Cisco doesn't hit speed dial. He hits the panic button.
Barry is there in six seconds flat. It's five seconds too long: Cisco crumples and starts sobbing before he can get a single word out. Barry wraps him up in long lanky arms and asks in genuine concern, "Cisco? What's wrong?"
Cisco sobs, gasping for breath, weeping into his shoulder because Barry please help help help. He fists Barry's shirt and wails into the bone, HELP ME, because he can't do this again he can't he can't he can't Barry.
Barry holds on, literally shaking with the force of Cisco's sobs. He stumbles because Cisco shoves him backwards until they hit a wall, urging that Speed Force fire to go go go right now fix it fix this and Barry, dazed, just holds on. Even his lightning seems upset, curling around Cisco tentatively, and it is not and never will be enough and "I can't do this," he gasps, over and over.
"Hey, hey, shh, it's okay," Barry tries, hugging him tightly. "It's okay, I'm here, whatever –" His gaze wanders, then, and it clicks, and he stiffens all at once. "Cisco?" he asks, and there's an ashen paleness in his voice, like a field after a nuclear fallout, and when Cisco does not respond it escalates to panic. "Cisco?"
"She's gone," Julian says in a dead tone, and Barry recoils, rescinds, revokes his commitment to the universe underneath his feet and Cisco suddenly knows he will run and take no one with him.
So he gives Barry a shove hard enough to bruise, don't you dare don't you fucking dare, and Barry doesn't tell him to ease up because Cisco falls and Barry fractures, and if Barry doesn't catch Cisco he will drown, but if Cisco doesn't ground Barry he will fall to pieces.
Barry shakes underneath him, trying to get explanations from a stuck-on-loop Julian going I-don't-I-don't-know-I-don't-know-I-don't— and it takes almost three minutes for Julian to explain that she is still alive but Cisco cannot convince the tears to stop. He can't get his breathing back under control, either.
Suddenly he hates that Barry is a speedster because in a normal world he could just hug him and only him, but in their world, he must accept the lightning as well, an aching surrender and dauntless refusal to quit wrapped in a wave of emotions. He already has too many to hold, but he must hold these as well, because they're empaths, and they can't change that.
Barry leashes his own anguish, gets it under control in seconds, but he – he didn't watch he wasn't there he doesn't know and the sobs break through Cisco's ribcage relentlessly. Her name is on his lips and he tries and fails to say it, to scream it, to beg for her to come back because he can't he can't he can't –
Crushing him against his chest, Barry whispers on loop, almost too fast to hear, "Cisco it's okay it's okay we'll get her back we'll find her I promise it's okay it's okay."
Cisco has always believed that tone before because one cannot doubt Barry's sincerity. But it's not Barry he doesn't trust; it's the universe, the universe which exists, the universes which will always exist, which Barry cannot erase, and he aches for Dante like he hasn't since the night it happened, this isn't happening this isn't real this can't be real this—
Barry Flashes and they're in a small, dark room. They sink to the floor in some arbitrary room, an empty space in an empty world. Barry hugs him tightly, permissively, and Cisco takes what he is given.
He screams because he needs to, because he has to, and he is so grateful for the soundproof walls for the uninterrupted unbreaking darkness and silence and for the bright speedster warmth underneath him and Barry Barry Barry Barry.
He holds on and Barry keeps them above water; he anchors them and Barry stays.
Throat aching, his sobs die to thin, whistling gasps. Barry's insistence presses in on him, "I promise, I promise" over and over and Cisco can't respond. Couldn't respond if he was there again, and watching Caitlin Snow die.
Ronnie, he thinks. Hartley. Dr. Wells.
His team – his family – dissolved. Barry came in and attempted to glue the broken pieces together.
But now Caitlin is gone, too.
She's not dead, he tells himself firmly, but it doesn't change the emptiness, or the fact that Dante Ramon is dead.
Change it, he pleaded with a Barry who looked at him with such intense aching horribly sorry eyes that he wanted to punch him, to scream at him, because SAVE HIM.
But that Barry wasn't there anymore, walked out silently, arbitrarily, at some middle ground between the two worlds. Disappeared like he'd never been there at all. He left a gaping void in his wake, filled by the wrong Barry, an intrusive, intruder Barry, and at first Cisco hated him even more than the other one because we've argued this before we've been here before I have spent so many nights speaking to your blank wall and I never want to see you again.
Barry says in a deep rasp, "Cisco."
It's a place to refocus, and Cisco holds onto his t-shirt, onto him, and tries to breathe again.
"I'm here," comes the voice in the dark, invisible underneath him, as Barry's arms tighten around him a little. "I'm here."
Cisco leans against him, exhausted, disbelieving, caught between pain and silence, between a need to scream and a need to retreat because these wounds are too painful to even acknowledge. Don't tell me about them, he pleads the higher universe around him. I don't want to know.
He has no choice, must know, and Barry insists into the quiet, "It's going to be okay."
How can you possibly say that?
He wants to throw it in Barry's face – you watched her die – but he can't. Because he has and always will be Francisco Ramon, and there are certain grievances he will not air, certain pains he will not inflict.
Even on traitors, he thinks, remembering the other Barry who never knew Iris was going to die; and even on time travelers, he knows, acknowledging the Barry before him who knows Caitlin is—
She's not dead.
He exhales slowly and feels Barry's hand rubbing warmth into his back. She's not dead, he insists. His heartbeat starts to feel real again and a sense of almost calm pervades, his soul wrung out. She's not dead.
He presses his face against Barry's chest and does not cry, exhausted and worn out.
It still aches in his teeth, but for the first time his jaw feels unlocked. As though all of the tense conversations he never had with Barry were finally permitted to see the light of day. To move on.
Cisco feels Barry say it more than he hears it, "We'll fix it.I promise."
And Cisco dares to believe him.