#chemfrost

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As the clock winds closer to midnight, The Chemist's arm winds around her waist, and she has to resist the urge to say something off script because she knows he won't appreciate the distraction on the job. Now's the time to play nice, if not a little naughty – though the kind of naughty they intend to be is rather different from this act they're putting on as they weave across the room towards a particular corridor. No one pays much heed to two drunken party-goers sneaking off to find a darkened corner with a normal enough bottle of champagne in hand. Of course, in the hands of The Chemist - with his arsenal of powders and liquids snuck in under the guise of her perfume atomizer and makeup compacts – it's not going to remain ordinary for too long.

Once they're out of sight of the main room, she flexes her fingers in anticipation of wielding her powers again finally. She's been itching to ice something all night, bored of pretending to be someone inconsequential so as to not stand out of the crowd. Having to hold all her impulses inside isn't so much her style, but it's his style and this is his plan. His plan that involves a lot of hands on work from both of them.

There's still the camera in the corner to deal with. He drops the bottle and she smirks at him as he pushes her up against the wall, bringing his face impossibly close, keeping up the pretense of two lovers. In reality, he's shielding the unnatural bright white of her eyes from the camera. His eyes are dark and he's breathing awfully fast as his body almost presses up against her for the ruse – he'd probably claim it's the adrenaline from the heist that has him amped up, nothing to do with her, but she's enjoying it nevertheless, as a possible taste of something they could revisit later on. He holds up one of her hands against the wall, and with the way he's angled, anyone viewing the footage might assume her other hand is held up on the other side. Instead, she reaches down to the side and threads the icy mist from her fingers into the nearby electrical socket. Just enough to short-circuit it and kill the lights and cameras that are foolishly on the same circuit breaker for this floor. The mark is paranoid enough to have a top-of-the-line vault installed, the kind that would have even Leonard Snart pausing for thought and possibly getting caught on a bad day, but that seems to have made him lax on other measures. They had the good sense to check for weapons and electronic devices before admitting anyone on the grounds, as well as for ready-made explosives, but not for the less usual constituent parts of what could be one and the same.

They don't have much time once the camera is out before someone investigates in person, hurrying down the corridor to one of the rooms above the back end of the vault. The Chemist counts out the steps from the door and then the contents of her purse are tipped out for him on the floor, with her holding up a burner phone as a torch for him to work by. She watches him set up the concoction of his and then collect up the items back into her purse. He stands back to a safe distance, one hand pushing her back with him though he doesn't look at her as he does so. He preps the champagne ready to pop the cork, shaking it a little. With his sleeve pulled back, his focus is pinpoint, eyes on his watch. Waiting for the clock to strike midnight and the fireworks to start. The perfect timing for the spray of champagne setting off a relatively small reaction to get a view into the vault. It won't be enough to break in in the usual way, but then again, they aren't aiming to steal most of the contents. There's just one thing in that vault of interest to The Chemist and it's certainly not the gold bars stacked high further across in the room below.

“Time to do your thing,” he says, moving away from the hole to give her room and allowing her to see the destroyed glass cabinet underneath the scene of the explosion. She spots their quarry quickly, building a dish of ice around the strange green crystal and then extending a solid column up beneath it to bring it within reach of her hand. She stows the rock rather conspicuously in her purse – if all goes to plan searching fleeing guests will seem the least of the security's problems.

Meanwhile, The Chemist has extracted from a fake topped lipstick the final piece to his meticulously planned puzzle of how to get away with this all. With his latex-gloved hands and a pair of eyelash curlers acting as tongs, he carefully holds the unremarkable-looking hunk of something at a distance. All business right now, he nods curtly to her and she dials up the single number in her phone.

“Belated Happy New Year, Ramon. ”

“It's about time, I'm so over this party.”

“You got about a minute to get in position.”

She ends the call abruptly and finds her accomplice staring at her inscrutably.

“I'll give you 30 seconds head start. You might want to brush yourself off first,” he says, indicating with his free hand to her dress that is less than pristine after the debris of his first science experiment. She shakes her hair free of the dust and gives the dress a once-over.

“What about you?” she asks.

He grins then, briefly, as if her concern is amusing. She doesn't usually have partners to keep track of so it's disconcerting to feel these things, and if she had the time she might try to explain it away so he doesn't get the wrong idea about their team-up.

“Don't worry about me, I'm fast. I could give The Flash a run for her money,” he says deadpan, and then turns back to the plan at hand, already reaching through the hole to drop the item into position.

She counts to 30 as she heads in the opposite direction to where they entered the floor, to avoid the complication of running into any security from that end if she can. She speed walks rather than sprints, hoping to look less conspicuous if company does turn up. The aim, as The Chemist kept reminding her all evening twitchily, was to not leave any hard and fast evidence behind – or witnesses of her powers to ID her. She wonders if he really is as fast as he thinks. Or as good at calculating the time they have before his clean-up strategy goes bang.

She lingers at the door at the end of the corridor, waiting until she sees The Chemist turn the final corner, running towards her. By the time he reaches her he's thoroughly out of breath and he yanks her through the doors, apparently forgetting she's not really in any danger given her healing abilities. Not to mention, there's plenty of distance already put between them and that mock chemical fuse of his - the rest of the champagne spiked with something a little more potent from her atomizer to combine explosively with the other mystery ingredient.

They stumble back into the party hand in hand, looking as disheveled as might be expected after a surreptitious rendezvous. She lets him pull her along with him into the throng of dancers and they end up jostled about by the crowd and pushed together much closer than they were earlier. She's close enough she can just about hear her partner counting under his breath, nearing the end of his countdown to the much bigger explosion to hide the evidence they were ever in that vault. And to Reverb's decidedly pricey accompanying wipe of the security data for the villa, that's as good as setting off an EMP, but without setting off any pesky scanners on the way in. Unfortunately for the attendees, there won't be many surviving digital mementos of the night's festivities, just the memories soon to be soured by their impromptu fireworks.

The Chemist's eyes are wider than normal as he tries to catch his breath next to her, and his gaze darts around as if he doesn't know where to look when he's faced with her in close quarters without any plan for the precious few seconds left. No one is looking at them right now, there's no real act to keep up except they can't flee before they have reason to. The combination of the explosion in the vault and Reverb's pulse rocks the building soon enough though, and people around them scream. But she's preoccupied at that precise moment with her lips pressed to those of the mastermind behind it; stealing his breath away and all his composure with it. When he gets his wits back about him, he kisses her back hungrily, ignoring the chaos around them. She gets lost in the feel of the heat of his body pressed up against her but the moment is over too soon. He breaks it off, but doesn't step back right away - he takes one final moment in her orbit to take her in, with a small smirk on his face. It's almost a smile, almost like he's gone soft on her.

“Happy New Year,” she says, unusually quietly, as if that alone explains why she kissed him. A nice neat excuse, when she shouldn't need one really because she does what she likes and she doesn't need to justify it. Except to herself.

“We better get out of here before they figure out what's happening.”