Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Caitlin assumed that when she died, she would hear alarms in hell. That would be her own personal punishment for all the things she’d done in life, all those things she couldn’t control: she would die, go to hell, and hear the blaring of Cisco’s warning alarm over and over. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to imagine ignoring it, staying in her sweltering hot containment cell for another few hours and pretending that the darkness behind her eyelids was actually her sleeping instead of just her brain trying to block out countless memories of a man in a dark room and hard metal on her wrists. She imagined the alarm stopping, imagined Cisco going out on his own and maybe getting some peace for the first time in over a year.

But the alarm kept blaring, and just the idea of Cisco going out there alone to face whatever was out there sent a chill down her already cold spine.

Caitlin sighed heavily and hit a button on her nightstand, letting them know she heard it, and she was coming. Her bed creaked as she rolled and planted her feet on the ground, and she saw the thin layer of ice that accumulated under her body start to melt. Cisco wasn’t kidding when he told her he kept it quite hot in here. Sometimes she wondered how they got the gas to keep her room so warm, but she didn’t want to know; she didn’t want yet another thing to add to her continually growing list of misdemeanors and felonies, her sins.

Her uniform, and she was certainly being generous calling it a uniform, was strewn about her floor where she had dropped it last night after their unsuccessful patrol. The alarm kept her company as she pulled on her too tight (for her taste, anyway) leather pants, and biker jacket. She threw her hair up into a ponytail and slid the earpiece on her nightstand into her ear before pressing the button to leave her room, timing herself by the wailing of the alarm. Three wails to get on her pants, nine to get completely dressed and walk out of her room. As soon as her door opened, the alarm stopped.

“Nice to see you finally out of your room, Cait,” Cisco said through the comm, and she rolled her eyes. Both he and Caitlin had a tracker in their arms to make sure their whereabouts in the city and the compound were always known, but Cisco was the only person who used it regularly. Iris, despite both Caitlin and Cisco’s better judgement, trusted them too much to keep track of them. “I was beginning to think you were going to freeze the alarm and ignore it.”

“Can I do that?” she asked, coming up beside him. He grinned at her from underneath his dorky motorcycle helmet. She didn’t even bother with a helmet, heading straight to the sleek black motorcycle emblazoned with a simple blue snowflake. That, like much of their current setup, had been Cisco’s idea; he wanted to make sure they had something of their own when they were out on the field. (He called her bike the Frostcycle and his the Vibemobile. She called him an idiot.)

Cisco knocked his fists together and tightened the velcro on one of his fingerless gloves. “Nah. Like everything else in your room, it’s resistant to extreme cold.”

She fought the urge to roll her eyes at him a second time, and kicked up the stand on her bike as she settled on top. Cisco followed her lead, steadying the bike between his legs as he turned it on and revved the engine. “You ready for this?” he asked.

“I guess,” Caitlin answered, keeping her eyes on the cargo door.

A warm laugh filled the inside of her ear, and Caitlin glanced up toward the camera in the loading dock, where she knew that Iris was watching. The bike purred between her legs, waiting for her to rev it up and push forward. “Oh, come on, Cait,” Iris said. “You two are freaking superheroes! You should be excited.”

Iris had too high an estimation of them; they were not superheroes. Caitlin wanted to say it over and over again, to carve it into the console above Iris’s computer and make sure that she read it every time she walked into the control room. She and Cisco were not heroes. They didn’t save ordinary people from evil men and women. They didn’t choose to do something good with their lives, to try and make a difference, to make Central City a nicer place. This wasn’t some world where things were easy, where people needed saving, where the bad guys were truly bad and the good guys were actually good. She wasn’t even sure if there were good or bad people left in Central City. There were only the Advanced, the people left there to combat and capture them, and the ordinary citizens unable to get out.

And Iris, she supposed. The one person in the world who looked at Central City and saw something that needed to be saved instead of escaped. “Easy for you to say,” Caitlin muttered, her gaze falling from the camera back to the cargo door. “You’re not the one going out every night in a skin tight biker getup.”

“Oh, come on!” Cisco said. He motioned toward the camera, signaling Iris to open the door. “I’m working on new costumes. We just have to make due until they’re ready.”

“If you hadn’t spent so long on these bikes,” Caitlin countered, “we would already have costumes. Actual ones. Not that blue corseted mess I see you tinkering with on our downtime.”

Cisco looked over at her and grinned. “Aw, so you do come and check on me when we’re not working,” he said, and batted his eyelashes. “And here I thought you didn’t care.”

Both of them revved their bikes at the same time, and shot out like bullets into the crisp fall night. Had someone predicted a year ago that she would spend her nights fighting crime in a tight leather outfit, she would have been both appalled and unsettled, and assumed they were making fun of her. Then again, had someone told her she would one day be able to walk out into a snowdrift and feel warm, she would have thought they were hallucinating and recommended they come to the hospital to see a psychiatrist. Oh, how things change.

She couldn’t even feel the chill in the air as they rode along the abandoned streets, dodging potholes and craters in the pavement as they drove. Cisco engineered their bikes to go well above the speed limit; he’d had to sneak parts in from the outside to make sure that he could override the suppressant system built into the bikes Iris purchased for them. (He also got some parts dropped off to better align the aesthetic of their bikes with his vision of their team. Case in point: the blue snowflake.) He’d had to pay extra for these parts, trading away a cold gun he’d built in his spare time to assemble all of the parts for their machines. She wondered if that cold gun was ever going to come back and bite them in the ass. There were no good people left in Central City, after all, and the people Cisco had gone to for parts seemed even more suspicious than the usual human on the street.

But she couldn’t fault Cisco for building the bikes, or for making them his priority. Their speed may be against the law, but it reminded Caitlin of flying, and falling through the air. She loved it. Riding her bike was one of the few things since the explosion that made her feel alive and had it not been so horrendously illegal, she might have gone out during the day and ridden around in the sun. It reminded her of her previous life. Of the plans she and her fiancé had made to go skydiving during their honeymoon.

She bit her lip and refocused on the road in front of her.

“What’s the sitch?” she heard Cisco ask over the comms.

“Officially, CCPD are tracking a suspect assumed to be armed and dangerous,” Iris said. “Unofficially, they’ve deployed their Special Forces unit, which means we’re dealing with an Advanced. From what I can tell, this guy can turn his skin into metal. Early reports of him firing a gun were just the bullets ricocheting off of his skin.”

“Hey,” Cisco said. “Ricochet. I like it.”

“Seriously?” Iris asked. “We should call him something like Iron Man.”

Cisco snorted. “We don’t even know if his skin turns to iron, so, vetoed,” he said.

Caitlin tuned them out, instead focusing on how they were going to defeat a man made out of metal. She wondered if his skin changed composition or if his skin turned into some kind of armor that encased his body, and whether or not the transformation was quick. Was it a fluid metal? Would he be able to walk and move in the same way, or would he be slower, his frame bulked out with a metal casing? Not that it mattered; either way, he was going to be susceptible to the cold.

They sped onward, and Iris guided them through alleyways and over access roads, her voice a constant buzz in their ears. Avoid that road, go through that alleyway, take a left. One of the few benefits of nearly constant surveillance, she supposed; there were cameras everywhere that gave Iris the access she needed to be their eyes and ears over the city, and when the police force was focused on something, most of them were unmonitored. Which meant Iris could access them as she needed them, tapped into the mainframe as she was, without alerting anyone to her presence. Caitlin and Cisco raced along, so used to Iris’ direction that they were able to change course and turn down side roads in seconds to avoid being spotted by roving patrols. “Okay, team,” Iris said finally, “in one block, take a left, and you should be directly in front of the Advanced. You’re going in blind, though. CCPD has full control of the street cams around the fight, and if I access them, they’ll know someone was watching.”

She and Cisco rounded the corner, and for a second all Caitlin could see were blindingly bright lights. Some of it she could attribute to the flood lights and sirens above the police cars, but the brilliant glow of yellow lightning was something else entirely. She pulled out her glasses (one of Cisco’s many quick inventions, made to block the flood lights and flash grenades used by officers) and squinted through the lens; even with them on, it was hard to make out exactly what she was seeing.

“Woah,” Cisco said beside her. “It looks like there is another Advanced out here. Iris, are the police getting reports of anything?”

Caitlin could make him out now, faintly. Dressed head to toe in bright scarlet leather, he would be nearly invisible due to his speed if it weren’t for the bright trail of lightning that followed him as he ran. It was easier to track the lightning than it was to pinpoint the second Advanced, and she watched as he darted all around their metal target, trying desperately to take him out.

“Shit,” Cisco mumbled. “Do you see how fast he’s running? That suit must be made of some special polymer to reduce friction or else it would be on fire---”

“Focus, Vibe,” Caitlin hissed, looking from the fight back to the CCPD. They were all engrossed in what was happening to the metal man, and hadn’t noticed she and Cisco pulling up. The man moving faster than light was trying to guide their iron man away from the police barricade, but it wasn’t working. The metal man stayed put.

“I’m not getting reports of a second Advanced,” Iris confirmed, and Caitlin sighed. “So either he’s an Advanced invisible to the human eye, or he works for the Special Forces unit. Do you guys think they’ve started recruiting?”

