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It starts when they take a group photo and Cisco is the only person blurry.
They take the photo again. Barry speeds back and forth between the phone and the group, but every time, it’s almost as if Cisco gets blurrier. They look in the camera roll, and in the first photo, Cisco is only a little out of focus. His features are still visible and distinguishable. In the fifth one, though, he’s basically a blob with some semblance of colour, while the rest of his friends are clear as day.
“Holy frack,” he says, studying how he slowly turns from a fully formed and recognizable person into what might as well be a glitch, a scratch of colour on an otherwise normal photo. “Dude, I’m like an error screen.”
Joe leans over, stares at the phone for a moment, and then goes: “Uh, is anyone gonna check this out?”
After a few tests and a boatload of selfies that just end up being photos of the walls, Caitlin has an idea of what’s going on.
“Basically,” she starts, scrunching up her face the way she does when she’s thinking really hard. Next to her, Iris props herself up on one of the empty counters. “Your powers mean you’re always vibrating in a slightly different . . . way, to everything else, and I guess that that just . . . doesn’t show up on cameras. I’m honestly not completely sure. I think you’d have a better shot at figuring this out than I do.”
“Awesome,” Cisco drawls, then pulls out his phone. “It only started when I started getting vibes. After Barry reset the timeline. It’s like that-”
“Brought out your powers?” Barry says, frowning. Cisco nods, and Barry continues. “Thawne killing you might’ve jumpstarted your powers.”
"An inciting incident, if you will,” Caitlin proposes. “Your radioactive spider.”
Cisco blinks, slowly turns to stare at her, and narrows his eyes.
“What?” She squeaks in defense, “I know comic books.”
“Actually,” Cisco says, voice hard and angry, “my spider bite would have been the accelerator explosion, since that’s what gave me my powers. Wells killing me is like- like my Uncle Ben. My great power coming with great responsibility. You’d know that if you read them in order like I told you to.”
“At least I’m reading them. I just read the most interesting ones first.”
“That is disgusting. I’m disgusted.”
“Uh, not to interrupt,” Joe interrupts, “but do we know if we can have him show up in photos again? Because it’s a little suspicious if he goes anywhere with security feed.”
Caitlin bites her lip.
“Well,” she says, hesitant, “Cisco will have to do work himself to be sure, but as far as I can tell . . . he’s stuck like this.”
So: Cisco can't show up on cameras anymore.
It’s kinda cool for a while, until Cisco goes to his first family dinner in months for his mom’s birthday and can’t find the words to explain to her that he can’t be in a family photo. For all the vocabulary he knows in both English and Spanish, he cannot convince his mother against the idea. So, he leaves before it even happens. His parents give him disappointed, vaguely upset looks as he leaves, but they do not stop him; it’s as if they didn’t expect better of him in the first place.
“Time,” he tells Dante, adding a pause between his words where excitement can grow, “is like a spider’s silk.”
It’s certainly not the most scientific, or fun, way to explain it, but today is one of the days where Dante is looking less like a dead brother and Cisco is feeling more like a live one, and so he does not want to ruin that energy by boring Dante to death or having him walk out of Jitters more confused than when he walked in. It’s only been a bit of time since they both nearly died together for the second time and finally decided to spend any time together at all; he’s not keen on ruining this immediately.
Everything – every concept, whether it be time travel or the fifth dimension or Dante’s piano playing – is connected on a spider web. It is pieced together so carefully, and with the slightest nudge of a finger, it could break apart.
What he doesn’t tell Dante, and what he doesn’t even know until it’s too late to tell him anyway, is who or what the spider is, or the fly, or anything else.
Occasionally, Cisco imagines himself to be the spider. He looks at his hands, and does not see hands that belong to a twenty-five-year-old guy that got bullied in middle school, but rather hands that might one day weave through the delicate balance that keeps the entire multiverse intact, grab onto a particularly annoying thread of silk, and pull. He thinks, that with enough practice, he could tear away the ground from beneath everyone, and he means it literally.
In these times, he thinks of Reverb. Reverb, who was almost as powerful as Vibe – Cisco – could be, and who knew it. Reverb said that they could be gods. In these times, Cisco knows that he was right.
