Friday came at 3:47 PM in the form of Cisco putting a paper coffee cup down on the corner of my workstation.
He didn't sit. He stood next to the desk with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, looking somewhere past my left ear at the far wall.
"It's not the bitter pot," he said. "It's the other pot. The one I keep in my office."
I picked up the cup. Smelled it. Actual coffee.
"Cisco."
"Don't."
"Thank you."
"I said don't." He pulled his hands out of the pockets and pushed his glasses up. "I have terms."
"Okay."
"You're not going to like them all."
"I'll like them more than no terms."
He glanced at the cortex doorway. Caitlin was at her station with headphones on, mug at her elbow, deep in a screen. Joe wasn't in today. Barry was at the precinct. Jay was, if the camera in the hallway was telling the truth, asleep in the guest quarters.
Cisco pulled a folded sheet of legal pad from his back pocket. Smoothed it on the desk.
"One trip a month. No more, no less. You ask for two, the answer is no. You ask for one and a half, the answer is no."
"Agreed."
"I pick the destination. Or I have to greenlight yours. I get final say on where we land."
"Agreed."
"No solo trips. Ever. Not even after I'm better at this than I am now. If you want to go to Earth-2, I'm with you."
"Agreed."
"Whatever you find over there, you tell me. Not the team — me. Then we decide together what the team needs to know."
I read that one twice off the legal pad. He'd written it longhand. The handwriting was small and careful, the way you write a thing you've thought about for a long time and don't want to mess up by being clever in the moment.
"Agreed."
"You touch nothing without clearing it with me. You take nothing. You don't —" he searched for the word, didn't find a polite one — "acquire anything. Not from a person, not from a building. We are tourists. We are not collectors."
He'd used the word.
I held his look.
He held mine.
"Agreed."
His shoulders went down a quarter inch.
He turned the legal pad around and put a pen on top of it. "Sign."
"You want a signature."
"I want a signature."
I wrote H. Griffin under his terms in pen. Slid it back.
He folded it. Put it in his back pocket. Sat down.
"Okay," he said. "Now the part I didn't write down."
I leaned back.
"When we first met," he said, "you were lying to us. About what you could do."
"Yes."
"Why should I trust you now."
I'd had three days to think about the answer. I'd written several. The good ones were the worst. The honest ones were the most dangerous. I'd settled on one in the parking lot at one in the morning two nights ago and hadn't changed it since.
"Because I could have left after Ronnie," I said.
He didn't react.
"After the singularity closed, I had cover blown, I had a team that hadn't decided what I was, I had options. I had a go-bag in my apartment that's still there. I could have been in another city by the morning of the funeral. I stayed."
He chewed the inside of his cheek.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"That's not a lot, man."
"No. It's not. It's what I have."
He looked at the coffee in front of me.
"Drink that before it gets cold," he said. "I made it like a person."
I drank it. It was good.
He stood up. Stretched his back until something popped. Made a sound that was half ugh and half satisfaction.
"One month from today," he said. "First trip."
He held his hand out.
I shook it. His grip was solid. The kind of grip a man gives you when he's decided something and doesn't want to drag it out.
"Where are we going?" I said.
"Somewhere boring."
"How boring?"
"I'm thinking somewhere I can buy a sandwich and we can leave again. Tourist boring. A whole new universe and we go to a deli."
I let myself smile. Real smile. He caught it and laughed.
"Star Trek but real," he said. "Right? Tell me you grew up watching."
"I grew up watching."
"Thank you. I tried this on Caitlin yesterday. She said Stargate is more accurate and walked away."
"She's not wrong."
"She's correct. She's not wrong, she's correct. There's a difference."
He drifted toward the door, talking with his hands the way he talked when he was about to start in on a tangent that would end thirty minutes later in a debate about the franchising rights of Captain Janeway. He stopped at the doorway.
"Harry."
"Yeah."
"If you break any of those terms, the trip stops. Not just that one. All of them. Forever."
"I know."
"Like, immediately."
"I know."
"Okay."
He went.
I sat with the coffee.
[Cisco Ramon: Trust agreement — formalized.]
[Dimensional access: Confirmed. First window: 30 days.]
[Term constraints logged. Compliance: Recommended.]
I closed the System.
Looked at the empty doorway.
Pulled my phone out and opened my calendar app. Tapped the date thirty days from today and titled the entry trip. Saved it. Locked the screen.
Then I picked up the legal-pad cup of coffee Cisco had made me and finished it slow.
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