When she woke, it was warm, she was lying on something hard, and her whole body felt heavy, especially her head. "Where'm I?" she slurred the words, trying to stir herself.

"Hey," a male voice, and she forced herself up. There was a blonde man standing there, holding a notebook and a pen. There was a badge clipped to one hip and a gun holstered at the other. Police.

She thrust out a hand at him, reacting without thinking and nothing happened. Killer Frost pulled her arm back in and stared at it, then tried to summon ice, pull in heat. Nothing worked, and she realized for the first time she didn't feel so cold. Zoom was nowhere to be found, didn't have her close so she could draw off the warmth he gave off, but she felt like she did when he was. No, she felt even warmer than that.

The beginnings of desperation growing in her chest, she searched her surroundings. She was in a box, made of some kind of plastic, one wall transparent. There was enough room to pace a step or two, a mattress with blankets, but nothing more than that.

"Hey," her visitor rapped on the wall, drawing her attention back and she whipped her head up, chastising herself for letting her guard down, for not remembering he was there. She was helpless now, they could do anything and she couldn't freeze them in their tracks anymore.

She fought the instinct to draw her knees up and hide. She would not be weak. It took her a few seconds to draw up enough energy to force herself to her knees, and then her feet, fighting the heaviness in her head that made it feel like she was thinking through cotton wool.

"Detective Eddie Thawyne," the blonde man said, not looking at her, "August seventeen. Interrogation of metahuman with freezing powers." He flipped open his notebook, "Let's begin with your name."

"Killer Frost," she replied, clear and cold.

He stopped writing, looking up at her. "Your other name. The one you had before the particle accelerator exploded."

"My name is Killer Frost now, Detective Thorn" she shot back, "that is the only name that matters."

"Thawyne," he corrected automatically, writing that information down. "Alright. Killer Frost. Why did you attack the police station?"

She raised and lowered one shoulder in a careless shrug. "It was the fastest way to draw out the Flash. I need him dead, so I had to find him."

"And why do you need the Flash dead, exactly?" the detective asked.

She stared at him, and he kept the contact right back. In every world, it seemed, there was no warmth in the police, he was cold and unflinching as a brick wall. And they called her the cold one. "To get home," she said at last.

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me where you came from or why you need to get back so desperately you're willing to walk into a station full of armed police officers to try to accomplish that," Thawyne persisted, "or how killing the Flash relates to you getting home."

Killer Frost continued to stare at him, projecting as much hostility as she could from a box that may as well be a padded cell.

"Of course not," the detective scribbled down something else on his notepad, "Anything you want to volunteer?"

"You should let me out now," she said, "or you will regret it." Zoom would kill them all when he came for her, if she didn't get out and do it first.

"Alright," he wrote something else down. "In the meantime, those cuffs will keep your heat loss in check. At least until we find a better solution."

It was not just keeping her warm, it was overloading her, keeping her powerless. All she had to do was kill the man in the red suit, who trailed gold lightning when he ran, and Zoom would take her home, free her from these restraints. She just had to remember that.

Thawyne flipped the notebook shut, tucking it away, and started toward the opening she could see behind him. He took two steps, then turned back. "Almost forgot. Cisco wanted me to ask one last question: what do you want for dinner?"

She shrugged, equal parts not trusting her throat to work if she had to speak and not caring what they fed her.

And he walked out, leaving her alone.

She had plenty of time to think in that box. They fed her three times a day, or so she thought without any accurate way to measure time, and arrangements were made to allow her to use the bathroom, but mostly she was just left to stare at the four walls with nothing but her thoughts.

Invariably, they kept wandering back to Zoom. She wondered what he thought of the fact she hadn't returned yet. Was he looking for her? Or did he just think it was taking longer than anticipated?

Previously, when she had needed to wait for long periods of time, she had her powers. She could make snowflakes dance at the tips of her fingers, write in icicles, build entire cities in miniature out of ice, crush them, and start over, building atop the rubble until the whole thing was catacombs ready to topple at the slightest brush. But now she had nothing. They had made her nothing.