If the CCPD hadn’t reported it, then he worked under their direction. And good guy or not… well, there were no good guys, she reminded herself. And if there were, they certainly did not work for the CCPD. If he was working with the government, then he was part of the task force designed to eradicate their kind. The ones that captured both her and Cisco right after the explosion.

Cisco pulled off his helmet and glanced over at her. “Maybe if we had stayed, they would have recruited us, too,” he said with a frown.

“I doubt it,” Caitlin said. “Iris, what can you find out about this guy? Do we know who he is?”

She heard Iris sigh. “I can’t get into their database without being tracked,” she said. “And whoever he is, they’re going to want to keep his identity, and definitely his abilities, under wraps. If I go in, officers will be here any minute.”

Iris was right. Going into these situations was never easy, of course, but so far they only had to deal with the other Advanced and, more and more frequently, the CCPD Special Forces unit. Caitlin never would have imagined that people who so clearly hate their kind would team up with one, much less throw the CCPD emblem on his suit and overtly claim him as one of their own.

“Whoever he is,” Cisco said, “he’s getting his ass kicked. Metal skin isn’t going to give way to a few punches just because the scarlet speedster is fast. He has to know he’s outmatched. I mean, he’d need a sonic boom to even register a hit, and he’s not far enough away to make it happen.”

She closed her eyes for a second, running over plans and their various outcomes in her head. Iris wouldn’t be able to help; out here, in the field as Cisco called it, it was just the two of them. She would have to trust her instincts. “Vibe,” she said, blinking against the light again, “you can produce a sonic boom, right?”

He smirked. “Of course. But I need to be close enough to make contact with his skin to have an effect.”

“Leave that to me,” she said. “Just be ready to hit him, and hit him hard. We’re going to need one solid blow to knock this guy out long enough to bring him back.” She took a deep breath, and felt the chill build in her stomach, felt it flow through her veins. Ice crystallized in the air and encased her fingers, and she focused on condensing and freezing the moisture in the air near her palm.

Caitlin lobbed her first chunk of solid ice toward the metal Advanced. It shattered near his feet, and both he and the scarlet speedster shouted in surprised. She saw a flash of lightning as one pulled away, but icy tendrils started threading up the legs of their target, and he had to yank his foot out in order to move.

She ran forward, another ball of ice already forming in her palm. She gripped it like a baseball, adding her own internal chill to the frozen moisture before throwing it at him. The ice arched, leaving a trail of frozen water falling through the air as it hurdled toward the guy’s chest. He dodged, but she made another one, throwing it against his side hard enough that it exploded against his metal skin. She spun around and sent a spray of ice toward the ground, catching one of his feet before he fell.

Their metal man slammed to his knees, cracking the ice underneath him. But she watched him shiver, and saw how much slower he was reacting to her attacks. The metal must only be skin deep, she figured, and his organs were starting to cool considerably. And without a source of heat around, he would either have to lose the metal skin or risk freezing from the outside in. Caitlin placed her hands on his shoulders and focused on draining the heat from him, on pulling out every single calorie of heat in his body. She could feel the tingle of warmth in her fingers and she relished the sensation of heat, however fleeting, on her cold skin.

“Frost, watch out!” Cisco’s voice crackled in her ear. Caitlin tensed, and she started condensing the water around her to build a thin layer of ice over her skin. She wasn’t sure what was coming, but she knew Cisco had her back, and he wasn’t just throwing out a warning.

Light reflected brightly off of metal, and Caitlin tried to get out of the way of what she now knew was an oncoming attack, but she was too slow. In a flash, the CCPD Advanced slammed a fist into her stomach, cracking the ice barrier she’d created. She doubled over from the force, simultaneously clutching her stomach with one hand and reaching out toward the speedster with another. But he was so much faster than she was, and she glanced up to see him ten feet away, shaking ice off his gloved fist.

“Killer Frost,” he announced, standing tall with his legs spread apart. She glared at him. That was not her name. Cisco tried calling her that once, after he heard one of the guards at the station use it, and she nearly froze him to his chair. And she actually liked Cisco. This asshole, though, was another story. She certainly would not mind draining him of all his body heat, if she were still that person. “You are under arrest. Stand down and let the CCPD take you in.”

Caitlin sucked in a breath and stood up straight. She wasn’t going to go back there without a fight, and if he wanted to get her, he was going to have to hit her again. And this time, she would be prepared. He had to get close to her to hurt her, and close range was going to be hard for him. Her frost would slow him down before she passed out.

“Yeah,” Cisco said, “that ain’t happening.”

The speedster glanced over at him and started to run, but Cisco thrust his hands out and she could see the other Advanced stop in his tracks, his hands pressed tight against his ears. He pitched forward, his speed all but gone, the lightning that had been crackling around him dying off. “It looks like my vibration works for more than just shielding us from cameras,” Cisco said over the comm, and Caitlin nodded.

“I’ll take him,” she said, “if you can sonic boom the metal off of our original target.” Cisco grinned and nodded (he had a fondness for sonic booms that she didn’t understand), and Caitlin ran over to the mysterious CCPD speedster. She froze his hands together in cuffs, and encased the lower half of his body in solid ice. Unless this guy could vibrate his molecules, then either he was going to have to wait until he defrosted or the CCPD would have to carry him back to whatever cell they dragged him out of.

She heard shouting from behind the barricade, people barking out orders to other people, but so far, no officers crossed their self-made line. To be safe, though, she threw a few ice bombs in their direction, making the pavement in front of their barricade slick and dangerous. If they stepped on it, they risked freezing their feet and developing frostbite.

She heard the unmistakable clap of energy that always came with Cisco’s strongest move, and looked over her shoulder to see their original target on the ground, all of the metal off of his skin. Cisco shot her a thumbs up, and she pushed herself off of the passed out speedster to head over to the metal man. He was big. If they were going to be able to get him back to the compound, it was going to take both of them to hoist him onto Cisco’s bike.

“Guys, you might want to grab our target and run,” Iris said. “CCPD is calling in backup to handle, and I quote, to take down the two outlaws that came to the rescue of criminal Tony Woodward, end quote.”

Cisco tsked. “We’re not exactly rescuing him,” he said. Caitlin lifted Tony up by his shoulders, and god. He had to be at least 200 pounds if not more… it was going to be a struggle to get him off the ground and into a containment cell at the warehouse. “Well, I guess we’re rescuing him from---”

Something popped behind them, and Caitlin dropped Tony’s body in surprise. Cisco cursed and she turned to see the speedster vibrating on the ground, ice shooting off of him as it exploded away from his body. Of course he was able to vibrate his molecules out of her trap. She didn’t even know what she was expecting, at this point. He was probably just another one of their experiments, pushed past the brink of humanity in the same series of tests and trials that she had to endure under the care of the government. Only he made it all the way through without losing control.

“Leave the target and run,” she commanded, grabbing Cisco’s elbow. “We need to get out of here, now.”

“But-”

Caitlin stopped for only a second, looking straight into his eyes. “Vibe,” she said. “We leave him. We have to.” He didn’t say another word, but she saw his eyes look down in disappointment as they ran toward their bikes. She knew he was disappointed; the last few outbreaks had been contained by the CCPD before they got there, and now that they finally had the chance to save another Advanced, it was ripped away from them. Going a month and a half without a win was difficult. But if they didn’t get out of there now, they were going to lose a lot more than their lives in those cells.

The speedster still had a few seconds before he shook himself out of all of the ice, and then he would be hot on their trail, a bolt of lightning against the darkness of the abandoned streets. They mounted their bikes and flipped the engines on, revving just once to get them ready to go before shooting away from the scene.

“Do you think we lost him?” Cisco shouted over the roar of the wind in their ears.

No, she didn’t think so. And if the ever brightening road they were taking was any indication, she was right. He was still moving slower than usual, but she guessed his legs were still freezing, even if they weren’t covered in ice anymore.

“We need a path back!” she shouted and hoped that her comm picked up the sound. Cisco usually talked to Iris when they were riding; his helmet was equipped with a microphone, so she wouldn’t get the ear piercing rush of wind over the speakers. But they had to leave so fast he didn’t have time to get his helmet on.

“Take a right,” Iris said, her voice high and shrill. She was worried about them, of course. Anyone else would have realized what was happening and opened the cargo doors before they made a run for it, but not her. She wanted to make sure they were okay. “And then in four hundred feet, you’re going to cut through an alley on your right and then make a left onto the next street. Do you think you can lose him?”

Caitlin swallowed. “No,” she answered honestly. “Iris, you need to get out of the compound, okay?”

“I’m not going to abandon you,” Iris responded hotly. “Maybe if I just lead you through the city---”

Caitlin sighed. “That’s not going to work. This guy can make it around a block faster than we can cut through an alley.”

Cisco sped up beside her, quickly overtaking her bike. “We need to split up,” he said, his untied hair whipping around his face. “He’ll have to choose which one of us to go after, and that will buy the other person enough time to get back to the compound and help Iris if we need to.”

She thought about that. If this guy went after her, then fine; she would take that risk. But she wasn’t going to let him run after Cisco and possibly capture him. Letting the CCPD get ahold of an Advanced she didn’t care about was bad enough, but to let them get Cisco again on top of it would be unforgivable. Miracles don’t come twice. “No,” she said.

