Captain Cold

Leonard Snart had a rule.

Well, he had several rules, carefully considered and firmly held. But the most important one was this: a job is a job. Keep it professional. No unnecessary complications. Plan everything, leave nothing to chance, and whatever you do, don't make it personal.

He was, by all observable evidence, very good at this.

Captain Cold — for that was what Central City called him, and Leonard did not object to the name — was not the kind of criminal who cackled and monologued. He was not the kind of criminal who showed up without a plan. He arrived at jobs the way a contractor arrived at a job site: on time, with the right tools, having done the measurements beforehand. He had a cold gun — a device of his own engineering that generated temperatures close to absolute zero, the coldest anything could possibly be, cold enough to slow the movement of molecules to a crawl — and he used it with the precision of someone who had practiced until precision was instinct.

The cold gun could slow the Flash.

This was not a small thing. The Flash moved at speeds that made most weapons useless — by the time a bullet left a barrel, the Flash had already stepped to one side. But at absolute zero, the very molecules of the air around the Flash slowed, and the Speed Force's connection became sluggish, like a river running thick with ice. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it was a very good problem to have solved.

Captain Cold led the Rogues — a criminal crew of considerable talent and unusual discipline. Mirror Master had his reflective portals. Weather Wizard controlled storms with a wand that generated impossible meteorological events. Heat Wave had fire, counterintuitively. The Trickster was unpredictable, which was, in a controlled way, a useful attribute.

They had a code. This was the part that surprised people when they learned about it. No killing. No targeting families. No pushing the Flash hard enough that he stopped being careful about what he used in return. Self-preservation through restraint — it was both practical and, in its own fashion, principled.

"We're not monsters," Captain Cold told Mirror Master once, when Mirror Master suggested that a particular job might benefit from being messier. "We're professionals."

The Flash understood Captain Cold better than most people would expect.

In a city full of criminals who operated on chaos and cruelty, Cold operated on order. There was, the Flash had grudgingly come to admit, something almost admirable about a person who held to a code even when holding to it made things harder. It didn't excuse the crimes. But it made the rivalry something more interesting than a straightforward chase.

Their encounters had a rhythm — almost a choreography. Captain Cold would arrive at a location with his crew, perfectly planned. The Flash would arrive, faster than planning could account for, and find a way through the cold gun's field. WHOOSH — he was there. ZAP — the cold gun fired, frosting the air in a wall of crystalline cold. The Flash vibrated, adjusting his molecular speed to match the frequency that let him phase through the cold — and then he was behind Captain Cold, hand on the cold gun's barrel, and the job was over.

"You know," Cold said once, standing patiently while the Central City Police Department approached, "I had a clean getaway planned for this one."

"I know," the Flash said. "I came in through the approach you'd blocked. The other one."

Cold looked at him. "You knew I'd block the main one."

"I know how you think by now."

Cold thought about this for a moment. "I'm going to have to redesign the whole methodology."

"Probably."

There was a short pause.

"Good fight," Cold said.

"Good fight," the Flash agreed.

And then the CCPD arrived and took Leonard Snart away for processing, and the Flash was gone before the first officer stepped out of the car, already three blocks away on something else, moving at the speed of purpose.

The Rogues always came back. That was the nature of the relationship — cyclical and professional and, in its strange way, honest. They tried to pull off jobs in Central City. The Flash stopped them. Nobody died. The code held.

And every time, Captain Cold had a slightly better plan than the time before. This, the Flash thought, running through the Central City streets with the wind pressing against his face, was the thing that kept him sharp.

A good rival, honestly, was a gift.