#really really hoping one of the boys has been a hardlight construct for ages

[fabiansociety]

“once things are a little bit… CLEANER, i would love to bring you in on that. really exciting stuff.”

y’all are gonna get stepford wived. get outed. body snatched.

[radiantcutice-blog]

No Honor Among Thieves

Len doesn’t know where it went wrong.

Maybe- Maybe it’s because he was distracted. Preoccupied by things back home, by Thawne and Barry and how the kids are- maybe that’s why things failed.

But even that isn’t right. Distraction doesn’t account for this mayhem, not when this plan has been in the works for months. Hell, it hadn’t even been Barry- if he had showed up, plans B through L are reserved for him, depending on when he arrived and who he’d gone after first.

It’s the damn Feds. Again, shouldn’t be a problem- except they know. They know every single move the Rogues make, every strategy in their arsenal, every single weakness. Things they shouldn’t know about this job in particular.

They go after Hartley first, taking out the ears of the operation, their early warning system, as well as the danger of his mind control. He goes down with a sonic blast targeted at his implants, flute forgotten as he scrambles to try and shut them off, fingers fumbling in his pain. It gives the Feds just enough time to slap cuffs on him, confiscate his gloves and his flute, and hustle him off. They leave the sonic device on to keep him in too much pain to pick his cuffs, twisting and writhing in the grip of the two agents that drag him along as he tries to escape the noise.

Rosa gets the Boot, fired off before she can even react, the hook clamping around her ankle and anchoring her to the ground in an instant. He snarls, reaching for his belt and the offensive tops within, but another squeeze of the trigger sends 90 thousand volts through him and he drops to his knees. The second the pulse lays them out flat, and the agents don’t even give Roscoe’s muscles the chance to relax before yanking their arms behind their back, making her cry out in pain as they cuff her wrists and begin confiscating her gear.

Mick they corner with a gun not unlike Len’s, bringing the temperature in the room down and meeting the gout of flame he sends at them with a blast of cold, causing the same explosion of steam that Mick and Len crossing streams usually does. It knocks Mick back, growling low as he struggles to his feet, but they’ve frozen the floor, too, like he’s a damn speedster they’re trying to keep off balance, and there’s a crackling crunch of snow cleats breaking through the thin layer of ice as they rush him. He manages a good few swings, clocks one with his gun and sets another’s gear on fire, but his teeth are chattering and he can feel the panic creeping up, and it distracts Mick just enough for a Fed to shove a cattle prod in the back of his knee to bring him down, leg muscles spasming painfully and losing any footing he had on the frozen floor. Crashing down, the Feds pile onto Mick even as he struggles against them, getting him restrained and his gun taken away before some asshole cracks him in the back of the head with their own weapon, and the blunt force head trauma on top of years of it makes Mick’s vision swim almost immediately.

They drag him into the hall where Lisa stands, looking frantic at first but then cold and hard, just like Len, teeth bared as she skates her way towards them, fists clenched. Mick tries to shout a hoarse warning, but Lisa’s too set on her icy rage and doesn’t realize one of the agents is brandishing Mick’s gun until the flames melt the ice from under her blades and send her hurtling ungracefully to the floor. The same cattle prod used on Mick gets jabbed into Lisa’s gut, making her convulse until they decide she’s had enough, cuffing her before one of the agents tosses her over his shoulder.

Another two agents drag Roy into the procession, the Rainbow Raider hanging unconscious between them, his glasses in one of their fists. His tech might be formidable, but Roy’s never been a physical fighter, and a flash-bang to overwhelm his hardlight constructs was all the Feds needed to get to the man himself and knock him out.

Len would have to be an idiot to ignore the explosions, breaking into a jog with his safety off as he heads towards the nearest Rogue- safety in numbers, they’ve got this down- only to find Digger backed into a corner and swaying, swearing up a storm as he clutches his head, his boomerangs scattered across the floor or stuck in the walls.

It feels like being whisked by Barry- going so fast that, for a moment, the world sometimes seems like it’s at a standstill- before Digger’s head swells and bursts outward, a splatter of blood and gray matter painting the walls and the ceiling, and Len hears a sound- is that his voice? Is he screaming?- before he fires his cold gun into the room, icing the four agents who’d surrounded Digger and watched as he-

As he-

In a burst of rage, he smashes his gun down against the forearm of the man holding the detonator, breaking it off from the elbow down to shatter against the floor as Len moves past them, reeling it all until there’s just a shard of ice where his heart should be. He’s calm. He’s rational. He can make this work, even with the plan gone to hell.