She saw the detective again a few times, and the man with shoulder-length hair who said his name was Cisco and whose face had fallen when she introduced herself as Killer Frost.

"You married to that?" he'd asked.

She'd fixed him with a stare, that, where she not reduced to this, would have cemented his feet to the floor and chilled him to his bones. As it was, he'd backed quickly away, and she was surprised to feel a tinge of regret when he was gone. She could hear others, distantly, sometimes catch glimpses as the cells were rearranged, but there was no sure way to communicate, and she was left alone.

She picked at the cuffs constantly, trying every variation she could think of to get them off. They resisted everything she could throw at them, she had nothing with which to pick the locks on them, they wouldn't break when she slammed them against the wall, though that action brought Cisco running again. He did nothing more than stand outside, watching her slam the cuffs against the wall over and over again, until her bones were ringing and she finally gave up, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. She expected him to leave after that, but he hadn't. Instead, he sat down cross-legged outside the glass wall, and didn't say anything until she turned her head.

"Why do you want," there was a breath of a pause where he censored out the Flash's name, "the Flash dead?"

She didn't mean to say anything, but the constant warmth she was under and the isolation had wrecked havoc on her self-control and the words came bursting out. "Zoom told me to," she confessed.

Cisco scooted closer. "Who's Zoom?"

She let the knowledge draw her mouth up into something like a smile. "The fastest man alive," she told Cisco, "in every universe."

He arched a disbelieving eyebrow. "Faster than the Flash?"

She let that disbelief slide, because he had never seen Zoom, didn't know how fast the man was and would be. "Yes," she told him, "faster than anyone."

Cisco's eyebrows raised at that, but after a few more comments, she was left alone with her thoughts and the cuffs once more.

A few hours later the cells moved again, but she didn't bother looking up from the cuffs. It was about time for a meal, it was probably just Cisco with more Big Belly Burger.

"You're going to ruin your fingers like that," a double-toned voice observed, and she jumped up, Zoom's name dying unsaid on her lips as she saw Flash standing at the control panel, one red-gloved hand still on the door lock.

"So, Killer Frost," said the Flash, stepping forward to stand in front of the transparent wall separating her from her target, "who's Zoom?"

She drew herself up, dropping her hands to her sides. Somehow, the fact that this version of the Flash sounded like Zoom felt like a betrayal, and she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her unsettled by that.

"A speedster," she answered, "faster than you can imagine."

"If he's so fast," Flash asked, "Why didn't he come kill me himself?"

"He didn't know the portal would stay open," she answered, "he couldn't stay here for longer than it took the breech to settle back down."

"Breech?" repeated the speedster, standing a little straighter.

She refused to say anything. If they didn't know, she wasn't going to tell them Zoom's secrets. He'd trusted her, and she could not break that.

"Who is he to you?" Flash asked. The speedster was leaning against the transparent wall now, arms crossed and one foot looped over the other ankle, utterly at ease. It would be maddening, for him to be so close and relaxed, just out of reach, except that she had learned the same technique from Zoom and used it innumerable times to set people off their guard.

Killer Frost opened her mouth to reply, then stopped, trying to think of the right word to describe what Zoom was to her. Boss didn't quite sum up their relationship. Boyfriend was... she tried to apply the word to Zoom, and it slipped off like water, too gentle and soft for everything Zoom was. Friend? But that wasn't deep enough, not for everything he had done for her after the accelerator explosion, not for everything she had done for him in return. But that was the answer.

"He gave me my name," she answered finally, the words coming as she thought about it. "A few months after the accelerator exploded, I got my powers," she raised her hands, showing the cuffs, "and I was lost. I couldn't touch anyone, didn't know what to do, and I was so cold. Zoom gave me my name, gave me purpose again, and made me feel like I wasn't lost and freezing and alone. I owe him everything."

