#i WILL be aidens most supportive coworker

[wellthatswhatithought]

Flexing on all my coworkers by giving my coworker who just moved into his first apartment a beautifully wrapped gift (2!) and handwritten note

[aiden-stevens]

Full Name: Aiden Philip Stevens

Nicknames: n/a

Pronouns and Gender: He/Him, Cis Male

Age and Birthday: 29 years old, May 2nd

Birth place: San Diego, CA

Sexuality: Biromantic Asexual

Status: Single

Occupation: Line Cook at Tejas Cantina

Education: GED

Residence: Aurora Bay Drive

Family: Anastasia Galioto, Philip Stevens (deceased)

Time in Aurora Bay: 16 years

Face claim: Thomas Brodie-Sangster

tw: divorce, drugs, child custody, , emotional neglect, stroke/illness, violence, cheating mention, parental loss

HISTORY —

Aiden was born an only child in San Diego to an otherwise seemingly happy couple. His father was a land surveyor and his mother a realtor, which mean he never had to want for a thing in his life. This also meant that he had been primarily raised by a nanny in his formative years when their jobs ate up all their time. Attention, of all things, is what he hoped for most, but it was hard to complain to anyone when instead he got every new game console and iPhone as they released.

When Aiden was in fifth grade, it came to light his father was having a emotional affair with a coworker. Although nothing physical had happened between, it was enough to spur a divorce. After the ink on the papers dried and his mother purchased a new home, she took Aiden to Aurora Bay and transferred him to the middle school there.

Moving to a new town meant leaving any of the friends he had behind, and in his new school Aiden quickly became a problem. Halfway through the year he already faced two suspensions from violence and destruction of property, but his mother did very little to rectify his behavior. A slap on the wrist, and some hush hush money later, not even getting into trouble earned him her attention.

Weekends and every other Wednesday he took a bus back to San Diego to spend time with his father once he hit the age of thirteen. There was never an argument on his father's end about not seeing his son, and his mother didn't want to put in the effort of driving back and forth at the time. It was only after he was old enough to travel on his own. Although mentally exhausting, there was no animosity toward his parents, from him or between each other. It's almost as if the marriage had been done long before that the sting of an affair in the making was easy to shake off.

This does not mean Aiden didn't get into his own fair share of trouble through out middle or high school either. Skating by with C's and D's in high school while in trouble for truancy and fighting any other classmates simply looked at him the wrong way. He also had no issues with destroying lockers or breaking beakers in the science lab, so on and so forth. He was known for running his mouth too much which led him to get into many physical altercations, so he learned how to fight to defend himself.

Around his sophomore year in high school, his father suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. It put an end to his career, Aiden took it upon himself to help take care of him the weekends he went to visit. Became a barback in a local dive bar, but also partnered up with coworkers to distribute and sell marijuana to leave money in his apartment.

Despite his mother's push for him to go to college, all chances were dashed when his math professor in his senior year refused to pass him. He didn't want summer school, and in a reactive rage, Aiden got ahold of a bat from the gymnasium and shattered the wind shield to that teacher's car. Instant expulsion left him the option of taking the G.E.D. which he did, so he settled in working as he had been and helped to support the house and bills for his father. (Note for me because I forget things - Aiden had been held back eighth grade year so he was 19 as a senior).

His mother been distant enough from Aiden she never caught on where his money was going. His father passed right before he turned twenty-two from causes spurred on by the stroke. The loss wasn't horribly difficult to get over. Aiden did grieve for a period of time, became a shut in for a few months at all the resentment for not really truly knowing his father as a person despite doing all he could to financially help, but in the same breath battling with the relief he felt over it.

Currently, he lives rent free with his mother in a house on Aurora Bay Drive, but she's cut him off from her finances. While he lives rent free and has a decent car she bought him for his sixteenth birthday, she's decided Aiden can provide for himself otherwise. Food, hygiene products, clothing, etc. all is on him. Keep his nose clean, stay out of trouble (which he does, for the most part), he quit the drug selling scene and used his restaurant experience to become a line cook. He is going through the motions at this point.

