This is a bit of a shorter chapter, but...I think it's worth it.

Warnings for this chapter: violence (in particular, a fairly detailed description of a broken arm), plus reference to a death wish.

Enjoy!

"Get up."

Frost planted a hand on each of her hostages' chairs, frowning down at Flash.

"Get up now. I want you to see what I do to them."

Flash heaved a breath and swung to his side. Frost didn't need the suit monitors to know that the shock had done a number on him.

"Cait—"

With a smirk, Frost reached back and slammed the button again. Flash curled in on himself, jerking, and West screamed, "Stop it! Stop, you're killing him!"

"Not hardly," Frost said. "A little shock will do him good."

But the logo on his suit fizzled, smoked, and it was clear that she had wrung the last use out of the defibrillator. Flash groaned and clutched at his chest.

"How does it feel?" Frost continued, this time directing the remark at Flash himself. "It's only electricity. You should be able to handle a little electricity."

Weakened as he was, it took Flash a few seconds to find the composure to lever himself up on his elbows. With his eyes on her again, she snaked one hand down to rest on West's shoulder.

"I can help you," Flash said. "We can help you."

"Not interested in your false heroics," Frost responded. "You can help me decide which one dies. It's a game you're used to playing, isn't it? You love to choose who lives and who dies, who's worth saving."

"That's not true," Flash mumbled.

"So who's it going to be this time?" Frost plowed forward. She drummed her nails against Vibe's chair and West's shoulder. "Tell me, Flash. The human or the metahuman?"

Flash pushed himself up to his knees, still heaving breath. "That's what this is about? Cait, you know I—"

"The choice isn't hard, is it?" Frost said. "You kill metahumans. You toss them to the side. It's what you do. So should I just make this simpler for you?"

The fingers near Vibe's shoulder glowed blue. Flash scrambled to his feet and held out a hand.

"Wait, stop!" he said. "No. That's not—that's not what happened, Cait. If you think that we—that we abandoned you—"

"It's the powers that make you evil," Frost goaded. "Metahumans are monsters, isn't that right?"

Flash's outstretched hand balled into a fist, dropped to his side. "Those are Jason's words. Eiling's. Not mine. You know they're not mine."

Frost allowed a trickle of ice to wind down the side of Vibe's chair. "But it's what you're thinking now, isn't it?"

"No." To Frost's surprise, Flash reached up again. With his thumbs, he hooked away the mask that disguised his face and let the cowl drop. The sight of his face, for some unattainable reason, made her heart pound fast and painful. "I don't know what Eiling told you. But it's just me. Just Barry." He paused, suddenly hesitant. "Do you…do you recognize me?"

"Stop stalling, Flash." Frost tried to rearrange her expression. Her other hand, the one on West's shoulder, began to glow.

"Okay, okay, okay," Flash said hastily. "Can you at least tell me why you're here? Why you want to kill me?"

"I was sent here to make you suffer, and then to make you dead," Frost sneered. "I don't ask a lot of questions."

"Ask a lot of questions of who? Eiling?"

"Who dies?"

Frost's heart slammed against her ribcage. She could see the anguish building on Flash's familiar face, in the way his eyebrows slanted, his eyes widened. "I don't want to hurt you, but I won't let you hurt them. I will stop you, Caitlin, no matter what Eiling did to you."

"What Eiling did to me?" Frost said, her voice trembling. "What about what you did? You abandon your friends to Eiling. It's so easy for you to forget. And now, you're going to pay."

There was one more moment of hesitation. Then Frost saw the tell: the flicker of yellow in his eyes.

Just as he started to move toward her, she swung both of her hands from the chairs and aimed for his feet. The ice slicked one of his feet, and he tumbled before he could even make it two steps. He struggled to right himself, but she had reached him in two short strides.

Standing above him, she leveled her glowing hands at his chest. He lifted an arm to defend himself, his left arm, and the memory came back to Frost in a flicker:

"Ow!" Flash shouted again as West attempted to peel back the sleeve of his suit. "And I don't need a real doctor. I can heal on my own."

"You can't heal a broken arm correctly on your own," West said. "I don't know how to set it."

Frost grabbed Flash's outstretched arm. Upon contact, she was intimately connected with his bones, his blood, his muscle. Her probing tendrils of cold sought out the pockets of weakness, the fragile and insubstantial bonds in the bone. She could feel it there, the unnatural juncture, the remnant of improper healing, the chink in the armor.

Once she had found it, she planted a foot on Flash's chest, gripped the weak spot, and twisted.

The duality of the shrieking in her head and the thumping of her heart was so loud, she didn't hear the bone re-breaking. But she could feel it. And she could feel the tremor through the Flash's body as his muscles constricted in agony, and she could sense the air that traveled up his throat and exploded as a scream.

She dropped his arm, and he tried to scramble away, but one firm shove with her boot sent him skidding across the floor to the wall. Still cradling his broken arm to his chest, he clawed his way up to a standing position, but he was also hobbled by the frost covering his foot. The moment it looked as though he was about to bolt for her again, she conjured an icicle and shot it his way. He ducked to the side just in time, and it sank into the wall where his shoulder had been moments before.

The distraction was enough: as he leaned heavily against the wall, breathless, she strode the length of the room and dragged him upright. She slammed him hard against the wall, one hand pinioning his broken arm and the other pressing against his chest. The lifeblood, his heartbeat, were violently attainable under her fingers.

