Summary: The information on the Flash's personal frequency was only ever a distraction so that no one would realize that Hartley had actually installed a virus in the system in order to steal terabytes worth of data on the accelerator. Which is promptly dumped online.

Of course, data is useless without context, but that's where Hartley's new blog comes into play.

(For HartmonFest June 25 - Finish Your WiP day)

Unpacking the Accelerator (The Broken Pedestal)

Hartley couldn't afford to stop for even a second after using his hearing aids to blow the pipeline cell door. He didn't have the time to pause over Cisco (it was convenient that he'd been knocked out, but Hartley felt sick anyway at the sight of him unconscious and bleeding on the floor) or fret guiltily over Caitlin (he'd naively tried to convince himself that no one would get hurt, but hadn't hesitated for a second to knock her out – what did that even say about him?); Hartley had a finite time limit on how long it would take for the Flash to realize something was wrong and coming running back to STAR Labs and Hartley had to install his virus, find the data he needed for his distraction, and get the hell out of STAR before he was left shit out of luck and trapped in the pipeline again, but this time without his one pair of exploding hearing aids.

So, instead of freaking out, Hartley pulled the USB drive from his boot and hooked it up to the computer that Caitlin had been using. So long as he didn't log out, he was golden. First thing first, he ran the virus program. Then, as he was waiting for confirmation that the program had done its job, he looked up the Flash's medical records, looking for a specific piece of damning information to leave on the screen.

It didn't take long for both his objectives to complete. Yanking the drive out and sliding it back into his boot, Hartley left the Flash's frequency data on the screen for Team Flash to find and freak out over.

Then it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. So Hartley ran.

Down the stairs and along the hall to the first emergency exit, wincing in pain as using the exit triggered a building alarm that was shrill in his ears even as he immediately moved into the camera blind spot and made a beeline for the street. He ducked into the nearest alleyway with no cameras and cursed himself for getting turned around. He closed his eyes and pictured the google street maps he'd memorized even as he stripped off his hoodie and wrapped it around his waist. He was about a block too far south, he decided after a moment. The alley he'd originally planned to duck into had been the one with new cameras installed at a back exit for a used book store, which was why he'd skipped it.

He'd set up a safe house not far from here, but he had to get there first. Before the Flash could find him.

Hartley had to keep moving.

In the distance, the STAR Labs alarm cut off. One less thing to worry about and, with any luck, Cisco was awake enough to report it as a false alarm. After all, it wasn't like they'd be able to just hide the pipeline or their illegal detainment of criminal meta humans if the police, or the fire department, started poking around in earnest. And while Hartley didn't approve of them keeping people down there, he didn't want Cisco or Caitlin to get in trouble for Harrison's crimes.

Even the Flash, obnoxious and condescending ass though he was, didn't deserve to pay for Harrison's bad decisions.

Admittedly, it doesn't reflect well on any of them that they're just going along with this farce of a prison and Hartley can't stand the idea of knowing about it and doing nothing, but... he has to have his priorities right now. If he can do something for them in the future, then he'll do whatever it takes to get that place shut down. But destroying Harrison's reputation might very well serve that purpose too, so Hartley's got to keep moving in his chosen direction.

So, taking a deep breath, Hartley left the alleyway and strode purposefully to the nearest newspaper stand. The money he'd hidden in the heel of his right boot gets him a cheap newspaper to hide his face in 'reading' whenever he passed a camera. He takes a meandering route, sticking to streets congested with pedestrians - not difficult in this part of downtown Central City - and eventually comes to a rundown, abandoned storefront at the border between the good side of downtown and the bad.

He slips around to the back, sneaks in through a window with a broken lock, and disappears up into the building's attic space where a nest of blankets and pillows, food, a change of clothes, non-explosive hearing aids, and a burner cell await him.

Hartley checks his email first and... there's the confirmation code from his virus. His old login has been reactivated with full network access restored. Then he dug out his snacks, set an alarm for that evening, and proceeded to do his best to just... lay low.

The alarm wakes Hartley up near eight-thirty that evening and he finally retrieves the spare key he'd hidden along with the snacks. Gathering up his nest into a duffel bag, Hartley checks that there's nothing left to indicate he was ever there. Then he leaves the building the same way he came in and reluctantly ignores the bus in order to walk the long distance back to his apartment. He's exhausted and starving by the time he gets home, but he's also successfully avoided anything that a persistent and talented hacker... like Cisco Ramon... could use to locate him.