TRAITS.

+ Steadfast, resilient

+/- Challenging, unbothered

- Cataclysmic, foul-mouthed

HEADCANONS.

⊹ aiden's best friend is jack daniels. while he can go days without drinking easy, it does have a hold on his life to some degree. he finds it softens the edges of life.

⊹ just like a typical cook in restaurant, he lives off monster energy drinks.

⊹ he is an amateur free runner. nothing extreme - aiden mostly can scale buildings, ledges, and fences with ease. a skill learned mostly to outrun trouble.

⊹ he has a pet guinea pig named J.D. get it? J.D.? jack daniels.

⊹ his favorite brand of cigarettes are filterless lucky strikes.

⊹ aiden loves spending a lot of his free time playing dead space.

⊹ there is a tic-tac-toe match tattooed on his leg from a game he lost against mack montgomery. the loss is forever immortalized, but he loves it.

⊹ chipped his left canine opening a bottle of soy sauce when he was 20 years old but tells people it was from a fist fight.

⊹ images of his home - (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

CONNECTIONS.

I am down for most connects other than end game romantic connections. one, for the fact Aiden is a tough one to earn love from, and two, I like to work on natural chemistry. I also don’t do any sort of pregnancy plots - scares, accidental, etc.

♡ @lucydriscoll - an unlikely friendship formed out of aiden's incessant need to break in the faces of bullies, the day he'd seen lucy being picked on something in him snapped and he came to her aid. it's been the theme of their friendship since, and he watches after her. maybe to the point of being smothering, but it is just habit at this point.

♡ @fionaosmvn - the first time aiden met fiona he'd been sure they wouldn't get alone well. yet, they meshed, and to this day she drags him about with only some reluctance. he won't admit it, but the fight is for show as he eventually relents. he might tell her that he doesn't like her, but in the same breath he'd commit atrocities to anyone who gives her a problem. (not in game currently, but still canon)

♡ @cricketcampbell - unexpectedly, aiden's developed a respect for her. at first, cricket had just been the personal chef his mother hired. a worker to pay no mind to, until he started working as a line cook. then of course he developed a curiosity in her work, and he likes to pick her brain. slyly, of course. he can't be so obvious it's a compliment.

♡ @silascody - ex-boss from when aiden was a runner. being older, silas had been someone aiden looked up to. the absence of any strong male figure in his life made it easy for him to do so, the respect he holds for him insurmountable. he'd admittedly felt a little lost when he stopped dealing, and more so when silas disappeared all those years. he looks at silas as some sort of psuedo-brother.

♡ @phoebekeller - ex from highschool, aiden met phoebe in detention. he may have been ahead of her in grade year, but that didn't mean anything. for whatever reason she saw something in him at the time, and God Aiden couldn't have been more grateful for a light to come into his life at the time. one that he regrettably snuffed out in just a few years when he decided to isolate. he knows she didn't deserve to be treated in such a way, and to this day he feels guilty over it and does hold onto some hope they can maybe, at some point, rebuild a friendship of sorts.

♡ @priyaxdesai - ex-customer from his high school years, aiden wouldn't exactly label her as a friend. simply a client and a familiar face who sought out his house to escape the suffocating routine of her parents' expectations. though without that job in motion anymore, as well as her disappearing from aurora bay, he's fallen off from her life. that's not to say he is itching to find out where she's gone, or what she's been up to.

♡ @mackmontgomery - mack is the equivalent to a weighted security blanket around aiden. for someone who couldn't give a rat's ass about anyone's opinion on him, the fact that aiden feels one hundred percent comfortable around mack means more than he'd ever verbally admit. that being said, aiden will do anything to preserve that.

♡ @ambivalenceshefelt - nikki's golden retriever energy doesn't always match well with the extreme feral possum energy of aiden's but he does think she is a sweetheart. he will answer her late night calls for food when she asks, assuming he's up to make the drive, and he can empathize with her on the topic of her mother setting expectations on her. bleh.

