Steps

Side Step: Glitch

She stood in the doorway, eyes wide as she looked him over. He could hear the soft intake of a gasp passing over her lips, see the red tinge that started to cover her skin. She was blushing, no..not just blushing, but actually flustered...over him. A bright smile began to curl over his lips as he took her in as well. God, she was beautiful. A string of embarrassing words started to coil in the back of his throat, ready to spring out into the still air, no doubt something stupid he would regret later. But like every other time he'd lived through this exact moment, his words were cut off by the person at his side.

Go Jae Yone set down the actuator he'd been tinkering with on the workbench next to Cisco and beamed at Leah. "Oh, hey shrimp. You make me lunch?" And with that, the world fell into darkness.

Cisco came to head down on his lab workbench. The cool steel had numbed his cheek, while his glasses rested uncomfortably crooked on his nose from where he'd simply slumped down in the middle of his work. What a night...

He rose and stretched out his stiff back. Something fell from around his shoulders as he raised his arms and his heart gave a sharp lurch like he half expected Leah to be standing behind him with a gentle, yet somehow still entirely too sour for his liking face of disapproval. She wasn't though. Of course not, not after what he'd done.

Cisco really hadn't even done anything wrong, he thought, as he picked up the blanket that had slipped from around his shoulders and slumped to the floor—Caitlin's doing, most likely. So, he'd finally figured out Go Jae Yone and 'Ray, the mysterious brother figure' were the same person. He'd known for months, really. The real trouble had been figuring out where Ray was on this earth, or rather, what had happened to cause his absence.

In most worlds that Cisco had seen, Go Jae Yone was always the link. Wherever Jae Yone was, Leah was quick to follow. They were complimentary souls. That was almost always how Cisco and Leah met; Jae Yone would show up in Cisco's life some way, and Leah would be right on his tail. Of course, there were different variations of them on every earth, but at her core, Leah was always Leah.

But here, on this earth, Go Jae Yone was simply...gone. A life extinguished in a split second, a glitch in the system. He was gone, and in the wake of his death laid a butterfly effect of changes. Cisco combed his fingers through his hair and sighed. What a wonderful gift to be able to see a multiverse of possibilities and know that this was the life he was stuck with.

There was a soft knock on the door frame that drew his attention and Cisco spun to see Barry stating at the mouth of his lab.

"Yo dude, what's up?" Cisco muttered as he stretched out another kink in his back. He made a note to himself to definitely not fall asleep there again.

"You...need to come see this," Barry said. The uneasiness in his face was the only cue Cisco needed and he found himself moving without hesitation.

Back in the Cortex silent alarms flashed, illuminating the already bright room with an ominous shade of red. All of the monitors were alight with swirling blues, purples, and blacks. Every map, covered. A pit opened up in Cisco's stomach.

"When did this happen?" Cisco rushed up to the center console and began to tab rapidly through the different data sets in front of him.

A hand clapped down on his shoulder. Ronnie. "We were hoping you would know."

Dark matter energy. Not just isolated around the lab either. Dots of white indicating where the energy seemed to be emanating from spotted the hazy map like a star-filled sky.

"Have there be-" He couldn't seem to get the words out, his mouth felt much too dry.

"No reports, at least not yet," Caitlin answered him without hesitation.

His head spun with the force of the implications of that statement. Tremors seemed to rock the very ground he stood on. "It wasn't like–the map was clear last night! I checked before I headed to my workroom. The whole thing was white, no blue an–" The weight of it all pushed down on him at once, nearly making him collapse.

"Hey, we're not saying this is your fault," Ronnie said from his side, his hand moving from Cisco's shoulder to toggle something on the console. The alarms stopped flashing, bringing the room back to its normal, overbright state. "We know it's not. We're just trying to figure out what happened and how it's going to affect the city."

"And if this is a breach situation or if we're about to start hearing about people gaining miraculous powers seemingly overnight like a certain friend of ours," Caitlin added.

"But we need to find out where this came from first," Barry said. "And we need to start thinking of plans of attack if worse comes to worst."

All the thoughts swimming in Cisco's head overwhelmed him. On top of everything that happened with Leah, his world was starting to show cracks. The tremors crashed against him again. Only-

"Did you guys feel tha-," Ronnie started to say.

And then the world fell out from underneath Cisco.