The Rathaway family's feelings about their son's reappearance were, understandably, complicated.
The initial instinct had been relief — Hartley was alive, physically unharmed, not dead in a ditch somewhere after the accelerator explosion. That instinct had lasted approximately until they understood what he was actually doing.
Their son was smashing the windows of their buildings. Deliberately, repeatedly, with apparent satisfaction. When they called to confront him, he had been almost cheerful about it. He was having some health difficulties, he'd explained, which made coming home inconvenient. He was also developing a technology that required ongoing field testing and calibration. And since his parents were, by any measure, extremely wealthy, he felt that the windows of their commercial properties were a reasonable resource to draw upon.
The logic had not gone over well. The Rathaway had tried persuasion, then escalation, then threats — none of it had moved him. They couldn't go to the police without airing the family's situation publicly, and they couldn't ignore it, so they'd been quietly absorbing the damage and pretending it wasn't happening.
Then, just yesterday, after the latest round of window-smashing, Hartley had called his father specifically to reiterate that he was gay and intended to find a boyfriend — a fact he had mentioned before, several times, and which Russell Rathaway had apparently never found a way to file under "acceptable." The call had ended with Russell declaring the father-son relationship formally dissolved.
Jude, had he been briefed on the full situation, would have found Hartley's motivations fairly legible. The Rathaway, working with incomplete information, could only read it as rebellion. So when Russell had said we don't have a son by that name at the airport, the butler had correctly identified this as a topic to abandon, and had.
The couple was walking toward the terminal with the painting when the first beam of frost-white light arced into the sky.
The freeze gun's hum was unmistakable. Leonard Snart stepped into the open with the composure of a man who had planned an entrance and was satisfied with how it was landing.
"Ready?" He called it out to the assembled police line with genuine warmth. "Or do you need a minute?"
The Rathaway bodyguards moved immediately — couple in the center, painting secured, moving toward the vehicle. The officers, for their part, had been waiting for exactly this, and the memory of every prior humiliation at Snart's hands was doing useful work on their adrenaline. They raised Cisco's modified shields and advanced.
"Snart! This is your last chance — come quietly and we can talk about your sentence!"
"Officer." Snart tilted his head. "What's the difference between a hundred years and a hundred and twenty? Let's skip the speech."
He opened fire.
The freeze beams hit the shields — and stopped.
Snart paused.
The beams were spraying against the shield surface and losing energy. The officers weren't even breaking stride. He turned the gun to maximum output, and the temperature around them dropped hard — frost climbing up their trouser legs, breath crystallizing, the kind of cold that reaches bone — but the shields held. The line held. The freezing gun, at full power, was not breaking through.
Nearby, Cisco was wearing the expression of a man who had just watched a years-long guilt trip resolve itself. He had built the original freeze gun. He had watched Snart use it on police officers for months. Making the countermeasure had felt personal.
"We might not need to do anything today," Shawna said, watching the line hold.
Jude said nothing. He was watching the street behind Snart.
"Mick!" Snart turned and raised a hand. "Your turn!"
"Call me Heat Wave."
Mick Rory came around the corner wearing a white asbestos suit and carrying a weapon that should not have been able to do what it did — rifle-sized, handheld, and producing a continuous jet of flame that extended fifteen feet and hit the police shields like a wall.
The cold shields were not rated for this.
Five hundred degrees. A thousand. The air itself was distorting above the pavement, shimmering and warping under the heat output. The flames hadn't penetrated the shields directly, but they didn't need to — they found the gaps, the edges, the spaces between, and the officers behind them were burning. In under a minute, Joe's line had broken apart.
"Retreat — everyone back, now!" Joe's voice cut through the noise. He read the situation clearly: Snart's goal was to draw the Flash, not to massacre a police unit, and there was no reason to let his people burn for a standoff that had just become unwinnable. Everyone pulled back.
Snart watched them go and turned to Mick.
"They're out. Cease fire, Mick — the Flash will be here soon, we need to be ready—"
Mick was not listening.
His eyes were fixed on the fire. The specific expression on his face was not battle focus. It was closer to appreciation.
"Look at that," he said softly. "Isn't it beautiful."
The flames had found the Rathaway vehicle.
The luxury car — the one the couple had been moving toward, the one their bodyguards were currently trying to get them into — caught in the next second, fire racing along the chassis with the enthusiasm that expensive vehicles tend to display when ignited.
Snart's jaw tightened. He recognized the look on Mick's face and knew from long experience what it meant. Mick had stopped being a tactician approximately thirty seconds ago and was now simply a man watching fire, which was a version of Mick that took a great deal of effort to interrupt.
Shawna was already gone.