#the fic @ me: [mr bennet voice] my dear i have the highest respect for your nerves. they have been my constant companions these many years

[qlala]

Long casefic mentioned: screaming crying tearing at the walls of my enclosure

listen I know I've been sooo lock and key about this one for years because I wanted it to be perfect before I posted any WIP snippets, BUT... 2024 we are all learning to say "death to perfectionism," so december 2023, I am also saying "After all, why not? Why shouldn't I share a little snippet?"

setting notes for the below: a CCPD precinct, a few months after Flashpoint. (If you never got there in the show, don't worry about it; Len doesn't know what it means, either.) Barry and Len haven't seen each other since Len tipped him off to the Trickster ambush the previous Christmas, and as far as Barry knows, Len has been off with the Legends ever since. (He hasn't been.)

It was fascinating to watch Snart pull the Captain Cold bravado around his shoulders, even with his hands cuffed to an interrogation room table and no parka in sight. He rolled his shoulders back, slouched down in the chair—as far as the cuffs allowed—and crossed one ankle over his opposite knee. Then he rolled his bored gaze insolently in Barry’s direction and raised an eyebrow. 

“Seems you have me at a disadvantage.” 

Barry realized his mistake, a moment too late; as far as the CCPD was concerned, he and Snart had never met.

“Right,” Barry said. He wasn’t an officer, so protocol was fuzzy on whether he was supposed to introduce himself to an... inmate? Had Snart gotten himself arrested again?

Snart’s smirk deepened at his obvious floundering, so Barry looked to Joe instead.

Joe gave him the same resigned look he’d just received from Singh, but unlike Singh, Joe took pity on him. He flipped shut the file he’d been reading, then slid it across the table toward him.

It came to a stop within inches of Snart’s fingertips, and Barry saw him test the cuffs covertly as if considering intercepting it. Barry picked it up before he could try, throwing him a knowing glare. 

Snart didn’t bother looking chastened. 

The file, Barry noticed, was thicker than most that passed through the CCPD. When he flipped it open and saw the FBI seal emblazoned on the front page, he understood why.

A paper clip held a picture of Snart to the next page: a recent shot, judging from the hints of gray in his hair. Barry started to turn the page, then became aware of the twin looks of apprehension he was receiving from Joe and Snart. When he glanced questioningly at Snart, he looked away, feigning interest in his handcuffs. Barry looked to Joe instead, and felt a prickle of uneasiness when Joe only shook his head, knuckles pale where they were wrapped around the back of the empty metal chair across from Snart.

Barry flipped forward in the file. The next few pages were background on Snart, with no major changes from what Barry had expected. He was familiar with Snart’s rap sheet already, and the psychological profile they’d drawn up on him was about as accurate as a tabloid horoscope. He did feel an old pang of guilt when he passed a memo noting the unexplained disappearance of Snart’s electronic files, but it was getting easier to brush that feeling aside every time.

Unsurprisingly, the medical records from Iron Heights were sparse. Several pages were entirely blank, but there was a scribbled correction stapled to the bottom of one, noting, of all things, a severe food allergy to pineapples. Barry couldn’t help but grin at that; for such a mundane detail, it had apparently only recently been wrested from Snart, and with great effort. 

He skimmed the rest of Snart's section. It was obvious that—tropical fruit allergies aside—the FBI knew less about Snart than he did. He pulled up short, however, when he turned to the next section and found another photograph clipped into the file.

“What is this?” He looked up at the answering silence, but Snart avoided his gaze, and Joe crossed his arms with obvious discomfort. “Joe?”

“Bartholomew," Snart interrupted, before Joe could answer, and Barry looked over at him in surprise. Snart gave him a slow, knowing smirk. “It is Bartholomew, isn’t it?” 

No one had ever said his full name with such obvious relish, and Barry seriously considered throwing back a Lenny just to see how he liked it. But he caught himself in time, and he bit back an exasperated sigh.

“How do you know my name?” he asked. 

It wasn’t very convincing, and a flicker of annoyance crossed Snart’s expression, obviously displeased that he wasn’t playing along with proper enthusiasm. Then the smirk was back, and Snart leaned back in his seat with an air of indifference. 

Barry watched him suspiciously; he looked far too in control of the whole situation despite being the one handcuffed to the table.

“Feds didn’t tell me much,” Snart said. “But this…” He dragged his gaze down and back up Barry’s body in a long, appraising look. “This, I can work with.” 

“Joe,” Barry repeated, pointedly ignoring Snart. There was a slightly hysterical edge to his voice, though, and Joe sighed and unfolded his arms. 

“What do you know about the Morellos?” 

Barry blinked; whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that. The name was vaguely familiar, and it took him a few moments to put together where he’d heard it before. 

“They’re an East Coast crime family,” he said, slowly. He looked to Joe for confirmation, and Joe nodded. “They practically ran Metropolis during Prohibition. Not much from them, since? I think they’re still active, but… they’ve mostly been pushed out by other Families.”

“Someone’s been listening to his podcasts.”

Joe didn’t so much as glance at Snart for the interruption, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “Until recently, that was the case,” he said. “Members of the other Families have started dropping like flies, and the FBI thinks the Morellos are moving to take back power.”

Barry flipped through the file until he found a brief on the topic, and nodded for Joe to continue. 

