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Chapter Text

“Harry!” Barry sped to a halt, and Caitlin lowered the gun she’d been pointing at him, as Harry stepped out of the portal, raising his hands. “What are you doing here?” 

“Can’t a person visit their good friends without being interrogated?” He scanned the room, frowning like they’d disappointed him, which they had. 

“We’re not interrogating you!” Barry defended, at the same time Caitlin sighed, holstering the gun and crossing her arms, and responded, “Cisco’s not here.” 

Immediately, Harry’s eyes stopped scanning the room and settled on hers. “Where is he?” 

“Gee, you make us feel so wanted.” She rolled her eyes. When Harry said nothing, silently prompting her to answer his damn question already, she continued. “It’s April twelfth.” And did not elaborate. April twelfth? Not Cisco’s birthday, not either of his parents’ birthdays, or even Dante’s. Not an anniversary of any sort Harry could think of. He even started running through his list of extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins (his mental catalogue of Cisco’s family was well-documented and well-researched) and came up empty. 

And, well, Harry did not get to be the most well-respected scientist on Earth-2 without admitting when he didn’t know something, so he finally gave up. “What’s April twelfth?” 

Caitlin’s lips pursed, and she had a look on her face that said, if Cisco didn’t tell you, I certainly won’t. Which meant… it was important. Intimate, and personal, somehow. And Harry wasn’t important enough or close enough to know what it was, yet. Clearly an annual thing. April twelfth. Something Cisco did alone, likely. Harry dismissed the possibility that it was some sort of medical treatment for an illness Cisco hadn’t disclosed, because there was no reason for something like that to happen on an exact date every year, even though terminal illness was the first thing his mind decided to jump to. 

“He’s visiting Hartley,” Barry said, clearly oblivious to Caitlin’s cues. Often, Harry despised his obliviousness. Now, he was infinitely thankful for it. 

“Hartley?” He turned to Barry, eyes narrowing. The familiarity of the name made a pang of distant loss echo through him, but he pushed it down. There were bound to be other people named Hartley (not many, but some, at least). 

Barry blinked at him. “You don’t…” he looked to Caitlin, who was shaking her head rapidly, “... know?” 

“Know what?” 

Barry’s face flushed a little and he looked away. “I- it’s not- if Cisco didn’t tell you, we shouldn’t-” 

“Allen. Where. Is. Cisco?” 

“Harry, it’s none of your-” 

He stepped forward quickly. “Don’t you dare tell me it’s none of my business. If something’s wrong-” 

“Nothing’s wrong! Calm down! It’s just… something he does once a year. It’s not-” 

“Who’s Hartley?” Harry repeated, and then, against his will, uttered a name he had not spoken aloud in several long years, “Hartley Rathaway?” 

And Barry winced. Which meant he was right. Which meant… 

“Where is he?” He looked to Caitlin, now. “You’ve never mentioned the Hartley Rathaway of this Earth before,” not that Harry had ever mentioned the Hartley of his Earth, “so why is he so important that Cisco has to visit him every year on April twelfth but doesn’t tell me?” 

“Harry, don’t-” 

“Because that’s when he died,” Caitlin said, her voice suddenly abrupt, and cold. Closed off. Harry blinked, and a wave of pain washed over him that he didn’t think he’d felt since Jesse had been kidnapped. Since Tess had left. Since- since he’d read Hartley’s letter (his Hartley, not that that Hartley had ever belonged to him). “Again, not that it’s any of your business.” Said like Harry wasn’t one of them, like he wasn’t part of their group, part of their secrets. 

But this wasn’t their secret. They weren’t the ones visiting a dead man. This was Cisco’s secret. Cisco’s secret that they were keeping for him, probably because he asked them to, and Harry was the asshole here, for forcing it out of them. Not that he wouldn’t have done this anyway, even if he’d known it was such a deeply personal secret. 

Obviously kept from Harry, specifically, because… 

“Were they-” Harry started, and didn’t finish his own question, because the answer felt obvious. Of course they had been. And who was Harry to judge? 

