Chapter Text
“Harry!” Barry sped to a halt, and Caitlin lowered the gun she’d been pointing at him, as Harry stepped out of the portal, raising his hands. “What are you doing here?”
“Can’t a person visit their good friends without being interrogated?” He scanned the room, frowning like they’d disappointed him, which they had.
“We’re not interrogating you!” Barry defended, at the same time Caitlin sighed, holstering the gun and crossing her arms, and responded, “Cisco’s not here.”
Immediately, Harry’s eyes stopped scanning the room and settled on hers. “Where is he?”
“Gee, you make us feel so wanted.” She rolled her eyes. When Harry said nothing, silently prompting her to answer his damn question already, she continued. “It’s April twelfth.” And did not elaborate. April twelfth? Not Cisco’s birthday, not either of his parents’ birthdays, or even Dante’s. Not an anniversary of any sort Harry could think of. He even started running through his list of extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins (his mental catalogue of Cisco’s family was well-documented and well-researched) and came up empty.
And, well, Harry did not get to be the most well-respected scientist on Earth-2 without admitting when he didn’t know something, so he finally gave up. “What’s April twelfth?”
Caitlin’s lips pursed, and she had a look on her face that said, if Cisco didn’t tell you, I certainly won’t. Which meant… it was important. Intimate, and personal, somehow. And Harry wasn’t important enough or close enough to know what it was, yet. Clearly an annual thing. April twelfth. Something Cisco did alone, likely. Harry dismissed the possibility that it was some sort of medical treatment for an illness Cisco hadn’t disclosed, because there was no reason for something like that to happen on an exact date every year, even though terminal illness was the first thing his mind decided to jump to.
“He’s visiting Hartley,” Barry said, clearly oblivious to Caitlin’s cues. Often, Harry despised his obliviousness. Now, he was infinitely thankful for it.
“Hartley?” He turned to Barry, eyes narrowing. The familiarity of the name made a pang of distant loss echo through him, but he pushed it down. There were bound to be other people named Hartley (not many, but some, at least).
Barry blinked at him. “You don’t…” he looked to Caitlin, who was shaking her head rapidly, “... know?”
“Know what?”
Barry’s face flushed a little and he looked away. “I- it’s not- if Cisco didn’t tell you, we shouldn’t-”
“Allen. Where. Is. Cisco?”
“Harry, it’s none of your-”
He stepped forward quickly. “Don’t you dare tell me it’s none of my business. If something’s wrong-”
“Nothing’s wrong! Calm down! It’s just… something he does once a year. It’s not-”
“Who’s Hartley?” Harry repeated, and then, against his will, uttered a name he had not spoken aloud in several long years, “Hartley Rathaway?”
And Barry winced. Which meant he was right. Which meant…
“Where is he?” He looked to Caitlin, now. “You’ve never mentioned the Hartley Rathaway of this Earth before,” not that Harry had ever mentioned the Hartley of his Earth, “so why is he so important that Cisco has to visit him every year on April twelfth but doesn’t tell me?”
“Harry, don’t-”
“Because that’s when he died,” Caitlin said, her voice suddenly abrupt, and cold. Closed off. Harry blinked, and a wave of pain washed over him that he didn’t think he’d felt since Jesse had been kidnapped. Since Tess had left. Since- since he’d read Hartley’s letter (his Hartley, not that that Hartley had ever belonged to him). “Again, not that it’s any of your business.” Said like Harry wasn’t one of them, like he wasn’t part of their group, part of their secrets.
But this wasn’t their secret. They weren’t the ones visiting a dead man. This was Cisco’s secret. Cisco’s secret that they were keeping for him, probably because he asked them to, and Harry was the asshole here, for forcing it out of them. Not that he wouldn’t have done this anyway, even if he’d known it was such a deeply personal secret.
Obviously kept from Harry, specifically, because…
“Were they-” Harry started, and didn’t finish his own question, because the answer felt obvious. Of course they had been. And who was Harry to judge?
Hartley had been…
He’d been brilliant. On Harry’s Earth, he’d been a shining star of ingenuity, sought after both as a brilliant theoretical physicist and as the rising face of his father’s company as Osgood grew ready to retire.
Sought after, mostly, by Harrison Wells, by S.T.A.R. Labs.
Years ago, when they’d first met.
Despite his valiant attempts to, Harry would never forget it. Forget him.
It was almost like courting, really. Recruiting brilliant people to work for him.
Harry despised it, but he had to do it, to achieve what he wanted to.
In Hartley’s case, it had been different. He was young, and genius, and fascinating, but Harry had first met him in person at a party, watched him do a line of cocaine off a coffee table before laying on the floor of the penthouse suite and exclaiming, apparently to no one in particular, because no one else was paying him any mind, “I’ve figured out what dark matter is.”
And Harry was in love, from that moment on.
“They’re gonna name an element on the Periodic Table after me,” Hartley had said, when Harry had sat on the couch next to him, while Hartley stared up at the ceiling from his spot on the likely-germ-riddled-and-disgusting shag carpet.
“Really. You already have a company. Now you want an element, too?”
“I’m greedy. And-” he sat up, wobbling a little but righting himself easily enough, “it’s not my company.”
“It will be.”
Hartley hmm-ed, like he didn’t believe that, and squinted at Harry. “What if I don’t want it?”
Everyone Harry was forced to schmooze should be this easy and fun to schmooze, he thought, because then maybe he wouldn’t hate it nearly as much, and he reached into his blazer pocket, pulling out a cigarette and lighting between his lips. “Then come work for me.”
His eyes unfocused and then focused again, and Harry hadn’t realized until that moment, exactly how out of his mind Hartley probably was. “Will you let me work on dark matter?”
Harry laughed, and passed over the cigarette when Hartley reached for it. “Don’t have any in the labs.”
Oh, how that would change. Not that Hartley would ever know about it (maybe if he had been there, he might have been able to stop it, he might have been able to fix it).
Harry had named the element after him, not that anyone would ever know.
But he did hope that Hartley, wherever he was by that point, saw the news, and had known. He would’ve seen the name, and he would’ve known. Harry hoped so, at least. If that was the one thing he could give him, he’d want it to be that. (Because Hartley had been right, in some respects, about the properties of the element he’d identified as dark matter, and Harry could only imagine the brilliance he would have contributed to the research following the accelerator explosion. If he’d been there).