Alliance {The Flash/Arrow}

Ten

Barry

Oliver and Ashton's forceful grunts echoed through the makeshift gym, their punches somehow missing each other as they moved around the mat in an almost choreographed fashion. They'd taken it upon themselves to spar with each other since Oliver had been hanging around the lab all day, and Ashton hadn't had much of a chance to show off her fighting skills. It was incredibly interesting to watch both of them fight. Ashton was half Oliver's size, but that gave her the advantage of being much more nimble and quick, something that was a stark contrast to Oliver's somewhat staggered and contained movements. She was dodging every one of Oliver's throws, ducking and bending backwards before taking a few swings at him and actually managing to land a few blows. It was pretty obvious that he was going easy on her, and I could understand why given their past relationship. I don't think that I could ever have the strength to hit Iris, even if it were in a consensual fight. It was obvious that she was going easy on him as well, and I could only imagine what both of them looked like if they were really fighting against one another.

It was definitely an interesting dynamic to have her on the team now. I'd grown so used to being the only one out in the field that it was a foreign feeling to know that I had someone covering my back whenever I was fighting. I knew that I had Cisco and Caitlin monitoring things from The Cortex, but that could only go so far. With Ashton fighting alongside me on the streets, I felt somewhat safer. It was obvious that she could hold her own in any kind of altercation, and she'd shown that she would protect me if push came to shove. I was glad for the help, but there was something nagging me in the back of the head. She was such a public figure despite her wanting to stay out of the spotlight, and if anything were to happen to her, word could spread that she is the other meta protecting this city. It could completely destroy her family's reputation, and I didn't want something like that to happen to her. She was hiding what all she'd been through in her past, but I could tell that it was something that she wanted to repress. I didn't want her to go through anymore than she already had, so we had to be extremely careful about this.

I didn't enjoy her not sharing part of her past, to be honest. I wasn't going to push her to talk about something that was clearing haunting, but it was daunting to know that she was keeping something from me. I'd learned that in order for a team to work, you had to be completely honest with each other. We'd learned it with Dr. Wells last year before the singularity, and I'd learned it with my relationship with Patty. I had had a hand in completely destroying it because of how much I kept from her, and I was trying to move past it as quickly as possible. I didn't want to be hung up and depressed about something that I couldn't do anything about now even though it was my fault. All I could really do was learn from the mistakes I made and try not to make them again in the future. I promised myself that I wasn't going to make the same mistakes with Ashton on the team now. I was going to do my best to make sure that she was included in all of the team's decisions so that she wouldn't feel like she was being excluded from something that she was part of now.

If I was being completely honest with myself, I felt something for Ashton that was similar to what I felt for Patty. She was such an outgoing and lively person that made you feel like you would gravitate towards her. She didn't take things too seriously, but she was mature and controlled when she needed to be. Watching her work in the lab was almost hypnotic because of how engrossed she would become in her work. Her process for fingerprints was something that was interesting. She seemed to block out the entire world around her as she focused all of her attention on the print. If it was a bad quality print, she would get a crease in between her eyebrows as she did everything she could to find distinctive minutiae points, and it was an endearing feature. I wasn't sure what exactly it was that I felt for her, but deep down I knew that it was something more than a platonic feeling, and that was terrifying. I didn't want to run the risk of either hurting her like I had Patty or have something like a relationship end badly. So, as a compromise, I was going to repress whatever it was that I was feeling for her for the sake of our jobs and the team.