But Hartley just grabs another power-bar from his dwindling supplies and gets onto his own computer. A dozen VPNs to bounce his signal around the world a few times and a little judicious hacking of the STAR Labs VPN certificate validation later and Hartley's logged into a familiar network.

He starts scanning the network for all files related to the accelerator and downloading them to a few precious terabyte drives he'd reformatted specifically to hold all this data. The problem with a data dump is that it had to be stored somewhere - saying you're going to dump data on the internet is a lot easier said than done. And Hartley doesn't want to dump inconsequential data or personal information his former coworkers may have accidentally left behind. Which means he has to sit on the data first. And risk getting caught taking it.

While the data downloads, Hartley starts drinking his best caffeinated tea. More caffeine than coffee and it won't trigger his stomach to tie itself up in knots a few hours down the road. (Coffee intolerance sucked.) Plus it actually tasted good. It was just... more expensive than coffee so Hartley didn't often buy it.

But he needed to boost to stay awake right now as he began trawling through the system for deleted data and hidden partitions. Anything remotely suspicious.

And it took three hours, but he hit the jackpot.

A hidden partition in the STAR Labs network. Of course, the whole thing was encrypted. It'd take god only knew how long to hack into it and someone poking at the data to decrypt it was going to get noticed. But Hartley could still copy it over, so he did. Some of it, anyway. If he could figure out how to decrypt it locally, then he could come back to original source and hack the rest.

But by then it was a ridiculous hour of the morning, his drives were full of data that needed sorting, and Hartley was ready to crash. So he turned off his computer after carefully disconnecting all the routes he'd used to obscure his IP address and fell face first into bed.

Hartley wakes up at noon and makes himself more tea. And lunch. Then he spends the rest of the day sorting data files. He sends the first batch of datafiles to journalists both locally and in major cities across the states and even Wikileaks. Then he uploaded the files to pretty much any free hosting site where he could easily draw attention to it with a handful of dummy twitter accounts, tagging journalists and scientists. (He even tagged Bill Nye out of a sense of childhood nostalgia, though the guy was pretty busy dealing with things like climate change deniers so Hartley wasn't expecting any attention there.) Some places will sit on it, looking for verification of authenticity, but some will publish it immediately. He makes himself go to sleep at a reasonable hour and ignore the news in the morning. Gets another batch of files ready to send off.

It's slow going, but Hartley's got a long weekend. Which is in the middle of the week, but that's just how his work schedule is at the moment. On Friday, Hartley has to go back to work.

As Harrison had promised, Hartley's career in science had been tanked. He didn't have the teaching certifications for being a physics teacher either - and he'd checked despite how galling it would have been after Harrison's threats - though he was considering acquiring them. At least he'd be doing something with his degree again.

For now he had two part time jobs. One at Barnes and Noble, having his soul sucked out of his body and perhaps reading too many trashy romance novels when he was lucky enough to get the register during slow periods of the day. Usually he was at the customer service desk, to which his personality was not well suited. The other job was doing hacking for a small PI firm that was less 'part time' and more paid by the hour. But it was good pay, when they needed him, and was probably the main reason why Hartley's sonic weaponry didn't break the bank.

Well that and a little theft here and there (and everywhere).

But the point is that on Friday, Hartley had to go back to the real world and leave the safety net of his shitty little apartment behind. He's not surprised to realize the cops aren't looking for him - haven't even connected him to the attack at Rathaway Industries yet - because cops tend to be shit at their jobs. And neither the Flash nor his detective foster father - because, yes, Hartley had done his research - were going to come forward with what they knew until they could guarantee Hartley wasn't going to reveal their unethical private prison setup.

So Hartley arrives at work unmolested and gets to listen to the news update a la gossipy coworkers. And, surprisingly, they really are talking about STAR Labs already.

Now, Hartley was, weirdly enough, well liked by his coworkers at the store. Which feels weird. He's almost a decade older than a good chunk of them, as most were struggling college students. Part of him had been worried at first that all they'd see when looking at him was a cautionary tale of how to fail.

And at first, sure, they'd had no idea what to make of him. He was grumpy and standoffish and not exactly approachable. He'd made them nervous. But one of those coworkers was learning that juggling a 20-hour work week and an 18-hour class load wasn't the best combination for his mental health the hard way and Hartley had taken to tutoring the guy in calculus just so that he'd stop crying in the middle of his work shift. He'd somehow even convinced him to back down to a 12-hour class load for the spring semester. And to make one of those classes something fun – like maybe piano – that would actually relax him while still getting him useful humanities related credits. And it seemed that taking Mike under his wing had endeared Hartley to the rest of the college students who decided that Hartley was actually a softie underneath his grumpy exterior.

