As soon as I become aware of my surroundings, I feel a sense of dread wash over me. It's dark again. I appear to be alone, but I know I'm being watched.
"Where are you?" I look around, but it doesn't even feel like I'm moving. It's like I'm stuck in limbo.
"Cisco." It's that voice again.
I laugh nervously. "So, uh, you got the name memo, did you? I appreciate it, because, uh, the only person who calls me Francisco is my mother. And that brings back all sorts of traumatic-"
"Cisco." This time, the word comes out as an unsettling laugh, and the voice is so familiar that it pains me that I can't place it exactly. "You're embarrassing yourself. Do you even realize how much you're capable of?"
"Uh, yeah. The Vibe thing is pretty sweet. I can use the Vibes to help my friends, and it actually helped me pick up a chick once."
"Is that all?" The voice feels louder now, closer. "Are you really content being Barry Allen's sidekick? Don't you ever want to use your powers to become something more?"
"No!" I cover my ears with my hands like a little kid ignoring his parents. "No. Leave me alone. Get out of my head!"
This time the migraine set in before he even opened his eyes. He groaned softly and rolled over onto his side.
"Cisco?" That was Caitlin's voice. She sounded so worried. He forced himself to open his eyes to see her.
He was in the medical bay, draped over a cot. Caitlin was leaning over him.
"Hey," she said, a forced smile on her face.
"Hey," he murmured, barely able to keep his eyes open from the pain and fatigue. "How long was I out for?"
"Not even an hour." Caitlin brushed his hair out of his face. "How do you feel?"
"Like a train ran me over," he muttered, and Caitlin laughed softly.
"Listen, you need to start taking better care of yourself," she said firmly. "You're severely dehydrated and you're clearly exhausted. Have you been having trouble sleeping?"
"A little bit." Cisco forced himself to sit up, even though it made his head throb.
Caitlin frowned at him. "How much is a little bit?"
"I dunno, a couple of days ago it was four hours… last night was more like three. Some nights I can't sleep at all." He rubbed his eyes, exhausted, and then realized that his hands were shaking again. He quickly stuffed them into his sweatshirt pocket so Caitlin wouldn't see. She was watching him suspiciously.
"Barry said you were talking to yourself," she said carefully. "Like you were hearing voices?"
"Barry." Cisco scoffed on the name. "Where is he anyway?"
Caitlin sighed. "He's upstairs, working, because I suggested that due to your- animosity -towards him, it might be better for him to give you some space right now."
"The only animosity I have is with his freaking double-standard about time travel," Cisco grumbled.
"You're evading the question."
She had him. "Okay, yeah, I was hearing things. I think it was some Vibe related thing."
Caitlin leaned forward quickly. "You're having Vibes again? What about?"
"Uh…" He combed a hand through his hair awkwardly. He didn't want to tell her that he'd been dreaming about his dead brother- she didn't want her to know how much pain he was still in over Dante. But he also didn't want to tell her about the mysterious voices -that would make him look just plain crazy. "I've been having these vibes- I thought they were dreams at first -about Dante. When he died."
Caitlin was very quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry. That sounds rough."
"Yeah." Cisco stared straight ahead at the wall.
"Barry said you were talking to someone," Caitlin pressed. Damn it. Sometimes she was too sharp for her own good. "Was that part of the vibe?"
"I- I dunno. I think I just kind of drifted off." He shrugged, trying to look innocent, but this only made her look more worried. She opened her mouth to say something but he cut her off. "Cait, it's fine. I'm just tired and overworked. That's probably why all the Vibe stuff is going haywire. It's not a big deal.".
"Somehow I have a hard time believing that. Even by our standards, hearing voices isn't a good sign." Caitlin looked at him for long while with an expression somewhere between sympathy and frustration. "There's no chance I could convince you to go home and rest, is there?"
"I don't think I can." Cisco clenched his shaking hands into fists.
Caitlin sighed. "Okay. Just let me take your vitals and then I'll let you go. We'll figure this out, Cisco."
