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Cisco couldn’t help but sigh when he realized that they had forgotten Barry’s doppelgänger locked up in the supply closet. To be fair, they had had a lot to deal with over the past twenty-four hours. And honestly, who stayed knocked out for twenty four hours, anyway?
When it came down to it though, he knew they needed to release him. If for no other reason than Detective Iris West was goddamn scary and Cisco did not want her coming after them. Not even remotely. He contemplated making Harry do it, if only because he was obviously this Barry’s idol as much as Doctor Wells had been at the beginning for his Barry, but at the same time, he also understood how upsetting it could be to have your idol torn down in front of you.
And no one deserved to deal with Harry, anyway. Guy made Hartley seem warm and cuddly.
So Cisco forced on his nicest, ‘Please don’t have your wife arrest us’ smile and opened the supply closet door.
“Finally! I thought I was going to die-” Barry – no, that’s weird. Allen? No, weirder, fine, Barry – cut himself off and recoiled from Cisco.
Alright, so this Barry knew Reverb. Lovely. “Look, man-”
“Don’t! Don’t kill me! Or, I don’t know. You’ve never tried to kill me before, but I don’t really want to think of any other reason you may have kidnapped me. I’ve ignored the weird stalking, I haven’t even told Iris. We were friends, once, well, more, I guess. But remember Organic Chem, freshman year? You weren’t always evil, Paco.”
Cisco couldn’t help it, his smile turned from a strained grimace to something a little more genuine. It seems that a universal constant is Barry’s foot-in-mouth disease.
“Have I entered an alternate universe or did you really just crack a smile for me?” Barry asked, voice still timid and vaguely horrified.
“Dude, Reverb is dead. I’m a breacher. Call me Cisco.”
It wasn’t until Barry seemed to relax that it hit Cisco what he had said. “Wait, what do you mean by more? Did you date a supervillian?” Maybe this Barry wasn’t the bumbling scientist trope they all thought.
Barry turned as red as a beat and gaped like a fish. “No! Well, maybe? Kind of, more than anything else? It was complicated. He wasn’t evil at the time. I mean, I don’t think so anyway.”
And apparently Cisco was very slow today, because it was then that he realized that the supervillian this weird dandy nerd version of Barry had dated was the weird Japanese culture appropriating, Matrix looking version of him.
“Honestly, I’m struggling more with wrapping my head around the idea that a Barry Allen would date a Cisco Ramon and I wasn’t lucky enough that it was me.” God, maybe Barry’s socially awkward rambling was contagious.
But if anything, Barry just looked confused. “What do you mean? Pa-Cisco, you’re an attractive, funny genius. How could any Barry Allen not have had a crush on you, at the bare minimum?”
Cisco scoffed. “Right. And have you looked in the mirror lately? Those doe eyes and cheekbones? Dat ass doe. Besides, I’m pretty sure my Barry, my earth’s Barry, is straight.”
Barry seemed disbelieving. And Cisco could get that, he couldn’t imagine a straight Cisco Ramon, but then again, he couldn’t remember being anything other than aggressively bisexual. And, y’know, he never would have guessed there would be an evil version of either himself or Caitlin running around, either.
It was only in the awkward lull of the conversation that Cisco realized he hadn’t uncuffed Barry yet, moving to do so just as Harry opened the door.
“What’s taking so long, Ramon?”
Cisco just bit his lip and tried to focus on the matter at hand, saving his Barry and returning this one to his wife. Though, maybe he wasn’t so bad, Cisco thought to himself, vaguely annoyed as Harry ripped the keys from his hands, especially if he kept railing into Harry like that.