Thus when Hartley shows up in Anna-Beth's peripheral vision, she turns to him and says, "did you hear about the STAR Labs leak? Someone's been dumping files about the accelerator and if they're real it might indicate they knew the thing was gonna explode and it got turned on anyway."

"They?" Hartley frowned.

"Yeah?" She frowned back, taking in his expression before nodding sharply. "Alright, Professor, let's hear it."

Hartley scowls at the nickname, but obliges her with the lecture anyway. "A project like the accelerator is going to be highly compartmentalized. Only a handful of people are going to see the larger picture. In a normal company." Hartley wonders if he's going to have to leak some of the employee records after all, just to make it clear this was Harrison Wells fuck up and not a company wide cover up. "Except STAR Labs had a high turn over rate in the positions where someone might've seen the issues. People in those positions lasted anywhere from six months to a year and a half." Hartley himself had been an outlier at not quite two years. It was only afterwards that he'd put the pattern together.

Too late to help anyone, but at least now he knew.

"That's not going to be long enough to put the big picture together. The leaks, however, are reaching a lot of people who can contribute to putting the pieces together quickly. So it's like if you've got one person who doesn't even know there's a puzzle versus a hundred people who are actively digging for pieces."

"The STAR Labs employee is going to take a while to realize there's a problem and get fired when they do," Anna-Beth filled in.

"Star student," Hartley complimented, getting a wide grin in return.

(Anna-Beth had been the only queer girl in her tiny home town, before moving to Central, and she was looking forward to her first city pride this year. So maybe Mike wasn't the only one Hartley'd taken under his wing.)

"If this is on anyone, it's on Harrison Wells," Hartley finished. "Well, him and anyone he bribed to look the other way."

It's a slow day at work that morning - the afternoon will pick up when the high school kids are let out, but Hartley's only got a morning shift today. He spends most of it playing catch up on what the media sites are saying.

They're confused, which isn't too surprising. But it doesn't seem like anyone's really figured out what to say or how to control the narrative yet.

Hartley's got a few ideas about that, though.

Hartley gets halfway through what'll hopefully be the second to last batch of files that he'll leak - not counting the employee records that he's decided he definitely has to go back for - when one of the local tech sites adds a new post excitedly talking about how there's going to be a STAR Labs press conference to address the leaked data.

In six minutes.

Wide eyed, Hartley lunged for his crappy little tv set, powering it on and changing the channel to the news station that had the least jumpy OTA signal. Then he waited, feeling sick, for Dr. Wells to show up and try to brush the whole thing under the rug.

Dr. Wells rolled up to the cameras in front of STAR Labs and he certainly tried to make the information available sound less damning than it really was, but thankfully there were quite a few journalists there whose pointed questions indicated either a fairly decent grasp of the science and math behind the accelerator... or that they had contacts at other labs who'd done a decent job of explaining the implications of the leaked data. The press conference still went better for Wells than Hartley would have liked, but it went much worse for Wells than Hartley had initially anticipated.

Time to stir the pot.

Daisy chaining various VPNs again, Hartley goes into a flurry of activity. He sets up a new /r/ on reddit and logs back into his dummy twitter accounts, helping boost other people's voices and promoting further conversation about what he's pushing to be called the STAR Labs scandal. He branches out to other forms of social media to use to mirror and boost content from what's become his next big idea. Which is going to be centered in a new, free Wordpress blog using a brand new Gmail account that he named, with what was likely too much whimsy and not enough caution, CentralCityHamelin. An obvious nod to his Pied Piper identity and a taunt to Harrison that Hartley probably should have resisted. But too late for that.

He names the blog Unpacking the Science and then subtitles it The Broken Pedestal. It's going to be where he explains just how flawed the accelerator was prior to the explosion and how there was no conceivable way for Harrison Wells to have overlooked it.

And then Hartley realizes he's got a problem. He doesn't know where to start.

So he opens a blank text document and hesitates. Puts his fingers to the keyboard. And just... writes whatever comes to mind. He just needs an introduction and a stated goal.

What he gets is... well it's got that, but there's a lot more. Hartley knew this was personal for him, but...

Maybe even he hadn't realized just how personal.

Being a former STAR Labs employee isn't exactly uncommon these days. After all, Dr. Wells only has two of his employees left in a building intended to house several hundred.

I am one of those former employees. And like most everyone, I didn't realize what Dr. Wells was really doing with the accelerator until it was too late. I thought I'd found a flaw in the accelerator - long before it was turned on. What I'd really found was what many of my predecessors had found and been fired for. One of many deliberate deviations from the submitted designs. And like my predecessors, I too was fired. My career tarnished. A Harrison Wells Special, killing the careers of promising young scientists who dared to tell him he was wrong.