“Last year, they worked out some kind of alliance with the Russian mob,” Joe said, “and now they control ninety percent of the heroin passing through Metropolis. The FBI couldn’t figure out what they were trading for that kind of power, until they realized the drug deals were lining up with major art thefts in the city.”

Barry glanced up from the brief, thrown by the apparent non-sequitur. “What would the Russians want with stolen art?”  

Snart snorted, and Barry turned to him with a raised eyebrow. 

“Universal value,” Snart explained. He swept his palms in a broad gesture, though it was restricted by the limited reach of the handcuffs. “Markets crash, currencies fall. A Picasso stays a Picasso. And canvas is easier to smuggle than gold.”

There was a certain logic to it, though Barry suspected it was a lot more complicated than Snart was making it sound.

“And, what, you’re involved with this?” he asked.

Snart actually looked insulted. “Drug trade’s a nasty business,” he said, a curl to his lip despite his light, almost bored tone. “Messy work. Lotta bribes, lotta bodies. Hard to make a profit when the product keeps killing your buyers. Not my scene.”

“What’s this got to do with you, then?” Barry asked. He pulled the second picture out of the folder and held it up. “Or me?”

It was a copy of the photo from his CCPD identification. It was a few years old—his hair was longer on top, his shoulders a little narrower—and Snart’s lips twitched in amusement.

“Cute,” he said. 

Barry rolled his eyes and slid the picture back into the file.  

“Snart’s managed to get it into the FBI’s head that he’d make a good criminal informant. Apparently, he’s an expert in modern abstract expressionism,” Joe said, the last part clearly a quote. When Barry turned to him, surprised, Joe only shrugged. “I know. Surprised me too.”

“Learn all kinds of interesting things in my line of work,” Snart said, picking idly at the edge of his handcuffs. “Ab Ex dominates the market, has for decades. Post-War’s always in style. It's easy. People get it.” 

His fingers didn’t curl around air quotes; they didn’t have to, his voice going vapid in a way that almost, almost pulled a smile out of Barry. Leonard Snart, closet art snob.

 “Unspeakable horrors,” Snart continued, with a lazy, ‘and so on’ twirl of his fingers. “Expressible only through feelings over form…” He circled the gesture back the other way, with momentarily distracting, long-fingered grace. “Yada-yada-yada. Modern art fan, Bartholomew?”

He was having too much fun with the name, and Barry gave him a flat look for it. 

“Barry.”

Snart’s lashes dipped on another once-over before he met his gaze again, eyes sharp and amused. “Pleasure.” 

Barry didn’t need the way Snart leaned hard on the word, drawing it out even as his lips curled up at one corner, to tell him he’d walked right into that trap.

Snart lifted one hand and twisted the cuffs to extend the other out toward him, as close to offering a handshake as he could manage. “Leonard Snart. At your service.”

Doubt it, Barry thought. But he bit back the comment and crossed his arms instead, folding his hands pointedly against his sides, then said, “Yeah. I know.”

Snart’s eyebrows lifted at the slight, and he lifted both hands in surrender. “Ouch.” He dropped his lashes on a private smirk just to flick his gaze back up again, not finished with the taunt yet. “Thought we might have something in common. Civilian to civilian.” 

Even the decades-old camera in the corner could probably pick up the amount of irony dripping from Snart’s voice, but Barry’s warning glance didn’t deter him in the least. 

“What with you being an employee of the CCPD,” Snart said, tilting one hand in Barry’s direction before curling his fingers back to indicate himself, “and me being an employee of the FBI…”  

“Criminal informant's not an employee.”

Barry didn’t jump at Joe’s correction, but it was a near thing. What was it about Snart that made it so easy to forget that there were other people in a room? 

“Tomato, tomato,” Snart drawled. He didn’t so much as glance in Joe’s direction, attention still trained on Barry. “Feds want me to infiltrate the local underground in Metropolis, see if I can't rustle up a few Morello 'associates.’” That time, he did curl his fingers in quotation marks around the word. “I pass along the names, the feds arrest them. Everybody goes home happy.” He paused, then added, “Morellos excluded.”

Barry was tempted to ask Snart how long he’d been waiting for him to ask, but he had more pressing questions. “And you agreed to help, what, out of the goodness of your heart?” 

Snart leaned across the table towards him with a dangerous smile, handcuffs scraping pointedly over the metal surface. 

“Let’s agree to disagree about the goodness of my heart,” he said, and any lingering concerns that Barry might've had about Snart might not know exactly who he was disappeared at the private gleam in his eyes over those words. “But no. Feds had a little chat with the District Attorney here in Central City. Detective West knows the details, but—“ He drummed his fingers on the table, then ticked his head toward one shoulder in a shrug. “Like I said. Everybody goes home happy.”

When Barry looked at Joe for clarification, Joe shifted his hands to his hips before pulling his glare away from Snart, one hand settling pointedly beside his gun.

“The Mayor of Metropolis reached out to our governor," Joe said. "They’re talking pardons.”  

“Yahtzee.”

There were a hundred follow-up questions Barry could’ve asked. But Snart was clearly still enjoying himself too, and Barry wasn't in the mood for more roundabout non-answers. So Barry turned his back on Snart and faced Joe head-on. 

“I still don’t understand,” he said. “What's my role here?” 

“For the record," Joe said, slowly, almost placatingly, "I told Singh this was a terrible idea.”

Joe hedging was never a good sign, and for the first time, Barry felt the stirrings of real apprehension in his chest.

“You told Singh what was a terrible idea?”