Always Running

May I Have This Dance

"What the hell are you two doing here?" Harry asks Cisco and Caitlin who are surrounded by coffee cups in the cortex.

"We ate too much ice cream and then had an idea about the speed problem and then we came here and then we crashed so...coffee." Cisco rambles.

"We've tried everything to make Barry faster. It's up to him now." Harry says dryly, turning around to walk out.

"Not make Barry faster. We think we found a way to make Zoom slower." Cisco explains while Caitlin nods next to him.

"We tried the darts already, remember? Failed."

"Yeah, no, the darts sucked. They just pissed him off. I'm talking about a way to steal Zoom's speed."

Harry turns with an intense stare. Cisco smiles. "Let us introduce you to...the Turtle."

"What's the Turtle?" Harry asks.

Cisco grins, his eyes widening, as he marches over to the computer to project the case file up onto the larger screens.

"The Turtle. The Lord of Larceny. The King of Thieves. The Picasso of Purloin if you will."

"Get on with it." Harry groans.

"Very skilled meta thief." Caitlin clarifies. "CCPD hasn't been able to catch him yet."

"What's his power?"

"Observe." Cisco turns dramatically to the screen. A video starts to play of a man walking through a room of still people.

"So, he, what? Stops time?" Harry observes.

"Nope. Time is still running. He slows everyone around him down. Not sure how he's doing it." Cisco whines.

"So why hasn't he been caught?"

"All the cases have been dismissed as lost or missing items, not thefts." Caitlin answers. "No evidence of larceny."

"But we do know that he's only interested in meaningful things. He only steals items with immense personal value." Cisco adds.

"Weird M.O." Caitlin scoffs.

Harry taps his pen on the desk. "So, we figure out how this guy is slowing people down-"

"And we give Zoom a taste of the slow lane." Cisco grins.

"Have you told Barry about this?" Harry asks.

"No, not yet. We kinda just came up with it like twenty minutes ago. Kinda got distracted explaining it to you. Kinda expected he might be asleep considering its four in the morning. Y'know. Normal people sleep at this time. Why are you up?" Cisco rambles.

"Couldn't sleep. Working." Harry says dryly before exiting the cortex.

Caitlin turns to Cisco. "More coffee or sleep?"

Cisco scrunches his face in thought. "Coffee, sleep, coffee?"

Caitlin nods and they head to the kitchen to start.

********************************

"It was like this wave around me, pushing back on me. Felt like trying to move through tar." Barry explains after his first attempt to stop the Turtle.

Cisco and Caitlin explained their idea to him when he arrived at the labs the next morning and, fortunately, a very valuable set of diamonds was meant to be presented at CCPD later that day. Barry attempted to go and confront the Turtle, but he was affected the same as everyone around him. He could barely move, even with immense force.