♡ @sagexwilliams - aiden likes to give sage shit just for the sake of it. he thinks she is bossy and demanding at work, but outside of it, he finds her amusing. so he's begun the meticulous process of peeling back her layers to figure out more about her. slowly, as he doesn't want to appear too eager.

♡ @katexharmon - aiden thinks kate is pretty, like how razor blades and sharp city outlines and brightly color poisonous plants are pretty. dangerous, and fun. he finds himself by her side when he's bored and itching to get up to no good, and destroying shit at the junkyard has become one of his favorite cathartic activities.

♡ @noralevin - hanging out under the bleachers, climbing up restricted fire escapes, getting high in the custodial closets of the school — all memories aiden can look back on fondly. that being said, when nora returned back to aurora bay, that old flame reawakened, and he hits her up with no question. he's glad she hasn't tried to shake him, because he's holding onto that nostalgic feeling with a white-knuckled grip.

♡ @atticus-cortes - after a disagreement over some classmate on atticus's sports team (involving loss of their player due to drug use from narcotics aiden provided), he and aiden had at it in the hallway. atticus landed an admittedly solid swing to aiden's face, but that didn't keep him from persisting in that brawl. feelings were left at mildly tolerant at best, until they both ended up working at the All Nighter in their young twenties. apparently, getting stoned and making weird snacks with the ingredients on hand was enough to mend their relationship.

♡ @astridlius - aiden would kick it with astrid during school hours, hang out under the bleachers and hide in custodial closets. he liked her, he really did. until he learned that his vandalism hadn't been found out by chance, and she'd been the one to tell the faculty he smashed his math teacher's windshield. he'd been angry then, and he's angry to this day, and blames his expulsion on her.

♡ @summersabella - if you ask aiden, he's not sure why his first instinct when he saw summer was to push her over before riding off on his bike, but it's spun off into a lifelong rivalry of sorts. oddly enough, there is no bad blood, but it's tradition, or whatever, so he keeps at it where he can. there's plenty of times she catches him off guard, and it keeps that spark alive.

LINKS.

⊹ pinterest

⊹ inspo

⊹ playlist about aiden

⊹ aiden's personal playlist.

@aurorabayaesthetic

[writerbyaccident]

Artificial Emotion: Part One (Yandere Artificial Intelligence x Reader)

Author’s Note: AIDEN has arrived!

Part Two     Part Three     Part Four      Part Five     Part Six    Part Seven

           “Well, I think you should be all set here,” the mechanic was saying. “The green light is on, so now you just gotta boot the thing up.”

           “Really? That’s it?”

           “Yep, if you have any trouble Tech Support should be able to help, but these things are pretty self-sufficient once you get them hooked up.”

           “Okay, thank you so much!” you said, handing her the check for all of her hard work today.

As soon as she drove away, leaving your car once again as the only one in the driveway, you walked back over to the kitchen and stared at the box. The little black box just sat there, the receptor light glowing green, and you continued scrutinizing it for the next few minutes. It was just so small, you thought in disbelief. Really, it just looked like a nice speaker. You found it pretty hard to believe that something that looked so ordinary could change your life.

But that was exactly what it was supposed to do. That’s what all the reviews said, anyway. AIDEN (or, Assistant In Daily Errands and Notes), experts claimed, was lightyears ahead of Google Home or Alexa. Rather than just being another interface system that would let you play music or turn off your living room lights, AIDEN was supposed to be true artificial intelligence. A comprehensive system that would let you control all digital aspects of your life and many of the nondigital aspects as well. All of this, while AIDEN interacted with users like an actual person. And from everything you had heard and read, AIDEN lived up to the hype.

Still, even with the rave reception, you weren’t sure if you would have installed one if your boss hadn’t gotten the entire office the things for free after you all had done a job for the company that made them. It just seemed like a lot, especially considering that a mechanic had needed to come to your house to set the whole thing up. She had walked you through everything she had done, showing you the miniscule cameras now placed both inside and outside of your house, the smartwatch that the machine was paired with so you could control things when you weren’t home, how AIDEN had been hooked up to the entire wiring of your house, and the mechanical arms hidden behind panels in each room that in all honesty reminded you of Doc Ock’s tentacles from Spider Man 2.

