(A/N) This is not in the Two Steps Back series. Mostly I'm just playing with a concept.
Resonance
Tick, tick, tick, goes the pen against the desktop. Cisco wants to reach over and grab it out of the neurologist's hand.
"An MRI? Really?"
"Just a precaution," Dr Feinmann says. Tick, tick, tick. "Just to rule out certain possibilities."
Cisco's cousin Linda had been trying to teach him how to salsa dance for most of their lives. At her brother Marco's wedding, she dragged him out to the floor and he resigned himself to another half a song of being hauled around, then dumped back on the sidelines when she lost patience.
Two songs in, she stopped and stared at him. "Have you been practicing?"
"No," he said, as baffled as she was.
She swatted him. "I know you. You cooked something up just to mess with me."
"Um, been a little busy, if you hadn't heard." The disaster at STAR Labs was only a month old, and he'd had to trim this trip to the bone in order to get away at all. He was going to the airport from the reception.
She shook her head. "Why you keep working there, huh?"
"I like it," he said, daring her to keep going.
She did, because that was his family. "You know Uncle Arnie's a big shot. He could get you any job you wanted."
That was an exaggeration. Arnulfo Banazewski was a medium-size shot at best, and the car companies were so far down the crapper they were in the U-bend. If they were hiring, it wouldn't be a twenty-two-year-old PhD whose only job to date had been at an R&D firm that had just plunged to earth like Icarus, trailing melting wings.
Instead of going through all that (again), Cisco said, "I don't wanna move back to Detroit and I don't wanna work at GM. I like STAR Labs."
"How much longer -"
"C'mon, Linda, let's dance."
After a third song, she dragged him off to the sidelines, but not to dump him. "Ma!"
"Mande?"
"You see Cisco dancing?"
"Yeah," she said. "You got a girl in Central City, mijo? Someone who takes you out?"
He kissed her cheek. "Who could compare to you, Auntie?" He tried not to think of Caitlin Snow, pale and brittle in her new grief. Even more, he tried not to think the nasty little thought that Ronnie Raymond was out of the way now, forever.
She swatted him. Linda had come by her penchant for affectionate violence honestly. "You're so far away, how do I know?"
"I'm okay." He stuck a finger in the sauce on her plate, grinning at her exasperated noise. He licked the mole off his finger and frowned. It was a little sweeter than usual. "Don't I call every week?"
"When I'm at the weekly department meeting." His aunt was the assistant dean of the School of Health Sciences at EMU, and he'd lived with her in Ypsi while he'd gone to school. She still thought he needed a curfew and reminders to brush his teeth.
He shrugged. "It's the best time."
"Huh. You just don't want me nagging you."
He grinned. "Like I said. The best time."
She swatted him again. He ducked and went to get his own plate.
When he came back, Linda said, "But seriously, Cisco. You've never danced like that before."
He shrugged and took a sip of beer. "I swear I haven't been practicing or anything. Maybe all those lessons finally clicked."
"All of a sudden your feet knew what to do?"
"Yeah, I - maybe." The dancing seemed obvious now. Your feet went here, your body moved there, finding its fit in the music. He could feel it in the hip-hop that was playing now. Even though a vague headache was starting to beat in time with the song, he tapped along.
She grinned smugly. "I told you it was in your blood. C'mon."
"Hey," he protested when she grabbed his hand and hauled him to his feet. "I'm not - I just got food!"
"I've, uh, read up on this and everything I've read says it's normal. Well maybe not normal. But nothing to be concerned about."
"If it's a lifelong condition. But this came on very suddenly, by your own admission. Coupled with the headaches and your exposure to the particle accelerator disaster at STAR Labs last year - " Tick, tick, tick.
"Right. No. I get it." He swallows. "Okay, when?"
At first, Cisco thought the problem was his teeth. He went to the dentist, something he'd been steadfastly avoiding for about four years.
The dentist filled two minor cavities and said, "That seems to be it."
"Really?"
"Mhm. Were you expecting worse?"
Cisco didn't hop up and book it for the door like he usually did. Man, he hated the dentist. "Ummm."
Dr. Jones started to take off his gloves.
"I've been getting weird tastes in my mouth. I thought it might be cavities."
The dentist sat down, one glove on and one glove off. "Sour? Metallic?"
"Yeah. And sweet. Bitter. Spicy. Everything really. When I'm not eating. Just random."
A drill started up in the next room and the doctor had to pitch his voice a little louder to compensate. "Is it happening now?"
A tart sting like biting into a lemon jabbed at his tongue. "Yeah."
More questions. More frowns. But they were puzzled, not concerned. "There are any number of things this could be chalked up to, Frank."
"Cisco," he corrected. "Like what?"
"Oh, sinus infection, nutrition, some problems with the salivary gland - you're not getting a burning sensation in your mouth, are you?"