"Your heart is a bit erratic," she said. "Must have been the electricity. I can slow that down for you, if you'd like. Shall we skip straight to your death?" She cocked her head, seeking out other avenues in his chest. "Perhaps I'll freeze just your lungs. Then you'll have some time to watch your friends die before you suffocate."

Flash shuddered as the cold started seeping through his torso. "P-p-please, Cait. Come back to us. It's Barry. It's your friend, Barry."

"Shh." Frost put pressure on his arm, and he grimaced. Her own pain was mounting, blinding pain, and she needed to get rid of it. She knew how to get rid of it. "How about we get this over with? I'll make it quick. It will only be painful for a few seconds."

Flash bucked against her grip, but she shoved him back against the wall again, liquid nitrogen dripping from her hand. He gasped against the cold, and she had to avert her gaze as she focused inward on his bloodstream, deciding where to strike first. She wasn't sure why she couldn't meet his eye. But, for whatever reason, the sight made her dizzy.

"Just relax," she said in a low voice, as Flash continued to jolt and shiver. "It'll be over before you know it."

She was just starting to seek out his heart when sharp sting erupted below her shoulderblade. She cried out, and her concentration broke. Unsupported, Flash slid down the wall. Frost reached back, felt something hard and smooth lodged in her back, wrenched it out. It was a two-inch long black thorn.

Frost clutched the object so hard it drew blood from her palm. She swiveled.

At the other end of the room, very much alive, stood Rose Canton.

A chink in the armor. A crack, spreading across a carefully-constructed porcelain vase, or splitting the smooth surface of a frozen lake. Frost faltered, something hiccupping in her brain.

"You died," she said once she'd managed to formulate speech. "You—are you real?"

She remembered the shadowy memory of Jason, taunting her from her frozen cell. Rose Canton motioned at the thorn in Frost's hand.

"You tell me."

The warm blood sent rivulets of steam down Frost's back, the wound itself not debilitating but deep enough to make an impression. The world was spinning, thrown out of balance. Another crack in reality.

"You're a…you're a trap," Frost said. "I don't know how…how you're alive, but…" The sound of a whistling teakettle, and a resurgence of power bubbled up through her fingers. "I can't let you stop me."

But before she could make a move, a hand gripped the back of her jacket and flung her against the wall. The speedster that pinned her—Flash, he was Flash—was vibrating so violently he looked about ready to combust.

"Kill me, Flash," she said breathlessly. "Kill me. I dare you."

"What did they do to her?" Canton said quietly. Louder, she said, "What did they do to you, Snow?"

This couldn't be real. Frost had seen it with her own eyes, the mourning for a dead metahuman that they'd hardly known. Canton was dead. And yet, the blood and the wound was bitingly real on Frost's back.

She tried to ram the splintering truth back into place, but it no longer fit.

Frost struggled, needing to relieve the pressure in her head, needing to get the power out from under her skin, but she was too dazed to get a true grip. She looked to the side and saw in the next room a movable whiteboard home to a state map. She couldn't see details, but she saw clearly, in red, the triangulations, the marker scrawls of Eiling and Caitlin? Evidence of an organized search.

Another crack. A fragment of reality came loose, fell away. Frost tried to shoulder loose from Flash's grip, but he slammed her back. In return, she slapped his arm away and shoved him hard in the middle of the chest.

"Go on, kill me," she provoked. "Kill me."

But something drew her eye the other direction, to another room off of the cortex. Pieces of the carefully-molded vase were chipping away at an increasing rate, raining down around her feet. The space she looked into had once been her workspace.

And she had vibed it—she had vibed it, hadn't she? The crashing of boxes and the shattering of picture frames, the destruction of a life. Replaceable.

The desk was stacked with books, papers, instruments. Relics. Artifacts. All familiar. All untouched.

Picture frames. A man with an engagement ring. Ronnie Raymond. A group of people who now watched from the cortex. Iris. Cisco. Barry. And herself, in the center of the photo, smiling so wide her eyes crinkled into slits.

"Kill me." Caitlin turned back to Barry, lightheaded, nauseous. She staggered forward again and made as if to shove at his chest, but her weight was no longer behind it, and the blow didn't even throw him off balance. "Please," she continued, too weak now to shove him again, but even more desperate. Reality tumbled down around her, the thousands and thousands of cracks simultaneously at a point of rupture. "Kill me. Please. Kill me. Kill me."

She was sobbing now, dry sobs like she'd gotten used to, where the tears froze halfway down her cheeks. Every eye was on her—Canton and Barry, Iris and Cisco where they still sat restrained in their chairs, restrained by her hands, bloodied and bruised and broken by her hands. In the hallway, the red alarm light still flashed. Caitlin lifted her hands to her mouth in horror.

"Kill me," she begged. "Please, kill me, kill me…"

She was repeating it even as the room slipped away, even as the rush of memory and dizziness and realization overwhelmed her, even as her legs gave out and the world went dark and blessedly silent.

If you're wondering-lots of inspiration for this chapter came from the excellent Angel episode "Five by Five."

Thanks so much for reading! I feel like a broken record asking for comments, but I really love hearing from you.

Till next time,

Penn