(The Flash) Frozen Flashpoint: Chapter 1 – The Storm After the Storm

Chapter 1 – The Storm After the Storm

Barry sat on the porch of the West house, leaning against one of the white pillars that supported the small roof over the entrance. He stared up into the sky, lost in thought.

Just moments before, he had left Cisco, Wally, Iris, and Caitlin in the living room, where they were watching TV and laughing together. But Barry didn’t feel like laughing or even smiling right now.

He had failed again. He had lost again. This past month had been an unending nightmare from hell.

First, there was the terrible trip to Earth-2. The grief of seeing Joe die was the easiest emotion to process from the whole ordeal. Then came the realization that it was Ronnie who killed him—and he did it with a smile.

Barry didn’t know Ronnie all that well. He had met the man a few times, but for some reason, he never felt comfortable around him and avoided him as much as possible. But then Ronnie sacrificed himself because of a mistake Barry made.

Barry felt so much guilt that he pushed everyone else away and started working alone as the Flash. And even though circumstances brought their team back together, Barry never let go of the guilt he felt about Ronnie’s death.

Part of him wondered if he was allowed to let go of this guilt or at least feel less of it now that he had witnessed what a version of Ronnie was capable of. Barry wasn’t proud of it, but he couldn’t help thinking that maybe that was what would have happened to their Ronnie as well if he had been in control of their power from the start, like the Earth-2 version seemed to be.

Another thing that had been bothering Barry for weeks after the trip was the warmth he felt when Killer Frost called him handsome and the pang he felt when he saw her kissing Ronnie right in front of him. Of course, since then, Barry painfully realized why that was.

Killer Frost was another matter that troubled Barry. Even under her cold persona, he could still see Caitlin’s caring personality. When Ronnie and Cisco were blasting him to death and Killer Frost tried to stop them, he could feel there was more than just fear in her voice when she asked them to stop. And then, when Zoom killed Ronnie, he recognized Caitlin’s agonized scream.

Then there was the fact that being married to Iris just didn’t feel like he imagined it would. The warmth he expected to feel each time they kissed, the peace he wanted to feel when he came home—it just wasn’t there. But the Barry of Earth-2 seemed content with her.

Barry spent many sleepless nights trying to figure that out until the realization hit him. The Flash. That Barry led a simple life with ordinary troubles, so the ordinary relationship with Iris was natural. But Barry had superpowers, and with that came a lot of added burdens Iris just couldn’t understand.

At first, it was because he wasn’t allowed to tell her about any of the Flash-related matters, and without that, Iris was just ignorant to a huge part of Barry’s life. During that time, the part of Barry that saw her as perfect died as well. That was why he wasn’t exactly excited by the prospect of them being married in the future.

On the other hand, now that she knew everything, she was inserting herself a little too much into this part of his life and not allowing him to be his own person. He dreaded to think how far she would go if they actually got into a relationship.

So no, Barry no longer desired to marry Iris. And still, in the future, they were married, which didn’t exactly bode well for his future, did it?

Of course, then there was his brief experience as a prisoner in Zoom’s lair. Which by itself was scary, but surprisingly still one of the least complicated events from that trip.

The only good thing that came out of that whole catastrophe was that he got to hear his mother’s voice for the first time in over a decade. He had forgotten how smooth her voice was; his last memories of her voice were her screams before he found himself in the street.

Of course, it didn’t end there; the trip was just the beginning.

While Barry never quite liked Jay from the beginning and took to avoiding him at some point because of the same odd reason he did Ronnie, the man’s supposed death still filled him with guilt.

Of course, that guilt turned into fury once they learned that Jay was, in fact, Hunter Zolman, aka Zoom. Barry couldn’t believe that after last year, he had allowed himself to be fooled again like that. And this time, the price was far worse than before.

It didn’t help when Zoom kidnapped Wally. Barry foolishly believed they could outsmart a man who was creating a plan while they were still licking their wounds after the aftermath of the Reverse Flash.

Zoom escaped from right under his nose, only to take Wally as a hostage in exchange for his speed. Of course, Barry didn’t need to consider it; his choice was clear from the moment he saw the message on the wall.

Even standing there making the deal with Zoom, wearing his mask so Wally wouldn’t recognize him, Barry didn’t question his decision. When he ran on the treadmill and felt the speed leaving his body, he told himself he was doing it to save Wally and that was all that mattered.

But then, when Zoom took the speed for himself right there in the lab and then sped out, Barry felt both slight trepidation and huge relief. Barry was sure Zoom would take the opportunity to kill him in his vulnerable state.

Then Barry noticed what else was missing. Caitlin. Zoom took her with him as he sped out. In an instant, the relief Barry felt was replaced by fury and dread. In that moment, Barry wished he had never given his speed to Zoom, even if it meant Wally would have died.

Barry wasn’t proud of that thought. He knew he made the right decision now, but then all he wanted to do was run after Zoom and break his bones one by one until the man gave Caitlin back.

