Work Text:
Things had been bad since Kendra broke up with him.
Cisco knew why she had done it. Her life had gotten swept up in a new narrative, and he wasn’t a part of it. Objectively, he knew that her departure wasn’t a rejection of him – wasn’t about him at all. Objectively, it made sense.
But Cisco’s self-esteem had never been particularly good at listening to sense.
After Kendra flew off, Barry and Caitlin were delicate with him, as if he were one careless comment away from a breakdown. Their solicitousness, which was intended to make him feel comfortable, had the opposite effect. The more cautious they were around him, the more he felt compelled to present a happy front. He joked, and laughed, and acted as if he wasn’t hurting, until finally, they believed it.
But he had been drinking when they weren’t around. Not too much: he knew that, at any moment, he might need to rush over to S.T.A.R. Labs for some metahuman emergency. He couldn’t get so drunk that he wouldn’t be useful if that happened.
(What was he to them, if he couldn’t be useful when they needed him?)
Self-loathing was an old reflex in Cisco’s mind: it was so easy to slip back into its well-worn grooves and pathways. In the space of just a week, it became automatic, the way it had been when he was still in school, still living with his parents. If a piece of Barry’s tech failed and put him in danger, it was because Cisco was worthless. If Caitlin went out with Barry one night and didn’t invite him, it was because they both despised him. If he forgot to email Joe back about the CCPD holiday party, it was because he was unfit for his job, unfit for adulthood, unfit for life.
He knew what he should do. He ought to reach out to Barry and tell him what was going on. Barry, his best friend, who radiated sympathy and hope and love as easily as he breathed. If Barry could see the worth in someone like Oliver Queen, surely he’d be able to see the worth in Cisco, and make it so that Cisco could see it again, too.
But it wasn’t Barry that Cisco turned to.
- - -
It was a little past 2 AM and Cisco had been alone in his lab for hours. The music blasting through his headphones wasn’t loud enough to completely drown out the venomous thoughts that kept drifting across his mind, but it shouted them down for a while. It also made it so he couldn’t hear anyone coming.
The hand on his shoulder came with no warning, and Cisco screamed. For a few heart-stopping seconds, he was sure it was Zoom, or Snart, or some other villain, here to kill him, or kidnap him to use as leverage against the Flash. He reeled away instinctively, knocking over a half-full bottle of beer, which spilled directly onto the keyboard.
When he saw Harrison Wells’ face, the panic did not disappear immediately. Cisco had gotten used to him being around, for the most part. But still, sometimes, if he rounded a corner and saw him without expecting to, his heart skipped painfully with fear.
“Holy shit, Harry, do not do that!” Cisco shouted, tearing the headphones from his head. He righted the beer bottle, but it had already done its damage. Cisco knew without even touching it that the keyboard would be ruined, that he would have to replace it. Nice going, you clumsy, worthless imbecile the nasty voice in his head chimed in, unhelpfully.
There wasn’t a trace of an apology in Harry’s face. Unlike Caitlin and Barry, his attitude towards Cisco had not changed at all since the breakup. Cisco knew that he knew about it: how could he not, when Caitlin and Barry kept pointedly asking Cisco if he was okay? Harry just didn’t care. If anything, he had been even more cold and inconsiderate, lately.
“Celebrating something?” Harry asked, with open derision. He nodded to the two empty bottles on the desk, and Cisco felt his face going hot with shame and anger. It was only a few beers. There was nothing wrong with having a couple drinks, during a late night of research. He didn’t need to justify his actions to anyone.
But he had been drinking for bad reasons, and he knew it, and he knew that Harry knew it, too.
“Yeah, I was celebrating going a whole day without seeing you, ‘til you ruined it,” Cisco snapped.
He might be a different man, but Harry’s face had the same immobile inscrutability that Wells’ had had. Cisco didn’t know if his words had irritated Harry, or bored him, or pleased him. It was still so strange, to look up at that face, rather than down at it. Cisco stood up so that Harry wasn’t looming over him so drastically, but he was still shorter by several inches. Cisco leaned back against the work station, worried that he might not be steady on his feet. He couldn’t stand the humiliation of wobbling.