The bike next to her slowed down. They turned down the alley Iris suggested, and it was dark until they got to the other side. He wasn’t trying to outrun them, she realized. He was waiting for them to lead him back to their hideout. Iris told them another street to go on, and Caitlin again told her to get out of the compound and save herself.

“If you won’t let us split up, then Iris needs to use a grenade,” Cisco shouted over the comms. “If he comes in after us, it will affect him just as much as it does us.”

“No!” Caitlin and Iris said at the same time.

“She needs to get out of there, not help us,” Caitlin said.

“I’m not going to knock you guys out,” Iris protested. “And I’m definitely not going to leave you, so Caitlin, don’t suggest that again.”

Cisco made a noise of frustration that reminded Caitlin of a growl. “It’s the only way,” he said. “So either we do this, or we’re all getting taken in. And while we know what they will do to us, we have no idea what will happen to Iris if she gets caught.”

Iris started protesting again, saying that she wasn’t going to hurt them. The grenades Cisco developed were useful, but painful; they could knock out any Advanced in a concentrated area, but it felt like something was boiling her insides in the few seconds before she fully passed out. Cisco said it felt like he was falling apart, like his molecules were coming undone. They tried it once, when Cisco first made them, and decided it wouldn’t be useful out in the field if it was going to knock them out as well. But he’d stocked them in the cortex, just in case Iris needed something to protect herself from a rampaging Advanced. Or the two of them. Cisco hadn’t said it, but Caitlin knew that he made Iris keep them on hand just in case their powers started going out of control. He was more heroic than she was, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that she could lose control and accidentally drain all of Iris’ body heat. He knew that their powers were virtually untested and constantly growing, and neither of them would ever want Iris to get hurt.

“Iris,” Caitlin shouted, and she stopped talking. “You have to do it. Or else you get out of there and leave us behind.”

She heard Iris exhale. “I’m not going to leave,” she said firmly, and Caitlin hated her for being so stubborn. She wasn’t sure what Iris saw in her. Cisco, at least, she understood; both why Iris would want to keep him safe, and why he would want to be near Caitlin. But Iris’ unwavering belief in both of them---how she trusted Caitlin implicitly---that was confounding.

“Then grab a grenade and stand in the loading area. We can find our way back from here.” She heard Iris huff over the comm, but she didn’t say anything else, and Caitlin hoped that she would follow through with the attack. If she could knock them all out, then it would be much easier for Iris to get this new Advanced into a containment cell. It wouldn’t be outfitted for his abilities until Cisco could figure out what they were, but maybe the preliminary precautions would be enough to hold him.

Caitlin hoped so, anyway. Their compound wasn’t too far off from the warehouse they kept the bikes stored in, and if this new Advanced ran straight back to CCPD, she doubted there would be enough time for them to clear everything out. She trusted Cisco to grab Iris and run. There were a few weak spots in the fence that surrounded the city for him to get to the other side, and Iris could pass through any checkpoint without a problem. She just hoped that if the CCPD found Killer Frost, that would be enough for them to call off the hunt for Vibe. He was in custody for a few days. They had to know that his powers weren’t dangerous like hers, that he couldn’t kill as easily.

The bright light trailed behind them easily, following them through every turn and twist through the city. She wondered if he knew where he was, anymore, or if he was as lost as she felt the first time Cisco dragged her down to the warehouse he’d found. She and Cisco sped up for the last few miles, turning a corner abruptly and speeding up the ramp into the warehouse they stored their bikes. Caitlin looked around fervently, willing her eyes to adjust to the darkness so she could see where Iris was and make sure she was safe. The warehouse lightened as the streak ran toward them, and then Caitlin saw her: situated on the second floor next to the railing, one of Cisco’s grenades in her hand. She swung up the kickstand and dismounted quickly.

The cargo doors started to shut, and the man rushed in after them right before the door closed. “Killer Frost,” he announced loudly. “You are under arrest-”

Iris pulled the pin on the grenade. For a second, the whole warehouse was bathed in a bright light. Then Caitlin felt her organs burn, and she screamed as she collapsed on the ground, Cisco thudding onto the floor next to her. Right before she blacked out, she saw the speedster drop, too, his whole body twitching. 

Iris watched them all fall to the floor, one after another, and she closed her eyes for a moment. She tried not to picture the nightmares she had more frequently these days; the ones that showed more than just her best friend, but her two newest friends as well. Falling down, nearly dead, the sky inky with streaks of electricity running through the dark clouds. It took her at least a month to get over that particular nightmare the last time, and she didn’t want to fall back into the same routine she had back then.

The intruder, a man in a red leather suit, twitched for a few seconds after Caitlin and Cisco stilled. Iris wondered if it was because he was trying to fight the effect and stay conscious, or if it was because her friends knew what was coming and this new person had no idea. Maybe they were slightly more prepared to endure massive amounts of pain until they passed out. She felt bad, watching him writhe on the ground. He didn’t deserve this. None of them deserved this.

Caitlin’s scream still burned in her memory as she descended the ramp; loud and shrill and filled with pain. She shuddered, and remembered how her friend described the first time she and Cisco were hit with a grenade, how twitchy she had been for hours afterward when she got too close to where Cisco insisted they be stored in the cortex, as if they could go off at any moment. As if she would turn her back and feel that wave of pain hit her again. It was the only time Iris saw Caitlin even slightly scared for herself, in the entire six months they’d known each other.

Iris pulled out the secondary grenade she’d brought with her, just in case the first hadn’t been enough to knock out the intruder, and stared at it. It was small and black, a yellow trigger pin on one side. Before they tried it out, Cisco tried to give them a cute name (stingers, if she remembered correctly, or maybe yellow jackets; he latched on to the black and yellow color scheme and ran with it), but after seeing the effects, he just called it what they were: weapons. Grenades. These devices were dangerous, and Iris wished that Cisco never made them. But they were necessary to make him and Caitlin feel safer and more in control of their abilities. They thought it was a safeguard for her, but she knew. It was to help them cope, so they knew they weren’t unstoppable.

She grabbed the trolley cart from the base of the stairs and went first to collect their newest addition, grabbing him by the hands and dragging him as best she could onto the cart for easy transport. His feet were hanging off one edge and his head lolled inches above the ground on the other. Had she not known the grenades caused such a wicked headache, she would have been more careful with the amount of times she hit his head on the cement floor, but honestly, he wasn’t even going to realize what had happened. Iris glanced back at her friends and frowned. Caitlin’s skin was already turning blue, and a thin layer of ice began to form on the ground around her unconscious body. Cisco whimpered; she wondered what he was seeing this time.

Their compound was built in the shells of a few warehouses abandoned after the explosion and was designed to make it difficult to move from one building to another without proper identification. Cisco and Caitlin always left and came in through the loading dock of the far right building, where Iris was usually stationed in the far left warehouse, behind the few computers they were able to scavenge and purchase on the black market. In the center was the building that Cisco and Caitlin lived in, the one that held containment cells for all of the Advanced, if and when they caught them. Caitlin and Cisco also lived in containment cells that could be locked from the outside if necessary. Iris hated that they took so many precautions with themselves, that while they both trusted Iris and each other completely, neither Cisco nor Caitlin trusted themselves.

Iris walked along, the man still passed out on her trolley. The last time, it took twenty minutes for Cisco and Caitlin to wake back up after being hit with one, and judging by her stopwatch, she had about fifteen minutes left to get his guy situated in a containment cell and lock it, then go back and make sure Caitlin hadn’t frozen Cisco solid while passed out. She held out her hand at the door between the buildings, letting the scanner register her handprint. Cisco called it rudimentary, as if a machine he built from scraps they found in the city that could be loaded with handprints of hundred of individuals (if their team ever grew, he had said) was anything other than extraordinary. The door unlocked and opened on its own, and Iris apologized to the passed out man on her trolley as she banged his head against the wall three times before squeezing them both through the door.

“Seriously, though,” she said to him even though he was passed out and couldn’t hear a word she said, “you are freakishly tall. I’m going to need you to shrink, maybe lose some muscle mass or something. Because this is just ridiculous.”

He groaned back at her, and her heart sped up in momentary panic. She hadn’t considered the possibility that he would react differently to one of their grenades, but it could happen. His eyelids fluttered and she pushed the trolley with renewed vigor, passing by empty rooms and abandoned spaces on her way to the containment cells. She eventually made it, after going through yet another security checkpoint, and Iris looked at their empty row of containment cells. Her friends slept down another corridor, where there were three or four larger cells that could be modified slightly more easily, but these were for the Advanced that they pulled in off of the street.

The guy moved this time, and Iris jumped. She dropped him on the floor and backed out of the room, quickly punching in the code to seal the containment cell. The doors shut, and the keypad turned red (Cisco liked his flourishes), and Iris watched the man for a few seconds. Most of his body was covered, but there was something striking about it, and she had hazy memories of seeing it before. His eyelids fluttered open, and she took a huge step back, her pulse racing.

She had to get out of here, now, before he saw her. The Advanced weren’t really supposed to see her; they dealt only with Caitlin and Cisco when they were here, before they figured out what to do with them. Iris turned on her heel and tried to squash the feeling that she knew him from somewhere. He was probably a cop, she reasoned as she walked out of the corridor. She probably saw him before the explosion.

