Timeless ❄️ColdFlash⚡

Chapter 8: Secrets Revealed and Tense Confrontations

When Cisco was seven, if someone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer would have been unironically: time traveler. Making a working time machine was one of his bucket list items that he knew could never be achieved, but damn would it be something if it happened.

Now he was making one. And all things considered lately, he had a sneaky suspicion that it might be the real deal. Not that it was an easy task regardless of Barry's diagram and blueprints. It had to open at one of the seams for Barry to get inside, be breathable once he was in so he wouldn't suffocate, and be made of a specific material Barry wrote down that could conduct electricity, which was not easy to find. It was going to take Cisco weeks to get it all right.

Wells asked him not to tell the others what Barry had called the machine so they wouldn't worry, which made sense. Everyone trusted that if Barry wanted Cisco to make something, it had to have a good purpose, but a time machine sounded crazy or at least frightening to most people. Still, it was odd. Wells in general seemed odd, which Cisco kept trying to dismiss. After all, Barry trusted him, didn't he?

Even reuniting with Ronnie hadn't garnered the response Cisco expected. Sure, Wells seemed pleased at Ronnie's return and interested in his new state of being with Professor Stein, but he was also wary, scrutinizing.

If Cisco didn't know better, he'd swear that sometimes Wells seemed...scared.

It didn't help his paranoia that he kept having these déjà vu moments he couldn't explain, where he'd swear something should have or would have happened differently. Residual temporal fallout from whatever had happened to Barry? Maybe, but it felt more personal. All Cisco knew was that he didn't feel the same connection to Wells that he used to, and he wondered what all of this had in store for them.

"Am I a time traveler too?" Cisco asked Barry while going over the blueprints once more, even though the materials hadn't arrived yet to start building. "Is that why I feel this way."

"You can feel the vibrations of the universe," Barry said, lying on the floor of the workshop as if he were staring at stars.

"I what?"

"You can't let your love for somebody cause you to be afraid of what might happen. You gotta take the good with the bad, no matter what."

Cisco's phone buzzed on his desk from the number he'd recently labelled 'GG'.

'Up to anything fun?'

"Was that advice about you, Barry?" he asked his friend. "Wells? Or Golden Glider?"

"Salted caramel's her favorite."

"Huh?" Nothing Barry said was ever truly startling anymore, though still strange. "Are you telling me to ask your criminal boyfriend's criminal sister out on a date?"

"I'm just so happy to be back with all of you again." Barry rolled into a sitting position, bright smile all for Cisco.

"You will be, buddy," he said, despite the melancholy sting always close at hand. "Whether it's from a time machine or whatever your symbols mean. I know it."

He thought he understood why Barry had started drawing on flat surfaces, then moved to corners, and now wanted a full cube to cover. He needed every dimension to make whatever he was trying to do work, though Cisco still wasn't sure how it would work.

If you build it, he thought with a wry smile, then texted 'GG' the address to his favorite ice cream parlor.

'Half an hour?'

'You're on, cutie. Without chaperones this time?'

'Unless Barry tags along, absolutely.'

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