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Chapter Text

Death is inevitable.

Eobard Thawne has made a life out of rejecting the inevitable.

Perhaps you can guess how this will go (after all, it would be a short story otherwise).

***

It starts like this:

He is unmade, and he is remade (piece by piece, atom built upon atom), and the pain he experiences in his return to existence feels like punishment and reward all at once.

Eobard Thawne is himself, and someone else, and nothing and everything and never and always. He is an instant and an eternity and removed from existence entirely.

Beyond anything, Eobard Thawne is.

Even as the infinite potentials pool out before him (the overwhelming awareness of every reality and every possibility, every is and every might be), he knows – subconsciously, unconsciously, driven by instinct – that, ultimately, he needs to pick one. So he does.

Why that one? Perhaps it is fate, or chance, or choice.

(Does it even matter – don’t they all lead to the same thing, anyway?)

***

What happens next is this:

The world crystallises around him even as he returns in fragments, in snatches of awareness, of understanding, of feeling. All coming together until he is, again, complete.

Eobard Thawne lives.

***

What Eobard will never admit is this:

He’s disorientated in a city he lived in for fifteen years. He’s forgotten what it’s like to live in this body, any body really, but this one (this one) – it has been so long. He thinks, perhaps, that he missed it.

But that’s not the important part, not for now.

What’s important is this:

***

Most things are the same. Some are not. This is the world Eobard left, it seems, but it is clear also that it has moved on in his absence.

Same or different, there are some things too important (too integral, too fundamental) to have disappeared entirely. In Eobard’s mind, there is one thing of value in this time. He will find it (find him).

***

He does (but you worked this out already).

What you may not know is the rest of it.

Chapter Text

Eobard Thawne travels the streets of Central City.

It’s quieter than he remembers, certainly, and darker too, perhaps.

Either way, the city is quiet, and it is dark, and there are hundreds of alleys which (in the manner of alleys everywhere) are even quieter, and even darker, and there is one alley in particular which – suddenly is not.

(Imagine it, if you can:)

It is the blue of Cisco as he raises his hands even as he leans slightly from some unseen hurt.  It is the threats of the man opposite him as his voice rises in time.  It is the lightning of Eobard, within and without, as he finds them both.

As he finds Cisco.

Cisco.

Cisco, tired and hurt and without support but at the same time gloriously, wonderfully defiant.  Eobard does not know who is ahead in this confrontation and, frankly, it is immaterial.  It is the work of moments to find himself behind this stranger, this faceless person wholly irrelevant except for the way he is placed between Eobard and Cisco. 

Eobard puts his hands to the man’s neck and twists, feels the crack as much as he hears it, and lets the body drop to the concrete with indifference.

It is far less interesting than what it in front of him.

Eobard can feel the moment Cisco sees him, the breath in which he recognises him, the heartbeat in which he understands him (that is is him).  Eobard revels in it (this is his return).

Cisco’s hands are still up, fingers curled into fists and it’s impossible to tell whether the act is more defensive or offensive, but even in Cisco’s shock they don’t so much as tremble let alone fall.

Good boy, Thawne thinks fiercely, proudly (because he is proud, however much Cisco would hate any right he has to that feeling).

He puts his own hands up, palms out, unthreatening as he steps slowly over the body of the man he has just killed.  Another pace and he notes the way Cisco’s shoulders straighten, the slightest shift of his fingers that removes any doubt as to whether he is thinking protect or attack.

He smiles, just a little, says “Cisco”, and it comes out like a sigh, as though the act of breathing required that name just as much as the oxygen in the air.  It’s the first thing he’s said in – he doesn’t know how long – and he can’t think of anything better.  The first word to pass his lips in this new life of his and he imbues it with the reverence it deserves.  It is just one more proof of how bound together they are, in life and death and pain and potential, and a thousand other things that most people are too stupid or undeserving to even realise exist. 

It feels right.

(Save me, Cisco, he had said because if anyone could – if anyone would – it was going to be him.)