Iris heard someone call her name, and then the door shut behind her. She imagined it, that was all; there was no way he’d said, “Iris?” as she walked out of his field of vision. She ignored the chill up her spine.

By the time she made it back to the loading area, Caitlin’s skin was a sick blue, and Cisco was shivering, his breath visible above his mouth. She ran over to him and smacked him in the arm, and hated that his grenades were so powerful that it made both of them pass out for so long. “Come on, Cisco,” she muttered, and shook his shoulder repeatedly.

He took in a sharp, deep breath and his eyes sprung open. “G-god,” he stuttered, his teeth chattering together. “I am freezing.”

“Yeah, well, you know how Caitlin’s powers are when she’s not awake to modulate them,” Iris said, helping him to his feet. His skin was cold to the touch, which was disconcerting, but at least frost hadn’t started to form in his hair. “What are we going to do with her?”

He blinked, and rubbed his arms, and Iris pressed her warm hands to his shoulders to try and give him a little more body heat. “We can’t move her,” he said. “If we touch her, she could accidentally kill us, and she would never forgive herself if one of us was injured. Or dead.” He paused, looking thoughtfully at Caitlin’s unmoving body. “We could always try tossing the speedster on top of her, see if that wakes her up.”

Iris rolled her eyes. “We are not doing that, and anyway, I already moved him to a cell.”

“On your own? Iris---”

“Yes, on my own,” she said. “He was knocked out. I wasn’t in any danger. I swear, the two of you act like I’m completely incompetent.”

Cisco threw up his hands in mock surrender, and Caitlin sighed, another whoosh of freezing air exiting her lungs. Both Iris and Cisco shivered, and then he grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door. “We can get her once she’s woken up,” Cisco said, ushering her through the door to the second part of their compound. “Until then, we can try and figure out what powers this new Advanced has. I mean, he moves faster than anything I’ve ever seen before, and he shook himself right out of Caitlin’s trap. Is he still passed out? Because I don’t know that an ordinary cell can hold him.”

“I hope it can,” Iris said, “because he was waking up when I dumped him in there.” She bit her upper lip and glanced over at Cisco. He was easier to deal with than Caitlin, especially when it came to her safety. He cared deeply about her, but Caitlin was protective to the point of obsessive with both of them. Cisco trusted her a little more to take care of things herself. “He, uh, also might have seen me. And recognized me.”

Cisco stopped in his tracks, using his grip on her wrist to turn her around and face him. “What do you mean, he saw you? And recognized you? Iris, do you know who this guy is?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Honestly,” she said, catching sight of his frown. “I didn’t see the guy’s face, it was covered by his mask thing. But he must have seen mine. I think he might be an officer, someone my father works with.”

He sighed, and ran his free hand through his long hair. “Let’s just hope he thinks you were a hallucination, Iris,” he said. “I don’t want you to get in trouble---or worse---because of what Caitlin and I do here.”

“What we all do here,” Iris reminded him. “I broke you two out, remember? I am the reason you two are on the run from the law.”

“No, you’re the reason we’re alive,” he said. “If we stayed in that place any longer, who knows what else they would’ve done to Cait, or to me. We might have been brainwashed into a weapon like this guy. We owe you everything, Iris.”

She shook her head and laid her free hand on top of his arm. “You guys don’t owe me anything, and you know that.” Cisco looked at her and smiled lightly, and she smiled back at him. She didn’t even want to think what would have happened to him if the CCPD tried to use him and exploit him in the way they used Caitlin. “But do you really think this guy is brainwashed?”

Iris heard boots on the cement floor behind them, and she turned to see Caitlin with two heaters pressed into her palms walking up to them. “He has to be,” Caitlin said. “He was attacking his own kind.”

“So were we,” Cisco pointed out. “It’s kind of what we do.”

Caitlin frowned. “He was attacking his own kind to bring them into the government’s custody,” she said. “That’s worse.”

Cisco and Iris didn’t say anything for a moment; they glanced at each other, and then back at Caitlin in unison. The silence grew between the three of them. Caitlin held the heaters against her exposed skin, and sucked in a breath when one of them was bled dry of heat. “I need to get into my room soon,” she said.

“We should go talk to this guy, then,” Cisco said. “Iris, you go watch in the Cortex. Let us know if you see anything that we’re missing. You’re good at reading people.”

“I could go with you,” she said. She wanted to know who he was, and if he really did know her. And if he trusted her, if he recognized her, then maybe she would be able to get more information out of him. Maybe she could ask him about the things CCPD was doing behind closed doors. “You’re right, I am good at reading people. And if this guy really is brainwashed, or something, I could help. We’re in the compound. I don’t need to hide in here.”

Caitlin shook her head immediately. “Cisco and I do this alone,” she said.

“And you already said that…” Cisco started, glancing over at Caitlin. “That there could be complications. Remember? Do you really want to risk it?”

Caitlin looked between them. “What kind of complications?” she asked immediately. “What’s going on? Did that guy try and hurt you, Iris?”

Iris shook her head, and sighed. Cisco was right; if this guy did know her, then it would probably be worse for all of them. Right now, her involvement with the jailbreak of known criminals Caitlin Snow and Cisco Ramon was a secret. When she was out and about in public, no one tried to attack her. Her face wasn’t on the posters, her name never on the watch list. But it was hard for her to squash her curiosity down. She wanted answers almost as much as she wanted to stay safe. “I’ll watch from the Cortex,” she said. “Don’t be too hard on him. Remember, he is as much a victim as you two.”

Cisco nodded, but Caitlin pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. Iris knew that she didn’t believe it; for Caitlin, those who willingly allied themselves with the government weren’t innocent. Iris felt sorry for the guy; he was about to get a strong dose of nice cop and I-will-kill-you cop. And if he made the mistake of trying to lash out at Cisco, then, well, he had something else coming to him.

She heard Caitlin ask Cisco again what the complication was, and Cisco told her it was nothing. She walked back to the Cortex and sat down as Cisco and Caitlin approached the man’s cell, and he was definitely awake now. His uniform was still on, the CCPD emblem bright against the dark red of his suit. Iris stared at him, and she felt that familiar nag in her gut at his physique. One of her screens showed the man in his cell, and the other showed the corridor where Caitlin and Cisco stood, and she could see all of their faces. Or, the partial face that the mask allowed for the speedster.

For a second, he stared at the two of them and they stared back. Caitlin’s arms were crossed over her chest, and Cisco was watching him with a critical eye, and the man was looking between the two of them so quickly it almost looked like his face was blurring out of existence. “Killer Frost,” he said, his voice a boom through the speakers. “And you must be Vibe. Or should I say Caitlin Snow and Cisco Ramon?”

“It seems we are at a disadvantage,” Caitlin said. “You know who we are and what we can do, but we have no clue who you are. So tell us, before I make you tell us.”

Well, this wasn’t going to go well. The speedster stopped vibrating his face, and she saw him stand up straighter and push his shoulders back, puffing out his chest. “Are you threatening me, Killer Frost?”

“She’s not,” Cisco said quickly, and Caitlin cut her eyes to him in fury. “She just wants to know who you are.”

The man frowned, and Iris stared at his mouth. It was so familiar to her. The set of his jaw, the way his lip jutted out. She wanted to place it, but the only name she could come up with was impossible. They all waited for him to say something, but instead the speedster simply stared at them. “Hey,” Cisco muttered, his voice echoing from his comm up to Iris in the Cortex. “Are you getting anything?”

Iris sighed. “No,” she admitted. “I need him to speak more before I can try and analyze him, and you know that on the fly analysis is just inference and guesswork.”

“Who are you talking to?” the speedster demanded. “There’s someone else here, isn’t there? A woman? She’s here, isn’t she?” He looked between Cisco and Caitlin again. “I saw her earlier. Where is Iris?”

Iris gasped, and Caitlin moved forward, slamming her fist against the reinforced glass. Ice spread out from the impact point. “Who the hell are you?”

“I want to talk to Iris,” he said. “I won’t talk to anyone else. Bring her down here.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Caitlin spat, venom in her voice.

Cisco reached out and grabbed Caitlin’s shoulder, causing her to flinch and pull away. “We can’t do that,” Cisco said. “There is no one here by that name. There’s just us.”

The speedster groaned in frustration, and suddenly it was hard to see his form at all, he was vibrating so fast. “I saw her,” he said, his voice shaking and layering together, building into something that didn’t even sound human. He took a deep breath and slowly stopped, coming back into focus. “Look, I can break out at any time, okay? But I need to talk to her. Where is she?”

Her heart sunk into her stomach, and her memory started to clear up. The sound of his voice, even so desperate as it was, was a comfort to her and she knew exactly why. “Even if there was someone else here,” Cisco said, “what makes you think we would let them down here without knowing who you are? You just admitted you can leave at any time. What if you tried to hurt them?”

The speedster stilled completely, and Iris stepped away from her console, starting toward his cell. “I would never hurt her,” she heard him say, his voice echoing around the room. “Not like you two.” It wasn’t that far from the Cortex to the middle building, where Cisco and Caitlin were, where he was. She broke into a run, and flew through the hallways down to the corridor they kept their Advanced. “---must have kidnapped her,” she heard as she opened the door. “She would never help you out if she had a choice.”