But sometimes when he thinks of Reverb, he thinks he might be a flyaway string of silk. He thinks of Reverb and he sees Zoom and hands vibrating faster than the human eye should be able to see. Cisco can see it, because he knows vibrations like, well, the back of his hand. Then, he thinks of Thawne, and hearts clicking off like an old TV.
(He thinks of his brother, and he thinks of Barry in the driver’s seat.)
Once in a while, he believes he’s just a little more consequential than a useless thread. He dies, regardless, a fly caught unfortunately in a web, but it is a necessary death, one that keeps the spider fed and the web alive. He is a martyr. There is a frozen gun pointed at the side of Dante’s head, and then he is packing his bags at STAR labs. He gets a nosebleed, and then he is fading away on an old cot. He is locked in a gorilla-sized cage surrounded by people he cares about, and the first life that should be lost is his.
(There’s another option. Sometimes, larger beings watch over the web, eyes wide and in awe. They are not allowed to interfere, or the web could crumble at their touch. This is not Cisco, though – he is shorter than his eldest brother was when he died. He hasn’t gotten any taller since he was fourteen.)
“And what, you can control it, mija?”
Cisco blinks, out of the moment and suddenly annoyed, though he pushes that twinge of emotion down. “What? Dude, no. I’m not even close to that powerful.”
It’s mostly true. He’s not that powerful yet, although he sees the universe spilling out every time he bites into a Boston cream doughnut. Even when – if – he does get that strong, he’s not ever gonna want to control time, not like that. Speedsters have a weird relationship with it, one that he’s tuned into, but not even they are in full power of the timeline, luckily. Nobody should be, he thinks.
(This is an opinion that will change one day, after a car accident and friendships that might never be repaired. He’ll change his mind back again one day, after months of therapy and realisations that nobody should play God.)
“Of course my little brother got the godlike superpowers and the 401k, and I’m still stuck in our parents’ house working at Sport Chek.”
Cisco swallows, fighting back frustration. “Bro, did you not even hear me? I can’t even do that crap. I’m like a glorified car speaker.”
And a glorified gun. A glorified highly dangerous weapon. He does not say that.
“Alright, mija. Downplay how you’re doing more at twenty-four than I ever will in my life.”
Cisco huffs, pulling away from the table and shoving out of his chair. He grabs his Flash, hides his other hand in his pocket where he fidgets with a loose string he’s been holding onto for weeks. He doesn’t make eye contact as he steps away.
“Whatever. At least Mom and Dad even notice when you’re in the room. Adios, man.”
With that, Cisco leaves.
Such an asshole.
Dante dies. Everything changes.
“I never wanted your brother to die,” Barry presses, stepping closer and closer to Cisco, his hands in front of him in tight fists. It’s better than flat palms, at least. “But I can’t go back. You know that.”
“You’re the spider, Barry!” Cisco explodes, teeth gnashing as he near spits in Barry’s face. “You’re the spider, man, I don’t care.”
Barry gives him that look, the one he gives them when he’s not quite following what they’re saying, but right now, it’s twinged with desperation, guilt, and a little bit of frustration. Good. Cisco hopes those feelings get worse.
“I- dude, what are you talking about?” He says, slowly (oh, he’s sure loving going slow, now that his family isn’t the one being saved from uncertain death).
Cisco doesn’t answer him, just steps back, shoes pressing hard against the cold floor like Barry is a car and he is an innocent walker, trying not to get hit. He scrambles away in a huff, repeating, “he’s the spider” under his breath until he’s out of the room. Barry’s headlights look back. He keeps going until the elevator dings and he’s fully escaped from the road – the building, STAR Labs – where he yells:
“He’s the spider!”
At the top of his lungs. It doesn’t help. He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands, lets out a shaky, wet sigh.
"Perdóname, Dante. Todavía no soy lo fuerte suficientemente.”
Not showing up on cameras works well enough to keep a secret identity – most people that aren’t Cisco can’t identify what they can’t even see, and it’s not like his goggles are doing him many favours in keeping his face hidden – but less so when a reporter tries to get a filmed interview with him regarding his job at the CCPD. Luckily Iris, the magic that she is, manages to stop that interview from ever seeing the light of day.
