129
"I don't wanna get out of bed." I mutter, Barry's arms wrapped around me tight, his face nuzzled into my neck, his eyes closed, exhaustion threaded in both our tones due to just waking up.
He huffs quietly, "Neither do I."
"But we have a whole day ahead of us." I turn in his hold, looking at him.
"Well, if we don't wanna get out of bed just yet- let's not." Barry rolls on top of me, pinning me against the bed.
"Barry, it's 8 in the morning." I shot him a look, "You need to put your mind to work- we need to get to work. I mean, Nora already left."
"Okay, I'll let my mind get to work." Barry looks up as if he was in thought, a thoughtful pout on his lips as he stared at the ceiling, then looks down at me, "I've made an educated guess of what you look like without clothes on. Wanna let me see if I'm right?"
"Hey-" I hit his shoulder playfully, a small chuckle leaving his lips, "You can't make a guess if you've already seen it."
"Well, I haven't seen it in what feels like ages- so I have forgotten." Barry kisses my neck.
"As if you could forget." I roll my eyes, a small laugh leaving my lips.
"You're right. I think about it every day." Barry smiles up at me, before pressing his lips into mine, cutting me off completely, starting the day off with a completely different turn.
-
"Orlin Dwyer." Ralph introduced, "Near as we can tell, he grew up in the Midwest. In and out of juvie, pretty much fell off the map, and then popped up in Central City a few years ago."
"Part-time employee of Szrek Chemicals for the last two years." Sherloque continued.
Ralph went on, "Foreman says he keeps to himself, pretty much a loner, gave a fake address."
"Did take custody of his niece." Sherloque pulls up her picture as they both repeat, "Grace Gibbons."
"After her parents were unfortunately murdered by a meta-human, now-" Sherloque continued on.
Ralph finishes for him, "So now we know why Dwyer hates metas. Once he got his powers, he started targeting them."
"Powers he got the night of the Enlightenment, as we all know, and he was struck by a shard from the Star Labs satellite explosion." Sherloque told us.
"Which was also the same night that Grace went into a coma." Ralph added.
"Where Dwyer visits her every day, every night, for the last three weeks." Sherloque informed us.
"So he's there now?" Barry asks, as they nod in response, "Then let's go get him."
I look down at my feet, letting out a quiet scoff at what he just said, rocking back and forth on my feet, the heels of my black heeled platform boots hitting the ground over and over.
The strands of my straightened hair falling from behind my ear, my entire body feeling unusually cold, despite the brown plaid skinny taper pants on I had on, paired with the cropped black sweater that ended right on the high waist line of the pants.
"Let's go get him?" Sherloque repeats, "How are you going to do that? Look, as always, I respect your spirit, Barry Allen, but as long as Cicada has his dagger to dampen your powers, there's no stopping him."
"So let's destroy his dagger." Barry states.
"How are we gonna do that unless we have some kind of power-dampening dagger power dampener hidden away in storage?" Ralph asks.
"We don't, but if we did we'd come up with a much better way of saying that." Cisco remarks from next to me, as I stopped rocking back and forth, looking up at Ralph.
"Sure, I mean, just, like, dagger-dampener," Barry starts to mutter.
"Wait, yeah, that's actually- that's decent," Cisco starts, as they all start to conversation amongst themselves, trying to figure out a name for it, as I stared at them in confusion.
"Guys." Nora cuts in, looking up from her journal, looking at all of us, "What if we could make one?"
"Make one what?" I ask.
"What if we can make a weapon more powerful than his weapon?" Nora suggests, "Cicada can control his dagger, so what we would need would be something more powerful than his connection to it."
"So like- some sort of super-charged magnet?" I question.
"Exactly." Nora nods.
"I don't know if we have anything strong enough for that." Cisco told us, "We made Sally out of a micro-composite alloy. As far as satellite's go, she was heavy-duty."
"And even if we could get our hands on the dagger, we'd still have to figure out how to take the dark matter out- to negate it's powers." Caitlin went on.
"Well, exactly right." Sherloque joined. "I mean, what you're suggesting is we find an alloy- no, no- indestructible alloy that has super magnetic properties, but also has the ability to negate dark matter. I mean, where are we going to find such a thing?"
"The past." Nora told us quietly, looking between Barry and I.
Barry and I instantly look at her, saying in unison, "What?"
"You've already come across everything that we need, right? A strong alloy with magnetic properties." Nora began.
"Savitar's suit." Cisco realizes.
"Something to remove dark matter." Nora continued.
"The Speed Force transmitter that Zoom used to steal Barry's speed." Caitlin thought out loud.
"Yeah, but that was his Speed Force." I cut in.
"Yeah, but those are exotic particles, which are basically the same thing as dark energy, so we would just need some of that to recalibrate it." Nora explained.
"Can-" Ralph stammered, "Can you do that?"
"I mean, you'd have to infuse the transmitter with the same kind of dark matter." Cisco says.
"Like the Devoe kind?" Ralph questioned.
"More like the Particle Accelerator kind." Cisco looks up.
"I'm sorry, we-" Ralph stuttered, "We need to blow up Star Labs again?"
"No, no, not again." Nora shook her head, "We just need to go back to the first time that it happened."
Barry shook his head, crossing his arms, "This is gonna mess with the timeline too much."
"No, it's not." Nora stops him, "Savitar's suit, the transmitter, these are all just discarded objects in time, so if we steal them, it won't affect anything at all."
"Even if all of that worked, we can't just waltz into the hospital with our soon-to-be-named dampening device." Ralph reasons, "Dwyer smells us coming, he's gone."
"Then we do a time hack." Nora said, having really thought of everything.
"A time hack?" Ralph repeated.