“They didn’t kidnap me,” she said. Caitlin turned to face her, furious, and Cisco glanced over at her without an ounce of surprise on his face. “I choose to be here,” she said as she stepped into view of the man in the cell. “Each and every day of my life, I choose to come in here with them and try and make this city safer for everyone who lives here.”

The man in the suit stilled, and then, slowly, he moved his hand to his mask and pushed it off of his head. It hung behind his neck, and she cried out, looking at him. Studying his face. It had been so long since she’d seen him, and for months she thought she would never see him again. But here he was; alive, and moving around, and breathing, and not injured. “Iris,” he breathed, walking toward the class and setting a gloved hand against its surface.

She smiled weakly. “Hey, Barry,” she said. “It’s really good to see you again. The last time I saw you…”

“I know,” he said, quietly. “It’s been a long time.”

“I thought you were dead,” she said, trying to keep her voice light but failing miserably. His entire face collapsed; his mouth sagged and his eyes softened and he huffed out a breath. His hand curled into a fist against the glass, and he stared at her. She tried to get the image of him from the last time she had seen him out of her mind, trying to stop her brain from overlaying images of Barry bloody and heaving over the one standing before her. The one with broader, thicker shoulders, with eyes so green and so alert that they almost hurt to look at.

It wasn’t until Cisco cleared his throat that Iris remembered they were standing with her, around her; she looked over at him and then back at Caitlin, almost reluctant to keep her eyes away from Barry for too long. “So you do know him?” Cisco asked quietly, setting a hand on her shoulder.

She nodded just as Barry hit his fist against the glass. “Don’t you dare touch her, Vibe,” he said. “I swear if you hurt her-”

“We aren’t going to hurt her,” Caitlin said from Iris’ other side. “The Central City Police Department, on the other hand, wouldn’t hesitate to lay a hand on her.”

Barry sneered. “Yeah, right,” he said. “The CCPD is protecting people from Advanced menaces like you, Killer Frost. Or have you forgotten that you’re a murderer? Does Iris know that? Have you told your supposed friends what you did to land yourself in jail before you broke out?”

Ice exploded on Caitlin’s fingertips, and Iris stopped her from unlocking the door and strangling Barry. “Do you two mind if I speak to him alone?” she asked. Caitlin said no immediately, still glaring daggers into Barry’s skull, but Cisco nodded and told her they would be watching. He gently took Caitlin’s hand into his own, ice hitting his bare skin, and pulled her out of the corridor.

She and Barry stood in silence, surveying each other. It had been so long since she’d seen him last, and she could barely process that he was alive. Standing in front of her. There were so many things that Iris wanted to say to him, things that she had spent months writing in her head. But now that he was here, alive and breathing, she was too scared to say what was on her mind. She was scared to tell him about all of the things she’d done that she imagined him being proud of, when she couldn’t sleep at night. Like breaking Cisco and Caitlin out of the CCPD’s custody, or finding Advanced, rehabilitating them, getting them out if necessary. About standing up to her father. She didn’t know if she could tell him about all the times she missed him, or how much it hurt to see him die.

She remembered the way his entire body crumpled on the night of the explosion, how he was thrown back onto a shelf of chemicals in the lab. When she finally got through to 9-1-1, they told her it would be an hour before someone could come to get him. There was an explosion, they told her, as if she didn’t know. As if she hadn’t seen the blast through the window of the lab. She remembered the blood bubbling up from his mouth, and how he shuddered weakly before she felt his heart stop beneath her palm. She cried over his body until an EMT arrived and took him away.

Iris couldn’t ride in the ambulance. She wasn’t family.

“I know what Caitlin did to get put in jail,” she said finally, carefully. Barry furrowed his brow and frowned. She didn’t know what he expected her to say; she couldn’t read him as easily, didn’t know if the things that his eyes and his body told her now were true. How much had he changed, she wondered, in the year she thought he was dead? How much had she? “But she didn’t deserve what they did to her, Barry. None of the Advanced do.”

Barry frowned. “This isn’t a matter of deserving justice. We are all dangerous. Especially Caitlin Snow. Are you sure you know what she did to get herself thrown in jail, Iris? She bleeds the heat from people, kills them. She killed at least three people before the CCPD caught up with her. You need to stay away from her, Iris.”

“They tried to attack her,” Iris said quickly. “It was accidental, and it was self-defense.”

“You need to let me take them in, Iris.”

Iris laughed bitterly, and Barry’s brow creased at the sound. “Neither of them are going back with you to be locked up by the CCPD,” she told him. “I won’t allow it. I won’t let you.”

He cocked his head to the side. “But you’re fine with locking me up and keeping me here?” he asked hotly. “What’s so different about what you do and what we do, huh?

“What we do is lock people up if they’re dangerous,” she said. “What the CCPD does is much worse. Caitlin told me what happened to her. At least, the things she can remember. The things she can talk about. We may lock people up for a brief amount of time, but it’s mostly to keep the CCPD from capturing them. Have you ever wondered what happens to all of the Advanced that you go after?”

Barry rolled his eyes. “They are put in a cell,” he said, “until they are processed. And then they go before the judge, and are either ruled guilty or not. It’s justice, Iris. Due process and all of that.”

“Are you sure?” Iris asked. “Because I’ve heard that the CCPD experiments on the Advanced they have in custody. That your director does it himself.”

He pursed his lips. She watched him process this information, and wondered how Barry found his way into police custody. Had the government taken him like they did Caitlin? Did they strap him down to a table and slice into his skin to see how he healed, or if he felt pain in the same way anymore? “Even if I believed that,” he said slowly, “and I don’t, she still deserves to be locked up. And she broke herself out of jail and took another criminal with her. She needs to come back with me.”

“She would never hurt me,” Iris said. “Neither would Cisco.”

Barry growled, low and frustrated. He slammed his fist against the glass and she jumped away from him, her eyes alert with fear. He froze, his wide eyes searching her face for a second, and she stared back at him, the desire to run still burning in her legs. His eyes closed slowly, excruciatingly slow, and she watched him take a deep breath, watched him try and keep his emotions from chasing themselves across his facial features. “You don’t know that,” he said, quieter than she expected from him. “You can’t know what they… what any of us will do, Iris. We’re powerful. We are dangerous. How many times---” he started, and then stopped, his fist opening against the glass. “If they don’t come with me, you have to. Okay? I can’t leave here knowing that you’re in danger.”

“Then I guess you won’t be leaving.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her, the edges of his mouth pulled downward, drooping. Barry stepped away from the glass and paced around his cell, moving just too fast for it to be natural. She watched him, furious and frustrated, afraid and amazed, her eyes tracing his every movement. The way he moved was so familiar to her but at the same time, he was someone completely different than the Barry she lost on the night of the accelerator explosion. He seemed to be talking to himself, muttering under his breath and much too quickly for her to understand any word that he was saying even if she could hear him.

She rubbed her hands over her upper arms and hugged herself. They were quiet, again; she stared at him with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, and he looked back at her, moving toward the glass until one forearm was pressed against the glass of his cell, his head slightly dipped. Tears stung at her eyes but she didn’t dare cry, despite the mix of emotions swirling through her at the moment. She missed him, of course she did, but he was wrong about Caitlin and Cisco.

Barry sighed, and pulled back, breaking eye contact. Iris sagged, quickly wiping a tear from her cheek while he was busy staring at the ground. Her muscles were tensed and cramped, and she wanted nothing more than either to let him out and run into his arms or to run back to Cisco and Caitlin and never see him again. She squeezed her eyes shut. “This isn’t at all how I pictured seeing you again,” he said finally, quietly; more a whisper than something she was meant to hear.

She bit the inside of her lip and opened her eyes again, glancing up at him through wet lashes. “How did you picture it?” she asked. “Running into me at the coffee shop, surprising me with your miraculous recovery?”

He grinned a little, his eyes lighting up, finally, with something other than anger and indignation. “Something like that,” Barry said. She straightened, and blinked away her tears. “I don’t know. I always imagined I’d see you somewhere other than from behind the glass of a cell door. Maybe outside, in another city. I just imagined I’d see you as me, first. Not as the Flash.”

“The Flash?” she asked, the corners of her mouth begging to pull up into a full-blown smile. Anything to relieve the tension that had built up inside of her chest, to pacify the ache when she looked at his face.

He tapped the CCPD emblem on his chest. “It’s, ah… it’s my code name. What they call me in the field so as not to reveal my secret identity.”

She nodded, her eyes dropping to the tip of her toes. “It makes you sound like a superhero,” she told him, grinding her shoe into the floor. “Having a secret identity and all.”

He chuckled. “I guess I kind of am one. Just one that actually works with the law instead of outside of it.”

A bad taste covered her tongue, and Iris resisted the urge to make a face. She looked up at him. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you work for them? You call yourself a hero and yet you’re wearing the CCPD’s emblem proudly on your chest.”

“I don’t understand what’s so wrong with that, Iris,” he said. “I stop criminals. I bring them to justice. And your dad is a cop! You used to want to be a cop? Have you forgotten that?”

“Of course not!” She unfurled her arms and held them rigid by her sides, her hands curling into fists. “But I wanted to save people, Barry. And what you do? What my father does? That’s not saving people. That’s hunting people down for being different.”

