"Hey there," the bartender said. "What can I get for you?"

Cisco surveyed his choices. "Can I get a Dos Equis and a glass of Pinot Grigio?"

"The Dos Equis is no problem." He grabbed a bottle of beer and opened it for him. "But I just ran out of the Pinot. I can go get another bottle if you don't mind waiting?"

"No problem at all."

As the bartender went off to find more wine, Cisco leaned back against the bar and looked around the ballroom. He waved at a few people, who waved back. He was actually kind of glad he'd come.

He'd made a lot of small talk tonight, repeated his own carefully edited life story over and over again. Caitlin had smiled and made conversation and obligingly put up with him showing off his gorgeous, brilliant girlfriend to everyone he'd ever known in high school.

He'd run into old crushes, old rivals, old friends. Si (no, nope, Simon, he corrected himself) Danwell had practically been the first person he'd seen, but only for a moment. Melinda Torres was married, and a paralegal. ("Still not a priest," he'd told her. She'd looked at him holding hands with Caitlin and laughed and said she'd heard that, but not who she'd heard it from. Hmmm.) Angel Morales, who'd always sworn he'd never leave Central City, had been living in Detroit for seven years.

Waistlines were thicker, hairlines were higher. People talked about jobs and marriages and kids. Everyone looked like an adult.

It was like those ten years had worked some kind of magic, transforming them from the Slackers, the Stoners, the Nerds, the Sluts, the Populars, the Jocks, to just - people.

"Cisco!"

Some lizard part of his brain recoiled and hissed at the voice. But he'd known this might happen. He'd even checked the nametag table and seen that particular nametag was gone.

Why couldn't this have happened when Caitlin was with him?

"Cisco?"

He braced himself and turned, blinking in a puzzled way. "Hi?"

"It's Jake!"

"… Jake," Cisco said, squinting at him.

"Tully?"

"Oh, Jake!"

Okay, he wasn't proud of his own pettiness.

Maybe a little proud.

Jake Tully had always looked like Central Casting's idea of a bully, all beefy build and buzzed hair and reddish face. It was too bad he'd always acted like it too. From a distance of years, Cisco knew Jake had been a kid, probably with a lot of bad shit in his life that he took out on anyone smaller or weaker or vulnerable in any way.

But somewhere inside him, there still lived the middle-schooler who got punched in the stomach on a daily basis, and that kid wouldn't have spit on Jake Tully if he was on fire.

Tonight, Cisco's personal nightmare was in a polo shirt and khakis, his face still red, his hair still buzzed, some of the muscle sliding southward into a beer gut but not quite all of it yet. And he was smiling. Sort of. "I was really hoping to see you!" he said.

Cisco took a deep swig of his beer and said coolly, "I don't have any lunch money you can steal, just so you know."

Jake flushed. "Yeah. That - yeah. I wanted to say - " He took a breath like a diver preparing to go under. "I wasn't in a good place in high school. Or middle school. Most of my time in school, honestly. I was mixed up about a lot of things and angry about a lot of other things and - but anyway, none of that was your fault and it wasn't right for me to do the things I did to you. So. I, uh. I wanted to apologize to you."

Cisco blinked at him, wondering if he'd stepped sideways through a breach and hadn't noticed. But no, the frequency of the universe was the right one.

It was just a universe where Jake Tully was standing in front of him, stuttering out, "S-so, I'm sorry."

"Wow," Cisco said. "Uh. Thank you? I guess?"

"Look, I'm not looking for you to forgive me or anything. I was really brutal. I wanted to get that out. Let you know I'm owning my past behavior."

Cisco put his beer down. "No really," he said. "Thanks. That took a lot. I've had to admit things like that before. It's not easy, and it was so long ago that you could probably pretend it never happened, but you didn't. I respect that, I really do. Thank you."

Jake shuffled his feet, looking away. "Well," he said. "I - like I said, I was really hoping to get the chance to say that tonight."

They stood awkwardly. Cisco looked around and saw no sign of the bartender. Was he pressing the grapes himself? "So!" he said. "What have you been doing since graduation? In your life?"