Flash tipped his head sideways on the glass. "You love him."

It wasn't a question, but it demanded an answer anyway.

"I-" she stopped. It wasn't that she had never thought about this, but the idea of Zoom didn't quite fit itself to the flowers and chocolate picture the word 'love' made. She had played with the words too many times to count, fitting them to Zoom in the dead of night while he was asleep, but she had never worked up the courage to say it to his face, frightened of the reaction he would have. "Yes, of course I do." But by the bit of his face she could see, he had caught the fact that her answer was shakier than she would have liked it to be.

"How long are you going to keep me here?" she asked, changing the subject abruptly.

Flash ignored the question for a moment, his eyes raking over her face. The feeling was oddly like when Zoom would look at her, like he was testing for something she couldn't have named even if pressed. She had opened her mouth to ask again when he spoke. "Will you try to kill me again if we let you out?"

She couldn't say anything to that, he already knew the answer.

The speedster looked down at the floor, and when he looked up again, the constant vibrations that had obscured his face had stopped. Though he still wore the mask, that didn't matter, not when she knew that face better than she knew her own now. Killer Frost gasped and flew to the transparent wall to press both hands against it.

It was Zoom; Zoom's green eyes and strangely young features, and she realized abruptly that she hadn't seen what color lightning he made, she had simply assumed it was Flash because he was wearing the red suit. It would be exactly like Zoom to take his enemy's costume as a trophy, to flaunt the slower speedster's failure while they remained in this universe.

"Zoom," she breathed, eyes desperately tracing his features, tacking together sentences that could explain why he had needed to kill Flash himself, why she hadn't been able to do it. She wound up with, "you came."

He took a step back in a blur of gold lightning and the shining bit of hope she had splintered across the floor like one of the icy cities she would never make again. Their gazes locked, and she saw dawning comprehension rising in Flash's face, and wondered what he was seeing in hers.

After a second, Flash broke the connection and whipped out of there in a trail of gold, leaving her to sink to the floor of her cell, mind whirling. It kept catching on Flash's face, like a loose thread, and then trailing back to Zoom before she forced herself to think about why she was here. The fact that Flash had Zoom's face, or Zoom had Flash's, changed nothing.

But she still kept coming back to that first moment when he had stopped the disguising gesture and she believed, hoped so desperately, that it was Zoom, and that led to all the times she had seen him without his mask on, looping around in an endless cycle.

The first time she'd seen Zoom without his mask was also the day he'd given her the name Killer Frost.

It was also, now that she thought about it, the first day she had killed someone. She had been so young then, so naive and still so confused about everything. Zoom was looking away, and didn't see the officer sneaking up behind him, didn't see her raising the gun, was unaware of the danger.

She had reacted without thinking then. She hadn't meant to do it, but when she flung out a hand, yelling Zoom's name, ice had shot out. It sharpened in midair, and by the time it had reached the officer, it was sharper than any natural icicle could ever be.

The officer staggered, the gun falling from her grasp as she clutched at the ice suddenly protruding from her chest. She had enough time to look up before she fell to her knees, the edges of the crystal-clear projection turning crimson and melting under the heat of the blood rushing out from the wound. She had been frozen there, hand still outstretched, as Zoom appeared next to her, sweeping her up without stopping. The last she had seen of the injured officer, someone in civilian clothes, gun in hand and badge flashing at his hip, was running to her, but then Zoom whipped them out of sight. He didn't stop until they were standing back in his lab, and even then he set her back on her feet and moved to set down the bag of things he had taken on the workbench.

She remembered being unable to stop staring at her hands while he moved around, setting things up the way he wanted them.

"You had my back," Zoom had commented, "I had underestimated your loyalty."

She hadn't meant to do it. She opened her mouth to tell him that, that the act had been a mistake, a fluke, but the words froze in her throat as surely as if she had used her powers on them to stick them there. Zoom huffed, appearing in front of her in a flicker of blue. "Look at me," he ordered.

