Frozen Flashpoint

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.