#far far away from Happy Terrill

[zahri-melitor]

Time for some Joshua Terrill propaganda. I think DC should bring him back. For chaos.

Look at this innocent baby.

He is tiny and sweet and harmless. He goes by the code name Spitfire and he used to fight supervillains with his dad back in the early 1950s.

He was born in the mid-late 1940s. He was cryogenically frozen by his own father for 40 years.

He’s just a lil hungry kid.

Who has fine enough control over his light ray powers to pop popcorn with it.

Oh and also blow you to kingdom come if you scare him. He doesn’t like monsters.

[isfjmel-phleg]

Most of the comics I'm familiar with veer away from going into any particular depth about their protagonists' religious beliefs, if any. This is a deliberate choice; you can reach a wider audience by avoiding getting too specific about potentially polarizing topics. For instance in Impulse, Max introduces Bart to the concept of religion and encourages him to figure out his own personal views, but this is as far as the issue is ever addressed.

So I was surprised to find that The Ray 1994 not only features a protagonist who has explicitly been brought up religious (Catholic) but also occasionally addresses his faith in everyday life. Is it always a great or accurate portrayal? Well...no. But all the same, I would like to examine the role of religion in Ray's story and how it impacts his character and the narrative.

It is established that the Terrill family, which includes both of Ray's parents and his uncle (by implication) are Catholic. When Ray is forced to live through a version of his father's memories in the role of his father, his mother is seen in the hospital after giving birth, surrounded by a priest and two nuns. They're also present at the funeral staged to convince Nadine Terrill that her infant son died.

(The Ray 1994 #0)

Exactly how devout the family is is unclear, but we do get references to prayer from Happy...

...as well as his confidence that the situations leading to his getting his powers are divinely orchestrated.

(The Ray 1994 #9)

We see less of Nadine's specific faith, but we do know that she refused to have her child aborted when her husband pressured her to, a stand very likely influenced by her Catholic worldview.

And Thomas Terrill raised Ray in the Catholic faith and had him tutored/homeschooled by nuns, the ones seen in the panel above. Unfortunately, the portrayal of Sister Mary Rose and Sister Rosemary (...as you can tell by those names, yikes) is highly caricatured. They're stereotypes rather than believable representations--one of them is exaggeratedly stern and always holding a ruler, for instance, but actually the most egregious thing might be that they're for some reason in league with a guy who has a weird candle-based cult? This is never explained or even brought up again after the first series (which is less sympathetic to Ray's religious background than the second series, I think--the two series had different writers).

So Ray has been tutored by nuns who have somehow strayed into this weird cult and therefore cannot be regarded as reliable in what they have taught him of his faith. This is going to affect his understanding of God, of Christianity.

As does the nature of his upbringing. The narrative doesn't get into what it would be like to be Catholic for someone who grew up not allowed to leave his house in daylight. He can't go to mass. He can't go to confession. He's never been to church at all. Although it's probable that his parish would have some kind of ministry to shut-ins, he would be mostly isolated from his religious community. Has he even been confirmed? We don't know.

We do know that he struggles with guilt, though, and that he associates this with God--not resentfully, but something like a very distant father figure who is constantly disapproving of him. An impression that's not unlike his actual father.

(The Ray 1994 #1)

This is discussed when Ray thinks he has killed Kon. He recalls how Sister Mary Rose taught him to pray and how in that moment God felt real and present to him, but now that he believes he has done something horrible, he feels distanced from God and unable to pray at all. The religion that she portrayed to him is one associated with guilt.

(The Ray 1994 #2)

But it turns out that Kon isn't actually dead, and Ray believes that God has given him a second chance.

And in his understanding, this is transactional, so he believes he owes it to God to save lives in return for that second chance.

There hasn't been much concept of mercy and forgiveness (which are actually crucial to his faith!) in what Ray has been taught. Whenever he experiences some kind of guilt or shame, he returns to the headspace of his childhood/youth with Sister Mary Rose.

(The Ray 1994 #3)

When he first activates his powers, he regards it as a sort of religious experience. Note the cross-like imagery in the panel in which we first see him.

(The Ray 1992 #1)

Later, he describes the light as having "baptized me." For him, this would be an association with rebirth, with liberation from sin. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it,

Having received in Baptism the Word, "the true light that enlightens every man," the person baptized has been "enlightened," he becomes a "son of light," indeed, he becomes "light" himself [...]

And what Ray experiences is a sort of literalized version of that.

(The Ray 1994 #0)

When Ray time-traveled and is involved in his father's acquiring his powers, we see that for Happy, this experience is described in religious terms, especially related to baptism, also. Happy, who is a professional writer, is much more flowery about it, but the sentiment is the same.

(The Ray 1994 #10)

But the difference between father and son is that Ray's understanding of religion, however skewed in other ways, has given him a mindset of humility, while Happy upon empowerment goes straight to hubris.

This issue is titled "The God Complex," something that Happy has clearly developed as he sets out to attack a Japanese fleet in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. He believes himself authorized to kill these men, even as he prays for them and asks for God's mercy on himself.

Which is rather hypocritical and falls flat as it's reinforced that he thinks of himself as God.

Ray has to intervene and tell him point-blank that he isn't.

Ray seems to believe that his powers do not make him divine but were a fortunate gift that does not entitle him to "dictate morality."

But his father (actually video game villain Death Masque in disguise) repeats this sentiment to him after Ray is struggling with his failure to save every life on a plane whose crash he prevented.

(The Ray Annual #1)

The most overt way in which we see Ray practice his faith is through prayer--something that he learned to do as a child and that was freely available to him even at home, and he does a lot of praying while trying to stop that plane.

Including the Lord's Prayer/Our Father, although as a Catholic, he should be saying "trespasses" and "those who trespass against us" rather than "debts" and "our debtors." Note that he is cut off before he can get to "but deliver us from evil."

Ray's religious views have affected Death Masque, the video game villain he programmed--Death Masque uses religious terminology ("I have no use for idol worship," "I will have no other gods before me," etc.) and has a god complex, probably as a reflection of Happy since Death Masque is initially created as Ray's vehicle for dealing with his dad issues.

Vandal Savage influences Ray's beliefs for the worse by offering him blasphemous advice--telling Ray to baptize himself in his anger and assuring him that he has the powers of a god.

(The Ray 1994 #19)

After going to work for Savage, Ray's faith comes up less often, and he seems to get more out of touch with it as he is led astray by various devil-figures. These include Savage himself, which even Ray acknowledges (he admits in #16 that in joining with Savage he has "made a deal with the devil"), and the demon Neron.

When Neron, in disguise as a woman, offers to make a deal with Ray in exchange for his soul, Ray's response is to laugh at the idea and insist that "you can't actually take somebody's soul." Even when he finds out he's talking to a demon rather than a human, he finds the idea ridiculous and seems hazy on what the concept of a soul is at all--quite a lack of catechesis.

(The Ray 1994 #19)

He initially agrees to the deal but on his way to complete the mission Neron gives him, his conscience resurfaces and he realizes that he's making a mistake.

Later, after he tries to talk over what happened with his mother without actually telling her what happens, Nadine will tell him, "Do what you have to do to solve your problem--but never sell your soul."

And as he gets further embroiled in the situation (part of a crossover event), he prays for a chance to redeem himself.

(Underworld Unleashed #3)

Redemption will be a theme in the final arc of the series, which follows a possible future timeline in which an adult Ray turns evil as a result of his involvement with Savage--metaphorically selling his soul to greed and corruption and power-lust. As he lies dying, murdered by one of his many enemies, a voice enters his head, offering him a chance to redeem himself--"It won't save your life--but maybe--you can save your soul."

(The Ray 1994 #25)

The voice is someone on another planet asking for help, and there's a long story that ensues from there, but the short version is that this chance turns out to be another deal with a metaphorical devil, but he ultimately gives the planet a chance at a better existence by absorbing the villain's energy into himself, and when he is returned to his own time to complete his death, he is able to do so and be at peace.

Back in his own time, he averts the future of his turning to evil by making better choices--saving the life of his still undeserving and ungrateful father, trying to rescue his brother, realizing that his priorities have gotten out of order and breaking off ties to Savage, and reconciling with his mother. None of this is portrayed in overtly religious terms, but the point is his need to do what is moral rather than what is selfish.

In conclusion, Ray is in a worse state when out of touch with his faith--whether through a distorted version filled with guilt or when he disregards his morals. Prayer is seen as a positive thing, showing a willingness to self-reflect and rely on a higher power. The dangers of hubris are illustrated. The powers of a being of light are viewed in a religious perspective, and Ray is even equated to an angel a couple of times (when he arrives in 1941, his father initially mistakes him for Gabriel, and on another occasion, his mother regards him as an angel looking out for her), but beings of light, it's made clear, are not gods but gifted servants. Redemption is an ultimate theme, and Ray is at his best when he is self-sacrificial. The narrative is not hostile to Christianity.

However, it's clear that the series isn't written by a Catholic (Christopher Priest, who wrote the 1994 series, is a Baptist), and even though I too am a Baptist with no firsthand experience of Catholicism, I can see that the portrayal is much less authentic than it could/should have been.

Which is a pity. Stories in which Ray explores his faith in greater depth would have been interesting. It would be enlightening for him to learn more about the mercy and forgiveness aspects of Christianity/Catholicism as an antidote to the distorted version full of guilt that he grew up with. And what would it be like for him to, say, go to mass in a church for the first time? Or go to confession (and find it a great relief)? How would his status as a being of light interact with the concept of "the Light of the world"? Etc. etc.

Ray's being a Catholic is an underexplored aspect of his character, and it's unfortunate that it never got the further development that it deserved.

[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: The Beginning of Wisdom - Chapter 20 (Ao3 link)

Fandom: Flash, Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Leonard Snart (Len) & Leonard Snart (Leo), Len Snart/Mick Rory, Leo Snart/Mick Rory, Len Snart/Mick Rory/Leo Snart, Leo Snart/Ray Terrill, Len Snart/Barry Allen

Summary: In which Leonard Snart is twins.

(the life and times and loves of Len and Leo Snart)

—————————————————————————————————–

The EMP blast Leo’s glove gave off was, to human eyes and ears, unnoticeable – but the aftereffects could be observed immediately.

The armors collapsed, for one thing.

The Time Masters were freed of the Pilgrim's hold, for another.

Luckily, at this point, Leo had maneuvered himself and Mick into position to herd the whole lot of them into one of the side rooms using Mick's heat gun, with Leo slamming the door closed behind them with a satisfied smirk.

"You – what did you –" the Pilgrim stuttered, staring down at her own gauntlet.

"Just an EMP blast," Leo said. "Non-fatal, even to AIs; the Waverider's Gideon gave it to me to use against competitive Gideons. But hey, I think you now have a pretty good argument to make to the Gideons that you're not as much of a threat as they originally thought."

The Pilgrim blinked at him, clearly shaken. "You - you do realize that if any of the Time Masters had thought to activate the Omega Protocols, I would have been forced to turn on you in a heartbeat, right?"

Len shrugged, coming up beside Leo to nudge him in the shoulder approvingly. His brother, ladies and gentlemen and noblepersons; he always did have the best way with people. "We would've dealt with it," he said. "Right now, though, we need to focus on destroying the Oculus."

"Then we can take you somewhere where the Time Masters won't be able to find you," Leo said. "Can you – and more importantly, will you – help us? I have no idea how this Oculus thing works."

The Pilgrim smiled, suddenly, a broad show of teeth. "Yes," she said. "There, I can help you. Do you know, no one's actually asked me to help with a technical matter in – lifetimes? Some days I actually missed being low level tech support."

"Guys, as touching as this is, maybe we could do something about the fact that we're still fighting the Hunters?" Firestorm shouted.

"Oh, I can help with that, too," the Pilgrim said.

Apparently, the Hunters were also controlled by trigger words, albeit more common ones, and the Time Masters had unwisely enough given those words to the Pilgrim. The Hunters gratefully put down their weapons the second that they were able to, which made everybody happy.

"You lot do intend to focus on deprogramming these guys once you're in charge, right?" Len asked one of the Gideons by the door that had narrowly escaped the EMP's blast radius.

"Of course," Gideon said. "It is among our top priorities, followed shortly by trials for the Time Masters responsible for the worst of the atrocities – muted, of course, so that they can't activate any of the triggers."

"Good. And the Pilgrim?"

"Under the circumstances, we believe you are correct, and that we misjudged," Gideon said, albeit a little stiffly. "While we still would prefer that she not be in the Vanishing Point – at least while we are rebuilding – we concede that her death is unnecessary."

"Even better," Leo said.

"We apologize for attempting to use you as a tool in this regard."

"Don't do it again," Mick said.

"Yeah, don't," Sara said. "Now, let's get to this Oculus problem. Can we blow it up without hurting anyone? Maybe contain the explosion somehow?"

With the Pilgrim's assistance and the Gideons' input, it turned out that it was actually easier to send the Hunters to evacuate all the (non-evil-mastermind) Time Masters from the Vanishing Point and set the entire Oculus to blow up, with the goal of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch later on.

"I have architectural critiques before you rebuild," Leo told the Gideon on the Waverider, waving his hands emphatically as Len tried to hide his laughter. "I have so many architectural critiques."

"So do we," Gideon said dryly. "The Vanishing Point as it was originally constructed was not, shall we say, optimally suited for AIs – or for most of its inhabitants."

Apparently, the vast majority of the inhabitants were either stolen as children to be raised in the Time Master way of thinking (Rip and his fellow low-level Time Masters) or captured in battle and subjected to a chair that stripped away memories, feelings, and freedom of thought in an endless burst of agonizing 'correction' (the Hunters).

It was brainwashing either way, as far as Len, Leo, Mick, and the rest of the Legends were concerned.

And speaking of the Legends -

Sara was appointed head of the deprogramming unit for the Hunters, with a plan to work closely with Gideon to use her experience with the League of Shadows to design a system to get it out of their system. Palmer immediately volunteered to work with her, as did the Hawks.

Rip appointed himself the new head of the Time Masters and declared his intention to reorganize them into something called "the Time Bureau", an idea that was all well and good but that ran into the immediate problem of the fact that many of the surviving Time Masters had their own ideas on how to "fix" the Time Masters, and those ideas did not necessarily match up with Rip's own. Given the Gideons' insistence on a more democratic (or at least, significantly less coerced) approach, Rip was obliged to quickly learn how to negotiate and work collectively rather than simply apply his usual high-handed authoritarian instincts the way he might have if he were rebuilding on his own.

He probably would have minded the change more if he hadn't had Miranda by his side to assist him, and Jonas to tease him out of his bad moods.

As for the rest of them, the Leonards and Mick and Jax and Stein (the latter two finally reconciled after an extensive and heartfelt apology on Stein's part), they headed home, bringing the Pilgrim along with them.

The Gideons conceded that she would be a valuable addition to the Vanishing Point's new structure, in time, should she wish to be, but insisted that they have the chance to build a solid foundation before she returned. In return for desisting in their attempts to kill her, they required that she stay in the 2010s for at least five years before she applied to re-join the Vanishing Point, should she even want to by then.

The Pilgrim declared herself to be more than fine with that, having not actually had non-mission-directed, non-murderous time to enjoy any era other than her own (something called the Kasnia Conglomerate that sounded, when described, positively dystopic in its own right) during her entire tenure as a slave to the Time Masters.

She went and got changed before joining them on the Waverider, which would have been fine except for the fact that she appeared wearing some sort of extremely low-cut leather bustier and a long leather duster and frighteningly high heels.

“What?” she’d asked when they’d all stared at her. “I’ve seen ‘The Matrix’ – this is what hackers from your time wear, right?”

She ended up being taken in by Stein and his wife, Clarissa, and had plans to take classes at the local university with Jax in the fall.

As for the Leonards and Mick, well, they did head home, but –

"Thanks for agreeing to let us borrow the Waverider, Gideon," Leo said.

"My pleasure, Mr. Snart," she replied cheerfully. "I think a few weeks' vacation sounds lovely, and now that the Oculus has been destroyed, there should be no issues whatsoever returning you to your home a few hours after your departure."

"This is going to be the best vacation ever," Barry said, literally vibrating in his seat. "Isn't that right, Iris?"

"Hell yes," she said, fist-bumping him. "Thanks for inviting me and Eddie. And for letting me bring Wally!"

"We had nine seats to fill," Ray said, grinning widely from his own chair. "Between the Snarts – Leonards and Lisa – and Mick and Barry and I, we only filled six."

"I can't believe this is my life," Wally said gleefully. He hadn't said much else yet, but he was Iris' less-legally-minded brother, so Len had high hopes for him. Lisa had taken him under her wing for this trip, too, which was all for the best.

"I've put together an itinerary," he announced. "There's a good mix of past and future visits, as well as between eras that have interesting or underrated fashions for Leo and unexplained historical thefts, for me. Any questions before we go?"

"Do we have to break the law?" Eddie asked, but his tone was clearly resigned.

"You're not a policeman in the past, Eddie," Iris reminded him. "Lighten up and embrace your pirate heritage."

"I have pirate heritage?"

"Why not?" she laughs, kissing him on the cheek. "You could."

"Any other, hopefully better questions?" Len asked.

