie with a particularly gigantic donut.
In black and white, of course. Like everything else, all the pictures of him had drained of color when he died. It made everything sting worse. She'd seen his face in color from the beginning, but now she couldn't remember the exact shade of his eyes or the different tones of his hair.
She didn't ask Cisco anything more, but she did go down a rabbit hole of research. One-sided soulmate was the technical term they used in social science surveys. OSS for short. She looked at reams and reams of statistics, quantitative and qualitative and longitudinal studies. Some of the OSS's said they were happy, some were depressed, some simply accepted it. Surprisingly, the stats on their overall mental well-being weren't all that different from people who were with their soulmates, or still waiting to find them.
Some one-sided soulmates spent their lives alone. But others dated and slept with and sometimes even married others like them.
She gave into curiosity and read the research on people who'd lost soulmates. She found the stats there very much the same. A little more depression, maybe, but there were a surprising amount of people who did just as the one-sided soulmates did - dating, sleeping with, marrying people they met.
Sometimes those people even found a second soulmate.
When that particular revelation popped up on her screen, she dropped a full cup of coffee and completely ruined her keyboard.
-
The day everything changed was just a regular day at first. The Flash and Vibe were out investigating a sketchy warehouse, and Caitlin was trying not to fret while reading yet another study on people who fell outside the soulmate norm.
"Cisco!" she cried as Barry whooshed them into the cortex, almost doubled over trying to support his weight. "What happened?"
"Got my bell rung," he slurred. "Ow, dude, ow, gentle - "
"The guy knocked him into a concrete pillar," Barry reported, settling Cisco onto the edge of the bed.
"No, don’t lay him down. 'll take care of him. You go get changed." As he whooshed out, she gloved up quickly and checked Cisco's pupils. They were the same size, and he denied any nausea or dizziness, but she’d still have to monitor him for signs of a concussion. She set her penlight down and gasped.
"What?"
“You’re bleeding.”
He wiped his face and blood smeared across the back of his hand. “Just a bloody nose. I’ll be fine in a minute.”
She tsked and pressed a square of gauze to his nose, gently feeling its shape. It wasn’t broken. “Are your teeth okay? Your tongue?”
“Mhm.”
“Don’t lean back! Just breathe through your mouth.” After holding it a few minutes, she checked, and indeed, the blood had stopped its flow. She let him straighten up. "How's your head?"
"Could use an aspirin."
"You got it." She turned away, but before she pulled her gloves off, she looked at the blood smeared over the fingertips and soaking into the gauze.
Against the light grey of her gloves and the white of the gauze, Cisco's blood showed scarlet.
-
At first, she thought she’d been mistaken. It had just been the blood, not anything else.
But then the sprinkles on the ice cream he brought her the next day showed up vividly blue and pink and orange against the rich brown of the treat. And the chips and guac she shared with him the day after that were pale yellow and brilliant green.
Color seeped back into her world a little at a time, mostly following Cisco. It was so different than before, but so wonderful at the same time. She'd forgotten how vivid red could be, how lavender was so delicate, how green was so rich. Sometimes she would just sit and stare at whatever had lit up today.
He noticed, of course. "What's wrong?" he asked one day, as the sunlight filtering through the skylights in the cortex picked out rich highlights in his hair.
She shook her head. "Nothing."
"You were staring."
"There was a - a bug on you. But it flew away," she added hastily as he swiped at his hair.
It wasn’t like it had been with Ronnie. Then, it had been instantaneous, like a finger snap. Not this slow bloom of color, spreading outward from Cisco like watercolors soaking into paper, until every corner of the world had a different hue and shade. But Cisco wasn’t Ronnie, and she didn’t want him to be.
She worried about it sometimes. Did this mean Ronnie hadn't been her soulmate? That she didn't love him anymore? But she knew he had, and she knew she did. She would never stop.
It was just that she was one of the lucky very few who got a second soulmate.
And then the thought followed: what if Cisco's mystery soulmate was her?
She turned it over in her head, as carefully as an antique china plate. The facts fit. She had been with Ronnie when she and Cisco had met. She even remembered them telling him about their first meeting, over dinner or something. She struggled to remember his reaction, what he'd said or looked like, but couldn't.
And when Ronnie had died and the color had drained from the world, she'd told him that too.