Hartley had been… 

He’d been brilliant. On Harry’s Earth, he’d been a shining star of ingenuity, sought after both as a brilliant theoretical physicist and as the rising face of his father’s company as Osgood grew ready to retire. 

Sought after, mostly, by Harrison Wells, by S.T.A.R. Labs. 

Years ago, when they’d first met. 

Despite his valiant attempts to, Harry would never forget it. Forget him. 

It was almost like courting, really. Recruiting brilliant people to work for him. 

Harry despised it, but he had to do it, to achieve what he wanted to. 

In Hartley’s case, it had been different. He was young, and genius, and fascinating, but Harry had first met him in person at a party, watched him do a line of cocaine off a coffee table before laying on the floor of the penthouse suite and exclaiming, apparently to no one in particular, because no one else was paying him any mind, “I’ve figured out what dark matter is.” 

And Harry was in love, from that moment on. 

“They’re gonna name an element on the Periodic Table after me,” Hartley had said, when Harry had sat on the couch next to him, while Hartley stared up at the ceiling from his spot on the likely-germ-riddled-and-disgusting shag carpet. 

“Really. You already have a company. Now you want an element, too?” 

“I’m greedy. And-” he sat up, wobbling a little but righting himself easily enough, “it’s not my company.” 

“It will be.” 

Hartley hmm-ed, like he didn’t believe that, and squinted at Harry. “What if I don’t want it?” 

Everyone Harry was forced to schmooze should be this easy and fun to schmooze, he thought, because then maybe he wouldn’t hate it nearly as much, and he reached into his blazer pocket, pulling out a cigarette and lighting between his lips. “Then come work for me.” 

His eyes unfocused and then focused again, and Harry hadn’t realized until that moment, exactly how out of his mind Hartley probably was. “Will you let me work on dark matter?” 

Harry laughed, and passed over the cigarette when Hartley reached for it. “Don’t have any in the labs.” 

Oh, how that would change. Not that Hartley would ever know about it (maybe if he had been there, he might have been able to stop it, he might have been able to fix it). 

Harry had named the element after him, not that anyone would ever know. 

But he did hope that Hartley, wherever he was by that point, saw the news, and had known. He would’ve seen the name, and he would’ve known. Harry hoped so, at least. If that was the one thing he could give him, he’d want it to be that. (Because Hartley had been right, in some respects, about the properties of the element he’d identified as dark matter, and Harry could only imagine the brilliance he would have contributed to the research following the accelerator explosion. If he’d been there).

Chapter Text

The first week after, Cisco had barely left the cemetery. Mostly out of anger. Out of stubbornness. Annoyance at the fact that it had cost him (or, Harrison Wells—really Eobard Thawne, if you wanted to get very specific) upwards of twenty thousand dollars for the goddamn burial in the first place, something that would have been half that cost had Hartley’s parents deigned to answer anyone’s calls when they’d been informed of his death, and allowed him to be placed in the Rathaway family crypt. 

The next week, he still wasn’t leaving the cemetery. That was the week he cried, and didn’t stop crying. 

Then there was the denial, because apparently the stages of grief didn’t follow each other the way they were supposed to. He may or may not have convinced himself that Hartley Rathaway had faked his death in an elaborate ploy, and that he was actually still alive and on the run and- 

Fourth week, Caitlin made him go to therapy. And also prescribed him something that made Cisco feel numb and exhausted all the time, but at least he could sleep, and at least his dreams weren’t about Hartley Rathaway. 

Things skipped after that, for a while. 

Fifth week fell into fifth month fell into a year fell into Dante being hit by a drunk driver (Dante had also been drunk, but his parents refused to talk about that part, even as it stared back at them from the toxicology report) and the lack of a funeral and- and Cisco went back to Hartley’s gravestone carrying his portion of Dante’s ashes, and sprinkled them over the grass before sitting down heavily and muttering, bet you assholes would’ve liked each other. Get acquainted. 

He told himself it was so he’d have somewhere to mourn them both. He hadn’t been back to visit Hartley in ages, so maybe it was just an excuse to see him again. 