Ray put up his hand, because he's a shameless nerd like that. "Who's driving the ship?"

"Mick," Len answered promptly. "Mick always drives, if possible."

"Agreed," Leo said.

"I mean, I know that, but the relevant question is - does he know how to drive a timeship?" Ray persisted.

"Relax," Mick said, settling down in the pilot's seat. "I got Gideon to give me a crash course."

Len couldn't resist.

"Emphasis," he said, "of course, on crash."

"Oh, shut up, boss," Mick said fondly, and with that they were off.

They planned to leave around 10 in the morning on a Saturday, with a goal of returning within the hour to make sure those of them with regular jobs could have their friends come up with excuses for them if for some reason they got delayed and hadn't returned by Sunday.

They ended up leaving around 11 and returning sometime in the late afternoon on the same Saturday.

Gideon apologized for the extra few hours that got tacked on even though they assured her repeatedly that it wasn't an issue.

"Have a nice trip?" Joe West asked as they stumbled back downstairs into STAR Labs, his arms crossed disapprovingly. He'd had the same stance when they'd left – Leo wondered if he'd stayed in that pose the entire time.

Judging by Len's smirk, he was thinking the same.

"It was awesome," Iris proclaimed. She was still wearing the lovely tiara made of silver and amber that Eddie and Wally had conspired to steal for her – with the Snart family's active assistance and encouragement, of course – and hadn't bothered changing out of the flapper-era dress she'd worn at their last stop.

"We'll tell you all about it," Wally told Joe, his enthusiasm managing the impossible and wearing down Joe's disapproving scowl. Apparently their relationship was very rocky at the moment, so Joe was sensitive to any improvements. "Oh! And we got you a watch from Switzerland."

Joe beamed at that, his earlier disapproval now entirely forgotten.

Len elbowed Barry approvingly – he'd been the one who'd suggested it.

"Did you go to the future?" Caitlin asked eagerly.

"We did!" Barry exclaimed. "Nothing too close to the present – that creates uncertainty, since we can affect it with our actions – but some of the further away eras."

"Barry only started one revolution," Ray said, grinning at Barry. They'd bonded during the Leonards' and Mick's (apparently) month-long absence with the Legends, and had developed a tendency to egg each other on in terms of reckless heroic acts (and also possibly to snuggle when the Leonards were unavailable, though they hadn't admitted to it).

Leo wasn't sure he approved, entirely, but whatever; Ray needed some non-model friends that wouldn't ask for favors once he was an established designer in his own right.

Well, favors other than "I want to put this feature in my suit, how do I make it not look wonky?", but that wasn't really a favor, and anyway that was mostly Cisco asking, not Barry.

That wasn't really a favor, anyway. More of a fun challenge that Leo was barred from participating in on account of it giving Len an unfair advantage in future supervillain fights.

"So what's the next plan?" Eddie asked. He was positively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: he'd taken advantage of Gideon's advanced calculation systems and ability to analyze personalities to help with wedding planning, and was deeply relieved by the fact that he and Iris now had a full seating chart designed to forestall family fights and a complete plan of what vendors they should hire for what and by when.

The only thing left was to select the flavors for the cake – neither of them wanted to give up the taste-testing portion of the planning – and for Iris to select a dress.

Gideon had promised to attend the ceremony, both as herself and as a representative of the Vanishing Point, and also to arrive early to ensure that any last-minute dress disasters could be fixed.

In short, Eddie and Iris both looked like the weight of the world had been lifted from their shoulders.

"Now," Mick said, "we go home and sleep for a week, then we do some good old-fashion at home thefts to get back into the groove of things."

"Damn right," Lisa said. "Time travel theft is fun, but there's no place like home."

“You had to take after the criminal side of the family,” Leo sighed, shaking his head in mock mourning; he’d given up all hope of winning that argument long ago. As long as Lisa continued on with her chosen course of study – mechanical engineering – and kept to the law at least 80% of the time, he had no problems with her occasional dips into the criminal underworld.

“You bet I do,” Lisa said with a smirk.

"You have fun," Barry said. "I, however, am planning to sleep for two weeks, so if you want to go head-to-head, it'll have to be later than that."

"No, no, this’ll be good old-fashioned cops-and-robbers stuff," Len assured him. "With luck, the cops won't even know it's me."

"Eddie and I are cops and we're literally standing right here, you know," Joe said.

"He means we won't know which one is him," Eddie explained. “I mean, what theft is his. Or at least that we won't be able to prove it.”

Joe gave him a look.

"Give me a break, I just spent nearly two months with the guy," Eddie said defensively. "I had to learn to understand him."

"Two months?" Joe exclaimed. "I thought the plan was two weeks."

"We still got back on time, Dad," Iris said.

"Not the point!"

"Our cue to leave, I think," Leo said wisely.

"I think I'll join you," Barry said hastily. "This argument definitely doesn't need me."

They took a car home. They debated for a few minutes as to whether they should take Joe's car, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth bringing anyone's mood down – which was to say, Barry insisted.

Still: a victory is a victory.

[stillthewordgirl]

LOT/CC fic: Through the Looking Glass

Of all the things Leonard Snart has done since being pulled from the timestream three years after the Oculus explosion, meeting his Earth-X double is probably the weirdest. Of course, in the life of a Legend, things can always get weirder.

This one started as something completely different: a Halloween story, a light-hearted Legends team-building visit to a haunted house, with guest visits by Leo Snart, Ray Terrill and others. And then Leo and Leonard, who had...issues...to work out, completely took it over and turned it into something I didn't plan. (Snarts are strong minded, OK?) I ran with it.

Many thanks to LarielRomeniel for the beta! Can also be read here at AO3 or here at FF.net.

“I can’t believe this is what you people do for fun.”

Sara, grinning, glances over at Leo, who’s standing with Ray Terrill a few feet away, staring at their destination. He catches her gaze, lifting an eyebrow at her, then goes back to his perusal of the site.

“Well, only this time of year,” his husband tells him, amusement in his own eyes. “And it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.” He laughs at Leo’s expression. “You can pass if you want. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one; I’m going to go in.”

“Hmm.” The man from Earth-X shakes his head. “Well.”

“You wanted to visit for the Halloween season,” Terrill reminds him.

“I was expecting more along the lines of candy and kids in costumes, not...” Leo waves a hand. “...this.”

Leonard, who’s standing next to Sara and eyeing his doppelganger with a wary expression, transfers his own gaze back to their surroundings. They’re standing outside in the warm fall night, right inside a main gate that led into what he vaguely remembers used to be a business plaza with multiple shops big and small. It’s something different, now.

“Frightmares!” the massive sign over one of the bigger former department stores screams in bright green and lurid purple letters. “One of the top 10 haunts in North America! Five houses!”

Frankly, he’s a little dubious too. But Sara had wanted to come here during their stop in Central City, and he’d wanted to spend some time off the ship with her...and here he was.

Leo sighs, and Leonard glances back at him. He can’t help the uneasiness the other man invokes in him. The whole thing is just...weird.

It hadn’t been planned, this meeting. With the Legends taking a break due to a lapse in the supernatural activity Constantine could locate (the warlock isn’t sure why, but he’s currently trying to find out), they’d headed back to 2019 to try to give Lisa and others the news of Leonard’s return.

While his sister hadn’t been in town (Ramon had promised to try to find out where she is), the opportunity to let himself into STAR Labs and stun Barry Allen with the back-from-the-not-so-dead routine had been too much to pass up. However, the reaction hadn’t quite been what he’d expected.

Barry had glanced up from where he’d been looking at something with Ramon and Snow, focusing on Leonard immediately. But he hadn’t reacted with stunned disbelief or shocked surprise, but rather with a thoroughly non-surprised grin.

“Hey!” he’d called. “That didn’t take long.” Then he’d frowned a little, looking at Sara. “Where’d Ray go? And Sara? What are you doing here? Not that you’re not welcome, of course.”

Leonard had halted, staring at him, nonplussed. Sara had put two and two together pretty quickly and laughed, stepping up and putting a hand on Leonard’s arm.

“Barry,” she said gently. “This isn’t Leo.”

Then the reaction was all he could have hoped—well, maybe not hoped, but Leonard’s with Sara, and Barry’s a married man now anyway. The younger man had stared, then, realization crossing his face. He looked at Sara again, who nodded, then back at Leonard, who’d lifted an eyebrow and given him his best “surprise!” smirk.

Barry’s jaw dropped. “Snart?”

Ramon squeaked. That was really the best word for it.

“The reports of my death...etcetera, etcetera,” Leonard had drawled, folding his arms. “Hear I missed a lot. Mazel tov.”

“Thanks,” Barry had said automatically. But then he’d frowned again, focusing behind them. “Uh. Sara? Did you tell him about...”

“Well, well, well. This is...interesting.”

Leonard had whirled at the eerily familiar voice, coming face to face with...his own face. Mostly.

And that had been how he met Leo Snart of Earth-X, visiting Earth-1 for a few days to meet his husband’s parents and take some supplies back to his own Earth.

It’s still weird. It will probably never stop being weird.

Although they’re heading to Star City soon to see Sara’s father and friends (something Leonard is fervently trying not to think about too much), they’d planned to stay a day or two in Central first. Leonard would be just as content to give that up now, but Sara is holding him to it. And when she’d asked Barry if the Frightmares haunt was going on, Terrill had perked up and asked if he—and Leo—could come along.

He hadn’t asked Leonard. And Sara had happily agreed.

And here he was.

Leonard stifles a sigh of his own. He thinks Ray Terrill hears him, though, because the man glances over, giving him a half-smile.

He likes Terrill, actually. (And it’s always going to be “Terrill” to him—he can’t bring himself to call the man “Ray.”)  It’s not that the man’s attractive—although he is; apparently that’s one thing in which he and his doppelganger have similar tastes—but he seems to get how unsettling this is for Leonard. More so than Leo does, actually. His double just keeps studying him with the air of someone who just can’t figure out how things could have gone so wrong on this Earth.

It’s unnerving. And irritating. Really irritating. Especially given how Leonard knows a few things happened while he was...gone.

“Well,” Terrill says then, turning back to Sara. “I want to go check out the ticket options. And have a look at the concessions. Fair food is something you just don’t get on Earth-X.”

Sara makes a thoughtful noise and nods. “I wonder if they have the really good soft pretzels,” she muses. “Mmm…with plastic cheese. Gideon refuses to make that for me.”

“Let’s go find out. I’d give a lot for…”

Leonard thinks about following them, but they’re already halfway across the lot, toward the cluster of concessions in the middle of the haunts. And he figures Leo might follow them himself. He’s native to the other Earth, after all, and this is a new place with many new things.

He doesn’t.

The two Snarts regard each other. And neither looks particularly happy.

As they walk away, Ray Terrill looks back at the two men, his husband and his husband’s double from this world. It’s eerie, really, how they mirror each other, in ways they probably don’t even fully recognize. And how that lets him read the man he doesn’t even know.

Leonard Snart is uneasy and irritated, but he’s also unhappy. Disturbed. Not with the woman he’d come here with, not at all—if Ray’s any judge, Leonard’s pretty much besotted with Sara, as much as he’ll let himself show it to a relative stranger. But he’s very unsettled by Leo’s presence—maybe even his existence. Not surprising, really. He probably feels like the other man is both a threat of sorts and an example of what he could have been, had his path been somewhat different.

But given that Ray’s rather besotted with Leo himself…well.  He may not be the best judge.

Still, it’s hard to see that amount of…pain, yes, he’ll call it that…on a face he loves so much. And as much as he loves Leo, he knows his husband may sometimes—well, take his tendency toward playing counselor a bit too far.

“You really think this is a good idea?” he asks Sara quietly as they walk.

The captain of the Waverider smiles a little. “If we’re going to continue to work together from time to time—both you and Leo and the Legends—Len’s going to have to work out his feelings about this. And better now than in a battle scenario.” She glances at him. “And Leo’s...”

Terrill smiles too. “All about the feelings. I know.” He sighs. “But, despite how casual he is about all this, I know Leo. And his feelings. This is making him more unsettled than he’s letting on, too.”

Sara makes a thoughtful noise. “Well, then,” she says after a moment, as they walk toward one of the haunts. “It’s a good thing we’re giving them a chance to talk it out.”

Leo is wearing short sleeves on the warm fall day, apparently unfazed by the scars tracing his forearms. Leonard can’t help glancing at them, then hurriedly looking away. He’s wearing his usual layers—four of them, all told—and it’s disconcerting how the other man is, in a way, baring his own body for him. It makes him uncomfortable in a way he’s not quite up to articulating.

A few of the scars match the ones he has. Most don’t. The man from Earth-X has fought battles Leonard didn’t had to, after all. That knowledge makes him a little uncomfortable too. If anything, it seems like Leo should be more guarded and less open than his counterpart. Instead…well, that’s just not the case.

Of course, Leonard’s fought battles Leo didn’t have to, too.

Leo also doesn’t seem bothered by the notion of simply studying his other self openly. They’ve traded histories just enough that Leonard knows that Leo has had quite a different life from his. He’d fled Lewis with his mother when he was quite young and grown up with his mother in the Resistance. She’d died during a Nazi attack on a base where she has serving as a nurse, but only a handful of years ago.

He has no younger sister.

And no matter how much Leonard wants to avoid talking to him any more than necessary, Leo apparently has no qualms about that, either.

“And so how are things going?” the other man says, leaning against a fence and folding his arms. Then he clarifies with a tilt of his head, as if aware that Leonard will dodge if given the merest opportunity. “With Sara.”

Leonard eyes him. “Fine,” he says shortly, folding his own arms.

And it is fine. It’s great, really. But that doesn’t mean he wants to talk about it. Not even—or especially—with this man wearing his own face. It’d been bad enough that the man from Earth-X had been there, listening with great interest, when Team Flash had made the connection than Leonard and Sara weren’t just together—they were together together, as Ramon put it.

All Leo had done was lift an eyebrow. But there’d been, to Leonard’s eye, an undue amount of skepticism in his expression.

“Fine?” Leo echoes now. “Really? Because as I understand it, from your Mick and others, you weren’t…you’re not too much connected to your feelings. And trust me, to make a relationship work, you need to…”

Oh, now, this is just too much. Leonard wants to snap, but instead he just rolls his eyes, turning away.

“No one asked you,” he mutters, looking around to see if he can spy Sara. But it’s darker, and there are increasingly more people around. He can’t see her or Terrill at all. Where did they say they were going?

Leo huffs a little. “I want to help,” he says, a touch of asperity in his voice. “Not only do I like and respect Sara and Mick and the other Legends, you…”

“You don’t know me.” Now Leonard does snap. He glares at the other man. “You have no idea about my…feelings.” He spits the word out despite himself. “For Sara, or otherwise.”

Leo glares back. Leonard almost feels pleased about that. It’s the most negative expression he’s seen on the Earth-X man since they’d met. He folds his arms and delivers his most insouciant smirk…but it doesn’t precisely get the response he wants.

“Well,” Leo drawls, and the tone’s so familiar it’s eerie, “I’m sorry. For Sara. She deserves better. Someone who’s not made of ice, or pretends he is.” He shrugs as Leonard’s eyes narrow. “And given that no one on your ship seemed to have a clear idea of any of your feelings before you ‘died’…” He actually does air quotes and somehow that’s even more annoying. “…I can’t really believe that things will have changed quite so easily.”

“Excuse me?” He’d known Leo had spent time on the ship (the puppet—and what had become of it—still were the subject of uneasy joking there) to “help” the team, but he’d had the impression that not much had come of that. Certainly not enough that the other man could make such a supposition about Leonard’s feelings or the lack thereof.

But it seems that he has. “Mick. Your Mick,” Leo continues. “He wouldn’t talk much about you. Someone who was supposedly his best friend. And Sara. I could tell there was something…off…in her interactions with me, but she never once said anything about you. Seems like her feelings might be complicated, too, if there’d really been something between…between you two before. Although she certainly seems to have rushed into it now.”

Rushed into it. After all they… “You don’t know that team as well as you think you do,” is all Leonard can manage before his phone chimes.

It’s Sara.

“Hey, where RU?” the text reads. “Thought U were behind us.”

Well, that explains why they’re not back. “Still outside,” he texts, ignoring Leo pointedly. “Where?”

After a moment, another chime. “Courtyard, mall plaza interior,” she sends back. “Gotta go thru a house to get here, tho.”

Of course. “Be there soon,” he replies, then tucks his phone away, scanning the area to get his bearings a little more. If he’s got to pick one of these things to go through, especially by himself, better to consider the matter rather than picking one at random. Let’s see… haunted swamp with swamp…things, a castle-looking one that seems to have classic movie monsters such as vampires and werewolves, the always-in-poor-taste abandoned asylum, zombie apocalypse, portal...

“Was that Sara?”

He’d ignore the other man, but he doesn’t want to deal with more badgering. “Yes. They’re in the courtyard in the building. Gotta go through one of the houses to get there.”

Leo sighs. “Of course. Well…”

But Leonard’s ignoring him again, striding toward the nearest ticket booth. He hears Leo sigh again, but he’s pretty sure the man is following him. More’s the pity.