“I need the data for the neutrino simulations,” Harry said, as if Cisco had not even spoken.
“I haven’t done them yet.” He did not have to apologize. He would not, must not. Harry was not Wells, and Cisco did not work for him. He didn’t need to earn his approval.
And it’s a good thing, too, since there’s no way you could manage to earn it even if you tried.
(Cisco couldn’t remember when his internal voice of self-hate had started to sound like Wells.)
“Then my trip down here was pointless,” Harry said.
He turned to go, and Cisco said suddenly, “It doesn’t have to be.”
This happened sometimes, when he had had a drink or two: he spoke without thinking, made decisions without even being consciously aware of it.
“What?” Harry asked, curt and disinterested. Cisco wanted to make him interested. He wanted to break that enigmatic calm of Harry’s, one way or another.
“I’d ask if you can keep a secret, but I already know you can,” Cisco said. No remorse from Harry, of course. He was alluding to the fact that Harry had kept his affiliation with Zoom a secret. But Cisco knew that part of the spite in his voice came from the secrets that had been kept by the other man wearing that face.
Harry crossed his arms impatiently. He clearly still didn’t get it. Cisco rolled his eyes and sighed, dramatically. “God, do I have to spell it out?” Then, because he knew Harry would think it was immature and crude, he made a circle between the index finger and thumb of his right hand, and moved the index finger of his left hand in and out of it, a hand gesture for fucking that he was pretty sure would be unmistakable, even if they didn’t use it on Earth 2.
Harry got it, then.
“You’re propositioning me,” he said, with a smile. It was the same kind of smile he’d had when Cisco had told him about being killed: delighted and mean.
“Yep. Just like old times,” Cisco said, recklessly. He wanted to say something that would wipe that smile off Harry’s face, and it worked. Harry went still, looking at Cisco as if had grown a second head, or spontaneously burst into flame.
“You were in a relationship with the other one,” Harry asked, voice stilted with surprise.
Cisco snorted at his phrasing. “We screwed. It was a thing.” It hadn’t been as simple as that, of course, but it was a better descriptor than ‘in a relationship’.
Cisco didn’t know if this Harrison Wells was interested in men. Technically, he had only ever known Eobard Thawne, in disguise. There was no reason to expect Harry would be receptive to propositioning. But Harry rejecting his advance could only be marginally worse than Harry accepting it, and Cisco wasn’t operating on reason, at the moment.
Harry took a step towards Cisco, then another. Something about the way he moved – deliberate, slow – told Cisco without words that he was interested. He looked Cisco up and down, appraising his body, and Cisco clenched his fists tightly. Harry’s third step brought him unquestionably into Cisco’s personal space.
“I thought –” Harry began, even as he nudged a leg between Cisco’s, pinning him against the work station. Cisco felt arousal begin to stir up in his body, prompt and obedient, “– you said he thought of you as a son?”
Cisco remembered when he had been coaching Harry to fool Grodd into thinking he was Wells. He didn’t know why he had chosen those words, in particular, as a gauge of Harry’s acting ability. Had it been a kind of confession?
“Yeah, he did.” His mouth felt suddenly dry. “Look, I never said it wasn’t a majorly fucked up thing.”
And then, because he didn’t think he’d be able to bear whatever Harry would say next, Cisco hauled him down by the shirt and kissed him. Harry kissed him back, demanding and harsh, just for a moment. Then he pulled away and just looked at Cisco. For once, his expression was perfectly readable: he was disgusted. Disgusted by Cisco, by his vulgarity and desperation, by what he had revealed about the dynamic between himself and the other Wells.
Under the weight of that stare, Cisco realized for the first time just how fucked up it must look from the other side. He had given Dr. Wells everything of himself—mind, heart, and body—without a second thought. And Wells had pretended to care about his heart, pretended to enjoy his body, because he had needed to use his mind. He had seen that the easiest way to manipulate Cisco was to capitalize on the fact that he was starved for love and validation, in any form he could get them, from any source whatsoever.
