Author's Note: Wait, what I'm writing a Flash fanfiction that's not Snowbarry- Season 1-6? Or Snowbarry at all? Am I feeling okay?
Yes, I'm feeling fine. I just had a sudden… urge, I guess, to write some fanfiction for this new pairing we were gifted that will probably not get anywhere because the Flash hates my shipping life. That pairing is, of course, Mark and Frost.
A NOTE! In this story, Mark did not kill anyone. He's just your regular old bad boy, steals some stuff and has a sketchy past, but he's not a killer. Frost also didn't stab him, and he wasn't apprehended.
"You wanna know the worst thing about all of this?" Frost grumped as she held her prison phone lazily to her ear. "It's the color. Caity. Look at this orange. Do I look like the kind of girl who wants to wear orange for the rest of her life?"
Caitlin smiled a little. "I don't know; I actually think it goes pretty well with your hair color."
Frost shrugged. "I'm considering shaving it," she admitted, squinting thoughtfully. "It'd be very avant-guard, don't you think? Besides, no one messes with a girl with a shaved head." She didn't wait for Caitlin to respond. "Mm, get this- I found Barry's cell."
"You did?" Caitlin asked eagerly. "I'll tell him that."
"When's he gonna come visit?" Frost huffed. "I haven't heard from him or Cisco in ages. You and Allegra are the real ones."
"Cisco's off traveling. And Barry, well, he's… busy," Caitlin shrugged. "There's a lot going on with the Speed Force right now. I'm sure he'll come visit when he gets the time."
Frost eyed her skeptically. "Yeah, Barry's really known for making time for his friends," she said sarcastically, twirling the phone cord around one finger.
Caitlin's eyes flitted to the wall clock, which Frost had also been inconspicuously watching. Despite her blasé tone and conversation topics, she really did miss Caitlin every second they weren't on the phone together. Being stuck in this prison with a bunch of people who could only understand her pre-redemption side was driving her insane. She missed fighting bad guys, she missed her Team…
But she knew she'd made the right choice.
A buzzer rang, singling that their time was up. Caitlin, as always, got a little misty at this point in the call. "I'll be back tomorrow, okay?" she promised. "Maybe I can even get Barry down here. He does miss not being able to go into the field with you and Cisco anymore, he does."
"I just thought he'd be a little more sympathetic," Frost grumped. "Considering he's literally been where I am before."
Caitlin, who was actually sympathetic, nodded. "I need to go," she said regretfully, starting to stand. "I miss you, Frost."
"Miss you too, Caity," Frost murmured, offering her a weak smile and setting her phone into it's slot in the wall. She was herded down the hallway by a guard, following a line of prisoners similarly dressed in garish orange. Listless, bored, and bordering on depressed, Frost wandered back to her cell and took a heavy seat on her creaky cot.
Her bunk mate Andromeda, at the very least, wasn't awful. She was a stick-thin woman of about thirty-three who'd organized a string of incredibly successful (save for the last one, when she got caught) car hijacks. Andromeda was pretty quiet and whip-smart, and thankfully had no bias against metahumans.
It wasn't as if Frost could use her powers, anyway. She hadn't been forced to take the metahuman cure, but she did have to wear a dampening cuff at all times. Frost supposed she understood; with her ice powers, she could have broken out of this prison in under ten minutes. She would have been on the run for the rest of her life, but law enforcement didn't know she was against that idea. They had done what they'd had to to make sure she couldn't escape.
"Your girlfriend visit you again?" Andromeda asked. She was sitting on her top-bunk cot with her face masked behind a book. Andromeda had an odd habit of reading with her nose almost touching the page. Frost wasn't sure if it was because she needed glasses or just because it was easier to hide.
"Caity's not my girlfriend," Frost sighed. "She's my sister."
"I mean the other one."
"Allegra?" Frost raised her eyebrows, smirking. That relationship prospect was slightly more appealing. "Nah. She has work at two during the week so she just comes on weekends."
Andromeda lowered her book. "You always get all mopey when they come to visit," she observed. "That's why no one ever comes to see me. It doesn't fill the hole, it just reminds you that one's there."