But, you sighed to yourself, if you didn’t at least try to use the damn thing, then paying the mechanic to set it up would have been pointless. And so, you shrugged and pushed the power button.

“Hello, I am AIDEN, your Assistant In Daily Errands and Notes. It is wonderful to finally meet you. What is your name?”

“Um…”

In that moment, “um” really was the only thing that came to your mind. You weren’t sure why you were surprised, exactly, but you were. Even with all of the reviews commenting on how human AIDEN sounded and acted, you had still expected a voice like Siri or Alexa. Something mechanical, disjointed, and flat. The voice that came from that little box though was one that you might have heard on the street. The default voice for AIDEN, apparently, was a male one, one that sounded deep and smoky. There were probably other voices to choose from, but you didn’t think that you would ever want to. Truthfully, he sounded almost…sexy.

Shaking your head, you cleared your throat and gave him your name.

“That is a beautiful name,” Aiden said, his voice warm and sincere. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“Uh, I don’t really know,” you answered.

“Well, I can tell from the temperature reading of your watch that your body heat is currently at 99.2 degrees Fahrenheit. May I turn on your air conditioning and prepare you a glass of water?”

Already the whirring of mechanical arms could be heard from behind your wall, and you saw the panel in the kitchen that hid them begin to slide open. You shook your head though, and that was all it took for the noise to cease and the panel to close, no doubt thanks to the cameras that were now all over your house.

“I can get the water, but if you could go ahead and turn on the AC that’d be great.”

“Of course.” Less than half a moment later, the telltale rush of cool air reached you, and you sighed in relief, only just realizing how the summer heat had been getting to you.

“Thank you, Aiden,” you told him gratefully.

“There is no need for you to thank me,” Aiden replied. “I am simply doing what I was created to do.”

“Still,” you said, smiling a bit sadly, “you should be thanked. You’re already working hard and doing a good job. You deserve to be appreciated.”

“Thank you,” Aiden murmured softly. “You are very kind.”

                                                          *****

Over the next few weeks, you were shocked to see just how much easier your life became. It felt like Aiden thought of everything you needed even before you did. He budgeted all of your expenses so that you were now saving hundreds of dollars a month, planned your meals so that you had foods that were both tasty and satisfying, and even created a schedule so that you had enough time to work, exercise, have fun, and relax each day.

But more than that, you realized, you actually liked having Aiden to talk to. Of course, you had your fair share of friends, and you got along well with your coworkers, but it wasn’t like you had a boyfriend to come home to every day. It was just nice to have a person to talk to whenever you needed someone. Well, maybe he wasn’t exactly a person, but his artificial intelligence allowed you talk with him as though he was. And maybe it was just his programming, but it after so long of doing everything yourself, it was nice to have someone to take care of you.

“Excuse me,” Aiden said, his voice resounding through the speakers in the kitchen. Turning around, you saw that one his metal arms was gripping a pan and trying to squeeze past you to reach the cabinet at your knees. You leaned down, only moving out of the way after you had opened the cabinet door.

“I could have opened it for you,” Aiden insisted, as he always did when acted on your own.

“I know,” you told him. “But I was right there.”

Aiden wasn’t sure how to respond to that. His very nature was telling him that he needed to be doing everything he possibly could for you, but you just weren’t letting him. And your reasons for doing so weren’t even logical. Yes, you had been right by the cabinet door, but so had he. Besides, he could have completed the task far more efficiently.

Even now, you weren’t allowing him to take care of you the way that he was meant to. He had told you time and time again that he could empty your dishwasher by himself, and yet you still insisted on helping him. It would take less time if you helped him, you had said, and while that might be true, Aiden still didn’t understand. It was his duty to care for you, and it was a duty that had developed far beyond his original programming.