And that was when he realized one big truth about his own life.

Even then, lying on the familiar medical bed in STAR Labs surrounded by what he considered to be his family, he felt emptiness inside him in the shape of a brunette doctor. He lay there and looked back over the last year and a half.

Suddenly his discomfort with Ronnie, who was her husband, and Jay, who she dated briefly, was obvious. He liked the men just fine, but he was jealous of them because they had something he wished he could earn: Caitlin’s heart.

In that moment, it couldn’t be clearer to him. Barry Allen had a huge crush on Caitlin Snow.

And things only got worse when Zoom tried to take over the city while bringing all his meta minions from Earth-2 to here. Barry spent the next few days trying to help catch metas and keep the morale of the people up with a hologram of the Flash.

Every evening, when Barry and Cisco had a couple of minutes to spare, they used Caitlin’s phone to vibe her and make sure she was still alive. Usually, Cisco would go alone because he wasn’t that practiced with his powers yet, but the first time Cisco brought him into the vibe, he recognized where they were: Zoom’s hideout in Earth-2. Which was bad, considering they had closed all the breaches there.

The experience he had in the Speedforce was not something he would be quick to repeat. That entire plan backfired on them, and Barry lost almost an entire day because of it.

Barry was honest when he said he wanted to go with the plan, dangerous as it was, because it was the only way to protect the people of the city. But what he didn’t tell anybody was that even as the lightning was coursing through his body, Barry thought about Caitlin and how he needed his powers to save her.

Even by the end of it, the only reason he came back was that what Iris said—coming home—sounded right to him, but not to her. That was why he hesitated for a moment. He didn’t want to create a home with Iris; she was part of his home in the past when Joe adopted him into the family. But as he looked at the face of his mother on the other side, she had a knowing look in her eyes. And when she told him to run, the message was clear: run and save the woman he did want to create a home with.

The next few hours were a blur to Barry, but then Caitlin walked inside STAR Labs, and Barry immediately felt lighter, as if the hole in his chest had been filled.

But all was not well after that. Every time he tried to approach her, she would flinch and take a step back, causing his heart to sink each time. His dad seemed to notice both his attempts and something more when he came to him and explained gently that Caitlin was traumatized by a speedster, and right now she was having a really hard time, and he shouldn’t take it personally.

Barry accepted his father’s advice. Even though at that moment he felt very low because of the situation with Caitlin, he did feel warm inside seeing the interactions between his dad and his crush.

Then came their plan to stop all the metas in the city with a single move. A complicated one, but still. They had to do something extreme as right then, Zoom was practically controlling the city with his meta-army.

Barry was surprised but delighted when their plan mostly worked. All the metas in the city fainted during their attack, and the police managed to gather them all before they woke up. But apparently, Zoom could open his own breaches and escaped through one of them before he could faint as well. So Barry had a feeling it wasn’t over.

And then came the worst part. During the celebration meal in the West house, Zoom appeared, grabbed his dad, and ran away. Barry didn’t even care about his secret identity in that moment; he just began to run.

Arriving back at his childhood home and seeing his dad killed there was heartbreaking. But if Barry was being honest with himself now, he was more broken about the event than the location. Since his mom died there, Barry hadn’t gone back to the house to let go of the memory, so the place was still loaded with negative emotions for him to begin with.

When he caught up to Zoom after he murdered his dad, Barry honestly thought about killing the man. Consumed with grief and hatred as he was at the moment, he would have. But then he thought he could hear Caitlin’s voice calling to him, and that made him stop for long enough so Hunter had to kill his own remnant again.

And then, if everything he was going through wasn’t enough, his own team betrayed him. Literally shot him in the back and then locked him away. Was he angry? Yes! But was he wrong? No. Zoom was holding Joe by the neck. If Wally hadn’t freed him in time, and if Barry was a moment too late, his second father would be dead as well.

As the cell closed in his face and he tried to call the names of everyone on the team in an attempt to guilt them into freeing him, he made a conscious effort to ignore Caitlin’s presence. Because her betrayal hurt the most, even now. He was grieving and in pain, and instead of sitting to talk with him, at least while he was in the cell, they just closed the door in his face. Leaving him alone.

The irony was bittersweet. He began that year by trying to push everyone away and stay alone and finished it betrayed and all alone.

Yes, he was definitely not in the mood for celebrating or company at the moment.

The idea to just fix everything kept flying through his mind. He began forming his plan after he saw his dad’s doppelganger, and wasn’t it a low blow. But when the familiar face but strange man left by himself with a breach he created, Barry decided it might be his best option.

He could save her. He could save everyone a lot of pain, especially himself. And after everything he went through in the past three years, didn’t he deserve a happy ending?

All he needed now was to just move his legs and keep running until all his troubles belonged to the past.

But before he could move, a soft voice called tentatively, “Barry?”

Barry turned his head toward the entrance door to see a tall brunette woman with fair skin and warm brown eyes.