#and people are dying and yet even their suffering goes unrecognized. somehow that's what's been bothering me

[la0hu]

the political state of the world is really getting to me today. i need to go reread my college essays on power and control to get a hit of hope or else i'm gonna keep spiraling

[robininthelabyrinth]

Countless Roads - Chapter 15

Fic: Countless Roads - Chapter 15 - Ao3

Fandom: Flash, Legends Pairing: Gen, Mick Rory/Leonard Snart, others

Summary: Due to a family curse (which some call a gift), Leonard Snart has more life than he knows what to do with – and that gives him the ability to see, speak to, and even share with the various ghosts that are always surrounding him.

Sure, said curse also means he’s going to die sooner rather than later, just like his mother, but in the meantime Len has no intention of letting superheroes, time travelers, a surprisingly charming pyromaniac, and a lot of ghosts get in the way of him having a nice, successful career as a professional thief.

———————————————————————————

“I can’t do it,” Len says immediately once they're both downstairs and out of hearing range. “You don't understand, I can’t –”

“You can and you will,” Lewis snaps. “Don’t you dare embarrass me in front of the old man, son; once he returns, he’ll have an iron grip on power, and we’ll be the only ones who know his secret – think of the power we’ll have, you and I –”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Len hisses. “I was – I wasn’t serious –”

“Be quiet,” Lewis snarls. “Not in the house! He might decide to come back into Cabrera –”

“He can’t hear us,” Len says impatiently; he needs his dad to understand what they're dealing with so that they can hurry up and get to the point in which Len refuses to do this, Lewis beats the crap out of him, and then, with luck, they part ways. Sometimes Lewis demands Len make it up to him somehow, whether by helping with a heist or something like that; Len can do that. Len cannot do this. This is worse than blasphemy; the mere suggestion is an abomination. “Tomio's definitely gone for the moment. Cabrera controls when he comes and goes; that’s why he uses the cigar. It’s the guide that draws Tomio in. As long as it’s lit, Tomio has the body; when it’s out, Cabrera returns. It’s obvious.”

“Huh,” Lewis says, looking contemplative. “He always said –”

“Of course he always said; he doesn’t want to appear weak! But –”

“You talking back to me, boy?” Lewis asks, and his voice has gone cold.

Len falters. He’s reminded of how much his body hurts, his head aching terribly, his bruises tender, his chest all tight with anxiety. Worse, he's reminded of how much it could hurt. What he feels now is nothing; his dad always knew how to identify Len's limits and go past them in an effort to teach Len what he called 'lessons', no matter what Len did. He's the one who taught Len what his limits were in the first place; everything Len's ever learned about hurting another human being, he learned from the man standing before him now. “No, sir.”

"Good," Lewis says with satisfaction.

"What did you do to me?" Len asks instead, because that’s what he really cares about right now when you put aside the whole awful request. The way he is right now, he couldn't do it anyway, which means his dad has figured out something that Len hasn't, and that doesn't happen that often.

But it's not just that cold calculation, that worry that his dad has an ace up his sleeve - his dad always has an ace, that's how he operates. He'd never go after Len without some sort of plan to put Len under his thumb once more.

It's just terror. Bone-deep terror, of the sort Len's never felt before, not even when he thought was going to die. Terror beyond the fear of whatever else his dad has planned, because right now Len can't hear his ghosts and he's totally losing it. He never even questioned it before; he never knew how the whispers of the ghosts were his constant backdrop until now. He never knew how much his whole world was based on what he had thought was an unalterable fact of his existence.

It’s so quiet.

He has to find a way to make the quiet stop or else he’ll go mad.

Len forces himself to add, "Dad. Don Santini said it was your secret, but..."

Lewis laughs, cruel and ugly. "Oh, you always thought you were so much smarter than your old man, didn't you?" he asks. "Always thought you could fix my heists, like they needed fixing – you were always so squeamish, trying to save lives, like that's at all important compared to getting the job done. Well, I've figured you out. I know how to shut you off."

"But how?"

Lewis smiles and puts a hand on Len's shoulder. His fingers dig in, less out of a desire to make a point than sheer habitual malice. "Don't think you need to know that right now, son."

Len's fingers clench. But he knows his role, as much as he hates it. "Of course not," he says, studying the ground. "But, Dad, how can I learn my lesson if you don't tell me?"