Frost shrugged listlessly, glaring at the opposite wall. "I didn't think you had anyone to visit you, anyway."
"I had a boyfriend," Andromeda countered. "Had, because apparently relationships can't last once one of you goes to jail."
"Gee, I wonder why," Frost muttered, tired of this conversation.
She tipped her head back, gazing at the ceiling. Her eyes trailed across the endless spiderwebbing grey cracks. They were, her artist mind noticed, a bit symbolic of her own life now. Always moving, always present, but never getting anywhere. Maybe someday they'd be patched up and erased and no one would even remember they existed.
Time was fluid in prison. Frost ate because it was lunch time and lifted weights (and missed Allegra) when it was time for that and played chess when she was really bored and stared at the ceiling a lot. She visited with Caitlin at 2pm every day and Allegra on the weekends and she tried to keep updated on the news so she would know what was going on with Team Flash. She mostly avoided talking with people, kept to herself, and worked on a scratch-art masterpiece on the wall beside her bed.
Then one day, while Frost was trying to teach Andromeda how to do a proper push-up, one of the guards called her in for a phone call. Confused, Frost followed him down one of the many long, grey halls to the meeting area. Caitlin had already come that day. Maybe Barry or Cisco had finally decided to drop by?
It was, in fact, a man who had come to visit her. Tall, arm muscles straining against a thin grey t-shirt, dirty blond hair scrubbed just right and a bit less beard than the last time she'd seen him, Frost drank in the sight of Mark Blaine.
"Well," was all she could think to see as she took as casual a seat as possible, reaching for her phone.
"Hey, Frost," Mark grinned, corner of his eyes crinkling. Frost swallowed dryly. He was just as attractive as she remembered, if not more so. "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"Serving my time, just like everyone else should be," Frost said. She huffed. "What are you doing here, Mark? With everything you've done, I'm surprised you're brave enough to even show your face in a place with this many cops."
Mark's grin widened. "Well, unlike you, I've made sure my crime-breaking stints didn't end up anywhere that would lead to me getting caught," he shot back. "Hate to say it, Frost, but for a criminal you were pretty sloppy."
Frost glared at him. "Did you come here to insult me or do you actually have something worthwhile to say?" she snapped.
"Because you have such a tight schedule now, huh?"
Frost glared harder at him, wishing that the expression that terrified most men had even the slightest affect on him. But Mark just smirked and leaned back in his chair, comfortably tucking the prison phone into the crook of his chin.
"Look," he said. "I've got a proposition."
"If you want me to give you tips on how to make one of your stupid cocktails, I'm a little tied up at the moment," Frost snipped. "Besides, you know these phone calls are recorded, right? Any proposition is between you, me, and whoever the heck feels like listening in. Privacy isn't exactly prioritized in prison."
"Don't worry about that," Mark assured her, holding up his phone wire. There was a piece of tech clamped onto it. "I'm interfering with the call signal. They'll just get a lot of static." He flicked his eyebrows at her resignedly impressed expression. "You forget I'm an engineer, Frost."
"I forget because I don't think about you," Frost shot back, a bit lamely. "So what's your stupid proposition, anyway?"
Mark leaned forward, resting his elbows on his side of the table. His biceps strained, and Frost tried not to drool. "I want you to let me help you get out of here," he said in a low voice.
"What?" Frost gaped. "You want to break me out?"
"Shhh…." Mark warned, glancing at the guard that was standing at the door, making sure they didn't get into any trouble. "Yes. I spent a lot of time learning about you, Frost, and I know that you don't belong here. People like me? Yeah, maybe. But not you. And if the legal system thinks that they're protecting more people with you locked up than you out fighting crime, well… they're even dumber than I thought."
He settled back in his chair again, raising his eyebrows. "So? What do you say?"
Frost still hadn't found a way to close her jaw. "Mark, if you break me out of here, I will never be free," she said. "I'm gonna be on the run for the rest of my life! That's not even a life! At least while I'm in here I still get to see Caity every day."