The rest of the day was slow and unremarkable. No news on Alchemy, no metas causing trouble. All Cisco wanted was a distraction, but the rest of the world wasn't obliging. He caught himself blacking out multiple times, but he didn't think anyone noticed.
Around 5 o'clock, it became obvious that nothing notable was going to happen that day. "I think I'm gonna clock out, guys," Barry announced, sliding his arms into his jacket. "Got a hot date with a hot reporter."
"Don't get too comfortable," Caitlin advised. "It seems like whenever you're with Iris, we have some crazy metahuman emergency."
Barry laughed at that, grabbed his backpack and made for the door. He stopped and glanced back at Cisco, who was playing idly with a desk ornament, a Star Labs snow globe. He didn't even know why they had it.
"Hey, Iris said she has a cute friend at work who's new in town. Maybe we should double up sometime."
"And be overshadowed by dream boy Allen?" Cisco muttered, turning the snow globe over in his hands. "No thanks."
Barry's smile vanished. "Dude, I'm trying here. Give me something." Cisco didn't look up. Barry sighed, said goodbye to Caitlin, and left.
A few moments of silence passed, and then Caitlin said, "You can't resent Barry forever."
"Watch me." He turned the snow globe upside down and watched all the tiny pieces of glitter float to the top.
Caitlin gave a frustrated huff. "Cisco, the work we do here depends on us trusting each other, and the things we do are too important to be jeopardized by you resenting him."
He dropped the snow globe on the desk with a loud clunk. "Me resenting him? So I'm the one who has a problem." He kicked off of the ground so that the chair he was in swiveled around to face Caitlin. "It's not like this is a petty disagreement. This is a legitimate moral discrepancy. He's willing to jeopardize the entire timeline and everybody else's lives, but only when it benefits him. Going back 15 years to rescue his mom and alter the outcome of a major catalytic event is no problem, but we can't go back a couple weeks and save Cisco's brother from a drunk driver."
"Cisco, that's-"
"What? Unfair? Untrue? Because I'm pretty sure it's neither of those." He crossed his arms.
Caitlin bit her lip, clearly uncomfortable. "All I'm saying is that it's really important that you are able to trust Barry."
"Well, maybe we shouldn't trust him."
"Cisco!"
"I'm just saying." He shrugged. "If I can't trust him, I think the issue is more with him than with me."
"Can't. You mean won't."
"Why are you defending him?" Cisco demanded, his voice breaking with anger. "He screwed up our lives. Out of pure selfishness. He killed my brother, and you expect me to meet him halfway?"
"Cisco!" Her voice came out as a frustrated shriek. She paused, composing herself. "Barry did not kill Dante."
"He was responsible!" Cisco spat, a hard edge to his voice. "Not only that, he refused to save him when him saving his dead family member was what got Dante killed in the first place!"
Caitlin covered her face with her hands and inhaled deeply. She looked back up at him, obviously taking great pains to keep her voice level. "I'm sorry Dante died, and I'm sorry you're hurting so much. But do not accuse Barry of things that didn't happen just because you're looking for somewhere to place the blame."
Cisco felt his body start to tremble again, involuntarily. He sunk his head into his hands, too exhausted to keep fighting with her.
More silence. He couldn't stop shaking. Then Caitlin: "Are you crying?"
His head snapped up. "No, I just... it's these damn Vibe powers." He raised his right hand so she could see the trembling. She rushed forward to get a closer look and examined his hand, perplexed. "At first I thought it was sleep deprivation, or I was having a nervous breakdown, but..."
"It's energy," Caitlin murmured. "It's like when you used your powers that one time on Black Canary, except-"
"Except I can't turn it off." He looked up at her, his face vulnerable, admitting defeat.
Caitlin turned his hand over in her own. "When did this start happening?"
"About a week ago. About the same time as-" He stopped himself just in time. He didn't want to bring up his hearing voices again- he had just barely gotten out of that one earlier.