"Only when I get the extra hot salsa at Taco Galaxy."
"You haven't lost any tastes? Unable to sense sweetness, for instance?"
"Nope. Opposite really. You said sinus problems?"
"That's a possibility. Have you been getting headaches?"
"Off and on, but they don't really feel like they're in my sinuses."
Dr. Jones frowned again, still puzzled. "Give it a little time, Frisco. It might go away. Let me know if it doesn't."
"Cisco," he said again, and decided not to come back.
He doesn't tell anyone about the test. Not Barry, not Caitlin, sure as hell not Dr. Wells. He just calls in sick and rides the bus to the clinic.
He hasn't been able to drive for about three or four months. He told the others he was trying to reduce his carbon footprint. They believed him.
Cisco had always kept candy at his desk - lollipops and chocolate for that little pop of energy when he was working on something and even heating up a cup of noodles would be too much time away from his workbench.
But as the federal investigation into the explosion wore on, and on, and on, he started accepting the gum that the agents offered him, or bringing his own. The taste of spearmint disguised the sourness that filled his mouth at the skepticism in their voices.
The day one of them asked him if Wells had any reason to sabotage his own particle accelerator, and made him listen to the scream of the accelerator overloading, he had to switch to cinnamon. The gum killed the taste in his mouth, but not the headache that clamped onto the top of his skull and didn't let go for two days.
They went away eventually, along with most of the other employees of STAR Labs, the ones who hadn't bailed immediately after the explosion. It was only him and Caitlin left, and Dr. Wells when he got out of the hospital.
Dude had been paralysed. He was a para-freaking-plegic. How could those agents think he'd had anything to do with the explosion?
So it was the three of them, and the wreckage of the accelerator.
Well, them and the guy in a coma that Dr. Wells had brought back from the hospital, like a goody bag. Bartholomew Henry Allen, although the two people who came and sat with him every day, just about, called him Barry.
Cisco still didn't know why Dr. Wells didn't just shut down the place. They weren't doing anything except making sure Coma Guy didn't die, and that didn't have much to do with Cisco himself. He didn't actually mind, because he got to spend his days fixing whatever caught his eye, and trying out new gadgets to see what they would do. Not a bad gig.
Still, it was like Wells was waiting for something to happen. Something big.
He makes jokes about showing off his ass in the hospital gown, and the techs and nurses smile the smiles of people who had heard every possible joke about five times that week.
When he ran out of contacts, he was actually relieved. Right, his eyes! Duh. His prescription had probably changed on him. These headaches were probably eye strain. He made an appointment with his optometrist.
They were running behind, so he wandered around the waiting room, reading the posters and pamphlets that were pretty much written to scare the crap out of you. He stuck a pamphlet on cataracts back into the display and then saw the one behind it.
Visual Hallucinations it said.
His fingers rested on the corner. The heavy, glossy paper pricked his finger.
Hallucinations were, like, pink elephants in the post office and giraffes riding the subway. The multicolored dots at the edge of his vision, the gauzy waves and swirls of color, were probably from too much time at the computer screen.
The door opened. "Cisco?" Orange and red flickered off to the side. "I'm ready for you. Sorry about the wait."
He turned with an easy grin. "No big."
"So how are you doing? Anything you'd like to report?"
"Nope," he said, settling himself into the exam chair. "All fine. Just need more contacts."
When the exam finished up - his prescription had changed - he stood in the waiting room looking at the pamphlets again. His hand hovered over the one about hallucinations.
His phone vibrated with a text. The patient is showing signs of consciousness, from Caitlin. Wells wants us both there.
It was probably another false alarm, but he took off anyway, glad to be distracted by Coma Guy.
He lies back and watches the ceiling disappear as he slides into the tube. The burr of the mechanics slide velvety over his skin and taste like chicken noodle soup. Good machine. Well maintained. He wonders if they'd let him look at it after his test.
For a guy who'd graduated high school before he could drive, Cisco felt pretty stupid when he finally worked out the common denominator.
But his world was filled with sound. The A/C, rushing away in the background. The honk and squeal and hum of traffic on the street. The whir of the treadmill as Barry tried out his speed. The fans on his computers, the murmur of voices in the apartment next door.
It wasn't until he tried out noise-cancelling headphones for the first time that the penny dropped. He was researching them because Barry said the whoosh of air past his ears and the Dopplering of car horns made it really hard to focus on whatever the rest of the team said over his comm.
Cisco popped them on, flicked the switch, and everything just - faded away.
The tastes, the smells, the glitters of color. All gone. Even, he realized, the subtle pressures against his skin like soft touches, something he'd barely begun to notice. Gone.
He blinked a few times, sniffed the air, swished saliva around his mouth. No. Still nothing.