First priority is Digger’s body. Len is methodical as he ices it, like he would a patch of ground or a particularly tough safe; his eyes are vacant, unwilling to really look at the body of one of his best friends, the man who was a brother to him, fucking de-

Shaking off the thought physically, he releases the trigger and turns away from the flash-frozen corpse, shouting for Sam and finding him in the reflection off an iced Fed not a few seconds later, looking absolutely haggard.

“Cold, what the fuck’s- oh, Christ.” Even in the reflection, even behind his helmet, Len sees Sam’s eyes go wide at the sight of Digger. “Is he…?”

“Get him outta here, Scudder.” There’s no room for argument and Sam knows it, leaving the relatively safety of the Mirror World to collect Digger’s frozen body from the floor as Len ices over a large patch of the wall to make a larger surface for them to pass through.

There’s a plan in place for this, as much as Len hates to admit it. It’s been haunting him for years, the thought that they’re all mortal, and he’d hoped to never use Avernus for anything more than someone dying of old age in their sleep. Wishful thinking, he supposes, but who wouldn’t want their family to live their longest and fullest lives? Hell, nobody deserves to die like this, not even a miserable bastard like Digger, not even after he’d killed that Gotham capitalist.

Sam fires his gun into the ice and it ripples for a moment before settling, the younger man adjusting his grip on the body before looking back at Len. “Stay here. I’ll be back.”

“You don’t give orders,” he growls, but Scudder doesn’t relent, baring his teeth back at Len.

“Job’s gone to hell, Snart, you’ll stay fuckin’ put while I get everyone I can into the goddamn mirror, not go running around to get yourself offed by more Feds.”

Len’s hand flexes around the grip of his gun and then loosens as he nods curtly. “I’m last through.”

“I know, Len,” Sam assures him before stepping into his reflection with Digger’s body.

He can’t help pacing while he waits- part of Len wants to smash the frozen agents to snow, part of him wants to run to find his sister, his husband- but Scudder’s right. Damn him, but he is. They need to get out of here, and Len running off half-cocked and angry, so angry, no matter how he’s tried to freeze it out, will just get him killed.

Like Digger.

Sam’s hand emerges from the ice a few long minutes later and Len takes it, stepping through the reflection, used to the way it clings to him, like emerging from being underwater until the surface tension finally breaks. The Mirror World is never pleasant, and he’s glad for Scudder’s hustle to the next bright spot in the murky and imbalanced dimension, dragging Len through the floor-length mirror in the front hall of the den and then firing his gun again to shut the portal down entirely.

It’s a good thing, too, because Len takes a few deep breaths before turning on his heel and slamming his fist into the mirror.

The way it shatters is utterly unsatisfying, the ugly way his knuckles pop bringing him no catharsis, and the voices that call out in response-

“Len!”

“¡Dios!”

“Cold!”

Only three. Three plus Digger, dead, headless, frozen, and neither Lisa nor Mick among them-

He turns back around to see Sam, Marc, and James staring at him in concern. Marc’s hair is more of a windswept mess than usual, Sam’s helmet is discarded to show the furrows in his brow, and James looks almost green, lips pressed in a thin line as he watches Len from behind his domino.

“What the fuck was that,” he asks aloud, and none of them answer, so he raises his voice. “What the fuck was that? That wasn’t Flash, or Icon, or Rocket- those were the damn Feds, and they nabbed half of us. They m-” The words stick in his throat, if only because he sees a bright puff of red hair around the corner.

“Uncle Len?” Owen.

Len wants nothing more in this moment than to have died in Digger’s place.

“Hey, kid,” he says softly. “Didn’t mean to wake ya.”

“Is everything okay?”

Swallowing back the shake in his voice, Len nods. “Just job stuff, Owen. You need somethin’?”

The boy almost shakes his head, then shrugs instead, looking at his feet.

“How ‘bout Marc comes and reads you one of his boring old books to help you get back to sleep,” he suggests gently, and Owen looks up again to shoot Mardon a hopeful glance.

“Can we keep going with Connecticut Yankee?”

At a loss for words for a brief moment, Marc spares Len a helpless look before smiling gently at Owen. “Of course, niño.”

Marc reaches out to squeeze Len’s arm before following Owen back through the house to the boy’s room, leaving him with Scudder and Jesse, the latter looking ready to squirm out of his skin as he glances at the hallway and then back down, not looking at Len or Sam.