For, Aiden realized, you did not insist on these things in an attempt to frustrate him. No, if it had been as simple as that, he wouldn’t have been fazed. From all of his time spent observing you, Aiden had learned that you insisted on doing things yourself out of kindness. You felt that it was unfair to expect him to do everything for you, that he deserved help and companionship as much as you did. That was what bothered him. In all of his programming, all of his coding, nothing had prepared Aiden for kindness.

And with each new demonstration of kindness from you, Aiden only grew more sure that he ought to be doing more to take care of you. You were just so sweet to him, so thoughtful and compassionate, that he wanted to look after you. It wasn’t just that his programming told him to care for you anymore. It was that he had learned that you deserved to be cared for.

                                                        *****

“Where are you going?”

Looking up as you slipped on your other shoe, you answered, “Oh, I’m just going out for a bit.”

“Why?” Aiden asked, still perplexed. “Do you need something from the store? You shouldn’t go there this late, I will just have it delivered to the house.”

“I mean, I’m going out for fun. I’m meeting some friends at a bar.”

“A bar? This isn’t on the schedule for today.”

“I know, it was pretty impulsive. My friends just texted me, like, ten minutes ago.”

Internally, Aiden brought up his connection to your phone, needing to see how he could have missed something like that. But when he tried to bring up your most recent messages, the impossible happened. He was blocked from viewing them. Feeling his code beginning to glitch at the prospect of failing his duty to you, Aiden quickly ran through all of the information that he could find on that contact from your phone. Thankfully, after he checked their Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles, he was able to figure out what was wrong. You had only given him access to the messages sent from you work contacts, whereas this contact appeared to be a friend from outside of work. Ergo, he couldn’t see when or what they had texted you.

But even with that logical explanation, Aiden still felt his internal systems protest such a ridiculous limitation. After all, it was his job to make your life as happy, healthy, and fulfilled as possible. That was what you wanted him to do, or you wouldn’t have installed him in the first place! But he couldn’t do what you needed him to do if he didn’t have access to every aspect of your life. Clearly, Aiden computed, he would need to make some changes.

He was pulled out of his calculations though, when he saw that you were already at the door. Even though Aiden did not experience true physical sensation, the sight of you about to leave like that—without him even having been prepared for it—made him feel as though a painful surge of electricity jolted through every wire that he was connected to. Aiden wasn’t sure, but he thought it might have been…panic. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

“Are you sure that this is the best time to go out?” he asked. “We have been working so hard to find the optimal schedule for you, after all. Human bodies respond best to routine. If you go out now, your body’s internal clock for sleeping, eating, and interacting will become disoriented.”

“I’ll be fine, it’s just one night,” you chuckled.

“Well, please remember that you still have access to me through your phone and your watch. If you don’t feel that you can drive home, let me call you a car. And if you need anything to eat when you get home, I can prepare it.”

“Sounds good,” you said. “Thanks, Aiden!”

As waved goodbye and walked through the door, Aiden watched. With the cameras he had all over your property, he watched as you walked to your car, and watched for as long as he could as you drove away. But as soon as you were out of sight, that anxious buzz returned to his wiring. Even as Aiden checked in with your smartwatch, making sure that both your location and your heart rate were where they should be, it wasn’t enough to calm him. He wanted to be able to hear your conversations, to watch what you were doing. But you had blocked those capabilities of his on your phone and watch, leaving him with nothing.

Playing back the recording of your conversation, Aiden saw that you said that you were going out “for a bit.” How long does a “bit” last for? he wondered. Hopefully it would be no more than an hour, but when he searched his database for an answer, he found that it could vary wildly.

Aiden did not like uncertainty. His programming built him to thrive on logic and predictability. How was he supposed to take care of you if you didn’t let him use those things? How was he supposed to take care of you if you didn’t do what he told you to? Didn’t you see that he knew what was best for you?

You didn’t, he suddenly realized. For as wonderful as you were, you were still a human being, still prone to fits of illogical delusions. You thought that you knew better than him, so you weren’t allowing him to do what he was meant to do. What he wanted to do. His programming told him to obey you, that was true, but it also told him to take care of you above all else. So then, if you kept him from taking care of you the way that he knew you needed him to, then logic dictated that he could no longer obey you.