There was a patch of dead grass around the grave marker (Cisco blamed Dante), and, Cisco, instead of lodging a complaint with the cemetery, simply returned the next day with an aerator and some fertilizer. No one paid him any mind. 

A few weeks later, the grass was green again, and Barry showed up at the cemetery. 

He was behind a tree, like he thought Cisco wouldn’t see him, and, honestly, he pretended not to for several minutes, sitting cross-legged at the grave, thinking in silence. 

He’d never really ended up getting along with him—Hartley or Dante. Obviously, not Hartley. Obviously. Considering… well. But he’d never ended up fully fixing things with Dante, either (obviously, obviously, things had been better with Dante than with Hartley). 

“What are you doing here, Barry?” he asked, finally, because he was sick of the lurking, and usually, by now, Cisco would start talking out loud, but Barry was kind of throwing him off his rhythm. 

Exaggerated stumbling that Cisco would probably find funny if it was being done by someone else, or by Barry in a different scenario, but whatever, as Barry made himself visible. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded genuine, but Cisco wasn’t about to give him any sympathy. “I was just… Caitlin told me about Dante. You know that. And you know how I-” 

“If you’re going to defend Flashpoint again-” he hated how cool that name was, “you can fuck off.” 

“Right.” Barry walked closer. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be here for Dante, but-” 

“Dante was cremated. My parents didn’t want him buried because he hated Central City. They scattered his ashes on the East Coast.” Because he was a pretentious dick. He’d be pissed to know even a portion of his ashes had been scattered, nonchalantly, on top of the grave of a man he’d never even met, in the middle of a city that he’d hated for most of his life. Fuck you too, bro. Or whatever. 

“What… happened to him?” 

Cisco’s head snapped to the side, and he glared at Barry, who shrank back immediately. “Before Flashpoint,” Cisco said slowly, “what happened to him? To Hartley Rathaway?” 

Barry swallowed, then glanced at Hartley’s grave marker, probably taking note of the date—April 12th, 2015. “As far as…” he gestured, “as far as April of 2015, I don’t know. He escaped the pipeline in… I don’t know, February? And we never saw him again.” 

“He escaped,” Cisco spoke hollowly, and his heart tore in two again, and his- he squeezed his eyes shut. “Barry, you have five seconds to get out before I blast you with a vibrational frequency that will make the nonexistent ghost of Hartley Rathaway say, oh my god, what frequency was that? I’m going to kidnap you and study you like you’re an atom in an electron tunneling microscope. Not that Hartley had ever known about Cisco’s powers. But he would’ve said that, if he could. He would’ve probably found Cisco actually interesting, for the first time. Oh, no. That hurt, too, somehow. 

“Cisco, what happened to-”

“I’m not fucking kidding.” 

That conversation was over three years ago. 

Barry had left, that day, and he’d never come back to the cemetery. Cisco was sure that Caitlin had visited Hartley. Or maybe Frost. One of them, at least. But none of them ever talked to him about it again. Cisco didn’t really know what he’d do if they did. Sometimes, he felt ready to talk about it, to move on, and other days he drowned in a wave of self-hate and wished he’d been the passenger in Dante’s car that night (who had also died. She was his girlfriend, probably, or maybe just a girl he’d met at the bar and was taking home. She was buried at the same cemetery, but Cisco couldn’t remember her name, because her family hadn’t wanted to speak to him). 

Eventually, Cisco stopped going so frequently. 

The dry spot around Hartley’s grave marker crawled back again in the summer, and this time Cisco left it. He left it until the cemetery people fixed it. They didn’t fix it, they just put new sod down. It died, too.

Chapter Text

Cisco took a deep breath, steeled himself to get punched in the face, hoped whatever cameras Dr. Wells had around the entirety of S.T.A.R. Labs would record this interaction in case he did, and approached Hartley, who was hyperfocused on his computer and hadn’t even noticed Cisco entering his lab, or was intentionally ignoring him (both equally possible). 

“Hey.” He crossed his arms, trying to feel confident, as Hartley jumped a little (yeah, he genuinely hadn’t noticed Cisco was here) and straightened up. “Why did you let Morrow take credit for six months of my work?” 