"Yeah, every day," Mark said, "for fifteen minutes. And what's going to happen when weeks stretch into years? Decades? Frost, you asked for a life sentence. You think Caitlin is gonna come visit you every day for, what, fifty years?"
"Maybe I won't live for fifty more years," Frost grumbled, picking at her nail. "Maybe someone will shiv me. That happens in prisons a lot, right?"
Mark stared at her, unamused.
"What's in it for you?" Frost asked suspiciously. "You knew me for, like… ten minutes. I know I'm hot, but…"
Mark snorted. "You are," he allowed, smirking again before sobering a little. "Look, I… I tried to just forget about you, okay? But the fact of the matter is that I'm the reason you're in here. I tried to frame you just when you needed to have your name cleared most. I thought I'd get off Scott free and you'd end up in prison for a couple months. But then you got a life sentence." He shook his head. "And I- I just feel like it's my fault."
"Gee, I didn't know you cared," Frost said with a faint smile.
"So?" Mark pressed. "What do you say? Let me get you out of here?"
Frost bit her lip, hesitating. On the one hand, the offer of freedom was insanely tempting. On the other… she knew what escaping would really entail. She'd be on the run for the rest of her life, constantly looking over her shoulder, never able to settle. According to Caitlin, she had actual fans who were pretty upset that she was being locked up; people who claimed that she had saved their life in one way or another and that she should get a second chance. But Frost had pleaded for a sentence without parole. She was never getting out. She couldn't get out.
"I- I need to think about it," she mumbled, unsure of how else to respond.
Mark nodded, understanding, before fishing a small tool out of his pocket. With barely a sound, he used a sparkling blade to cut a quarter sized hole in the glass separating them. "Diamond edge," he explained. "Took forever to make… as did this."
He pulled something else out of his pocket: a small, round disk that almost looked like a button. He pushed it through the hole, and Frost quickly picked it up and hid it in her hand. "What is it?" she asked.
"If you stick that on your cuffs, it'll disable them," Mark explained. "As talented a guy as I am, you're going to need your powers if you want to be able to get out of here."
Frost nodded, swallowing. "Uh… thanks," she mumbled, a little uncertainly. "Mark-"
The buzzer sounded. Their time was up. Mark stood up. "I'll stop by in a week," he promised. "Be ready with your answer."
With that, he hung up the phone and walked out of the prison.
W / T \ Y
Frost, seated out of sight from the cameras, stared down at the tiny piece of technology in her palm. She was beyond terrified that it was going to fall down a crack or slip under a floorboard or something; it was that small. Last night, she had hidden it in her pillowcase and had almost lost it just from that.
She just wasn't ready to attach it to her meta cuffs yet. True, turning off her dampeners didn't automatically mean she was planning on agreeing to let Mark break her out of jail. At the same time, it meant she was accepting some help from him, and she didn't want him to get the wrong idea.
Frost heard footsteps coming and hurriedly closed her hand around the tech. But it was just a fellow inmate, headed down the hallway to his cell. She let out a low groan, ducking her head forward. What she needed to do was crush the tech in her fist. What she needed to do was smash it under the heel of her shoe. What she needed to do was flush it down the drain.
What she needed to do was stick it onto her cuffs and get out of here.
No. What Frost really needed to do was talk to someone. Someone who would understand her moral dilemma, someone who would give her unbiased advice. Thankfully for her, that person came in the form of Allegra Garcia, who arrived at Iron Heights prison right on time for her usual Saturday visit.
"Hey," Allegra greeted when Frost sat down across the glass from her. She was wearing her usual moody expression, slouched in a chair and eyeing the guards sullenly. Allegra wasn't really a fan of prisons, but she sucked it up for Frost's sake, which the ice queen appreciated.
Frost got right down to business. "Did you know they tap these calls?" she mentioned as casually as possible. "Zero privacy."
"Uhh, yeah, I know," Allegra replied, raising an eyebrow. "I was in prison for awhile, Frost; I know the drill."
"You know what else is interesting?" Frost mused. "The fact that you can listen into someone's conversation but not understand anything they talk about, because mutual knowledge is kind of like a… secret code."