He slowly lifted the headphones, letting the world in again.
A veil of blue layered itself over the top right corner of his vision. He turned to look at the vent in the ceiling, pushing out warm air.
A door whooshed open, and Caitlin's voice floated through, talking to Wells about something. The words trailed green behind them and smelled like burning leaves - smoky and pleasant.
"Awesome," he breathed, and the taste of caramel filled his mouth.
The machine starts up, and he jumps at the first noise, a blaring alarm like the siren that had heralded the particle accelerator disaster. It tastes sour enough to have him scraping his tongue against his teeth, even though he knows that won't do any good.
The tech says over the mike, "Cisco, the less you move the better picture we get."
"Yeah, okay. Yeah." He swallows and tells himself to wait it out. He'd begged for gum. They'd said no. Something about his jaw moving too much.
The blaring klaxon goes silent, for three breaths. Four. Then a rolling monotone, interspersed with distant beeps like some strange sonar. It's still insanely loud - though loud noises don't make his ears hurt anymore - but there's something weirdly pleasant about it.
He folds his hands over his stomach and watches the waves of chocolate-coffee-soil brown sift and roll over the interior of the tube, dotted with pops of yellow. It's a nice color.
"Cait?"
"Mmm?"
"What's that thing where you can taste colors and stuff?"
"Acid trip?" she said tartly.
"No, I mean without drugs."
"Oh. Synesthesia."
"What again?"
"Synesthesia," she said slowly and distinctly. "Neurological pathways are crossed so that input from one sense registers in another."
"Synesthesia," he echoed, watching the word slide away from him like mercury, glimmering and silvery.
She chattered about possible causes of synesthesia. Cisco was distracted by her glittering words - cerebral cortex, limbic system - interlocking gears that tasted as crisp as fall apples. "Why do you ask?" she said finally.
He didn't want to tell her because she would frown and talk about tumors and meta-abilities and as far as he could tell this was just cool. He shrugged. "It popped into my head randomly and I couldn't remember the term. Synesthesia? Syn-es-the-sia."
"Cisco?"
The colors of his name varied slightly from person to person. When Caitlin said it, the orange went light and sweet, almost yellow. Like a peach.
"Cisco?" she said again, and now there was a worried edge to it, like the peach had been sitting in the fridge too long.
He grinned at her. "Words are fun."
Her forehead crinkled. Luckily, at that moment, Barry texted. In focusing on the most recent Central City weirdness, she forgot about it. Or at least, she didn't say anything else.
If this is something wrong, he hopes that it isn't very wrong. That it's something he can live with.
Because if it is something wrong, he'll have to make up his mind whether to let them fix it, and lose all of this. And he's not entirely sure what he'd pick.
He bought an iPhone with the biggest hard drive possible and filled it with music. All kinds of music. Even stuff that wasn't music, sounds of waterfalls (mango flavored, sort of green) and birds (different citrus flavors depending on the species, a little spiky) and thunderstorms (best thing ever, especially when the thunder was the air-splitting kind that cracked the world into shards of gold).
He took to recording ambient noise wherever he heard it, and adding that to his library.
Alongside the research on synesthesia, he read about waveforms and pitches. Overtones were always the same color, he realized, and spent some time pondering the eight standard musical pitches and the seven standard colors of the rainbow, and working out how they lined up.
His noise canceling earbuds (better than Barry's) were always in his pocket now, because no matter how awesome this was, it could get to be too much sometimes.
But not often.
The MRI is close quarters, and the sound swirls inches from his body. He does something he's never done before, and reaches up to tangle his fingers in the waves of color.
"This is amazing," he said to Barry.
Although everyone thought he was the biggest music nerd in existence, he'd surprised his buddy by agreeing to come to the annual Messiah sing-in. They were sitting in the audience section, for people who didn't want to sing, underneath an obnoxiously large wreath. The whole church looked like Christmas had thrown up.
Eddie was a few rows away, in the tenors, and Iris (who had dragged Barry along because she hated classical music but didn't want to admit it to Eddie) was on Barry's other side. Barry had begged Cisco to come so Iris wouldn't get suspicious about Barry's feelings.
Cisco thought that Iris was the most oblivious person in Central City, and she wouldn't get suspicious until Barry swept her back in a romance-novel-style clinch and stuck his tongue down her throat. Maybe not even then.
But he'd thought he might as well come along. Though he didn't have much classical in his hard drive (compared to everything else), he'd enjoyed other live concerts. It could be kind of cool to see what this music was like live.
Kind of cool was an understatement.
"You're welcome," Barry said, with a skeptical lilt to his voice, as if Cisco might be screwing with him.
"No, seriously." He watched the colors weave in the air, threads and threads and threads dancing perfectly together. The trumpets tasted like hot chili peppers and the violins like chocolate. He loved chili chocolate. Was that a bassoon? Bassoons were delicious. Indigo. "Amazing."