She was distraught enough she didn't notice at first that he had stopped speaking in the double-tone, but then he slid a hand under her chin and pulled her face up so she had no choice but to look at him. Before that moment, she had imagined a dozen reasons he wore the mask. She'd thought that maybe the explosion that had made him what he was had also disfigured him in some way, or maybe he was someone that the police would recognize, some public official who needed to remain anonymous, or maybe he couldn't control his powers without the suit completely covering him.

But none of those things were true. She knew all the public officials, and she didn't recognize him. He looked like anyone she might have passed on the street, he wasn't disfigured. If anything, he was handsome. There had been little time to take him in though, because then he had kissed her, backing her up against the nearest wall to get a better angle.

"My killer," he had breathed into her ear, so warm it made her shudder and pull him closer to her. There had been a pause where he traced patterns onto her skin, chasing the frost that bloomed, "Killer Frost." After that, he had called her Killer Frost in public, Killer in private, and she had stopped sleeping in her own room.

She climbed into the bed in her cell and pulled the covers up around herself, cold despite the cuffs. She would give anything for that now, to be able to curl into Zoom and be warm, not this artificial, constant warmth that was forced on her by Cisco's invention, but the kind that Zoom shed like a duck shed water, the excess speed burning off into heat. If she was lucky, maybe she would dream and be back where she belonged, the way she was supposed to be, with ice in her blood and frost at the tips of her fingers.

It took a long time to fall asleep, and she had no idea how long she stayed that way, but Flash was standing outside her cell again when she woke up. She sat up, the blanket slipping down, and swung her legs over to set her feet on the floor and they watched each other without saying a word.

"Why did you show me?" Killer Frost asked finally, "your face, I mean."

"I thought it would make it harder for you to kill me," Flash replied, "if I was more than just a costume and some speed, if you could put even part of a face to me. I didn't think I had your-" there were words in the minute break there, but he seemed just as lost for them as she was, "had Zoom's face," he corrected finally.

In a way, it made sense. If Zoom in her universe had superspeed, other versions of him could have the same gift after the accelerator exploded.

But in another way, there was only one Zoom, and it felt wrong that someone else was running around with his face and his gift, even if it was in another universe. "Neither did I," Killer Frost told him.

"Could you kill me now?" he sounded hopeful.

She sat up a little straighter as a plan formed itself in her head. She paused long enough to make it believable, then shook her head, slowly, indecisively. "I don't know," she said, tentative, exactly like she couldn't believe she was really saying this, "you look just like him. I-" She looked down, fixing her gaze on the floor.

It would never have worked on Zoom, but this was Flash. Without looking up, she knew it had worked as the door to her cell swooshed open, and she heard footsteps come closer. She forced herself to remain still as he came to her, until he was standing in front of her, trusting that the fact he wore Zoom's face would somehow save him.

Then he knelt in front of her, taking her wrists, the cuffs that kept her powerless, in his hands. She couldn't even feel how warm he was, the same warm Zoom was, with the blocks on. "I'm sorry," he said, "about these. We didn't know what else to do."

Then she lunged. She hadn't realized how much she had come to depend on her powers until she suddenly didn't have them, and the attack was utterly graceless. He wasn't expecting the motion, and even the fastest man in this universe could be caught off guard, and they tumbled across the floor, out of the cell as she tried to get her hands around his throat and he tried to ward her off. He couldn't escape as long as he couldn't run, so as long as she kept him down, he couldn't get away.

He seemed unwilling to fight her at full strength, and she used that against him, pinning him down and grappling with him as he tried to ward her off.

She wasn't sure how he did it, but suddenly they were moving, the world blurring past as he careened down a hallway, crashing toward a wall. At the last second, when she was nearly convinced he was just going to smash her into it to get rid of her, he turned, grazing the surface and skidding through a door that flung open under their joint momentum. This, it turned out, was a custodial closet, and she went tumbling through the sudden mess, still unwilling to let go of the tenuous hold she had on him.