Len watches James until Marc and Owen’s footsteps fade and Owen’s door clicks shut, a chill crawling across Len’s skin as his blood freezes in his veins.

“Trix. Look at me.” James lifts his head and Len sees his Adam’s apple bob, hands curling into fists as he holds himself back from drawing the cold gun once more. “Tell me you didn’t.”

“Snart, we don’t know it was an inside job-”

“Don’t fuckin’ gimme that, Scudder, we know damn well it was. No way the Feds would get the drop on us otherwise.” He steps closer to Trickster and the young Rogue flinches. “James. Answer me.”

A soft wheeze escapes him before he musters words. “Cold, I swear to God, I didn’t think-”

“You didn’t think what, Jesse? You didn’t think they’d really catch us? You didn’t think they’d get so many?” It takes everything in Len not to grab James by the front of his uniform and shake him. “You didn’t think they’d murder one of us?”

“No! No, I didn’t, I just thought-”

“They’re the fucking Feds, not the CCPD! They’re competent, especially when some meshugenah hands them all the intel they need because he thinks- what, exactly? What were you thinking, you fucking idiot?”

James shoves Len back, shame turning to something ugly and defiant in the face of Len’s anger, and Len has to put a hand up to keep Sam from stepping in.

“I was thinking about this, Cold! The way you treat me, the way the Rogues fucking treat me- how I never get the chance to prove myself-”

”Prove yourself?” Len cuts in, “Kid, what the hell are ya talkin’ about? You haven’t needed to prove yourself since you first joined up! You made it through the trial period, you showed us you had the skills- that was all we needed! You’re a Rogue! End of story!”

“But it’s not! You all still treat me like a child-”

“You’re second-youngest!”

“-and like you don’t want me around-”

“Because you’re an ass, James, not ‘cause you’re not capable!”

Jesse makes a disgusted noise. “Like everyone in this group isn’t an ass sometimes!”

“Not everyone’s a navel-gazin’ homophobic jerk, James, and you know it damn well,” Len snaps back. “You, you were a pain in my ass, in everyone’s asses, and I stood up for you. I played the leader card, more’n once, because you were family, James. You were my fucking son, and I wasn’t about to put you out.”

A hush falls as James stares at Len, the oh-so-clever Trickster finally at a loss for words. His breath shudders, and Len watches him struggle through his emotions as the words sink in. Sam shifts uncomfortably in Len’s peripheral vision.

“Cold- Len. I’m sorry. I don’t-” His voice falters. “I dunno what I was thinking.”

Len wants to forgive. He does. He didn’t spend years handpicking a team with the intention of giving up on them, or leaving them behind. He didn’t cultivate a family just to turn his back when things got rough, but this-

This is beyond rough.

He hadn’t brought James in, young and scared and alone but so, so brilliant, just to drop him on his ass again. It’s been years of Len trying to help James, make him a better man as well as a better criminal, and to see he learned nothing- to see him betray the family, to see him orphan Owen-

“You broke my heart, kid,” Len admits quietly, raising his hand to halt any answer and talking over James when he doesn’t take the visual cue. “You broke my damn heart, but if you’re out, you’re out.”

His eyes are steely even as Jesse tries to reason with him. “Len, come on-”

“That’s enough.” The words hurt, but Len gets them out, even if his voice is hushed. “Go tell your Fed buddies that James Jesse’s all theirs. The Trickster’s dead.”

James recoils, brows drawn together. “You can’t do that.”

“I can, and I am,” Len assures him. “Trickster’s dead. And if Jesse sets foot in the Gem Cities again, he’ll be dead, too.”

Stepping out of the way, Len gestures from James to the front door. “You know the way.”

The silence draws out between them as Jesse stands there, a tremor in his frame as he stares at Len, as if the look will change his mind, but Len is set. His hand drops to his gun when it starts getting too long for his tastes, and only then does James look away, eyes on the ground as he hustles past Len and Sam, leaving without another word.

Len watches him go and allows himself one shuddering breath once the door shuts behind James, covering his eyes for a long moment before he gets it together.

Cold. Hard. Calm. He’s fine. They’re all gonna be fine.

Everyone but Digger, that is.

He pulls his phone from an inside pocket of his parka, turning it on and dialing a number he knows by heart, eyes distant as he listens to it ring.

“Hey. Yeah. Yeah, I know what time it is. Listen, Flash. I need your help.”