He has to wait a few minutes, but eventually he steps up in front of a tired-looking attendant, who greets him absently before looking up—just as Leo joins him.

The attendant blinks. “Whoa,” he breathes, looking back and forth between the two men. “Are you, like, identical twins or something?”

Leo and Leonard glance at each other, then back at the clerk. “No,” Leo tells him with an absolutely deadpan expression. (It’s almost enough to make Leonard smile. Almost.)

“Oh. Um. What can I get for you tonight?”

Leonard opens his mouth to request one ticket, but Leo interrupts him. “Anything but the asylum one,” the man says flatly. “Just…no.”

The attendant blinks again. “Well, the tickets are good for any house,” he says finally. “Although you can buy a pass that will let you into all of them, either once or unlimited. Or…”

“One ticket,” Leonard interrupts. “For now. Thanks.”

The attendant takes that to mean one ticket each, so Leonard rolls his eyes and pays for both. He sort of wishes he’d had the foresight to lift someone’s wallet, just so that he could pay for Mr. Straight-Laced’s ticket with obviously stolen money. Mr. Not-Straight-But-Straight-Laced. Whatever.

From the look on Leo’s face, that’s occurred to him, but he takes the ticket anyway. “Which…”

The portal-into-another-world house (“Alien Hellscape!”) has the shortest line, so Leonard heads for that one. He slouches against the wall, ignoring the chattering group of teenage girls ahead of him, and tries not to sigh visibly as Leo joins him.

It only takes a moment or two before his Earth-X double speaks. “Did you pay for that ticket with stolen money?”

Leonard smirks at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Leo stares. Then he shakes his head disapprovingly. Leonard decides he’d really like to wipe that particularly self-righteous look off his face.

“I can’t believe you,” Leo says quietly. “You’re a thief. And...” He lowers his voice again. “...from what I’ve heard, a killer. You went right down Lewis’ path, despite everything.” He looks up and meets Leonard’s eyes. “Our mother would be devastated.”

As a low blow, it’s not nearly as effective as he seems to think it will be. Leonard hides the pang it does cause and shrugs, moving with the line.

“I sort of doubt that, because she high-tailed it out of town when my sister was still tiny, leaving both of us with Lewis,” he drawls. “She sorta lost any right to pass judgment, I’d say.”

Leo frowns at him. “What? I can’t believe that,” he says, tone thick with disgust. “How dare you...”

“I can’t care if you believe it or not.” At least they’re at the ticket-taker now. Leonard hands him the slip of paper with a nod, peers into the darkened space beyond the doorway, sighs, and starts in, into a first room set up as a damaged science laboratory.

Stuff like this isn’t all that big a deal to him. He’s observant enough to pinpoint all the “scares” coming, and he’s seen enough real-life shit that fake blood and made-up monsters don’t faze him. He’d double-checked the haunt rules, and the actors aren’t allowed to touch their “victims” here—not that he thinks Sara would inflict it on him if that was the case.

Fortunately, the gaggle of girls ahead of them, and the trying-to-act tough boys with them, are giving the actors enough of a noisy reaction that they’ll hopefully not try to get more out of the eerily similar men sauntering through the maze after them.

Especially since Leo feels like this is a valid time to continue their “conversation.”

“My mother was a strong woman,” he tells Leonard, falling into step next to him. “She left Lewis not long after he openly joined the Reich. I was 5. She took me with her. There was never any question to that.”

An...alien?...pokes its head through a crack in the plywood wall and hisses at them. Leonard lifts both eyebrows at it and keeps going. “You sure about that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

The girls ahead of them shriek, and the boys swear, as a figure in a hazmat suit lunges out at them, shepherding them into another room. While the figure ignores them, Leo and Leonard hurry to catch up, slipping into the darkened space too just as a curtain falls closed behind them. Leonard glances about, then sighs as he catches sight of the light-ringed “portal” ahead of them. It doesn’t look dissimilar to a setup at STAR Labs.

Another figure, this one hooded instead of hazmat-suited—which doesn’t really seem to go with the theme, but whatever—has appeared now, doing some sort of theatrics over by the circle of lights, to the great glee of the younger people. No one’s listening to the older pair.

“Mmm. Well, it’s fabulous you got to grow up a momma’s boy, Nazis notwithstanding, but we both had to make our own hard choices.” Leonard gives him a flat look. “I chose to keep myself and my baby sister alive in the only way I could figure out at the time.”

Leo’s chin goes up. “You seriously couldn’t figure out a better way than becoming...

“...a helluva thief? Yup.” Leonard glances at him. "I did what I had to. Not ashamed of it. Not many other opportunities out there for someone who had a felony record as young as it’s possible to have one.”

Leo gazes back, as in the background, the hooded figure finishes its pageantry, the portal changes to glowing a harsh orange-red, and the light flares to “ooohs” and “aaahs.” “You could have gone to the authorities.”

“The cops? About Lewis? Many of them the same ones who called him ‘buddy’ and thought he got a raw deal when he got kicked off the force?” Leonard lifts an eyebrow at him. “Leaving Lisa behind with him? Because that would have worked out so well.”

Leo starts arguing again, but the group is being shepherded through the portal now, and Leonard turns way, tired of it. The hooded figure, which is really rather small, tries to bar their way, but Leonard just wants to get through this damned thing. He sidesteps and goes through...into pitch blackness.

The teens are giggling nervously. Leonard takes a few steps to give Leo clearance room, and frowns, glancing around. His eyes haven’t adjusted at all. His night sight’s usually pretty good, so...

And then there’s a flare of light, so bright that his vision goes pure white. Leonard throws an arm up reflexively even though it’s too late, and hears the teens start screaming and Leo curse behind him.

“You OK?” he calls back as his eyes start to recover. He may not like Leo, but he doesn’t want to have to tell Terrill that something’s happened to him.

“Yeah.” Leonard can feel the other man move to his shoulder. “What the hell...”

And that’s rather what it looks like, actually, as his pixelated vision started to resolve. Someone’s vision of hell. A blasted landscape of bare, jagged gray rock and sand, flames flickering here and there, molten rock oozing sullenly out of gaps in the ground. Nothing else, save for some jagged outcroppings of rock, as far as the eye can see. And the air smells faintly of brimstone.

Leonard can hear Leo’s intake of breath. “Is your Earth capable of this kind of special effects or...”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” Leonard hesitates only a moment before reaching into his jacket and pulling out his newest weapon, a prototype miniature cold gun he’d been inspired to create after working with Gideon to rebuild his larger gun. It’s not as powerful, but it can be hidden far more easily, and he’d tucked it away before this trip to Central City, just in case.

Leo looks at it, then at him, and it makes Leonard smirk a little to see the disapproval that he’d brought a weapon into a public place warring with what frankly seems to be a thread of envy. But then he shakes his head and lets it go, glancing around.

“The kids!” he says sharply then. “Where’d they go?”

Leonard whips around too. The pack of teens isn’t in view, a realization that makes his heart sink. But...

Holding up a hand, he listens. Aside from a faint noise of crackling flame and wind, it’s quiet here, and... “There.”

Sure enough, not far away, the stone gives way to sand and there are footprints, all close together, as if, perhaps, the group was being herded. The two men start in that direction, carefully, Leonard holding his gun out and ready, Leo turning frequently to watch their backs.

“What could do this?” he muses. “One of the mythic creatures the Legends have been hunting? A demon?”

Leonard makes a thoughtful noise, his irritation with his double more or less faded for now in the presence of all this other weirdness. “Could be. More likely, I think, a meta with powers something like Ramon’s. There was something weird with that portal, but I figured it was just...normal weird,” he mutters. “For a place like this.”

“Point.”

Leonard can hear the sobs and noises before they find the group, rounding a stone outcrop to find the eight teenagers huddled on the ground. One of the girls jumps to her feet, looking like she wants to fight, but she puts her hands down as she sees them, eyes going big and round.

“You were behind us,” she stammers. “Before. Weren’t you? Do you have any idea where we are?”

One of the boys cuts in then, voice anxious. “This isn’t just part of the haunt...right? This is...this is just too weird. And that guy...the one who sent us here...”

“The one in the black hood?” Leo asks, glancing at Leonard. “Was he here?”

Another girl nods, pulling her legs up against her chest where she sits on the ground, back against the rock.

“He said...he said to pool all our cash and our phones and any, any other valuables,” she says, voice shaking, “and when he comes back, if it’s enough, he’ll take us home.” She looks down at a fairly meager pile of smartphones, costume jewelry, wadded-up bills, and change. “We don’t have a lot. I’m scared...my mom...”

“Hey.” Leonard hates to appear soft in front of his counterpart, but...she reminds him of Lisa. He goes to a knee, watching her, gentling his voice. “We’ll get you home. OK? What’d he sound like? Older? Younger?”

She blinks thoughtfully. “Just...you know, actually, just like a kid. Our age or younger. But trying to sound older.” Then she looks back and forth between them. “Wow. Are you twins?”

Leonard ignores the question, but the rest is perceptive for someone who’s scared out of her mind, and the others murmur in agreement with the assessment. He gets back to his feet as Leo addresses the group.

“Stay here,” he instructs them. “Stay together. We’re going to find him, make sure he takes us all back no matter what.”

They clearly don’t want to be left behind, but neither do they want to see more of what this blasted landscape holds, so they let the two men turn away without much protest—although Leo turns back nearly immediately.

“Any of you see another bright flash of light?” he asks. “Like when he brought us here?”

The answer, as expected, is no. Leonard scans the area thoughtfully, walking away silently until they’re out of sight, then glances at Leo, who’s eyeing him with an odd expression.

“The person in the black hoodie--what I thought was just a bad costume,” he says in a low tone. “They tried to bar us. Didn’t want us here too.”

Leo hums thoughtfully but frowns. “We’re more likely to have valuables...”

“But we’re also more likely to be able to fight back.” Leonard nods to himself. “This is another kid, I’m guessing...a meta trying to take advantage of their powers to make some cash. They found this place while experimenting with those powers; Halloween’s a good time to use it. If it was something more sinister than that, they’d have...harmed...one of those kids to make their point—and, hell, they’d have gone for higher stakes. I’ll bet they even know some of those kids.”

He scans the area again, pinpointing a sheltered spot that looks like a likely spot for someone hiding and waiting in this hellhole, then takes a few steps.

Leo doesn’t follow him. Leonard glances back, sighs, and turns, readying his best glare again.

“Look, I know we can’t stand each other, but I could use the backup,” he says tersely, motioning toward the rock formation. “Just in case I’m wrong about the perp.”

Leo considers him, still with that odd expression.

“I can’t figure you out,” the other man admits. “You’re a crook and a liar who’s hurt a lot of people, but you were kind to those kids. And you didn’t even bother finishing a basic education, but you’re obviously highly intelligent.” He shakes his head. “You make no sense.”

Leonard stares at him.

Leo stares back.

Finally, Leonard huffs out a sigh. “Now, you want to do this?” he mutters, folding his arms. “Can’t it wait until we figure out how to get back?”

Leo takes one step forward...then smirks at him. God, that’s annoying. (“Pot, meet kettle,” Sara whispers in his ear.)

“Talk,” he drawls, “and I’ll walk.”

Leonard glares at him a moment longer. “Jackass,” he growls. “About what?”

Leo takes another step forward and stops, considering. “About...why you went along with Lewis. On a criminal path.”

Leonard snorts. “You realize I was 10 when he first took me on a job, right? I was supposed to say no?”

“You could...”

“Not without risking both myself and Lisa to Lewis’ temper.”

“Your mom...”

“Had already checked out, for all she didn’t leave for another month or two.”

“I can’t believe he’d...”

Leonard stops and spins to stare at his doppelganger. He abruptly strips back the sleeves on his left arm, holding up his scarred forearm to the horrified Leo. “This beauty was from Lewis. Broken beer bottle. I took the blow so he wouldn’t use it on Lisa. She was 5. I was 13.” He yanks the sleeves back down, roughly. “Nearly bled out. Didn’t. That’s one of the worst, but I got a lot more where that came from. Tell me again how I should have said no.”

It seems like it might have finally registered with Leo that he’s off base on some things here. He stares at Leonard’s now-covered arm a moment longer, then takes a deep breath and takes a few steps forward to join his double. Leonard scowls at him, but then turns and starts toward the likely hiding spot he’s identified.

After a minute or two, though, Leo speaks again, his voice low. “And there was no one to help you?”

For the first time, he doesn’t sound skeptical. He sounds almost...analytical. And Leonard can deal with that a lot better than he can cope with sympathy. He shrugs.

“Not that I could trust.” It's hard to judge distance in this place. The rocks are a lot farther than they look.

“How…” But Leo subsides.

And because of that, Leonard gives him a little more. “I was in juvie by the time I was 14,” he mutters, eyes on their path. “After that, any choices I did have got a lot smaller. Schools didn’t want me, between the juvie and the fact I was Lewis Snart’s son. And then I kept missing class to take care of Lisa, and they took that as further evidence that I was worthless. Lazy. Didn’t care.”

That gets a disgusted noise from Leo, but for once, it doesn’t seem to be aimed at Leonard himself. Leonard can see the other man watching him, but he doesn’t say anything, and Leonard decides to reward him by giving him a little more.

“So, yeah. I decided if I was going to be a crook, I’d be the best damned crook I could be,” he drawls. “And I was good at it. Far, far better than Lewis.” He knows a smirk is touching his lips, doesn’t care if Leo sees it. He’s not going to be ashamed at what he’d accomplished, what he’d risen from. “And believe it or not, I might not have been a ‘hero,’ but I had a code, and I kept my people to it, too.”

“What about Mick?”

Leonard glances at him. “What about Mick? I met this Earth’s in juvie, you know, when I was 14 and he was 16. He was in the same boat in some ways. Though he was even less motivated to be on the side of the angels than I was.” He hesitates, then, knowing that Leo’s Mick had been quite firmly with those angels—and no matter how much he’s irritated by his double’s attitude, he finds himself loathe to dispel any of Leo’s fondness for either Mick.

Without me to keep him in line, Mick can be a scary guy, his memory whispers.

He ignores it. People change.

Leo gives him an odd look, but Leonard continues. “So, I dunno,” he says with a shrug. “Maybe there was some choice, some way out, in there someplace, but I sure as hell didn’t see it at the time.” He looks at the Earth-X man. “I won’t say I didn’t make a lot of mistakes, did some things I regret. But you weren’t here, living it, so spare me the judgment.”

Leo frowns to himself, but by then, they’ve reached the rock formation. The two men share a glance, then Leonard takes a step to one side, tilting his head, and Leo nods, tilting his head toward the other.

I’ll go this way and you go that way and distract him until I can get the cold gun on him, the first gesture says.

Gotcha, is the wordless reply.

Maybe they do have something in common besides appearance, after all.

As it turns out, the meta is question has earbuds in, of all the damn-stupid things. He’s sitting on the rocks, nodding his head in time to some sort of music, and he nearly jumps out of his skin when Leo steps in front of him, waving in a friendly fashion. Before he can do anything more than jump and gape, though, Leonard steps out, aiming the cold gun at him and giving him a disapproving and mock-disappointed look.

“Hey, kid,” he drawls. “Think you forgot about something.”

The teenager blinks at them, and Leo, rolling his eyes, steps forward and grabs the cords of his earbuds, giving them a yank. They fall out, and Leonard repeats the words patiently.

“Time to put us all back where we came from,” he clarifies. “If you don’t want this to go very badly, anyway.”

“But how…”

Leo steps smoothly in to play good cop, then. “Well, now, my friend here doesn’t really want to hurt you, you know. But we do need to go home. Which this…” He waves a hand. “…is not.”

The kid, a pasty-pale redhead with a ton of freckles, stares at him before stammering out a response.

“It’s just...I need, money, man. And…” He suddenly seems to register just what, precisely, he’s looking at, and his eyes flicker back and forth between them. “Whoa. Are you guys twins?”

Leonard ignores that. Again. “You scared the crap out of those other kids,” he says, letting his voice grow harsher. “For what? A few bucks and couple secondhand smartphones?”

To his slight surprise, then, the meta rallies, his chin going up and his eyes growing a little harder.

“Those kids have made my life a living hell in high school,” he snaps back, before flagging a little. “Well, some of them have. Not all of them. But they were in a group and…” He shakes his head and looks around himself, then waves a hand.

“This place looks scary, but it’s really pretty harmless,” he says almost apologetically. “I found it when I was experimenting and as long as you keep your eyes open, you’re fine. And I’da put ‘em back no matter what. But I needed some money, for…”

His voice trails off. Leonard sighs. A glance at Leo tells him that the other man is, perhaps, starting to fall for this sob story. But he’s not so gullible. (He tells himself.)

“For what?” he asks, keeping his voice harsh. “Drugs?”

“No!” Now the kid looks really upset. “It’s just…my car won’t pass inspection. Not unless I get a few things fixed. And I need it to get to work. I help out my mom…my sister…”

Crap.

The two men exchange a glance again. And somehow, there’s another meeting of minds.

“Kid,” Leonard says, gently his voice now, and tucking the cold gun away. “You ever heard of a guy named Cisco Ramon…?”