And even now, I wonder if any of us have been able to reclaim the reputations he ruined. For all that his own star has waned, Harrison Wells words still bar me from my chosen career. And I know I'm not alone in this.

But at least I'm still alive. Not all of Harrison Wells' victims can say the same. The night the accelerator exploded, seventeen people died. More were injured. Some of us were physically changed at the cellular level. None of us were ever going to be the same again.

Before I dig into the science - before I explain the chain of events that caused this tragedy... there's something else I need to discuss.

See there's a name missing from the talk about that night. A name that everyone in this city should know. Because if you were in a ten to fifteen mile radius of STAR Labs that night, you owe this man your life.

I owe him my life.

His name was Ronnie Raymond. He died that night. Saving our lives. And no one talks about him.

He went into the accelerator and manually shut off the power build up. Safely redirected the explosion upward and outward into the storm. And he was incinerated because once lockdown is initiated, the pipeline doors cannot reopen. Ronnie Raymond went in there knowing there'd be no way out. And because he did, the city was still standing in the morning.

Ronnie wasn't my favorite person. He made some of the most inane jokes I've ever heard and couldn't fill out a PTO request correctly if his life depended on it. But he was unfailingly kind and an amazing engineer. And now he's the man who saved Central City.

The world is a lesser place without him in it.

I did everything I could to try and stop the accelerator from being turned on and it wasn't enough. And I was outside the building that night, knowing what was about to happen and powerless to stop it. And I think... maybe I wanted to die that night. So I wouldn't have to live with the guilt of feeling like I didn't do enough to stop this. And now here I am alive and I still haven't figured out how to make the guilt stop. Even knowing it's not my fault isn't enough to make living with myself any easier.

But maybe this blog will help. I can't fix what happened, but I can speak for the dead. For the victims of that night, whether they know who they are yet or not.

After Hartley escapes from the pipeline, Cisco does pretty much everything he can to track where Hartley's gone. With Barry's frequency data in hand, he could cause Barry a lot of hurt. And knowing what he does about their setup as Team Flash at STAR Labs...

He could land them all in jail.

But there's nothing. All night and the next morning... nothing.

No one thinks for a minute, though, that Hartley's done.

And then Thursday morning at Jitters, Cisco hears whispers all around him as he gets his morning coffee.

"Did you hear?"

"Hear what?"

"STAR Labs is in the news again."

"STAR Labs got hacked."

"The news is going crazy, how could you not have heard?"

He's late getting into work because Cisco sits down to drink his coffee and check on his phone to see what everyone's talking about. And winds up letting his Flash go cold, mostly untouched, as he flips through all the simulation data from the accelerator posted up on Wikileaks.

An anonymous whistle blower? It's fucking Hartley. No other explanation fits.

But supposedly, amongst all this data, is proof that the accelerator explosion was no accident. And that leaves Cisco more than a little shaken as he finally calls into work and apologizes to Dr. Wells. "I should have called earlier, but I... look, Dr. Wells. You need to check what the news is saying about STAR Labs. Right now."

There's a moment of quiet as Dr. Wells does exactly that. But Cisco knows the moment Wells sees the news about the hacks. Because there is a very quiet 'shit' over the phone. "Hartley's play," is clearer and meant to carry.

"Apparently. No one's contacted you over this yet?" Cisco checked the time. It was only... nine o'clock, but the vultures should've been circling already.

"I missed a call from my lawyers earlier," Dr. Wells admitted. "I need to..."

"Of course. I'll be at the lab soon." Cisco let the call end and dumped his cold coffee. Then, deciding that the day was already awful and he deserved a treat, he got a fresh Flash for the drive in to STAR Labs.

Things get worse with the second leak Friday morning, especially since there were a minimum of two more promised. It's a lot of data, but scientists around the world are already analyzing it and...

And there's a flaw. A glaring flaw in the pipeline schematics.

Cisco goes over their findings and he feels sick as he realizes... this was it. This was what Hartley must have meant when he'd taunted Dr. Wells in the pipeline.

I know your secret.

Dr. Wells gives a press conference that afternoon. He says all the right words and offers contrition. No doubt his reputation as a scientist has just taken another significant hit. But it all feels really... artificial to Cisco.

Like it's an act.

Cisco shoves that feeling down hard.

