Being screamed at by his father hadn't put Hartley in a bad mood. His feelings, if he were being precise about it, were considerably more complicated than that. Charting them out—and Hartley charted everything—yielded a specific ratio: five parts surprise, three parts doubt, one part helplessness, and a heavy dose of sheer numbness. He had endured this exact conversation so many times that the words no longer cut; they just bruised.
But underneath the family drama was a physiological shock he couldn't quite categorize.
His parents' voices had reached him clearly. Not through the grinding, slightly off-pitch mediation of a homemade hearing aid, but directly. Cleanly. The exact way sound used to arrive before the particle accelerator had taken it from him. The chronic throb deep in his cochlea was gone. The foreign-body sensation of the implant he'd learned to tolerate over nine months—flesh and wire and nerve, an unwelcome tenant he'd negotiated an uneasy peace with—had vanished. Only a faint phantom ache remained, a fading memory of pain just sharp enough to confirm the last nine months had actually happened.
"My hearing... has been restored?"
He said it aloud without meaning to. He raised one hand, waving it slowly beside his ear. The delicate friction of air against his fingers registered with a crystalline clarity no prosthetic had ever managed to replicate. It was the gossamer, unprocessed, natural texture of sound that the best technology in the world could approximate but never quite reach.
Surprise came first. Doubt followed instantly, stemming from a single, undeniable fact: medically, this was impossible. Following the explosion, he had spent three months tearing through every relevant journal, cutting-edge research paper, and specialist consultation available to the Rathaway fortune. He had arrived at the exhaustive, absolute conclusion that his hearing loss was permanent. He had accepted it, moved on, and built himself better tools.
There is currently no medical procedure on Earth that can do what just happened to me.
He filed that calculation away. He forced his attention back to the helplessness, the numbness, and the reality of his parents. They refused to accept him. It wasn't a political stance. He had no investment in the arguments shouted in the streets outside. He just knew, without sentiment or anguish, a simple fact: he didn't like women. It was as fixed as his eye color, as unargued as his IQ. He hadn't chosen it, he couldn't undo it, and he refused to debate it.
He was too tired to perform outrage. He had stopped performing a long time ago.
He looked at Cisco. "Wells picked himself a new batch of favorites, didn't he?" A sneer curled his lip. "But the Flash is the real prize, I'd imagine. The rest of you are just furniture."
Cisco immediately stepped forward, grabbing Hartley's arm and steering him away from the nearest cluster of officers. He pushed him far enough into the shadows that their voices wouldn't carry. The lab's cooperation with the CCPD was public knowledge; its cooperation with the Flash was emphatically not. Hartley Rathaway dropping the name Flash at full volume in a room full of cops was a disaster waiting to happen.
"Watch your mouth," Cisco hissed. "Or I'll help you with that." He turned to Jude. "Where's Snart? What happened to the painting?"
"Gone." Jude gave a small shrug. "Shawna couldn't manage Snart alone, and the Pied Piper had just gone down. Wasn't a lot of options."
"'The PiedPiper'?"
"Well, he pipes sound, doesn't he? Seemed to fit."
Cisco opened his mouth, closed it, and exhaled slowly through his nose. "I've been trying to come up with names for months. I swear you people are doing this to me on purpose."
"I'll take it," Hartley said flatly.
Cisco glared at him. "Nobody asked you."
"I like it. It's mine now."
"...Let's just go back to the lab."
S.T.A.R. Labs received Hartley Rathaway with absolute silence. The tension in the cortex mirrored a bunker bracing for an artillery strike.
Caitlin was at her workstation when they walked in. She looked up, registered Hartley's presence, and pressed her lips into a thin line. Hartley met her stare with a broad, entirely joyless smile.
"Long time no see," he offered. He injected his voice with a calculated warmth, a deliberate, sharp reminder to everyone in the room that he had once belonged here. "Fewer faces than I remember. Where did everyone go?"
Caitlin ignored the bait. She turned her focus back to her monitor.