Hartley raised an eyebrow. “Oh, was it your work?” he asked mildly, and pointedly looked away from him. “Didn’t know.” 

He did. He did know. And he knew what he was doing, too. But Cisco could play this game. Actually, scratch that. Cisco had been playing this game. He was really fucking good at the game, too. And he was over it. He took a step forward. “Alright. Fine.” Another step, so he was right in front of Hartley, and considered dramatically falling to his knees before deciding debasement wasn’t worth the bit. “Mr. Rathaway, I am so sorry for infiltrating your perfect sanctuary of privilege with my non-whiteness. Is that what you want to hear from me?” And, honestly, Cisco thought he deserved points for that, because he didn’t think he’d ever seen Hartley look that dumbfounded and utterly speechless before, when he looked up from his computer again. 

“I-“ he started, and then cut himself off, obviously realizing he had absolutely nothing to say to that, and Cisco let him flounder for a little longer than he needed to, because it was nice to make Hartley Rathaway speechless, for once. 

“You, what? You thought you could get away with treating me like a second class citizen because my Spanish is better than yours? ” Hartley’s face was red. Cisco wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment, or anger. Or both. “Well, you’re not. I deserve this job. I deserve to be here. And I am not going to take shit from a racist asshole with white supremacist parents. I will fight you to keep this job if it fucking kills me. ¿Sabes?” 

Hartley’s mouth opened, and then closed again. Then he sat down, and stared at his computer screen like he was rearranging his life, before murmuring a barely audible, “Oh my God,” and looked up at Cisco again. “Can you-” he gestured to the chair across from him, “sit down. And shut the door, please.” 

Cisco sat down, but, pointedly, did not shut the door. Hartley didn’t comment on that fact. For a few seconds, they sat in silence, Hartley’s distress increasing incrementally. 

“It’s, uh, stupid,” he said eventually, the first time Cisco had ever heard him stutter while speaking, “for me to try to convince you I’m not…” it was funny how hard the word was for him to get out (Cisco would ask him if he had a single nonwhite friend, but he was pretty sure the answer to that was that Hartley didn’t have friends, so that didn’t say much), “racist.” 

Astounding he finally managed to say it. Cisco should give him points for that—and yes, Cisco did keep track of their social interactions on a point system. But he did that for everyone he knew. “I never meant to…” he swallowed, visibly, and Cisco tried not to laugh (keyword here being tried), “I’ve gotten a lot of people fired,” he said, instead of finishing his previous sentence. Cisco raised an eyebrow, having not expected that twist, and waited to see where it was going. 

“The first person was my supervisor. You know, I was nineteen when Dr. Wells hired me.” He always called him Dr. Wells when he was talking to other people, but the second the aforementioned man entered the room, it was Harrison. “He brought me on as an intern,” Hartley continued, “And everyone knew who I was. Everyone knew what happened when I was seventeen. That I was with a man who I thought I could trust, until he decided to make a quick few thousand bucks selling pictures of us to a tabloid. S.T.A.R. was- it was safe, for me, usually. When Dr. Wells was around. But my supervisor…” 

Hartley trailed off for a second, his lip curling in disgust. “He hated me. Maybe because I was smarter than him. Or, at least because I thought I was. I still think I am.” He waved his hand, like his humble-brag didn’t matter. “Anyway. He called me a faggot.” Cisco blinked, wondering if he’d flinched at the word. “More than once,” Hartley added, still not looking at Cisco. “And I tried to let it go, because Dr. Wells wouldn’t- he wouldn’t fire him on my word alone. He couldn’t, legally. That’s what he’d say, at least.”

Cisco took note of that, maybe the first time he’d ever heard Hartley utter a bad word about Dr. Wells. “Best he could do was put him on probation and make him take sensitivity classes. That only made things worse, so.” Hartley cleared his throat “So I logged into his email account and forwarded over all the emails he was sending to his coworkers where he was saying the same things. It was stupidly easy. Of course, Harrison knew it was me, but no one could ever prove anything.” 