Her questing fingers found something hard and she smashed it across her body into his head as hard as she could. He tripped backward, falling to the floor with his feet tangled in a mop as she finally let go and scrambled to her feet. She raised the object again and he ripped his mask back.

It was exactly Zoom's face. Until that instant, she had held onto the faint glimmer of hope that maybe he just looked like Zoom in the parts of his face that weren't covered by the mask, but there was no mistaking him. "Go on," he said, "finish it. I'm a murderer too."

And she couldn't. She couldn't even muster up enough to be angry that he was wearing Zoom's face, she just couldn't. Not when he sounded as bitter as she had once felt, before Zoom told her there was no reason to be that. There was no way to fake that, not without having lived it.

She turned and fled blindly through the door still hanging mostly open, tearing through the halls without really caring where she was going. Anywhere was better than there, with a man wearing Zoom's face saying he deserved to die with absolute conviction in his eyes. She turned another corner and found herself in a large room.

But there, in the middle of the room, about seven feet up, not far from a stack of metal boxes, was the tumbling, rolling motion of a breech between the universes. Desperation made her hands tremble as she hauled herself up the stack, expecting any moment for Flash to come into the room and spirit her away, back to the cell where she would live out the rest of her days, cut off from everything she held dear.

It was a jump, but she was desperate now. She didn't want to face Zoom like this, without succeeding, but she had no choice, no options left but to go through the breech. She couldn't stay here and let them strip away all her powers, take away everything she was.

Even as she set a foot on the last box and pushed herself off, she saw a flash of gold. The Flash appeared where she had been standing an instant ago, watching her with a helpless expression on his face.

It was odd, she thought, as the breech swallowed her up, but he had never tried to kill her. Even when she had stood a good chance of ending his life, he hadn't really been fighting her, hadn't tried to kill her in return. Zoom would have killed anyone who tried to do the same to him, but Flash hadn't.

Then the breech took her away.


Extra Scene

Barry sat forward, struggling with the mop that had somehow managed to knot itself around his legs while Killer Frost was trying to kill him. She had not been half-hearted about it either, his throat was already aching where she had wrapped her fingers around it and his head was starting to throb from where she had smashed a bottle of cleaner into his skull. He was going to have spectacular colors of bruises.

The door burst open the rest of the way and Joe's frame filled the entrance. "What happened?" he demanded.

"Killer Frost," Barry replied, tugging on a particularly vicious strand of mop, "I thought I was making progress with her, I went into her cell, and she attacked me."

Joe looked over his shoulder as though the errant meta would be behind him. "And why did she stop?" he pressed.

"She ran off when I told her she should kill me," said the speedster, as casually as he could, dumping the mop onto the floor of the closet and looking for a way to stand up.

"How did you know that would make her stop?" the detective asked.

Barry, finally free of cleaning supplies, pulled himself to his feet and looked Joe in the eye. "I didn't," he said, then ducked under the man's arm and sped off to find their escapee.


Most of this is from Killer Frost's view, but occasionally there are scenes that wanted to be told, that add to the tale, and couldn't be from her view, so they'll pop up as an "Extra Scene" at the bottom. Read them or ignore them as it suits you.

If anyone is interested, I'll be putting a little more detail about the universes Killer Frost visits down here, as she leaves each one, exactly what happened to make them diverge from the Earth-1 we know. Again, if you don't care, feel free to skip it, but it's here if you want it.

This was a world where Barry came back from saying goodbye to his mom in time to prevent Eobard from going through the portal, and Eobard threatened his friends and family. Faced with a choice between himself and everyone he loves dying and doing something about it, Barry chose to snap Eobard's neck, so Eddie didn't die and there was no singularity.

Watch out for the next chapter soon! Happy holidays.