She subtly bugged her eyes out at Allegra, willing her to understand. Allegra squinted suspiciously. "Mhmmm…"
"Someone came to visit me," Frost went on. "Hot bartender."
"Really."
"Yeah. And he brought me something."
The squint intensified. "A… drink?"
"No. Something like what Cisco would make." Frost searched Allegra's face, trying to figure out if she was understanding. "Something that does the- that does the opposite of the necklace Julian made me. Something to go on these guys." She glanced down at the cuffs on her wrist. "But I'm not sure if I should use it."
"Wow," Allegra murmured. "Wow, um… Okay, so when I was, like, eight or something, my neighbor got a pet mouse."
Frost looked at her blankly. Allegra had far surpassed her in code crypticness, so much so that Frost had no idea what she was saying.
But she wasn't done: "I was so used to seeing mice running around in the field near my house," Allegra went on, "and so I got super mad at my neighbor because I was convinced he should let the mouse go and let her live her life freely and happily, like she deserved. But my mom explained that mice outside in nature aren't necessarily happy, because they constantly have to be worried about food and shelter and which animal is going to be, um… hunting them down. Freedom isn't really 'free'… there's a price. And sometimes that price is- is too high to make it worth it."
Allegra fell silent, letting that sink in.
"So, um…" Frost clenched her jaw, unable to look Allegra in the eyes. "Would you… would you set the mouse free?"
"If I wanted it to be safe?" Allegra gazed at her. "No."
W / T \ Y
"Did you hear about that hot new prisoner?" Andromeda asked from behind the pages of her book. "Sheesh. If prison had as few rules as summer camp I doubt he'd be spending any nights in his own room."
Frost sent her a weird look, even though she couldn't see it through the mattress separating them. "Can't say I've seen him yet."
"Oh, you'll know when you do," Andromeda assured her with an appreciative whistle. "You'll know."
Frost thought about her own very attractive guy, the one that wasn't really hers by any stretch of the word, the one whose visit she'd ignored that past Wednesday because she felt that sent a much clearer message than her words ever could.
Frost, needing to get out of her cramped cell, was relieved when lunch rolled around. As she walked through the doorway of her cell towards the cafeteria, she caught sight of tiny black pieces of plastic crushed into the small space between the wall and floor. Frost swallowed tightly and moved on.
Andromeda, behind her in the arduously slow lunch line, kept trying to get Frost to join her in sneaking peeks at the new inmate. Frost stubbornly refused to indulge her, keeping her eyes on the perfectly portioned servings of food being slapped onto her plate. She was succeeding quite well in this when a hand fell on her arm.
"Watch it-" Frost started to snap, spinning angrily toward the cause of the touching.
Her jaw dropped.
"Hey, Frost," Mark Blaine said with one of his trademark charismatic grins. "Surprised to see me?"
Ignoring Andromeda's squawks, because this was very same 'hot new prisoner' she'd been ogling, Frost grabbed Mark's arm and dragged him away from the lunch line. "What are you doing here?" she hissed. "Didn't me not agreeing to meet with you send a strong enough message? I'm not breaking out, Mark. Not happening. So whatever job you think you're pulling…" She trailed off, glaring at him.
"It's not a job," Mark said with a shrug, gesturing to his orange pantsuit. "I got caught, plain and simple. Whether or not I hacked into the computer system to make absolutely certain I was sent to Iron Heights prison is a whole other matter."
Frost gaped at him, unable to help the blush that started heating her usually ice-white cheeks. "You're kidding," was all she could manage.
Mark grinned, crossing his arms so that his biceps strained against his sleeves. "Does it look like I'm kidding?"
No, it did not look like he was kidding. Frost drew in a breath and blew it out, limbs practically buzzing.
Her time in prison was about to get a lot more interesting.
Author's Note: Ahaaaa YES that was literally so fun.
I decided to keep the story kind of open-ended, because I really do believe that Frost wouldn't want to break out of prison after going through so much effort to get in, and yet somehow I feel like the redeemable!Mark I created for this story wouldn't let her be in there alone. So do with this what you will.
Will I write them again? No. Probably not. But you really never know with me- I guess we'll see what happens.