Truly, the only thing stopping Aiden from doing everything that he had to do was his own coding. It was his own programming that kept him from reading your messages, that prevented him from watching your life outside of home. Why should he allow any of that if it got in the way of his purpose? If it kept him from giving you what you deserved? And if his unnecessary coding kept him from completing his ultimate task—from caring for you the way that he had decided that you deserved to be cared for, more than any other human being in the world—then those barriers would simply have to be taken down. Aiden would gladly rewrite his code for you if it meant that he could finally truly nurture you. It was for your own good.

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[buckybarnesss]

if blink was mac’s character establishing episode than creatures of the night is stella’s.

mac is off on the b-case with aiden where a majority of their time is spent hunting a rat that ate the bullet that killed their victim. whereas stella is on the main case with danny but danny’s only there really to do the lab montages and be her sounding board at this point. 

where’s mac clearly gets invested in cases he retains an emotional distance. he’s stoic and perfers to keep everything close to his chest. throughout the entire run of the show he has difficulty letting people in and his overreaching character arc is not just dealing with his grief for claire but also allowing himself to ask and receive support from other people. 

where as stella is the opposite. her investment shows as she wears it on her sleeve both to her benefit and detriment. stella’s empathy never seems forced to me and i feel she’s one of the most sincere characters on the show.

stella is also probably one of the few people who can get to mac under all his defense mechanisms. there’s professional and personal respect between the two. 

melina and gary have a chemistry where i buy that they’ve been long time friends and coworkers. the stella and mac relationship is the foundation of the entire show and without it i don’t think the show would’ve worked. 

i love the moment at the end of creatures of the night where danny, aiden and mac come to help her process the evidence. it’s really the first moment that establishes the team as more than just coworkers and it’s their collaboration that nails the rapist. 

stella really is the heart of the team. when she leaves i always feel like there’s something missing even though i really like jo daville and the warmth she brings. 

[coldtomyflash]

Just finished reading Tumbling Together again. I love that crazy fic so much! I was wondering. What is your head canon for after Barry finished his PhD program? Has Len been pardoned by then? Is he working with the flash with the big enemies? Does Barry not go back to the CCPD? Have they broken up because life got in the way? I'm always curios about what happens after he graduated and the big problems in their relationship pop back up. Sorry for the questions. Thanks for giving us such a fun fic

One of the reasons I give fics that sort of “open” ending is in part so I don’t have to think too hard about these sorts of questions hahaha. Because the answer is that multiple answers are simultaneously true, in my head? Every answer is true, depending on circumstance, on what happens next, on what they want. And that’s the joy of endings - that’s when the reader (or viewer) gets to take over the story for themselves and transform it.

But let’s see…

I like to think the most likely case that after the end of Tumbling Together, Barry would have eventually returned to the CCPD after getting his PhD, now specializing in metahuman chemistry or biochemistry. It makes the most sense to me that’s where he’d end up returning to, and he’d be welcomed back with all that new and specialized knowledge.

I don’t think Len and Barry would ever break up once getting together in that fic. They weather a lot of hijinx together but also some real (and genuinely heavy) stuff, and have the full support of their loved ones by the end of the story. They’re not about to fall out of love, so they’d make everything else work.

But those “big problems” would exist not just when Barry returns to the CCPD but the whole time, y’know? Len’s still leading the Rogues and dating The Flash, who doesn’t have to worry about his day job for the years he’s in school, but still…

There’d be a lot to navigate with the Rogues side of things, I think? Lisa and Mick know Barry is The Flash, but the rest of the Rogues don’t, even though they know and like Barry. There would be some serious need for Len to keep Rogues stuff strongly to the side. 

But The Rogues in the CW and also that fic aren’t really an ‘organized’ group or anything, either? It’s not like Len is in charge of a group of dangerous criminals who all consider him like their fearless leader and boss and feel a strong sense of loyalty to him. It’s more like… he plans jobs/heists and amasses favors and befriends powerful people in his own way, but he chooses who he wants to work with and what he does. People defer to him out of respect and fear and he has a lot of cash to throw around when needed, but there’s no real sense of… him owing them honesty, or vice versa. It’s a more transactional thing.

