Hurts Like Heaven

Chapter 19 - She's Got It, Yeah Baby, She's Got It

***BARRY***

Cisco comes back to the Cortex smelling a hell of a lot more fresh than when he left the treadmill. He's taking steps for greater cleanliness for his next task, too - breaking out these rubber gloves with bright blue fingertips. I haven't seen these gloves before, and I admit, I find myself raising my eyebrows at the sight.

"I made them for just in case of anything like this," he says when he sees my raised eyebrows. "Like, if you wanted me to examine some evidence, but I can't leave fingerprints without contaminating it? So I designed these on the principle of touch-screen-capable gloves. They're Vibe-capable."

"Do they work?" I ask.

"Haven't had a chance to put 'em in action till today." Cisco stretches the gloves over his hands, wiggling his fingers like a concert pianist. "So where's that evidence you want me to look at?"

I pull the baggie out of my pocket, put on some rubber gloves of my own - it takes me a while to find the box of gloves that Cisco hasn't experimented with, because I don't want to take away from his supply - and hand him the note. He presses the enhanced fingertips into the paper, waiting a second to see if there's any vibes to be had.

"It's just gotta warm up to my fingers," Cisco assures me after a long moment of a whole lotta nothing.

"I hate it when that happens," I say. "That's always been my biggest problem with touch-screen gloves, you know?"

"You? Having problems with gloves?" Cisco nods at my hands.

"I can never find them in the right size, that's more the problem. They need to be as exact a fit as possible in order to work properly."

"Don't I know it." He stops to pull down his T-shirt, which is riding up a bit. It's a bit too small for him, that shirt, but if I know him - and I do - I know he's going to wear that shirt till it's been laundered down to Ken doll size.

"Try it again," I tell him.

"Don't gotta tell me twice." He adjusts his special gloves and places them on the paper, really pressing his fingerprints into it this time. "Man," he groans, relaxing after a long moment. "Why is this thing so resistant?" He looks straight into the blue fingertip on his index finger, then opens his palm to smack his forehead. "Now I get it."

"What's wrong?"

"This thing's not conducting 'cause I didn't make it porous enough!" He takes the gloves off and sticks them in one of his many machines. At his speed, it's all I can do to match him for it and put the paper back in the baggie before his movement blows it off the table. "I thought the material would do all the conduction for me, but nope."

"What's the material?" I ask as Cisco fires up his machine, which spends a couple of seconds poking tiny holes in the gloves' fingertips at a speed high enough that only I can follow it with the naked eye.

"Just your usual proprietary blend of Silly Putty and iron hammered to the thinness of gold leaf," Cisco deadpans.

"Come on, dude," I laugh. "We're both scientists here."

"Okay, I was joking about the Silly Putty," Cisco finally admits. "It really is iron leaf, with a hint of cobalt for color."

"All magnetizable?"

"Naturally."

I nod. "Smart. Think it'll work now that you've poked holes in it?"

He does that wiggling of his fingers again, ol' Maestro Cisco. Don't tell him I said that, since "maestro" doesn't quite mean the same thing in Spanish and he'll never let me hear the end of it because he's sick of my lengua gringa butchering his family's native tongue. Or something like that. There's a reason why I hardly ever use what little Spanish I know around him.

Cisco lays his fingers on the paper and breathes in, out, deeply. Then his eyes fly open for a long two seconds as he gets a Vibe.

"Where is she?" I ask.

"Down the road in Keystone City," he says. "Holed up in some apartment somewhere, uh...actually close by the bridge."

I snap my fingers, letting a little bit of lightning spark out. "Road trip?"

"If you don't get me lost, man."

"If I do, I'll only take a couple of seconds to get us back on track." I put my arm around Cisco's shoulder, and he quickly takes off his perfected gloves so he doesn't get them damaged in transit. I wouldn't want to be personally responsible for so much more money he has to spend, not like the time when I tried to personally clean his sneakers after dropping a glass of punch at last year's Christmas party. I instead subjected them to a terrible case of Speed Force burn, so I wound up giving him two Christmas gifts.

We only get lost once, to my credit. Cisco and I don't go to Keystone very often, so we're not super familiar with the area. As befitting its name, it's a pretty place, more than earning its shared nickname of "Gem City" with CC. But it's beautiful in a different way, like everything's been sculpted from ten thousand shades of marble. I didn't even know marble came in blue, but that's the color of the building where Cisco brings me.

Though when he touches that blue marble, quoth he: "Up in Apartment 35. And by the way, this building's covered in some kind of Venetian plaster."

"Well, crap. And I was considering moving in."

"Kara wouldn't approve," Cisco says knowingly.

"What do you mean? It's her color!"

"Not this shade. I had Vans in this shade as a high school graduation gift, and my first day in college, I got them spilled on!"

I wince at the thought. "Just like when-"

"No, nothing to do with you," he's quick to add. "This guy was a regular blond Viking type, not like you. Though the fact that he was drunk on the first day, and I never saw him again...I'm still convinced I imagined him. The damage to my shoes was real, though!"

"One of these days," I say, "my feet will get the same kind of curse as yours."

"It better be that," Cisco responds, "and not a curse that takes your speed!" Speaking of speed, we run upstairs and knock on the door of Apartment 35. "Ms. Snart?" Cisco calls through the door in his snarkiest, snottiest voice. "We got your Amazon delivery right here!"

The door opens a few inches, the chain stopping it from doing so any further. "Nice try. I don't use Amazon," says the all-too-familiar voice of Lisa Snart, who's nowhere to be seen. "Too public."

I stick my hand through the door and wave hello. "Message received," I tell her. "Where's Leonard? I've been missing him."

"So have I. But that's not why I reached out to you." Lisa closes the door, unchains it, and lets us in. "Come in, come in. I got coffee if you want it."

"Cream and sugar?" I ask.

"No cream, but I got horchata-"

"Fake American crap? Save it, amiga," says Cisco. "We'll take it black, like your soul."

"I should refuse my hospitality," Lisa mutters to herself, but she pours the coffee anyway. Three cups, all identical, painted gold. Naturally.

"So what's the deal?" I ask as I sit and savor the coffee in my hands. My suit prevents me from feeling the warmth until I actually drink it, a strange contrast.

"I got a line on some bad deal going on in National City," Lisa says. "Something to do with technology either stolen or reverse-engineered from the Superfamily's old planet."

"Why us?" Cisco asks.

"I do keep tabs on my old contacts, friendly, enemy, or in between," Lisa says with an unabashed smile. "I know you and Supergirl have been partnered up a lot lately. Thought you could join her on this mission."

"Is that so?" I stay as poker-faced as possible.

Behind Lisa's back, Cisco raises his eyebrow at me, as if to say, "Holy SuperFlash, we got a shipper on deck!"