Instead he works that much harder to identify how Hartley stole those files. He couldn't have done it while he was actually at STAR Labs. There hadn't been enough time for him to grab that huge amount of data. It would've taken hours for him to transfer it all, even over high speed cables, and then Hartley would've needed multiple drives to carry it all out.

It simply wasn't feasible.

What was more likely was that Hartley'd left something behind in their systems. And that's what Cisco goes looking for.

On Saturday, Cisco finds a trace of a virus program in the HR database. Hartley's login is active and Cisco shuts it down. And it reactivates moments later. No sign of the actual virus, but...

Cisco deletes Hartley's profile this time. Watches to see if it comes back.

It doesn't. Instead a new profile appears. CCPiper.

Well now Hartley's just being an asshole.

And Cisco's own profile gets shut down right as he's trying to get rid of the CCPiper login. He's booted right out of the system.

"Go home, Cisco," Dr. Wells tells him when Cisco reports what happened. "I'll fix this, alright. Just... take the week off. Unless something Flash related happens, I want both you and Caitlin as far away from this mess as..." He sighed. Looked tired as he ran his hand over his lower face in a stress response. "Let me be the one to clean up this mess."

So Cisco went home. And Sunday he mostly just sleeps and hides from the world in his apartment... and wonders why none of his family have even called yet.

On Monday Cisco begins digging through the news reports and social media, trying to figure out what the damage really looks like.

It takes a while for the picture of what's going on to really form. The last of the data leak is posted that morning and it's employee records. Most of the personal identifying information has been stripped off, but there's enough left to prove authenticity and make a point about employee turnover in certain positions. There's more sim data out there, showing how bad the accelerator explosion would have been if... if Ronnie hadn't...

It's bad. It's all looking really bad and some of what Dr. Wells said at his press conference clearly contradicts the leaked information. Cisco tries to tell himself that it's all faked, but his login is working again and it's all too easy for him to start corroborating things on his work laptop.

Enough of the damming parts are easily proven true that Cisco can't imagine a reason Hartley would have to slip in lies too. Either Dr. Wells knew there was a problem and ignored it - pretended it wasn't as big a deal as it clearly was - for the sake of his own ego or... or he'd wanted the accelerator to explode. Which made no sense. They'd have all died and Dr. Wells wasn't suicidal, so neither scenario makes sense.

There's got to be something Cisco's missing. Something... something Dr. Wells hasn't told them or... there has to be more to this than hubris.

Cisco hibernates from the world again on Tuesday. Too exhausted by everything to do more than turn on his PS3 and play his favorite comfort games.

Wednesday, Cisco finds a blog dedicated to explaining in layman's terms the science of the accelerator and the implications of its flaws. Written by an anonymous former employee of STAR Labs.

It's Hartley. Obviously it's Hartley. It sounds just like him.

But he... he talks about Ronnie. Calls him the man who saved Central City.

Yet it's Hartley's words about his survivor's guilt that hit Cisco the hardest in that introductory post.

And now here I am alive and I still haven't figured out how to make the guilt stop. Even knowing it's not my fault isn't enough to make living with myself any easier.

Those words resonate with Cisco's own difficulties with living with Ronnie's death. And it's almost galling that not only has it taken Cisco this long to find someone who seems to really understand the guilt and shame and self-loathing that's spent the last year coiled up in Cisco's chest... but that it's Hartley who winds up being the one who gets it.

Cisco texts a link to the blog to Caitlin, giving her a warning that it was likely Hartley writing it and that he talked about Ronnie in the first post. And then Cisco moved onto the next post.

It's well written, straightforward, and manages to be educational without being condescending. Cisco's a little surprised Hartley had it in him. But while the first few posts lay the groundwork for understanding the basics of how a particle accelerator should work, they also begin to point out the differences between the STAR Labs accelerator and the average particle accelerator - or even a collider... and where the design begins to differ from the implementation.

Before he can think better of it, Cisco subscribes to the RSS feed and logs off his computer entirely.

Hartley builds a small following on his blog during that first week. It's unexpected because, well... after going so long with no one listening to him, he'd rather expected to be shouting into the void.

Instead people are actually reading and asking intelligent questions and he's reworked the angle at which he approaches some of his explanations as a result. He wants the average person to be able to read his blog and understand what he's talking about. It's not easy. Sometimes it feels like technical jargon is another language entirely and one that is, in many ways, more difficult to translate than German. But it's worth it. Some of the guilt that's been weighing on Hartley finally begins to ease a little. As does some of his desperate need for revenge.

Even with the bad PR from the accelerator incident, Wells had still been well liked and respected in the scientific community. He still had his little cult of personality fawning over him, severely reduced though it might be. Hartley had intended to take those away from him and how better to do so than with the truth?

