She had never tried to create something that could possibly hold any sort of weight while she was falling, but right now it was learn or die. Her creation fell at the same rate she did, until she shoved it downward, pushing more ice after it, forcing it to go faster than she was until there was a jarring sensation back through her as it hit the ground. She worked a ramp under herself, and then she was sliding, too fast, still too close to vertical, and it was a desperate struggle to keep ramp under her, but she wasn't free-falling anymore.

The ground came up faster than she had realized, and she went spilling out across the broken chunks of concrete and rock, landing on her left side. It was still a hard landing, and she was going to be colorful tomorrow morning, but she was alive, so she'd count it as a victory. Slowly, so as not to jar anything that might possibly be broken, she brushed the remains of the ice off her and sat up. One hand flew down to her hip, and she breathed a sigh of relief when she found the emblem still there. It didn't seem broken, but she was going to have an enormous circular bruise where she had landed on the thing. Inventory done, she looked up.

She was sitting at the bottom of a crater, the sides stretching out and looming up. It was enormous, like something had just come along and scooped out a chunk of the world and taken it elsewhere, leaving behind the crumbs. Her entire left side throbbed when she went to stand up, but it held her weight, and after a moment of looking around, she picked the direction that looked the flatest and started walking.

It took nearly half an hour of picking her way over rubble that shifted under her with every step, trying and mostly succeeding not to lose her balance and slide backward, before she reached the top of the crater. The ground before her stretched out in a series of rolling hills, with only scare vegetation dotted around.

"Stop," it lacked the double-tone, but by now she would know Barry's voice anywhere, and she turned to him. There was a tiny part of her that was hoping this one would give her a reason to kill him, but a much larger part hoped this one stayed true to form. At the rate she was going through them, leaving all the Flashes she was supposed to be killing alive in her wake, Zoom would never understand, but killing one now would feel too much like betrayal. She didn't quite want to think about who she would be betraying.

The costume was the same dark red, skintight thing she was getting used to, but it wasn't as clean as the others she had seen. His suit had been ripped in places and obviously patched, the scraps not quite the same color, the stitching irregular, done by hand rather than a machine, and one of the lightning bolts on the sides of the mask had been ripped off and not fixed.

"Barry," she greeted, starting to go to him.

He took a step back in response, and she stopped dead in her tracks as he shoved the mask back. She knew the face, but at the same time she didn't. This one had a scar slicing across the left side of his face, starting at the bridge of his nose, barely missing his eye, and cutting across his cheek before trailing down his jaw. How deep would that have to have been, to have left a mark like that when he healed as fast as he did?

"How are you alive?" his voice sounded hoarse, from disuse or dust, she didn't know, but it was the voice more than the words that made her stop. He sounded like a caged animal, and he looked like he was about to go blasting off again at the slightest movement. He looked older, more worn, than any other Flash she had seen so far, and it wasn't just the scar.

'By not dying' was obviously not the correct answer here. "Should I be dead?" she asked hesitantly.

"Yes," the word was flat, too much or too little behind it for her to tell what he could be feeling about that. "I'm so sorry, but you were one of the crazy ones Cait, and you were supposed to be dead."

A few small pebbles shifted underfoot and her side throbbed as she took a cautious step forward, but Flash didn't back up this time. "What happened here Barry?" she asked. Gingerly, she put a hand to the spot that was hurting the worst and chilled it.

"I always thought that Eobard was horrible for destroying my family," he said by way of answer, "but I never thought he would get worse on the day he died, was unmade, whatever."

She took another step forward, and he vanished from the spot. Only the barest flicker of lightning to show where he had gone. She spun in a complete circle, looking for him, and found him standing at the edge of the crater. "What happened?" she repeated, tone low and soothing, the sort she would use on a cornered animal. It was a little ridiculous, they were on a flat plain, Flash could escape in any of three-hundred and sixty directions and there was no way she could catch him if he decided to run.

"The end of the world began," he answered. He turned around, and in another barely-there flicker of lightning he was gone from the spot.

Flash's voice made her jump this time. She hadn't heard or felt him come up behind her, and yet when he spoke, he couldn't be more than few paces behind her.

"You must be a ghost, Caitlin," Flash said as she turned, "but it was good to see you, one last time. I'm sorry for how everything ended."

He was barely three paces away, and for another of her heartbeats, he stayed frozen, looking at her as though he might never look enough, as if he was seeing right to the heart of her. It made her feel simultaneously hollow, exposed, and priceless. Then, before she could do more than shift her weight to start to step toward him again, he was gone, turned and ran faster than she could hope to follow.