Still, he pauses, an allowance to Cisco’s unspoken warning.  It’s not fear that Cisco would defeat him that stops him, simply that Cisco deserves this time.  It costs him nothing and he owes Cisco this much, he freely admits.

This close and he can see Cisco swallow, observes in the changing lines of his forehead how his eyes widen then narrow, and – a moment later, he doesn’t need to be this near to see Cisco stumble where he stands.

“Cisco,” he says again, because there’s a dead man behind him and blood on Cisco’s clothes and Cisco still hasn’t said anything. 

He just needs Cisco to say something.

He doesn’t. 

A siren rails in the air behind them.  They both ignore it.

Eobard waits some more.

“Thawne?” Cisco asks eventually.  His name cracks into two syllables but there’s no weakness in the way Cisco’s voice breaks, only strength in how it continues.

He stumbles again and this time Eobard is at Cisco’s side, arms around him and guiding him gently to the ground. 

Cisco could have reacted in a hundred different ways, with hatred and hurt and anger, and none of them would have surprised Eobard.  He was there for every moment of their history.  He is under no illusions as to their parting.

The one thing he could never have anticipated though, is the way, after a pause (after ten seconds or thirty or maybe a day), Cisco’s face trapped between surprise and expectation (what are you doing here? on one hand and what took you so long? on the other) until they cancel each other out into a kind of blankness (or perhaps it’s just exhaustion), Cisco’s body twitches itself out of its suspension and then: Cisco’s body curls towards his, hand fisting in the thick leather of his suit with such tight urgency that Eobard can feel the pressure of those fingers pushing bruises into his skin beneath, Cisco’s face buries itself against his chest over his heart, and – a moment, while that heart of his beats once, twice, three times – the shaking of Cisco’s body in a way that is unmistakably that of a person silently sobbing.

Eobard has missed a lot in the time he’s been gone, but he sits on the ground of this bleak little alley and knows three truths: Cisco is alive, Cisco is at his side (where he belongs, he thinks – viciously, selfishly, protectively), and Cisco is breaking apart in his arms.

It is in this return to life that Eobard Thawne wraps his arms around Cisco, holds him close like he never did when he was Harrison Wells, and rests his cheek against the dark hair of a boy who hates him as much as he’s ever loved him.

***

It’s still dark when the shaking cedes to trembling and eventually even that quiets until Cisco is calm and still against him.  It’s longer before Cisco moves and then only to turn his head until he’s looking at his fingers twisted as much as they can be in the yellow of Eobard’s suit.

Eobard knows Cisco, though (for all that in return Cisco might deny that he ever knew Eobard – even though that’s not true, not really, because for the scale of the lie so much of it was truth), and he can practically feel the furious working of that marvellous brain of his.

Eobard risks breaking this strange peace and chances, finally, to move – to curve one hand around Cisco’s head and stroke down to his neck, palm wide and fingers carding through strands of hair that are longer than he remembers.  Cisco might doubt Eobard’s ability to love, and Eobard may long have lived by placing his objectives above his emotions, but what else can he call this ache to reassure Cisco in respect of a tragedy he doesn’t even know?

Cisco finally untangles himself from Eobard, a slow process with joints stiff and fingers cramped (separates them like they’re not so closely woven they can never truly be free of each other), hand then body and finally to standing.  

He keeps carefully out of range of any further assistance Eobard might try to give.

“We need to leave.”

When Cisco speaks, his voice is hoarse and painful.  Eobard would wince to hear it if he were that kind of man, but he’s not (and if he ever did it would be for Cisco, Cisco who has always brought him closer to his lines than anyone else).  His face aches with exhaustion but there’s also the weight of a decision made in his gaze, visible beneath the pain and unhappiness, and it pins Eobard like he’s daring him to refuse, to let him down.  Again.

Eobard is almost intrigued enough to test that, to see what Cisco would do in return, curious as to just what he is capable of now. 

He has always had so much potential. 

Instead, he simply helps Cisco move the body to the side wall, the weight heavy between them.  If it is a problem, well, it will be someone else’s.