And it was working.

It still wasn't quite enough, not when Hartley wanted to utterly ruin Harrison's life. But that man cared for no one but himself. Even the Flash was nothing more than a useful tool. The latest in a long line of gullible idiots getting taken for a ride. And Hartley certainly couldn't fault the 'superhero' for falling for the same act Hartley'd tripped over himself for. Going after Barry Allen or Cisco Ramon or Caitlin Snow was never going to net Hartley what he'd wanted.

But they'd made an excellent smokescreen while Hartley began his attack on the one thing Harrison cared about most. His reputation.

It was said it took a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy for a reason. Hartley knew just how fragile such things were.

The STAR Labs scandal becomes the subject of not just newspapers and blogs and new programs, but of talk shows. Harrison is clearly on damage control, his lawyers using DMCA takedown requests and suing to have the confidential documents taken off the internet. A few places comply - most don't. And Hartley's blog with it's small following pretty much flies under the radar.

Until it doesn't.

Hartley's blog gets referenced by the Central City Picture News. Then a few other news sources reference him too. And then he gets contacted by one of the CCPN reporters, wanting an interview. Possibly wanting to uncover the actual identity of the person behind the blog.

He maybe starts hyperventilating at work when that last one happens because, holy shit, people actually want to know what the story behind STAR Labs is. Mike has to drag Hartley into the stock room and runs Hartley through some of the very techniques he's used for calming Mike down in the past. Which is sweet of the nineteen-year-old, but probably also freaks the poor kid out.

Hartley declines the interview in the end, but offers to answer questions via email. He values his privacy and also doesn't want to become Harrison Wells' next target. The reporter agrees to respect his anonymity and then starts sending him question after question about STAR Labs and the accelerator and Harrison Wells as a person and a boss.

There is nothing more vindicating than being sourced as a trusted anonymous insider in a news story that takes another chunk out of Harrison's reputation.

Cisco is still keeping up with Hartley's blog the week he goes back to work. There are hints in there to the existence of meta-humans. Mentions of the effects the dark energy could have on a person's DNA or interacting with certain protein sequences if the energy were to linger in a person's system.

Nothing concrete. Nothing that could get Hartley's anonymous blog labeled as just another member of the tin foil hat brigade. But there's definite... foreshadowing in there. Hartley's was clearly waiting for some tipping point before going in that direction and it leaves Cisco feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Like this is his very own dirty laundry that Hartley's threatening to drag into the lime light.

And, sure, Cisco's thought the whole meta human thing was cool, but... they'd been planning to de-power the criminals in their basement. Sweep the whole affair under the rug, as it were. But the way Hartley phrases things...

Some of us were physically changed at the cellular level. None of us were ever going to be the same again. Or the more explicit, our bodies were altered - our very DNA changed - without our consent. And no one knows for sure yet what the medical fallout of this will be. Just that once we do, those of us changed will likely find ourselves as victims all over again.

Those people in their basement are criminals, yes. But they're also victims. And once Cisco has that thought, he can't unthink it. Can't erase the realization that they don't have the right to forcibly remove their powers or keep them locked up without due process... and Cisco has no idea how to fix this.

Barry and Joe work in law enforcement. They should know better but this whole pipeline thing was Joe's idea. And Dr. Wells had instantly approved it. And Cisco himself had been all too eager to delve into the science without considering for even a second the consequences on the very real people they were planning to incarcerate down there. No one, not even Caitlin, had objected. Had spoken up to say, hey, what about human rights? What about the laws we'll be breaking, the injustice we'll be causing?

None of them were innocent in this.

It's a stupid idea to think of going to Hartley to talk about this. They don't get along. At all. Hell, Hartley had apparently zero qualms about leaving Cisco unconscious in the rubble from exploding the pipeline door open. The... door of the cell that they'd illegally imprisoned Hartley in for what was essentially glorified vandalism. All because Hartley was a meta.

... maybe Cisco deserved worse than what he'd gotten. When did they stop treating people like humans unless they were 'good metas' like Barry?

That's what pushes Cisco to start looking for Hartley again.

Hartley doesn't forget about the encrypted files or the hidden partition in the STAR Labs systems. But decrypting the files isn't a priority for him at the moment.

He gets a notification from his virus in the STAR Labs system when the copy in the HR database is eradicated. The main virus goes dormant, waiting for Hartley's orders to release a new copy that would let him back into the system if he should need it down the line. Hartley wonders how long it took Harrison to clear out the HR database and software once he realized what Hartley'd done. Puts a smile on his face imagining Harrison getting locked out of the system a few times and actually resorting to venting his frustration with cuss words that were, supposedly, beneath him to utilize.