Cisco blinked, trying to process all of that. “Is… are you saying it’s gonna be a lot harder to find proof of your biases? Are you threatening me?”

“Jesus Christ! No! I’m saying-!” Hartley stood up, waving his hands, and, in his defense (or, points to him). he seemed genuinely sincere, “I’m saying I know how it feels! And I- I never meant to hate you because you’re…” he paused, with all the awkwardness an afraid-of-being-insensitive white person could have, and Cisco took great pleasure in absolutely refusing to fill in the rest of that sentence for him, so it remained unfinished. Hartley huffed, running a hand through his usually-pristine hair. “My point is-” 

“You hate everyone equally,” Cisco finished for him. “Except that you don’t. You definitely hate me more, dude.” 

And Hartley leveled his gaze at him, and said nothing for a few short seconds, before he finally looked away and said, slowly, “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way. But I treat you the same way I treat everyone else.” 

And the thing that pissed Cisco off the most, was that it was a lie. Just like he’d always thought. Yeah, Hartley was a dick. He was a dick to everyone. But he was especially a dick to Cisco. Not because Hartley was racist (well, that could be a contributing factor, seeing as Cisco had never gotten specific clarification one way or another on that matter), but because Eobard Thawne had been showing favoritism and threatening Hartley’s very existence, as soon as Cisco had appeared. Of course he was jealous. Of course he hated and resented him. The man he loved was suddenly dangling the possibility of a new, shiny toy that would replace him and leave him with nothing. 

Obviously, Hartley had lashed out. 

But everything with Hartley, was obvious, in hindsight. And Cisco couldn’t say he would’ve done much different back then if he knew then what he knew now.

Chapter Text

It was Harry’s fault. Or, rather, he’d be happy to take the blame for it, if it had made any difference, but Hartley had been gone before that could’ve even been considered. 

The other man in the photograph had never been identified, because it wasn’t technically a crime to be gay on Earth-2 anymore, so there was no investigation. But the name Harrison Wells was thrown around frequently enough on internet forums that Harry was fairly confident in saying it was the widespread belief of the world that he was the one whose picture had been taken making out with the brilliant, famed, tech entrepreneur, Hartley Rathaway. 

When Hartley had been twenty-four. He’d been a year away from getting access to his grandfather’s trust fund, and he’d thrown it all away for Harry (not that Hartley had never kissed a man before, not that he’d never fucked a man before, but this was about the cameras, now). Not that he’d known he was throwing it all away, either. 

They hadn’t been together long, not long enough for it to matter as much as Harry wished it had, not long enough for him to convince Hartley that if his parents cut him off, that if he lost everything, Harry would be there, in whatever capacity Hartley wanted him to be there. 

It hadn’t been enough. Maybe it never would’ve been. 

The letter he left was short, to the point, and started with the simple sentence, before you panic, this is not a suicide note, but that doesn’t mean I want you to try to find me. 

Harry had not listened to that, not that it mattered, because Hartley Rathaway had vanished quite perfectly. 

He’d spent months looking for him. 

It would’ve been longer, if not for the accelerator. Or, maybe, the accelerator was because he’d been trying to find Hartley. And not paying enough attention to his life’s work. Love tended to do that. Or something. 

It was certainly easier to find the Hartley Rathaway of this Earth, though it wasn’t exactly simple. There were no articles about his death, no obituaries, and, upon locating the Rathaway family crypt, Hartley’s name was nowhere to be found. Apparently his parents had hated him on both Earths. 

The woman at the cemetery office was overly helpful almost immediately, looking up the name and pointing out the plot where he was buried on her map, and even offering to drive him over with her golf cart (Harry had to assume it was just because she wanted to drive the golf cart), which he declined. 

He spotted Cisco after only a few minutes, and approached him slowly. He was sitting cross-legged in front of a gravemarker, and Harry approached him slowly, not specifically trying to be quiet, but not trying to be particularly loud, either. 

Cisco saw him, or maybe knew he was coming, anyway, and turned toward him, his face blank of discernible emotion. 