Barry looked at him like he might possibly be on drugs.
"Who is this dude?" Cisco asked in the silence between songs. The next one was a big one, he could tell from the excited smiles in the singers' section. When the string section started up, he recognized the melody.
Barry looked at the director. "I don't know, some guy from the university, I guess?"
Haaaaa-llelujah! all the singers roared at once, flooding the church with color. Haaaa-llelujah!
"No, I mean the dead dude who wrote this."
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hal-le-e-lu-jah!
"I dunno. Iris, which dead dude wrote this?"
Iris gave them both Omigod seriously looks and pointed at the front of their programs, which had the words Handel's Messiah and a picture of an old white guy, grouchy under his wig. "Um, Handel?"
"He was a genius," Cisco said fervently. The altos and tenors came in, their melodies sliding parallel, all velvet and silk: For the Lord God omni- (Hallelujah growled the basses, deep royal blue, and the sopranos answered, Hallelujah! bright and silvery) -potent reigneth. Hallelujah!
The church actually had wi-fi, so he had the entire Messiah in his music library by the last "Amen."
As they filed out, Cisco watched the snatches of music in the air as singers hummed their favorite parts. Barry watched Cisco like he wanted to test his pee.
On the bus home, the headache struck like lightning, twenty minutes of his brain trying to crack his skull from the inside. When it eased up, he realized two things:
One: that he was lying in a fetal position on a nasty bus floor, and he'd nastified it further by throwing up a thin dribble of bile.
And two: that it was really time to talk to somebody.
The sounds eddy around his hand, brown shifting to orange. The pitch of the machine's noises change when he does. He pulls his hand away, and they go back. He says, "Huh," and twiddles his fingers until the orange shades into yellow and the peach-taste of Caitlin saying his name floods his mouth. The pitch of the machine goes up and down and then up again.
The dull ache that's been nagging him all morning dissipates.
Outside the machine, very far away, the tech makes a noise of astonishment and consternation. Cisco ignores it, bent on seeing what else he could do.
A month after his MRI, Barry and Caitlin sat him down in the lab for a serious talk. He watched them explain that they cared about him, they really did, and if something was going on that they needed to know about, well, they needed to know about it.
"Okay," he said. He went around and turned on all his noisiest machines. Colors clashed, tastes fought. The din was unbelievable.
Barry and Caitlin looked at each other like they were mentally dialling the looney bin.
Cisco grinned at them. "Pay attention!" he yelled.
Then he pressed his hands out and brought silence slamming down around them like they were pheasants under glass.
"They've stopped?"
"I haven't had a headache since the day of the test," Cisco says. He has his own theory about why, but he's having too much fun with his new abilities to deliberately abstain for the sake of testing that theory. Maybe when he's worked out the kinks. Anyway, it isn't one that he can share with a doctor who didn't even believe in metahumans.
Dr. Feinmann nods slowly, brows pulled together. "Well, that is good news."
"What'd the scans show?"
"Normal. No masses, no blockages." He looks down at the manila folder spread over his desk. "Have you ever had an MRI before, Cisco?"
"Nope."
He slides the folder across the desk so Cisco could see. "This - here? And this? And these. They make up your auditory cortex."
He peers down at the dappled plastic. "Cool."
"They're larger than most."
Cisco opens his mouth, decides now is probably not the time for a dirty joke, and closes it again. "I've always had good hearing," he says instead, flashing a grin.
The doctor studies him. Cisco leans back in his chair, waiting patiently.
"The synesthesia is still there?"
He nods. "I've gotten used to it. Honestly, that was never the problem. I like it."
"Many people do." The doctor sighs. "Let me know if the headaches return."
Caitlin put her hand to her ear. Barry shook his head like he was trying to clear water out, and stared at the treadmill, which was roaring along in silence.
"You didn't go deaf," Cisco said, and the sound of his voice bounced off the inverse waveforms he was pressing outward against the noise. "I wouldn't do that."
He knew how, of course. He could make it happen, temporarily, with a little bell of waveforms around their head, or even just their ears. He'd practiced. He didn't need the noise canceling earbuds anymore, not when he could do it so much better himself.
He could do it more permanently, too. A snap of sound, tightly directed, would shred the tender membranes of a human eardrum like so much pizza cheese. He hadn't tested that, of course, but he knew it would work.
His inventions always worked.
Caitlin's eyes were huge. "Cisco," she said, and her voice bounced a little too. She gulped.
"Cisco," Barry said. "How?"
He said, "You weren't the only one, man. It just took me a little longer." He dropped his hands - that was for show, anyway, he didn't need hand motions anymore - and let the world of sound come rushing back again.
FINIS