Lewis smirks.

One thing Len knows: Lewis never could keep from boasting about his goddamn cleverness. It’s a trait Len knows all too well that he’s inherited; he’s tried to manage the downsides of such a trait by restricting his crowing about his stunts to Mick, who listens fondly to the thousandth round of ‘and then I did this – you know because you were there, but it was so awesome’, and even then he sometimes finds himself having to call off jobs because he's opened his big mouth and boasted about it to the wrong person.

But getting Lewis to that stage – well, sometimes it takes a few steps.

Len swallows his pride. Ego isn't going to help him now. "Please?"

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lewis says, drawing the words out. “Maybe I don’t think you need to know this one at all.”

Len bows his head. “Sure, dad,” he says meekly. “Guess I’ll just never know how you taught me.”

Lewis frowns a little. Nothing like the thought of his cleverness going unrecognized to make him reconsider a decision to withhold information – especially if it looks like Len’s not going to suffer from fits of curiosity like Lewis would like him too. No point in dangling something the other side doesn’t visibly want, after all.

Not when the point of withholding the information is to cause suffering, anyway.

After a few moments – and shoving Len into the passenger side of the car, like he couldn’t get in himself – Lewis snorts, and Len knows he's won the battle, if not the war; Lewis won't be able to resist telling him. “Glass,” Lewis says.

“What?” Len asks, thrown. That makes no sense.

"Glass," Lewis repeats. "It's glass."

At Len's dumbfounded look, he laughs.

“You were sixteen or something,” Lewis says, reminiscing with a faint smirk. “I had the Santinis over and you got underfoot the way you always did, being annoying and disturbing people –” Len never willingly interrupted a Family meeting his dad was holding, but this isn’t the first time they’ve disagreed over what constitutes being a disturbance. Sitting quietly in the corner not doing anything when someone gets angry, for instance. “—and when Piero tried being nice to you, you brushed him off like trash. Remember that?”

Len does remember that, actually; Piero – now Don Piero Santini, head of the Santini Family’s hooker wing, dipping his filthy fingers both into running the local pimps and importing new ones through trafficking – had been young, then, just another one of Don Tomio’s sons, not even a Don in his own right yet, but he’d been just as awful. Len had been bringing out beers for everyone all evening, his father’s version of hospitality, and Piero had followed Len back into the kitchen when he’d been taking the empty bottles to throw away, and he’d grabbed Len, put his sticky fingers over him, and Len had pulled away in revulsion. It hadn’t even been voluntary, his disgust momentarily overriding his instincts for self-preservation.

Piero had grabbed a beer bottle and smashed it over Len’s head.

Don Tomio had laughed.

Yeah, Len remembers that. That’d been the time he’d gone to the hospital despite his father’s edicts against it. The time he'd panicked terribly and thought he was dying, that he'd nearly died. The time he’d told Mick about the black book.

First time they’d kissed.

“You made such a goddamn fuss,” Lewis says, shaking his head in memory. “Little scratch on the head like that, it was nothing – I had to escort the Santinis out of there, apologizing for you the whole time, ‘cause you were being such a baby, and then before I came home to show you what’s what, your stupid sister called the ambulance. Cost us a pretty penny.”

Len nods mutely. When it looks like Lewis isn’t going to continue, lost in memory, still grumbling about the cost of the goddamn ambulance that was probably the only thing that saved Len’s life, Len asks, “But, Dad, what’s that got to do with the ghosts? I know I’m dumb, but I don’t get it.”

“You are dumb,” Lewis says, appeased, puffing up his chest a bit at the thought of understanding something Len doesn’t. “Last thing I heard when we was walking out was you caterwauling like a crazy person, screaming about how you couldn’t see Mick – that stupid invisible friend you were always whispering with, and also that partner you showed up with some years later – and when I found out about Lisa's little talent after the black hole business, I put two and two together. I knew at once that it wasn't Lisa, she never spoke to the air or had invisible friends or nothing, so it had to be you, and then I remembered you and the glass and all that screaming - yeah, it was easy enough to figure out. It’s the glass, y’see.”

They said you had glass in your skull, Len remembers Mick saying, sounding so young, so upset.

The back of his head throbs.

“You put glass in my head,” Len says dully.

