Inspired by Hurricane by Halsey.
Killer Frost lives in the outskirts of Central City, in a dingy shack with only one light bulb. It has no switch and hangs barely on its thread. Down the road, there's a small pub that smells of a mixture of sweat and liquor. It's lonely, she admits, but it's all she needs.
She's lying on a rusted metal bed frame with rags thrown across as a makeshift mattress. It doesn't help her aching back. She stares at the light, which swings ever so slightly with each passing breeze— wood panels hang precariously by a single nail, leaving gaps in the walls.
Her eyes flutter shut. She is lulled to sleep by the soft buzzing sound emanating from the old light.
In a drunken haze, she finds herself kissing a man. Cisco had always said she was handsy when she was drunk.
The man is slouched in a chair, and she's carefully perched on top. She captures his attention with her lips. The air around her becomes a little cooler.
She feels a bottle of vodka in her hand, and she swings it lazily as she sucks the life out of the man beneath her. Killer Frost shudders with pleasure and feels herself smile against his now frozen lips.
There's someone yelling at her, and she can recognise the voice. It's the bartender, with a gun raised, ready to shoot. She feels herself slide off of the man. Turning slowly, her head cocks to the side, lolling around before she looks down at the floor. Dirty tiles stare back at her.
The gun cocks.
She raises her head, a drunken smirk tainting her once picture perfect smile. Slowly, she raises her hands in mock defense, the vodka bottle still swinging between her fingers. She backs out of the small pub with a grin plastered on her face, her steps wonky and she almost walks into the wall.
Somehow the bartender has the nerve to ask her his vodka back. She stops in her tracks, raising the bottle to her lips. The liquid burns trails as it flows down her throat, and once she's done, she breathes a puff of cold air into the bottle, before tossing it behind her.
She walks out, the sound of gunshots and broken glass trailing after her.
She's too drunk to realise that she's walking the opposite direction to the shack. She ambles along the road— there are no cars around to run her over. She keeps walking, and somehow, despite her scientific background, she thinks she'll be able to reach the moon that looms ahead of her.
Night slowly turns to dawn, and she's still walking. She had discarded her high knee boots after her feet had started hurting, leaving them by the side of the road. Small, jagged rocks dig into her feet, but she doesn't mind. It keeps her awake.
She reaches a busier highway, one into Central City, and stops before someone could spot her. Her eyelids droop, and she lets out a sigh. Where was she going? After all, she belongs nowhere.
Finally, she gives in. Her legs buckle beneath her and she's falling—
She falls, but the landing isn't as hard as she thought it would be. She's so warm she thinks she's dreaming, but her head hurts too much to think and all she wants to do is cry, so she does. She cries, and wraps around herself tighter.
Her eyes open, ice delicately falling from her eyelashes. She's still dreaming, she thinks, because she's staring at the ceiling of S.T.A.R Labs. Her head is still pounding and she honestly doesn't care where she is, because the steady sound of her heart beat on electrocardiogram monitor provides enough incentive for her to sleep and never wake up.
Electricity crackles through the air, and the end of her thick blanket lifts in the breeze created by her hero. She should've guessed. She lets her arm fall from the side of the bed, and ices the floor. A satisfying thump and the sound of a shelf falling makes her smile.
Despite her pounding head, she knows she needs to move. She needs to get out of here before—
"Cait!"
She stops pulling out her IVs and turns to look at Barry. He's still under the shelf, but in a flash, he's standing in front of her. She looks up at him, unable to move. His eyes hold her captive as much as her lips absorb heat..
"Cait!" Cisco's voice breaks the spell. Barry turns to look at Cisco, who's running into the room. She takes her chance and sprints out, brushing past a tearful, tired Cisco, leaving an icy trail behind her. She ignores the pang in her heart. She makes it into the elevator before she turns around. The doors close, but not fast enough.
Nothing's ever fast enough against the Flash.
Barry makes it past the closing doors, and now they're where they were moments before. He moves to grab her hand, but she snatches it away. He drops his hand awkwardly to his side.
"Cait," he whispers, eyes pleading.
She licks her lips in anticipation, tasting the liquor stained from last night. "That's not my name." Her voice reverberates in the small elevator, and she can see Barry wince. "I'm not who you think I am," she says, her voice softening, although she doesn't intend it to. Maybe she feels sorry for him. He'll never get Caitlin Snow back.
"Then kill me." He sounds exhausted, and that's when she notices the dark eye bags. The doctor inside of her screams for him to get sleep, but she doesn't exist anymore— at least she tells herself that.
"Do you think that'll work a second time?" She's tired too, she realises. Her head still hurts and she should have at least snagged an aspirin on the way out. The elevator comes to a stop, and the door slides open. She pushes past him, conjuring an ice wall in place of the elevator door behind her.
"Cait, come back to us." His voice is muffled behind the thick ice, and she ignores the way his dejected tone tugs at her heart.
She didn't think she could leave Central City without some trouble, but she didn't expect the whole CCPD police force after her. She guesses she could blame Cisco for that one. Or maybe her notorious reputation as Killer Frost.
And it's not that hard to spot her with her platinum blonde hair and hospital gown.
She opts to move through Central City discreetly, using the darkness to her advantage. She takes the alley ways she had once called home and the abandoned buildings that were temporary sanctuaries.
She climbs up the stairs of her an abandoned building, ignoring the shards of glass she treads on. The windows had been blown out last time she was here. She reaches the top of the building, blasting the roof door open with ice. The strong wind tugs at her hospital gown, her hair a flowing river behind her. She welcomes the cold.