It bothers him, sometimes. He isn’t forgetting what he looks like; that isn’t the problem. Mirrors still capture his beauty, and there are reflective surfaces aplenty in STAR Labs. Plus, Barry is a surprisingly good artist, and captures his likeness to the point where Cisco has trouble fearing that his face will one day be forgotten.
It’s just that, well . . . sometimes he pulls out photos of Dante from the few weeks before the accident and wishes there were some sort of proof that they had been trying.
“You know, on Earth-42, we’re all human-sized bugs.”
“Dude, what?”
“Seriously, Wally. We’re all insects that live in apartment buildings the shape of ant hills and bee hives.”
“On Earth-42? Like, life, the universe, and everything? That Earth?”
“Yeah. Maybe that’s the point of everything. Being gigantic awesome-ass bugs and insects.”
Since his vibes have been getting stronger, Cisco has been finding himself reliving pivotal moments in a blink.
He breathes himself, being kicked off his elementary school football team. He is in his eight-year-old self’s body, and sees Jonas Fletcher sneering at him and whispering something to the kid next to him that Cisco can’t make out.
He sees Armando’s missing photo, still wearing his football jersey, as his whole family pin their closest memories to telephone poles in the hopes that they’ll get to experience them again.
He feels the pressure of Ronnie’s shoulder against his, Caitlin to Ronnie’s right, the night the accelerator exploded. The entire lab’s excitement is radiating in waves, and the building soon will with them.
He hears Dante’s voice on the phone the afternoon before. They do not end the call on good terms, hard voices distant and cold, and Cisco flumps onto his bed, frustrated.
But unlike Barry and all the speedsters that will come before and have come after him, although Cisco can experience these moments as if they are happening in the present moment, he can do nothing to change them (yet, but that’s a fact he hasn’t quite wrapped his head around – yet). He can only affect his vibes if they are happening in the present moment, as strange as the present feels to him sometimes nowadays.
To this day, he has not yet figured out a way to kick Jonas Fletcher in the balls for whatever he said about him.
He cannot force his nine-year-old body to break away from his parents and Dante and run down the street screaming Armando’s name until he might finally find him, safe and alive.
He hasn’t unlocked the ability to go back to the exact moment that the alarms started blaring in STAR Labs, punch Ronnie to the floor (he surely wasn’t strong enough back then, but he’s built up muscles in the past few years of fighting bad guys and being kidnapped on a near monthly basis), and lock himself in the pipeline before anyone else had to die.
And, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot tell Dante that he’s sorry, or to just please take the bus to work tomorrow, Cisco is begging him. He just never hears him.
They beat Savitar. They save Iris, and H.R. dies. Caitlin leaves. It’s over. They win. It’s not a win that brings with it any good will. Barry goes missing.
He and Iris go to a photo gallery, or an art exhibition, or something like that, a little less than four years since the accelerator’s death and a few months since Barry’s disappearance. Iris says she’s working on some sort of story, though he knows that she doesn’t work for the newspaper anymore, so maybe it’s just an excuse to get them out of the labs for once.
She invites all of Team Flash (or at least, what’s left of it), but Joe has work and Wally flubs something about needing to Star City for the weekend. The two of them, though, are basically jobless other than when people are trying to kill them, and the only people Cisco knows in Star City are superheroes and cops who do not want to spend the weekend with him (except for Felicity, but she’s been around less and less since Barry disappeared), so they have no excuse. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, either, to get out in the town with a friend, even if it is to get out to an art exhibit. Cisco likes art. He’s an art guy. He’s seen each of the original Star Wars movies at least seven times, and they’re art, so as far as the world is concerned, he’s an art fanatic.
Cisco feels a little uncomfortable though, if he’s totally honest. The photography is nice, and not at all the problem. The problem is that half the people standing around them as they browse through images and images of disasters in the heart of the city (that, much of the time, are partially Cisco and his friends’ fault) and flowers bloomed to full growth (this he struggles to hold himself accountable for, but maybe there’s a meta out there with the power to grow lustrous plants, so who knows), are holding very expensive and high-quality cameras. Cameras that, should they point at him, could prove very very dangerous as well.