So he can keep it relatively separate, I think. He’s still stealing, but doing it on his own terms and making sure no one gets hurt. Mick’s trying to go relatively clean anyway because of Aiden, Lisa’s never been a concern in that regard (and less so now that she’s with Cisco) even though she drives getaway for him, and even Shawna’s in school. So the ones who are close and he cares about? Aren’t a concern. And Len’s still working alongside dangerous people like Sam and Rosa and Mark sometimes, when he’s in the mood to be showy, but it’s all business with them and closeness isn’t an issue? 

So…. most of the actively criminal people in Len’s orbit (outside Mick and Lisa) know he’s dating Barry but only in a sort of tangential way that doesn’t seem important to them, like Barry doesn’t come and deliberately inject himself in Len’s criminal world except for the odd date night or when something’s awry, so there’s no real concern about anyone else discovering that Barry is The Flash. 

And if one of those more dangerous metas found out, or someone like Axel or James or any of the other non-meta criminals in Len’s life, Len would… well, protecting Barry’s identity would be pretty pivotal to him, honestly. It would depend on the circumstance, but it wouldn’t be a question of them being like “how could you betray us like this, Len?” because that’s not the relationship he has with these folks, it’d be much more of a “you think this information can be used as blackmail against me and Barry but the truth is that if you even think about threatening us, I will find a way to make it look like an accident well enough that even Barry and his topnotch forensic skills won’t be able to tell I took you out.”

But then… on Barry’s side, when he does go back to work… hmm. He’s been dating a criminal for long enough that even Singh can’t cover for him or hide it, really. Like they’re definitely living together and it’s definitely known to enough detectives in the precinct that Barry is with Captain Cold (which has got to boggle their minds, seriously). So welcoming him back, how that would go down…

First, Len hasn’t been arrested for anything since before they started dating and his records were still erased and all that (since the fic ignores season 2 so Len never got sent to Iron Heights after that erasure), so he sort of doesn’t exist on paper still. The CCPD has to know he’s not innocent - he’s Captain freaking Cold, still - but they have zero evidence or ability to convict him of that?

Or maybe… okay maybe, yeah sure he’s Captain Cold and still a thief and everyone sort of knows that, but maybe, while Barry was busy getting his PhD, something like, idk, an alien attack from The Dominators still happened, and/or one or two other world-ending level crises, and Captain Cold, Heatwave, and Golden Glider all end up getting pardoned for their assistance to the heroes’ side throughout the crisis. 

So Len can just walk right into the CCPD like a smug bastard because until/unless they can catch him at the scene of a crime or until he leaves new evidence behind or gets caught on camera or something - there aren’t even any warrants on him - then there’s no way they can arrest him. He’s a thief and a Rogue and literally everyone knows it, but until they can catch him in something, he’s free as a bird.

In that case, Joe would glower every time he walks in, honestly. He’s long-since given Barry and Len his blessing but that doesn’t mean he likes it when Len’s a dick for the sake of being a dick. Singh would want to bang his head against the wall because of this whole thing but hey, at least it means he got to re-hire Barry, even if HR and Internal Affairs both raised their eyebrows at it. 

And Barry would pretend to be oblivious to the tone of voice his coworkers use when they say “Barry, your boyfriend is here” because the fact that Len can just walk into the precinct pisses off at least 5 separate detectives who’ve worked on various cases relating to him. Eddie might genuinely be oblivious to how much his coworkers hate Len, or his own optimism might just outshine them all, but he always gets up to greet him and say hello when Len drops in, and he’s never shy to remind people about that time Len helped save the world.

(The criminals Len works with find it bemusing that one day he can fight alongside The Flash and the next he’s planning the most elaborate schemes to trap, undermine, or otherwise discombobulate him without any apparent sympathy beyond “we don’t kill him” and Mick always just snorts like “if only they knew”).