The soft whir of rubber wheels on polished flooring preceded Harrison Wells. He rolled out from the adjacent corridor at an unhurried pace, halted his wheelchair at a comfortable distance, and studied Hartley. His expression remained entirely neutral, a carefully constructed mask.
"Long time no see, Hartley."
The muscles in Hartley's jaw tightened. Something shifted in his eyes—not hatred, which burned too hot to sustain, but a cold, durable resentment.
"How did you know the Flash was working with us?" Wells asked, his tone level. "He could have been operating independently."
"Speed and trajectory data," Hartley said. "I wrote an algorithm. Based on his response times and the coordinates of the incidents he's intervened in, there's a consistent point of origin he returns to. Pattern recognition. It's not complicated."
Cisco froze. Caitlin's fingers stopped typing. The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable, as Hartley's casual explanation served as a blunt reminder of his sheer, overwhelming intellect.
Hartley's smile sharpened into a blade. "Let's skip the reunion. I'm sure you'd love to ease into this with some fond memories—get me feeling sentimental before the difficult part. So let's just do the difficult part." He paused, locking eyes with Wells. "You lied to these people. You knew the risks. I told you the risks. And you fired me and threatened my career to keep me from telling anyone. Would you like to do the honors, or shall I?"
"Is this your revenge?"
"No." The word landed flat, heavy, and certain. "If this were revenge, I'd want you dead. But dead is too simple. People would mourn you. They'd write nice things in the paper and call you a brilliant visionary who gave his life for science. Nobody would know what you actually are." He tilted his head. "So, no. I want you embarrassed. I want the people in this room to see you clearly. That's better."
Wells held his gaze for a long moment. Then, he spoke, his voice quiet. "I was overconfident. I was arrogant. The explosion was not my intention."
"Then you should have listened to me."
"Wait." Caitlin stood up, her voice sharp. "He warned you? Before the particle accelerator fired, he told you it could explode—and you knew?"
"Oh, that's not quite the whole story." Hartley turned to her, his expression utterly venomous. "Would you like to know what happened after I warned him?" He squared his shoulders, shifting his posture to mimic Wells, and lowered his voice into a cold, precise imitation: "Hartley, you are relieved of your duties at S.T.A.R. Labs. And if you so much as breathe one unsubstantiated accusation to anyone, I will personally ensure your career ends with you teaching remedial physics at a community college."
Nobody breathed.
Wells didn't deny it. He sat motionless, absorbing the weight of the accusation. He let out a long, slow exhale. "Yes. I ignored Hartley's warnings and activated the accelerator anyway."
"And I have no doubt," Hartley added, his voice dropping to an eerie calm, "that you'd do something similar to the Flash if it suited you. Betrayal is a habit, Dr. Wells. The first time is a choice. After that, it's just who you are."
Caitlin pushed her chair back. She marched out of the cortex without a single word, her footsteps fast and echoing down the hall. Cisco watched her go. He looked back at Wells, profound disappointment etched into his features, then turned and jogged after Caitlin.
The lab settled into a hollow silence. Wells remained in his chair. Hartley remained rooted to his spot. The argument had consumed all the oxygen in the room.
"Come on. I'll take you home."
Hartley blinked, pulled from the wreckage of the confrontation. Jude stood beside him, already walking toward the exit. He didn't check to see if Hartley was following; he simply moved, dictating the next step through pure forward momentum.
"Why are you taking me home?"
"Because I checked." Jude pushed the heavy glass doors open, not breaking his stride. "The building you've been demolishing this week? Your parents declined to press charges. Which means your actual legal exposure is the assault on the doctor. Judging by the expression on Wells's face just now, he's not planning to file anything either. So. You're free to go."
Hartley absorbed the information. Slowly, the reality of Jude's words settled over him, chilling his blood.
Going home. Back to that massive, empty house. Back to his father's rigid jaw, his mother's calculated silences, and the suffocating architecture of the Rathaway estate—a place that had never, not once in his life, welcomed him.
A wave of vertigo washed over him, draining the color from his vision.
Of all the punishments available, he thought, this might be the worst one.
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