Spoilers up to 4x18.
A/N: This assumes she has at least some vague memories of her time with Savitar from when she was trying to regain control and ended up neither Frost or Caitlin at end of S3, but it does also stick with the canon compliant idea that sometime between then and S4 they end up distinct like S4 shows.
Many thanks to shyesplease for betareading.
The statue is a faithful rendering but it isn't as impressive as his armor. It's dull, lifeless, forever stationary - that's what sets it so far apart from the reality. She strokes over the smooth metal, not reverently like his followers might, but with remembrance before she grasps it tight.
She channels everything she feels into a chilling rage and she isn't sure who she is angry with. Him for failing, herself for being weak and betraying him, herself for being weak and becoming Frost in the first place, Iris for killing Savitar, or Savitar for not accepting the help she now knows they had offered him.
The ice spreads rapidly, covering the visage that isn't how she will remember him. Finally, it is cold enough that one poke of her finger shatters it. Rather appropriately, for someone forged by so much pain as he, her pain is all that is left of him. He is only memories now.
"Your God is dead," she announces to the gathering of minions, and she is surprised they don't question her, ask why, how. She realises they are looking to her, as if she is the next best thing, but she doesn't want Godhood, not really.
The reason she is here and he is not is because she'd wanted her friends instead of power and she had chosen accordingly in the end. She'd wanted acceptance, and Savitar's had been a balm at first, but it hadn't been enough. She still wished he could have survived, that there could have been a miracle fix; a happy ending, except broken people like them don't get one.
But Barry and Iris will. Hopefully Cisco too. However, she doesn't feel she has a place in theirs, whoever she is now she forfeited that right. Besides, a happy ending has never appeared to be in the books for her whatever her name has been.
"Do you know why you left?" her therapist asks neutrally.
Because everyone leaves me, she thinks, even if they don't choose to. Probably that was why she had left for 6 months; it was better to choose herself, to be the one who left. That was why she'd wanted to drive them away when she'd first struggled with Frost and why she'd stopped fighting the influence of her powers after she'd nearly died. Leaving was less painful than being forced out.
Anger was a lot easier to feel than pain too, and hadn't that been why she'd found herself relating to Savitar? He'd shown her his way of becoming more, but part of the problem had been he hadn't gotten rid of how he felt. Both of them felt just as much as before, they just got better at subsuming it under stronger emotions, obliterating the possibility of compassion and doubt.
"I wanted control."
As she says it, she knows it's true, even if it's not the whole story. She still struggles with the fear of losing herself, but sharing her body with an alterego had challenged her plenty on that front. Its's the new normal for her, not that she can share the exact details in these sessions.
She still goes to sleep worried she won't wake up again.
The papers don't quite know what to make of Flash and Killer Frost teaming up. The more they write about it, the less they tend to write 'Killer' in front of the name. Twitter tags start referencing to them as FlashFrost and Cisco rightly bristles at Vibe not getting the recognition he should. Frost takes pity on him, and they do a stint of low hassle missions together to try to boost the publics awareness that there are infact three meta members on the team.
Thesedays, she's afforded a little more leeway on her past actions. The prose is more forgiving and, as Caitlin reads it, it doesn't feel right to her. She doesn't want forgiveness but she does want to get on with her life. If she'd actually been held accountable for the mayhem she'd caused those few weeks, or the damage done as Amunet's lackey afterwards, she wouldn't be able to.
Yet she can't let herself become complacent. They talk about her like Frost is a reformed hero. Her actions might be heroic but she isn't one in her eyes. Everything she does is to try to make up for the bad choices she'd made, but it never truly will, so she'll keep on giving and giving until there is nothing left to give; it's penance and, she thinks, all she has left to offer of her life.
She's given up love. Love isn't happiness when what you love only turns to dust, over and over, like a bad dream she kept reliving. Frost had been protection from that and, in a way, she still is, because who will love both versions of her? If she believed in destiny she'd think it cruel, but she only trusts in cause and effect, the inevitable.
Barry and Cisco were her reason to come back, but the heroics turn out to be her reason to stay. She just happens to have a chance to live around it some days, when things are less hectic and there's no immediate threats. True downtime - where the whole team gets to relax together - is rare, making it so much more precious; a good reminder of what to fight for.
She decides heroics will be her legacy; enough good will be done to one day wipe out the guilt that lingers behind every word she says (forever feeling like she should be saying I'm sorry, over and over - never enough).
Where is the place for Caitlin Snow in all that – second place to Frost, second place to duty. Her body came back to them but did she really? Like she'd said before she'd left, she isn't Frost and she isn't Caitlin; she's someone else entirely that nobody knows, including her. Six months wasn't enough to find herself in the end. She finds herself in pieces, parts of herself discovered in unexpected places on forgotten days she gets to simply be.
Her therapist asks her how she feels and she wants to say, 'Why do I have to?'