“Didn’t need much,” Lewis confirms. “Your stupid ma always did say a hundredth part was enough of anything. She’s where you got it from, I bet. Stupid bitch never told me, not even when we could've used it - selfish, she was, always selfish.”

Len doesn’t bother arguing.

Glass. He’d never known. He'd never even thought back on that time enough to guess.

It’s so quiet.

"Now,” Lewis says. “Why don’t we talk instead about what you'll be needing to do what Don Santini asks."

Len swallows. The black book – a ghost’s fondest dream, to come back to life whole and entire, not as a ghost, not even as the close-enough mimicry that Len’s given to Mick, but life itself. Their own life back, instead of leeching off the life of others; everything any ghost's ever wanted.

He can't. He doesn't know what it'll do - to him, to them, to the universe.

But he lied, all those years ago, when he told Mick he didn't know how to do it.

The worst thing you can do, his mother had told him, eyes wistful, thinking of her own family where she learned all of this, is also the easiest. If I could not tell you, I would, and let the damned knowledge die forever. But it's too easy, baby, too easy to get wrong, and I won't let you blunder into it by accident when I can save you from that fate. So let me tell you how it's done, so you don't ever do it. Let me teach you. Let me tell you how to make the dead dance on this earth again. But, my son: this you must never do!

But Lewis can’t ever know that. No one can.

Len can't do it.

Len won't do it.

And with that decision made, all that's left is finding out how much it's going to hurt him - how much Lewis is going to hurt him - for refusing.

"Dad – " he starts, aiming for conciliatory, something to soothe the blow of Len’s refusal.

"Do you know what this is?" Lewis asks abruptly, showing him a remote he pulls out of his pocket.

Len hesitates. He doesn't. A remote can be programmed to anything, and his father is the worst sort of cunning. Lewis Snart always has an ace up his sleeve. Always.

"This is your sister's life."

Len's blood runs cold. "No."

"This here remote is programmed to set off a bomb," Lewis says, and smiles. Len doesn't see a lie in that smile, no matter how desperately he searches for one. “You didn’t think you’re the only one with a piece of glass in their head, do you?”

“Glass –”

“High end fiber optics set up,” Lewis says with satisfaction. “I click this button, it activates the frequency. Keep it on long enough, well.” He mimes an explosion with one hand, making a fist and then spreading his fingers wide. “Her pretty little head goes boom.”

“But Lisa ain’t got the power,” Len protests. “You know she doesn't. I’m the only one that does. You don’t need to put glass in her.”

If he can get Lewis to remove the threat to Lisa –

“I know,” Lewis says, crushing Len’s tiny shred of hope. “But it’s always good to have a Plan B, especially since I’m going to have to pull the glass out of you to let you do your thing. Can't have you taking advantage of that little break to start summoning up whoever you please for a rescue mission.”

Len looks down at his lap, where his hands are clenched so tight that his nails have started to draw blood from his palms. As much as he hates to give his dad credit for anything, it’s not a bad plan.

There’s every chance that it’ll work, actually. Len can’t risk anything happening to Lisa, he’s never been able to risk that, and he believes his father when he says that he’s put a bomb in her head, as monstrous an idea as it is. And without his ability, he'd never be able to get someone to warn Lisa of the danger - like him, she probably just figured that the pain in her head was the results of having been knocked out, not of having a bomb in there. She'd be confused, annoyed, but not scared, and she wouldn't bother going to a doctor to get it checked out. She'd never know to do it.

Just as bad, Len has no idea what happens to Mick if Len’s power is shut off – he’s still a ghost, in the end; a strong one, yes, one that people can see, but if he spends the life energy that Len gave him in a futile attempt to find Len, to save him, then by the time Mick actually does find him, he’ll be weak enough for Cabrera’s bindings to trap him. And that would be utterly intolerable, as intolerable as the idea of anything happening to Lisa.

And Len won’t even be able to see him to warn him. The fact that he saw Cabrera’s possession – mediums are the creepiest goddamn creatures in the world, well beyond ghosts, it’s official – while Lewis and Nicolas didn’t even flinch means that he’s still got some of his ability, buried as it is beneath the glass, but the ghosts make no noise anymore and he hasn't seen or heard a single one, even though he knows how many there are in this city.

It’s so quiet.