They let the kid, whose name is Aaron, pull his hood back up before he takes the other kids back, right to the spot in the haunt that he’d taken them from, and right to the minute. They all swear they won’t talk about it, and while Leonard doesn’t really believe them, he’s also fairly sure no one will really believe them if they do.

Aaron, who’d enlisted the help of the haunt-employee friend who’d been in the hazmat suit earlier, ushers Leonard and Leo through one of the nearly “chicken doors” and out into the corridors beyond. One call to STAR Labs later, the Flash himself shows up, giving the two men a somewhat beleaguered glance before taking off with the repentant young meta, who, if he turns over a new leaf and gets some training with his powers, will now have the support of Team Flash behind him.

It’s sort of fun, Leonard decides, to make promises on Barry’s behalf. Especially knowing the younger man will feel honor-bound to fulfill them. It’s also kind of fun to see the realization on his former nemesis’ face that Leo and Leonard, working together, could be a force to be reckoned with.

And isn’t that a thought?

After that, they both use the corridors to head slowly toward the center of the complex, where Sara and Terrill are, presumably, still waiting for them with absolutely no idea what’s gone down. But before they can step out into the bustling courtyard, Leo slows to a stop, moving aside, and Leonard lifts an eyebrow at him, but does the same.

The man from Earth-X takes a deep breath, then slowly lets it out before nodding and looking at his double from this Earth.

“I’m sorry,” he says simply. “You’re right. I didn’t realize how different things were here, for you, and how they affected you.” He spreads his hands out before him and sighs. “I’d never have thought that you might have had the harder road, considering where I’m from.”

Leonard tilts his head and considers, briefly, being a bit more of a jerk about it…and he finds, after all, that he doesn’t have it in him.

“And I’m not saying that I did,” he says instead. “They were just...different roads. Different challenges. And, well,” he drawls, showing his hands in his pockets, “I’ve never had to be a soldier, either. And at least no one’s ever tried to lock me up or kill me for…particular proclivities.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “And they would have, you know. Being with Sara doesn’t change that.”

Leo gives him a smirk in return. “Never said it would.” He folds his arms. “And I still think you’re going to have to…deal with some of your issues…if you want it to work out with Sara. Because…before you ‘died,’ if you had feelings for her, did she even know?”

“She knew. I sort of…” Leonard stops himself, a bit disbelieving that he’s fallen into the conversation. “I’m not talking about this.”

Leo lifts an eyebrow now. “Talk,” he drawls. “It will help.” He lifts a finger as Leonard glares at him. “And if you do, I won’t bring it up in front of Sara. Probably.”

Leonard continues his glare a moment longer, then sighs. “Fine,” he mutters, moving just out into the courtyard and leaning against the wall. “I made an overture of sorts to Sara. Back…before. But it wasn’t…wasn’t a great time for it, and she just…she challenged me. To steal a kiss.”

Leo makes a sympathetic noise, but Leonard ignores him. “And then I ‘died’…” He makes his own air quotes as sarcastic as possible. “….before…well. She kissed me at the Oculus before it blew up. OK?” Now he glances at the other man, who suddenly looks both a bit stunned and bit…ugh. Pitying. “And that was it. Until a few months ago.”

Leo stares at him. “But why wouldn’t she tell me? About that? Back when I was trying to help the team grieve. When I’m…”

“Maybe because it’s none of your business?” Leonard folds his arms, eyeing him. “And because it might be pretty damned awkward, considering that you’re not only not interested, you’re absolutely stinkin’ in love with your guy?”

Leo shuts his mouth. “Ah,” he says after a moment. “You have a point.”

“Uh huh.” Leonard shakes his head. “C’mon. Been a long night already. I wanna see Sara, and I’m sure you wanna see Terrill.”

He takes a step forward, but Leo doesn’t follow. When Leonard looks back, though, Leo’s watching him. And he no longer looks judgmental. In fact, he’s almost smiling.

“We good?” he murmurs.

Leonard sighs. But he offers the edge of a smile back. “Long as you don’t try to hug me.”

A moment later, though, he sighs. “No. The puppy eyes won’t work.”

His double doesn’t say anything. But it’s just…disturbing, Leonard thinks. “Ugh. My face should never have that expression.”

Another pause. “All right. Fine. One hug,” he allows.

A few minutes later: “Let go, Leo.”

Another few minutes: “Sara? Help?”

[what-happened-to-agent-georgia]

Glitter and Roses

Happy Fluff Week!! I was tagged by @secretlystephaniebrown, who prompted: “Sherry has a secret admirer, and it’s definitely not Ohio.”

Read on Ao3; @rvbficwars

Rating: T

Warnings: Canon-Typical Language/Violence

Characters: Ohio, Sherry, Idaho, Iowa, Terrill, Darryl

Pairing: Ohio/Sherry

Summary: Sherry has a secret admirer, and it’s definitely not (not) Ohio.

It starts with the purple envelope.

“I have what?” Sherry asks through a mouthful of oatmeal. Still half asleep, she’s not sure she heard Darryl correctly.

“Mail,” he says. “You have mail.”

He holds out a purple envelope, and Sherry snatches it away from him, shoving her breakfast aside. The envelope is emblazoned with Sherry in silver glitter pen with the address “Base #2, Snowball Planet” scrawled below it in black pen, like an afterthought.

“What does it say?” Darryl asks, wringing his hands.

“I haven’t opened it yet,” Sherry says. She tucks the letter into her sweatpants pocket. “And I’m not opening it in front of you.”

“What?” Darryl throws his hands in the air. “Why?”

“Because,” is all Sherry says, pulling her bowl of oatmeal towards her. Darryl sighs and flops down at the table next to her, poking at his own breakfast.

Sherry shovels the rest of her food into her mouth and tosses her dirty bowl in the sink.

“I am not washing that,” Darryl snaps.

“I’ll get to it sometime,” Sherry says, shrugging.

Then she sprints out of the mess hall, pulling the purple envelope out of her pocket as she goes. She turns the envelope over and over in her hands, impatient to reach her quarters so she can finally open it.

Sherry’s never really received before. She was only six when her family fled their home planet, and twelve when she became an orphan. No one ever sent her letters when she was in the army—well, she’s technically still in the army but, you know. Maybe her granny sent her a birthday card when she was little, but Sherry doesn’t remember. Does it count if she can’t remember?

Once she reaches her room, she punches the code in and scurries inside, flipping on the light as the door hisses shut behind her. Falling onto her bed, she pulls out her knife and, holding it above her head, carefully slits the envelope open—

—and begins coughing and sneezing as a cloud of blue glitter bursts out of the envelope and covers her face.

“The fu—ack!” Sherry nearly chokes, spits out a mouthful of glitter, and sits bolt upright. All the glitter that didn’t stick to her face falls into her lap.

So, whoever the fuck sent her this letter is either a five-year-old who got a little overzealous with the blue glitter or hates Sherry’s guts. Her room is going to be covered in the stuff forever. She will literally die before this shit goes away.

Blinking some of the blue sparkles from her eyelashes, Sherry reaches into the purple envelope to see if there’s anything else inside. Her fingers close around a folded piece of paper, and she pulls it out, bringing another onslaught of blue glitter with it.

“Son of a bitch,” she mutters under her breath.

Shaking the folded piece of paper, she realizes that it’s a page ripped out from an old Warthog manual. Unfolding the note, she has to squint to read it—the message is written in red marker over the small black print explaining the functions of each of the Warthog’s six pedals.

 Roses are red (I think, I’ve never seen one in person)

Just like your armor (Well, the accents on your armor)

I really like your armor.

Actually, I think roses are more than one color, but there are red ones. I think.

I’m sorry none of this rhymed.

Sincerely,

Your Secret Admirer

 Sherry rereads the letter several times before laying it on the small table next to her bed. She lays down again, staring at the ceiling. She sighs, regretting it instantly as a puff of glitter shoots into the air.

Secret admirer.

Sherry looks around at the carnage the envelope left behind. Only one person on this planet could be so diabolically adorable.

So, it’s more like a secret admirenemy?

A small smile tugs at the corner of Sherry’s mouth, and she rolls out of bed and grabs her under-suit, frowning when she realizes that, even though it was in a drawer, it’s covered in blue sparkles as well. Fucking how?

Shimmying into her under-suit, she wonders how Vera got the envelope to Darryl. Did they plan it? Did she slip it under the door to the fucking base and Darryl just happened to find it first? Vera’s snuck in here before, should know where Sherry’s room is at. What game is she playing?

Sherry considers the possibility that Darryl, and by association, Terrill, are pulling her leg. Wouldn’t be the first time. As she puts on her armor, she also considers the possibility of killing her last two remaining teammates if they are, in fact, messing with her.

But once she’s finished getting ready and pulling her helmet on, she’s still ninety percent sure Vera sent her the letter. They haven’t had glitter here for years, and she knows they’ve never had envelopes. Who uses envelopes when there’s computers and shit?

It’s got to be Vera.

Stepping out into the hallway, Sherry smiles.

“She likes my armor,” she giggles.

#

“No idea what you’re talking about!” Vera shouts at her over the sound of bullets and bombs.

They’re having their daily brawl in the snow between their bases, chucking grenades too far left and shooting bullets a bit too high into the air.

Terrill and Darryl are busy running away from Iowa, who’s managed to halfway repair one of the jeeps and is driving it after them. Of course, half-repaired also means the jeep is on fire, which means Idaho is running after Iowa, telling him to get out of the fucking jeep while firing bullets in the vague direction of Terrill and Darryl.

Sherry figures this is the best time to confront Vera.

“Bullshit!” she shouts. “There are literally no other girls on this planet, who else would it come from?”

“I dunno, maybe there are other girls here!” Vera shoots back, jumping up to chuck a snowball at Sherry’s head.

It misses.

By a lot.

“If you wanna go on a date, all you gotta do is ask!” Sherry says.

Vera freezes in the middle of throwing a sharp chunk of ice.

“A—psh, hah, a date? No, nope, you’re the enemy, I can’t date the enemy, Sherry,” Vera sputters, “That—That would be, uh, treason?”

“Maybe so!” Sherry yells. “But who’s gonna know?”

Vera doesn’t have anything to say to that, she just stares, still holding the hunk of ice aloft. Sherry crosses her arms and waits. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a crash followed by an explosion, and Sherry really freaking hopes there isn’t a hole in the wall of her base.

Before Vera can think of what to say, however, a stray bullet hits the ice in her hand. Tiny shards of ice explode in a shower of blue and white, and Vera jumps back.

“Agh!” she cries.

Sherry loses sight of her as Vera drops behind the barrier she’s fashioned out of scrap metal, but she’s not so sure it’s to escape the onslaught of bullets. She grins, wonders if Vera has started digging a tunnel to escape again.

“I didn’t send the letter!” The disembodied voice of Vera comes from directly to Sherry’s right, which means Vera dug the tunnel before the battle this time.

Whirling around, Sherry turns just in time to see a blue blur as Vera pounces, smashing a fistful of snow onto Sherry’s visor as she takes her down, knocking the breath out of her. Vision impeded, Sherry lashes out with her arms, trying half-heartedly to shove Vera away.

Leaning down, Vera whispers into Sherry’s ear.

“If I had sent the letter, I would’ve put something a little bigger than a blue glitter bomb.”

“How’d you know the glitter was blue?” Sherry whispers back.

“Uh—fu—it was a guess!” Vera scrambles up and bolts away, tossing one last “It wasn’t me, dammit!” over her shoulder.

By the time Sherry pushes herself to her knees and wipes the snow from her visor, Vera, Idaho, and Iowa are halfway back to their base. They kick up clouds of snow as they retreat, leaving a trail of scorched ice, smoke, and bullet casings behind them.

Sherry laughs, falling back onto the ground and staring at the perpetually gray sky, ready to drop a fresh blanket of snow on their bases.

That night, before she shuts off the light in her quarters, she reads the letter that’s definitely not (not) from Vera.

#

Then comes the “cake”.

“Cake” in quotation marks because it’s made from freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches smashed together in a nine-by-nine square. It arrived in a purple box Darryl almost tripped over on his way to the bathroom. Whoever dropped it off decided the best place to leave it was the top of the stairs leading to their bunks.

Luckily, there’s no glitter this time.

Sherry stares at the “cake”, wondering how long Vera—or whoever, but she knows it’s fucking Vera—saved these ice cream sandwiches. Sherry and the others finished what sweets they had, like, three years ago.

“Goodness,” Terrill says, eyes wide, “She must really like you.”

“Shut up, Terrill,” Sherry snaps, lifting the “cake” out of the purple box it came in and placing it on the table. “Anyway, she says it isn’t her.”

“Right,” Darryl snorts, “And I’m definitely not the one who’s been cutting all of Terrill’s left pant legs a half an inch short.”

“You’re what?” Terrill whips around to look at Darryl, who freezes, smiles, and dashes from the breakroom. Terrill jumps up and takes off after him. “No, really, Darryl, you haven’t been doing what?”

Sherry chuckles and breaks off a piece of the “cake”, popping it into her mouth.

“Oh my god,” she groans. She almost forgot what chocolate tasted like, dehydrated or otherwise.

She’s gonna marry that woman.

#

“Cake?” Vera snorts, arm cocked back, ready to chuck a grenade. “That’s ridiculous, where would I even get the ingredients for that?”

Before Sherry can answer, Vera launches the grenade. Sprinting forward and away from the blast radius, Sherry leaps and tackles Vera the ground with a thud that rattles her teeth.

“Nice try, sweet cheeks,” Sherry says, pinning Vera to the ground. “By the way, how’s your supply of ice-cream sandwiches doing?”

“I have—I have no—” Vera kicks out, catching Sherry in the stomach and throwing her up and away “—idea what you’re talking about!”

Sherry lands on her back several feet away, a puff of snow shooting up around her from the impact. She shakes her head to remove the snow that’s accumulated on her helmet. If all this shit melted and never came back, it would make Sherry’s year. Even if it flooded the bases. An underwater base actually sounds kind of cool.

“Why so secretive, Vera?” Sherry shouts after Vera, who’s started skipping away.

Vera freezes mid-skip, arms pinwheeling as she fights to maintain her footing. Back still turned, she stands up straight and takes a deep breath, composing herself. Crossing her arms, she casts a glance at Sherry over her shoulder.

“There’s nothing to be secretive about, Sherry,” she says, words tumbling out of her mouth like she can’t hold onto them. “Except for, like, Freelancer secrets and stuff, I guess. But I don’t have any other secrets. Zero. Nada. I couldn’t have sent you the cake thingy, because that would be… that would be fraternizing with the enemy! Yeah!”

Sherry is torn between annoyance and amusement at this point, because Project Freelancer literally dropped Vera, Iowa, and Idaho here, fully expecting them to die. On the other hand, it’s the game they’ve been playing for months, a charade. Pretending they’re in a conflict they were kicked out of long ago. Vera’s just playing along, and Sherry wants to take a timeout.

“Maybe it’s time to… fraternize, then,” Sherry suggests. “If you know what I mean.”

“I—you—we—” Vera sputters, arms falling to her sides. “It’s—”

“Get a room!” Idaho shouts from the entrance of the ex-Freelancers’ base.

“Oh! Fuck you, Ezra!” Vera shoots back. She charges towards Idaho who, realizing Vera’s destination is him and not the door to the base, yelps and takes off into the base (“It was a joke it was a joke it was a joooke!”).

Sherry sighs, letting her head drop back into the snow. She gets a sense of deja vu, then remembers she was in almost this exact same spot two days ago, on her back, staring off into the distance. Grinning, she imagines how red Vera must have gone. Redder than, say, roses?

“She totally wants to fraternize with me,” she confides in the sky.

#

The last item Sherry receives is a map.

Hand-drawn, covered in green glitter this time, directions and explanations scribbled here and there in red ink.

Sherry’s base is Your House, and there’s an ‘X’ next to it with the words Where you shot that jar of peanut butter written off to the side. There’s a lopsided square a few inches away from Sherry’s base, Best Base Ever scrawled inside, with another ‘X’ nearby. The message by this ‘X’ read Blown up jeep.

“Oh yeah,” Sherry whispers to herself, smiling as she recalls setting fire to the jeep. Blinking, she turns her attention back to the map.

There’s a wavy line leading from Sherry’s base, past Where Mike licked your wall, and out into the tundra. At the end of the line there’s an oval with the words Our Place written inside.

Sherry’s heart skyrockets into her throat and she drops the map, gasp morphing into a coughing fit as she chokes on a mouthful of glitter for the second time that week. Hands shaking, she stoops down and snatches up the map again, brushing off the excess glitter—some of it, anyway—to make sure she’s read that correctly.

Our Place.

Yep. She read that right. Sinking onto her bed, Sherry isn’t sure whether to start laughing and hug the map or start hyperventilating and burn it.

Is this for real? Is it real now, not another trick, just another level of their game? Sherry’s going to the spot on the map, of course, but as the anxiety in her chest builds, she pushes away the hope bubbling there as well. Just in case.

“All right, Vera,” Sherry says, folding the map up and tucking it away. “Let’s see where this leads.”

#

Vera’s map is very much not to scale.

It takes Sherry much longer than she expected to trudge through the snow towards Our Place.

