Work Text:
Caitlin was in her lab, diligently typing up some of her notes on a meta they had just encountered, when she heard footsteps enter behind her. She briefly glanced down at the time in the bottom-corner of her computer, a small grin gracing her face as she nodded to herself, knowing exactly who it was.
"I'll be right with you, Savitar," she told him, not wanting to rip herself away from her present task when she was so close to completing it.
She heard him grunt in response, causing her to playfully roll her eyes. He often put on a show of nonchalance, but after spending as much time as she had with him over the last couple months - mainly tracking and testing to make sure he wasn't going to disappear from the timeline - she had been able to deduce that he cared a lot about pretty much everything.
Caitlin saw the way he dejectedly looked down at his shoes when someone flinched as he walked into a room; or the way he locked his jaw when someone made passive aggressive remarks; or how his gaze would linger on the mannequin holding The Flash suit every time he entered the Cortex.
Savitar also seemed to care a lot about his life and its permanence in this timeline, if him religiously showing up to his weekly tests meant anything. She even cleared him a month back, feeling like they exceeded the time frame where he could've been potentially erased. However, he was adamant about keeping their weekly routine, so she obliged.
It's not like she minded, anyway. It gave her something to do. Strangely enough, in a town flooded with metas prone to commit crime, she had a lot of down time. And if she was being honest with herself, Caitlin was relieved he wanted to continue, since she had come to really enjoy his company.
During the first couple weeks he was on the team, it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk at all, but slowly she learned a lot about the former God of Speed during their checkups. As much as he looked like Barry, he really was rather different and more complex. He was a lot more subdued and quiet; every word and action were very purposeful. His humor was dark and dry, but his lips would still quirk upwards whenever she dropped a pun (though he'd deny it). He was content to spend a lot of his time alone, mainly devoted to tinkering and building in his low-lighted workshop, but he would talk with her for hours on end in stimulating conversations about everything and nothing when given the chance.
But getting to know him had their consequences. Because the more she learned about him and the more time she spent with him, the more she found herself liking the guy. He could be intense, but she liked that charged atmosphere. He also could be a royal pain in the ass, but she enjoyed the back-and-forth banter that often resulted from it. It wasn't until she found herself looking forward to their check-ups that she had to admit that maybe she liked Savitar a lot more than she had ever anticipated she would.
And admitting that seemed to open the floodgates, fueling the attraction she already held for Barry into another thing entirely. She didn't know if it was the scars, the confidence or the slow way he held himself despite being able to break the sound barrier in his sleep, but he oozed sex appeal.
"Annnnnnd, I'm done," Caitlin commented as she hit the save icon, before turning around to face her patient. However, once she actually saw Savitar, her eyes popped open wide. "Oh…" she quietly expressed, eyeing him up and down.
Savitar distributed weight to his other leg as he crossed his arms. "What?"
Caitlin shook her head, mainly to try to reset her expression of anything potentially inappropriate. "Nothing…well, it's just…you usually wear all solid black clothes and now…"
She trailed off, taking in the piece of clothing more. The team had given him money to buy clothes for himself when he decided to stay. At the time, he only bought more black jeans and more solid black t-shirts. The team often joked that he was like a live-action cartoon character since he seemed to wear the same thing everyday. But today, for whatever reason, he was wearing a t-shirt that had thick navy blue and black horizontal stripes.
It wasn't a bad look in the slightest, especially for someone like Savitar. It still worked with his dark and gloomy aesthetic, but oddly enough it softened his edge too. His scars and cloudy eye never made him any less attractive in her eyes, but the pop of color seemed to help complement them into something less intimidating. But the shirt itself was her undoing, making her think thoughts she promised herself she wouldn't think (in his presence, anyway).
"Do the colors clash or something?" he snarked as he jumped up on the cot to sit, bringing her out of her head.
"No!" she immediately let out, before apologizing. "Sorry! It's just..well, I'm used to your normal attire. This is just out of your norm, and you going out of your norm is, well, shocking, to say the least."
Savitar rolled his eyes. "Hardly noteworthy."
"I would disagree," she breathily countered, before forcing herself to clear her throat.
His eyes looked at her with amusement. "Wasn't not killing you all and joining the team out of my norm as well?"
Caitlin sheepishly shrugged. "I like to think that was more of a…change of heart…?"
He faintly snorted. "I don't have a heart."
She put her hands to her hips. "Well, I don't think that's true either."
His eyebrow raised. "Oh yeah?"
"Yes," she answered with a curt nod.
His gaze drifted to the side. "Yeah, well," he started, eyes landing on her medical gear, "are we going to do this check up any time soon, or what?"
She held back the inclination to roll her eyes. "Like you have anywhere else to be," she dryly commented as she looped her stethoscope around her neck and picked up her Baumanometer. However, she was thankful for the distraction since doing the checkup would give her an excuse to think more clinically and not on…other things…
Savitar chuckled through a smirk as she wrapped the Baumanometer around his arm. "I'm having a terrible influence on your bedside manner."
She pursed her lips. "Well, when your patient is a pain in the ass…" she commented as she purposely pumped the cuff once or twice too many.
He snickered through a wince, evidently satisfied with himself.
After noting his blood pressure on a nearby notebook, she took the Baumanometer off. "But honestly, what made you change things up today?" she wondered as she placed the eartips of the stethoscope in her ears and the diaphragm against his chest.
He nonchalantly shrugged, face a blank canvas of emotion, but she could distinctly hear his heart rate spike ever so slightly. "Conducting an experiment."
Her eyebrows jumped to her hairline; she hadn't been expecting a response like that. "Conducting an experiment about what?"
"To see if people treated me any differently because of it."