Len has no doubt that they’ll get Mick, either; Tomio rose to rule the Santini Family with an iron fist from the unenvious position of being the seventh grandson, born on the right side of the sheets via a marriage taking place less than two weeks before his birth, and he did it by virtue of being more ruthless than everyone else. Assuming Mick's still out there and free somewhere, it wouldn’t be hard to lure Mick in – Len foolishly gave him the task of dealing with the Santini problem, and Mick’s only gotten more and more obsessed with the issue after repeated failures. Now that Len’s gone missing, if there’s so much as a hint that someone knows something, Mick will be there, and Cabrera will be waiting.

And then, with both Mick and Lisa under threat, Len will be under his dad’s thumb for good. At least until he raises the dead too many times and his soul, and very likely his life, is lost for good.

It’s like Lewis always told him. There’s no escape. Lewis will always win in the end, and this whole time, Len’s just been kidding himself, thinking he's been free, thinking he somehow won his freedom. So many years of freedom. With Lisa, with Mick…

No.

Len didn’t give up and given in to Lewis' plots when he was a kid, and he’s damn well not giving up now.

He just needs time.

“Now what ingredients do you need for the resurrection ritual?” Lewis asks.

“Earth,” Len says, trying to think of something that sounds realistic. He's never done a ritual in his life; his curse doesn't work that way, but Cabrera's powers clearly do, and Lewis is obviously assuming they run on similar lines. False, but Len's never one to correct his opponent's mistakes for them. “You know – ashes to ashes, dust to dust –”

That’s a Christian thing, not a Jewish thing, but it sounds good, and what does Lewis know of Judaism anyway?

“It’d be best if it’s from Don Tomio’s home," Len adds, thinking of vampire myths. "The real one, back in Italy. That'd be the best, so it’s associated with him –”

“Easy enough to get,” Lewis says carelessly, crushing Len's hopes. “The Santinis import plants from their hometown in Italy, dirt and all; we’ll get some. What else?”

Len tries to think – everything that comes to mind, earth, blood, whatever, it’s all too easy to get; he needs to play for time, he needs something hard to get, something that would be guarded –

“Diamonds,” he blurts out.

“What?”

“Diamonds,” Len says. “Blood diamonds, unmarked by modern light.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Means they can’t have the new IDs engraved on them,” Len says. He has absolutely no idea what’s coming out of his mouth, but it seems to be working so he's going to lean into it. “You know how glass shuts me up? Lasers nowadays are all glass and mirrors; using them fucks with the purity of the diamonds.”

“What the hell do you need a diamond for, though?” Lewis asks skeptically, but not as disdainfully or disbelievingly as Len might have feared.

“The soul is more precious than diamonds, and nothing you desire compares to her,” Len misquotes, butchering the Biblical language horribly to make it fit his needs. He never learned the Bible properly, not even the Hebrew one like he was supposed to, but Mick was a good Irish boy raised in the 1930s and he’d had it strapped into his backside so thoroughly that even Len has picked up some parts of it by proxy. “For she is a tree of life to those who take hold of her.” He thinks a bit more. There’s got to be more quotes he can use. “The sin of men is written down with an iron stylus, and it's with diamond point that it's engraved on the tablet of their heart.”

It’s all bullshit, of course; from what he recalls of the relevant quotation, it's knowledge that is more precious than rubies, and which gives life, it’s all goddamn metaphor, and the second bit wasn’t even from the same goddamn book as the first part and at any rate is talking about something entirely different.

But it sounds half convincing.

If only half.

“So we need diamonds?” Lewis asks, screwing up his face in annoyance.

“I never said it was cheap,” Len says, keeping his voice as calm as possible when he wants to scream and beg for Lewis not to do this. But that never helped before; only calmness and coldness can help. Just like Lewis always taught him. “Human lives rarely are.”

Lewis grunts thoughtfully.

Len can’t believe this is working.

“You put in a hell of a lot of effort to get that Kahndaq diamond those months back,” Lewis finally says, and Len has to force his shoulders straight and to make himself hide the sudden overwhelming flood of relief. It worked, he's done it; he’s convinced Lewis of his lies, bought himself precious time to think of a plan to get out of this, and all because that particular gem has an association with marriage. Even when Mick isn't present, he's saving Len's ass. “That was an old one, and a biggie; bet you needed that for that stunt you pulled on Black Hole Day. All those ghosts swarming over the city – like something out of a goddamn movie, that was.”