She looked around that plain, at the rapidly retreating trail of dust that was the only remainder of Flash. She would never catch him, and there was no incentive for him to come back. The only thing in sight was the crater, and if there was no one here, there was no reason for him to ever come back. She didn't know why he'd come here in the first place.

This time, she made a bridge, with pillar supports, leading up to where the breech floated high above the city. Maybe it was the lack of buildings to lend perspective that made the crater feel so much deeper, in addition to being a crater

Killer Frost paused at the top of her creation, a step from the breech, and looked back. She was half-expecting Flash to come and prevent her from crossing back into the breech, question her further about what had happened, how she had apparently returned from the dead, but her pathway was clear. Her gaze shifted down toward the edge of the crater to find a lone speck that could have been Flash or could have been simply a trick of the light.

In a chill that went to her bones, the kind that had nothing to do with how much heat she could absorb, she realized she didn't want to try and catch him. Not if ending this twisted game of tag meant she would have to kill him at the end. She was done trying to kill the Flash.

She turned back and fled the last two steps, running from the thought as much as the mangled universe she had been dumped into.

Even after so many universes, she still wasn't used to everything changing in a few steps. The breech thumped her around, knocking her into things she didn't want to think about, and then spat her out.

For one furious second, she thought she had missed the breech, because the ground was still hundreds of feet below her and she was falling again. The differences rapidly made themselves obvious though. She was falling toward skyscrapers now rather than an empty crater, and Central was spread out below her, people below stopping what they were doing as they noticed her.

It was harder than it ought to be, to pull up enough ice to form something, but she couldn't remember the last time she had used her gift that much without drawing off someone. Thankfully, the building she was now falling past made a good anchor point.

She wrapped the incline this time around the building, rather than a single pole, and she could do it at a less steep gradient. She was still a few floors from the ground when she came across window washers and had to curve out to avoid getting tangled in the strings of their washing unit.

The ice broke and she was falling again, doing her best to keep her body limp as she worked on something else.

A blast of wind from below caught her, and twisted in midair as much as possible as her fall slowed. Flash was standing there, arms a blur as the wind to catch her was generated. She came to rest on the ground in front of the building, a lot more gently than she had expected when she first realized she was falling.

"Nice slide," said Flash from behind her, "if you could possibly wave your hand and undo that?"

She must have hit her head at some point, because her vision was wavering. The world kept tipping when she moved. It was starting to get clear again now that she was sitting down, but the Flash didn't look quite right.

"Barry?" Killer Frost asked, extending a hand toward the hero as she tried to focus and see. The Flash froze, midway through reaching to take that hand.

"What?" the words came out in the double-tone Zoom had used so often, but even with that disguise, she could tell something was different. The tone was too high, the cadence off. This wasn't Barry.

She put a hand to her face, trying to scrub away the dizziness. It worked a little, leaving her to blink up at the speedster with clearer eyes.

The Flash gasped and then tugged off the red mask.

It was like looking in a mirror. Flash was her, she was Flash.


Extra Scene:

"Was she there?" Cisco asked, hardly looking up from his papers as Barry let himself into the command center. There was no name attached, neither of them had said her name out loud for weeks, but he knew who Cisco was talking about.

"Yes," the speedster answered shortly, moving over to the nearest table, covered in notes. Some of them were crossed out, others highlighted. Cisco's vibes, predicting the next catastrophe as best they could. "She was. Thank you, for closure."

"No problem," Cisco reached up and circled a section of the map in the bright orange marker that happened to be in his hand. "Calculations say they'll strike there next. Tell the red squad to be ready to move at eight-twenty tomorrow morning."

"Are you sure this is the right thing?" asked Barry.

Cisco looked up, meeting his eyes, and Barry wanted to flinch. Since the singularity had devoured Central, Cisco's vibes had prevented a lot, but he had the unique opportunity of seeing the other side, where things did go wrong. The engineer woke up screaming most nights, though it was hard to find anyone nowadays who didn't have nightmares.

He turned his haunted gaze back to his papers. "I've seen what happens if we don't."

There wasn't any way to argue with that. "I'll tell them," Barry said, and ran off.


Information for the universe.

Firestorm hesitated, unwilling to let Clarissa and Caitlin watch them die, and Barry couldn't keep the singularity totally contained. It ate Central before they stopped it, and the world just went further downhill after that.

Thanks for reading, and watch out for the next chapter soon.