"Well, um." Jake rubbed a hand over his hair. "I screwed around for a few years. Did jobs I didn't like, kind of thing. About five years ago, I started to figure some things out and I went to Quad-C. Got my associate's, and I work for Mercy General now, doing medical billing."

"How is that?"

"It's good. I like it. Pay's pretty decent. I like the people." He shrugged. "You?"

"I'm an engineer."

"Yeah? I can see you doing that. Where do you work?"

"Star Labs."

His forehead crinkled. "Hey, wasn't that the place that - "

"Yyyyyyeah," Cisco said, bracing himself. He'd gotten a few bad reactions tonight, saying where he worked, even though it was coming up on five years.

Jake didn't look like he was going to be one of them. His face scrunched into lines of concern. "Were you there for that?"

"Yeah, I was, actually."

"Wow, rough, I'm sorry. I didn't even know they were still around."

"It's a way smaller operation now," Cisco said, picking at the label on his beer bottle. "We do a lot of inventing, independent research kind of thing. A lot of, mmmm, community-oriented kind of projects."

"How's that pay?"

"Uh, it's all right. Honestly, most of my income these days is from my own patents."

Jake's eyes widened. "Like stuff you actually invented?"

He shrugged and smiled. "Nothing too glamorous. Techniques, materials used in industry. But I get a decent chunk of change on a regular basis." Not for the first time, he was grateful that Barry went against the prevailing business model and let him and Caitlin submit their more useful discoveries to the patent office as themselves rather than under the Star Labs corporation.

In spite of his self-deprecation, Jake still looked impressed. "So you're a genius scientist inventor, basically."

"Billionaire playboy philanthropist," Cisco said, waving his hand. "Ha. Yeah."

The bartender was back, finally, apologizing for how long it had taken, pouring out the wine quickly.

"Well, here's the other half of my order, so … " He put a tip in the bartender's jar and picked up the wineglass. "It was interesting seeing you, Jake. Take care, okay?"

He wasn't more than a few steps away when Jake caught up with him again. "Uh, hey, I wanted to ask you - "

"Yeah?"

"Would you ever like to, uh, to go get coffee sometime?"

For the second time in ten minutes, Cisco wondered if he'd drifted into an alternate universe.

"Just so we're both clear - " he said. "Was that you hitting on me?"

Jake flushed even redder. "I said I got some things figured out, a few years back. That was one of them. I know, such a cliche. Homophobic bully was actually gay all along. But cliches get to be cliches for a reason, right?"

"Yeah," Cisco said. "Yeah. Guess so. Well, as - um. As flattering as that was, I'm actually with someone these days. She's here tonight." He hefted the wineglass. "This is for her. So I'll have to turn that offer down. But hey, I'm really happy that you got that worked out."

"Yeah, I heard about your date," Jake said. "And look, I'm sorry that the way I targeted you in high school for being gay made you feel like you had to go back in the closet just to come here tonight. I - "

"Whoa," Cisco said. "Clarification. I wasn't gay in high school. Never claimed to be. I was and am pansexual. The only closet I'm in is when I'm trying to find my favorite shoes."

"Really?"

"Yeah. The woman I'm with, her name is Caitlin. She works with me at Star Labs. She's a kickass bioengineer and geneticist. She's my girlfriend, not my beard."

"Shit," Jake said quietly. "I'm sorry. Again. Wow."

"That's okay, as long you're clear now. See you, Jake."

"I just figured Si would know what he was talking about."

Halfway through his turn, Cisco paused and turned back. "Si? You mean Simon? He met her. I introduced her as my girlfriend."

"Yeah, well, he didn't seem it was a real thing."

"What did he think, then, that it's a wacky sitcom plot where she's a friend doing me a favor?"

Jake's eyes darted from side to side. "Not a favor," he said in a low voice.

Cisco's eyes narrowed.

" … so much as a … financial transaction?"

