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It’s not sobbing, certainly. But... He wouldn’t call it sniffling either. It’s a soft sound, a whimper maybe. It’s dark. It's far too dark to see anything. Cisco wakes up. He shivers, anxiety scraping at the inside of his throat slowly like some kind of spider’s legs individually moving.
The susurrus of a broken voice softly speaking. Too low to make out anything but the ebb and flow of consonants against vowels. It rocks like a ship. Back and forth. Back and forth. Cisco wakes up with someone else’s tears in his eyes.
A touch to his skin in the dark, numbers and letters traced out slowly, falteringly, bitten off nails snagging against dry, thin skin. Equations of the universe, questions without answers, fading into the obscurity of the black as their sensation fades far too fast. When Cisco wakes from the dream this time, it's to the fear and resignation that his mind is fading. That he's losing something so intricately tied to himself that he can't even imagine what he would be without it. Better to dead than without it.
It's still pitch black. It's always pitch black. No light. Just the endless sounds of soft scurries. The occasional brush of something with more legs than brain matter. The mind numbing terror of the void. Cisco wakes up screaming until his throat bleeds.
Cisco stares at the still unidentified remains they’d uncovered when they’d found Detective Thawne. He bites his thumbnail and finally voices himself outloud. “I can hear you. I know. You’re giving me these.... Every night, dammit, you’re giving me these vibes, man. Can’t you just... I don’t know, say your name for once? Just once.” He glares and gives a frustrated growl at the scarred up skeleton, the scrapes left behind by rats making him sick to his stomach. He knows he's going to have to tell the others now. There's no getting around it. He's exhausted. He's scared. His every moment is filled with the anxiety this thing is giving him in waves. He hasn't eaten more than a bite since they brought it up here. He can barely drink anything. And the one time he tried right after a dream vibe tasted like rotten, foul, filth ridden poison. He'd thrown up and not had anything to eat for the rest of the day.
The black comes back as he sleeps. Following it swiftly is the soft sound of reedy breath. A hollow, weak cough, the taste of blood in his mouth. A soft, breathy keen. The dark is somehow getting darker. It’s beckoning him like an old friend or a new god.
He's listening to him die. He knows that. He's seen what was left of the body. He's listening to a man starving to death beneath their feet. No-one comes to gloat, no-one comes to wax poetic about life and death. It's just a man, alone where he was put, chained by the throat. Cisco cries on the medical bed, wrapping his arms around his knees as he sobs, hiding his face.
He feels the bite of the iv plastic adhesive bending, alarm sounding that the drip was obstructed, he just curls tighter and blocks everyone else out. They talk about removing the body, of, at least, putting it into a pipeline cell. Anything to block the access it seems to have gained to Cisco. But he doesn’t want them to. He needs to know. He needs to figure out who it is. Who is reaching out to him. He pulls away in shocked surprise as he’s touched, still half in the dark.
He blinks owlishly, red-rimmed, wet, and sunken eyes taking too long to identify Caitlin. He watches her inject something into the bag before getting him to stretch back out on the bed with soft words and careful coaxing.
Cisco wakes up again slowly. His eyes flutter in the shadows of the dimmed lights. He’s so tired. But for the first time in a long time his head is clear. He’s hungry. Honestly hungry. He looks around and spies the pretzel bag Caitlin had left for him earlier. He smiles tiredly and pulls it to himself.
Nobody mentions the body for days as Cisco recovers and even he can admit, to himself, that he’d needed to be pulled away from it. He carefully takes in all the damage the neglect had given him.
When he’s able, when he’s finally left alone, when his silence isn’t looked at with concern but simply now accepted, Cisco makes his way down to the pipeline. He stares into the cell -- watches the black bag that sits on the small, silver, cart. So delicate, that cart. Holding the weight of an entire life. The bag does nothing. It never does. No dreams come to him anymore, no more soft whimpers. No more scratchy numbers pressed into skin. No more screams of anguish. But he still feels it. He still feels the need and the desperation and the betrayal. The acceptance that he’ll never get out. That he’ll never see the light again.
Time turns around him. He works with the team, silent and wordless, skills sharp and swift as ever. His wit's still his. But his heart, it feels, is stuck in that bag. On that cart. It's stuck in that dark and he can't shake it. He talks to the bones where he won't talk to the others. He makes promises he's sure that he can keep. If he can just get into the cell. He's locked out though. And he isn't yet in a deep enough place to take it apart to get in. That comes later.
That comes after meeting Harrison Wells part Two. After the dark comes calling as soon as he lays eyes on the cold blue gaze. After he doesn't shake the hand proffered him. He walks away. He goes to his workshop and shuts the door, hiding himself silently in a cabinet, in a corner, in the dark. He stays there, half dreaming of soft hiccupping whimpers and the clawing sensation of death creeping in.
When it's just as quiet in the building as it is in his lab, Cisco emerges. He takes his tools and makes his way down.
He doesn't hear the alarm that sounds, doesn't see the lights that flash, only the crying. And the dark. The scurrying and the whispers. The memory of thin lips and ice blue eyes. A kiss, sincere and sad and sweet. A goodbye. And darkness. So much darkness. The man's name being screamed out until nothing but sobs are left, begging not to be left there. Not to be left alone, in the dark.
Cisco jerks awake as he's touched, his throat raw from his own screams. One look at the man in front of him and Cisco scrambles back in terror, never leaving the floor. He tucks himself as far away as possible, curling into as tight a ball as he can. He's taken back into the dark. Back to the early days. Back before the starvation set in, before the water became poisoned with vomit and effluent. Before the rats and the bugs. Back to when it was just time in the void. Time and solitude. When minutes are counted by concertos playing in his head and he thinks one day there will be light.
And he knows, he knows, he knows. And he cries. He knows. He cries as the man cries and he knows because the man knows. Because the man plays the flute with his hands, and plays chess in his mind, and prays equations in Latin like he's breathing. He opens his eyes to the light and cries. For both himself, and for the man he'd never truly known.
“Hartley.”