Two Chapters! Hope you like them, please please review.
I own nothing except Alyssa, so don't touch her or sue me.
Chapter 13: Black:
"You need to go back to Starling Felicity."
The blonde's head jerked up so fast Alyssa was worried she'd broken something. "Why?"
"Oliver and Diggle need you. You can't have an awesome team on any side of the law without a computer genius to help out." Alyssa smiled sadly. "Your team needs you."
"So do you." Felicity whispered, standing and walking over to sit on Alyssa's lap.
"I know." She whispered sadly, but her yellow eyes met Felicity's grey firmly. "I'd say I want you out of trouble, but when I'm sending you back to your vigilante friend it seems the wrong thing to say. But I feel you're more directly in danger with me. When this thing with Wells is over I'm moving to Starling."
Felicity gasped. "You want to move in with me?"
"In the area certainly." Alyssa was oddly nervous. "I want to be around you and I hoped it wouldn't be a problem but if it is-"
Felicity shut her up with a kiss that left them both starved for air. "Of course I want you with me." Alyssa gave a relieved, shaky laugh, and pressed their foreheads together.
"I'm pretty sure a role reversal just happened here." She muttered and there was more laughter. They kissed again softly, and Alyssa moaned.
"Shut the door."
҉
Cisco soldered metal together, trying to focus on that instead of the argument he'd had with Hartley. It had started with them disagreeing about how best to limit a Meta's powers over a broad field instead of tailoring a machine to each ability, and lead to an argument too much like one of their old fights where Hartley ended up belittling Cisco's abilities. Cisco had fled the room, and now he was in S.T.A.R. Labs trying not to think about Hartley or Dr. Wells who was rapidly becoming more suspicious, tried not to think of anything but a tool to stop Mardon.
In fleeing the room, tears blurring his vision, he had missed Hartley's look of horror, his beginnings of an apology.
Hartley was ashamed of himself. He had not meant to insult Cisco, had no idea what had pushed him over the edge. He went the next day to Alyssa who was reading in the room she had shared with Felicity before sending her soulmate back to Starling yesterday.
"I messed up."
She put the book aside and wrapped him in her arms, like they used to do whenever one of them was sad. "What did you do?"
There was love and pity and slight exasperation in her voice, so familiar that his heart ached. He didn't know what Cisco had said to pull that dead look mostly out of her eyes, but he was grateful. Cisco…
"Oh Hartley." Alyssa sighed when he told her the story. "For someone so brilliant you can be so incredibly stupid. And don't say anything about me not noticing Felicity was lesbian; we never had animosity between us, certainly not at the level you two seem to generate. What were you thinking?"
"I wasn't."
"That makes the most sense." Alyssa admitted.
"I can't lose him." Hartley whispered. "You, Felicity, now Cisco, you are the only people in the world I love. I can't afford to lose you, any of you. I already lost our parents, I can't lose you."
"Well at least you seem to have realized you love him." Alyssa replied dryly. She stroked her twin's head, another familiar gesture. "You want my advice?"
"Even if I didn't you'd give it." He muttered and Alyssa laughed.
"To true. Make him something. You and Cisco both love your gadgets so much, make him one. Something useful but a little silly if you can. Maybe involving those lasers he seems so fond of." Both twins chuckled dryly. "I hope I don't need to say that you must apologize profusely."
Hartley nodded. Alyssa felt slight wetness seep through her blouse and came to a decision. "But first you and I are having some twin time. I'm thinking chess, a stop by that bakery by the park, and we need to find you a new computer." Hartley smiled.
҉
Cisco frowned as he examined the containment cell they had used to capture the Reverse-Flash. As he had told Caitlin, there was no reason anything should have gone wrong. And while she said that Dr. Wells nearly died, well, nearly. There had been nothing to stop their enemy from completing the job unless he wanted the doctor around for some reason, and them being on the same side was one.
Them being the same person? That he hadn't expected.
҉
Alyssa was worried for Joe. She had seen the designs of Cisco's "Wizard's Wand" and they looked good, but she was better at hacking things than building them and there were honestly so many things that could go wrong she almost didn't want to think about it. She told Joe to actually keep his hand on it but when Barry called her to tell her about Captain Singh she called Joe and told him if he went after Mardon without any backup he would die at her hands.
She looked over at Hartley, who was working on his apology gift for Cisco. He hadn't told her what it was, but it was starting to look suspiciously like a miniature millennium falcon.
Hartley liked to make things almost as much as Cisco did, there was just something so wonderful about watching a concept come to life under your hands, watch it gain form and use.
Now if only he could get rid of this growing anxiety prickling under his skin.
It had grown over the last few minutes, the feeling that something was wrong, but he pushed it to the side, or tried to. It had gotten more persistent, and he had just opened his mouth to ask Alyssa if she had any idea what was going on when three things happened at once.
There was a strange feeling in his chest, as if some one had grabbed his heart and wrenched;
A searing pain shot through his wrist as his soulmark changed from green to terrible black bordered in white;
And Hartley finally realized where that feeling of anxiety had been coming from. "No."
Cisco toppled to the floor, his heart shredded…
Dr. Wells, Eobard Thawn, gave a regretful sigh…
Above them Caitlin tried to find Cisco in the security cameras…
Hartley leaped on Alyssa's motorcycle, felt it come to life but his only thought was of Cisco...
Alyssa closed her book and pulled on her gauntlets ready for war, her twin's pain filling her…
Felicity paused in her work with the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.
At the beach Barry ran, trying to stop the tsunami, getting faster and faster…
There was a shift in the world, and none of it happened.
Not yet at least.