Caitlin, or whoever she is, doesn't get that luxury of not feeling anymore. Frost is behind the cold wall inside her, with the numb protection that affords, and so Caitlin doesn't get to push things down like she used to unless she wants to give up being herself. Now she has to feel - no feigning ignorance of the pain she caused, the pain she's in. If those bruises could heal, would she be able to see who she is underneath it all? But Caitlin gets up each morning battered by her nightmares and there isn't enough of a reprieve thesedays to ease the discomfort that comes from sitting not quite right in her own skin anymore.
She goes to her appointments and answers all the questions without giving away too much. Secret identity intact, check.
She tells her friends she is fine, she is tired, she could do with a break. They could all always do with a break, so that elicits the reply she is looking for, the accidental dismissal of 'Yeah, you and me both'.
She wonders what they missed most about her, back when she stopped being herself, that first time she left them, cold.
She wonders what they might unknowlingly miss about her now, if they had a chance to take a breath and think about it. Because she knows there are little things left by the wayside, the things about herself she didn't bring back with this new person she is. And then there are some others she loses little by little to time as who she is now unfurls in front of her, or to realisations, like the fact she isn't that friend anymore, the one they can trust unconditionally.
What will they remember me by? A headline (Killer Frost still at large)? An epitaph (Caitlin Snow, a dear friend)? The woman they think they know is mostly made up of memories, even if they are memories she shares with who she used to be. The woman they don't know very well yet is made of more - of pain and all the memories that cause it. Once upon a time she'd opened up, shared her memories of Ronnie, talked about 'Jay' with fondness, before she'd known the truth, but this is not the same.
She remembers wanting to hurt them like she hurt, wanting to kill her humanity so she could kill without remorse. She dreams of someone almost Barry but whom you could never mistake for him. A man with a pain so deep she could relate to it, trace it over his face in the scars in some fashion distinctly not soothing.
She'd known her future when she had been with him. Frost had felt in control. The universe had order laced with his will and her determination. Now she's lost, her life spun out from that intent. Regaining her morals had been a smaller comfort than it should have been, not enough to cling to, so she'd made her job her lifeline, the one meaning left to her other than 'make it right'. But some days, part of her wants to go back to the simplicity of being selfish and by his side. It's in those moments she remembers she hates half, or more, of herself.
"How do you feel, Caitlin?" her therapist keeps asking.
Like Caitlin died a long time ago, but she doesn't say it. She can't explain it without explaining the creeping cold that lives in her bones, the sharp presence itching at the edge of her mind waiting for a tug to bring back her clarity. She'd always prided herself on being coolly logical and detached – she took it too far, too literally, and now she can't find her equilibrium with it gone. Neither version of her is balanced, both remain broken, and yet people look to her, look at her, look at Frost probably too, as if they are whole.
Like they are only separated by time or distance; a shift happening in a second, in a step, and Frost a world apart from their dear friend that they don't see as still missing.
Frost is gone. Just like that.
Caitlin cancels her next therapy session, knowing she shouldn't but does it anyway, unable to think of a better solution to the problem she is presented with. Because she can't even start to think how to explain what this means, how a chunk of her is missing – not simply detached, displaced, but gone completely, stolen. Her life has tilted sideways, truly unbalanced. She hadn't noticed how she'd floundered her way to functional somehow until it's been partially ripped away again.
Now she is purely Caitlin, left with a gaping hole in her personality, because if Frost was her darkness, inhabiting the side of her anger and fear, where is she without her? For almost a year, she's never had to deal with the worst of those emotions. There had been the dull ache of regret and dispondency about what her life has turned into, but any time it threatened to become too much, Frost would emerge. This time, she's without protection.
She has no powers. Today is the day she thought she would praise to kingdom come if it ever happened but she doesn't feel relief. Instead, she feels the crushing sense of fear of being reliant on others, being vulnerable. She keeps expecting to blackout but she doesn't.
And if there is one thing more unimaginably bad than having powers she can't control, it has to be DeVoe having control of those powers instead. It inspires a completely different kind of fear in her. She'd thought she'd lacked control before, but at least she'd known who was in control and had eventually grown to trust Frost - a hard won victory born of many compromises.
Barring a few exceptions, she doesn't have any memories of this recent cooperative version of Frost that the rest of the team has; she could only know her in echoes of her effect on others and the after effects of her decisions on her life. Here in her apartment, all she has left to show of that side of her is the beer in the fridge, her more daring wardrobe choices in the closet, and a few crumpled notes that reside in their bin by the desk.
She fetches those notes, treating them like precious mementos, smoothing the papers out, reading the handwriting that isn't quite like hers and the words that sound like the most flippant version of her inner voice. None of them say anything meaningful, but they exist - proof of who she used to be, slices of her life someone else lived.
Going away had given her a modicum of peace, the space she'd needed to come to grips with her changed reality. Coming back had tested her, ending up with her forging a new routine and a reinspired goal to do good, to do better. But through it all, ever since she'd first found out about her powers, Caitlin had first and foremost wanted control.
Frost is gone but everything that she stood for will creep back into Caitlin in the end. With every dark and painful emotion, she will return, along with the ability to finally feel something more that Caitlin has lacked for some time. Feelings once repressed, once rejected, once detached; feelings she now knows she has to accept as part of her, like Frost was. Caitlin still wants control, but this time, she wants her powers back.