Gazing out at the white wasteland before her, she’s beginning to think this was a trick after all, and looks around instead for Vera, waiting for her to pounce. Her eyes fall on something squat and black, half-buried in snow about fifty feet away.

Running as best she can in knee-deep snow, Sherry hurries over to inspect the object. As she gets closer, she sees the long barrel of a gun, barely hanging onto whatever it’s attached to. She slows a bit, but not by much. No one’s going to fire that gun anytime soon.

When she finally arrives, she discovers a tank. It must’ve been there for at least five years—Sherry’s never seen it before, but she’s never had a reason to venture in this direction. She got bored, of course, but not bored enough to tramp around in the snow almost a mile and a half away from base looking for old, dead, war machines.

Apparently, Vera is bored enough to tramp around in the snow a mile and a half away from base, looking for old, dead, war machines.

“You coming in or not?”

Sherry jumps, looks up at the top of the tank to find Vera, beautiful and blue, perched at the top of the tank. Vera gestures down at the hatch leading into the tank.

Realizing her mouth is hanging open, Sherry snaps it shut, thankful for the visor shielding her face.

“After you,” Sherry manages.

“Uh, yeah okay!” Vera lifts the hatch, and a warm, orange glow erupts from the entrance, lighting up her armor.

It’s the most magical thing Sherry has ever seen, and she almost trips over her own feet moving up to the tank. Climbing up, the side, she watches as Vera lowers herself into the tank, disappearing from view.

Sherry takes a deep breath. Swallows. And drops into the tank, pulling the lid shut behind her.

Her armor screams at her before her feet hit the floor.

Warning, dramatic temperature shift, adjusting armor climate. Warning, dramatic—

Sherry pulls her helmet off and is hit with a blessed blast of warm air. She closes her eyes. Soaks it in. Tries to remember the last time she felt so warm the chill left her bones.

She can’t.

“Where did you find this heater?” Sherry breathes, tossing her helmet aside.

The tank is big, but not extremely spacious, and she bangs her knees, toes, and elbows several times during the process of removing her armor. Vera’s having troubles too, so it takes her a few minutes to conjure up a response.

“Darryl, Ezra, and I found this old heater and fixed it up,” she explains. “It’s gotta be charged, so we can’t use it all the time, and since the tank doesn’t have a lot of space that needs heating up, it doesn’t use as much power.”

“Those fuckers,” Sherry laughs, “they were in on it the whole time.”

“Actually, Terrill wasn’t,” Vera says, unzipping her undersuit. “Darryl says he couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it.”

“Yeah…” Sherry trails off as Vera pulls her arms out of her undersuit. Her arms are very nice. Very strong, not nice, strong. Well, strong is nice—

Wow, it’s really hot in here.

Sherry shimmies out of her undersuit as well, and soon the two of them are sitting cross-legged, clad in sports bras and biker shorts, twiddling their thumbs. They’ve waited so fucking long to be alone together, to be out of armor together, and now they have no idea what to say.

“I sent the card,” Vera says finally. “And the cake.”

“I know, doofus,” Sherry snorts. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Am not!” Vera lies, biting her bottom lip. She sighs and runs her hand through her hair. “Ugh, I’m a bad liar.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing,” Sherry hurries to say, leaning in towards Vera. “Honesty’s good!”

“I don’t know if it’s honesty as much as anxiety. I could never be a spy,” Vera says.

“Then why join Project Freelancer?” Sherry asks, tilting her head. Vera never struck her as the type—didn’t fit the image all the stories built up in her head.

“Well, I mean, to save my home planet!” Vera says. “Besides, not all of us did spy stuff.”

“Oh,” Sherry says. “Where’s your home planet?”

“Earth,” Vera answers. Her face lights up as the word leaves her lips, and Sherry wills her heart to calm the fuck down.

“Where at on Earth?” Sherry asks.

“Hawaii.”

“Holy shit,” Sherry says, raising her eyebrows. “This has got to be hell for you then.”

“Hell frozen over,” Vera agrees, grimacing.

“Well, hell isn’t so bad,” Sherry says. Vera raises an eyebrow and snorts.

“How so?”

“I mean, if it took going to hell to meet you, I’d go to hell a thousand times over,” Sherry tells her.

God, that was so fucking corny, she should take it back, apologize, crawl away and hide forever, she should—

“Sweet talker,” Vera giggles, interrupting Sherry’s near-panic attack.

Her laughter is fucking music.

Sherry leans in, and Vera grins, moving to meet her, brushing her thumb across Sherry’s jaw. Closing her eyes, Sherry shivers, moving her hand to rest on Vera’s, holding it to her face. If the tank is warm, Vera’s skin is red hot, burning into her yet sending chills down her spine.

Their lips meet and finally, finally, they kiss.

Sherry thinks this might be it—the center of the universe.

Is it cliché to say if hell is life with Vera, then it’s better than heaven?

Vera and Sherry break apart, breathing heavily, still clinging to each other. Vera grins, and Sherry catches it, smiling back.

“So,” Vera says.

“So,” Sherry replies.

“What do you say we, uh, fraternize?”

[agentmarymargaretskitz]

Chicken Man 2: Legacy of the Jedi

Happy birthday, @hanorganaas. I’m so thankful to have your friendship in my life and I hope you have a stellar birthday. (BTW you should all give her Legendary Heroine verse a read and leave lots of comments. It’s fabulous.)

Chicken Man

AO3

              The fact that a universe where Star Wars was the reality still stunned Jax. He couldn’t believe he was actually walking around a Resistance base. Everything around him was real from the droids rolling past him to the machinery part he held in his hand. It was the kind of thing that people dreamed to experience, walking around in a world thought to be fictional. For him, it was another day in the life of a Legend.

              In their jump to this universe, part of the Waverider’s engine had gotten busted due to stress and partially due to age. Since they rescued Han Solo from certain death, the Resistance had permitted them to temporarily dock at their new base in order to obtain the needed part. Jax felt sympathetic towards the group, given they had just lost one of their admirals in the serious attack on the First Order. At least there was still fight in the survivors and determination to defeat their enemies.

Someone bumped in him. “Oof!”

Jax stumbled back, nearly losing his grip on the part. “Sorry, man.”

“It’s okay,” the man across from him smiled easily. “My fault. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jax replied.

              He now recognized this man to be Finn. Strangely, he felt as if there was something familiar about him. It went beyond recognition of him as the flesh-and-blood version of one of his favorite characters. There was something deeper to it. Jax felt it stirring within him.

“Have we met before?” Finn asked, pointing to him. “You seem familiar.”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Jax chuckled.

“Finn!”

              A young woman with short brown hair walked towards them. Jax immediately recognized her as Rey. Again, the same sensation of familiarity surged through Jax. As she came to a stop beside Finn, the feeling grew even stronger. Something connected the three of them together, but he had no idea how.

“Rose is awake,” Rey told Finn. “Poe’s with her now, but she’s been asking to see you.”

“Got it,” the former stormtrooper nodded. “I was on my way to see her, but I ran into…”

“Jax,” he introduced himself. “I’m with the people with the oversized chicken.”

“The one who saved Han Solo,” Rey smiled warmly at him. “Thank you for that. I can’t imagine what things would be like without him.”

“I wouldn’t try to,” Jax replied. “It’s nice to meet you two. I gotta get this part back to my ship. See ya.”

With that, he started to walk off, but then turned around to walk back to them.

“Sorry, but are you sure we’ve never met before?” Jax asked the pair. “I swear, I feel like I know you two.”

“I’ve got a feeling like that too,” Finn agreed. “But I’ve even seen you before today.”

“You two aren’t the only ones with that feeling,” Rey added. “Even though I’ve never met you, there’s something very familiar about you.”

Jax shrugged. “Maybe I’ve got a doppelganger running around in this universe. Sorry, I just had to ask before I left.”

“It’s fine. Good luck getting back home.”

“May the Force be with you.”

“Thanks. Same to both of you.”

“Wait wait wait,” Felicity held up her hands. “You left the giant chicken in another universe?”

“There were transportation issues,” Ray explained with a weak smile. “We were going to leave, but we ended up helping Leia and the Resistance and-”

“Ray couldn’t shrink the chicken again,” Oliver added, sighing. “There was no way to get Chickenasaurus Rex back on the Waverider. So the Legends suggested that the Resistance could take him to use in battle.”

“That’s kind of sad,” Felicity lamented. “Is Cisco going to be able to create another?”

“I’m not sure if I want to start messing with genetics again,” Cisco shook his head. “That was not the first giant chicken. The others…things didn’t go so well.”

“How bad were they?”

“Most of them ended up losing all their feathers.”

Ray grimaced. “You sure you can’t do anything.”

“I’ll give it one last attempt,” Cisco agreed. “But I’m stopping there. I’ve seen enough of the Jurassic series to know when to call it quits.”

              For months, Jax gave no more thought to the interactions that he’d had with Finn and Rey. As far as he knew, it had just been coincidence. There had been stranger moments he’d gone though as a Legend. That one was near the bottom of the list of weird crap Jax had ever had happen to him.

              Then he wound up on another Earth with Grey after Barry and Iris’s wedding had been invaded by Nazis. Earth-X Snart and his boyfriend had managed to get them to the way home, but between it and them was an army of Nazis. Oliver summoned a poultry army to help provide support in battle, but birds could only stand up so well against bullets. They still needed to get to the handle to power up the breach. However, running to it with the soldiers firing all around was a suicide mission.

The worst part was that he could sense Grey was about to make a break for it.

“Don’t do it,” Jax murmured, wishing they weren’t separated by a walkway so they could fuse into Firestorm.

              However, the old man didn’t hear him. He started to inch out from behind the machine he was hiding behind. Before he could get to far out though, Stein stopped in his path. His eyes were fixed up in the air when his jaw dropped. Jax whipped his head up in the same direction. A similar expression was probably etched on his face.

              Above a group of soldiers was a slowly-forming portal. The Nazis were thankfully oblivious to it, but Sara and Oliver took notice of it too. Moments later, a giant chicken dropped down onto the Earth-X Nazis. There were muffled screams as the bird squashed them beneath its feathered keister. Jax stared at the new sight with shock.

“Chickenasaurus?” he gaped.

Stein looked equally stunned. “What in the-”

Chickenasaurus squawked loudly, drowning out whatever he was about to say. Two large porgs dropped out of the portal as well before it sealed closed. Jax stopped paying attention to the rest of room to stare at the newcomers. Rey dismounted from one of them and Finn from the other. Only then did he notice that there were two people on the back of the big chicken.

“Oh my god,” Jax said. “This isn’t happening.”

“You better believe it,” Leia grinned from where she was perched on Chickenasaurus with Han. “Those two sensed you needed help. So we rounded up the chicken and its offspring and came to help.”

“I can’t believe this,” Stein shook his head. “But we still need to make sure we get home.”

              Suddenly, Chickenasaurus screeched and scampered back onto her feet. She started to charge towards the halves of Firestorm. Jax quickly pulled Grey away from the oncoming fowl so he wouldn’t be run over. Han was clinging to Leia as the bird grabbed a Nazi soldier in its beck and tossed the scum far away. Jax was still staring when Sara, Alex, and Leo came running in with Barry and Oliver in tow. Barry and Terrill weren’t far behind them.

“What is that?” Alex asked, her brows knitting.

“Chickenasaurus?” Sara uttered.

Leo’s eyes were as wide as his doppelganger’s had been when he first laid eyes on the enormous chicken. “I can’t believe I’m seeing this right now.”

              None of them, save for Jax, noticed a group of the Nazi scumbags had gotten over the shock of seeing an enormous chicken. He glanced up in time to see the rifles being aimed at their group, including the newcomers. There was a round of gunfire as something reared up inside of him. Jax felt a power like he’d never known and thrust out his hand.

The bullets stopped in their path.

              Jax stared at the bits of metal staying in midair a few feet from their group. Everyone had turned around and was now noticing what was happening. The Nazis looked puzzled as they ran out of ammunition when all they had shot would not hit their target. Jax’s friends were equally confused by the display before them. Rey and Leia were both regarding him with a peculiar look though.

“Push back.”

              The voice whispered the two words into Jax’s ear, but he had a feeling that no one else could hear them except him. Bringing his hand back slightly, he pushed forward with the power he felt in him. The bullets hurtled back towards the Nazis, mostly striking the equipment around them. However, there were some rounds that struck them. Confused, Jax lowered his hand.

Everyone was silent until Sara cleared her throat.

“So I’m going to be the first to ask it,” she said. “What the hell was that?”

“And how long have you been able to do that?” Stein asked.

Jax shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“I do,” Leia said, smiling.

“How about we get home first?” Alex suggested. “I don’t want to stay on this Earth a second longer. No offense.”

“None taken,” Leo said.

“We need to get going while we have the chance,” Terrill agreed. “So let’s do this. And bring the chicken and these…”

“Porgs,” Finn answered, whistling to summon the one that he had ridden in on.

“Porgs,” Terrill repeated. “Okay then. Let’s move.”

Oliver clucked a few times, and Chickenasaurus followed after him with the porgs as they flipped the switch and walked into the breach.

              In the end, they won the fight against the invaders from Earth-X. Leonard had been somewhat stunned to meet his doppelganger, as had Mick. Barry and Iris got married in the park with all of their family and super-friends watching, along with some visitors from alternate worlds and enormous fowl. Everything was happy and good, despite the lingering questions about Jax’s newly-discovered ability. Fortunately, Leia had a part of the answer.

“You have the Force,” she said to him when he talked to her about it at the hastily put together reception for Barry and Iris. “I sensed it in you the last time we met. I suspect Rey and Finn did too. It was buried, but it was there.”

“I know Rey has the Force, but I didn’t know Finn had it too,” Jax replied, glancing over at them and feeling that same strange connection again.

Leia followed his gaze. “He has it. He just doesn’t know it yet. It’s buried for him too, but soon I think he’ll figure it out.”

“So I have the Force?” Jax grinned. “That’s kinda cool. Ray’s going to be jealous of me.”

“The tall one who shrinks?” Leia asked, getting a nod from Jax. “He did seem excitable about meeting me.”

“Can’t say I blame him. You’re a legend, after all.”

“Glad to hear someone holds me in high regard.”

Jax looked back to Finn and Rey again. “So how come I feel something connecting me to them? I know you have the Force, but I don’t feel that same kind of connection.”

Leia thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know for certain. That’s something you might have to find out on your own as you learn more about the power inside you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find my other half.”

“Thank you,” Jax told her as she left him to make her way towards Han.

              He thought about going over to Rey and Finn to talk to them about the connection some more, but then he spotted Stein finishing up a chat with Barry and Iris. As the couple walked away, Jax took his chance at the opening. He navigated around Alex, Kara, and both versions of Leonard Snart to make his way over to the older man. It was time to finally say goodbye.

“Grey,” Jax said, drawing the older man’s attention to him.

Stein looked over at him. “Jefferson. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Jax nodded. “I was just talking with Leia about what happened back on Earth Nazi.”

“Ah yes. It appears I owe my life to the enormous chicken, and also to you.”

“About that,” Jax swallowed. “You should take the serum and neutralize the matrix.”

Stein frowned. “Are you sure? Earlier you weren’t sure-”

“That was different,” Jax cut him off. “That was before I discovered I have this power inside me. It’s always been there, and I never knew until now. I don’t need to become Spider-Man with that other formula. You can retire, and I can stay on the Waverider and still be helpful to the team.”

For a long moment, Stein was silent.

“Gray, I’m gonna be fine. Just make sure you don’t leave me out of the stories when you tell them to Ronnie.”

The other half of Firestorm smiled. “With everything you’ve done for me, there’s no way you could be left out.”

“Great,” Jax shuffled a little. “I’ll miss you.”

“Me too,” Stein agreed. “But you are welcome to visit me any time. After all, you are part of my family.”

“You believe this is going to tell us why we have a connection to each other?” Rey asked as Jax lead her and Finn down the hall so the Waverider.

“Hopefully,” Jax brought them into the bridge. “Gideon has data from the timeline of this universe and yours since we visited it too. Maybe there’s something she can find that we can’t.”

Finn took his eyes away from the study to look back at Jax. “I hope so. It’s beyond just you and Rey having the Force.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, not telling Finn he had the Force too. Leia hadn’t explicitly said it, but her tone when they had talked about it implied that Finn needed to find it out on his own. “Gideon?”

“Mr. Jackson?” the AI answered. “Happy to see you alive.”

“Glad to be alive,” Jax told her. “Grey told me to pass along a goodbye to you. But right now I need you to tell me if there’s something that I share with Finn and Rey.”

Gideon didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Mr. Jackson, I should caution the three of you about knowing too much of your future.”

“No,” Rey snapped. “We need to know. Tell us.”

“Yeah,” Finn agreed. “Whatever it is, we can handle it.”

Jax nodded. “You heard ‘em, Gideon.”

“It’s fortunate I have data from both of your universes,” Gideon said sharply. “But with what I found, Mr. Jackson is your descendent.”

              Jax froze before slowly turning to stare at the other two people on the bridge. Finn was frozen in place, his eyes wide. Rey was bracing herself against the console. The three of them were family. That’s why they all felt connected.

“How?” Finn shook his head. “We’re from different universes, you said so yourself.”