She frowned as she moved the diaphragm around his chest, listening to how the air moved through his lungs fluidly. "Any observations so far?"
"Just a nosy doctor."
"Well sorry for being curious," she said while making a face at him. "But I'm sure if I randomly showed up one day wearing…a trash bag…you'd wonder why!"
"So wearing this striped shirt is equivalent to wearing a trash bag?" he pondered. "And here I thought you liked guys in striped shirts."
"I do!" she hastily asserted. "And it looks great on you!" It really did. "I was just trying to come up with something I wouldn't normally wear and I couldn't think of anything and…wait…"
She had been so quick to reassure him that she missed the latter half of what he said, but slowly his words were finally reaching her brain. "…how - how did you know I liked guys in striped shirts?"
His heart beat spiked again for the briefest of moments, and she swore a ghost of a smile was gracing his face.
"I heard you telling Cisco about it the other day, when you revealed your childhood crush…"
The doctor found herself blushing. "I doubt I was the only one who had a crush on Waldo from Where's Waldo," she said in her own defense.
Savitar snorted. "If that is what helps you sleep at night."
She opened her mouth to further defend herself, but stopped as a realization clicked into place. Her eyes thinned as she let the stethoscope slip from her fingers. "Am I the sole subject of this so-called experiment of yours?"
He smirked, arrogance oozing from his demeanor. "I wanted to see how deep the kink ran."
Caitlin could feel her already-present blush flare up, but she tried to remain collected. "So you wanted to see if I'd suddenly get the hots for you? Is that it?"
His eyes widened ever so slightly, and just like that she felt the power shift and knew the conversation was now in her hands.
Caitlin set her tools down and placed her hands on either side of his legs, leaning into his personal space. "Do you want me to have the hots for you, Savitar?"
He stared her down unwavering, face as stoic as ever, but she noticed his Adam's apple bob as he discreetly swallowed. "Don't you have more tests to run?"
"We'll get to them, but I feel like there are more pressing matters at hand," she told him, leaning back to get a good read on him. Savitar could be tough and intimidating, but she noticed he scared easily too, and she didn't want him running away before she could get some answers.
He grumbled and scowled, but he didn't make any move to leave, which encouraged her to keep pushing.
"So? Are you going to answer me?"
He crossed his arms and huffed. "Look, I get it," he let out impatiently. "The striped-shirt phenomenon doesn't work on me. You're making it crystal clear, Caitlin!"
"Clearly not," she volleyed back, "but maybe that's because right now all I can think is how stupidly attractive you look that I'm having a hard time sending the right message!"
Savitar's head jolted backwards in surprise. "What?!" he hollered in exasperation. "But you haven't acted any differently towards me whatsoever since you saw me with the striped shirt."
"That's because I find you attractive all of the time, dumbass!"
Savitar took those words and sat silently on the cot for a moment, really thinking it all through and processing it. "So the stripes worked?"
"They did," she admitted, her eyes treacherously looking at the shirt with a yearning, "but they also weren't needed," she clarified, trying to remain on task. "You could've just asked me out like a normal person."
He grunted. "When you look like I do, it seems like a far-fetched idea that anyone would have any interest," Savitar explained, causing Caitlin to frown. "So I thought if I did something that would be foolproof to get your attention that I could at least make a judgment about where we stood."
The doctor sat down on the nearby chair; she felt like she just took a step off the tilt-a-whirl. All of this was a lot to process at once. "I had no idea you were even interested in me…"
He let out a stunted laugh. "Why do you think I insisted we keep doing the checkups even though the odds of me disappearing from oblivion are like 1 in a trillion now?"
Caitlin felt herself suddenly becoming very self-conscious; she felt so dense. "That - that was you trying to spend time with me?"
"For someone so brilliant, you really are quite oblivious sometimes."
She stood up from her seat. "I could say the same about you too," she countered, sticking a finger into his chest. "Why else do you think I would agree to do so many unnecessary tests? For practice?!"
He pushed her finger away as he slipped off the cot to get in her face. "God, you make so-" but cut himself off to instead grunt in frustration.
Caitlin narrowed her eyes. "Make you what?" she demanded to know, arching her eyebrow. "Go on, finish that sentence," she dared.
"Frustrated!" he supplied with a strained smile. "You make me so unbelievably frustrated!"
"Well you're not the only one," she maddeningly confessed before grabbing a fistful of that tantalizingly striped shirt and pulling him into a bruising kiss.
Living up to his old moniker - the God of Speed - he wasted no time in reciprocating. He kissed her back with just as much fever and desperation as she felt. The word finally rang in her head at getting to experience what it felt like to kiss Savitar after so many weeks of fantasizing. Just like the man himself, it was complex - rough but tender and metallic tasting in the sweetest way. She could sense how much he wanted her as his hands frantically grappled for her hips. She could feel how much she was affecting him as she pressed their pelvises together.
"Fuck…" Savitar breathed out in awe as he broke off the kiss, his hold on her relaxing so they could take a step back to breathe. "That… was unexpected…"
Winded herself, she took a few seconds to find her words. "Yeah, well…with you in that shirt, my frustration had to go somewhere."
"Didn't realize it was sexual frustration you were referring to though."
"It's all semantics, really."
His eyebrow quirked, his grin turning sly. "I hope that all wasn't going too fast for you."
She shrugged. "If anything," she said, sticking her chin up in defiance while her fingers absentmindedly fondled with the fabric of his shirt, "I don't think it was fast enough. Was that all you got?" she innocently questioned, knowing it was going to have the desired effect she was looking for.
His eyes grew a tad darker as he watched her with challenge and lust. "Oh, I can go a lot faster," he huskily insisted, before whisking her away to somewhere a lot more private.