Cisco lifts a hand and a glow emits – reaching out, twisting around itself – and a few feet in front of them a pulsing rift forms, hanging in the air.

Oh, Cisco.  Wonderful, clever, impossible Cisco. 

The breach is beautiful, an answer to questions not yet asked.  Cisco truly has flourished with Eobard’s gift.  He mourns briefly that he never had the opportunity to teach Cisco, his student in so many things but not this most important one, to see the awe on his face the first time he created something like this and the way they would have been bound ever more closely together with the joy of each discovery.

(Eobard can acknowledge that it was his own actions that stole that possibility from him.  The sacrifice must have been necessary at the time.)

It is a living thing, pulsing and breathing in the air, as remarkable as the man who made it.  Eobard looks at Cisco without thinking, as though to share this moment with him as they did so many times in the past, but Cisco is staring resolutely ahead. 

This incredible thing hangs before them and there is not a shred of joy on Cisco’s face.  He steps through the breach without waiting to see if Eobard will follow.

He does.

(There would be no story if he didn’t).

***

As with so many things since Eobard’s return, the cortex is the same but different.  Almost every available surface is covered in notes and diagrams and equations, all in Cisco’s writing.  Coffee mugs and the odd takeaway container litter the surfaces. 

He notes the silence.

Eobard is not a man who allows himself to feel something so mundane as worry but there is an uncomfortable feeling low in his stomach that he cannot, quite, ignore.

Cisco doesn’t pause, doesn’t check on Eobard, just limps across the expanse of floor to dump his goggles on the sole chair in front of the console and moves from there to the med bay.  Eobard stands in the middle of the room and soaks in the unexpected sense of familiarity. 

(Cisco never turns his back on him.)

Eobard watches Cisco remove his jacket before adding his chosen instruments to the tray and pulling it all to the bed in practiced moves.  He sits and Eobard can see his grimace when he peels his shirt away.  It’s a deep breath before he picks up some gauze and presses it to his stomach.

Eobard crosses the floor to where Cisco is finishing cleaning his wound, bloody pieces of gauze on the tray and another close to joining them.  Eobard can see a long cut along one side of Cisco’s abdomen, the skin around it irritated and burned. 

It would appear that, however unintentionally, Eobard may have done a public service by removing that particular individual from the population.

Cisco’s does nothing to acknowledge Eobard’s presence, acts like he wasn’t clinging to Eobard less than an hour ago with pain so thick that Eobard could practically sink his teeth into it, just goes about his task with a continued silence.  Eobard is unfamiliar with this new, quiet Cisco.  Even at his most angry, his most hurt, his most betrayed, he had words for Eobard.

It’s when Cisco reaches out for a needle, already threaded, that Eobard intercepts him.

“Let me,” he says, hand curling over Cisco’s wrist (thinner than it was, skin thin but pulse strong), for no other reason than it seems natural to do so.

Cisco freezes and for a second Eobard thinks he has miscalculated.  The tips of Cisco’s fingers whiten like he’s considering putting the needle through Eobard’s hand.

“Don’t touch me,” is all he says. 

Eobard slowly uncurls his fingers, careful not to push him or spook him or whatever it is he needs to be careful of here, for all that he cannot quite prevent the drag of thumb against delicate bone.  He finds Cisco frustratingly more difficult to read than he is used to. He wonders how much of the fault rests with him.

He turns his face to Cisco’s.  Once again his gaze goes unmet.  Cisco’s eyes remain locked on Eobard’s hand even after he returns it, unthreateningly, to his side.

“Where is everyone?” he asks softly.

The only response he gets is the pursing of Cisco’s lips. 

He takes a step back and is rewarded by a slight loosening of Cisco’s frame, and it’s only with the release of breath that he realises Cisco has been holding it in since Eobard approached him.

Cisco stitches himself up with the same steady hands and measured strokes Eobard’s seen him use on a thousand different machines, cuts the thread and applies gel to the burns. He takes some more gauze and tapes the sides down.  Only once all of this is done does he look up and meet Eobard’s eyes for the second time that night.