The blog is Hartley's main project for the moment. It's been more successful than Hartley could have dreamed.

And he's got two interviews lined up for prominent labs in the city. They're not quite on the level of a place like Mercury Labs, but the positions are in Hartley's field of study and sound fascinating. Plus they'll pay a lot better than Barnes and Noble. Hartley'd submitted his resume around right before infiltrating STAR Labs, expecting exactly nothing to come of it like the last few times he'd circulated it. But maybe it's a sign that Harrison's influence is waning because... for the first time, there are people interested in hiring him. Who have looked at the tldr version of his work experience and thought 'this guy might be a good fit'.

His college age coworkers are all really excited for Hartley too. It's going to hurt leaving them behind. Maybe he'll have to set up a physics and calculus study thing on the weekends, since apparently he's better at explaining things and less scary than their professors. But of course, that's if he gets one of the jobs.

(Hartley's so used to being let down that it's hard to think positively. But he wants to be hired for one of those two positions so bad it hurts.)

Interview number one goes well. His potential manager seems to like him, is impressed with Hartley's answers to the science side of things, and seems fairly fascinated with what Hartley has to say about the research that earned him his PhD. Of course, he won't know what the potential salary is unless they make the job offer to him, but he's not exactly at a point where he can afford to be picky about it.

To celebrate the good feelings he came out of the interview with, Hartley kicks off another decryption attempt on his computer, changes into a comfy pair of pajamas with his rat hoodie over the t-shirt, pours himself a glass of wine, and turns on his current show for binge watching on Netflix. He's contemplating the pros and cons of having a second glass of wine when there comes a knocking at his door.

Hartley expects it'll be one of his neighbors. He's been doing minor electrical repairs because the building has some really awful aluminum wiring in it. He can't fix what's in the walls, but he can make the switches and outlets work again when they arc or burn out. So he doesn't check when he opens the door.

But when the door opens and its Cisco Ramon standing there, Hartley regrets not using the peep hole.

Cisco doesn't think he's ever seen Hartley dressed down before. So the pajama pants and the soft gray hoodie that declares "Rat Shirt" three times in a column with a little rat outline curled around the top left corner is... unexpected.

Thankfully, Hartley seems about as nonplussed by Cisco being there at all as Cisco is by Hartley's outfit, so they're about even.

Hartley sighs, loudly, and leaves the door open as he crosses the room to go pour himself a glass of wine. Clearly not his first of the night, though Cisco hopes it's only his second. He needs to talk to not-drunk Hartley, but somewhat-buzzed Hartley will suffice.

Taking the open door as a silent invitation, Cisco steps inside and shuts the door behind him. "Uh, hi, Hartley."

"What do you want, Ramon?" Hartley puts the wine bottle back in his fridge and kicks the door shut behind him. "If it's an apology, you aren't getting one."

"No, I... I should be apologizing. To you." Cisco swallowed hard. "What we did was... I'm sorry."

"Are there still other people in that little hell closet of yours?" Hartley smirked when Cisco winced. "Yeah, try harder." He sipped his wine and sat on a stool pulled up by one of the counters.

"I know what we're doing with the pipeline is fucked up. I don't know how to fix it."

"Open the doors, let them go. Not that difficult, Ramon."

"If I do that, then the guy who turns into poisonous gas will probably thank me by killing me," Cisco said. "I'd like to find a way to do this where I don't get killed in the process."

Hartley sighed. "That's fair. I may not like you, but I'd rather you didn't get killed for being stupid enough to follow Harrison around with breathless obedience. If that's the punishment for falling into his cult of personality, it's not a fate I'm keen on suffering either." He set the wineglass aside. "How many people are down there, anyway?"

"Two." It should have been three, but Woodward... Dr. Wells said he'd broken out. Now Cisco's not so sure. "Kyle Nimbus, a former mob hitman who can turn into poisonous gas because he was being executed at the time he was exposed to dark energy. Legally he's considered dead. And he's used his powers to murder everyone who put him on death row. Except for Detective Joe West. The Flash saved him."

"Of course the Flash saved his foster father," Hartley scoffed.

Cisco scowled, but kept talking. "And Roy Bivolo whose powers induce intense rage in anyone who looks him in the eyes. He used his powers to rob banks and a lot of people were hurt because of how he mind raped them."

"So they're bad people who probably should be in jail," Hartley concluded. "But real jail, not your extra-judicial prison."