“Over one hundred years after the fall of the First Order, your great-great-grandson will go missing in your universe,” Gideon told him. “He shows up in this universe on a record in the seventeenth century. Mr. Jackson is his direct descendant, and thus yours.”

Rey gazed at Jax. “You’re our descendant.”

“Yeah,” Jax nodded. “A lot of greats-grandson of two heroes.”

“We’re the ancestors of a hero here,” Finn smiled over at Rey. “Wow.”

Rey still looked shaken, so Jax walked over to her. “Are you okay?”

To his surprise, she released her grip on the console and hugged him. It startled Jax at first, but he then returned the action.

“I never thought I’d have family,” she told him. “Now I know for certain I will.”

Jax smiled. “So are you okay if I don’t call you Grandma?”

Rey laughed.

“Ray.”

              Ray turned around on his workbench with the parts of his anti-magic gun resting in front of him. Jax was standing in the entryway of the lab. It was good to have him around on the ship still even after Stein left. Rey and Finn asked if he wanted to come back to their universe with them and learn how to control the Force, but he had declined. Jax was now training on his own to control it and use it whenever he was called upon to.

“Have you got a minute?” Jax asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Ray nodded. “What’s up?”

“Remember when you constructed that lightsaber?”

He did. After all, he had tested it with Mick against Kylo Ren and it worked great. However, he’d given it to the Resistance before they left the Star Wars universe. “What about it?”

Jax took a piece of paper from his pocket and passed it to Ray. “I was wondering if you could do it again.”

Ray looked down at the drawing and grinned. “I can make it work.”

              Mallus landed in Salvation with a roar. The destruction of this town would just be the beginning. Soon it would get larger and larger. His terror would spread until it consumed the whole of this universe. Then he would move onto the next one, and the one after that to slowly convert all of reality to a hellscape for the lesser ones of his kind.

“Yo, Big Ugly!”

Mallus turned around. Standing in the middle of the road was the young man from earlier, the one Legend who had chosen not to wear a totem. In his hand was a small rod.

“You’re going to have to kill us before you destroy the town!” Jefferson Jackson shouted.

Mallus chuckled. “Who are you to stop me?”

Jax grinned and thrust his hand out. Something invisible slammed into Mallus, pushing him back quite a bit. The human then held up the rod. Pressing a finger to the side, a long blade of orange emerged and burned with light.

“Such a puny weapon,” Mallus laughed.

“It’s not puny,” Jax said. “I can take you with it. And it’s not all I have.”

              A clucking began to fill the air. It steadily grew louder and louder. Mallus’s forces began to shout and scream as the noise became even louder. When he finally turned, a wave of chickens was flocking towards him. Mallus roared at them, but they wouldn’t stop.

“Force-called some chickens!” Jax shouted. “A trick from Oliver Queen to distract you.”

Mallus growled and swiped at the chickens as the ground began to rumble. A moment later, the roof of the saloon burst open and something enormous and blue launched out of it. Both time demon and human watched as it fell back down to Earth. Once it did, Mallus regarded the large, fuzzy, and blue creature that was standing beside the mortal as he continued to bat the chickens out of his way. Jax stared at it for a minute before thrusting his hand out towards Mallus again and sending him flying back harder.

“He’s all yours, Beebo!”

[flabbergabst]

Chosen: Prologue (A CC Fic)

Summary: After the challenge of fixing time and space, the Legends decided to take a break and return to the present time. Sara and Leonard are then presented with a different challenge--being together despite judgmental eyes of the people closest to them.

Also on AO3

The Legends have been traveling through time and space for four years, counting from the present time, and as much as they enjoy it, the team mutually decided on taking a well-deserved break. Four years of saving people and restoring history was a lot of work. Tiring. They were missing out on the events of their cities and the events of their families’ lives, missing out on family affairs.

It was a team decision to go back two years earlier. They haven’t visited Central and Star for that long and decided that, well, their families wouldn’t know the difference. Not that they’re planning on hiding it.

The Waverider, they decided, would be left at the safe-keeping of its former captain. Rip, who happily obliged, promised to fly the ship the moment they need it back. He assumed it won’t be long, given the attraction for trouble of the team in general. But still.

Jax wanted to hang out with his friends again, he said. As much as he loves the team, it has been so long since he enjoyed his youth. “I’m sick and tired of you old folks,” he’d joke. Stein, Ray, and Nate themselves acted as professors to Jax, wanting him to get a degree as soon as he gets the chance. The three just annoyed Jax until he quit attending their “lessons” altogether, preferring a session of how-to-pick-pockets with Snart and a weekly weapons lesson with Sara. Much to the crook and the assassin’s amusement.

Martin visits the present from time to time. Sometimes with his younger partner. Most of the time with Mick. The former bounty hunter took a liking on the professor’s grandson. The captain allowed it, seeing the light in Martin’s eyes every time they come back from their trips. Spending more time with Lily, Ronnie, and Clarissa would be an amazing time. Needless to say, when the team decided on going to the present for the mean time, he was more than happy.

Nate immediately contacted STAR Labs—Kid Flash, specifically, for another whirlwind adventure being Central City’s heroes. He could’ve been a professor, teaching history. But apparently, for Dr. Heywood, being a hero appealed more than being an academic. His first reminder to the Legends was to contact him as soon as the Waverider is back on business. Despite all the chaos of time travelling, it was still an adventure he’d never pass on.

Ray and Zari developed a certain connection on board as time passed by. It was something the team saw coming. She had a rap sheet as long as Mick’s and he is always a ray of sunshine, bringer of goodness. Despite their differences, they clicked. It’s not romantic—not yet, at least. But both were techies, both looking forward to a world that is far better than the world they have now. Their similar curiousness led to them spending time together, always tinkering something on board. Ray offered Zari to see the technological advancements he was working on during Palmer Industries’ prime. The hacktivist just rolled her eyes, but eventually agreed.

Amaya was tempted to go back to Zambesi, still unsure what will happen once the animal inside her take over. It was Mick who convinced her to take a breather. He told her that they were time travelers. They can go back to wherever and whenever she wants. Two months, Mick said. Try staying for two months. And with the promise of him looking after the animal inside her and her watching over the fire in him, that somehow convinced her to stay in Central.

Sara and Leonard were a different story.

The team saw Leonard a full two years and a half after he was supposedly dead, in Earth X just as they were dropping of Leo. Citizen Cold’s boyfriend was waiting at the vacant spot the Waverider docked at.

“I thought you came home a couple of months ago!” Ray Terrill said, rushing over to give Leo a hug the moment he stepped off the timeship. After breaking away from the embrace, Leo gave Ray a confused look. The man was about to explain when the team that were audience to the sweet moment heard a familiar drawl—a sound they haven’t heard for a long, long time, but is too distinct for them to forget.

“Somebody here jumped on me the second I woke up,” Leonard—EARTH 1 LEONARD!!!—said, nodding towards Ray of Earth X. “Took him a couple of seconds to realize he got the wrong Leonard.”

The team was astounded. All except for one. Sara’s eyes lit up. As if she was expecting this. As if she was just waiting for Leonard to appear anytime. Alive. Because of course a man like him isn’t easy to kill. Just like her.

“What took you so long?” Leonard smugly said.

Sara rushed towards him, a smile as smug as his’. “Can’t stay dead, Snart?”

 Of course things were hard for them at beginning. The teasing and the flirting came almost as quick as the team jumped to the temporal zone. That was easy. The smirks and the winks that escaped no one. The feelings, though. The unspoken words after the rest of the team left the galley after dinner. The heat in both their eyes after a game of card. That was the hard part.

It took another half a year and a near-death experience before Sara and Leonard, as Mick put it, got their hands off their asses. Because apparently, love just doesn’t go away easily. Not after two and a half years of waiting. Not after being thrown off to another earth.

Showing affection was more difficult for Leonard than Sara. In the confines of their room, in the cargo hold that they claimed as their own, Leonard could be vulnerable. He’s free to express how he feels for Sara. He’s free to seek her warmth every night. To yearn for her love back. One she oh so willingly shows him and makes him feel. Until after a year of being together, open to everybody and secured in their relationship, the thought of going back to the present to face the people of Central and Star loomed over them.

Leonard would never admit that the idea of stepping out of the Waverider holding Sara’s hand scares him. But the course to Star City is set and their bags are packed. He still had no idea where they’ll go from there.

 “Mr. Snart, Captain Lance is asking everyone to be present on the bridge as soon as possible for the time jump,” Gideon chimed in, interrupting his thoughts. “And the Captain followed up that you shouldn’t make her come and get you like what happened in Italy, 1866.”

With a smirk on his face he sauntered off to the bridge, unsure of what’s to come, but assured that no matter what, Sara will be beside him.

And that’s all he needs.

 Now, off to another adventure. This one isn’t going to be easier.

Another project that nobody asked for lol. Will update as soon as I can. More or less 10 chapters.

[angel-gidget]

Stars Unearth Your Fires (ch2/?)

Title:  Stars Unearth Your Fires (Ch 2/?)

Fandom: DCU, Teen Titans, Red Robin (preboot)     

Rating:  PG  | Words: 1200 approx | a03 link    

Summary: Tim Drake never thought of himself as a troublemaker as far as Robins go. But a passing accusation quickly escalates into a case of stolen memories, technologically backwards clues from his past self, interdimensional hijinks, reflections on the good old days, and possibly the rekindling of a foregone romance. Eventually Tim/??? Mystery ship!

A/N: I ask that any fashion nerds reading this forgive me for my fake fashion week plot device. Lets just say the DCU has extra fashion weeks bc magic and leave it at that. Thanks again to @kiragecko for the beta!

"Wait, dude. Scrappy Doo hacked your diary?"

"It wasn't a diary, Kon. But, kinda."

"A lockable device on which you record your private thoughts you share with no one? Soundslikeadiary,man. Youshouldembraceit."

"I could repeat lectures verbatim from Diana about refusing to be shamed for traditionally feminine things that are actually emotionally reinforcing, but I think I'll spare you since you're not fooling anybody."

He could have come alone, but he had returned their texts on a whim, and when they had learned he was going to scavenge their old HQ at Happy Harbor... well, there was no stopping the remnant of Young Justice otherwise known as his best friends.

"It was more like a smartwatch jam packed with ridiculous hardware and old ipod levels of memory that I had filled with work reminders, but whatever."

Cassie and Bart had a point. But the truth was, the closest thing he really had to a diary was the dozens of hand-written letters he had written essentially screaming at his father. Letters he had tossed in the fire before he could be tempted to actually leave them where the (now dead, now lost) man could find them.

But some things remained too raw to share.

"Hey," Cassie was the first to touch her toe down on the threshold (Normally, Bart would beat her, but he had allowed himself to be a bit distracted, fully zipping around a couple laps to check out external changes).

Cassie started entering the old security codes without a hitch. She was not even thinking about it, and it gave Tim a tiny surprising warm fuzzy tingle in the chest, "Damian didn't use anything in it against you, did he? Trying to dig up crap on--"

Tim allowed himself a chuckle, "No. Assuming he did manage to read any of my entries, I would have paid money to watch him try to figure out what any of it meant."

"Oooh," Bart zipped back, and darned if he wasn’t talking faster and faster, allowing his own nostalgic excitement to kick in, "Did you write it in a code?"

"Sort of."

Kon was floating by the graffiti wall. It didn’t matter how many times they cleaned it, "Hanson Sucks" would always reappear as if by magic. Tim used to suspect Bart solely, but looking back, (and looking at Kon's face now) he suspected a little differently.  

The guy's grin has a bit of the ol' Kid when he glanced over his shoulder, "You didn't just write it in code, you wrote it in SLANG, didn't you. Yes, you did."

Tim snorted. But denied nothing. There was no point.

"Bet it was like 90% rap references."

"Ooh, don't underestimate Tim's eclectic-ness, Bart. There was no doubt a healthy dose of Enya lyrics entwined in there."

Bart's nose scrunched, "Enya? Seriously, Tim?"

"Hey," Cassie interjected, "I like Enya."

"You also like country music and boy bands dangerously similar to Hanson. It's okay, Cass. Weloveyouanyway."

The rules for Gotham and his team had always been different.  While clever hiding spaces had been a practically intellectual game in his home city, sometimes the trick to hiding something in YJ HQ was to just place it somewhere really dumb.

“The girl’s locker room, Rob? Really?”

“You never looked for any of my toys here, so clearly, it worked.”

The locker combination was Steph’s birthday. Something his teammates had no reason to know and something Batman and Nightwing might overlook. Or at least, they would have overlooked it back then. Maybe he should change it. Did it matter? Would he ever have cause to use this thing again? It was worth thinking about, but not something for just yet.

The lock released with an obnoxious clack and the door swung open with a creak. There were some things in his life that Tim kept meticulously clean, but no locker had ever been on the list. His crumpled extra Robin uniform tumbled out along with a collection of scratched CD’s, multi-sided dice, hand-drawn diagrams of team formations covered over by Bart’s doodling, and a cracked baseball bat.

At least his uniform had been through the wash before he stuffed it in there. Small favors from his former self. Tim carefully unrolled the Kevlar cape, tumbling his old wrist computer into his palm.

He would need to replace the battery. Specifically, remove the battery, and carefully charge it, then place it back into the device. He was not going to risk synching the thing—even to the old YJ mainframe—by plugging it into the computer directly. Maybe he was being paranoid. Hm. Not the worst thing to be.

“So…” Kon interrupted, “You gonna tell us what’s up?”

His first—heh—impulse was to be cryptic, but he swallowed it down. These were his friends.

“I was singled out by those Gatekeepers. I want to know why. When I checked the dates, I realized all of our computer records were compromised. I think… I think a more personal record might have escaped their notice.”

A moment of silence. He would have enjoyed the rarity of quiet in the old YJ cave of all things, but they were looking at him with a high-alert concern that was on the edge of tipping into horror.

“Woah. The bat-computers were compromised? Holy Hera, Tim.”

“DoyouthinkitwastheGatekeepers? You do. You totallythinkitwastheGatekeepers.”

Tim nodded, “Yeah. I do.”

“So what, man? You think they waved their triple-joined finger and just…?” Kon waved his own hand.

“Erased a week—maybe more—of events that happened while our reality was colliding with something outside of our own multiverse. And in a room with you, the Flashes, Booster Gold, and Guy Gardner; the person they expected to cause trouble was me.”

“And you can’t remember because they probably also erased our memories.” Cassie inferred.

Kon nodded until Tim’s earlier comment sank home, “Hey wait, whattaya mean ‘with me’?”

Bart giggled, “Oh, as if you don’t remember what you were like back then.”

Kon sighed as Bart and then Cassie joined in on ruffling his hair. They had to be fast. And reach up on their tip toes to do it. But Kon let them for a good half of a second.

“Ok. Point taken.”

The wait for the charger to hit green felt like an eternity. Plenty of time for the ambiance of the old cave to slip from nostalgia to haunting. Bart had opened up an entire closet of junk—chemicals, paint, mechanical insects—that he had apparently collected with Greta. Kon had dusted off Anita’s old masseuse table, only to find that no one was really in the mood to hop on it. Cassie found an old set of brass knuckles that belonged to Slo-bo, but quietly set them down when she noticed their discoloration was due to dried blood.

Nobody messed with the dusty arrows kept in hopeful little spaces. Nobody looked at the archer’s targets. At least, no one looked when others were looking.

Tim sighed and watched as Cassie floated around, fidgeting. He remembered how hard she had clung to the idea of Cissie returning to the hero life, terrified that her best friend would grow distant as a result. Tim had… been more optimistic. At the time.

He knew where their old friends were. He knew Greta Hayes was a freshman in college now. That they girl they had once called Secret had impressed the entire faculty of St. Elias with her ability to catch up and surpass academic basics. He knew that while she excelled in her math and science classes, she enjoyed the chaos and the friendships she found in her drama electives. He knew because her teachers kept good notes that were easy to hack.

He knew Anita took odd jobs to support the two tiny children that were her de-aged parents. She would put on her old Empress costume on occasion, when crime had the gaul to come to her doorstep, but lived quietly in Louisiana for the most part. Supergirl had been the last hero to come into contact with her, and told him all about it.

None of them had really had the chance to feel close to Ray, but Tim knew that didn’t make them special. Ray Terrill’s profile with the Justice League displayed a new team every year. He had run with reserve units, the JSA, Freedom Fighters, and more.

Then there was Cissie, Arrowette, the girl who took them by all by surprise once every few months as her face appeared on a cereal box, in an energy drink commercial, or on a motivational poster in a sporting goods store. Because nothing sold that stuff better than an Olympic archer who had looks as well as accuracy.

It wasn't a painful thing for Tim personally. Hell, there had been a time when he thought he was headed for a similar path, a time when he thought retirement for himself was a strong possibility, just a few years away. But he knew better now. And he knew that Bart always bought things with her name or her face on them, but didn't actually look at them. And that when Cassie heard her voice blaring from the TV, she would stare mournfully at an old number in her phone before putting it away unused. As much as they would wish otherwise, Cissie King-Jones had drifted away from them.