Cisco, as a rule, does not like to be afraid of things. He’s held his own against plenty of dangerous people in the past, and he’s certain it will happen again. He’s been kidnapped before, and killed, and yet he’s made it out alive every time. However, wanting does not a brave man make, and since joining Team Flash, he’s noticed that large crowds aren’t much his forte anymore. They never really were, but nowadays especially.
His body and powers are a glorified weapon: if any of these photographers take a photo of him and see, they could scream ‘meta!’ with all the fear of the unknown that humans are programmed to have, and then he’d freak out, and his powers might react, and then he’ll be on the news, not for his great inventions or disgraced evil boss this time, but for being the latest meta-murderer that he’s meant to take down.
And so, even with Iris at his side, he couldn’t be blamed for being a little tense. Her hand is locked in his – they've always been pretty touchy, the lot of them, for better or for worse. He can’t say he adores being mistaken for Iris or Caitlin (back before . . . everything) or Wally or anyone else’s boyfriend, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Iris certainly doesn’t seem to appreciate it, especially when they stare at the engagement ring on her finger and the distinct lack of one on his for a little bit too long, clear judgment written over their faces.
(Once, before anything had gone wrong, somebody asked him if he, Caitlin, and Ronnie had room for a fourth. Which, first: what? And second: the guy was actually pretty hot. Cisco hesitated for just a second too long before Caitlin ended up pulling all three of them halfway across the bar.)
Iris, notebook in the hand that isn’t holding Cisco’s, leads the two of them down the hallway. She stops at an exhibit, and they push forward to get a better look at it. It’s a photo of a tree, standing alone, just as it is being struck by lightning. The lightning jolts down, is in the moment of travelling down the trunk of the tree, alight with flames that will soon spread to the rest of its branches. The sky behind it is pitch black.
“Dude, that is so trippy,” Cisco says, squinting at the photo and stepping closer to get a better look. The photographer, someone in their early twenties with electric blue hair down to their ears, smiles at them. They’ve got a leather jacket with a million patches that squares their shoulders real strong and a backpack with a million pins sitting on the ground next to them. They’ve got a camera with a million stickers in their hands and they’re pointing it at them, tilting their head.
Cisco’s eyes widen, leaning back immediately. “Uh, uh,” he says, stupidly. “Whoa, there. I’m not, uh, looking to have my face up on these walls here, even if it is a beautiful, um, face, and I know that-”
“We’re not the biggest fans of getting our photo taken,” Iris cuts him off, with grace. “Sorry.”
The photographer shrugs not unkindly, rests their camera against their ribs. “I get it, no worries. I just thought you two look like great friends. I like taking shots of people in motion, living out their lives and all.”
They called the two of them friends, and were nice enough, so Cisco smiles at them and, when they’re walking away from them and the rest of their photos, Iris grabs their card and tucks it into her purse. Just in case, he assumes. Maybe she’ll want to go back to reporting one day.
They move along, onto the next exhibit. It’s a bunch of photos of animals, usually small ones such as rats and birds and the like. But Cisco finds himself focusing on a certain frame, off to the side and next to where its photographer is leaning against the wall. They do not notice Cisco dragging Iris while she mutters under her breath over to their closest-positioned photo.
He stares at it. Held within the frame and then, in the photo, between two thick branches of a tree, is a spider-web, glistening with tears or raindrops. It is beautifully crafted, and its own master sits, folded in the corner of her masterpiece. She is still. If she is sleeping, it is like the dead. She watches over the rest of the web, eight eyes closed. Within the middle of the photo, a rotting fly.
It is a magnificent photo, taking from so close up that Cisco wonders how they took it without disturbing anything. He imagines that he himself would not be afforded the same grace. He’d be too mesmerized in the moment. He’d ruin the picture by trying to be there, too. Everything is recorded in fine detail; nothing is out of focus, or blurry.
Cisco grins at the artist, who hums back. He says, “this photo is awesome, man. Nice job,” because he has no idea how to talk to photographers. He tries to meet their eyes, but their glasses are smudged.
Then from behind him, like they’ve read his mind and know his nightmares inside-out, someone screams, “meta!”