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, watching the newly colorful starbursts behind her lids. "Oh, Cisco," she murmured to his past self. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I never saw. I know you couldn't tell me, but I wish I'd realized you were hurting."
Watching her with Ronnie must have been torture for him. Watching her after Ronnie died - that must have been torture in a different way, her loss of color confirming every day that he wasn't her soulmate.
But it was going to be different now. If they were soulmates, he deserved to know.
And if they weren't -
Her stomach pitched uneasily at the thought.
-
Her heart thundered in her chest as she made her way down to his lab. She'd kept this secret for a month now, clasped to her chest. And he'd kept it for years. This was going to change everything,
For the better?
She hoped.
He was head and shoulders into the souped-up treadmill Barry used to test his speed, a tool box open next to him. "Hey," he called out as she came in. She never could surprise him. Was that a soulmate thing, a Vibe thing, or just a Cisco thing?
"Hi," she said brightly, almost shrilly. She swallowed hard and perched herself on the edge of his table, wiping her sweaty palms on her favorite skirt. "What are you working on?"
"Oh, just tuning this old girl up. How about you? What brings you down here?"
"Do I have to have a reason to come down here?"
He peered at her over his shoulder. "No, but you sure look like you do."
She wiped her palms again. "I was just thinking."
"Uhoh," he said cheerfully, turning back to the treadmill.
"About your soulmate."
Although he didn't say anything, all the cheer sucked itself out of the room.
"About, um, when you met them, and how long it's been, and -"
"Caitlin," he said in a heavy voice. "You said you wouldn't talk about this anymore."
"I know, I did, but I'm just curious - "
"You promised," he said. "You made me a promise."
"I - I did - "
He straightened up again, crossing his arms, resting the greasy wrench against his shoulder. His brows loomed heavy and serious. "So why the hell are you breaking it now?"
Okay, this wasn't broaching the subject like she'd thought it would. "You should put that wrench down," she said. "You're getting grease all over that shirt."
"Subject changed appreciated, but why - "
“And I like that shirt," she said. "I like that color on you. “It’s very flattering.”
He dropped the wrench on his foot.
When the clanging and the yelping and the jumping up and down and the checking that his foot wasn't broken had all died down, he wiped his greasy fingers on a rag, getting the fingers greasier. "So," he said levelly, "you met someone. That's great. That- that's awesome. What's their name?"
Oh. She hadn't expected this.
"Cisco," she said. "It's you."
He looked up, pain filling his eyes, and probably not from his foot. "No, it's not."
"It is," she insisted. Oh, wow, she hadn't expected him to be this stubborn about it.
"No," he said. "No. You met someone and you didn't realize, that's all. I don't know why you think it's me, because we've known each other for years, and it's never been me before." His voice cracked.
She reached out to take his hands. "But it is. I've been seeing in color for a month now. Just a little at first. But now it's everywhere. And it started with you. Cisco, it's you."
He shook his head slowly. "How?"
She shrugged. “I’ve been researching. Did you know it's a whole field in social science? The study of soulmates. Amatology. It's so much more complicated then everybody thinks, Cisco. We always hear how you know in the first moment, and it's just that one person, forever, and - and that's not accurate! You can have more than one. And you know somebody for years before they become your soulmate. And that's what happened to me. With you," she added firmly.
He was pressing his lips together. "It was - " he said, then stopped. Swallowed. Took a breath. "It was the first moment with me. The first color I saw was the gold of your engagement ring."
"Oh," she breathed.
He swallowed again. There were tears in his eyes. "I've loved you for years, Caitlin, so I need you to tell me right now. Swear to me you're sure, and you're not screwing with me, and you - " His voice sank to a whisper. "And you absolutely know I'm your soulmate."
"I'm sure," she said. "I'm not screwing with you. I absolutely know that you're my soulmate, Cisco Ramon. And you know why? Because I don’t want it to be anybody but you."
He kissed her, hard, pulling her close. She had half a thought for her meticulously selected outfit, then mentally consigned it to the rag bin and kissed her soulmate back.
When they had to come up for air, he rested his forehead against hers. "I never wanted it to be anybody but you, either," he breathed.
"Even when - Ronnie?"
He nodded. "Because he made you happy. I wanted that more than anything else."
She traced the lines of his face, the arch of his brows, the curve of his lips. Dear and familiar and beautiful. "You're going to make me happy too."
FINIS