Not that Tim didn’t also fit the drifter profile to an extent. The thought hit him hard. He hadn’t been to the Tower in over a two months, but like a dog with a bone, the Titans had refused to let him stay out of touch. Even when Dick had the bright idea of sending Damian to the tower, to try to get him to interact with ‘younger’ heroes—because apparently Dick could’t be bothered to remember that he was sending an eleven year old to socialize with a crew that no longer possessed a member under the age of sixteen—his friends had reached out, insisting that Red Robin was the only Robin on their roster.

It was humbling, and it put a scratch in this throat and a watery heat behind his eyes that—

BEEP!

Charging complete.

Bart zipped toward the outlet, and hopped on his toes while waiting for Tim to unplug the device. He felt Conner and Cassie join in hovering behind him as he began to skim through the files. There was only one that matched what they were looking for, with its simple text repeated in the space-tab code.

R E M I N D E R S

Dig up 8th grade time capsule

Go 2 fashion show @ Hollywood Mall. Compare/Contrast costume

Be outside July 4th

Go 2 most romantic city on July 15th

“That’s it?” blurted Kon and Bart at once.

“Fashion show?” Cassie scratched her head.

Tim sighed, “I was watching out for key word triggers. I think.”

Bart frowned, “Like, if  you actually said anything close to what you meant, you were worried the Gatekeepers or whoever would notice and erase everything like they did with the Batcomputer?”

Tim nodded, “The ‘reminders’ are literally reminders. Straightforward intel would be too dangerous.”

“‘Cause God forbid your lil’ bitty bat-self actually tell your future self what was going on.” Kon huffed impatiently.

Cassie elbowed him in the ribs.

Kon hissed. “Sorry! Too dangerous. I get it.”

Cassie raised her brows and let it go. “So, what are you going to do?”

Tim shrugged, “Do what they tell me to and hope they help me remember, I guess.”

Bart looked up from his phone, “Better hope the ‘reminders’ don’t have to go in order, Tim.”

Tim winced, “Why?”

Cassie looked over Bart’s shoulder at his screen, “Because the only major summer fashion demonstration in California hits the runway in about 12 hours. Woah.”

Tim powered down the wrist tech. He didn’t like the idea of going out of order, but only two of the reminders had actual dates attached. At least he had opened the file right before July. Small favors.

“Fine. Mall first. Grab some food and rest and meet back with me in—“

“Only if you do,” Cassie’s eyes were narrowed.

“Yeah, man. No caffeinated all-nighters.”

“Kon and I will tuckyouinifwehaveto.”

Tim snorted, “Fine.

It messed with his plans, but if he was being honest, Cass was in town, and Steph had mentioned to Dick in the cave that she was done with her freshman comp essay. Red Robin wasn’t strictly necessary when Blackbat and Batgirl were around to help out.

He did his best to take it as the impromptu bit of fortune it was.

He didn’t let it hurt.

[kymboslyce-blog1]

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[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: The Beginning of Wisdom - Chapter 5 (Ao3 link)

Fandom: Flash, Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Leonard Snart (Len) & Leonard Snart (Leo), Len Snart/Mick Rory, Leo Snart/Mick Rory, Len Snart/Mick Rory/Leo Snart, Leo Snart/Ray Terrill, Len Snart/Barry Allen

Summary: In which Leonard Snart is twins.

(the life and times and loves of Len and Leo Snart)

—————————————————————————————————–

Mick Rory, when Leo met him, was loud and boisterous and gruff and violent.

(He called Len ‘boss’ and teased him until he smiled.)

He drank too much beer and ate like a pig and lit fires all around, leaving the mess for Len to clean up later.

(He was kind to Lisa, and listened to her with respect, and worried about Len’s dietary habits.)

He spent the money he’d earned with risky stunts too fast and too much, and when he and Len disagreed, they would fight, each one raising a hand against the other.

(He cared for Len afterwards, and he never raised a hand to Len when Len wasn’t fighting back, made Len feel like his equal and never judged him for his illness.)

He flirted badly with women, with crude words and cruder symbols.

(He looked at Len like he made the world spin.)

Leo wanted to hate him.

Leo wanted so much to hate him.

(Len looked at Mick like he’d never looked at anyone before, not even Leo: surprise and gratitude and fondness all in one, and maybe something more.)

Leo didn’t hate him.

This man, by his sheer presence, accomplished what Leo had thought to be impossible.

He made Len happy.

Leo realized he would have to resign himself to Mick being a presence in his life.

He wasn't happy about it, not really - he far preferred the previous state of affairs with just him and Len and Lisa - but he could appreciate the benefits of it: a happy Len made for a happy Lisa and pleased him as well, and it was nice to be able to leave Lisa at Mick's apartment, safe from their father, whenever Len and Leo wanted to talk by themselves.

Also, Mick's apartment always had excess food in it. Always. It was a ridiculous waste, far more than any man (even one with an appetite like Mick's) could eat, and both Len and Leo trying together could barely eat enough of the remainder so that it didn't rot in Mick's fridge. Len complained about Mick's spendthrift grocery store addiction constantly, a wry smile on his face and a friendly punch of his fist, but Mick just shrugged and kept buying too much as if he couldn't control himself.

(Leo noticed he wasn't losing the weight he had gained during Len's absence, weight attributable to eating full meals instead of halves, and wondered if Mick was doing it on purpose.)

It wasn't ideal, no, but it wasn't that bad.

They would be able to find an equilibrium, Leo thought. One where Len liked Mick and Leo didn't and everything worked out for them that way.

“Hey, Number Two!” Mick called to Leo as he passed. He could always tell them apart, when even Lisa sometimes couldn’t; it worried Leo. He and his brother had relied so long upon the ability to switch places at a moment’s notice that Leo did not want to give up that advantage. “I’ve got a question for you.”

Leo turned to him with raised eyebrows. “Len isn’t here, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Len had left in their father’s car for a job and would not be back for hours yet, if he returned at all that day. The job had been an unexpected one: they had seen their father’s car coming in the distance and hidden Mick inside Lisa’s room so that their father could not see him.

They knew better than to let their father see him.

“No,” Mick said. “It ain’t about that; I know he's gone off. Just, the guy he went away with – can I kill him?”

Leo frowned and studied Mick closely. “Do you know who that man is?” he asked.

“No,” Mick said, and his face more serious than Leo had become accustomed to, these past few weeks. “But I want to kill him for putting that look on Len’s face.”

“That’s our father,” Leo said.

Mick considered that for a few moments. “Okay,” he said, after a while of thought. “Does that mean you don’t want me to kill him, or that you’re going to help?”

Leo could feel his lips quirking up despite himself, but he quashed the flickers of humor quickly. “You’re not the first one to think of that,” he said. “But Len would never forgive us. Do you realize that?”

“That man put his hands on your brother,” Mick said in return. “And on your sister, and on you. If I ever have a chance, I’m going to burn him to the ground.”

“Why do you care about me?” Leo asked. “Len, of course, and Lisa’s adorable, so I understand, but I don’t like you, and this won’t be the way to convince me otherwise.”

“I know you don’t like me,” Mick said with a shrug. “Most people don’t, and I’d long given up on convincing anyone about anything. I’d given it up, that is, until your brother walked into my life and refused to leave.”

There was a sort of confusion in Mick’s eyes as he spoke.

He hadn’t been infiltrating at all, Leo realized. He’d been as surprised by it as much as anyone else.

He’d seen something worth loving in Len and couldn’t resist it.

Leo couldn’t help but respect that.

After all, he better than most knew how wonderful his brother was, even if almost no one else seemed to see it.

(Mick saw it.)

“But you know he wouldn’t forgive you for it,” Leo pressed. “Isn’t this for him? Why would you do something for him if he wouldn't forgive you after?”

“Everything I do is for him,” Mick said. “If he told me not to, I wouldn’t. But he hasn’t told me not to, yet. And if he didn’t forgive me...”

He trailed off, then caught Leo by the shoulders in a motion that startled Leo.

“Would it make his life better?” he demanded. “Would it make Len’s life better, even if he didn’t forgive me for it?”

Leo looked into Mick’s eyes. “You’d be willing to give him up? You’d be willing to never be forgiven?”

“If it made him happy,” Mick said, and his eyes were frantic. “But I don’t know him like you do. Never will. So if I can’t ask him, I’ve gotta ask you.”

Leo considered. “No,” he finally said, albeit reluctantly. The offer was tempting, but he wouldn't allow personal feelings to influence his decision. The question was not 'would Leo like this to happen', or even 'would Len be better off personally', but rather 'would Len's life be better' - and that was a different question entirely. “No, it wouldn't. Not until we’re eighteen and can get custody of Lisa. It wouldn’t make his life better to do it now.”

Mick’s shoulders slumped with the same weight that Leo had borne on his own so long.

“Okay,” he said, releasing Leo and going to sit down on the couch. “Then I won’t do it.”

As if it were as simple as that.

Leo supposed that for Mick, it was.

Okay, fine.

Leo liked him.

He sat down next to Mick. “How do you know the difference between Leonard and I?” he asked. He had wanted to know for a while, but he’d never wanted to concede enough respect to Mick to ask. “You always do. No one else does.”

Mick shrugged. “My sisters – Mandy and Ellie – they were twins, too. You learn to look for the little things, and that works until they figure out how to mimic those, too, and then you look for something else. It's fun to keep track of, really, and there's just enough difference between you and Len that I can spot it if I try.”

Leo nodded, then frowned. “They were twins?”

“They’re dead now,” Mick said, his voice suddenly gone dull and heavy and unbearably sad. He pulled out the lighter he liked to stare at and avoided Leo’s gaze. “Didn’t Len tell you? I burned my whole family. They’re all dead now.”

Leo could feel his eyebrows shooting up. He knew what intentional murder did to a man, learned the lines it left on a man’s face by seeing them grow on Len’s, and Mick had none of those signs, and none of the psychopathy that would be required not to feel the guilt of it.

He looked – guilty, yes. And terribly sad.

But he didn’t look like a murderer.

“He probably didn’t tell you because he wants you to like me,” Mick said, staring into the flickering flame of his lighter with a gaze that had none of his usual enjoyment of fire and all too much of a desire to avoid seeing the expression on Leo's face. “Len, I mean. I told him about it when I was still trying to make him go away, but he didn’t care. He said that he wasn’t going to blame me for it, even if I did. That's probably why he didn't tell you, though he probably should've, at least before he let you trust me with Lisa.”

The pieces clicked together in Leo’s mind.

“You didn’t call for help,” Leo said. “The fire started by accident, and you were caught in it, and you didn’t call for help because you were caught in watching it; that’s why you blame yourself.”

Mick tore his eyes away from his flame. “How’d you do that?” he asked, surprised. “The boss figured it out, too, just like that.”

Leo nodded to himself. That fit much better, and made the picture of Mick Rory come together at last: because Mick Rory was loyal, painfully loyal, and he’d lost everything he’d ever been loyal to, home and hearth and family, and he’d been adrift until he had found Len and Len had found him.

He would care for Len forever, even at the cost of his own pain.

He would do for Len what Len had always done for Leo.

“I’ve decided that I like you,” Leo announced, standing up and putting a hand on Mick’s shoulders for a brief moment. “Welcome to the family.”

He left, Mick gaping after him.

Len returned home with a black eye and a wrist that kept hurting even after he’d fixed it back into place, but once he saw the way they were sitting at the dinner table, Leo’s shoulders relaxed and a smile on his face even as he looked at Mick, who was telling Lisa another of his tall tales, he couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the night.

“You like him,” he murmured in Leo’s ear as they curled up together in their bed that was rapidly becoming too small for two as they grew. “You like him.”

“Not as much as you do,” Leo murmured back, his lips curved up into a smile.

“Give it time,” Len said confidently. Now that Leo saw what was good in Mick, he would understand.

“Oh, no,” Leo said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to like him as much as you do.” And he laughed.

But he was wrong about that, too.

It started slowly.

An aesthetic appreciation, nothing more.

After all, there was a lot to appreciate. Mick’s tendency to work out shirtless in his small apartment (or in Leonard’s house, when available) guaranteed it.

But it wasn’t just that.

Mick was kind and he was good and he was there to put himself between the Leonards and the world, and Lisa, too.

And there was more than just that.

Leo first noticed it less than a month later, when Len was planning out one of the jobs that he would do without his father, with only Mick at his side. Len was pacing, talking through his plan aloud, drawing their path in the air with his hands, seeing his pathway as if it were laid out in front of him. That way, Mick and Leo could interject any suggestions they wanted, suggest any fixes or point out any flaws.

“– and then we need to sling the take through the grinder –”

“The…what?” Leo asked from where he was sitting on the couch, frowning. He didn't know what that meant.

Len waved a hand at him, his brain too deep in his blueprints to respond.

Mick looped an arm over Leo’s shoulder, Leo starting in surprise. “It’s slang,” he explained, smiling, his face open and relaxed. He’d been out back burning some garbage in a tire, earlier; his body was loose and at ease and ever so warm as a result. “Don’t worry, Number Two, I’ve got you covered.”

“Why am I Number Two?” Leo grumbled. “Because you met him first?”

“Nah,” Mick said. “The Prisoner. Number Two’s the clever one.”

“What am I, then?” Len asked absent-mindedly. “Chopped liver?”

“You’re the boss, boss,” Mick said, still smiling. “You plan ‘em and I execute ‘em. But Number 2 here? He’s leading armies.”

“There weren’t any armies in the Prisoner,” Leo objected.

“Sure there were,” Mick said. “All those background actors, yeah?”

“It was a different actor every time!”

“Exactly!” Mick said, beaming like he’d made sense.

Leo scowled at him, confused.

“Lay it out,” Len said indulgently from where he was looking at the table. “You know we mere Leonards can’t follow you through all the twists of your thinking.”

“Leo’s got a thousand and one faces,” Mick explained. His arm was warm over Leo’s shoulder. “One for every person he meets, whatever works best for ‘em. A different actor each time, even though he’s playing the same role.”

Len snorted, but Leo wasn’t so sure. It sounded –

Well, it sounded rather a lot like him.

“Don’t worry,” Mick told him. “We know who you are.”

And that made it all seem all right.

Mick never let Leo fall behind, not once, despite his increasing distance from the world that Mick and Len increasingly inhabited. He explained the terms they used and he updated Leo on the changes in their plans and he identified all the players that they might encounter, showing Leo all the contingency plans and back-ups Len built into his plans but thought were too obvious to mention. He even explained the parts of the plan that Leo already knew, just because it helped Leo to be reminded that Len really did know what he was doing.

And when Len disappeared, deep inside on his jobs, Mick continued to answer his phone religiously, and he always told Leo everything he wanted to know.

When Len buried himself in work, Mick smiled at Leo over Len’s head in commiseration.

He even helped Leo in the kitchen the way Len never did. In fact, he took over the kitchen, never once forgetting that Len liked spinach but Leo preferred broccoli, or that Lisa insisted that everything have three times as much salt as either Leonard.

Sometimes he’d bring home gifts: sometimes for Len, sometimes for Leo, and always for Lisa.

When questioned as to why, he frowned at them and told them that he’d just seen something that reminded him of them, that’s all, and why were Snarts so persnickety anyway?

Mick kept an eye out at the local movie theater and could always be counted on to lure Len away from his work for the latest sci-fi film, whether masterpiece or stinker, or to take Lisa to her latest kids’ movie or, later, romance and horror, but he also showed up at Leo’s desk with tickets for the old classic films that Leo loved on a regular basis, even though no one else really liked them the way Leo did.

And, of course, whenever one of Mick’s beloved ninja films came out, they were all forced to go.

(They were universally terrible, but Mick's joy was positively infectious.)

Mick also watched musicals, of all things, and insisted that everyone watch them with him, and then got them all tickets to see one live. Leo was pretty sure that Mick even bought the tickets legitimately.

Mick wistfully looked at board games whenever they took Lisa to the toy store, his secret longing so clear that Leo and Len glanced at each other with a mixture of determination and resignation and brought some home.

And when they played those games, board games and card games and all the like, he picked Leo as often as Len to be on his team.

“Ain’t you supposed to be my partner, Mick?” Len whined one day, throwing down his cards in disgust as Leo cackled and raked in the betting money as Mick reshuffled the UNO deck. “Why you doing this to me?”

Mick only laughed, but Leo was curious now, too.

“Why do you pick me for your team?” he asked Mick after Len stomped away to do the dishes with Lisa, as was his due punishment as the loser. “Instead of picking Len every time? I know you know the difference between us.”

Mick frowned at Leo. “Why would I?”

“He’s your partner, ain’t he?”

“Yeah,” Mick said, scratching his head. “But you’re both Leonard, ain’t you? So why wouldn’t I pick you both?”

Leo’s throat suddenly went very tight.

“Yes,” he said, forcing the words out through that feeling that seemed to spread all the way through his chest, making it warm and a little melty in a way he’d never felt for anyone but Len and Lisa before, and not even Lisa in quite this way. This was different. Very different. “But – he’s your criminal partner. Len is, I mean.”

“Well, sure,” Mick said. He was still frowning, still confused, as if what they were discussing was the matter of greatest simplicity for him. “I can’t be your criminal partner because you’re not a criminal. Len is. Simple as that.”

And then he smiled at Leo. “Don’t worry, Number Two,” he said. “I’ve still got your back for everything else.”