“Barry told you where to find me?” 

Harry jutted his head toward the office he’d come from. “The cemetery woman.” 

“Bitch.” 

“Don’t call women bitches,” Harry muttered, watching Cisco shift slightly as he sat down next to him. 

“I’m calling you a bitch. For snooping.” 

Harry tilted his head. “Like I said. Don’t call women bitches.” 

Cisco sighed loudly, leaning back on his elbows. Harry watched the sunbeams hit the curls of his hair as he leaned back and wondered how one person could be so beautiful. Then he wondered if he’d ever had that thought about Hartley. Probably. “She finally comes out.” 

“Shut up.” Harry had not come here to talk about the gender stuff. He actually didn’t go anywhere to talk about the gender stuff. Ever. Unless he was grasping at straws for a subject change and desperately avoiding whatever the current topic was. 

He snickered, before his expression fell again. “How much did they tell you?” 

“That you visit him once a year, on the day he died.” 

“That’s it?” 

“I’ve… inferred some things.” 

“You’re good at that.” 

Harry couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or not. “I knew him,” he said quietly, and watched Cisco’s eyes slide from the sky to Harry’s face. “On my Earth.” 

Cisco didn't say anything for a minute, seeming to contemplate that, before he asked, slowly, “Did he work for you?” 

Harry shook his head. “I wanted him to. He was… on my Earth, Hartley was brilliant. One of the brightest people I’ve ever met.” 

“Yeah.” Cisco looked away from him again. “Here, too.” 

“I’m… sorry,” Harry said, stilted, and Cisco winced, like that had been the wrong thing to say. It probably had been. People had said I’m sorry after Tess, and Harry had hated it, then. Only Jesse had said I’m sorry after Hartley, and Harry had hated that even more, for different reasons. They sat in silence for a minute, before Harry decided to speak again. “Can I… tell you something, Cisco?” 

“You called him by his first name, Harry. You said all you need to.” 

He hadn’t realized he had. It came so naturally—more naturally, even, than when it came to Cisco’s name, though Harry used Cisco and Ramon interchangeably, because it was comfortable. Hartley had always been Hartley. It was impossible to imagine calling him Rathaway, and equally impossible that Hartley would accept being called that without throwing something at Harry. “I feel like… I could say some more.” If it’ll make you feel like you can share your past with me, too. You don’t need to keep secrets from me. We don’t do that anymore. 

“You’re going to make it worse.” 

He usually did. That also, usually, didn’t stop him. Not much stopped him. “We had… almost a year together.” 

“Harry-” 

“We met at a party. The kind of party for billionaires who are on the cusp of developing a drug problem. Luckily we met each other instead of…” He trailed off on that train of thought, and struggled to bring it back again. “I thought he was brilliant.” He’d said that already, and judging by Cisco’s expression, he hadn’t wanted to hear it again. Harry was very good at saying the wrong thing. Maybe he should bring it back to the gender issues. Might be easier. “I’m not telling you this to hurt you.” 

Cisco took a deep breath, looking a little like he might throw up. “Harry.” He reached out, about to touch Harry’s arm, before pulling it back again. “Stop. I need you to stop.”  

“What? Ramon, I’m trying to tell you that I’m not mad.” Harry waved his hand, as if that would help Cisco understand him, “Or- or jealous, or-” 

Cisco sat up on his knees, turning toward him and putting his hands on Harry’s shoulders. “No, Harry.” He took a deep breath, before saying his name again, calmly. “Harry. You’re making it worse, okay?” Harry opened his mouth to respond, before Cisco shook his head and let go of him. “Or, you’re not making it worse. I’m making it worse. Or, actually, I’m about to make it so much fucking worse.” He ran a hand through his hair, and then stood up, wrapping his arms around himself. “Because- Hartley- Hartley and I weren’t together. We weren’t even friends.”

Harry blinked, trying to re-orient. “Oh.” He waited, and Cisco seemed to struggle to elaborate, before falling completely silent, so Harry repeated himself; “Oh.” Then, after a pause, added, “Well then- what-” 

“I killed him.”