He looks at Eobard like he’s searching him, weighing him, assessing his worth.  He suspects that Cisco will always find him wanting now.  He has fallen far from his old position in Cisco’s eyes. 

“They’re dead.”

Cisco’s tone is flat from too much emotion rather than a lack of it.

(Dead.  Dead in a way that Eobard is not, was not, because in the depths of Cisco’s abilities, where the truth of everything lives, where he cannot yet trust himself enough to venture, he knows it to be an inescapable truth that Eobard Thawne lives, and has lived, and will live.

It is not yet in Cisco’s comprehension that the same, one day, could be possible for him.)

“Who is?” Eobard asks, and he knows it will pain Cisco to answer but he’s only ever hurt Cisco when it’s been necessary.

“Everyone,” Cisco says, eyes burning into Eobard, “Barry.  Caitlin.  Iris.  Joe and Wally.  Harry and Jesse.  They’re all dead.”

For all the care with which he says their names, Cisco bites out the last words, tone dripping with desperation and devastation.  If he’d sounded anything like that in the alternate timeline Eobard struggles to imagine how he ever managed to kill Cisco.

There is a haze of blue around Cisco’s fingers.  He presses one hand over the other, extinguishing the light.

All those names.  

Eobard is not an unfeeling man.  He cared for some of them too, in his own way, and he grieves for them a little if mostly in the distant manner of one saddened by a death long past.  He pains for Cisco more, the only one left alive and kept company only his losses. 

He grieves for him because it’s Cisco and Eobard Thawne has always loved Cisco differently.

“I’m sorry, Cisco,” Eobard tells him because he is (means it even through the part of him that notices how lovely Cisco is in despair) but he doesn’t try to reach out to the man sat in front of him again. 

He doesn’t know if he will ever be allowed to touch Cisco again.  He wonders if that desperate comfort in the alley is supposed to be enough to carry through the rest of his days, carefully meting out the memory a moment at a time.

But –

“I don’t care if you’re sorry,” is all Cisco says, “I care if you’ll help me.”

“Help you what?” Eobard asks even as he knows that this, this is what made Cisco look at him in that alley, already considering the possibilities of Eobard’s reappearance because Cisco’s mind is intuitive and calculating and creative, would have been leaping ahead even then, and it has always been one of the few warm spots of Eobard’s time in this age.

“Help me put things right.  This isn’t how it’s supposed to be – "

(Eobard knows with sudden clarity what he’s going to say, remembers warning Barry against precisely such a thing because time has a way of balancing things out – in matters such as this, you can’t prevent a tragedy, you can only replace it.  Barry ignored him.  Barry always thought the cost was worth it because he never quite understood that it’s not truly a sacrifice when you are leaving it to someone else to bear the loss.

There’s no need to tell Cisco the same, he knows this in a way so few can comprehend, carries it in his head and his bones and the memories of a hundred different lifetimes.  Cisco has sacrificed, and been sacrificed, and kept going anyway if for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. 

Cisco won’t ignore the warnings, and he’s going to ask anyway, because that’s the type of brave Cisco has always been.)

“– but we can go back.  You can go back.”

Cisco’s leaning towards Eobard now, just a little, and Eobard can’t help but respond in kind.  He’s intrigued.  “Why would I do that?” is what he asks instead.

“Because it’s the right thing to do?  Because these are people you claimed to care about once?  I don’t know how long you’ve been here but you must have seen how wrong everything is?”  Cisco smirks bitterly, hopelessly, not at all the grin Eobard remembers – sweet and happy and freely given – and doesn’t even give Eobard a chance to respond.

“If you help me, and if we succeed, once everyone’s back and we’ve stopped this from happening again I’ll - ,” Cisco pauses, considers how to phrase his bargain, “One condition: I won’t help you hurt anyone innocent, but otherwise, anything.  Help me now and I’ll do anything you ask.”