“No, for being dangerous,” he said. “We don’t hunt people down for being different, Iris. We go after people that are actively harming others or breaking the law.”

Iris laughed bitterly. “Really?” she asked. “Then what law did Cisco break to get him locked up? Do you even know?’

Barry shrugged. “I’ve heard stories,” he said. “Vibe was arrested for trying to escape the perimeter, and now he’s wanted for breaking himself and Killer Frost out of jail.”

“He was arrested because a family member called in a tip,” she said. “I know, because I read the police report two days after he was brought in. And then he had the audacity to go into hiding after that, and then eventually try and get out of this place, which did mean getting past the solid wall of concrete around our city. You’re right. Cisco was arrested exercising his right to leave. But he didn’t break himself out of jail, Barry.”

Barry’s eyes widened and he started at her. She heard the thunder of footsteps, and Iris knew that Caitlin and Cisco were coming to her right now. She knew that they would pull her out of here, try and talk her down. But she was lucky; they weren’t fast like Barry was now.

“I did.”

His jaw dropped softly and Iris watched him, her face set in stone and her arms crossing over her chest. Cisco and Caitlin stopped just on the edge of her peripheral, their chests heaving and their eyes wide. “You didn’t,” Barry said. “You wouldn’t.”

“She didn’t,” Cisco said, stepping up toward the two of them. His voice was frantic. “I broke the lock on the jail cell, I got Caitlin out. We met Iris later----”

“He’s lying,” Iris said, her eyes still anchored on Barry. Barry stared back at her. “I did it. I had the key, Barry. I know they’ve always wondered how Cisco blasted open the door without breaking the lock. That’s because he didn’t. I did. My dad told you how long it’s been since I’ve seen him, right? And how long has it been since they’ve been out of jail?”

Barry shook his head at her, but she could tell that he was doing the math in his head. It had been four months and six days since she’d broken them out of jail, and four months and three days since she’d last seen her father. He furrowed his brow and stared at the ground for a long while before finally looking back up at her again. She could see from his eyes that he knew she told the truth, that he and Joe had talked about why Iris had left. She doubted, though, that Joe told him the whole story. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m a criminal. An outlaw. And you, Barry Allen, have sworn that you joined the CCPD to stop criminals. You bring them to justice. I read restricted files on the computer of a detective and broke two prisoners out of their holding cells.”

“I work in the Advanced Taskforce division,” he said. “I don’t deal with problems like this.”

“I broke two Advanced out of jail,” she said. “That makes me your problem. You said you can break out of that cell at any time. Fine then, do it. Take me into custody.” Barry didn’t move. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you moving? Do you want me to open the doors?”

Cisco came up and grabbed her arm, jerking her eyes away from Barry’s face. Barry hit his palm up against the glass again. “What are you doing?” he hissed. “Iris, why are you telling him this?” But he knew why. His eyebrows were scrunched together and his lips were in a slack line, his lower one pushed out slightly. He wasn’t confused. He was upset.

Iris ignored him, pulling her arm out of his grasp and looking at her best friend. “Barry,” she said, her voice quiet, “I want you to promise me that you won’t tell anyone where we are.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You can. If not because it’s the right thing to do, then because it’s me asking you to do it. You trust me, right? Then don’t let them get hurt because of me.”

“Iris-”

“Barry.” Iris walked right up to the glass, laying her palm over the outline of his gloved hand. He looked at her, standing so close, and swallowed. She looked back at him, and tried not to feel how much it hurt to manipulate him like this. It was to keep her friends safe, she knew, and she let that knowledge unravel the weight on her tongue. “Please. Promise me that you’ll keep our secret. Do it for me. To protect me. If not, they will arrest me, too.”

He closed his eyes and breathed in and out and in again. “I promise,” he said, his voice low. “I won’t tell anyone where you all are hiding out. I can’t promise that I won’t come after them, but… it won’t be here. That’s the best I can do.”

Iris walked up to the door of his cell and punched in the code, the reinforced glass doors sliding away. Caitlin shouted her disapproval as Barry stepped out of the cell. “You promised,” Iris said. “Remember that. Because if something happens to either of these two, if they are captured by the CCPD, then I swear I am going to go down to the precinct and turn myself in.” Barry nodded.

Caitlin, still standing toward the back of the hallway, crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at Barry. Iris could see her displeasure, her anger; she knew Caitlin didn’t trust him, that she didn’t think he would keep his promise. But despite the CCPD emblem on his chest, despite the differences that she could see in him, Iris trusted him.

“If you run out of that door and go back to them,” she said, her voice small, “you have to know we won’t be seeing each other again.” Her tongue felt like cotton against the desert of her dry mouth, but Iris swallowed anyway, willing something to stop the harsh scratch of her throat.

Barry froze, his fingers curled around the cowl hanging from his neck. He cut his eyes at her. “You can’t be serious,” he said.

“I am,” she said. “I want to save people, Barry, not hurt them. And as long as you are stopping us from helping citizens of this city feel safe and secure, then you get in the way of that. So yeah, I’m serious.”

They stared at each other for a moment, the gulf created by her words widening between them, but she wasn’t able to look away. He stepped toward her and pulled her into a tight hug, and she let her head drop onto his shoulder as he pressed his cheek against her hair. “I understand,” Barry sighed, letting go of her. Iris was immediately aware of the lack of warmth as he moved back and slipped his cowl on, covering his face.

She thought about the things that the explosion had taken from them all. A sense of normalcy in their lives. Their freedom. So much of the city. The accelerator exploded, and everything changed. Caitlin’s fiancé and Cisco’s family had left town as soon as they were able. Iris stared at her best friend, covered in red leather and barely recognizable, even to her, even though she knew that he was under there. She wondered what he had lost, if he counted her among the things that had been taken away from him. They had all lost something in the explosion; Iris just imagined she lost Barry in a very different way.

She turned away from him, and without looking back, walked out of the room. 

Caitlin marched past Iris and Cisco, who turned as soon as Iris did to follow her out. The moisture in the air around her fists swirled and shimmered, condensing into ice and forming a thin, protective layer around her skin. The speedster watched her, his lightning eyes tracing every movement of the ice clinging to her body.

“Killer Frost,” he said, his voice clipped and controlled. She saw the glint of a tear in his eye, but she didn’t care. She didn’t like him. She didn’t like the way he stood, didn’t like the cross of his arms or the emblem on his chest, and she didn’t like his attitude.

She touched his shoulder, and he recoiled immediately, rubbing at the layer of ice that formed even over his leather. “I want to make one thing clear, Flash,” she said, and he stopped rubbing at the chill. “If you in any way hurt Iris or Cisco, I will kill you.”

He crossed his arms and tried to look imposing. She wanted to laugh at him, to taunt him. To make him feel worthless for how much distress he’d caused both of her friends. “The same goes for you. If you hurt Iris, or anyone else for that matter, again, I will stop you. By any means necessary.”

Good. “You don’t scare me,” she told him.

She grabbed his arm and pulled him along with her, letting the chill settle into his bones and she led him to the nearest exit. He tried to protest and to pull away, but Caitlin held up her other hand covered in ice, and shot him the most frightening look she could muster. If Iris and Cisco needed her to take out the trash, then she was more than willing to do so. She just wanted to make sure that he understood her. Understood what she could do to him.

She opened the emergency exit, and let go of his wrist.

In a crack of thunder, he was gone, only the trail of a quickly fading light to even signify that he was once there. 

Cisco followed Iris out of the room, not even turning to check on what Caitlin was doing, stalking off after the speedster like that. Okay, so maybe he turned just a little, to make sure that she wasn’t going to make a popsicle out of the guy, but he really shouldn’t have worried; Caitlin may hate this guy, and have every right to hate him, but Iris didn’t hate him. And that was all that mattered in their books. Mostly what mattered. Because to be honest, the sight of tears in Iris’s eyes as she brushed past Cisco was enough to make him want to vibrate the speedster’s molecules apart, and he wasn’t even sure if he could do that.

He burst into the Cortex just moments after she did, making a beeline for her as Iris collapsed into the most convenient chair. Her head dropped into her hands and his heart dropped into his stomach, watching the way her shoulders shook and her head bobbed up and down. He had seen Iris cry plenty of times before, which certainly wasn’t a good thing; he and Caitlin both hated it when she cried, when they couldn’t do anything to protect her from the shitty world that the explosion had given them. Like when a kid they tried to save ran out on them and got arrested trying to cross over the fence, or when their mark refused to stay with them, refused to be helped whatsoever.

And he was definitely not going to forget the time when she cried about Bette, who left the compound because she thought she shouldn’t be around people, thought that it wasn’t safe for her to be around so many things that she could potentially explode; him and Caitlin found her body in an alley a few days later. Iris cried, and insisted they have a funeral, some kind of recognition for the friend they lost. Bette would have been grateful for that, he assumed; she had stopped seeing herself as human before she came here.

Nearly all of them did. Probably a result of the fear and distrust sowed by the government, of the manhunts and the wall around Central City designed only to keep Advanced inside the gate and the way they were treated. It kept them all from feeling like they deserved to be alive, like they deserved to live a life that wasn’t constantly evading the government or trying to keep their head down.