Like out of Ghostbusters, actually. Mick had made the joke at least a thousand times, and Barry at least a thousand times more, and then Lisa had gotten in on it, and that’s not counting the number of times the other ghosts had joined in.

Sadly, Len had smirked every single goddamn time someone had made the joke, because he’d thought it was never going to not be funny.

Looks like he found the one time it isn’t.

“That how you found out about me?” Len asks. “The curse, I mean?”

“What curse?”

“My ability,” Len explains. “With ghosts.”

Lewis snorts. “Doesn’t sound like a curse to me,” he opines. “You could make serious bank with that, m’boy, but you use it for frivolities like playing around with that ghost partner of yours. Guess it explains why no one was ever able to kill him and make it stick – hard to kill the dead, ain't it?”

“Yeah,” Len says. Might as well admit it, since Lewis already knows the rest of it.

“Easier to bind them, though, according to Cabrera.”

Len remains silent. That jab hurt, but he can't let Lewis see that, or he'll just keep going after the sore spot.

“Yeah, that’s when I figured out you weren’t just nutso,” Lewis continues. “Always thought you were a bit conked in the head, honestly; just like that whore of a mother of yours. Pity I never cottoned on to her, now that would have been a hell of a lot more of a money-maker than her ass ever was –”

Len grits his teeth, then releases the tension with a force of will. He's not going to let his dad goad him into a reaction that he'll just get punished for having.

“You’re a bad son,” Lewis taunts. “Not even saying anything to defend your ma anymore?”

“No, Dad,” Len says, forcing his tone as even as he can get it. “I know better than to argue with you.”

“Damn right you do,” Lewis says, satisfied. “Now tell me where we can get your unmarked diamonds.”

“How would I know?”

“Son…”

Len knows that tone of voice. Lewis doesn't care that Len hasn't had time to plan, that he's asking the impossible; that tone suggests that Lewis did Len the favor of giving him life, all those years ago, and that Len's failure to immediately produce results means that he's got to start repaying that debt right away, and that Lewis will make Len regret every minute of it. That tone is nothing but a prelude to pain.

Len thinks fast.

“Dalamar’s provides all the security for high-end jewel stores in the city,” hesays, fishing the factoid out of his brain in a fit of desperation. He’d looked up their location and floor plans for a separate heist, but he'd opted against doing anything rash like hitting the security headquarters itself. Once he hit Dalamar's, it would be far too risky hitting a store right where they expected to be hit; that isn't why he kept an eye on it, anyway. In his view, it was always good to keep up with the newest developments in what technology was actually being used in the city, and there was nothing like a security shop for finding that out. But if you were desperate to find a diamond and you didn't much care about keeping a low profile... “Their HQ will have a list of all the important imports and exports, plus blueprints of the relevant building plans. We can break in there, easy, and from there we can go get the diamonds.”

“Knew you knew something,” Lewis says, his voice thick with satisfaction. “It's a plan, then. We’ll hit the HQ for the blueprints, gather up a crew – I’ve already got some help waiting, knew it wouldn’t be that easy – then we’ll go in after the diamonds. You can use some for your resurrection bullshit, and the rest can serve as, heh, a bit of spending money, getting Tomio back in power and me by his side.”

Len personally thinks that Tomio will have Lewis shot the second he can in order to hide the details of his resurrection; unlike Cabrera or Len, Lewis possesses nothing that Tomio won’t be able to do himself. Lewis might have some leverage with his control over Len, but that won’t last forever, not once Tomio figures out the details of the glass trick and the fact that he can do it just as well without Lewis' assistance. Better, probably; Tomio lacked many of Lewis' more easily exploitable faults.

He knows this isn't a solution. Len’s bought himself some time, at most; even his father’s slapdash heists still need a day or two of planning. He has time to try to plan a way out of this, even though his entire body is tensed up in panic and his brain is screaming for lack of noise, a quiet so deep that his brain keeps coming back to it, beating helplessly against it, making it impossible to think for more than a few seconds straight.

It's so quiet.

He hates it.

“So where’s the Dalamar HQ?”

But Len will think of something - some way to save Lisa, some way to save Mick, some way to save himself, because he can't do it. He can't bring Tomio back to wreak havoc on the world. He'll think of something.

He has to.

“Fifth and Hoyt,” Len says and closes his eyes.