ColdFlash- Soulmates

Chapter 17: Stay with me

  "We've worked things out," Barry told team Flash.

   They were all standing in the cortex two days after the kiss on the beach, not that anyone other than Barry and Leonard had any knowledge of that event. No one had mentioned Snart in those days and Barry wasn't going to ask for a topic like that to be brought up. Naturally it was Cisco that did. Asking whether Barry had sorted out the "problem" as he had promised. Which subsequently grabbed everyone's immediate attention.

   "He won't kill or hurt anyone as long as we don't arrest him," Barry told them what he and Leonard- his boyfriend?- had agreed on on the beach following their late night kiss, saying it out loud though made it sound a really lame deal. "Leonard will also stop stealing but he wants to ease out of it or something. So stopping slowly. We just can't arrest him in the mean time."

   "Like you would let that happen anyway," Cisco said, staring directly at the speedster.

   Barry rolled his eyes, he couldn't be bothered to fight over this anymore so he just said," you're right Cisco, I wouldn't. Because I haven't already sent him of to Iron Heights once already."

   "I have to ask Bear, if you know Snart, do you know his sister and Mick Rory?" Joe asked, partly through curiosity and partly to spare Barry from Cisco's probing. Whatever the purpose, the question took him off guard some what and so he only nodded.

   "Was that Heatwave bloke always so unhinged?" Cisco asked, seemingly happy to go along with the new subject.

  Barry let a smile grace his face then thankful to Joe and amused that Cisco had been so easily moved from his topic... even as the thoughts and memories than formed in relation to Len's best friend making him more than a bit uncomfortable.

   "Yep, he has always freaked me out," Barry said.

   "And your smiling about that, about spending time with a pyromaniac," Joe said incredulously.

   Barry just shrugged with another small smile before picking up his jacket and leaving for work. One thing he knew at that moment was despite the tension everywhere else, it was no longer inside him. The release of the truth had taken a massive weight off of his shoulders.

***

   It was dark outside the window. As dark as the city would allow with all of the street lamps, glowing lights and car headlights. But as well as the dark, it was cold.

   There had been a point after the warehouse fire, after he had been attacked by that man with the knife, that Barry hadn't been able to stand the cold. When he had just removed Leonard Snart from his life, when he had still been programming his mind to hate the man. At that point in time the cold had repulsed him. The cold was Leonard Snart. It was something that resided in the essence of the man, it was his. It reminded Barry of the man and the many memories went with it. Their first date. How the low temperatures had comforted Barry when Len wasn't around. How he had deliberately tested his boyfriend's tolerance of the cold by making his apartment bloody freezing and the smile, well more of a smirk, that lit up Len's face when he walked through the door and felt the temperature, realising what was going on. And the blue, those ice blue eyes that turned to him with something far from the cold that the colour would suggest. Snart even embodied it as an opposite to the extreme heat that was Mick Rory. In those times the cold had been a bigger comfort than anything, the cold opposing the heat, keeping it at bay, in complete contrast to the normal way of life.

   The... break up then meant that the cold represented everything wrong. Every mistake from that year. It was a nasty, unwelcome reminder of someone that he really, really wanted to forget. So Barry shunned it.