But none of those times really compared to this one. Yeah, she was always distraught when people left, or when people couldn’t be saved. And Bette was so hard on all of them; she was one of the first they really got to know, one of the first they tried to save, and she ended up dead. All of those times, Iris cried. But she always tried to cry away from them, like her grief wasn’t real unless it was in front of other people, like she could hide it and contain it if it happened when she was alone.

Now she was here, crying in front of him, shaking and sobbing and curling her hands around the sides of her chair. Now, her grief was everywhere, and he felt like punching someone out. That dude, whoever he was to her, was an idiot. To choose the police department over her, to decide to go back to them. He should be ashamed.

“I’m so sorry,” Iris told him. Cisco walked over to the chair and stood next to her, looking down. “I shouldn’t even be this upset. I feel like an idiot.”

Cisco reached out to her and set his hand on her back, rubbing soothing circles. “You don’t have to apologize, Iris. Don’t apologize for feeling something.” Iris leaned against his side and he let her cry against him, let her reach out and take on of his hands into her own. His leather jacket was unzipped and pushed back so she could cry onto the soft cotton of the t-shirt he wore underneath. She cried, and she cried, and Cisco moved his hand from her back to her hair, brushing it out of her face.

Eventually she calmed down, her sobs sputtering out to heaving breaths and finally to something calmer, something sadder. Like she’d cried out all of the water in her body, as impossible as it was. “So that’s your best friend?” he asked. “The guy you always talk about.”

He felt her nod against his side. “Yeah. I thought he was dead.”

“I heard,” Cisco said. “That sucks. That you, you know, thought he was dead, and that it turned out he was very much alive but just working for the enemy. Both of those situations suck.”

She laughed a little, and Cisco felt slightly better. He wished that he could take all of her sadness away. “We grew up next to each other,” Iris said, even though Cisco didn’t ask for any kind of explanation. “Barry’s been a constant in my life for so long, you know? This past year has been hell without him. And yet, I don’t know that having him back is any easier. I… I wish it were under different circumstances. That he was just another Advanced that we picked up. Not one that was actively hunting you guys.”

He moved his hand from her hair to her shoulder. Cisco wasn’t sure what to say, what he could do to make her feel any different. He couldn’t convince that guy to do anything else, like come over and join them.

“This is going to sound completely cliché,” she said, “but I’ve always had a crush on him. I know, I know, me crushing on the boy next door. How embarrassing! But all of our lives, I was too afraid to say anything to him, and then it was too late. And now that he’s back, that I’ve seen him with my own two eyes, it still feels like it’s too late. That he’s changed so fundamentally that he’s not the same boy I’ve loved my whole life.”

“It’s not,” Cisco said, glancing over at the monitor. Since Cisco was in the Cortex, the security feed was streaming video of Caitlin, leading the speedster out of the compound, her lips blue and her fingers wrapped around his wrist. “Iris, he may be working for the CCPD, but he’s not a bad person. Or, at least, he doesn’t give off that vibe.”

She rolled her eyes and looked up at him, a tiny little grin on her face. “So you can read people’s thoughts and feelings now? That’s a handy shift in abilities.”

Cisco shrugged, and winked at her. “What can I say, I’m all about the convenient power upgrades. Makes for much better gameplay.”

“That makes it sound like we’re playing on easy, Cisco.”

He wiggled his eyebrows and smiled. “Who says we aren’t?” he asked. “This world we’re in? It’s a cakewalk. Totally playing on the easiest of easy modes. It’s a little disappointing, actually.”

She laughed again, fuller and more genuine; the noise bubbled up from her and spread a full smile onto her face. “But seriously,” he said. “That guy. I’ve seen him before. Not here, not in this world, but in my visions. He’s never a bad person, Iris, not that I’ve seen. And he is nearly always with you.”

Iris was pensive for a moment; she sucked in her lower lip and stared out toward the wall. “That’s a nice thought,” she mused, not looking at him. “Me and Barry together. I wish that could happen to me, you know? That I could be the lucky Iris for once. But I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Not in this universe, anyway.”

They were quiet but together, and eventually Caitlin joined them though she kept her distance. Iris may have been finished crying, but a few tears still escaped when she laughed or when she thought about something, and they knew from experience how much of a pain it was when your tears spontaneously froze on your cheek. For him and Iris, anyway; Caitlin only got frustrated when the few tears she cried turned to ice the moment they left her duct.

Iris fell asleep in the chair, her head nestled up against Cisco’s side as he perched on her armrest. He wanted to move, but he also knew that if he moved she would jerk awake and then insist she had enough sleep before making herself coffee and getting to work, scouring the airwaves for any news of another person to help. He would often find her at night with the screen on and a pot of coffee next to her, listening to the police scanner and looking through the feeds of cameras posted around the city.

Caitlin handed him a tablet, and Cisco flicked through the various security settings on their mainframe and in the compound. The signal disruptors were still working; there was no way the CCPD could have heard anything from Barry’s communicator, if he had one. And a tracking device that wasn’t hooked up to the mainframe in the Cortex would have shorted out immediately upon entering. He wished he could expand that tech past the walls of their hideout, but he had to make due with the supplies they found left in the city and after a few months, nearly all of the good equipment in even Star Labs was gone.

He checked the strength of the firewalls on their server, careful not to move too much so he wouldn’t disturb Iris. There were a few troubling attempts to get into their system but so far none of them were successful, which was good. His computer programming skills were fine but they weren’t good enough that he could write new firewalls while someone was breaking down his old ones. They didn’t keep any personal information on these computers, but they broke enough laws just by having their computers that discovery would lead to an immediate investigation.

“I don’t trust him,” Caitlin said finally, her voice quiet; she didn’t want to wake Iris either.

Cisco chewed the inside of his cheek and stared at the tablet screen. The motion detectors around the building were nearly impossible to fool, but he hadn’t tested them out with someone’s speed like Iris’s friend, and he couldn’t say he wasn’t worried Barry was going to break in and carry Iris away without any warning. “I know,” Cisco said. He looked back at her. “I don’t, either. But there’s not much we can do as long as he doesn’t tell people we’re here. And if we went after him ourselves, or hurt him while out on a mission, then I don’t think Iris would forgive us.”

Caitlin sighed, her eyes falling from Cisco to Iris. “He’s important to her,” she said simply. “The first Advanced to work for those people, and he’s important to her. Now she’s going to be obsessing about how to help him, too.”

“She’s a good person,” Cisco reminded her. As if either of them really needed reminding that Iris was a decent human being. “She would try and help him even if she had no idea who he was. It’s just who she is, Cait. She sees the good in people and she wants to save them. Just like she did with us.”

The room temperature dropped a degree as Caitlin sighed again, her head hitting against the back of the chair. “I know,” she said, her lips curving around the words. “She’s insane. At least when it comes to me. But it’s not hard to see the good in you, Cisco, no matter what you think when you can’t sleep at night.”

“Same for you,” he said, watching her. “It’s not hard to see the good in you, Caitlin.”

She smiled, her lips barely moving upward. “That’s not true,” she said, and stood abruptly, “but it’s kind of you to think so.” He closed his eyes and bit back the retort on his tongue, the one that he knew would set off another argument with her. About her being a hero in spite of her flaws. “You should probably get some sleep. I’ll take watch tonight.”

He nodded. Cisco shifted slightly, and Iris fell away from him, still fast asleep. He bent down and lifted her up, one arm around her shoulders, the other under her knees. It was hard sometimes to remember how small she was, when she was standing behind the screens of the Cortex, shouting commands at them and leading them. But she was petite and tiny and vulnerable, and she felt it when he picked her up. Iris’s head fell onto his chest and he glanced back at Caitlin but she was too busy focusing on her screen and the heater pressed into her palm to notice him.

He walked out of the Cortex with her sleeping body in his arms, the door locking behind him as he moved toward the row of makeshift apartments he’d built. Iris had one here for when she couldn’t make it to her own apartment, which was pretty much always these days. He set Iris down on her bed and covered her with a blanket before leaving her room and walking to his own. He sometimes wondered what would’ve happened to him if he had left right after the explosion, after Dante found him in the backyard under that tree. A few people left, but the mass migration didn’t happen until after it was revealed that people with powers developed in the wake of the explosion, and by that time they were screening nearly everyone who tried to leave. Anyone who had the gene for abilities, latent or developed, and tried to leave was taken into custody. It helped nothing, though, to think about how things could’ve been different if he wasn’t here, if he hadn’t developed abilities, if the explosion hadn’t happened. If he had been anything in life other than a disappointment to his family.

Cisco punched in the code for his apartment door and walked inside. He peeled off his leather jacket (Caitlin was right, they needed real uniforms) and slumped into his workstation chair, letting his head fall into his hands. His hair was long now, longer than his mom ever really liked for him to have; it swung down from his shoulders into his face. He pushed it back and sighed. After the weird vision he’d had when Iris knocked him out, he doubted he would get any sleep tonight. It was always traumatic to see himself die, but this time it was worse than usual. He’d been with someone he very clearly respected, someone he loved, even. Cisco could feel those emotions coursing through his veins when the man approached him.