Conjuring an ice slide, she finds her way back to the lonely shack, leaving blaring police sirens and loud helicopters behind her. She doesn't see a golden streak beneath her.
She decides to walk the rest of the way home to pick up her boots.
She squats down to pick them up, dusting them off. Electricity crackles behind her and she feels her heart drop because of course it wasn't that easy to escape.
He's not even in his suit, so he has to pat down the small flames before he can talk to her. The friend inside of her wants to giggle..
She slowly picks herself up from the ground, her boots forgotten on the dead grass. "What are you doing?" she asks, turning her body around to face him.
His face is illuminated in the moonlight, and she can see that he looks worse than before. His eyes are puffy, his cheeks tear stained. He looks even paler and if she looks closely, he's shaking. She has to fight herself to not go and hug him. He runs a hand through his hair, completing his dishevelled look. He stares down at his battered converses. She wants to laugh again. They're so Barry, she almost feels comforted that there is still something that is the same, even though everything else has changed.
"Look—" he starts, eyes training on her bleeding feet. He shakes his head a little, before focusing on her. "You're still y—"
"Barry," she growls, cutting him off. His eyes widen a little, and she doesn't realise it then, but that was the first time she had called him Barry in two years. "I am not the same. Don't kid yourself."
He steps forward, eyes alight with determination. "Remember—"
"I remember, but that doesn't mean I am the same Caitlin you knew," her voice becomes colder, her edged double tone more obvious. She can tell he takes it as encouragement. Killer Frost feels a storm brewing.
He closes in on her, only inches away. He's close enough that she can feel the warm he exudes. "What's stopping you from being Caitlin?" He asks, voice low.
Her lips stretch humorlessly. "The fact that I don't want to be Caitlin. I don't want to be some weak scientist."
Barry's brows pull together, his jaw set. "This isn't—"
"What? This isn't—" she laughs, "—me? Well news flash. It is now. I'm a killer. Get used to it or get out," She turns on her heel, ready to form a new ice slide home. Barry flashes in front of her, blocking her way.
"You haven't killed anyone in Central City in months, almost a year!" He looks unbelievably hopeful, like a beacon of light in suffocating darkness.
She lets out a laugh that's more like a bark. "You see that building?" She points to the small building further down the road, its silhouette barely visible. The lights are still on since she was last there, but she supposes there is no one alive to turn them off, except herself. "Look inside. You'll find two frozen bodies and the whole place coated in ice. Stop deluding yourself."
He shakes his head, shutting out her words. He's really persistent, she'll give him that. "We can help you. We know that you need warmth. Here look!" He grabs her hand, giving her a small smile. "If I vibrate enough you can feed off my excess heat. You don't have to kill anyone."
Heat fills her whole body, warming the darkest corners and smallest crevices. Her toes curl in pleasure. But she's taking more than he can give, and something inside her worries. "You're two years too late." She pulls her hand out from his grip, glaring at him.
"You're family. It's never too late."
Killer Frost sneers at him, her irises suddenly blinding white. "Are these your new catch phrases? We can help you. You're family. Let me guess. You're one of us. We protect each other, til the end? Well guess what, Barry Allen? You're just going to have to live with that fact that you killed your best friend."
Killer Frost regards him. The fire within him is quenched, but Killer Frost can't stop herself. Caitlin would never say these things, but she finds it burning deep within her. "Was she even your friend? I thought I was cold, but boy, you Flash— a hero— let your friend become me. You let this happen, and you didn't care enough to stop it then and now you think that she's… sick. And you're right. She is sick. She's sick of you, messing with her life. You're the fastest man alive, and somehow you're still too fucking slow to fix your mistakes."
Something inside of her screams. Brown floods her irises.
Barry swallows, eyes glistening. The light within him is snuffed cold. His breath hitches and she thinks he's going to say something, but he steps back, looking up at the sky. After a long second, he wipes away a tear.
"I'm so sorry." His voice cracks in all the wrong places and he wraps her in a warm embrace before she can fight back. It takes her a while to realise she's crying too, and maybe she doesn't want to fight back. Killer Frost had done enough harm.
Before she can wrap her arms around him, he's gone.
Maybe Killer Frost feels sorry for her, because Caitlin Snow finds herself in control. She tugs her boots on (after all, that's what she came for), crying silently. Caitlin storms her way to the shack, refusing to use her powers. Wind picks up around her, tearing at her hospital gown, her hair whipping violently across her face. Snow falls around her, merging with the wind. She can't see anything through her tears.
Caitlin shudders, and once she can make out the edges of the pub, she vomits. She vomits up the vodka (and she can't help but think there's some irony in that). She vomits because she's killed two people, and their bodies are frozen metres away from her. She vomits because Killer Frost has no remorse. She vomits because she's the most wanted criminal in Central City.
She stumbles away, wailing now, the storm around her growing stronger— feeding off her misery.
She makes out the wooden panels of her shack after floundering down the road, and that's when she allows herself to collapse.
She's falling, but this time there's no one to catch her.
The snow settles around her. More planks of wood that had made up the walls had been ripped off, their remains splintered around her. She watches the single light bulb sway slightly through the gap in the wall. The light's buzzing sound is uneven. Caitlin crawls towards it, grasping at any way to find comfort.
The light flickers before it finally dies, leaving her in darkness.
There really needs to be more Killer Frost fics in the fandom and I hope this suffices and does justice on the characters. I really felt like there needed to be more angst between the team and Killer Frost and this is kind of how I pictured something like that happening.
And is it me or Hurricane really gives me KF vibes?
review x