Cisco is stock still, frozen, for what feels like an eternity, before Iris’ tugging on his hand breaks him out of it and he finally sees a crowd forming around an exhibit, pulling out their phones and cameras in a rush.
“It’s someone else,” Iris hisses to him under her breath, “somebody else is a meta, not you.”
His chest releases a flood of relief he hadn’t realised he was holding. He runs a hand through his hair, then jolts – somebody else is a meta. They could be dangerous.
Iris, knowingly, elbows him. “What are you doing? Go!”
He hurries out and away from the crowd, and shoves himself into a bathroom stall at the end of the hallway. Quick as a bug, he breaches away, then returns just as quickly, decked out in Vibe gear. He stands dutifully a few steps away from the growing audience, and calls, “Is everyone alright?”
As it turns out, everyone is fine.
The meta that some elderly lady had screamed about and was now glaring at over five or so heads, turns out to be the photographer that had tried to get Cisco’s photo earlier. The lady had apparently allowed them to take a photo of her, and then, not even a second after they had pulled up their camera, they were on the ground.
It’s clearly a false alarm, and so Vibe, a little annoyed that his outing with Iris had been interrupted, says as much, shooing away the people circling them. He tries to comfort the old woman, tells her she must have blinked, or looked away, or something like that, and that the poor photographer was not a meta-human, he’s sorry.
Then he goes to tell the photographer that things like this happen all the time, they shouldn’t worry about it too much, when they scrunch up their face and give him a sort of sheepish look.
“Yeah, no,” they say, rubbing the back of their neck the same way Barry did – does, “she was right.”
Iris shoots him a look from where she’s hovering just far enough away to not attract attention, and he hopes that the nod he sends back doesn’t get noticed by the photographer.
The new meta – Robi Worken, twenty-five, moved to Central City only a few months before the particle accelerator explosion to pursue their career and get away from their family – can pause time. They're sort of like Turtle, who is still one of his worst enemies even after everything that’s happened since and even after Turtle died, except they actually stop time, and they can only do it for a little bit of time, although he wants nothing more than to train them to raise that time period.
Really, it’s more like how Barry’s explained what it feels like to go at top speed, and that thought makes Cisco squeeze his eyes shut and force bile to stay in his stomach. That’s Barry’s power, no one else’s except for Wally and the other speedsters that dash - hah - through their lives on occasion.
But Worken isn’t moving fast – everyone else just isn’t moving at all. And, according to Worken, the only thing they really want to do with their powers is take cool shots. Cisco gets it. Not everyone with powers wants to be a superhero or serial killer. Still, before they leave STAR Labs, he does christen them with a name, should they ever choose to use it: Clockwork.
He’s still a little frustrated that his trip with Iris was put on hold and then promptly forgotten, because for all the difficulties that come with . . . everything, she’s quickly shaping up to be one of his closest friends. So, he promises her that they’ll find something they can do together that will most definitely not turn out to be a mission in disguise. He not-so-subtly motions to his copy of The Matrix that’s sitting on one of his desks, just waiting to be watched.
(Halfway through the movie a scene reminds them both about a case that Joe is working on, and Iris realises something that might help him crack it. They don’t end up watching past that.)
Metas don’t have to save people. They don’t have to want to, even, or try. He thinks about that long after Robi Worken has left, into the cold night. He bangs his head on his table, and stares at the Speed Force Bazooka sitting in front of him. Then, he gets back to work.
(He also thinks about the other photographer, with the smudged glasses and the photo so realistic it looked like a painting. They are very good at their job. Cisco, not so much. He sees the spider web, sitting peacefully between two branches, the story of life and death and loss playing out on each inch of its surface, and cannot help but be a part of it, too.)
When Cisco is nine years old, his older brother goes missing. They never find the body, and Cisco never finds the way to believe he’s really dead.
When Cisco is twenty-two, the particle accelerator explodes, and with it, Ronnie. He believes he’s dead this time, he really does; and then he comes back. And then he dies again, and again and again and again in Cisco’s nightmares. But he came back once. A fraction of Cisco believes it could happen, again.
When Cisco is twenty-three, an awful, awful man that calls him his son shoves his flat hand into his chest and then crushes his heart with his fist. He wakes up the same day, shaking.