The whirlpool of bad feelings he’d been stuck in since Kendra had left had been no more about Kendra than her departure had been about him. She’d merely opened up the old wound. Loving her had been nothing like loving Wells. It had been soft, and good, and gentle: so much so that Cisco had almost started to believe he deserved something soft and good and gentle. But when she had left, he stopped believing that.
“And your friends don’t know about this.” It was not a question.
With sudden clarity, Cisco realized what he’d done. Harry was the last person in the world he should have trusted with this information. He would use the information against Cisco, sooner or later, the same way he had outed him as a metahuman. And when the others found out about this… Cisco didn’t know what he would do.
This was just one more thing that he had managed to fuck up.
Self-loathing was like a living thing inside Cisco, gnawing its way through bone and artery and organ. He wanted to hurt himself, badly. And he knew the easiest way to do it was standing right in front of him.
“So,” he said, defiantly, wishing he couldn’t hear the croak of suppressed tears in his voice, “you gonna fuck me or what?”
Harry smiled again and undid his fly, which was answer enough.
- - -
Cisco didn’t call Barry very often. Unless it was an emergency, he texted: everything from passing thoughts, to non-urgent updates about ongoing cases, to youtube videos, to internet memes.
So when Barry’s phone woke him up at 3 AM, and he saw that it was Cisco calling, he expected a catastrophe.
“What happened?” he asked, quick and businesslike, waiting for Cisco to tell him where to run.
But he didn’t say anything. Barry knew from the quick, stuttering sound of his breathing that Cisco was fighting off tears. He remembered when Snart had kidnapped him to get the identity of the Flash, when Vandall Savage had attacked him and Kendra and Barry had only barely caught the knife in time. He felt cold all over.
“Are you in danger?”
“N-no.”
Relief swept over Barry and he reassessed the situation. Cisco calling him up crying in the middle of the night was still an emergency, but it was a friend kind of emergency, and not a Team Flash kind of emergency. Kendra, he thought. It was probably about the breakup.
“Where are you?”
Barry waited a few seconds while Cisco debated whether or not to tell him.
“S.T.A.R. Labs,” he said at last.
Ten seconds later Barry was there, barefoot and in pajamas, the speed of his arrival sending papers scattering to the floor. Cisco was standing there, phone still in his hands, swaying a little on his feet. He looked rumpled and miserable. Barry saw the beer bottles, saw a bright bruise on Cisco’s neck that it took a few seconds to identify as a hickey. Its presence seemed totally incongruous with the situation.
“Hey, hey,” Barry said, softly, because Cisco’s face had crumpled at the sight of him, and he was really crying now. Barry tucked Cisco’s face against his shoulder without hesitation, holding him steady.
“I knew you were bullshitting me about being okay,” Barry accused, all warmth and concern. “I get it, Cisco. Breakups are the worst.”
“Wasn’t as bad as the one before it,” Cisco murmured.
Barry didn’t know what to say to that – he didn’t really know much about Cisco’s ex-girlfriends before Kendra.
“There’s something I’ve been… something I should have told you a while ago, but—” Cisco’s voice cracked, and he had to take a moment before he could finish, “but I couldn’t talk about it, and now I’m scared that once you hear it you’re not going to like me anymore.”
“Well, I doubt that’s true,” Barry reassured.
“It’s about Wells –” Cisco said, voice thick with tears, “– and me. It’s about Dr. Wells and me.” Something about the way he said the second and invested the word with additional weight and meaning.
The pieces fell together in Barry’s mind. The transition from bad breakups to secrets about Wells was too pointed to ignore. But, he realized, it wasn’t just that. A part of him seemed to have already known. It was not seeing something new, so much as it was recognizing the shape of something he had seen for a while now.
“I’m listening,” he prompted.
And so, haltingly, Cisco began to tell him.