And, oh.  That is.  Interesting and unexpected and it heats all of the dark places in Eobard (and even those that are not so dark).

Eobard has no doubt that Cisco is aware of the magnitude of what he’s offering.  Born of desperation it may be but Eobard knows Cisco will honour this deal, even if the price of saving his friends’ lives is that of his own.

“That’s a lot to offer,” Eobard tells Cisco, and it’s a good thing he’s had ample opportunity to learn patience because he wants to snatch Cisco’s gift in both hands and hold it tight so that Cisco can’t take it back.

“If I had anything more, I’d offer that too,” Cisco says (and means it, because he still has no idea of his own value, doesn’t understand that Cisco himself is worth more than almost anything else he could put before Eobard), “Everything’s gone wrong.  Everything’s gone.  I can’t fix it alone.”

Cisco twists his head away and Eobard can see a wetness clinging to his eyelashes, reflecting the lights of the lab.  He doesn’t know if it’s sadness, or exhaustion, or hope that causes it.

He wonders just how long Cisco’s been alone (alone but for his lost loved ones and does living with their ghosts make it better or worse?). 

He wonders how much it costs Cisco to look at Eobard like he could, just possibly, be their salvation.

Time passes. Eobard thinks and Cisco waits.

“Come here,” he says eventually, because some promises cannot be made from a distance.

Cisco stands, carefully, and very deliberately doesn’t allow his arms to twitch protectively towards his stomach or his heart, one wound new and the other one that has never quite scarred over as it should, no matter how much time has passed.  

He stops in front of this old-new Eobard, this man he’s barely met yet knows so well.  He is near enough that he has to tilt his chin to look up at the older man with something that is, if not quite fear, then more than a mere wariness and all the more courageous for it.

It’s so uniquely Cisco, this strange mix of deference and stubbornness.  He has always taken responsibility for his submissions, always owned his decisions even as he was so quick to forgive others theirs (everyone except Eobard, or perhaps they simply never had the chance?).  Eobard feels a swell of affection that seems, oddly, harder to control in this body than his last (his body, he reminds himself – this body came first).

Cisco’s pulse jumps in his throat.  Eobard feels the ghost of Cisco’s blood thrumming, speed force quick, wants nothing more than to spread his hand across Cisco’s neck and press against that evidence of life.

Instead Eobard smiles down at him, achingly familiar for all that it’s on a different face and genuine in a way that Cisco probably hates.  He tucks a piece of hair behind Cisco’s ear with infinite care, doesn’t think about how easily he could wrap it around his fist – tilt his head back (pressure, not pain, and isn’t that a balance they’re not always managed as well as they deserved) and reveal the curve – instead lets his knuckles draw down the slope of Cisco’s neck, revels in the feel of warm skin beneath. 

It’s just the two of them here, as it so often was, and will be again.  Together they were able to achieve almost anything and if Cisco wants to turn back time, try to return his friends to life and find a way to prevent the mistakes that caused this the first time round, well.  That’s what they’ll do.  Eobard already knows what he’s going to claim in return. 

It will absolutely be worth it.

He cups Cisco’s jaw in his hand, touches him in a way he was never free to do before.  He’s kissed people with less intimacy than he gives to the stroke of his thumb across Cisco’s cheek.  Cisco’s lashes flutter but he doesn’t blink, doesn’t trust losing sight of Eobard enough even for that.

(It’s fine.  They have time.  Eobard will make sure of it.)

Everything about Cisco screams caution but, still, he turns his head the space of a breath and Eobard can almost fancy that he is leaning into his touch, just a little, just for an instant.  Cisco looks at him, defiant and knowing, desperate and certain, lemon sharp and pomegranate sweet.

Eobard savours this moment, awards it its due reverence.  He has no place for gods but here and now, with Cisco beneath his hands and the unlimited promises before him, this is as close to a holy place as he has found.   He leans close.

“I accept.” Eobard breathes, and it is a promise and a warning all in one.

“Now let’s save the world.”