"Yeah."

"Okay, I can work with that," Hartley muttered, eyes going a little distant as he turned the information around in his head. "But say we succeed in whatever we do with those two. What happens the next time your shiny new friend defeats someone in a fight and is too caught up in his hero worship of Wells and the cop culture he was brought up in to consider that his little prison is actually making him just as bad as the people he imprisons. 'Cause now he's a torturer. And make no mistake. Those little cells of yours are massively inhumane - given the ridiculously tiny accommodations and the fact that it's solitary confinement only - and does, in fact, constitute legal torture. Never mind the kidnapping aspects."

Torture.

Cisco feels himself go a little light headed. He wasn't... he'd never thought he'd be party to that kind of thing. He wasn't supposed to be that kind of person. But apparently... because Hartley was right. That sounded like torture. It was torture.

He - Cisco Ramon - was helping torture people.

"Hey, Cisco." And Hartley actually sounds worried. "Come on, don't check out on me, okay?" And Cisco's not sure when Hartley stood back up, but now he's guiding Cisco to the couch. "Sit down and just breathe, okay? Do that with me? Just take a deep breath in and hold it..."

When Hartley inhales, a little loud, Cisco finds himself following suit. And then exhaling shakily along with Hartley. Again and again until his head clears and Cisco realizes he's been crying a little.

Embarrassment swamps Cisco and he has to just... keep breathing, shaky and uncertain, while Hartley gently rubs his shoulder. Eventually, though Cisco calms enough to apologize for freaking out.

"It's... it's fine, Cisco." And that might be the first time Hartley's ever used his first name without making it sound like an insult. "You're in a shitty position and while it is kind of your fault you're in it, it's also not you're fault for trusting in the wrong person. Or people. I don't really know Allen well enough to judge what kind of person he is. I'm just of the 'all cops are bastards' persuasion." His tone went firm, though as he insisted, "it's understandable you freaked out."

A computer bings in the background and Hartley's head jerks up. "Oh, shit, it worked."

"Uh... what?" Cisco asked, looking around for the computer. There's a laptop on the floor by the tv that he hadn't noticed.

"Okay, so when I hacked STAR Labs, there was a hidden partition full of encrypted data. I copied some of it to see if I could figure out how to decrypt it. Thought it had to be something interesting if Harrison was hiding it," Hartley said, walking over and grabbing the computer and a drive attached to it. "It'd be hilarious if there's evidence of tax evasion or something along those lines."

Yeah... hilarious.

Cisco closed his eyes and pressed his hands against his face. How had this become his life? Plotting with Hartley to undermine his friends and desperately trying to figure out how to convince Barry they can't ever use the pipeline prison again.

He feels like a traitor. And then he thinks about how those two people - two victims - of their hubris are being technically being tortured with the inhumane solitary confinement they've been subjected to and Cisco's brain threatens to spiral again.

Hartley plops back onto the couch with the laptop and starts perusing the newly decrypted files. He's relaxed at first, but he goes noticeably tense after a few minutes.

"What is it?" Cisco asked. There's silence. "What did you find?" He looked up to see... a horrified expression on Hartley's face. Cisco straightened up and instead of asking again he leaned over and looked at the screen.

It's a... a dossier. With Cisco's name on the top.

His age, weight, ethnicity... meta gene - present and active. Powers currently dormant, likely needing additional stimulus to start presenting. In previous timeline, subject demonstrated powers including the ability to view the past, present, potential futures, and alternate timelines. And the ability to manipulate the fabric of the universe itself, creating breaches and exhibiting the ability to use...

Cisco's stomach revolts. "I'm gonna be sick," he muttered and Hartley shoved the laptop aside, bolting up and dragging Cisco to the bathroom. They make it just in time as Cisco drops to his knees and pukes into the toilet.

Subject. Not Cisco. Not Francisco Ramon. Not employee or friend or... subject.

There were few words Cisco could think of at that moment that could be considered more dehumanizing than that. He was a meta and somehow Dr. Wells knew that and was... studying him. And what was that about a previous timeline?

"There's a file on Snow too," Hartley said quietly, rubbing Cisco's shoulder again. "And a bunch of names I don't recognize. There are probably more in the partition since I only got a small portion of the data on there."

"I'm a meta," Cisco said quietly. "And he's studying me like his own personal lab rat."

Hartley's hand stills for a moment and then squeezes gently. "I'm sorry."

"How can I help ruin him?"

The smile that appears on Hartley's face isn't exactly nice. But Cisco's pretty sure he's not going to regret going along with whatever Hartley's about to ask of him.