Cisco's text came at 11:14 the next morning.
coffee. The bitter pot. Your office. Be there in twenty.
I went.
He was at my workstation with two mugs already poured. He was wearing the same hoodie as yesterday. The bags under his eyes had bags under them. He hadn't slept.
I sat in the visitor chair on the other side of the desk.
"Thanks for the coffee."
"Drink it."
I drank it. He drank his.
After thirty seconds he set his mug down very carefully on a coaster I didn't own — he'd brought a coaster — and looked at me.
"You're a monster."
"Yeah."
"You take people's powers."
"Criminals."
"You take criminals' powers and you keep them and they get added to you like you're —"
"I know what it sounds like."
"It doesn't sound like anything. It is something. You've taken nineteen things that did not belong to you and you've stuck them in your chest and called them yours."
"I have."
"And you don't —"
He stopped.
Pressed both palms against his eyes. Held them there.
When he took them away his eyes were red. He'd cried, sometime in the night. Not at me. He'd cried at the situation.
"I sat on my couch until four in the morning," he said. "I wrote a list. People who'd be dead if you hadn't been on this team. My name was on it twice. Cait's name was on it three times. Barry's was on it once and you and I both know that the once would have been the once. Eddie's name was on it. Half the bullpen at CCPD's names were on it from the Zoom attack — not because you killed Zoom, you can't, but because you were in the room that day and I think Zoom didn't do worse because you were in the room and he was clocking you and deciding you weren't food yet."
"Cisco —"
"I'm not done."
"Okay."
"I wrote a second list. People on the planet who'd be alive who aren't, and people who'd have their powers who don't, because of you. I had nineteen names, the same ones I had in August, and they were all people who'd have killed somebody if you hadn't gotten there first. I went through every file. I looked at what they did. I wasn't generous. I was looking for one I'd argue for. I didn't find one."
I waited.
"This isn't fine," he said. "This isn't fine and I want you to hear me say that out loud. The second list could grow. The standard could slip. Somebody on the second list could turn out to have a kid you didn't know about, or a redemption arc somebody else was running, or a plan to come back and do better, and you decided for them. You decided. That's an enormous thing to decide. And if it ever gets bigger than nineteen-criminals-zero-deaths I'm going to have a very different conversation with you than this one."
"Understood."
"But it's nineteen-criminals-zero-deaths. And every one of them is alive. And I am not in the business of throwing away my friend over a moral position I haven't earned. I survive in this city because of you. That counts."
"It counts."
"So here's where I land."
He pulled a folded sheet of legal pad from his back pocket.
It was the same pad he'd used for the Earth-2 terms. Same handwriting. Smaller, this time. He'd written it last night.
He opened it. Slid it across the desk to me.
"Read."
I read.
One: No hunts during active team operations. If we're on a meta call, you're on a meta call. You don't slip out the back to do a job because the city is busy.
Two: No targets without an evidence file you can show me. If I ask to see why a person was on your list, you show me. I won't ask about every one. I will ask sometimes.
Three: If a target turns out to be redeemable — kid in a bad spot, person being coerced, whatever — you abort. Your job is to make a call and live with it. My job is to push back when I think the call's wrong.
Four: You tell me before, not after. Not permission. Notification. I have to know it happened so I'm not flat-footed when it shows up on Barry's desk.
Five: If you ever lift a finger toward anyone in this lab — Cait, Barry, Joe, Iris, Eddie — I will use everything I know about you to stop you. And I will know you saw this clause in this list and I will know you signed anyway.
I read it twice.
Picked up the pen on his side of the desk. Signed H. Griffin at the bottom.
Slid it back.
He folded it. Put it in his pocket.
"Cait?" I said.
"She'll be in this afternoon. She slept eight hours and ate breakfast which is more than I can say for either of us. She wants to talk too."
"Same terms?"
"Different terms. Hers."
"Okay."
He picked up his mug. Drank.
"Plasma."
"Yeah."
"Show me."
I lit a tiny pulse on the pad of my thumb. The size of a lit match. Held it there for a count of two and let it die.
The room smelled briefly like an electrical fire.
Cisco stared.
"You can fuse abilities."
"Yeah."
"You can take two powers and combine them."
"Yeah."
"That's not — that's not even a thing on the metahuman literature, that's not a thing people do, you know that, right?"
"I know."
"That's amazing."
"It's also how I made plasma out of two weaker things, so —"
"No, no, no, don't undersell it, that's engineering, that's — Harry, that is —"
He stopped. Caught himself.
His face went through three expressions in a second. The first was the genuine wonder of a man who'd just been shown a thing he'd thought impossible. The second was the corrective wince of a man remembering that the man showing me the impossible thing is the man on the moral list I sat up till four AM about. The third was the long exhale of a man who'd already decided to live with the contradiction and was practicing how.
"It's still amazing," he said quietly. "I'm allowed to think both things."
"You're allowed."
"You're a monster."
"I know."
"You're our monster."
"I know."
He drank the last of his coffee.
Set the mug down.
Stood up.
"Don't tell anyone else for now. We figure out together when Cait is ready and when Barry can hear it."
"Okay."
"Welcome to the worst secret-keeping arrangement in Central City."
"Honored."
He almost smiled. Didn't quite get there. Walked out.
I sat at my workstation a long time with the empty mug in front of me.
Cleaned the mug. Put it away. Got back to work.
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