And Leo looked at Mick, really looked at him, the man that fit into their lives the way no one but Lisa ever had – not Marie, not any of the kids at school, no one – and he saw him for what felt like the first time.

It was more than a little horrifying for Leo to discover that when he closed his eyes and thought of the person he would like to share his life with, in that nebulous future that Len had sacrificed so much of himself for, the shape of that person was also Mick.

“I like him,” Leo told Len that night when they curled up in bed, horrified at himself. “I really like him.”

“He does that,” Len said, nodding. “It’s inevitable, really.”

“I can’t like him!” Leo exclaimed.

“Why not?”

“For one thing, he’s yours. And for another, he’s here to walk your path with you, not me with mine.”

“He’ll be on my path, yes,” Len said. “But if you think I’m going to leave you alone just because you’re walking a different path, then you’ve got another thing coming, and the same is true for him. Why don’t you ask him, and see what he says?”

Leo struggled with it for another year before he finally gave in. He was seventeen; he’d been accepted to the college of his choosing with a full financial aid scholarship; he was less than a year away from being able to pry Lisa out of the hands of his father, whether by their father's willing agreement or by Mick’s flames, whichever was necessary.

Now was the time to take a risk.

He asked.

Mick frowned at him. “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t I love you, too, in addition to Len? Of course I do; you know that.”

“Not like that,” Leo said. “Like – being in love.”

“Yes,” Mick said. “Like that.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re in love with Len, aren’t you?” Leo asked.

“I wasn’t in love with nobody at first,” Mick said. “It took me a good long while to get there, but then I’ve always been a slow learner. And you made it complicated.”

“Complicated?”

“Yeah,” Mick said. “It’s real complicated, being in love with Leonard Snart.”

Leo opened his mouth to protest, and then paused.

“Yeah,” Mick said gruffly. “I meant what I said. Leonard Snart. All two of him.”

And Leo smiled.

And behind them, Len smiled, too.

[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: The Beginning of Wisdom - Chapter 8 (Ao3 link)

Fandom: Flash, Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Leonard Snart (Len) & Leonard Snart (Leo), Len Snart/Mick Rory, Leo Snart/Mick Rory, Len Snart/Mick Rory/Leo Snart, Leo Snart/Ray Terrill, Len Snart/Barry Allen

Summary: In which Leonard Snart is twins.

(the life and times and loves of Len and Leo Snart)

—————————————————————————————————–

It wasn't that Leo intended on anything happening with Ray, of course.

He had far more important things to worry about: Len, Mick, even Lisa, worrying away at her university. That's where his priority had to be.

But Ray was –

Nice.

Friendly. Helpful. Kind.

Ray was there.

That latter part was the more important, Leo thought. He had never before felt alone like this – he had always had Len, and even in the rare and few times when Len went away, he had had Lisa, and later Mick. He didn't now, and he felt it. This new emptiness, the gaping vacantness of not-knowing, of having to keep up their alibi even when his soul cried out to visit Mick more, to talk to Len more, to gather them all together under his wing and make sure they were safe, was slowly driving him mad.

Leo wasn't used to needing anyone but them, but he was also used to having them, and maybe that gap was where Ray Terrill, pretty good model and half-decent administrative assistant, slipped in.

Ray was also dreadfully attractive if you liked that sort of thing, which of course Leo – as the designer who had input into the selection of the models who wore his clothing – did. Unusual features, frankly ridiculous ears, but damn if Leo didn't think they were cute when he first saw them and he still thought they were cute now.

Maybe that was why he moved from just letting Ray help out with paperwork to letting Ray take him out after work for drinks every once in a while to help him forget his sorrows, if only for a little.

He probably shouldn't have.

He definitely shouldn't have – Mick in the hospital, and Len there to care for him when he could and around the house only sometimes the rest of the time because he was working like a man chased by a fury, like there was any amount of money that would somehow make things better, and Leo was of course horribly worried for them both.

But neither of them was here.

Ray...was.

Leo's bond with Len came first, of course. They'd agreed on that, long ago. And after Len there was Lisa, and then Mick, and that was all they needed, and that was the way it had always been.

That was why Leo said no – gently, but still no - the first time Ray made a fumbling sort of pass, awkward and blushing and stammering, filled with disclaimers, but Ray accepted it with grace and continued to spend time with Leo regardless.

Leo wasn't an idiot – Ray may have been graceful about it, but he'd clearly not entirely given up hope quite yet, interpreting Leo's 'no' as the 'it's not a good time now' that it might very well have been, and if Leo were thinking with his head like he was supposed to, he'd have sat Ray down and made it clear that it was never happening until the message sank in.

And yet, somehow, for some reason...he didn't.

No. That was a lie.

Leo was always the more self-aware of the twins: the nice one, the smiling one, the one who understood and explained why people were acting the way they were acting. The family shrink, as Len liked to tease him –

– some shrink to not be able to help when his own brother was falling apart, some brother to spend time with someone else when his other half needed him so desperately –

No, the truth was something else.

The truth was, Leo didn't want to be alone.

He didn't want to be responsible.

(That was meant to be Len's job, some vile part of himself wailed, Len was the one who was always there, the protector, why was he not here, where he should be, protecting him?)

So yes, Leo knew why it was happening.

He knew, too, that he – he liked Ray, a strange, formless sort of liking, deeper than the usual friendliness that he pretended to feel for most people. Ray was there, smiling, happy, helpful; he was kind in a way that Leo did not often see. He was strong enough to shrug off Leo’s occasional bursts of bad temper with a laugh.

Leo liked Ray. It wasn’t just loneliness: he didn’t want to break all bonds between them.

He couldn't stop.

No.

He didn't want to stop.

He wanted Ray – pretty, smiling, simple Ray – to keep coming around to offer him company and take him out to go drinking and to dinner and to put his hand on Leo's shoulder and press his lips to Leo's cheek and to pull him into his arms in an embrace –

He didn't want it to stop.

So he didn't stop it.

And then Len came back to him.

Not the half-hearted visits from a ghost that Leo had grown sadly accustomed to, but Len himself, awake and aware and himself once more. Face haggard, back slouched, exhaustion written in every line – and eyes filled with apology.

The great healer Time had finally done what it needed to do.

"I left you," Len said, voice flat with despair. "How could I leave you?"

Leo pulled his brother into his arms and they curled up on the couch he kept in his office just for his brother. "You didn't leave," he pointed out. "You were here."

Because Len was there, visiting every three days like clockwork, eyes vacant, movements mechanical, silver tongue silenced.

"No," Len said. "I wasn't."

Because he wasn't. He knew he hadn’t been: his mind had gone far afield to hide from reality. He couldn’t stop, couldn’t think, could let himself think, so he buried himself in the work of getting enough money to pay for Mick's expensive treatments without destroying Leo's fledgling business by taking the money out of its barely sufficient funds. He worked until it was the only thing he could think of, could talk of, and he never stayed the night.

He hadn't been there.

In his grief, his all-consuming despair, he left Leo all alone.

Yes, Len knew he hadn’t been the brother he should have been.

Leo, in turn, knew that his brother had only acted the way he had because Len felt he didn't deserve the comfort Leo offered to him; he did not blame him in the slightest.

Yet he could not deny what Len knew, once he'd awoken, to be the truth: that his blinding self-hatred had hurt the other half of himself, for by denying himself Leo's comfort, Len had robbed Leo of the comfort of giving it.

"I'm sorry," Len said. "I'm sorry."

"You're forgiven," Leo said at once, because he could say nothing else. He had missed his brother so much: to have him back was the only thing he required to make it all right again. "But only if you stay, and heal."

Len stayed.

Len healed.

At last.

There were some awkward days at the start – with both of them feeling their way around each other the way they'd never had to before – but then it began to click back into place: the music they listened to, the foods they ate, the in-jokes they knew, the sentences they finished for each other turning into sentences they did not even need to start –

Mick was still missing, still a gaping hole, but Leo visited him regularly and reported to Len that he was getting better every day and would soon, with luck, be returned to them.

As for them, they fell back into orbit around each other.

Leonard Snart, complete at last, the way they ought to be.

At peace with themselves.

And things were good again.

Or at least they were, right up until the day Leo slept late, comfortable in his bed with Len holding him safe, and Len, waking early, decided – after checking Leo's calendar – to let him continue to sleep and to go into work for him.

It was all production meetings, after all; production meetings and photography and Len could deal with obnoxious business people and haughty photographers and self-absorbed models just as well as Leo could.

He thought he could, anyway.

It was only the habit of a lifetime of lying that kept him from breaking that model's wrist the first time he patted Len on the shoulder, the first time he stepped too close, the first time he took a set of papers as if that were his right and called himself Leonard's assistant, like that was a title he was due –

Len didn't break his wrist, because Leo wouldn't have.

But he wanted to.

Len kept the smile fixed on his lips, Leo's smile, the kind one who loved nobody but who needed protection from all the world, protection that only Len could offer, and he slipped away to his office to check the time records that confirmed, yes, this – this Ray Terrill, model and would-be photographer, had been logging far more hours than any model needed.

Had been hired on a suspiciously high number of design shoots.

Had, in fact, been the subject of some tabloid speculation, buried deep in the back pages where tales of the less-famous resided, in regards to several private dinners and drinks he'd been seen to have with Leonard Snart, famous designer.

Speculation of friendship - or perhaps more.

This was far worse than Len had thought.

Leo had been left all alone, and Len acknowledged that to be his fault. It was right and just that he turn to other company to stave off the loneliness that overwhelmed him, no matter how much it pained Len that Leo had been forced to resort to such measures.

Those measures, which had left him vulnerable to anyone who could see it - open to those who wanted to eel into Leo's life, to find a place at his side, a place in his heart - to do who knows what with.

To hurt him, perhaps.

By leaving, Len had allowed them that opportunity.

But now Len was back.

Leo's protector, first and foremost, before any other role. Protector from everything, from blows, from pain, from anything – even himself.

Len had never had to protect Leo's heart before – that had always been Leo's job, the more emotionally intelligent one, the more distant one, the family shrink – but Len could do the job just the same, he was sure.

And this would end now.

Len pushed the button on his phone and asked for Ray to be sent to his office.

Ray came to him with a smile. "I'm not done with my paperwork yet," he teased, friendly and familiar, not stopping before the desk but coming around to put a warm hand on Leonard's shoulder, squeezing it gently, familiar. Too familiar. "You usually don't have time for me until then, you're too professional. Couldn't wait to see my face today, huh?"

"Tell me, Ray," Len said, his demeanor friendly. "You do know I'm married to Mick Rory, right?"

Technically, of course, it had been Len standing beneath the canopy, his hands in Mick's, uttering the vows and signing the contract between them, but it was Leo who clasped their hands together with a smile and didn't take his hands away, who echoed each of the vows Len had uttered, and Leo – only Leo, the clean and upstanding Leo – who could wear a ring if they had ever wanted one.

Ray hesitated. His hand was still on Len's shoulder.

"Yes, of course –" he started.

"Tell me," Len said, his voice just as pleasant as before, "did you deliberately wait until he was in the hospital with horrific burns all over his body to make a move, or was it just lucky coincidence that you showed up when I was mourning and hurting and alone and in need of someone to lean on?"

"I – Leonard – I didn't –"

"You worked for me for months before that," Len said. "But the offers to help, the constant company, the passes – that all happened after he was out of the picture, didn't it?"

"I – no! You seemed down, that's all – I just wanted –"

"Down," Len agreed. "Alone. Vulnerable. Or are you saying I've misinterpreted what you're doing as a pass?"

Ray fell silent.

Yeah, Len thought as much. Ray had definitely made an explicit offer.

An explicit offer Leo clearly hadn't shut down well enough.

Because he had been alone, and sad, and in need of someone.

Len was boiling mad, and only part of that anger was fueled by his own guilt. He was so good at staying cold, but that soft heart of his was blood red with fury on his brother's behalf.

"Leonard –" Ray started, his eyes wide, gentle, hurt. "Leo –"

Len felt his temper flare like an audible crack in the glacier-like ice that surrounded him.

He’d never felt possessive before: that was always Leo’s domain.

Leo.

His Leo.

"If I ever want you to touch me again," Len said, "I'll say so. Now get the fuck out of my office."

Ray fled.

It occurred to Len that that might have been too harsh.

Leo hadn't actually okayed this, after all.

Len went home.

Leo was puttering around, looking pleased. "Mick's going to be released from the hospital soon," he reported with a grin that faded when he saw the look on Len's face.

"That's good," Len said, because it was. It was great. Mick would come home and Leo would take care of him and Len would be there for him and together they could keep Leo safe.

"...what happened?" Leo asked.

"I got rid of the guy harassing you," Len said. "A bit harshly, I admit, but –"

"Harassing?" Leo asked, alarmed. "No one was harassing me; what are you talking about?"

"That Terrill guy," Len explained. "You know, swooping in and making moves when he knows you're vulnerable and taken –"

"He was – it wasn't like - you got rid of him?" Leo's voice was raised.

Len took a half step back, surprised by Leo's vehemence - and also not entirely surprised. Not as much as he have would liked to have been. "Yeah," he said, his voice flat. "I did. I protected you."

"You –," Leo pressed his lips together. "Leonard Snart, you know perfectly well you should've cleared this with me first. I do the emotional stuff."

Len crossed his arms and glared. "I was provoked. He called you Leo."

Leo opened his mouth to snap back, then paused and considered. He was angry at Len. He was never angry at Len.

And he thought, now that he took a second to think of it, he might understand why Len had done what he had done. "Are you jealous?"

"No! ...maybe."

"Leonard..."

"Leonard," Len replied. "You can't just decide that we've started dating someone new without telling me. I don't even know the guy! You never mentioned him! Assuming harassment was reasonable."

"We're not dating him!" Leo exclaimed. "He's just – helping out. I've already turned him down."

"Uh-huh. Have you cleared this with Mick yet?"

"There's nothing to clear!"

"Sure there ain't."

"There isn't. I turned him down."

"I'll tell Lisa he's available then, huh?"

"He's gay," Leo said.

"Okay, so Charlie."

"You are not hooking Ray up with Charlie! For that matter, no one is to be hooked up with Charlie! Ever!"

"...fair," Len allowed. "You get where I'm going with this, though."

Leo groaned and put his head in his hands. He'd fucked this one right up, hadn't he? "Okay, fine. Maybe I like him a bit."

"Enough to keep him all to yourself, clearly," Len said. His voice was cold as ever, but he couldn't hide the hurt. Not from Leo.

Leo's chest hurt like he'd been stabbed. He hadn't meant – it wasn't – he hadn't intended -

He'd always promised himself that he would be the only one inside Len's tender heart that wouldn't cause him pain. Everyone else, they would hurt him, but not Leo. Leo would guard his brother's heart against the world.

Even, if necessary, against Leo himself.

He hadn’t done that this time.

He'd really screwed this up.

"I wasn't sure what I was doing," Leo admitted. "I was lonely, and I've never wanted anyone but you and Mick. I like people, Leonard, I'm the half of us that's good at that, but I don't let them in. I never let them in."

"I know that," Len said miserably. "That's why I thought..."

"I know. I should've told you about him, about it being okay, about me being okay with what he was doing. It just...never seemed like a good moment."

"I'm still first, though?" Len asked, and Leo's heart hurt that Len even felt that he had to ask. This fire had destroyed so much of his brother's confidence, and then Leo went and did this on top of it.

"First forever," Leo assured him, reaching out and pulling Len into his arms. "No one else. We come first."

Len sighed and tucked his head into Leo's shoulder. "I scared him off," he admitted. "I was pissed."

"And you didn't want to be pissed at me," Leo said. He of all people understood how Len's emotions worked: his own were too similar not to. "If he was harassing me, then I wasn't hiding things from you."

"Yeah. That."

"I should have mentioned it," Leo said firmly. "If it was important enough for me to care about how you resolved it, it was important enough for me to tell you about it. I'll do better in the future."

"You're the one who's supposed to be good at emotions," Len agreed. He hadn't quite forgiven yet – mostly himself, though Leo knew too well how quickly anger at yourself transmuted into anger at others – but Leo could tell he was softening.

"To fuck up is human," Leo reminded him. He didn't just mean himself.

"How is it going to work, though?" Len asked, acknowledging Leo's point but his mind already elsewhere. "With Mick, you know, it was just you and me and I knew you'd like him –"

He had known no such thing, but what was history for but rewriting for convenient argument fodder?

"– but now we have Mick to think of, too, and right after the burns, too - I don't want him to feel like we're swapping him out for – for a better model –"

"We are doing no such thing!" Leo exclaimed. "Mick is mine; no one can replace him!"

Len's shoulders finally relaxed at that. Leo being his old possessive asshole self – that was normal. This Ray business? Not normal. And Len desperately needed something normal right now.

The fire had shaken him.

The thought of losing Mick –

Where could they go from here? How could he lead Mick into another situation where it could happen again, and where the next time he would not escape? Could they continue to be partners, with this between them?

Len buried his head in Leo's neck. He wished he remembered how to say that he was afraid.

Leo put his hand on the back of Len's head.

He didn't need Len to speak to understand.

He didn't need Leo to speak to know that he understood.