Cisco put both the beer and the wineglass down on a nearby table and took a measured breath. before he emitted a frequency that would shatter them, and probably any other glassware in the immediate area. "Si Danwell," he said slowly, "is running around telling everyone that my girlfriend is a prostitute?"

"Actually, he didn't bring it up until I asked if you were here and - maybe I misunderstood."

Cisco took another breath. "Okay," he said, picking the bottle and the glass up again. "I'll talk to Si. Clear it up. Thanks, Jake."

Jake opened his mouth, then shut it again. He nodded. "See you around, Cisco."

He worked his way around the dance floor, thinking hard. Was this maybe one last planned humiliation? For old times' sake?

But that would be a really elaborate con, and that had never been Jake's style. Plus, his vibes gave him a leg up in reading people these days, and he'd gotten nothing but honesty from Jake.

From Si, now - there'd been something sneering and nasty about him, just around the edges. But of course, there always had been.

To tell the truth, Cisco had liked that in high school, when both of them got sneered at on the regular. Hanging with Si meant they did a lot of sneering back (quietly. Where nobody could hear them). But it had lost its charm ten years on.

He craned his neck, trying to find Caitlin. She was still at the table where they'd been sitting, except now Si was sitting in his chair, talking to her.

Was he asking her if Cisco had hired her off Craigslist, or something?

For a moment, he considering vibing on them to hear the conversation. But she really hated when he vibed on her in non-emergency situations - they'd had some pretty big fights about it - so he resisted.

If Si really was spreading rumors about her, then Cisco would talk to him privately and find out. Then he would bring Caitlin in and they would handle it. If Jake really had misunderstood, then it was no big deal and Caitlin never needed to know that one person had maybe for about ten minutes thought she was his hired girlfriend.

He lost sight of them for a few minutes as people came between them, and when the momentary crowd cleared, she was alone at the table. He made an effort to look cheerful and unconcerned about anything, ever.

She smiled back at him, and he felt his own smile get more real just from that.

"Okay, I can't believe I'm actually saying this," he said, handing her the wineglass, "but Jake Tully grew up into an okay guy. He apologized! Can you believe that? He said he wasn't in a very good place in high school, but that doesn't excuse him taking it out on me, and he wanted to say he was sorry. And then he did!"

"That's amazing," she said. Her eyes were soft and affectionate.

Like he always did when she looked at him like that, he thought about pulling her into a quiet corner and kissing her until they were both dizzy. But that could wait. Really it could.

"Yeah. And then he hit on me, which was awkward, but explained a lot." He sought a perfect balance between casual and curious. "Hey, was that Si Danwell I saw you talking to just now? Where'd he go?"

She blinked and glanced into her glass - total tell. "I think he had a personal emergency and had to leave."

"Aww. That's too bad. I wanted to catch up. We were tight in high school, but after, we sort of drifted apart." He glanced at the door, wondering if he could catch Si outside.

She put her hand on his arm. "Honey, maybe you should just let him go. I think he's one of those people who peaked in high school."

He glanced at her, starting to frown. Caitlin could be a real snob sometimes, not malicious but thoughtless, her blind spots running roughshod over other people's reality. She'd gotten better, though, he'd thought. "Well, that doesn't matter to me. I don't care if he's working at a sporting-goods store or something now, he - "

"No. As a human being."

Oh. Wait. Shit. He had said something. "What'd you talk about?"

"Nothing important," she said firmly.

And although he didn't mean to vibe, Cisco suddenly knew that his one-time, no-more friend had been gross and disgusting, that Caitlin had handled it in her own way, and that she absolutely, positively, didn't want him to know. Not for her sake, but for his. She didn't want him to know that someone he'd once cared about had insulted both of them.

Caitlin took his beer and set it down. Even though she was trying to hide it, her eyes were anxious. "You wanna dance?"

He let out his breath. Si was gone. Not just from the reunion, but from his life. High school was way, way over. Anyone who'd heard his bullshit and actually believed it was someone who didn't matter.

He smiled at her. "Can't think of anything I want to do more."

FINIS