Usually, his deaths were meaningless and ordinary. Hit and run, drive-by, old age. Even the one vision where he overdosed on some kind of hallucinogen. But this one, it was betrayal. And it hit him, hard. His heart sped up as he remembered, and it was hard to keep the tears from spilling over as he recalled every single moment. From the day he woke up in the hospital after the explosion until now, he could always count on the godforsaken dreams, but this one was worse. And he remembered thinking, just for a second, that he needed Barry to get there. Barry. The guy that Iris knew, the one that he hadn’t met until tonight. That guy. Why couldn’t his dreams, these stupid visions, make sense for once?

He balled his hands into fists in his hair and sighed again, trying to focus on his breathing like Cait had taught him to keep himself under control. He counted to five, and then ten, and eventually hit fifty before his panic subsided and left him with twitchy hands and an overactive brain. Cisco smoothed out some of the plans he had been working on, and picked up the fabric that was stretched out over his desk. Insulated, designed to absorb sunlight and convert it into heat. Not that it would help them much anyway, seeing as most of their missions happened in the dead of night, and Caitlin refused to go out during the day if she could help it. But if he installed artificial sunlight lamps in her room, then maybe he could develop a way for the fabric to retain the heat.

After that, he could start adding on the armor, making sure it was thick over her chest plate and her torso. It would be a shame to get rid of the biker pants, but Caitlin hated that whole outfit, and he would never be able to convince her to keep the part that was most skin-tight. He’d toyed with adding onto that basic design, making tight but stretchable pants that fit easily into boots, yet had a light armor to protect her upper thighs. He had to keep those vulnerable parts of her safe.

Cisco almost snorted out loud. Caitlin Snow and vulnerable didn’t mesh well together in a sentence. Closed off, depressed, calculated and collected if somewhat detached from herself, self-hating; those described Caitlin Snow. But she hardly, if ever, let her vulnerabilities show to anyone, even Iris, and Cisco knew how hard it was not to spill your entire life story to Iris when she set down a mug of hot tea and a brownie she’d made.

“Cisco.” Caitlin’s voice echoed throughout his apartment and he jolted so bad that all of the papers on his desk went flying, along with many small pieces of machinery that were going to be a complete bitch to find later.

“Y-yeah?”

“I have a report coming through,” she said. “I need you suited up and in the Cortex in two minutes.”

He groaned. “We already went out once tonight, Cait. It’s four in the morning. Can’t we just let this one slide?”

He knew the answer, of course; they couldn’t. And he didn’t want to leave this person’s fate up to them, whoever they may be, because being in the custody of the CCPD was currently the lowest point of his life. He wasn’t even experimented on, not like Caitlin, but it was still terrible. Being abused, laughed at, treated like an animal. Yeah, not something that he’d actively wish on his worst enemy, not even the one dick from his college that could speak six languages and made sure everyone knew how intelligent he was.

Cisco pulled on his jacket and slipped the communicator into his ear, touching it twice to turn it back on. Her voice transferred from the speaker in his room to his ear. “A girl was spotted teleporting to the top of the perimeter, and then she was electrocuted by the currents up there. She escaped, but just barely. The CCPD’s been tracking her for a few miles.”

“Do we really want to go into another CCPD hotspot?” he asked. “If that guy is going to be there, won’t that be a problem? Iris will have a fit if she sees Barry and we fight him again.”

Caitlin was silent for a few seconds. “There’s no need to wake Iris,” she said carefully. Right. So they were going to do this one off the books, so to speak. They had done a few missions without Iris before, when she couldn’t make it, or when they knew it was going to end ugly. But he didn’t like it. Caitlin didn’t, either. “And anyway, the CCPD’s tracking another Advanced right now, too. A guy that can control the weather. He’s in the process of destroying one of the food distribution centers right now, and it’s caused quite a panic one the other side of town. I don’t think they’re devoting many resources to a girl who’s just teleporting. Especially not their resident metahuman helper.”

He punched in the code and slid his hand over the sensor for a second before the door to the Cortex opened. “Just teleporting, huh?” he asked. “Do we have a description for her?”

“No, but I think we’ve come to the same conclusion on this one,” Caitlin said. “A teleporting girl who wants nothing more than to escape? It sounds like the one Iris ran into a few weeks back, the girl she wanted to help. If we play our cards right, then maybe we can turn this night around for her.”

Cisco joined her at the computer. “We’re going to have to navigate manually for this one,” he said, “since we aren’t waking her up. It won’t be precise, and it won’t be as fast to change course.”

She shrugged. “The Advanced seems to be moving in a fairly linear progression. Away from the wall and inward, toward the old hospital. I’ve heard rumors that it’s a hideout for some teens and young adults who’ve, ah, lost their way.”

“Rumors?” He looked at her, his eyebrow raised. “Who did you hear rumors from? You literally never talk to people outside me and Iris, and the occasional banter with an incompetent police officer.”

She shifted in her seat and looked away, blowing a gust of icy air out of her mouth. “I heard it over the police line,” Caitlin admitted. “And it makes sense. The hospital is well stocked with beds and bathtubs you can fill with water, plus a lot of other supplies that you’d need, like bandages and scalpels and sterilizing alcohol.”

He stared at her. “Over the police line? Really? If they knew about that large of a colony of Advanced, Cait, don’t you think---”

“Look, Cisco,” she said. “We either do this, or we don’t. I say we go in. I say we save a girl. For Iris. And for the rest of them.”

He thought about it for a second. If the hospital really was a hideout for Advanced teenagers and that wasn’t just some backwards guess by the Advanced Taskforce, then maybe gaining this girl’s trust would open them up to saving a lot of other people who needed their help. And Iris would be really disappointed in them if they didn’t even try. Especially once she heard it was the teleporting girl she’d met. “Okay, we do this. But I’m routing the secure CCPD line into our comms, which means we’re gonna hear a ton of outside chatter about all number of things. And it also means we’re going to have to keep quiet, or else they will know we’re listening. Think you can stay focused?”

“Of course I can stay focused,” Caitlin sniffed. But Cisco could see the beginnings of a grin pulling at her mouth, and he took that as a victory. “You should worry about yourself.”

“Whatever,” he said, streaming the line directly into their comms. They both winced at the sound of three or four people talking at once. The police communicators were set up a little differently, with each officer using a specific code to receive messages. But Cisco used the dispatch code, and so they heard it all. Loud noise reported. Possible Advanced sighting. Another one of the few shops left in Central City being burgled, probably for food.

She looked over at him and he nodded. They walked together, trying to make as little noise as possible as they went from the Cortex over to the loading dock where their bikes had been left, along with Cisco’s helmet. He guessed it was a good thing that neither of them bothered to undress after their last mission. Maybe, once he finished with that better suit of hers, she would just stay in it all the time, except when he was cleaning it. Or maybe he should just make multiples. With the kind of work they did, it was possible that her suit would be torn or damaged in some way. Oh, that hurt him to think about, and he wasn’t even done with the design yet. He’d have to improve durability.

Caitlin hit him on the arm, and Cisco jerked back into reality. Mission. Right. He picked his helmet up off of the ground where he’d left it, and they both tapped their comms twice to turn them off while they started and revved up their bikes. “Ready?” Caitlin asked.

“I’m always ready,” Cisco lied, and they turned their comms on again.

For the second time, he and Caitlin shot out onto the streets, cutting through the stillness of the night. It was always eerie, coming out so late after curfew. There were hardly any people out, especially with the increased police presence as of late, and the ones that were awake and outside at this hour had the good sense not to make enough noise to alert the security cams that they were coming out. They, of course, didn’t know that Cisco had set the cams near the compound on a continual loop, playing feeds from other cams in the old warehouse district focused on abandoned buildings.

Even with his helmet on, the speed at which they were riding kept him from feeling the effects of a few sleepless nights in a row. The thrill of adrenaline, the only thing keeping him from crashing. Yikes.

He and Caitlin took the obvious backroads, not able to venture down alleyways and possible shortcuts without Iris’s watchful eye and pleasant voice in their ear. From what he could parse out from the police line, the Advanced girl was still moving in a fairly straight line, honed in on Caitlin’s old workplace. Which was kind of a good thing, because as it turned out, Caitlin knew the quickest way to the hospital from pretty much every corner of the city. They cut down a few back roads and barely missed a patrol car that turned onto a street just as they were turning off, but really, he was surprised at how easy it was for them to get there. Maybe it was the late hour.

“We have the girl in our sights,” he heard one of the officers say. “We are ready to shoot.”

Caitlin sped up and Cisco followed suit, revving up his bike and flying down the road after her. They slowed down as they rounded the corner, and then another one, before they were only a block away from where the girl was supposed to be.

He could see her, the blood on her face visible even from his distance. She looked hurt, and there was a man pointing a gun at her from behind a squad car. A single squad car. Other than that, visibility was low, but with only a single squad car, there wouldn’t be a problem. They could talk to the girl and convince her to come with them after they knocked this guy out.

He and Caitlin stepped off of their bikes and he put the kickstand up, pulling off his helmet. He saw the girl frown, and then she mouthed something that he couldn’t make out before she was gone, not even a cloud of smoke left behind.

“Targets acquired,” he heard, and Cisco turned to look at Caitlin. She stared back at him, wide eyed. The officer behind the squad car door turned his gun on them.

“Frost,” he said. “I think this is a trap.”