It was too late. She had caught on. "The same time as what?"
Cisco tore his hands through his hair anxiously. He didn't like lying to her.
"The same time as when my vibes about Dante started," he said firmly, and she nodded, convinced.
"Well, the good news is now that we know this is a Vibe thing, we can fix it," she said. "I'll take a look at the data we collected last year when you got your powers. There's got to be something helpful in there."
"Do you want me to stay and help, or-" He trailed off.
"You should go home and rest." Caitlin was already at a file cabinet, looking for the data in question. She glanced over at him. "If you think you can."
"Yeah." Another lie. "I can try, anyway."
"Good. That's what's important right now." She dropped a heavy stack of files down on the desk and looked back up at him. "I have a lot of work to do. Be safe." She leaned forward and gave him a quick hug.
He stared at the test tube he had taken home from work, trying to concentrate. Caitlin had made him realize something- the shaking wasn't his powers turning on him, it was excess energy. Maybe if I can channel it, it'll stop.
He took a deep breath and held his hand over the tube. He tried to remember what it had felt like when he used his powers on the Black Canary, on the Rival, on Killer Fr- on Caitlin. He tried to envision all of the weird, shaky energy in his body concentrating at his fingertips.
He braced himself, and then…
Nothing.
"Dammit," he cursed aloud, and stood up, frustrated. Why wasn't it working? He did his best to focus on it-
Without warning, the test tube shattered and tiny shards of glass flew everywhere. Cisco froze, in shock.
Did I do that?
He remembered the elevator at work. He had stopped it from working. He had done that without even thinking about it.
He tried again with another test tube. This time, he could feel his fingertips vibrating. He held his hand over it-
It shattered even faster this time.
Then a thought occurred to him. The vibrations worked on static objects because they had a very low vibration. But on Earth 2, Reverb was able to manipulate the vibrations of living things. Like people.
Could I do that?
Without another thought, he grabbed his jacket off the hook by his door and ran downstairs and outside. He looked around to make sure no-one was watching and then bent down over the black beetle that was lying on the ground. He started thinking about vibrational frequencies, and about disrupting them- and he didn't realize that he wasn't even holding his hand out when the beetle shattered.
Cisco felt an unsettling feeling come over him, like his skin was crawling. If he could do that that easily, what could he do to people?
It was 4:17 AM. He hadn't slept even for a second.
Despite his best efforts to channel his power, he was still shaking uncontrollably. It had almost gotten worse since he had used them. He wanted desperately to call Caitlin- not just because she was the doctor who always had an answer, but because he was just plain scared and needed her comfort. But something inside of him convinced him to not reach out to her.
He hadn't Vibed since last night- or that morning? He couldn't remember which. But he could still hear the voice- not quite out loud, but more in the back of his head. When he had Vibed after passing out at work, he had recognized the voice, but hadn't quite been able to pin it down. It was driving him nuts, but he had an idea to pin it down.
He stood up and staggered over to the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, trying to focus.
"Cisco." He said his own name out loud, cringing at how weak and shaky his voice sounded. He tried again, trying to dig into his diaphragm to make his voice sound deeper and more even. "Cisco."
Nothing. It wasn't working. He was just standing in front of the mirror at 4 in the morning chanting his name like a lunatic.
He had to try harder. He closed his eyes, trying to remember the voice he'd heard in his Vibes. Like Captain Cold had a baby with an elocution textbook. Round the vowels, hang onto the consonants too long. Without warning, he felt all of the pent-up energy in his body gather at his fingertips- just like it had earlier when he'd broken the test tube and the elevator button. And the beetle. He stared at his hands warily.
"Cisco," he tried again, and this time he felt the energy fly out of his fingertips, more like the times he had used it in combat before. The force startled him and he fell backwards.
The vibrating was extremely loud now- as if it was coming from an external source. He felt a slow sense of dread fill him as he staggered to his feet.
"Cisco." He nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized that his reflection had changed.
He was staring Reverb in the face.
Holy crap.